Rating: 
Summary: Evil starts at the top
Review: A brilliant book! Every killer squad (Einsatzkommando) sent into occupied Russia had a Ph.D. adviser attached to it. As the old proverb has it, the fish starts to stink from the head.
Rating:
Summary: Evil starts at the top
Review: A brilliant book! Every killer squad (Einsatzkommando) sent into occupied Russia had a Ph.D. adviser attached to it. As the old proverb has it, the fish starts to stink from the head.
Rating:
Summary: The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jew
Review: Browning (history, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) argues that while the Nazis' effort to find a Final Solution to their self-created Jewish Question was inherent in their ideology, we cannot understand Hitler's policy as a linear process from Mein Kampf to Auschwitz. Browning examines how Hitler's racial and political vision moved from a desire to create a "Jew-free" Germany toward mass slaughter throughout Nazi-dominated Europe. The critical period, according to Browning, was between September 1939 and March 1942, when Nazi policy underwent a process of "radicalization," brought on primarily by Nazi military success. Although German and Polish Jews suffered first, it was the mass extermination of Soviet Jews, beginning in summer 1941, that provided the final push for a general European-wide massacre. While Hitler provided ideological impetus to the reorganization of the demographic map of Europe, Browning demonstrates that his subordinates attempted to translate his political and racial visions into concrete actions. As Browning argues, "If one wants to know what Hitler was thinking, one should look at what [Reichfuher-SS and police chief administrator Heinrich] Himmler was doing." Just as important is Browning's analysis of the role of bureaucrats, eugenicists, and technicians, who realized that advancement meant implementing Hitler's ideological goals. Browning's volume is essential reading for all students of the Shoah.
Rating:
Summary: The dynamic of death
Review: Christopher Browning's book is the most detailed account of how Nazi Germany moved from discriminating against Jews and encouraging their emigration just before September 1939, to the systematic extermination of them by March 1942. It is based on the most recent research and has 111 pages of notes and a thirty page bibliography. How such an atrocity could have happened by a wealthy, otherwise sophisticated state against a small powerless minority is still difficult to comprehend. Browning shows how complex the path was. In September 1939 the German attack on Poland was marked by massacres of the local population, with a disproportionate emphasis on Jews. Poland, which had been divided between Germany and the Soviet Union, was further divided by the Nazis between those areas that had belonged to pre-Versailles Germany which were returned to the Reich, and the remainder, which became the General Government of Poland. Many ambitious people, among them Adolf Eichmann, thought that one could simply expel the Jewish population into the General Government, or later into the Wesern countries. This was not a detailed plan decreed on high by Hitler. Instead it was the response often of local initiative or by powerful players in the Nazi government, with the SS being the most important, sometimes getting a sign from Hitler to move forward, occasionally getting a sign to stop. But the expellers had problems. The general government was reluctant to be swamped with Jewish refugees. France in particular did not want Jews from Luxembourg. The army's military jurisdiction had to be reigned in and any concern over the brutal tactics diluted. This was done with some success, but the people who sought to economically exploit Poland (around Goering) had their own, limited pragmatic objections. At the same time there was a similarly complex process with ghettoization. As the ghettoes developed (Browning is very careful to point out the differences between Warsaw, Lodz, Cracow and elsewhere) a division developed between "attritionists" who thought confining the Jews to ghettoes would reduce their numbers, while "productionists" argued it would be easier to exploit the Jews economically if they were guaranteed a certain minimum standard of living. Although some scholars have sought to find an economic logic to the Nazi's actions, Browning notes the irony that the productionists were slowly winning the battle over the ghetto when it was decided to exterminate the Jews.The key turning point was the decision to invade the Soviet Union. In the months beforehand plans were drawn up that assumed the deaths of millions, even tens of millions of Soviets from starvation and dispossession. Within days of the invasion the SS Einsatzgruppen were murdering thousands of people. At the same time other Nazis, other allies and local populations in the Baltic and Ukraine carried out massacres of male Jews on their own initiative. By August women and children were being included across the occupied Soviet Union, though not everywhere. By October plans were being drawn up to create gas chambers and by January 1942 the Wansee Conference was held. By March 1942 the Nazis were systematically moving to slaughter every Jew in Europe from Ireland to Vladivostok. When was the decision made to do all this? Browning makes four important points. First, there was no big bang of the origins of the Final Solution, no single decision which