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Title: The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (Comprehensive History of the Holocaust Series) by Christopher R. Browning, Jurgen Matthaus ISBN: 0-8032-1327-1 Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr Pub. Date: March, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Evil starts at the top
Comment: A brilliant book! Every killer squad (Einsatzkommando) sent into occupied Russia had a Ph.D. adviser attached to it. As the old proverb has it, the fish starts to stink from the head.
Rating: 5
Summary: The dynamic of death
Comment: Christopher Browning's book is the most detailed account of how Nazi Germany moved from discriminating against Jews and encouraging their emigration just before September 1939, to the systematic extermination of them by March 1942. It is based on the most recent research and has 111 pages of notes and a thirty page bibliography. How such an atrocity could have happened by a wealthy, otherwise sophisticated state against a small powerless minority is still difficult to comprehend. Browning shows how complex the path was. In September 1939 the German attack on Poland was marked by massacres of the local population, with a disproportionate emphasis on Jews. Poland, which had been divided between Germany and the Soviet Union, was further divided by the Nazis between those areas that had belonged to pre-Versailles Germany which were returned to the Reich, and the remainder, which became the General Government of Poland. Many ambitious people, among them Adolf Eichmann, thought that one could simply expel the Jewish population into the General Government, or later into the Wesern countries. This was not a detailed plan decreed on high by Hitler. Instead it was the response often of local initiative or by powerful players in the Nazi government, with the SS being the most important, sometimes getting a sign from Hitler to move forward, occasionally getting a sign to stop. But the expellers had problems. The general government was reluctant to be swamped with Jewish refugees. France in particular did not want Jews from Luxembourg. The army's military jurisdiction had to be reigned in and any concern over the brutal tactics diluted. This was done with some success, but the people who sought to economically exploit Poland (around Goering) had their own, limited pragmatic objections. At the same time there was a similarly complex process with ghettoization. As the ghettoes developed (Browning is very careful to point out the differences between Warsaw, Lodz, Cracow and elsewhere) a division developed between "attritionists" who thought confining the Jews to ghettoes would reduce their numbers, while "productionists" argued it would be easier to exploit the Jews economically if they were guaranteed a certain minimum standard of living. Although some scholars have sought to find an economic logic to the Nazi's actions, Browning notes the irony that the productionists were slowly winning the battle over the ghetto when it was decided to exterminate the Jews.
The key turning point was the decision to invade the Soviet Union. In the months beforehand plans were drawn up that assumed the deaths of millions, even tens of millions of Soviets from starvation and dispossession. Within days of the invasion the SS Einsatzgruppen were murdering thousands of people. At the same time other Nazis, other allies and local populations in the Baltic and Ukraine carried out massacres of male Jews on their own initiative. By August women and children were being included across the occupied Soviet Union, though not everywhere. By October plans were being drawn up to create gas chambers and by January 1942 the Wansee Conference was held. By March 1942 the Nazis were systematically moving to slaughter every Jew in Europe from Ireland to Vladivostok. When was the decision made to do all this? Browning makes four important points. First, there was no big bang of the origins of the Final Solution, no single decision which launched everything. Second, the planning for Barbarrossa, with mass executions, mass expulsions and mass starvation on a level previously unforeseen, clearly implied the genocide of the Jews, if not their absolute extinction. Third, Nazi decision making policy was "an unsytematical dialectical interaction of mutual radicalization between central and local authorities...as well as decisions and orders from above; and intuition, initiative, and experimentation, as well as obedience from below." Fourth, one cannot just concentrate on Hitler and Himmler, one must look also at the military, civil administration, the bureaucracy, economists and collaborators. The role of anti-communism in the war against Germany's most dangerous foe was of special importance. Having pointed out how polycratic struggles and local initiative set the stage for genocide and how previous plans for expulsion had been consistently thwarted until 1941, Browning then presents a theory for Hitler's role, in two stages. In July 1941 Hitler moved towards the Final Solution in a euphoria of victory, but then stopped plans for deportations in August when the Wehrmacht's offensive was delayed. But in September, the military situation improved, the euphoria returned and it was in this six-week period until the end of October that Hitler decided to kill every Jew the Nazis could get their hands on.
This summary does not go into the immense detail and considerable nuance that Browning provides on every point from popular opinion to the setting up of the first death camps to the role of the euthanasia program where many exterminators started their career. Some details stand out. As the Holocaust was about to make their work redundant, the professional anti-Semitic bureaucrats added a new round of petty restrictions of Jewish life, such as a 1941 rule in Dresden that prevented Jews from buying cut flowers. Later we learn of how, in order to meet their anti-partisan hostage quotas, the Germans in Serbia started shooting male Jews in Serbia out of hand. One of the people behind this policy, Field Marshall List, was not only not Nazi "but a highly cultured and deeply religious man" who was praised by the future pope John XXIII for his attempts to alleviate famine and military mistreatment in Greece. But the prejudices of his caste against guerrillas and Serbs made him push an open door to genocide. Indeed one of the most dispiriting things in this book is that no-one in the vast Nazi machine seems to have stopped to point out how evil it was to murder millions of innocent people.
Rating: 5
Summary: I feel shell shocked
Comment: This is the best book an a Holocaust topic I have read, even though it troubled me greatly. I had always believed that the destruction of Europe's Jews was carefully planned, not largely improvised as Professor Browning demonstrates with blinding clarity and unassailable research. It does not diminish the evil but it helps to explain et. Do buy this powerfull book.
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Title: The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans ISBN: 1594200041 Publisher: The Penguin Press Pub. Date: 05 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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Title: The Nazi Conscience : by Claudia Koonz ISBN: 0674011724 Publisher: Belknap Pr Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Stalin : The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore ISBN: 1400042305 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 13 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories by Omer Bartov ISBN: 0801486815 Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: After Such Knowledge: Where Memory of the Holocaust Ends and History Begins by Eva Hoffman ISBN: 1586480464 Publisher: PublicAffairs Pub. Date: 06 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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