Completing the work begun with The Years of Persecution; Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1939, Friedländer (history, U. of California at Los Angeles) has produced an ambitious study of the Holocaust that seeks to integrate understandings of the Holocaust as it played out across Europe; macro-level determinants of German anti-Jewish policies; micro-level experiences and reactions on the part of Germans, their collaborators, occupied peoples, and Jewish victims; and interactions between central ideological-cultural determinants of German policies and institutional dynamics, the evolution of the war, and other circumstances. Among his major themes is the crisis of liberalism and the reaction against communism as ideological sources of anti-Semitism. He argues that, "for a regime dependent on constant mobilization, the Jew served as the constant mobilizing myth" that represented evil per se in each facet of the tripartite mythology of Hitler as a quasiprovidential leader come to bring the Germans salvation in the form of the "ultimate purity of the racial community, the ultimate crushing of Bolshevism and plutocracy, and the ultimate millennial redemption." Beyond this central ideological-cultural question, he also explores how European social institutions failed to serve as a countervailing interest to Nazi extermination policies; attitudes and reactions of bystanders, Jewish leaders, and other actors; the myriad counteractions taken by individual Jews in response to the Holocaust; and issues of witness and historical remembrance. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)