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: This is no light treatment: over 800 pages of detail
Summary: 5 Stars
THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION completes Friedlander's major historical work on Nazi Germany and the Jews, describing the persecution and murder of the Jews not just in Germany but throughout occupied Europe. Source material documents are the foundations of a wide-ranging study appropriate for college-level and specialty holdings strong on Nazi Germany Holocaust history: chapters rely on diaries, letters, and memoirs to capture events, adding in political and social analysis to round out the personal accounts. This is no light treatment: over 800 pages of detail provide regional and state-wide analysis throughout Europe.Book Review: The Indelible Memory of the Dead
Summary: 4 Stars
I read Saul Friedlander's first volume about Holocaust, Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939 almost ten years ago. That was one of the first, and one of the best, non fiction books I've read. With well crafted, confident prose, Friedlander guided us through the various stratas of German society as the Nazi administration slowly but relentlessly increased the pressure on the Jews. I was mightily disappointed as the years passed by and the second volume failed to appear. Rumor had it that it wasn't forthcoming. I only discovered that "The Years of Extermination" would in fact be released after it has been.
I got the hefty hardcover (870 pages, including 205 pages of notes and bibliography in a bookstore in Israel while shopping for a book to take with me to a business trip. It was only after I purchased "The Years of Extermination" - but before I left - that I realized I would be reading most of it in Germany. How appropriate.
"The Years of Extermination" cover Germany's Jewish policy in the war years. The chapters are chronological rather than topical, and follow a relatively stable format. First, the chapter briefly discusses the progress of the War, the contingencies that played a part in the shaping of the extermination policy. Next, Friedlander describes the happenings in the highest echelons of the Nazi Regime - the various power struggles, speeches, and plans concerning the fate of the Jews. The rest of the chapter would be dedicated to the carrying out of the policies, and to the actions and reactions of the various victims, perpetrators, and by standers, throughout the Reich and among its allies. Friedlander also report about the knowledge and actions, or mostly lack thereof, of various Jewish and world leaders.
Friedlander's book is hard to read, and harder to summarize. The inhumanity of the Nazi Horror often makes you cold - it is easy to lose track on the personal suffering, on the individual human beings, when one discusses the mechanism and bureaucracy of Genocide. Friedlander successfully counters this tendency with excerpts of diaries, some well known (Anne Frank, Victor Klemperer) but most, like Lilli Jahn, the Jewish Doctor wife of an Aryan physician, all but forgotten. So reading the book is an emotional experience - a study of unmitigated, incomprehensible destruction.
Friedlander engages, to some extent or another, most of the controversies regarding the Holocaust. Particularly striking is his judgment, after a long and detailed discussion, of Pope Pius XII: "if the Catholic Church is merely considered as a political institution that has to calculate the outcome of its decisions in terms of instrumental rationality, then Pius's choice may be deemed reasonable in view of the risks entailed. If, however, the Catholic Church also represents a moral stand, as it claims, mainly in moments of major crisis, and thus has to move on such occasions from the level of institutional interests to that of moral witnessing, then of course Pius's choice should be assessed differently." (p. 573)
For me, small details were often the most striking. Among the Jews gathered up in the Ghettos were Christian converts, and there were Churches in Ghettos. Despite receiving some privileges, the Jewish Christians were twice damned: "As a foreign entity" wrote an underground Jewish journalist "they were thrust into a dual exile in the ghetto. A decisive majority of the Jewish population maintains no contact with these `Jews'. Foreign to the Jewish masses in their culture, hopes and yearnings, they share the Jews' suffering as uninvited partners in misfortune" (quoted on page 244). None of that made them any more compassionate, however: One of the Reverends in the Ghetto saw God's hand in placing him in it, and pledged to remain as much an anti-Semite as he was before once he got out.
I also did not know that the font with which the word Jude (Jew) was written on the yellow David star the Jews were forced to wear was invented specifically for that purpose, intentionally reminding one of sinister Kabalistic Hebrew, while remaining readable in all languages.
Reading and Reflecting about the horrors of the persecutions, it is hard not to wonder about the murderers. Did they know what they were doing was wrong? Did they realize the baseness, the unimaginable criminality of their actions? At times, they must have. "Goering is completely aware of what would threaten us all, if we were to weaken in this war" wrote Goebbels. "He has no illusions in this regard. In the Jewish question in particular, we are so fully committed that for us there is no escape any more. And that is good that way. Experience shows us that a movement and a people who have burnt their bridges fight fan more unconditionally than those who still have a way back." (Quoted on page 538).
There are, I think, dark implications in this and similar paragraphs. Incomprehension is sometimes the only resort we have for people who have brunt their bridges so far that they were no longer a part of humanity. Sometime later, I may speak rationally about their motives and incentives and ideology. Right now, all I feel is overwhelming incomprehension, and (using friedlander's term) the indelible memory of the dead.
Book Review: A new and good history of the Holocaust
Summary: 5 Stars
There are an number of prominent full length, one volume, histories of the Holocaust, this is the newest and contributes much to the study of the terrible event. In particular this book returns the reader to the 'old' view of the Holocaust. It challenges Arendt's theory that the Jews were responsible for their own fate and that the Germans were 'banal' and it assaults various 'economic' histories of the Holocaust by recalling the racial hatred that motivated the mass murder.
The most important contribution this book makes is examining the internal workings of the Jewish communal institutions and their leadership. Of the utmost importance is the books concentration on cataloguing the crimes of the Nazi collaborators in Croatia, Rumania, Ukraine, Latvia, Poland and elsewhere. The book combines a massive amount of source material to give flavor for all sides of the Holocaust machine. It is well written, beautiful and tragic and poignant.
The greatest drawback is a total lack of pictures or maps. This is a great shame, for the Holocaust was colossal in scale, maps are necessary.
The story is chronological rather than thematic or geographical, which can be confusing and the book lacks adequate headers to break up the countries studied. Nevertheless, quite an accomplishment, a great new history.
Seth J. Frantzman