As Giles MacDonogh convincingly argues, 1938 was Hitler’s annus mirabilis. When the year opened, the Führer was safely in his box. Apart from the reoccupations of the Rhineland and Saar – bits of Germany temporarily wrested from the Fatherland after the First World War – he had gorged on no chunks of European real estate. Jews had been persecuted but not exterminated, political parties had been banned and Nazism’s enemies exiled or repressed – but no mass killings had taken place. For most people, Nazi Germany was a small cloud on a largely sunny European horizon.

By the time the year ended, the picture had been totally transformed. Hitler, by a mix of bullying, bravado and sheer guile, had occupied both his Austrian homeland and the Sudetenland – the ethnically German border region of Czechoslovakia – reducing the Czech lands to a powerless morsel ripe for swallowing. . . .

MacDonogh’s book is a minutely detailed chronicle of how this tragic transformation took place. It is an insider’s account, largely confined to the chancelleries and embassies where the Continent’s fate was decided, and based on the diaries and memoirs of those diplomats and politicians involved. One chapter is devoted to each month of the year, giving a sense of a gradually unfolding doom as Nemesis approaches. . . .

MacDonogh’s account of the Anschluss and its aftermath is a masterpiece of extreme emotion held in check. His level tone as he reels off appalling atrocities and such chilling statistics as the steadily rising suicide rate among Jews trapped in Vienna somehow makes the tragedy of the destruction of a whole community even more telling. . . .

The book is not without its faults – MacDonogh sometimes too readily assumes that his own expertise on his subject is shared by all his readers. One wishes, too, that the publishers had allowed him to write exclusively about the extinction of Jewish Austria, since that is what this moving and searing book is really about.