The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (Vol 2) (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In the second volume of his essential history of Nazi Germany and the Jews, one of the great historians of the Holocaust provides a rich, vivid depiction of Jewish life from France to Ukraine, Greece to Norway, in its most tragic period, drawing especially on hundreds of diaries written by Jews during their ordeal, depicting a world collapsing on its inhabitants, along with the thousands of humiliating persecutions that Jews suffered on their way to extermination. Friedländer also provides insightful discussions of the many interpretive controversies that still surround the history of Nazi Germany. He has been party to many of the debates, and he remains attuned to the most recent historical research. Friedländer knows the bureaucratic workings of the Third Reich as well as anyone, but refuses to see in that alone the explanation for the Holocaust. Instead, he focuses largely on cultural and ideological factors. He considers other factors, such as "the crisis of liberalism," but these were not the essential motives for the Holocaust, which, Friedländer says, was driven by sheer hatred of Jews, by "a redemptive anti-Semitism" espoused by Hitler, a belief that Germans could thrive only through the utter destruction of Jews. This is a masterful synthesis that draws on a lifetime of learning and research. (Apr. 10)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

Saul Friedländer, born in 1932, has now finished his magnum opus, the second volume of his history of Nazi Germany and the Jews (the first, covering the years 1933-1939, appeared in 1997). The Years of Extermination may prove to be the last major general history of the Holocaust produced by a leading scholar who lived under the Nazis. For this reason, and because it relies heavily on the findings and perspectives of recent scholarship, it presents a kind of appraisal of our understanding of the period.

Friedländer brings together a vast array of evidence -- including the Nazi leadership's public and private pronouncements, the testimony of bystanders and the testimony of victims -- to ground his basic contentions about two principal concerns: how the decisions about the persecution of the Jews unfolded, and how Germans and other Europeans reacted to that persecution. He does this through a detailed chronological recounting of the events, in which he follows the thread of the regime's anti-Jewish initiatives while repeatedly cutting to different European countries for snapshots of their implementation.

The evidence is overwhelming, Friedländer shows, that anti-Semitism not only motivated Hitler and the Nazi leadership in their persecution and extermination of the Jews, but that it led Germans to accept and implement the regime's policies, and most of the peoples of occupied Europe to aid or watch, with little sympathy, the destruction of the Jews among them. Until a decade ago this was generally denied by scholars, who, focusing almost exclusively on the Nazi leadership and enamored of misleading structural and social psychological theories, ignored the evidence from victims and perpetrators alike about the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism.

Friedländer confirms that, while the Nazi leadership and many Germans wanted desperately to rid their country and Europe of Jews, actual anti-Jewish policy moved forward in a pragmatic, not entirely linear way -- from ghettoization and expulsion schemes to regional killing to total annihilation. After all, the Germans' assault on the Jews encompassed a continent and evolved in the context of changing military, political and economic constraints and opportunities.

He also leaves no doubt that it is transparent nonsense to exculpate ordinary Germans involved in the persecution, as well as the conquered peoples of Europe who aided the Germans, with claims that they did not know of the mass murder or were terrorized into compliance by the Nazis. Following a growing trend, he rejects the convention of referring to the German perpetrators as "Nazis," which many of the Germans were not, and calls them instead "Germans."

Approval of the mass murder was indeed widespread in Germany and across Europe. But what was singular, which Friedländer does not sufficiently emphasize or analyze, is that the project was ideologically driven forward from Germany by Germans who alone sought the total elimination of the Jews from Europe and ultimately from the world. Whatever substantial local aid Germans received from Dutch, French, Poles, Ukrainians and others, it was principally Germans who imagined a world without Jews.

For all the book's virtues, Friedländer's failure to explore this and other critical themes makes The Years of Extermination little more than a dressed-up chronicle. Covering an entire continent's record of persecution inevitably yields superficial treatments and omissions. Still, he does not include, aside from the Nazi leadership, this genocide's central actors -- the actual killers themselves -- let alone examine them, their motives and deeds in depth. This astonishing omission compromises his overall project.

