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The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945

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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.

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

This cataclysmic modern catastrophe that we now call the Holocaust has now, at last, found its first truly magisterial, comprehensive treatment in Friedlanders The Years of Extermination.

Previous attempts at this task (by Lucy Dawidowicz, Raul Hilberg, and some others) have suffered from being premature (i.e. they were conceived before some of the more important archives were available), and, in some cases, by having a whiff of eccentricity about them. This latter criticism applies particularly to the writers of some of the more specialized monographs. Many of these have flogged particular insights, which, while often valuable by themselves, were sometimes exaggerated and promoted for polemical purposes.

Was the Holocaust a natural outcome of German anti-Semitism? Was it a matter of greed of the Germans who wanted to rob the Jews? Was it mostly a matter of injustices inherent in the Versailles treaty, as some of the older commentators have urged? Was it partly a matter of German Protestants and their Lutheran heritage, as a recent writer would have us believe? Friedlander, to his enormous credit, pays close attention to all such partial insights but transcends them all. He has read everything and has considered everything (well, almost  see below). He distills for us all of the extremely rich specialized literature and gives us a coherent, full, rich, detailed, satisfying picture of what happened to the Jews in the Second World War.

When I say that he considers all the specialized research, I mean of course the work that needs consideration. He wastes no time on the so-called Holocaust deniers, nor, indeed, on those who insist that the moon is made of green cheese.

Obviously no book -- the Messiah not yet having come  is perfect. Alas. The outstanding fault that I find in this volume is its failure to as much as mention the (admittedly very minor) role played by Arab politicians in making the Holocaust possible.

Almost all other general books on the subject find at least some room to mention the Palestinian leader of the day, Hitlers great friend and supporter, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini. Of course no book can cover absolutely everything, and Husseinis role was small. But Friedlander does find room to point to the (very minor) roles of the Swiss and Canadian governments, who, while culpably indifferent to the fate of the Jews, were in no way actively hostile, as was the Mufti. Those interested in the story of the Mufti will wish to look at the section devoted to it in Robert Wistrichs much smaller and much more modest Hitler and the Holocaust (New York, 2001).

But of course I cannot end on a negative note in writing about this great book. I have read most if not all of the previous comprehensive work on the subject, as well as a good deal of the more specialized literature. In studying this new book by Friedlander, I found new and surprising material on almost every page. I am completely confident that this book marks a turning point in what we know about the Nazi era. Both specialists and general readers owe a tremendous gratitude to the author for having given us this absolutely marvelous work.

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.

This is a magisterial book, as one of the critics defined it. Not only does it contain an exhaustive research, poignant diarists' quotations, and a vast collection of amazing facts (such as the refusal of the Hungerians to surrender their Jews to Hitler, or the indifference of starving and desperate parents to the deportation of their children), it also, and most importantly, "nails" the Nazi crimes and criminals as no other book has ever done. In the presence of this book, Holocaust deniers will be forever silenced. Furthermore, I can hardly imagine the pain Prof. Friedlander, a Holocaust survivor whose parents were murdered by the Nazis, had subjected himself to in writing this tome of a book. It is a brave, sacrificial work.
I agree, though, with some of the critics' complaints that the book, although riveting, is at times a difficult slog. Maps and pictures would have helped. Also chapters' titles would have helped. In the notes section, printing the chapter #s and the pages #s at the top of the page would have helped a great deal. But isn't it the function of the editors to notice such things? My most important criticism, though, concerns Friedlander's omissions. The Nazi evil sears the pages, as it did the Jews, and the victims' cries for help plow like an ax, as Kafka would put it, in the frozen sea within us. One cannot forget those screams, cannot take the ax out and toss it to oblivion. The bystanders, too, are revealed in their shame and cowardice, like thousands and thousands of shadows crowding the gladiatorial arena. But one group of people is noticeably missing: the heroes who risked their lives to save Jews. Wallenberg is given a brief mention in half a sentence; the Danish rescuers are mentioned in a mere short paragraph; and Schindler and Hannah Senesh are not even mentioned. Thousands of heroic gentiles are listed in the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., but Friedlander has found no room for even some of them in his book. If an act of courage is mentioned, it is disposed of quickly, as if it did not matter. But it did, and it does. Granted, Friedlander's subject moves in a different direction, but his omitting of the heroes does them--and all humanity perhaps--a grave injustice.

I have never read anything by Saul Friedlander before. I'm not really a Holocaust historian, though I've read a few books on the subject. I tend to be more of a student of World War II history in general, and of the military aspects of things in particular. This book, however, attracted me because it won the Pulitzer, and frankly it doesn't disappoint: it's well-written, judicious, and very intelligent and comprehensive, and the author does an excellent job of putting everything in context and explaining what occurred.

