*****On the chilly morning of November 3, 1943, Nazi SS men and their collaborators rounded up Jews in Trawnicki, Poniatowa, and Majdanek Poland. They marched the men, women, and children to large pits. Then, with loudspeakers blaring music to drown out the sounds of gunfire and screams, they shot 18,000 Jews to death. Proud of their day's work, the sadistic perpetrators called the atrocity Erntefest---Harvest Festival.

***During the Second World War, six million Jews---as well as other targeted groups such as Gypsies, Poles, the handicapped, and homosexuals---were systematically murdered by Adolf Hitler's Nazis and their collaborators. The incomprehensible number---six million---becomes all the more horrifying when it is broken down into the many individual atrocities, which occurred almost daily from 1941 to 1945.

***On September 29-30, 1941, in Kiev, Ukraine, 33,771 Jews were stripped naked, shot by automatic fire, and buried in Babi Yar ravine. Three and a half million Jews died in the gas chambers of the Nazis' six death camps in Poland. On August 23-24, 1942, 8000 Jews from Zdunska Wola, Poland, were gassed at Chelmo. On June 20, 1943, 5000 Jews from Amsterdam died at Auschwitz. The brutality went on and on.

***"There is no doubt," said Winston Churchill, "that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world."

***This chronicle, written and fact-checked by top scholars, recounts the long, complex, anguishing story of the Holocaust. the mission of the publisher has been to report the facts, clearly and free of bias or agenda.