Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The anti-thesis of Goldhagen, October 6, 1998
By A Customer
I suggest you read A. Mayer's book chapter for chapter with Goldhagen's. Mayer's book takes on the question of the final solution from the point of view that the two fronts, and therefore the two regions of European Jewry were dealt with in different ways. German anti-semitism as well as the worlds anti-semitism weighed out a heavier toll on those Jews in the East than those in the West. Nations allowed Western Jews into their countries, but closed their boarders to the Eastern Jews. And as the Nazis war machine progressed it installed death camps in Poland, the East. But, no Death Camps are built in France,Belgium, or Austria. The East was reserved for the final solution. Mayer, does not believe Hitler had planned the final solution but developed it as he went along. Case in point, Hitler at first expelled Jews to the four corners of the World, trying to get them out of Germany. If the Final solution was Hitler's end all allong why scatter the population you plan to exterminate? Mayer delves into these questions. He does not let Germans off the hook, nor the rest of the world. Goldhagen's work is the exact opposite of Mayer's book. Goldhagen believes in the final solution from Hitler's inception onward in Germany. He puts the blame intirely on the Germans of that period and no one else. He does not distuinguish from the different fronts. And, he unties the history of the Nazis from the Germans of today. His most defining chapter is that of the einzatzgruppe. It is the horror of these special battalions that decimated the Eastern Jewish population and caused a need for the Nazis to create camps to put those they had not been able to kill in the first onslaught. The basis of this comes from another book by Browning that is from the police reports interviewing the Germans that were in these special forces. In Brownings book he looks at the evil doers themselves and how they justified, broke down, and how the majority of them became murders. These three books I highly recommend.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Beyond Horror, February 5, 2009
Between the invasion of Russia in June of 1941 and the withdrawal of German troops from near Moscow in the winter of 1941-42 the SS killed about a half a million civilians behind German lines, 9/10ths of whom were Jewish. Most were killed as the invasion began to falter. Despite this fact, the author claims that these killings were not part of a preplanned final solution, but a result of a series of factors including Nazi identification of Jews with communism, the hardened anti-Semitism of the SS, the role of emancipated Jews in the Soviet Union as workers and party members, the SS picking up on pogroms of the anticommunist nationals in such places as Latvia, and Bessarabia, and Jewish residence in hard-fought-for conquered cities. Hitler attacked the Soviet Union to eliminate Jewish Communism from the world. Slavo-Jewish-communists were untermenschen and the war in the East was a total war of annihilation and subjugation. The Germany army participated in this. Stalin's licensing of guerilla warfare behind German lines provided a convenient excuse for military brutality and acceptance of SS atrocities behind the lines. In casual comments Hitler and other Nazis suggested that death of civilians and captured soldiers made the job of clearing the East for settlement easier. Of the three million Soviet war prisoners very few survived. They died of cold, hunger and overwork. When asked in 1941 by the Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte how they were feeding all their Soviet war prisoners, a German general replied nonchalantly, "By now they are eating each other." Though thousands were shot, they were not lined up in front of trenches and exterminated as were the Jews of Kiev at Babi Yar.
Why did Mayer write another history of the "Final Solution?" He seems to be addressing the accepted rendition of history that the Holocaust is a unique event for mankind, the planned result of Nazi anti-Semitism. The book reads like an argument with a non-present co-conversant. Mayer seems to be trying to refute claims that a systematic planned murder of the Jews was part of Nazi thinking years before its actual execution. Mayer's aim is to place the Holocaust in an historical context of the Nazis identifying Jews with communists and frustration due to the failure of the drive to the East. The explanations he comes up with are apparently objectionable to people who regard the Holocaust as the most egregious event in human history, more horrible than anything that happened to any other peoples, a policy embedded in early Nazi thinking and carried out by modern bureaucratic and technological means. These people often argue that its special nature is reason for special compensation to Jews.
Having taught at Brandeis University for thirty years, I would come into contact with such opinions. Because this sentiment was overwhelmingly present on campus (and maybe official dogma of the institution), I tended to avoid the subject, engaging in other pressing matters which I knew much more about such as the war in Vietnam, devastation of the environment, the need for Black Studies, American imperialism, and the mental factors of human suffering. From students sitting in my office I heard about courses which they said tried to prove the Holocaust was the worst thing that ever happened to any people. I would raise my eyebrows not knowing whether the student's renditions were accurate or whether the University supported this idea. From the refusal of the university administration to admit Israeli peace activists to graduate school in the 1970s, I knew there were some ideological lines that could not be crossed, and I had other interests.
Now reading Mayer's book as a follow up to his book on Zionism, I can see how charged explanations of the Holocaust are. I have not visited the museums in Washington or Boston. I don't watch Holocaust movies. That human beings can commit genocide is hard to accept or even to witness reenactments of. And I don't understand why one group would tout its holocaust against that of another. For Mayer the comparable devastations to the "Final Solution" are the Crusades in the 11th century and the pogroms in the late 19th. He contrasts the killing of Jews in central Europe by the rabble of People's Crusades passing by to the complex social character of the Nazi movement in German society. Both the lumpen-crusaders and the pogromists of Eastern Europe (particularly Tsarist Russia) hated Jews as Jews in the spirit of the blood libel of first millennium Christendom, and both were abetted by rulers for economic and political reasons. Nazi anti-Semitism was another thing altogether. Rooted in this earlier hatred and relying on that form of prejudice's existence in European society, Mayer says that it was the Nazi's identification of Jews with communism, selfish capitalism, and Enlightenment modernism that are the significant factors. The Nazi's aim was not to kill Jews but to extirpate Judeocommunistic and racially polluting influence from a pure, traditional, almost agricultural, German Aryan nation. So, with the acquiescence of German, Junker, religious, and lower middle class society the Nazi's tried to drive the Jews out, sell them to Western capitalist nations or transport them first to Madagascar and then a Jewish enclave in part of German conquered Byelorussia. Beatings, deemancipations, occasional killings, and stigmatization drove out only half the Jews from Germany proper before the war (others either couldn't get out or stuck it out because they identified with being German and thought the oppression would pass). The West, mired in the depression and with its own dislike of Jews, could not be shamed by Hitler into opening its doors to Jews.
The traditional rulers of Germany, the landowners, industrialists, the church, the army and bureaucracy did not raise a hand to object to the Nazi's increasing discrimination against the Jews. Mayer restates this several times in the book. He says that it was not so much that they were predisposed to dislike the Jews but that they went along with the excesses because of indifference and self absorbtion particularly as the war pressed in on Germany itself. Mayer's argument makes their indifference seem more callous than it might have been given the fact that any open opposition to the Nazi's after Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 became increasing more dangerous. The police gladly participated in Hitler's elimination of the opposition. The Nazi's had their SA. Thus, except for the army, no matter what their position in society, anyone who might have objected would have been subject to, at least, the house arrest of von Pappen, or worse like German communists simply killed. And the army went along because of Hitler's success at restoring their power, occupation of the Rhineland, then Austria and Munich. So why kill the goose that lays the golden eggs--and for their part, the army bombed civilians indiscriminately and mistreated Soviet prisoners.
Then with the growing conquests the Nazis' found themselves with even more Jews to dispose of. So an enclave was the assumed answer. With the conquest of Poland, the SS began to shove Jews across the border into the Russian occupied half, dump them into an area near the boundary and move them into ghettos preparatory to moving them further east. Here is where Mayer paints the transition into the "Final Solution." The logic of a rapid total war against the Soviet Union confronted by Wehrmacht stopping Soviet resistance created an atmosphere in which the SS slid into a process of elimination without any ideological program of killing in place. This is an interesting thesis. It is convincing. It does not diminish the absolute horror of what was taking place and how it morphed into the death camps. That it takes a bit of aggrandizement away from the people who would like the world to see Jewish suffering as greater than any other does not seem very important. I don't know why Mayer does not compare the Holocaust to other holocausts: when the last Native American women, children, and old people were taken from what became Littleton, Massachusetts and put on Deer Island to starve to death after the rest of their people were killed in attacks on their villages, what scale of inhumanity are we to measure it by. Were the horrors of death marches, the camps and gas chambers worse? And the Palestinians in Gaza, the Armenians in Turkey, the Chinese in Japanese occupied China, the Soviet prisoners of war, the cities razed by the Mongols, the slave trade in both Islam and the West, Rwanda, Cambodia. It is hard to contemplate any of these, and if we are going to memorialize, why not all of them.
Reading about the difficulty of evading the Nazi Behemoth, it is easy to see how Jews would demand Palestine as their escape. So what if it inconvenienced the people living there. It was more than a life and death issue for the Zionists. (See Mayer's other book for teasing out the issues of Zionist land grabs before the Holocaust was ever imagined). Life in Eastern Europe under the Nazi's was horrendous and the Russian people suffered, no matter that they may have participated in unforgivable acts of their own during collectivization. (In talking with a refusnik I and others help leave the Soviet Union in the 1970s, I asked why Ukrainian Soviet soldiers so easily surrendered to the Germans during the early invasion. He responded, "They couldn't conceive of anything worse than the Soviets. They discovered.") Hitler at one point claimed that the Nazi's were better than the commies because they didn't slaughter people straight away as Stalin had in his collectivization and purges. Hitler was astute saying that the West, ignoring their own colonial devastations would have been quite happy to see the Nazis and Communists struggle to the death. So some would discount Russian suffering because of their own brutality and because Jews suffered more. Maybe the issues are intractable and I am naïve about the world. As I was taught growing up along with the young state of Israel, "You have to take care of your own." Would the fight to admit Jews into the US in the 1930s have been much more important than Zionism?
Mayer shows that after the pullback from Moscow, without apparent direct command the SS behind Wehrmacht lines slipped into a policy of extermination. The early shootings were countered-balanced by the need for labor. Germany had to replaced wounded and killed German troops and drew upon undrafted German workers. So the economic establishment used captive Jews, Poles, and Soviets as slave labor and hired others from occupied territories. The SS was split between those who wanted to build a productive empire on captured Jews (endorsed by industrialists) and those who just unwanted to punish the Jews. Concentration camps became the vehicles for doing both with factories set up nearby. As the Soviets advanced and allied bombing disrupted production the need for labor grew. Both the Lodz and Warsaw ghettos survived longer than the elimination faction wanted because of Jewish garment workers made winter military clothing. When Germany seized Vichy the deportation east of Western European Jews and forced marches from the East increased. People died like flies along the way and when they arrived at their destinations they were divided between the productive--worked to death---and the non-productive who were killed straight out. Disease took a tremendous toll. Working Jews had starvation rations versus other laborers who were sustained. As the Russians closed in, Hitler's and other Nazi's raving about the Jews became all the more rabid. Knowing, but not admitting they were losing, they ranted that one thing they would accomplish was the elimination of Jews from Europe. From the perspective of 1944 it really appears as though the Nazis always intended to extirpate Jews and they were carrying out their plans. That it was a rational, efficient, bureaucratic process is unlikely. They did use trains for transportation and gas ovens. The oven were often operated by both doctors and criminals who had been recruited to carry out Hitler's attempts to eliminated the mentally ill and disabled of Germany. That was stopped by the Church, but the killers simply moved east to work for the SS exterminators. Forced marches, disease, and brutal killing were accomplished with guns and even shovels during the Cambodian killings, the Armenian genocide, Rwanda, and the trails of tears US Cherokee, Navajo and other Indians suffered. None of these might be called rational bureaucratic or efficient nor was Germany's genocide.
Tossing and turning in restless sleep after finishing Mayer's book last night, the inhumanity of humans toward each other bothered my dreams. What the Nazi's did was beyond imagining. Comparing it to the slaves middle ocean crossing creates an impossible dilemma. After all the Afro-American slaves who survived were not continually tortured. And the British did eliminate first the trade and then slavery to their own financial disadvantage without anyone forcing them to.
As I read my way through Mayer's book I would have like both a flow chart and an epilogue. The way he writes by treating one theme through time and then another likewise got me confused. How and when did each of the factors fall into place. As the Nazi extermination picked up steam, the shadow argument with others seems to fade. When I finished the book I could easily have felt that given Nazi ideology the outcome would have happened even if the Nazi's had won, even though Mayer suggests that Jews trapped behind lines as the Nazi's fell back would have been better off in a stalemate. Mayer writes in beautiful sophisticated sentences, but I also sometimes couldn't follow them. This is a good book but I find myself puzzled. Given the outcome, there must have been some alternative, but maybe the Nazis' true insanity made it impossible. Although they tried to barter the Jews to get the Western allies to split from the Soviets, and after the ghetto uprising the West had been informed of Nazi extermination, what could have been done. The same may be said for Rwanda and Cambodia. At least something was done in the former Yugoslavia.
Charlie Fisher Emeritus Associate Professor, Brandeis University
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the previous review is better than mine, February 12, 2008
Mayer's book is essential reading for most who have a stereotyped view of WWII. Note particularly his use of the word Judeocide instead of Holocaust (a term coined I think by Lucy Davidowitz in anger over Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem--I may be mistaken) "Holocaust" was a word never used to describe the destruction of European Jewry until the sixties-to that I can testify. Personally I believe Hitler's primary aim was the destuction of the Soviet Union and the Jews "were in the way" the second largest cohort of people murdered by the Nazis were Soviet Prisoners of war 3.6 million. I think Mayer could have been even bolder but that is my prejudice. A great book and a fine review by the previous reviewer.
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by Eric D. Weitz
by Alan Brinkley
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