Harvest of Hate

London: Elek Books, 1956. Hardcover. Good/Good. 338, illus., map, appendix, index, DJ soiled and discolored, small tears to DJ. Léon Poliakov (25 November 1910, Saint Petersburg - 8 December 1997, Orsay) was a French historian who wrote extensively on the Holocaust and antisemitism and wrote "The Aryan Myth". Born into a Russian Jewish family, Poliakov lived in Italy and Germany until he settled in France. He cofounded the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, established to collate documentation on the persecution of Jews during World War II. He also assisted Edgar Faure at the Nuremberg Trial. Poliakov went on to serve as director of research at the National Centre for Scientific Research (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) from 1954 to 1971. Poliakov was the first scholar to assess the disposition of Pope Pius XII critically on various issues connected to the Holocaust. In Nov. 1950, Poliakov wrote "The Vatican and the 'Jewish Question'-The Record of the Hitler Period-And After" in the journal Commentary. An account, based very largely on official German documents, of the Nazi program for the extermination of the Jews of Europe. Examines the progress of Nazi racism from simple propaganda through the mass murders during the second World War using eyewitness accounts and official documents to describe its course. Poliakov's work is not limited to the extermination of the Jews. Leon Poliakov elaborates on the Germans' genocide of Poles in terms of the wholesale murder the Poland's intelligentsia, the reducing of the fertility of the population, the mental degradation of the Polish population, etc.. He quotes Polish sources whose estimates are that 3 million non-Jewish Poles were murdered, with 35,000 Polish intellectuals among the victims. He also recognizes the fact that any mass resettlement of Poles would have exacted a very high death toll. This would in itself be tantamount to genocide.