A solid guide to a crisis in which leaders found themselves constrained by many obstacles from doing more. -- Richard Overy * Literary Review * A Calculated Restraint is Richard Breitman's magnum opus, the culmination of decades of brilliant scholarship. In an ideal world, this book should finally resolve the questions and dispel the myths that so many still have about the Allied leaders' knowledge of and response to the Holocaust as it was unfolding. I highlighted so many passages I ran out of ink. -- Rebecca Erbelding, author of Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe In this brilliantly interwoven study, eminent historian Richard Breitman illuminates what three of the twentieth centurys most consequential leadersChurchill, Roosevelt, and Stalinknew privately and said publicly about the Holocaust. A riveting storyteller and a keen analyst of the sources, Breitman stays true to the record and to the facts known at the time. His account of the moral limitations and political calculations of these powerful men could not be more timely or instructive. -- Wendy Lower, author of Hitlers Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields This fine book is vintage Richard Breitman: grounded in a mastery of relevant sources, guided by close and careful reading, insistent on historical contextualization, and suspicious of pieties. Breitman shows that one can understand the past only by immersing oneself in it, not by projecting present concerns or retrospective desires onto it. -- Peter Hayes, author of Why? Explaining the Holocaust Richard Breitman sets out with a seemingly simple goal: to contextualize the Allied leaders statements about what we now call the Holocaust. It is an indispensable task for historians, and a particularly urgent one in the field of Holocaust Studies, where all too often such statements are taken out of context. Drawing on his vast expertise, Breitman not only achieves this goal but also incisively analyzes Allied leaders policies regarding the Holocaust. With clarity and precision, he debunks many conventional myths and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the Allied response to the murder of European Jews. -- Michael Berenbaum, author of The World Must Know