The central idea of his first volume, "redemptive anti-Semitism" -- that anti-Semitism is a quasi-religious belief system that offers to redeem the world of its troubles -- barely appears here. In that earlier work, he also explicitly rejected the conception of Hitler's and other Germans' anti-Semitism as "eliminationist" -- that anti-Semites believed Jews posed such a threat that they had to be eliminated somehow, whether by ghettoization, deportation or annihilation. Yet in this volume, without comment, Friedländer redefines redemptive anti-Semitism as a mission to save the world precisely "by eliminating the Jews." That may be because his earlier, woolly concept is useless when considering the central analytical problem of this book, the relationship between anti-Jewish prejudice and anti-Jewish action. After all, many anti-Semites who did not seek world redemption willingly took part in the expulsion and mass murder of Jews. Now that Friedländer must deal with actual eliminationist policies as his main subject, he alters his earlier concept and then drops it after the introduction, leaving his book analytically disarmed.

Friedländer repeatedly fails to explore the larger significance of the many events he describes, such as the relationship among the Germans' various plans to deport Jews, to slaughter "only" the adult Jewish males in one region, and to annihilate them totally. And he fails to place the Germans' and other Europeans' extermination of the Jews in any broader context, including the Germans' large-scale but systematically different brutalizing and killing of non-Jews.

Friedländer's book offers a useful, updated panorama of the events of the Holocaust. But readers seeking more than an introductory narrative will have to look elsewhere.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 896 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins; 1 edition (April 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060190434
• ISBN-13: 978-0060190439
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #215,243 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

89 of 98 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Indelible Memory of the Dead, May 5, 2007

By	Omer Belsky (Haifa, Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I read Saul Friedlander's first volume about Holocaust, Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939 almost ten years ago. That was one of the first, and one of the best, non fiction books I've read. With well crafted, confident prose, Friedlander guided us through the various stratas of German society as the Nazi administration slowly but relentlessly increased the pressure on the Jews. I was mightily disappointed as the years passed by and the second volume failed to appear. Rumor had it that it wasn't forthcoming. I only discovered that "The Years of Extermination" would in fact be released after it has been.

I got the hefty hardcover (870 pages, including 205 pages of notes and bibliography in a bookstore in Israel while shopping for a book to take with me to a business trip. It was only after I purchased "The Years of Extermination" - but before I left - that I realized I would be reading most of it in Germany. How appropriate.

"The Years of Extermination" cover Germany's Jewish policy in the war years. The chapters are chronological rather than topical, and follow a relatively stable format. First, the chapter briefly discusses the progress of the War, the contingencies that played a part in the shaping of the extermination policy. Next, Friedlander describes the happenings in the highest echelons of the Nazi Regime - the various power struggles, speeches, and plans concerning the fate of the Jews. The rest of the chapter would be dedicated to the carrying out of the policies, and to the actions and reactions of the various victims, perpetrators, and by standers, throughout the Reich and among its allies. Friedlander also report about the knowledge and actions, or mostly lack thereof, of various Jewish and world leaders.

Friedlander's book is hard to read, and harder to summarize. The inhumanity of the Nazi Horror often makes you cold - it is easy to lose track on the personal suffering, on the individual human beings, when one discusses the mechanism and bureaucracy of Genocide. Friedlander successfully counters this tendency with excerpts of diaries, some well known (Anne Frank, Victor Klemperer) but most, like Lilli Jahn, the Jewish Doctor wife of an Aryan physician, all but forgotten. So reading the book is an emotional experience - a study of unmitigated, incomprehensible destruction.

Friedlander engages, to some extent or another, most of the controversies regarding the Holocaust. Particularly striking is his judgment, after a long and detailed discussion, of Pope Pius XII: "if the Catholic Church is merely considered as a political institution that has to calculate the outcome of its decisions in terms of instrumental rationality, then Pius's choice may be deemed reasonable in view of the risks entailed. If, however, the Catholic Church also represents a moral stand, as it claims, mainly in moments of major crisis, and thus has to move on such occasions from the level of institutional interests to that of moral witnessing, then of course Pius's choice should be assessed differently." (p. 573)

For me, small details were often the most striking. Among the Jews gathered up in the Ghettos were Christian converts, and there were Churches in Ghettos. Despite receiving some privileges, the Jewish Christians were twice damned: "As a foreign entity" wrote an underground Jewish journalist "they were thrust into a dual exile in the ghetto. A decisive majority of the Jewish population maintains no contact with these `Jews'. Foreign to the Jewish masses in their culture, hopes and yearnings, they share the Jews' suffering as uninvited partners in misfortune" (quoted on page 244). None of that made them any more compassionate, however: One of the Reverends in the Ghetto saw God's hand in placing him in it, and pledged to remain as much an anti-Semite as he was before once he got out.

