The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration - Hardcover

Author of A Past in Hiding and winner of the Fraenkel Prize in contemporary history and Wingate Literary Prize for nonfiction, Mark Roseman teaches at the University of Southampton and has published widely on German history. He lives in Southampton, England.

"Roseman's book is a lively contribution to work on a terrifying period in history. It is no simplistic account--chaos and uncertainty are the very 'stuff' of history--but, throughout the book, we are forced to recognise the very ordinariness of these men as we follow, step by step, the diverse routes they followed in their will to destroy."—Joanna Bourke, author of The Second World War: A People's History, The New Statesman

"There is, to my knowledge, no book that brings together more masterfully in less than 200 pages the daunting problems and massive research on the Holocaust than Mark Roseman's account of the notorious Wannsee Conference. Concise and very accessible, yet also comprehensive in its contextualization of the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question' and its origins, I found this a most illuminating study of the cold-blooded planning and execution of the most horrific crime of the twentieth century."—V.R. Berghahn, Seth Low Professor of History, Columbia University

"A cool, judicious and well informed guide to the meeting whose minutes were described by the war crimes prosecutors at Nuremberg as 'perhaps the most shameful document of modern history.'"—Richard J. Evans, author of Lying About Hitler

"This is the best analysis in existence of the fateful Wannsee Conference and its place in the fateful events that culminated in 'The Final Solution.'"
—Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler

"Roseman's account is an excellent introduction to this immensely complex story . . . A highly-readable, concise and thorough account not only of the conference itself—about which very little documentation ever survived—but of the whole debate on the timing and nature of the Holocaust. Convincing."—Richard Overy, author of Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, in The Sunday Telegraph (London)

"Well-researched and subtly argued . . . Roseman's grasp of every detail of the Wannsee Conference is impressive . . . Equally important is the document translated here in full: the minutes of the meeting, known as the Wannsee Protocol . . . Roseman's book is also a contribution to the question of how far Hitler was personally responsible for the extermination program."—Hyam Maccoby, The Evening Standard (London)

"An up-to-date analysis . . . Succinct, closely argued, free of academic jargon. Engrossing and chilling, it helps our understanding of Wannsee's place on the twisted path to genocide."—Theo Richmond, author of Konin: A Quest, in The Sunday Times (London)

"Mark Roseman has succeeded in a brief 150 pages to write not one, but two standard works: one on Wannsee itself, the other on Germany's road to the Holocaust."—Berlin Tagespiegel