I'm about halfway through Timothy Snyder's Black Earth, which has shifted from giving the needed context to explaining how the Holocaust started and unfolded. He manages to ask and answer questions that I had never considered, e.g. how it was possible for enormous amounts of regular, non-crazy people to kill even larger amounts of Jews; how far Hitler was willing to go to realize his vision of Darwinistic racial struggle; how the Holocaust only started after Hitler realized he couldn't deport the Jews to Madagascar; and how not just the Germans but most of Eastern Europe had a "Jewish problem", but for entirely different reasons.

Good luck, rinx. I usually listen to something like this at times like that.