launched everything. Second, the planning for Barbarrossa, with mass executions, mass expulsions and mass starvation on a level previously unforeseen, clearly implied the genocide of the Jews, if not their absolute extinction. Third, Nazi decision making policy was "an unsytematical dialectical interaction of mutual radicalization between central and local authorities...as well as decisions and orders from above; and intuition, initiative, and experimentation, as well as obedience from below." Fourth, one cannot just concentrate on Hitler and Himmler, one must look also at the military, civil administration, the bureaucracy, economists and collaborators. The role of anti-communism in the war against Germany's most dangerous foe was of special importance. Having pointed out how polycratic struggles and local initiative set the stage for genocide and how previous plans for expulsion had been consistently thwarted until 1941, Browning then presents a theory for Hitler's role, in two stages. In July 1941 Hitler moved towards the Final Solution in a euphoria of victory, but then stopped plans for deportations in August when the Wehrmacht's offensive was delayed. But in September, the military situation improved, the euphoria returned and it was in this six-week period until the end of October that Hitler decided to kill every Jew the Nazis could get their hands on. This summary does not go into the immense detail and considerable nuance that Browning provides on every point from popular opinion to the setting up of the first death camps to the role of the euthanasia program where many exterminators started their career. Some details stand out. As the Holocaust was about to make their work redundant, the professional anti-Semitic bureaucrats added a new round of petty restrictions of Jewish life, such as a 1941 rule in Dresden that prevented Jews from buying cut flowers. Later we learn of how, in order to meet their anti-partisan hostage quotas, the Germans in Serbia started shooting male Jews in Serbia out of hand. One of the people behind this policy, Field Marshall List, was not only not Nazi "but a highly cultured and deeply religious man" who was praised by the future pope John XXIII for his attempts to alleviate famine and military mistreatment in Greece. But the prejudices of his caste against guerrillas and Serbs made him push an open door to genocide. Indeed one of the most dispiriting things in this book is that no-one in the vast Nazi machine seems to have stopped to point out how evil it was to murder millions of innocent people.
Rating:
Summary: detailed look at the Nazi genocide
Review: Professor Christopher Browning of the University of North Carolina (with contributions by the German historian Jurgen Matthaus) describes in unprecedented detail the steps that led to the crystallization of the Final Solution during the first two and a half years of World War II. Browning identifies the five weeks between September 18 and October 25, 1941, as the climactic turning point in Nazi policy. By then the close circle around Hitler knew what he expected of them. They were aware that no European Jews were to escape the anti-Jewish measures that had once been planned for after the war and that the goal of these measures was the physical destruction of the Jewish people--men, women, children. Although the cluster of fatal decisions in the fall of 1941 was the culmination of a series of events which began with the invasion of Poland 25 months earlier, it was Operation Barbarossa--the war of destruction against "Jewish Bolshevism"--that set in motion the German genocide against Soviet Jews and dramatically changed the tone and pace of Nazi policy and practice. As Browning makes clear, Hitler himself was the driving force behind the Final Solution. "His obsession with the Jewish question ensured that the Nazi commitment would not slacken, that the search for a final solution one way or another to the problem would not be neglected or be indefinitely postponed." As the embodiment of Nazi ideology and the constant inciter of the party faithful, Hitler exerted enormous pressure on the regime to implement his wishes. No leading Nazi could prosper who did not appear to take the Jewish question as seriously as he did himself. This pressure stimulated "a competition among the faithful and ambitious to advance ever more radical proposals and to carry out Jewish policy in an ever more brutal and comprehensive manner." It was not Hitler's style to micromanage or even to give orders. He preferred to have his subordinates carry out his wishes without him needing to oversee their work. "Where would I be," he said, "if I would not find people to whom I can entrust work which I myself cannot direct, tough people of whom I know they take the steps I would take myself. The best man is for me the one who bothers me least by taking upon himself 95 out of 100 decisions." This important, thoroughly researched book is part of Yad Vashem's Comprehensive History of the Holocaust project that "seeks to summarize research findings on the Holocaust during the generations following the war." As the middle volume of three volumes to be devoted to an examination of the development of Nazi Jewish policy, this book will come after a volume on the prewar years and before a volume on the implementation of the Final Solution. The rest of the volumes in the series will cover the impact of the Holocaust on the individual national Jewish communities of Europe.
