The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedlander Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945
Book Review: The Years of Extermination
Summary: 5 Stars
I am only about one third through this book but so far believe it to be one of the best I have ever read on this subject. It seems to present a very balanced view of what happened. And when I say balanced I also mean a very complex view of the causes. One of the problems with so much of the history Americans are taught is that it is either too simplified or too politically correct. This book is neither. I have studied WW2 for over 30 years and still find that I am leaning new, important facts about the multiple causes.
This book is a fairly easy read. You can, and sometimes should, only read a few pages at a time. The author has loaded the book with a huge amount of facts and almost none of them show anyone in a good light. Certainly not the Germans, the Soviets, the Catholics, most of the people in the German occupied countries and to me, most surprisingly, the Jews themselves !
Book Review: A Magnificent Achievement
Summary: 5 Stars
Daniel Goldhagen's critique above is mystifying on several counts. First, Friedlander clearly deals extensively with the killers and their motivations including testimony in their own words. Statements, testimony and diary entries by Goebbels, Himmler, Eichmann, Hoss, Frank and many others, including by the killers, are quoted repeatedly and extensively. Second, in no way does Friedlander diminish his earlier emphasis on "redemptive anti-Semitism" despite the paucity of that particular phrase in this second volume. In fact, he returns again and again to Hitler's animus in quasi-religious terms: the Holocaust as prerequisite to the survival of the human species itself; Hitler's self-described Reichstag "prophecy" concerning the Jews. If this is not "redemptive" I don't know what is. In fact at one point Friedlander expounds on this very issue specifically and at length. Notwithstanding the inapposite Goldhagen criticisms (the history is all there, notwithstanding Goldhagen's charge that this is history lite, including extensive examination of questions such as the "order" to kill the Jews, the role of the Pope, etc.), there is a certain weight of psychological focus on the mindset of Jews and ordinary Germans as expressed in diaries and letters. In this, Friedlander accomplishes something very difficult: he allows us a glimpse into the mind and the world of the Holocaust day to day--what was it like as a Jew, what did the ordinary German think, what did the soldiers think and report back home of the atrocities they witnessed and more than occasionally abetted? What did priests think and do? What did religious people think? Interweaving these glimpses into the broad tapestry of the history of the murderous events themselves, Friedlander gives us the macro and micro all at once--a deft, historically invaluable perspective. In short, I know of no Holocaust history which so comprehensively and grippingly covers the entire event, from its earliest stirrings and antecedents to the end of the war, and how it played out in the fabric of the societies which comprised Europe, as the two volumes of Friedlander's history. This should be required reading of every human being.Book Review: Exhaustive and exhausting
Summary: 5 Stars
An exhausting read of an exhaustive study---
These two books are the definitive study of the systematic murder of 6 million Jews, and should be made the textbooks for study groups of this terrible subject.
The books are well written and engrossing--the subject is awful and in retrospect unbelievable---noone could imagine a civilized people particpating in and standing by while so many of their friends and countrymen were being brutefully murdered. Most of Europe and the world just did nothing.
The authoritative documentation is extensive---the subject has to be discussed again and again--it is so readily repressed,
Book Review: Comprehensive History and Documentation of Jewish Extermination
Summary: 5 Stars
I found this to be a compelling work following Friedlander's previous volume detailing the Years of Persecution. The use of diary extracts and personal testimonies of both Jews, who survived or perished alongside Nazi personal correspondence or testimonies helps to throw in sharp relief the horror of the period. Friedlander is brilliant at portraying the immense scope of the horrific experiences through the eyes of the persecuted and the persecutor. This view known as micro history keeps us grounded in the immediacy of the long drawn out murders.Book Review: A Magisterial Accomplishment
Summary: 5 Stars
This cataclysmic modern catastrophe that we now call the Holocaust has now, at last, found its first truly magisterial, comprehensive treatment in Friedlander?s ?The Years of Extermination.?
Previous attempts at this task (by Lucy Dawidowicz, Raul Hilberg, and some others) have suffered from being premature (i.e. they were conceived before some of the more important archives were available), and, in some cases, by having a whiff of eccentricity about them. This latter criticism applies particularly to the writers of some of the more specialized monographs. Many of these have flogged particular insights, which, while often valuable by themselves, were sometimes exaggerated and promoted for polemical purposes.
Was the Holocaust a natural outcome of German anti-Semitism? Was it a matter of greed of the Germans who wanted to rob the Jews? Was it mostly a matter of injustices inherent in the Versailles treaty, as some of the older commentators have urged? Was it partly a matter of German Protestants and their Lutheran heritage, as a recent writer would have us believe? Friedlander, to his enormous credit, pays close attention to all such partial insights but transcends them all. He has read everything and has considered everything (well, almost ? see below). He distills for us all of the extremely rich specialized literature and gives us a coherent, full, rich, detailed, satisfying picture of what happened to the Jews in the Second World War.
When I say that he considers all the specialized research, I mean of course the work that needs consideration. He wastes no time on the so-called Holocaust deniers, nor, indeed, on those who insist that the moon is made of green cheese.
Obviously no book -- the Messiah not yet having come ? is perfect. Alas. The outstanding fault that I find in this volume is its failure to as much as mention the (admittedly very minor) role played by Arab politicians in making the Holocaust possible.
Almost all other general books on the subject find at least some room to mention the Palestinian leader of the day, Hitler?s great friend and supporter, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini. Of course no book can cover absolutely everything, and Husseini?s role was small. But Friedlander does find room to point to the (very minor) roles of the Swiss and Canadian governments, who, while culpably indifferent to the fate of the Jews, were in no way actively hostile, as was the Mufti. Those interested in the story of the Mufti will wish to look at the section devoted to it in Robert Wistrich?s much smaller and much more modest ?Hitler and the Holocaust? (New York, 2001).
But of course I cannot end on a negative note in writing about this great book. I have read most if not all of the previous comprehensive work on the subject, as well as a good deal of the more specialized literature. In studying this new book by Friedlander, I found new and surprising material on almost every page. I am completely confident that this book marks a turning point in what we know about the Nazi era. Both specialists and general readers owe a tremendous gratitude to the author for having given us this absolutely marvelous work.