This examination, by a bona-fide historian, of the mass killings of Jews, is almost flatly factual rather than rhetorico-emotional. One turning-point was the conference at the Wannsee, near Berlin, in January 1942 which was presided over by Heydrich (later assassinated, and deservedly) - a bureaucratic, unsensational affair during which mass genocide was discussed and decided upon with cool efficiency. Benz also shows how national paranoia, following the Slump and other disasters, made the Germans fertile ground for Nazi propaganda claiming that world Jewry was planning to destroy them. If fully implemented, the Holocaust might have accounted for as many as 11 million, but though time and other factors did not allow this, it still got rid of roughly six million. As to the degree of public ignorance, or otherwise, Benz's verdict is that "the Germans knew about the gas chambers and extermination camps without wanting to know about them".