Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

by Peter Longerich (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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ISBN-13: 978-0199600731

ISBN-10: 0199600732

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A comprehensive history of the Nazi persecution and murder of European Jews, paying detailed attention to an unrivalled range sources.

Focusing clearly on the perpetrators and exploring closely the process of decision making, Longerich argues that anti-Semitism was not a mere by-product of the Nazis' political mobilization or an attempt to deflect the attention of the masses, but that anti-Jewish policy was a central tenet of the Nazi movement's attempts to implement, disseminate, and secure National Socialist rule - and one which crucially shaped Nazi policy decisions, from their earliest days in power through to the invasion
of the Soviet Union and the Final Solution.

As Longerich shows, the 'disappearance' of Jews was designed as a first step towards a racially homogeneous society - first within the 'Reich', later in the whole of a German-dominated Europe.

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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Skeptics who maintain there is little of value left to learn about the Holocaust should read this superb and provocative work originally published in German in 1998. Now revised and published in English for the first time, it offers relatively new data as well as a convincing thesis regarding the genesis and execution of systematic genocide. Longerich rejects the assertions of so-called “structuralists” who view the “Final Solution” as a byproduct of the war, which implies that anti-Jewish policies simply “got out of control” under wartime stress. Rather, extermination of Jews was the logical result of the virulent race hatred of the Nazis. Furthermore, Longerich shows that this hatred of Jews was prevalent in Germany well before the Nazi ascension to power in 1933. As expected, it permeated parties of the Right, but it infected all aspects of German society. This is a scholarly work relying heavily on letters, reports, and statistics, but it does not neglect the shattering anguish of individual humans. This is a vital addition to the field of Holocaust studies. --Jay Freeman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Peter Longerich is Professor of Modern German History and Director of the Research Centre for the Holocaust and Twentieth-Century History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published widely on the subject, in English and German, including The Unwritten Order: Hitler's Role in the Final
Solution, and The Systematic Character of the National Socialist Policy for the Extermination of the Jews. The latter formed part of his Expert Opinion in the notorious David Irving v. Penguin/Lipstadt trial. He is currently working on a biography of SS leader Heinrich Himmler.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

ASIN : B005OQGZMM
Publisher : OUP Oxford; 1st edition (April 14, 2010)
Publication date : April 14, 2010
Language : English
File size : 5463 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Not Enabled
Print length : 659 pages
Page numbers source ISBN : 0199600732
Lending : Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #719,224 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1,158 in Jewish History (Kindle Store)
- #2,102 in Jewish Holocaust History
- #3,200 in World War II History (Kindle Store)

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Paul

Exceptional academic account

Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2012

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This book is a detailed, scholarly synthesis of the evolutionary process by which the Nazis progressed from persecution to mass murder to complete genocide. It is not meant to be an introduction to the Holocaust or an overview of the topic -- and if some have read or rated this book expecting a more "accessible" overview of the Holocaust have probably chosen the wrong book. I can say, however, that to get a more detailed and compelling account of how the Nazis actually created and implemented the Holocaust, one probably has to look at very topic-specific scholarly articles or at primary source material. For the topics and themes covered in the book this is probably the best (and most balanced) single volume accounting in existence.

The book shows quite convincingly a few main themes:

1) The Nazis did not finally decide upon complete extermination, without any sort of caveats or pretexts, until at least the Spring of 1942. By this point there were gas chambers in operation at Auschwitz, Belzec, and Sobibor, and more than half a million had been killed by shooting in the Soviet Union. In other words, the practical fact of genocide actually came into being before the Nazis actually decided that genocide was their "final" solution. Longerich even makes a case that the Wannsee Conference cannot be definitively argued as a fundamental decision to exterminate 100% of the Jews, because there was still argument and pretext at the time about extermination as a way to select out those fit for forced labor.

2) Hitler was without question the driver of the Holocaust, as many fundamental changes in policy happened after key meetings between him and Himmler (or other functionaries).

3) Goering was much more complicit in the Holocaust, at least up through 1941-1942, than is widely recognized.

My only critiques of this book are the following:

1) For all the effort (and evidence) that refutes there having been a single "decision" or "order" that initiated the genocide, Longerich does not address in historiographic terms whether this is even an important question or not. Whether Hitler envisioned a complete extermination program in 1919, 1933, 1939, or not until 1942 is sort of moot. Given enough time, enough power, and an ideology-driven regime that rewarded "audacity" and radicalization, it's sort of inevitable that the butchery and mass murder of 1941 would coalesce with the ideal of a "final solution". In other words, even if in 1941 a complete genocide wasn't envisioned, it was certainly predictable.

