The first volume of The Politics of Genocide traces the history of the Jewish community in Hungary in the years immediately following World War I—a "Golden Era" when Hungary's Jews achieved a nearly commanding position in their country's economic and cultural life. Braham then illuminates their experience after 1932 when the anti-Semitic Gömbös regime came to power, and in the years that followed which saw a further swing to the right in Hungarian politics that foreshadowed the final destruction of the Jewish community. Following the Hungarian Jews' fate under the Teleki, Bárdossy, and Kállay governments, Braham recounts the enactment of anti-Jewish laws, the creation of mass deportation plans and the labor service system, and the first massacres and atrocities. Then, with the arrival of the German occupation forces in 1944, Braham begins a comprehensive, region-by-region and town-by-town examination of the horrific, systematic destruction that followed.

The technical efficiency of the extermination program in Hungary was the result of years of experience acquired by the Nazi machine. The barbarity and speed with which the "final solution" was implemented there constituted, as Winston Churchill has said, "probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the history of the world."