The purpose of this book is to explain the Holocaust in terms of a multiple “trap”: a multiple “Catch-22” into which a whole group or groups of people had been maneuvered in stages. Hence, this term is an analytical organizing framework that combines the forces that worked separately but together to trap the Jews of Europe and prevent their escape during the Holocaust.

The process that explains the final trap, however, was much longer and could be traced back to World War I and its outcome, which transformed the “Jewish Question” in various Western, central European, and Middle Eastern countries into a major politically imbued issue, but the purpose of this book is not to draw such a broad picture to explain the behavior of Germany, the West, and other parties before 1933.

My intention is to discuss the Holocaust itself and the stages in which the trap was closing on its victims in a kaleidoscopic fashion by describing it not only as it was committed by the perpetrators, as suffered by the victims, or as a subject for inaction and action by third parties, or as a threat to fourth parties alone, but as developing like a sort of doomsday machine set in motion from all sides. Each party worked the way they did because of the logic created by the Nazis and by their own reasons, which dictated the behavior of third and fourth parties and the relations between them before and during the Holocaust, when the interplay between the various parties contributed to the victims' doom first by preventing help and later by preventing rescue.