Saul Friedländer
THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION
Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939–1945
869pp. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. £30.
978 0 297 81877 9

No episode in the history of the twentieth century has been investigated more thoroughly than the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe – whether in its origins, its implementation, the character and motivation of the instigators, participants and bystanders, or the reactions of the victims. Yet there is still no agreement on what exactly it is that we are investigating. As long as there is no consensus on the question, there can be none on the answer. One of the many merits of Saul Friedländer’s massive study of the years 1939 to 1945 is that it is as much about method as about content. For that reason his fourteen-page introduction to The Years of Extermination counts as a significant contribution to the debate. Most books about the Holocaust are, in one way or another, books about policy-making in the Third Reich, branching out into a never-ending debate about the debates, what the German historian Peter Reichel has called “the second history of National Socialism \[that\] has . . . become longer, many times over, than the first one”. Most of the late Raul Hilberg’s pioneering classic The Destruction of the European Jews is devoted to “the process of destruction”, that is, to a study of how, when and by whom Nazi policy was made. Numerous other works have followed in his footsteps, often providing valuable additional material. Friedländer’s new book does not fall into this category, though his preceding volume, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (reviewed in the TLS, October 10, 1997), to some extent does. In addition to the policy literature there are monographs about individual ghettos and camps, like H. G. Adler’s Der verwaltete Mensch, on Theresienstadt, or The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941–1944, edited by Lucjan Dobroszycki. Above all, there are Primo Levi’s unforgettable accounts of Auschwitz. Finally, there are monographs on collaboration, deportation and rescue in individual countries under German Occupation, those, for example, by Gerhard Hirschfeld on the Netherlands and Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton on France.

For Friedländer, none of these approaches is by itself adequate for a full understanding: “the history of the Holocaust should be both integrative and integrated”. That statement leads to the debate over sources. Much of the historiography of the Holocaust rests on German documents. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the documents are available and remarkably complete, especially now that former Soviet archives have been – partially – opened. The second is that for many historians, including Hilberg, they represent the most “objective” source. They tell us, admittedly with some gaps, who said what, who thought what, who gave which orders when. Nor is the fact that many of the documents contain ambiguities, euphemisms and self-censorship, or reveal little more than turf wars or buck-passing, a major obstacle. Scholars have by now learnt how to decode what they see in front of them, whether in official records or diaries. What is at issue here is the validity of testimonies from below, in particular the recollections of surviving victims. More than one post-1945 trial of alleged perpetrators has collapsed because of doubts raised, not always in good faith, about the reliability of camp survivors’ memories.

Friedländer himself was involved in a long-running dispute with the director of the Munich-based Institute for Contemporary History, Martin Broszat, who had dismissed survivors’ memories as “mythical”, ie, as a subjective version of an individual experience. In fact, Friedländer does not use much survivor testimony in this book. What he does draw on is the extraordinary wealth of chronicles, diaries and letters written between 1939 and 1945, on the one hand by Jews, as the Nazi machine overran their lives, on the other hand by civilian occupiers, ordinary soldiers, and collaborators, as well as Polish, Dutch and French bystanders and German dissidents and resisters. Some of the Jewish sources have been published and become well-known, such as Adam Czerniaków’s Warsaw Diary and Emanuel Ringelblum’s Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto. Others exist in manuscript only. Their value lies not merely in the factual data they convey, but much more in what they say about what was and what was not known at the time and about mentalities, perceptions, debates, rumours, illusions and fears.

Friedländer’s thesis throughout The Years of Extermination rests on the centrality of racial anti-Semitism in defining the goals of German policies. For him the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was not an epiphenomenon, derived from objectives such as economic expansion, repopulation schemes, or a geo-political re-ordering of Europe. On the contrary, the prime movers of policy were ideological and cultural factors, factors that were there from the start of the Third Reich, though notions on their implementation fluctuated and evolved erratically. It was this ideology, which he calls “redemptive anti-Semitism” that lay at the heart not only of the Nazis’ message to the German public and, above all, to Party members and followers, but also to the populations of Occupied Europe, in order to secure their approval, or at least acceptance, of Nazi measures. Exactly how effective this propaganda was is, however, difficult to evaluate retrospectively. Jeffrey Herf’s The Jewish Enemy is the fullest account we have of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda in the print media, with its ill-disguised references to the ultimate fate of Jews; no doubt many, probably most, Germans came across it, but how much of it sank in? Friedländer says more about film, in many ways Goebbels’s favourite medium. The record that emerges was mixed. Jud Süss, based on the well-known story of the eighteenth-century Jewish banker and his bloody fate, was a box office success. Der ewige Jude, more overtly propagandistic, was a flop.

