David Cesarani did not live to witness the publication of his masterwork, the synthesis of thirty-five years of scholarship on the Final Solution. This will be without question as definitive an account of the years of Jewish persecution in the 1930s and 1940s as we are likely to get. It is an account overflowing with shrewd judgement and honest reflection, the qualities that he always brought to his engagement with the past.

Cesarani devoted his life to the study of anti-Semitism and the Jewish experience in the age of the world wars. He was for many years director of the Institute of Contemporary History and the Wiener Library, and was a key figure in getting the government