2) The Nazi ambitions for deporting all the Jews to Siberia or Madagascar or whatever was fundamentally a genocidal strategy. Longerich softly alludes to this, but the fact is the Nazis had a goal of extermination (albeit more "passive") anyway, even before they invaded the Soviet Union. They had already, especially with the institution of ghettos and even earlier the deprivation of social services, essentially doomed the Jews to attrition by disease and starvation anyway. The plan to deport them in millions to hostile environments, guard them against escape by the SS, and deprive them of any sort of sustenance or livelihood, has to be seen as an exterminatory policy. So the moral committment to genocide had existed among the Nazis for years.

3) Longerich emphasizes early in the book that the Nazis were never able to really have a positive "pro-Aryan" programme -- so they substituted a negative antisemitic program instead, and this was the cornerstone of their purportedly pro-Aryan policies. But this is no surprise -- the Nazis were antisemites and xenophobes (dating back to pre-WWI in Hitler's case) long before they had articulated a pro-Aryan vision. So it seems to me that pro-Aryan rhetoric was a ruse to effect an antisemitic campaign, not the other way around.

15 people found this helpful

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S. Heminger

Phenomenal Analysis of the Nazi March to Genocide

Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2010

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Throughout the historiography of Nazi Germany there have been tumultuous and fractious divisions between scholars ascribing to a number of differing views on the development of government sponsored antisemitism, culminating in the Holocaust itself. For the most part those views have been mutually exclusive, hence the fractious nature. These mutually exclusive views and debates initially and most familiarly consisted of those between the 'intentionalist(Hitler's intentions and objectives are the primary focus) vs functionalist (the bureaucratic jumble in the regime led to an erratically radicalization in anti Jewish policy) ' schools of thought. More recently the debate has developed into one of whether the periphery (those at the enforcement level of government) or center (the highest echelons of Nazi officials) were most crucial in driving the radicalization of policy.

In Peter Longerich's new history, the Holocaust, he answers most emphatically that it was all of the above. His analysis, supported throughout with the kind of primary documents critical to a work of this nature, is full of insight and a fresh manner of reporting the march to genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany and those within her sphere of influence. In short, he argues that rather than either the functionalist or intentionalist, periphery or center arguments being correct, they all have merit. None of them exist in exclusion of opposing ideas but rather the periphery and center fed each other and Hitler's intentions and the bureaucratic confusion all contributed to the Holocaust occurring as it did.

Longerich's analysis, going back as far as the early days of the Nazi regime, is superb and adds fresh insight to initial methods used to marginalize and remove Jews from all manners of social and professional life in Germany. Through a methodical and exhaustive use of the extant contemporary documents he convincingly argues that from the beginning those on the periphery and center worked in parallel, using differing methods aimed towards achieving the same goal and both taking encouragement and feeding off of the other's cues. The center gave general directives and those at the periphery increasingly adjusted their rough intimidation and violent methods in an intuitive manner that usually preceded official legal measures. This he recounts with repeated examples in both economic and social life in Germany up to Kristalnacht and its attendant legal restrictions on Jews shortly thereafter. After this action, which represents the last of three periods identified of pre-war intensification of harassment and legal Entjudung (de-Jewification), the author writes that Nazi antisemitic public policy was at a temporary stand-still as the enfeebled position of the Jews in Germany made it nearly impossible to effectively evoke the image of the terrifying and dangerous threat they had been portrayed as, to that point. Furthermore, Longerich's narrative, explaining the box which the regime had painted itself into through its removal of Jews from the national economy and the now impossibility of pursuing the voluntary emigration of a people bankrupted by the regime's own actions is thoroughly convincing.

Longerich's analysis of the intensification of antisemitic measures of the war-time period, beginning with the invasion of Poland, is equally fascinating. This covers the early attempts at population transfers as embodied by the Nisko plan as well as later forced emigration schemes which are described in comprehensive detail. In general, this section alone is a masterpiece within the field of Holocaust studies and could easily fill a 500 page volume of its own. With his in-depth analysis and unrivaled command of the contemporary sources he clearly demonstrates that, once again, those on the periphery and those at the center were not working against each other and neither did one or the other take the lead. Rather he argues for an interpretation that envisions a type of give and take in which radicalization by those in the field, such as members of the SS, Police battalions or even technical experts from the T4 program took cues from those above and interpreted them into concrete actions.

Against this backdrop of increasingly larger scale assaults against Jewish communities in Poland and ever-more-grandiose 'reservation' plans for occupied Poland, Longerich traces the story of how massacres moved from a short-term plan for specific regions of the USSR to a Europe wide extermination plan by mid 1942. Unlike most of his contemporaries in the field of Holocaust studies however, the author eschews the typical search for a date by which a concrete decision to exterminate all the Jews in Europe and perhaps beyond was made. In fact he argues with a great deal of documentation to support it, that the Wannsee conference itself was not the watershed that it has later been made to appear. Longerich's assertion is that although there was a definite agreement that a 'Final Solution' would be implemented, there was no certain plan for implementing it and in fact this only came about gradually throughout the course of the spring and summer of 1942. Painstakingly, he recreates the decisions and events and provides a narrative of the highest quality.

