More than 55,000 copies sold. Now in its seventh paperback printing.
More than 55,000 copies sold. Now in its seventh paperback printing.
Why?
Explaining the Holocaust
Featured in Ken Burns’ documentary “The United States and the Holocaust.”
Amazon Editors’ Pick
A bold new exploration that answers the most commonly asked questions about the Holocaust.
Despite the outpouring of books, movies, museums, memorials, and courses devoted to the Holocaust, a coherent explanation of why such ghastly carnage erupted from the heart of civilized Europe in the twentieth century still seems elusive even seventy years later. Numerous theories have sprouted in an attempt to console ourselves and to point the blame in emotionally satisfying directions—yet none of them are fully convincing. As witnesses to the Holocaust near the ends of their lives, it becomes that much more important to unravel what happened and to educate a new generation about the horrors inflicted by the Nazi regime on Jews and non-Jews alike.
Why? dispels many misconceptions and answers some of the most basic—yet vexing—questions that remain: why the Jews and not another ethnic group? Why the Germans? Why such a swift and sweeping extermination? Why didn’t more Jews fight back more often? Why didn’t they receive more help? While responding to the questions he has been most frequently asked by students over the decades, world-renowned Holocaust historian and professor Peter Hayes brings a wealth of scholarly research and experience to bear on conventional, popular views of the history, challenging some of the most prominent recent interpretations. He argues that there is no single theory that “explains” the Holocaust; the convergence of multiple forces at a particular moment in time led to catastrophe.
In clear prose informed by an encyclopedic knowledge of Holocaust literature in English and German, Hayes weaves together stories and statistics to heart-stopping effect. Why? is an authoritative, groundbreaking exploration of the origins of one of the most tragic events in human history.
Published by W.W. Norton & Company in January 2017.
You may buy the hardback edition of the book on amazon.com. Now also available in trade paperback and in audio book format.
German translation now available. Spanish translation now available, also in paperback. Chinese and Slovak translations forthcoming.
See all books by Peter Hayes.
Reviews and Endorsements
Peter’s newest book
“Profits & persecution: German Big Business in the Nazi Economy and the holocaust
Published by Cambridge University Press, “Profits & Persecution,” will be released in February 2025 in Europe and the United States.
Advance Praise
”Peter Hayes shows how the German business community cooperated with the Nazi regime for multiple reasons: partially overlapping political values; a near total absence of anti-semitic sentiments; but above all the perceived need not to be outdone by economic rivals in the race for profits, spoils, and government favor. Within the framework of Germany’s directed economy, the business community became increasingly complicit in the atrocities of the Nazi regime, including ultimately the despoiling of Jews, the lethal exploitation of forced and slave labor, and genocide.”
- Christopher Browning, author of “Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, and German Killers”
“Peter Hayes’ mastery of the sources and scholarship drives this riveting, shocking account of the widespread complicity of every major German business sector — banking, chemicals, weapons, energy, transportation, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, and insurance — in the systematic persecution of Jews as well as the atrocities of the Third Reich. This brilliant, courageous book is a disturbingly precise assessment of corporate conduct in a criminal dictatorship, a rare reckoning with broader applications to similar regimes historically and to the world today.”
- Wendy Lower, author of “The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre
About Peter Hayes
Peter Hayes holds degrees from Bowdoin, Oxford, and Yale and was from 1980 to 2016 Professor of History and German and from 2000 to 2016 Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor at Northwestern University.
His publications have won several prizes and been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish. His acclaimed study of IG Farben, Industry and Ideology, received the Biennial Book Prize from the Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association.
In his monumental history of the Nazi economy entitled The Wages of Destruction, Adam Tooze called Industry and Ideology "the best book on IG, indeed the best book on business in the Third Reich." Hayes has long supported the work of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, notably in preparing How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he formerly chaired the Academic Committee.
Also an award-winning teacher, he lectures widely on German and Holocaust history in the United States and abroad.
Photo credit: Augustas Didzgalvis for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Interested in having Peter Hayes speak?
Agent
Peter W. Bernstein
40 E. 83rd Street
New York, New York 10028
peterwbernstein@gmail.com
212.794.0272