In March 1942, about 75 to 80 percent of all Holocaust victims were still alive. Eleven months later, 75 to 80 percent were dead - the result, as Christopher R. Browning states, of a brief, intense wave of mass murders concentrated in Poland. A German unit of just over 450 men, the Reserve Police Battalion 101, was responsible for the execution of 39,000 Polish Jews and the deportation of another 44,000 to the Treblinka extermination camp over a period of 16 months.

In this chilling and impressively powerful work, Browning describes how a group of ordinary men became cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews. Based on a judicial inquiry of 210 members of the battalion in the 1960s, he paints a portrait of the soldiers who took so many lives and arrives at a disturbing conclusion about the universalization of such barbarity in our world.

Christopher R. Browning is a professor of history at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. He is a co-author of the official twenty-four-volume history of the Holocaust from Yad Vashem and the author of three books on the subject.

A remarkable - and singularly disturbing - insight into human behavior. This meticulously researched book represents a significant contribution to the literature on the Holocaust.