Indeed, Dr. Longerich's narrative suffers from only one drawback and that is readability. This is most certainly not a generalist book meant for the a reader with a moderate level of interest in the subject of the Nazi persecution and attempted extermination of European Jewry. This is a work of analysis however, and was never intended to have the emotional impact of a general narrative or memoir. Those looking for the latter would be well served with something along the lines of Dr Saul Friedlander's excellent two volume history. In any case, for those searching for the comprehensive history of the Nazi march to genocide, 'Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews' will likely be that history for years to come. It is truly a phenomenal work of history.

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Jonathan

For historians not the casual reader

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 30, 2021

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A brilliantly researched book but it helps if you have a very good knowledge of Nazi Germany as it is written on that assumption.
I can understand why the likes of Kershaw and Evans rate this book, as it gives a meticulous account of the development of the Holocaust and then the various atrocities themselves. At times it reads like a list and will be a great reference book for future historians.
This is not a book that studies the impact of the Holocaust on individuals nor does it deliver detailed political analysis, however throughout the author refers to other historians who do this.
If you want to understand the mechanics of the Holocaust and when the key decision on the annihilation of the Jews was made and how this came about, this is the ideal book.

Kindle Customer

Detailed, informative and sadly gripping

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 19, 2012

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Longreich's recent biography of Himmler follows on from this compelling account of the Holocaust from one the leading historians of this period of history. It is well-reaearched and detailed and gives the reader a graphic account of the mentality of those who could destroy an entire race with such mechanised brutality. These books have to be written because the reader must never forget that the Holocaust is still with us today in different guises. I have long been an admirer of Longreich and his attention to detail.An excellent book for such a haunting and sad theme.

4 people found this helpful

Boppinggeo

Very Well Researched

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 4, 2021

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This is by far and away the best book that I have come across about this particular nasty chapter in history. Thoroughly well researched and very well written

J W PORTER

Excellent book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 14, 2014

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Simply the best history of the Holocaust based on latest scholarship. Longgerich has produced a masterpiece a must for every 20th century historians bookcase

3 people found this helpful

S. Ramsey-Hardy

Impressive and important

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 7, 2010

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A very important and scholarly book, which takes its place as one of the most significant on the subject of Nazi anti-Jewish policy, and how this policy evolved. Peter Longerich's work is characterised by measured restraint, with an absence of inflammatory rhetoric. The author scrupulously bases his interpretations on the documentary evidence available (where there is ambiguity he says so), and this book is up to date in its research in newly accessible sources.

Longerich's mastery of the evidence is extraordinary, and his detailed examination of the development of policy is compelling, though it must be said that this is a pretty demanding book for the general reader.

The author convincingly argues that the policy of the Nazis towards the Jewish people within their sphere of power evolved gradually. It appears that policy did not always develop as something dictated by the Nazi leadership, but that there was considerable room for evolution by individual and group initiative: Peter Longerich's detailed examination of, for example, the activities of the Einsatzgruppen during the summer of 1941, demonstrates this.

During the 12 years of Nazi domination, policy appears to have gained momentum parallel with, and in response to, changing circumstances (notably the onset of war), becoming increasingly radical and cruel until the eventual arrival at the unthinkable: outright annihilation of the Jews.

Longerich also makes it clear that the Jews were exploited for political purposes by the Nazis, that the anti-Jewish policy was "politically useful" in consolidating the entire regime, and its invasion of private life. Among other things, the Jews were used to "explain" the almost nonsensical idea of an "Aryan Race", a racial idea which could only be sustained with any apparent logic by stating what it wasn't! And political exploitation of the Jews continued to the very end, when Himmler tried to bargain with the allies with Jewish lives.

The author also offers correctives to interpretations of events which are sometimes thought of as accepted truths. For instance, it is not infrequently said that the notorious Pogrom against the Jews in Germany, known as the Reichskristallnacht in 1938, was a spontaneous protest, in response to the shooting of a German diplomat at the Paris Embassy (by a Jewish boy whose parents had been deported from Germany.)

Longerich makes it completely clear, in some fascinating paragraphs which include recent research, that there was no historical, causal, connection at all between the two events. The Nazi leadership skilfully exploited the unexpected event in Paris to "excuse" an already-envisaged pogrom, by conveying veiled (but understood) orders to local Nazis throughout Germany by telephone, and making the pogrom appear to be a popular response, which it largely was not.

Longerich's picture of the methods employed by the Nazi leadership by which secret and shameful directives like this were given, and understood, is well explained.

Peter Longerich's awe-inspiring work concentrates on the development of Nazi anti-Jewish policy, and the dreadful effect of these policies on millions of European people. This very clear, extremely thorough and well-written book, happens to form a valuable companion to two recent volumes by Saul Friedlander, who examines the effect of these cruel policies on the lives of Jews, as individuals, across Europe.

27 people found this helpful

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