Browning (and Matthaus) have succeeded admirably in their goal of broadening our understanding of this part of the road to the Holocaust, and their work will no doubt be definitive for many years to come. Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, author of The Destruction of the European Jews, calls this book "by far the most incisive analysis of the decisions that gave rise to the annihilation of the Jews in Nazi Europe." --reviewed by Charles Patterson, author of ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust
Rating: 
Summary: Only for academics
Review: This book is only appropriate for someone that desires a comprehensive, in-depth understanding of the subject. The actual text is about 450 pages with some 200 pages of footnotes. The writing is very difficult to follow and its meaning unclear. The text would have benefitted from a strong editor who would have forced the author to speak in plain, generally understood English.
Rating:
Summary: Superb Scholarship; Dispiriting Reading
Review: This important book is a detailed narrative and analysis of how the Nazis came to pursue the systematic extermination of the European Jews. It is aimed at summarizing and clarifying approximately 2 generations worth of scholarship on this aspect of the Holocaust and distilling it into an accessible form. Written primarily by Christopher Browning with contributions from the German scholar Jugen Matthaus, this very well written and organized book is entirely successful in achieving its aims. The Holocaust, at least in its final form, was an improvisation. There is no doubt that virulent anti-Semitism was a core feature of Nazi ideology and that elimination of Jews from any society dominated by the Nazis was an essential goal of the Nazis. In the years prior to WWII, the chosen instruments, however, were legal discrimination, coercion but not mass murder, and intense pressure to force Jews to emigrate from Germany. As with other aspects of Hitler's goals and policies, he and his underlings had not thought ahead as to how they would realize their ultimate objective of purging German (and European) society of Jews. The great success of the German military in 1939-1941 acted as a spur and radicalizing force in Nazi Jewish policy. The conquest of Poland, and later much of the Soviet Union, with their large populations of Jews, meant that the prewar solutions were inadequate. What followed were a set of expedients; forced emigration and starvation, ghettoization and starvation, mass executions by shootings, and early experiments with mass murder by gassing. Flushed with apparent victory in the fall of 1941, Hitler and his minions made the decision that none of the previous measures were satisfactory and embarked on the policy of developing extermination camps.
Browning and Matthaus not only chart the development of these measures and provide judicious analyses of the available data on how and when decisions were made by the Nazis, they also provide great and important detail on the context in which decisions occurred. The development of mass murder by gassing, for example, occurred in the Nazi eugenic campaigns, another aspect of their ideology of 'racial hygiene.' The murderous campaigns against Jews in occupied Poland are set in the context of the German effort to reduce Polish society to a rural proletariat that would be used as a source of cheap labor for the Reich. Yet another aspect of racial hygiene and part of the Nazi effort to guarantee Lebensraum in Eastern Europe. Indeed, the Nazi campaign against Jews is comprehensible only as part of a broader racist ideology and effort to obtain lebensraum. The Jews, unfortunately for them, occupying the central place in the Nazi demonology.
Several other important issues are dealt with. The complicity of the German Armed Forces. The role of public opinion in Germany. The competition between those of the Nazis who wished to proceed directly to murder and those who wished to extract some economic value prior to murder. The "polycratic" nature of the Nazi state and Hitler's decision making methods. All of these important topics are analyzed thoughtfully.
In many respects, this important book is profoundly dispiriting. Many portions are simply painful to read. This book makes clear the incredibly destructive consequences of ideologies demonizing other human beings and provides considerable insight into how such acts occur.
Rating:
Summary: Superb Scholarship; Dispiriting Reading
Review: This important book is a detailed narrative and analysis of how the Nazis came to pursue the systematic extermination of the European Jews. It is aimed at summarizing and clarifying approximately 2 generations worth of scholarship on this aspect of the Holocaust and distilling it into an accessible form. Written primarily by Christopher Browning with contributions from the German scholar Jugen Matthaus, this very well written and organized book is entirely successful in achieving its aims. The Holocaust, at least in its final form, was an improvisation. There is no doubt that virulent anti-Semitism was a core feature of Nazi ideology and that elimination of Jews from any society dominated by the Nazis was an essential goal of the Nazis. In the years prior to WWII, the chosen instruments, however, were legal discrimination, coercion but not mass murder, and intense pressure to force Jews to emigrate from Germany. As with other aspects of Hitler's goals and policies, he and his underlings had not thought ahead as to how they would realize their ultimate objective of purging German (and European) society of Jews. The great success of the German military in 1939-1941 acted as a spur and radicalizing force in Nazi Jewish policy. The conquest of Poland, and later much of the Soviet Union, with their large populations of Jews, meant that the prewar solutions were inadequate. What followed were a set of expedients; forced emigration and starvation, ghettoization and starvation, mass executions by shootings, and early experiments with mass murder by gassing. Flushed with apparent victory in the fall of 1941, Hitler and his minions made the decision that none of the previous measures were satisfactory and embarked on the policy of developing extermination camps.
