One would think that by now, so many years after the Holo­caust, there can be lit­tle left to add to our under­stand­ing of the hor­rif­ic acts that led to the exter­mi­na­tion of Euro­pean Jew­ry. Not so. Theodore Hamerow, in his book Why We Watched takes the infor­ma­tion we already have and exam­ines it from a new and orig­i­nal angle. 

Numer­ous stud­ies have been con­duct­ed on the roles of bystanders dur­ing the Holo­caust. These works looked at the var­i­ous Euro­pean coun­tries involved in the exter­mi­na­tion process in order to deter­mine how much infor­ma­tion they real­ly had and the impact that infor­ma­tion had on the ways they chose to act or not to act. 

Hamerow’s study pro­vides a new twist. The author sets the stage before the Holo­caust and sug­gests that because of the type of anti-Semi­tism that exist­ed in these coun­tries there is no con­ceiv­able chance that large num­bers of ordi­nary cit­i­zens would have inter­vened to save the lives of Euro­pean Jews as indi­vid­u­als or as a group. Hamerow’s the­sis implies that the Jews of Europe nev­er had a chance — not because of the pow­er of Hitler, but because of the pre-Hitler make-up of the coun­tries these Jews once called home.