“With its …[over thousand] detailed and expansive footnotes drawing on twenty-four different archive collections in eight countries and three continents and an enormous secondary literature, this is one of the best researched regional studies of the Holocaust ever to appear. It is helped by the fact that the authors are also always so cognizant of what was happening elsewhere in Europe at the same time and thus frequently draw out the relationship between seemingly haphazard local decisions and trends across Europe…Indeed, the way in which the book ‘makes sense’ of complex institutional behavior is at times breathtaking…The precision in the detail and the scope of the contextualization make this one of the more important works to appear on the Holocaust in recent years.” • English Historical Review “Translated flawlessly from German into English by Ray Brandon, [this] readable and engaging study eminently meets the series’ high standards of scholarship. Its 17-page bibliography lists old classics as well as the most recent publications, and the copious, annotated endnotes following each chapter constitute a parallel book in themselves. Although the authors rely heavily on the much-researched Federal Republic archives, they also introduce materials that became accessible only with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union itself.” • European History Quarterly “This very readable and well documented study fills an important gap in the Holocaust literature: it offers insight into the microcosm reflecting the entire terrifying and murderous scenario of the SS State.” • Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung “[This] excellent study of the Riga ghetto, informed by Eastern European sources and available now in English translation, provides a precise and ghastly description of what [the liquidation] meant for the local Jews. With laudable thoroughness, they describe the organized shooting of Jews, the first form of industrial-scale mass murder.” • The New York Review of Books