Can any textbook—by its nature a synthesis of disparate events, materials, and perspectives—give students a sense of the depth and emotions of the Holocaust? Works such as Doris Bergen's War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003) and David Engel's The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews (Harlow: Langman, 2000), though intellectually sophisticated, are short, focused, and painted in broad strokes. One can use them in a course along with primary sources, literary works, and monographs. In his handsome textbook adorned with numerous photographs, David M. Crowe produces a much more detailed narrative covering perpetrators, victims, rescuers, and some bystanders. It has some strengths, but too many weaknesses in its current form.

At the outset Crowe maintains that a broad overview of Jewish history is necessary, because some students lack exposure to it and might otherwise see Jews only as victims. Compression of several thousand years of Jewish history into less than eighty pages, however, would challenge any single author, especially one who is not a specialist. Accepting the Exodus story as history, Crowe suggests that Egypt originally was a land of opportunity for the Hebrews (p. 7). My colleagues tell me that there is no evidence for this conclusion. Alexander the Great conquered Judea, not Palestine (p. 9). Some problematic statements are without great consequence; others seem to suggest potential reasons that anti-Semitism may have gained purchase. Crowe claims that Jews attacked Christians during the Bar Kochba rebellion (p. 14). He makes a similar unsupported statement (p. 17) about Jews' frequent uprisings and massacres of Christians in the Middle East in the fourth and fifth centuries.

Despite the early emphasis on Jewish history and the history of anti-Semitism, Crowe favors a broad definition of Holocaust. He includes considerable and nuanced coverage of the Roma—a subject on which he is an expert—and lesser coverage of other groups. Yet he stresses Nazi fixation with the “Jewish menace” and determination to root Jews out above all. Most students will come away with the impression that there was some logic to the jagged pattern of steps from Nazi persecution of Jews to genocide. Although Crowe usually avoids historiographical controversies, his interpretation is moderately intentionalist.

Crowe gives selected victims their own voice through lengthy excerpts of diaries or testimonies. He also effectively uses stories of rescuers—including Oskar Schindler (about whom he has written a biography)—to show that outsiders were not uniformly hostile or indifferent to the suffering of persecuted minorities. He explicitly rejects the view associated with Raul Hilberg (p. 244) that there was almost no Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, and he gives considerable attention to a number of resisters.

Problems of inaccuracy dot the work. Contrary to Crowe's account, Hitler's ability to induce the Center Party to vote for the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933 (p. 110), did supply the critical part of the two-thirds majority needed for passage in the Reichstag. The story of the SS St. Louis, whose passengers were German Jews seeking at least temporary refuge in Cuba in May 1939, is jumbled (pp. 130-31). They did not possess documents that would allow them to settle in the U.S. over a three-year period—they had American quota numbers (on a waiting list) that might or might not come up. Contrary to Crowe's claim, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) had enough money to pay what corrupt Cuban officials required, but after their demands escalated, they refused to do so. The amount of money offered by the JDC is garbled by typos or typesetter's errors.

It is at least a serious exaggeration to claim (p. 157) that Germany's churches protested against the Nazi euthanasia program. This statement has the unfortunate effect of playing down the courage of those individual churchmen who did protest. Germany did not prod the Soviet Union to occupy its portion of Poland (p. 158). There are misspellings of names (e.g., Verschur for Verschuer) and italicized German terms in which some vowels with umlauts (not just the umlauts) are omitted. They are probably typesetting and coding errors. Other errors impede comprehension. What is a student to make of a discussion of Heinrich Rothmund, head of the Swiss federal police and an opponent of giving Jews asylum in Switzerland, when, a page later, he is called Dortmund (pp. 352-53)? These are a sample of problems in a work hobbled by insufficient attention to detail and inadequate checking.

Crowe writes fluidly, and the work probably will maintain student interest. If there is another edition, the author and publisher might rethink some organizational decisions. It does not make sense to have lists of suggested readings following each chapter, but footnotes at the end of the book. They should both be in the same place. (Consulting the notes is useful, because not all sources are of equal weight or quality.) More maps would be helpful.

Crowe tends to pursue some individual stories well into the postwar period. So, in a chapter on the role of neutral countries during the Holocaust, after discussion of Vatican actions, there is an extended treatment of the postwar controversy about Pope Pius XII and the Vatican's subsequent changes of policy (pp. 371-74). This will overmatch many students still trying to make sense of what happened during the Holocaust. There are other such cases as well. It might make sense to put postwar developments together in a separate section at the end labeled aftermath of the Holocaust.