I also did not know that the font with which the word Jude (Jew) was written on the yellow David star the Jews were forced to wear was invented specifically for that purpose, intentionally reminding one of sinister Kabalistic Hebrew, while remaining readable in all languages.

Reading and Reflecting about the horrors of the persecutions, it is hard not to wonder about the murderers. Did they know what they were doing was wrong? Did they realize the baseness, the unimaginable criminality of their actions? At times, they must have. "Goering is completely aware of what would threaten us all, if we were to weaken in this war" wrote Goebbels. "He has no illusions in this regard. In the Jewish question in particular, we are so fully committed that for us there is no escape any more. And that is good that way. Experience shows us that a movement and a people who have burnt their bridges fight fan more unconditionally than those who still have a way back." (Quoted on page 538).

There are, I think, dark implications in this and similar paragraphs. Incomprehension is sometimes the only resort we have for people who have brunt their bridges so far that they were no longer a part of humanity. Sometime later, I may speak rationally about their motives and incentives and ideology. Right now, all I feel is overwhelming incomprehension, and (using friedlander's term) the indelible memory of the dead.

36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A new and good history of the Holocaust, April 28, 2007

By	Seth J. Frantzman (Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

There are an number of prominent full length, one volume, histories of the Holocaust, this is the newest and contributes much to the study of the terrible event. In particular this book returns the reader to the 'old' view of the Holocaust. It challenges Arendt's theory that the Jews were responsible for their own fate and that the Germans were 'banal' and it assaults various 'economic' histories of the Holocaust by recalling the racial hatred that motivated the mass murder.

The most important contribution this book makes is examining the internal workings of the Jewish communal institutions and their leadership. Of the utmost importance is the books concentration on cataloguing the crimes of the Nazi collaborators in Croatia, Rumania, Ukraine, Latvia, Poland and elsewhere. The book combines a massive amount of source material to give flavor for all sides of the Holocaust machine. It is well written, beautiful and tragic and poignant.

The greatest drawback is a total lack of pictures or maps. This is a great shame, for the Holocaust was colossal in scale, maps are necessary.

The story is chronological rather than thematic or geographical, which can be confusing and the book lacks adequate headers to break up the countries studied. Nevertheless, quite an accomplishment, a great new history.

Seth J. Frantzman

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Magnificent Achievement, September 9, 2007

By	Irving Wiesen (New York) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Daniel Goldhagen's critique above is mystifying on several counts. First, Friedlander clearly deals extensively with the killers and their motivations including testimony in their own words. Statements, testimony and diary entries by Goebbels, Himmler, Eichmann, Hoss, Frank and many others, including by the killers, are quoted repeatedly and extensively. Second, in no way does Friedlander diminish his earlier emphasis on "redemptive anti-Semitism" despite the paucity of that particular phrase in this second volume. In fact, he returns again and again to Hitler's animus in quasi-religious terms: the Holocaust as prerequisite to the survival of the human species itself; Hitler's self-described Reichstag "prophecy" concerning the Jews. If this is not "redemptive" I don't know what is. In fact at one point Friedlander expounds on this very issue specifically and at length. Notwithstanding the inapposite Goldhagen criticisms (the history is all there, notwithstanding Goldhagen's charge that this is history lite, including extensive examination of questions such as the "order" to kill the Jews, the role of the Pope, etc.), there is a certain weight of psychological focus on the mindset of Jews and ordinary Germans as expressed in diaries and letters. In this, Friedlander accomplishes something very difficult: he allows us a glimpse into the mind and the world of the Holocaust day to day--what was it like as a Jew, what did the ordinary German think, what did the soldiers think and report back home of the atrocities they witnessed and more than occasionally abetted? What did priests think and do? What did religious people think? Interweaving these glimpses into the broad tapestry of the history of the murderous events themselves, Friedlander gives us the macro and micro all at once--a deft, historically invaluable perspective. In short, I know of no Holocaust history which so comprehensively and grippingly covers the entire event, from its earliest stirrings and antecedents to the end of the war, and how it played out in the fabric of the societies which comprised Europe, as the two volumes of Friedlander's history. This should be required reading of every human being.