This latest analysis and collection of Jewish sources, focusing on prescient reports from Geneva, 1939--1942, is truly excellent. Despite decades of reading Holocaust documents, I found the accumulative effect of reading these reports powerful and moving. This volume is a superb addition to an important series.

Christopher R. Browning

This volume provides invaluable insights and provokes important questions about the way a small group of uniquely positioned Jewish officials conceptualized Nazi anti-Jewish policy and its origins, logic, and trajectory at the time when the Holocaust was unfolding. The documents that form the centerpiece of the book are reports from 1939–1942 by Richard Lichtheim and Gerhart Riegner, the heads of the Geneva offices of two major Jewish organizations. These reports were shaped by a blend of personal experience (which in Lichtheim’s case included witnessing the Armenian genocide during the First World War), political perspectives, a location at a European diplomatic and lobbying hub, and the accompanying privileged yet partial access to factual information. Contrasting Riegner’s more famous claim to have revealed a particular ‘Hitler plan’ with Lichtheim’s earlier descriptions of a ‘vacillating’ German policy, the editor encourages us to reflect upon the way these narratives cohere with, and even informed, the cardinal competing scholarly interpretations of the development of the ‘final solution.’

Donald Bloxham, University of Edinburgh; author of The Final Solution: A Genocide