after 1965 by the expert Professor Rob Kroes. Since the book was mainly intended to serve the Dutch reading public, it was never translated. In 1950, Presser received a commission from the Dutch government to produce a study about the fate of the Dutch Jews during the war. That would later become his historical masterpiece Ondergang [The destruction of the Dutch Jews]. He worked on this project for fifteen years and made full use of the vast archives of the Dutch Institute for War Documentation. The resulting work was a huge bestseller in the Netherlands when it was published in 1965. It still is the main reference work on the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands under German occupation. A British edition came out in 1968 and an American edition in 1969, with reprints in 1988 and 2010. Presser graphically recounts stories of persecution: the registration, stigmatization, segregation, isolation, spoliation, roundups, the temporary exemptions, life in the transit camps, deportation and ultimately extermination but also stories of Jewish resistance, escape attempts and the process of going into hiding. The author pays attention to the role of the Dutch bureaucracy in the segregation and the isolation of the Jews and conveys the utter despair felt by people whose whole world had crumbled and would be destroyed. Of the Jewish population of some 140,000 in 1940, about 107,000 were deported from the Netherlands to the Nazi concentration and extermination camps from 1941 to 1944. Of those, fewer than 6,000 returned in 1945. An epilogue considers the aftermath on the "postwar Jewish attitude to life". Presser made a very significant contribution to Dutch historical studies. His book on the Revolt of the Netherlands against Spain (1568–1648), first published in 1941 with a second print in 1942 that was soon prohibited by the German occupiers, was reprinted another four times after the Second World War. Until the late 1970ss it was the only modern, comprehensive historical study on the Dutch Revolt in its entirety. In 1953 Presser introduced the term 'egodocuments' as an umbrella term for texts in which he was especially interested: diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, interviews and personal letters. Along with other great historians, such as Groen van Prinsterer, Robert Fruin, Huizinga, Pieter Geyl, L.J. Rogier, Jan Romein, Annie Romein-Verschoor and Arie Th. van Deursen, he can be counted as one of the greatest historians of the Netherlands in the 19th and