This book combines a history of the course of antisemitism in the Third Reich with an investigation of its origins in German thought and society, from the late eighteenth century to its maturity in the pathological hatred embodied in Nazi ideology and policy. It opens with a graphic account of the Reichskristallnacht, 9 November 1938, when in a series of carefully worded orders the Nazi Party instructed the Sturmabteilung (the SA) to destroy Jewish businesses and to burn synagogues; the police and fire brigades were instructed not to intervene, but the press were invited to attend. Throughout that night, all over Germany Jewish property was burnt and the Jews bated, bullied and beaten, some drowned, others incarcerated for transport to concentration camps. The Reichskristallnacht, Dr Graml argues, marked the turning point between persecution and the Holocaust. Using evidence from a wide range of confidential documents, diaries and secret reports, he examines the long series of events that led up to it and the inexorable progress thereafter to the Holocaust. He also faces the vexed question as to how far the systematic attempt to exterminate the Jewish peoples of Europe was an expression of Nazi policy, and how far the will of the people.