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When "Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews" first appeared in German in 1998, it was hailed as a major contribution to Holocaust scholarship. Its author, Professor Peter Longerich, the director of the Research Centre for the Holocaust and Twentieth-Century History at Royal Holloway, University of London, served an expert witness at the David Irving v. Penguin/Lipstadt trial.

This English edition combines some of the latest scholarship on the subject of the Holocaust, which makes it an extremely valuable addition to the field. The new sections include anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic; the elimination of the Jews from German society; life in the Polish ghettos; the Holocaust in Eastern Europe between 1942 and 1944; and the end of the Holocaust.

Longerich identifies four specific periods between the time the war began and the summer of 1942 when the Nazi leadership developed and implemented the plan for the systematic murder of European Jewry. The turning point, Longerich argues, occurred as early as autumn 1939.

It is crucial to note that he confirms that no other group was as unrelentingly persecuted and suffered with the same catastrophic results as the Jews. This is especially important given the attempts to equate the plight of the Jews with other groups that were killed during this period.

Nazi leaders established general objectives and goals, while their subordinate organizations used this latitude to exercise a considerable amount of individual initiative. This generated competition between the various departments within the German government to solve the Jewish Problem. The inevitable tension this engendered did not hide the broad consensus within the National Socialist movement for the urgent need to expel the Jews from German society.

After Kristallnacht (Nov. 9-10, 1938) and the laws promulgated to remove the Jews from every segment of German life, the Nazis had difficulty portraying this powerless minority as a continuous threat. Germany's failure to force all Jews out of the country prompted another approach once the war in Europe began in September 1939.

Expelling all the Jews within the German sphere of influence to Poland was part of this twisted road to Auschwitz. In Poland, the Jews were to be warehoused in a "Jewish reservation" under primitive living conditions that would cause them to die of disease and starvation. Longerich suggests this plan would have enabled the Germans to blackmail the Western Powers to allow them to conquer other territories in order to expand their living space (Lebensraum) without any outside interference.

Most historians have assumed the decision to murder the Jews was made sometime during 1941, and that there is a fundamental difference between this "territorial" phase and the later "final solution phase." Longerich opines that the "territorial solution" was also conceived as a "final solution," because the ultimate goal was to annihilate the vast majority of the Jewish people.

By autumn 1939, Longerich claims that Nazis already began to prepare to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The actions they took beginning in 1941 were just the practical steps they had envisaged in 1939. In his famous speech of Jan. 30, 1939, Hitler had threatened "the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe," which at that point was an option. The expanding war in Europe allowed the Nazis to initiate the second stage of their plan. Longerich is quick to point out that the connection between the war and the elimination of the Jews did not make the destruction of the Jews inevitable.

Before the destruction could start, the "Jewish reservation" had to be established. As long the reservation did not exist, "extermination" was only an objective "that could also under certain circumstances be revoked." The systematic murder of the Soviet Jews began in the summer of 1941.

SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler initiated this campaign to murder elderly men women, and children during the war and before an occupying administration was established in the newly conquered territories, thereby creating the ground for the ethnic cleansing that was to follow. Himmler clearly anticipated Hitler's desire to make this a mission to exterminate the Jews for posing a racial threat to the German people.

The third stage in the systematic annihilation began in the autumn of 1941 when the Nazis deported the Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to the ghettos in Poland. Hitler's decision to deport the Jews under German rule to the East was connected to his decision to murder all the Jews already there.

The intolerable overcrowding and suffering in the ghettos were of great concern. That tens of thousands of additional Jews from Central Europe were about to be sent to the ghettos forced the Nazis to demand more extreme solutions from the local authorities.

Those "unfit to work" were singled out for death, while Jews trying to flee the ghettos were shot. The first extermination camp at Belzec was established with other camps soon following. Hitler and the leadership of the SS "guided the process and set it in motion." They knew their message would create independent initiative.

The Wannsee Conference of Jan. 20, 1942 consolidated the various approaches into a comprehensive program to implement the Final Solution. The fourth stage involved the deportation of Jews from Slovakia, the Reich, the Protectorate, The Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the entire General Government (Krakow, Warsaw, Radom, and Lublin).

Longerich describes how ultimately it was the Nazis' ability to adapt to the fast changing conditions in each of the countries that came under their control that enable them to achieve their horrific results.

Dr. Alex Grobman is a Hebrew University trained historian. He is the author of a number of books, including "Nations United: How The U.N. Undermines Israel and The West," "Denying History: Who Says The Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?" and a forthcoming book on Israel's moral and legal right to exist as a Jewish state.