Hitler's Shadow War

In Hitler's Shadow War, World War II scholar Donald McKale contends that Hitler's persecution and murder of the Jews, Slavs, and other groups was his primary effort during the war, not the conquest of Europe. According to McKale, the war was a diversion that Hitler used to draw attention away from his real goal, the Final Solution. McKale explores the origins of the anti-Semitism that spread like wildfire through Germany before and during the Nazis' rise to power, and the failure of the Allies to perceive and stop the Holocaust even as they were defeating the Germans in combat.

Donald McKale is the Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of Humanities in the history department at Clemson University and is the author of Hitler: The Survival Myth, The Nazi Party Courts, and War by Revolution: Germany and Great Britain in the Middle East in the Era of WWI. He lives in Clemson, South Carolina.

EDITOR'S CHOICE of the History Book Club, March 2003 The distinguishing features of Professor McKale's account are that it is based on the latest scholarship, places the systematic murder of the Jews into its World War II context, and does these things in a very well-written survey that will enlighten and inform the general public as well as specialists.--Gerhard L. Weinberg, author of A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II