The evidence has become notorious. As our chronological distance from Nazism and its phenomenal core the mass extermination has increased, the latter's historical weight has grown as well. No introduction can do justice to this paradox's many sources, some of which I explore in the chapters that follow. Let us here simply note that the growing centrality of the Holocaust has altered the entire warp and woof of our sense of the passing century. If, well into the 1970s, wide-ranging portraits of the epoch would grant the Holocaust a modest (if any) mention, it now tends to fill the entire picture. The incriminated event has thus become the epoch's marker, its final and inescapable wellspring.