It describes the German extermination policies that resulted in the murder of six million European Jews.

The book presents a detailed history of the Holocaust and is based on a vast array of documents and memoirs.

However, Friedländer rejects the extreme Intentionalist view that Adolf Hitler had a master plan for the genocide of the Jewish people going back to the time when he wrote Mein Kampf.

Friedländer, through his research on the Third Reich, has reached the conclusion that there was no intention to exterminate the Jews of Europe before 1941.

[2] Historian Richard J. Evans, writing in The New York Times said that, though written with academic rigor, "what raises The Years of Extermination to the level of literature, however, is the skilled interweaving of individual testimony with the broader depiction of events.