The mass murder of six million Jews by the Nazis during World War II is the subject of this compelling history ["Never to Forget: The Jews of the Holocaust"]. Interweaving background information, chilling statistics, individual accounts and newspaper reports, it provides an excellent introduction to its subject for American young people, whose lack of knowledge about the war and/or about anti-Semitism continually amazes people like the reviewer who lived through those times.

Scapegoating a minority group to gain and consolidate political power was not a device originated by Adolf Hitler, but it was used by him with outstanding success. Meltzer documents just how and why this happened, and how Hitler retained mass support even though "wages sank while profits rose." The one deficiency of this background information is that readers are given the impression that Hitler controlled everything in Germany, including big business. It is much more...