If the Nazi propaganda campaign did achieve successes throughout Europe, that was because it addressed climates of opinion that had emerged independently of National Socialism. These were: a disillusionment with democracy; the growth of leadership cults; and the popularity of integral nationalisms and anti-minority movements, sometimes with racialist overtones. In many countries, and in institutions like the Catholic Church, fear of Bolshevism overrode other political considerations. In Germany, the Weimar years had accustomed many to a shriller and more polarized political atmosphere as well as to the growth of political violence. As Michael Wildt has shown in his recent Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung, one form of this development was physical and economic violence against Jews, generally instigated by local Nazis, the purpose of which was to generate a sense of a people’s community that was defined by its enemy. There was thus the potential, dating from before 1933, for erecting a system in which public norms were based on violence, and in which the terms of Volksgemeinschaft (national community) encouraged a sense of entitlement to the assets of “the Other”, whether in the form of businesses, homes or private possessions. This was also an aspect of Nazi rule that might appeal in Occupied Europe, whether in France or Poland, where native anti-Semitism could merge with personal envy or greed. Friedländer gives some embarrassing examples of how widely some Nazi assumptions gained acceptance. Jean Giraudoux was horrified at the “hordes of Ashkenazim” who were fleeing to France from Germany. Michelangelo Antonioni was full of praise for Jud Süss, which was awarded the Golden Lion in Venice in 1940. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin thought that the Germans deserved to win the war “because they have more spirit than the rest of the world”. There were plenty more passengers in the ship of fools that steered towards the Nazi harbour in 1939 and 1940.

Having set the ideological scene, Friedländer presents a series of chronological chapters on the development of the Final Solution from phase to phase and country to country. With every year and every conquest that passed, the German screw tightened. The first use of the term “final solution” appears in a memorandum by Adolf Eichmann, dated December 4, 1940, that even specifies 5.8 million as the target figure of victims, but the “solution” at this stage is “the transfer of Jews . . . to a still-to be-determined territory”. There is even an extraordinary memorandum by Himmler, dated May 27 of that year, that rejects physical extermination as “Bolshevik” and “un-German”. As we know, these hesitations did not last. Similarly, at the beginning of the war there were still misgivings in the Army about massacres. General Johannes Blaskowitz, Oberbefehlshaber Ost, sent a personal protest to Hitler about the actions of the Einsatzgruppen, to no effect. The Wehrmacht, however, did not stay clean for long, whether after the launch of Operation Barbarossa or in Southern Europe.

What is particularly revealing is the graphic detail in soldiers’ letters to their families, relating killings that they had witnessed or perpetrated. Here, too, there were dissenters. Captain Hosenfeld, who appears briefly at the end of the film The Pianist, concluded that “it is no honour to be a German officer”. For Count Helmut James von Moltke, who paid with his life for his conscience, the events in the East constituted a “blood guilt that cannot be atoned for in our lifetime and can never be forgotten”. But such men were exceptions, as were the clergy and laity who went further than the hierarchies, Catholic and Protestant, were prepared to go in opposing persecutions. While the persecutions intensified, Germany’s satellites began to get cold feet. The initial enthusiasm with which French and Dutch police complied with German orders waned, and the civilian population increasingly took the victims’ side. Italian reluctance to play along with the deportations is well known, and the Italian-occupied zone of Southern France became a veritable haven for fleeing Jews. Overall, these brave thoughts and actions amounted only to a small mitigation in the sufferings of the 6 million. The most revealing and the most heart-rending of the many documents from which Friedländer quotes are those from the Jews of Europe – rabbis, community office-holders, ordinary people, even children – as they wondered what their fate would be and underwent the daily degradations and arbitrary brutalities of the ghetto and the camp. Resistance, when it turned out to be possible, was often counterproductive. The Warsaw Ghetto rising and the attempted revolts in Treblinka and Sobibor merely frightened the regime into accelerating the genocide. Only in Sobibor did a limited number of prisoners manage to escape, thanks to the fortuitous presence of Soviet POWs. No one recorded the futility of hope more graphically than Primo Levi:

"We all proclaimed it, we were all sure of it, but at bottom nobody believed it. Because one loses the habit of hoping in the Lager and even of believing in one’s own reason. In the Lager it is useless to think, because events happen for the most part in an unforeseeable manner; and it is harmful because it keeps alive a sensitivity, which is a source of pain, and which some providential natural law dulls when suffering passes a limit."

