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57 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
detailed look at the Nazi genocide, June 14, 2004
Professor Christopher Browning of the University of North Carolina (with contributions by the German historian Jurgen Matthaus) describes in unprecedented detail the steps that led to the crystallization of the Final Solution during the first two and a half years of World War II. Browning identifies the five weeks between September 18 and October 25, 1941, as the climactic turning point in Nazi policy. By then the close circle around Hitler knew what he expected of them. They were aware that no European Jews were to escape the anti-Jewish measures that had once been planned for after the war and that the goal of these measures was the physical destruction of the Jewish people--men, women, children. Although the cluster of fatal decisions in the fall of 1941 was the culmination of a series of events which began with the invasion of Poland 25 months earlier, it was Operation Barbarossa--the war of destruction against "Jewish Bolshevism"--that set in motion the German genocide against Soviet Jews and dramatically changed the tone and pace of Nazi policy and practice. As Browning makes clear, Hitler himself was the driving force behind the Final Solution. "His obsession with the Jewish question ensured that the Nazi commitment would not slacken, that the search for a final solution one way or another to the problem would not be neglected or be indefinitely postponed." As the embodiment of Nazi ideology and the constant inciter of the party faithful, Hitler exerted enormous pressure on the regime to implement his wishes. No leading Nazi could prosper who did not appear to take the Jewish question as seriously as he did himself. This pressure stimulated "a competition among the faithful and ambitious to advance ever more radical proposals and to carry out Jewish policy in an ever more brutal and comprehensive manner." It was not Hitler's style to micromanage or even to give orders. He preferred to have his subordinates carry out his wishes without him needing to oversee their work. "Where would I be," he said, "if I would not find people to whom I can entrust work which I myself cannot direct, tough people of whom I know they take the steps I would take myself. The best man is for me the one who bothers me least by taking upon himself 95 out of 100 decisions." This important, thoroughly researched book is part of Yad Vashem's Comprehensive History of the Holocaust project that "seeks to summarize research findings on the Holocaust during the generations following the war." As the middle volume of three volumes to be devoted to an examination of the development of Nazi Jewish policy, this book will come after a volume on the prewar years and before a volume on the implementation of the Final Solution. The rest of the volumes in the series will cover the impact of the Holocaust on the individual national Jewish communities of Europe.
Browning (and Matthaus) have succeeded admirably in their goal of broadening our understanding of this part of the road to the Holocaust, and their work will no doubt be definitive for many years to come. Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, author of The Destruction of the European Jews, calls this book "by far the most incisive analysis of the decisions that gave rise to the annihilation of the Jews in Nazi Europe." --reviewed by Charles Patterson, author of ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust
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45 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb Scholarship; Dispiriting Reading, April 15, 2004
This important book is a detailed narrative and analysis of how the Nazis came to pursue the systematic extermination of the European Jews. It is aimed at summarizing and clarifying approximately 2 generations worth of scholarship on this aspect of the Holocaust and distilling it into an accessible form. Written primarily by Christopher Browning with contributions from the German scholar Jugen Matthaus, this very well written and organized book is entirely successful in achieving its aims. The Holocaust, at least in its final form, was an improvisation. There is no doubt that virulent anti-Semitism was a core feature of Nazi ideology and that elimination of Jews from any society dominated by the Nazis was an essential goal of the Nazis. In the years prior to WWII, the chosen instruments, however, were legal discrimination, coercion but not mass murder, and intense pressure to force Jews to emigrate from Germany. As with other aspects of Hitler's goals and policies, he and his underlings had not thought ahead as to how they would realize their ultimate objective of purging German (and European) society of Jews. The great success of the German military in 1939-1941 acted as a spur and radicalizing force in Nazi Jewish policy. The conquest of Poland, and later much of the Soviet Union, with their large populations of Jews, meant that the prewar solutions were inadequate. What followed were a set of expedients; forced emigration and starvation, ghettoization and starvation, mass executions by shootings, and early experiments with mass murder by gassing. Flushed with apparent victory in the fall of 1941, Hitler and his minions made the decision that none of the previous measures were satisfactory and embarked on the policy of developing extermination camps.
