Following a foreword by Margaret MacMillan that summarizes the argument of this book, Michael Marrus engages with what scholars, politicians, and a variety of ordinary individuals have called the “lessons” of what is now commonly known as the “Holocaust,” showing how they have changed over time and demonstrating the need for caution when assessing them. In a series of reviews of these supposed “lessons” identified by public figures, historians, Jews, and Israelis, as well as of what the author calls “Universal Lessons,” Marrus points to the dubious nature of the enterprise of deriving “lessons” from such an event. In the process, he provides a helpful introduction to the literature on the Holocaust as it has developed over the years, with emphasis on new material that has become accessible, especially from East European archives after the end of the Cold War. The review of the literature also includes a brief but helpful summary of the controversy between David Goldhagen and Christopher Browning over the motivation of perpetrators, as well as an overview of the origins and developing nature of Yad Vashem, the Israeli institution that commemorates and documents the Holocaust. At the same time, Marrus explains in some detail how he came to be a student of the Holocaust and includes information at various points in the text about his personal engagement with the subject. In fact, he draws on his personal experiences as a basis for his account of the origins and early controversies surrounding the establishment of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Marrus admires those individuals who assisted persecuted Jews, but has doubts about utilizing the Holocaust as a point of reference to illuminate “lessons” that can be derived from such behavior. His point in this context is his opposition to what he considers to be the casual utilization of the great horror of the Holocaust to illuminate some current event or push forward some policy of current interest. Historians have the obligation to inform us about events, Marrus rightly argues, not to draw “lessons” from them. That is quite a responsibility when the subject is as horrendous and troubling as the Holocaust. In the author's view, the murder of the Jews “enlarges our knowledge of the human condition” (162). The key obligation of the historian is to get the account right, and in a field as important and contested as the history of the Holocaust, this is not an easy obligation to meet. On the contrary, the Holocaust shows us what humans are capable of doing, a difficult fact to accept.

The study also reviews how the Holocaust was largely ignored in the first decade after World War II, and how it slowly attracted scholarly attention through the work of Raul Hilberg, and came into public view with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in the early 1960s. In connection with that trial, the author appropriately stresses the shift from scholarly dependence on documents in previous trials of war criminals to a substantial role for, and reliance on, the testimony of survivors. Instead of using notes to identify quotations and the works of the authors who are cited and mentioned, this well written book substitutes a series of bibliographies for each chapter. Such a listing of “Principal Sources” will certainly be helpful to general readers and students who wish to continue reading about the subject. Since the book may become the subject of discussion and debate, a listing of the works the author has consulted over a lengthy career will indeed be a boon. One deficiency of this study is nevertheless its depiction of the Holocaust as a European event. The Nazi regime intended a worldwide, systematic killing of Jews, in fact—something that makes the Holocaust different in intent from more localized genocides designed to remove a category of individuals from a specific area to be inhabited only by the “right” people.