The Holocaust has never been so widely commemorated, but our understanding of the accepted narrative has rarely, if ever, been questioned. Here, David Cesarani argues that Hitler's extermination of the Jews was neither planned nor inevitable. As the war went against the Third Reich, the persecution of Europe's Jews escalated from discrimination to genocide. Drawing on a vast array of sources, dating from the earliest days of Nazi Germany to the post-war displacement camps, Final Solution recounts the terrible fate of Europe's Jews, often in their own words. Resting on decades of scholarship, it is compelling, authoritative, and profoundly disturbing.'As definitive an account of the years of Jewish persecution in the 1930s and 1940s as we are likely to get . . . it deserves to be widely read and reflected upon in a continent where racial and religious prejudice is not as far below the surface as we like to think' Richard Overy, Literary Review'A masterpiece . . . dense with fascinating detail, so very well written, and so passionately and compellingly argued.' Jewish Chronicle'A brilliant synthesis and interpretation of the greatest crime of the modern era . . . A book that demands to be read and deserves every historical award going' Oliver Kamm, The Times