Browning and Matthaus not only chart the development of these measures and provide judicious analyses of the available data on how and when decisions were made by the Nazis, they also provide great and important detail on the context in which decisions occurred. The development of mass murder by gassing, for example, occurred in the Nazi eugenic campaigns, another aspect of their ideology of 'racial hygiene.' The murderous campaigns against Jews in occupied Poland are set in the context of the German effort to reduce Polish society to a rural proletariat that would be used as a source of cheap labor for the Reich. Yet another aspect of racial hygiene and part of the Nazi effort to guarantee Lebensraum in Eastern Europe. Indeed, the Nazi campaign against Jews is comprehensible only as part of a broader racist ideology and effort to obtain lebensraum. The Jews, unfortunately for them, occupying the central place in the Nazi demonology.
Several other important issues are dealt with. The complicity of the German Armed Forces. The role of public opinion in Germany. The competition between those of the Nazis who wished to proceed directly to murder and those who wished to extract some economic value prior to murder. The "polycratic" nature of the Nazi state and Hitler's decision making methods. All of these important topics are analyzed thoughtfully.
In many respects, this important book is profoundly dispiriting. Many portions are simply painful to read. This book makes clear the incredibly destructive consequences of ideologies demonizing other human beings and provides considerable insight into how such acts occur.
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56 of 64 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb Investigation Of Holocaust Circumstances!, August 19, 2004
While no serious Holocaust scholar would argue against the idea that the Third Reich meant in some fashion to dispose of its so-called "Jewish Problem" through some dispicable action or another, whether it by via forced emigration, deportation, resettlement in either Madagascar or the western reaches of the Ukraine, or through other means, there has been a long-ranging debate within the academic community regarding the intent of the Nazis from the beginning regarding the actual attempted extermination of the Jewish people as it later occurred, primarily in Poland and the occupied territories, during the later course of World War Two. One school of thought argues that from the very beginning Hitler intended to rid himself and Europe of the Jews through such nefarious means as starvation, forced labor, and later, in the death camps. Others, such as Professor Christopher Browning, posit that the policy of extermination evolved as a result of existential factors such as food and shelter as the Wehrmacht marched east into Poland and beyond to the Soviet escarpment.
Thus, this brilliant work by Browning intends to offer proof of the more circumstantial theory, one in which various attempts were made to offer some relief to over-extended troops and resources to deal with the indigenous Jewish population within Poland and the other territories as they were conquered based both on logistics and the state of chaos that ensued in the war zone. This is not to suggest that the Nazis intended to spare the Jews; on the contrary, the issue was how to dispose of them, whether it be through forced emigration, slave labor, simple starvation, or finally, through implementation of an intentional murder machine by way of the death camps. From the beginning Hitler intended to use them to best advantage.
As Browning argues, however, the course of events must be taken into consideration when viewing the evidence, for while Hitler's main aim in warring first with Poland and later with Russia was for what he referred to as "Liebenstraum", or living room, it was also his intent to brutally subjugate the native populations within the conquered areas and literally work them to death, so their labors could profit the Third Reich and prepare the areas for German immigrants. But given the chaotic and undisciplined nature of the Nazi hierarchy and its bureaucracy, several overlapping policies worked against each other and created a wilderland of competing efforts, many of which left the local authorities puzzled as to what policy to follow and how to reach the unrealistic goals given to it by higher headquarters. In the midst of the chaos, according to Browning, evil machinations gradually emerged and as they succeeded in reaching goals, became the modus operandi.
Browning brilliantly focuses on the specific time frame in which the policies of the Third Reich solidified into what became the Final Solution. This is easily the best and most completely documented work on the subject I have yet read, and while I find it an impressive work of historical research (Browning's use of new archives and secondary materials is particularly impressive in this regard), I remain unconvinced that Professor Browning has successfully ended the debate (not that he claims to have done so), nor do I think he has explained some very deliberate and troubling evidentiary materials that seem to provide grist for the other camp regarding the instructions given to both the Wehrmacht and to special troops under the command of the Gestapo regarding the conduct of troops in the eastern zone.
In this regard, German troops were encouraged from the very beginning of the so-called eastern campaigns against both the Poles and the Russians to consider all indigenous Jews as communists, and thus subject to summary execution whenever and wherever they might be discovered, whether in urban areas working as academics or as rural farmers tending to their humble fields, and to support and aid the special troop formations trained and organized to systematically round up and murder indigenous Jewish populations from village to village, from the very outset of military operations in September 1939. So, while I personally subscribe to Browning's interpretation of the gradual move toward more and more intentionally systematic and increasingly more murderous assaults against the Jewish population, I do not believe he has proven once and for all that it was not part of the original plan from the time the Nazis took power in 1933. Nonetheless, this is indeed a superb book, and one I can heartily recommend. Enjoy!
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