When we have gone through Friedländer’s formidable evidence and arguments and considered all the other scholars who have tried to provide an explanation of this organized nightmare, we are still faced with the old question: how was it that so many citizens of a state with an advanced economy and a sophisticated educational system, with experience of the rule of law and at least some responsible self-government, could entrust their fate to a loud-mouthed charlatan who made no secret of his devotion to plunder and mass murder? Many reasons have been advanced, derived from both distant and recent history. They include an insecure national identity, a long history of autocracy, an admiration of military values, the trauma of a lost war and of humiliating peace terms, the inexperience of the democratic politicians of the Weimar Republic, an ambivalent attitude to market capitalism, and a longish tradition of finding in Jews a scapegoat for shortcomings in political, economic, or cultural life.

All of these may count as necessary conditions, but none of them is sufficient. To them we may add contingent factors, like the Great Depression. Without the Wall Street Crash, Hitler would be scarcely a footnote. We can agree that genocidal racism was the driving force of the Nazi movement both after 1939 and before. As Friedländer pointed out in his first volume, the Nazi Party was remarkable for being a sect that went on behaving as one after it had gained power. We might add that Friedländer probably attributes too much influence to Hitler alone in defining the aims of Nazism as opposed to propagating them. He was, after all, surrounded by like-minded men. Himmler, Heydrich and Goebbels were at least as fanatical in their anti-Semitism as he was, and Goering, Bormann and Alfred Rosenberg were not far behind. But was this, as Friedländer insists, the bond that linked Hitler to his devoted followers inside and outside Germany? Was the secret of Hitler’s dominance that he appeared to be the metahistorical personality to lead the fight against the metahistorical Jewish enemy? Did “the Jew” represent the “constant mobilising myth . . . for a regime dependent on constant mobilisation”? It was almost certainly the bond that held the Nazi movement together. The force of propaganda and indoctrination stressed by Friedländer, and not only by him, no doubt helped to extend the bond beyond the immediate confines of the movement.

But another secret of a movement like National Socialism is that its appeal is eclectic. Not everyone who admired Hitler bought the whole package. The regime was able to appeal to patriotism, a hunger for leadership, a generalized xenophobia, a distrust of parliamentary democracy, populist disdain for elites and high culture, and, as the war progressed, fear and hatred of Russia and Bolshevism. Indeed, there was among some Germans a tendency to absolve Hitler from responsibility for the horrors committed in his name – “If only the Führer knew . . .”. The stubborn defence that German forces put up on the Eastern Front, even when the war was manifestly lost, prolonged the time in which the Final Solution could be pursued, but that was not the primary reason for this resistance. For the fanatics, the Red Army did indeed represent the military arm of “Judæo-Bolshevism”; for the rest, whether civilian or in uniform, it consisted of “Asiatic hordes” or “inhuman Orientals”, a stereotype reinforced by the experience of Occupation in 1945.

That the ideological driving force behind Hitler and his hard-core entourage was “redemptive anti-Semitism” is a proposition we can accept. No other explanation can tell us why the Holocaust was pursued with such relentless, escalating and ultimately counterproductive thoroughness, or why the Nazi leadership appeared to be convinced that Jews commanded the agenda of both Soviet Bolshevism and British and American capitalism. We can also accept that many – though we cannot tell how many – in the German armed forces and the civilian population came to believe this line, presumably having started out from a position of more traditional, non-genocidal anti-Semitism. Whether this explanation can cover all the reasons why so many Germans and other Europeans went along with Hitler’s war is a different question that requires more differentiated answers.

Peter Pulzer is Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Oxford and an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College. His recent books include Jews and the German State 1848-1933: The political history of a minority, 2003.

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