Heinemann £25 pp578

For reasons probably not unconnected with 9/11 and the continuing danger of Islamist terrorism, interest in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust shows signs of abating. Germany is in the depths of domestic crisis, while its diplomatic position is equivalent to a form of purdah. If the flurry of books that appeared before 2000 represented a final reckoning with some of the (European) horrors of the 20th century, those that have appeared since seem curiously adrift in the world of Osama bin Laden.

The late 20th century saw the academicisation and institutionalisation of what is sometimes cynically called the “Holocaust industry”. That there will be no abating of interest in these committed circles is evident from the fact that this fine book is one of a projected dozen or so on the origins and implementation of the Nazi Final Solution of the Jewish Question produced under the auspices of the Yad Vashem authority in Jerusalem.

This is a dense, scholarly book with hundreds of pages of footnotes that learnedly discuss such things as the colour of autumn leaves to verify the evidence of Nazi crimes. By contrast, a perfunctory introduction deals with the 2,000-year history of religiously inspired anti-Judaism and its modern metamorphosis into racially motivated “scientific” anti-semitism, before the authors settle down to the minutiae of Nazi policy-making.

While the book has no doubts about the pathological virulence of Hitler’s hatred of the Jews, they see policy as having been initially dominated by a desire to force Jews to emigrate, a policy that the regime’s subsequent conquests (of much larger Jewish populations) effectively stymied. Emigration was superseded by the idea of expulsions, whether to the eastern peripheries of Nazi-occupied Europe or in the form of projected mass deportations to Madagascar. All these schemes knowingly entailed what might be called destruction of Jewish populations. As the Nazis’ own population experts discovered — with the concurrent project of repatriating millions of ethnic Germans — generalised statements of ideological intent on the part of the leadership were a different proposition when viewed from the perspective of those who had to herd and transfer hundreds of thousands of people.

Although the sporadic murder of Jews was part and parcel of the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland, the invasion of the Soviet Union — the nest of the “Jewish-Bolshevik” peril — established the genocidal character of this campaign. As Hitler put it: “Naturally, the vast area must be pacified as quickly as possible; this will happen best by shooting anyone who even looks sideways at us.”

The nature of the surviving documentation means that all accounts of the decision-making process at the highest level are as speculative as the beastly outcomes were real. Christopher Browning argues that when, in July 1941, Hitler sensed that victory in Russia was imminent, he urged the acceleration of the mass murder of Soviet Jewry that was integral to his vision of a racially cleansed “Garden of Eden” in the east. Plausibly, Browning claims that, to grasp what Hitler was thinking, one has to follow what Himmler, his SS chief, was doing. This meant dedicating enhanced numbers of personnel to killing Jews, while exhorting them to cross the last moral threshold by murdering small children. Parallel with this, the search began for a comprehensive European-wide solution to the “Jewish Question”.

As the prospect of victory in Russia shimmered late that autumn, all residual inhibitions disappeared and a combination of central urging and local initiatives came together in October as teams of mass murderers began fitting out the first mass-extermination centres. Not everyone will agree with this speculative scenario; other accounts claim that the decision flowed from the prospect of defeat that loomed with Germany’s December 11 declaration of war on America.

One of this book’s significant achievements is to re-create the indecisions that preceded horrible finalities. Nearing the time at which crucial decisions were probably being made, an SS officer sought clarity when he wrote to a superior on September 3, 1941 regarding “undesirable ethnic elements” deported into his orbit: “Is it the goal to ensure them a certain level of life in the long run, or shall they be totally eradicated?” A month later, according to the authors, that question had been resolved in its stark essentials.

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