Genocide and Fascism is much more than the conceptually sophisticated and genuinely scholarly book that Daniel Goldhagen should have written on the relationship between ordinary Germans and the Holocaust in the Third Reich. It is simultaneously a major contribution to the comparative study of nationalism, racism, fascism, political religion, biopolitics, eugenics, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, and illuminates the dynamics of all ‘eliminationist’ campaigns waged by modern totalitarian movements and regimes against perceived enemies on the grounds of ethnicity, biology, culture, or ideology. Kallis not only puts the uniqueness of Nazi crimes against humanity in a wider context which vaporizes many long-cherished myths. He takes the reader to the beating heart of missions to purge humanity of demonized Others, whether by fanatical ‘terrorists’ or ‘liberal’ states which still play a major role in shaping contemporary history.

—Roger Griffin, Oxford Brookes University, Author of Modernism and Fascism