In June 1944, Freda Wineman and her family were dropped off at Birkenau-one of the Nazis' largest and deadliest concentration camps. With the nod of an SS official's head, her life was spared. With another nod, her mother was sent to the gas chambers. Freda's survival was a miracle, and her mother's death one of millions caused by an amalgam of violent crimes rooted in fanaticism, bigotry, complacency, and greed. In this sweeping narrative history, Laurence Rees combines rigorous academic research with twenty-five years' worth of heartbreaking testimony to investigate how history's greatest crime was possible. "Bergen-Belsen cannot be described in human language"' says Alice Lok Cahana, who was sent there from Auschwitz. But in a way it can, and the memory and significance of the era echoes through words like Alice's. Packed with never-before-told stories and astute analysis, Rees reveals that what became known as the Holocaust was in fact a series of escalating decisions, made amid a culture of deadly inventiveness, that developed into a worldwide catastrophe. The blame is widespread, Rees reminds us, and the effects are enduring. The Holocaust is the first new, accessible history for thirty years, an authoritative account that offers new judgments on the key decision makers and brings renewed urgency to the Holocaust's role in our collective past and our shared future.