The book begins with the start of the War, and discusses first the various efforts to resettle Germany's Jews, the dilemma the regime encountered when they conquered Poland, and finally the solution that they came up with to deal with the issue: extermination. The author discusses each period fairly objectively, frankly more objectively than I would have thought possible. Objectively, of course, Hitler and the Nazis wind up being described as insane mass-murderers. The author moves seamlessly from the discussion of various measures that were taken towards extermination with the diaries of various Jews who were caught in the Holocaust, and of various German soldiers and civilians who commented on how the Jews were treated.

This is a very very good book. It's hard to imagine saying you enjoyed reading it: it's a chronicle of mass murder, after all. But the book is extremely well-written and documented, and the facts are remorseless in their clarity. The author puts to bed two hoary old myths that have troubled me for years: most of the German population had at least some idea what was going on, and there was no propaganda or cynical aspect to the Nazi ideology: they were really that anti-semitic, and would have been even if opposed by the populace.

I would recommend this book to almost anyone interested in the Holocaust or 20th Century history.

"The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945" is the most thorough, complete and scholarly book on the Holocaust that I have read. In an effort to try to understand why and how the Holocaust occured, I have read extensively about the conduct and activities of the Europeans as well as non Europeans (governments, organizations and people)during this awful period. Friedlander puts it all together for me, and as a result I have a much better understanding of these terrible events. I highly recomend this book to those who want to read an in depth study of the Holocaust.

William R. Cohen
Herzlia Pituach, Israel

This massive work is a disappointment in style. The writer's prose seems calculated to make the reader's work difficult, and there is no excuses for one who knows the pitfalls of academic writing to quickly breach the first rule of research-based treatises - don't burden the language by turning three or four sentences into a single one. The book is constructed from language so cluttered, with sentences so convoluted, that the narrative is weakened and folowing the exploration of causality (the real point of the book)becomes more and more frustrating. The tangled prose is one thing. Another is the self-referencing ("as we shall see," "when we previously met them in an earlier chapter," "later,this will be exlored in full") which somehow got past the subs. The only memorable prose is the searing quotations of those who were consumed first by hopelessness and then by the machinery of murder. One cannot help but recall Primo Levi's assertion that the best witnesses of the Holocaust were consumed by it.
At the end of reading this book, it is difficult to recall lines of thought, apart from the public nature of Hitler's determination to wipe out European Jewery, and the nature of the Vatican's indifference, which bordered on complicity. But this has been covered elsewhere and to better effect. So I found it hard to warrant the claims made by some reviewers that the book contained revelations. If you are looking for clearly expounded research that provides a memorable reading experience, this book is not the last word.

This is truly a magisterial study of the Holocaust (Shoah), well deserving of its award of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and follows the author's earlier volume covering the 1933-1939 period. It runs some 663 pages of text, includes 128 pages of meticulous notes, and 51 pages of bibliographic references. It places heavy reliance not only on contemporary documents, but also on published and unpublished memoirs and diaries (such as that of Victor Klemperer, also reviewed on Amazon). The author has a unique perspective, since he was born in Prague in but grew up in France between 1940 and 1944 during the Nazi occupation. He spent part of this period in a Catholic boarding school and considered converting. His parents were both lost.

There are many fine books on the Holocaust. But Friedlander's work is unique and distinctive in contribution. He does not just recount in graphic detail how the extermination program progressed (although there is plenty of this horror discussed), he explains how it developed. It is not until page 339 that he even gets to the Wannsee conference. Rather, he focuses upon how the Nazi Jewish policy evolved from harasment to racial extermination. The author makes the somewhat surprising argument (to me at least) that the Nazis did not start out at the beginning of the war or earlier to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Rather, the policy evolved as the war developed and various demands encouraged this program to be developed. In fact, it is not until late 1942 or early 1943 that the extermination policy was implemented by the Nazi leadership. Truly an interesting argument to say the least.

Given the author's previous biography of Pius XII, there is much discussion of the Catholic Church's reaction to all this. The author also discusses the Jewish Councils set up by the Nazis and whether they sacrificed the "less valuable" Jews in an effort to spare the more elite groups--another interesting topic. The book proceeds chronologically from 1939 through to 1945. Friedlander is able to balance a large number of topics skillfully as he develops his narrative. Many individual countries and their involvement in Holocaust implementation are discussed. The competing goals of extermination versus the use of Jews as slave laborers in defense industries is also covered. The author also wants to make it explicitly clear that ordinary Germans well knew that extermination was underway. Finally, one of the most surprising aspects to me was the author's explanation of how the determination to complete extermination only increased as it became obvious the war had been lost.

Friedlander could have written an emotional account, given his background. Instead, we see the work of a master historian true to his craft and unwilling to sacrifice professional standards in his analysis of a topic that surely was of the greatest pain to himself. We can all benefit from his professional dedication.

I have nothing negative to state in a review of Friedlander's latest book; its organization, research, and presentation all seem to me faultless. And there is fresh perspective, too--which is a rare find in a Holocaust text. Friedlander is completely in control of his wrenching subject matter. Bravo.