WILLING HANDS

By the bestselling author of Righteous Renegades, Twelve Years of Terror, and The SS: Anatomy of a Criminal State.

On 22 July 1942, notices appeared on the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto announcing a "resettlement." They said nothing about where people were going. The next morning, the first train left for Treblinka. In the weeks that followed, 265,000 people were murdered - the largest single act of destruction of any community in the Second World War.

The Holocaust did not happen in spite of Europe. In too many places, it happened because of it.

Willing Hands is the definitive account of how the Nazi genocide was built, staffed, and sustained - not only by the SS, but by the Dutch policemen who conducted roundups, the French officials who organised transports, the Lithuanian riflemen who volunteered for the killing squads, the Ukrainian auxiliaries who drove deportees to the gas chambers, and the Hungarian government that deported 437,000 of its own citizens to Auschwitz in fifty-six days in 1944 - with Germany already losing the war.

Across twenty-four chapters, this landmark work traces the machinery of the Holocaust from Dachau in 1933 to Bergen-Belsen's liberation in 1945. It gives the Operation Reinhard death camps - Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, where 1.7 million people were murdered in eighteen months - their full historical weight, and examines the Trawniki men, the auxiliary killers whose participation made the killing programme possible.

It does not look away from the question too many histories avoid: who, beyond the Germans, made this possible - and why?

Authoritative and unflinching, Willing Hands is the culmination of a decade of Holocaust scholarship - essential reading on what happened, how, and what it demands of us now.

Published 22 July 2026 - the 84th anniversary of the first deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka.