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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Understanding the Holocaust and Its Extension to Slavs, July 20, 2006
Reitlinger describes the extermination of Jews in great detail, arriving at a probable range of 4.2 to 5.7 million murdered Jews (p. 501). He surveys this genocide through time and according to German-occupied nation. He also goes into various technicalities. For instance, he details the failure of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria to consume anywhere near the over-10,000 expected bodies daily (p. 150), and the need to supplement, and then eventually replace, the crematoria with open-air pyres.
Although his work centers on the genocidal extermination of Jews, Reitlinger (p. 487) recognizes, to some degree, the same fate eventually awaiting the Poles and other Slavs (p. 487): "Of the racial problems with which Hitler's Reich believed itself confronted, the Jewish problem was apparently the only one that demanded a Final Solution, but there were always advocates for a final solution for the Slavs. Himmler's Office for the Strengthening of German Folkdom was full of them."
Reitlinger (p. 32) provides a corrective to the much-ridiculed (then and now) Polish Army: "On September 1st, 1939, when the first German troops crossed the Polish frontier, ill-founded optimism was rife. The Poles were expected to last out long enough to benefit from the slow mobilization of the West. Few realized that the eighteen days of Polish resistance were a remarkable achievement for a nation which was not equipped for armoured warfare." In actuality, the last Polish army units fought for 35 days, and prewar Polish military planners had recognized the fact that, without substantial French and British assistance (and even without factoring the unexpected joint Soviet-German attack against Poland), organized Polish military resistance could not last more than about six weeks.
Reitlinger's work also provides a body of information that serves as a corrective for many Holocaust-related distortions that have accreted in recent decades. For instance, in his movie UPRISING (2001), Jon Avnet actually makes the amazing claim that the Jews, during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, fought longer against the Germans than the entire Polish Army did in 1939 (sic)! Apart from getting the relative durations wrong, Jon Avnet is comparing two entirely different undertakings. In 1939, the widely-dispersed and poorly-armed Polish nation had to face the full brunt of a 1.5 million-man mechanized German Army and Air Force. In contrast, the following quotes from Reitlinger (p. 276) describe the size and state of the German forces needed to suppress the poorly-armed Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: "From this angle the Warsaw affair was an anti-partisan action which was conducted by only 1,100 regular troops who were not even reinforced...At Warsaw, no front-line troops were diverted and not for a moment were the communications of the front threatened..."
In atheistic literature, Auschwitz Kommandant Hoess (Hoss) is falsely said to have been a practicing Christian. In actuality, Hoess (Hoss) rebelled against his strong Catholic upbringing when a young adult, and joined the then-fledgling Nazi Party (p. 107).
Now consider the much-exaggerated Polish-German collaboration in the killings of Jews, a mainstay of the commonly-Polonophobic Holocaust materials. On the subject of the extermination of Polish Jews, Reitlinger (p. 265) comments: "...inside the ghettoes the [German-Austrian] Security Police relied on Lithuanian, Latvian, and Ukrainian militiamen to help them in the filthiest work of all. In many accessory matters ordinary Polish police played their part, while the Junaks, or Blue Police, who were recruited from German-speaking Poles, could be relied on for anything. Among civilians even members of the Polish resistance would make a few zlotys by denouncing Jews--and they could be tempted to go further. On November 8th, 1942, after a resettlement action in Cracow, the Prince Archbishop, Cardinal Jan Sapieha, complained to Governor Frank that Polish youths from the conscript labour service had been incited with liquor to take part in the round-ups" (p. 265). If Poles were so eager to help in the killing of Jews, one wonders why inebriation was necessary and why the Germans were forced to rely on Ukrainians and Baltics (brought from significant distances), and German-speaking "Poles" (who were actually Germans by nationality (Volksdeutsche), not Poles!), to do the lion's share of the killings.
Regardless of what exactly happened at Jedwabne, Reitlinger (p. 221) provides the context: "Another factor contributed to the inertia of White Russian Jewry and this was the savage hostility of certain elements in the peasant population which had grown up with the phenomenal increase of the Jewish settlements in the late nineteenth century. Since the revolution neither the bourgeois republicanism of the Polish area nor the Marxism of the Russian area had eliminated this hostility..."
One can conclude that works examining the extermination of Jews, written within about the first two decades after the event, such as Reitlinger's, tend to be much more scholarly and objective than the ones published in more recent decades.
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by Filip Muller
by Raul Hilberg
by George S. Patton Major General
by William L. Shirer
