Yehuda Bauer: The Author Of The Holocaust

Yehuda Bauer is arguably one of the most profound authors of the Holocaust and Jewish History. He was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia and emigrated to Israel where he completed his High School years and went on to attend Cardiff University where he studied Jewish History under a full scholarship. He returned to Israel and continued his graduate studies at Hebrew University. Bauer received his PhD in 1960 for a thesis in the British Mandate of Palestine, and was the founder of the Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. In total, Bauer published over 25 books about Jewish History and the events surrounding the Holocaust. Bauer, being Jewish himself, was definitely more sympathetic of the Jewish people, but that is not uncommon in literature about the Holocaust. Yehuda Bauer was a very qualified writer based off his experience and education about the Holocaust and Jewish History more broadly.

History of the Holocaust, written by Yehuda Bauer in the early 1980s, is a comprehensive history of the Holocaust and the surrounding details about Nazism, Anti-Semitism, and the Jewish lifestyle before the Holocaust. Mr. Bauer starts of the book with a general overview of “Who are the Jews?” and how their history led to the Jewish Holocaust. The emergence of the Jews is a controversial, confusing, and conflicting set of theories. Bauer then goes on to discuss how the rise of anti-Semitism was devastating for the Jews.

One of the most devastating blows to the Jewish people was the rise of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was based on Christian anti-Judaism: “The deicide accusation, the supersession myth, the supposed moral turpitude and deserved punishment resulting from the rejection of Jesus Christ as the Messiah, as well as economic be...

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...how did the Nazi government decide upon a policy of comprehensive extermination of Europe’s Jewish population?” In Bauer’s depiction of the decision, he believed that since “the United states, the only major Western power which was still neutral, had not protested the treatment of the Jews up to that point,” that there seemed to be “no objection from an international point of view to an intensification of Nazi brutality.” Donald L. Niewyk, author of The Holocaust, believed that the decision to exterminate the Jews came from a last-resort decision. That there was a “plan to deport European Jews to Madagascar” which seemed “to have been operative as late as October 1940,” but “was simply not feasible” as the Island was not under German control. This ran the German Nazis out of feasible options, so the only possible option was to exterminate the race entirely.