Browning and Matthaus not only chart the development of these measures and provide judicious analyses of the available data on how and when decisions were made by the Nazis, they also provide great and important detail on the context in which decisions occurred. The development of mass murder by gassing, for example, occurred in the Nazi eugenic campaigns, another aspect of their ideology of 'racial hygiene.' The murderous campaigns against Jews in occupied Poland are set in the context of the German effort to reduce Polish society to a rural proletariat that would be used as a source of cheap labor for the Reich. Yet another aspect of racial hygiene and part of the Nazi effort to guarantee Lebensraum in Eastern Europe. Indeed, the Nazi campaign against Jews is comprehensible only as part of a broader racist ideology and effort to obtain lebensraum. The Jews, unfortunately for them, occupying the central place in the Nazi demonology.
Several other important issues are dealt with. The complicity of the German Armed Forces. The role of public opinion in Germany. The competition between those of the Nazis who wished to proceed directly to murder and those who wished to extract some economic value prior to murder. The "polycratic" nature of the Nazi state and Hitler's decision making methods. All of these important topics are analyzed thoughtfully.
In many respects, this important book is profoundly dispiriting. Many portions are simply painful to read. This book makes clear the incredibly destructive consequences of ideologies demonizing other human beings and provides considerable insight into how such acts occur.
Rating:
Summary: Did Hitler ever ordered it?Not a shred of evidence here!
Review: This is a most commendable work from Browning, an internationally repescted Holocaust researcher who conclusively demonstrated that Hitler, while desiring of the cleansing, ie, forcible expulsion, of the Jews from German dominated Europe, in one way of another, had never decreed that the Final Solution , as coined by Himmler and his deputy, Heydrich, should end in the death camps and gas chambers.
The radicalization and escalation of measures against the Jews mostly originated from his underlings who competed for brute power in a polycratic, darwinist bureaucracy, and who sometimes paid little attention to Hitler's expressed wishes, unless they were set down as written directives.
On wonders all those counter factual arguments puit forth by the Intentionalists that Hitler, mindful of the adverse consequences (!) of a written directive putting Jews to death, was careful not to lay down a paper trail leading to him as the main culprit, when Hitler himself signed a directive for the forced euthanasia of crippled , mentally handicapped, and deformed GERMAN babies and old people (what would cause a greater outcry amongst the Germans, should a directive be found, one for disposing of thier own kin and the other of the despised Jews?).
As from 1939, Hitler, as evidenced by all the OKW/OKH/OKL/OKM dairies as well as his so called table talk,concerned himself exclusively with foreign diplomacy or his campaigns, and never gave much thought about domestic politics or internal administration, thus leaving a void for his cohorts to enagage in a free for all power grab, with to each his own interpretation of what Hitler mentioned as the end of Jewry in Europe, and each and everyone going for increasingly radical measures as justification for aggregating addtional power/authority to oneself.
All in all, this is a sad book to read of the fate and treatment of the Jews by their persecutors, tormentors and executioners, be they Germans, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Dutch, French, Italians, Russians, Slovaks, Czechs, Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Belgians, Greeks....
Rating:
Summary: Intensive but worthwhile
Review: This is one of the best books on the market that explains the political development of the Holocaust inside the Nazi power circle. It provides a strong argument that the Nazis did not originally plan to exterminate the Jews in Europe, but rather export them from Germany. Browning's thesis is a challenge to the slippery slope fallacy, which suggests that just because a person steps a foot in one direction doesn't mean he'll step a mile. The Nazis clearly started out w/ a 'Final Solution' plan of sending the Jews to a place like Madagascar (which was on the table as late as the Battle of Britain), but after the invasion of Russia this 'Final Solution' snowballed into a landslide of killing Jews via gas chambers (not that the Anti-Semitic rhetoric of the early 30s were justified in any way, whether pro-genocide or pro-expulsion). The Nazis took a step in a bad direction, and then they walked a mile along that evil path. This would give logicians a nightmare.
Most people assume that Hitler ran on a genocide program in 33. This is a dangerous assumption, for two reasons: 1.) it tends to view the Nazis as a supernatural party of evil. Make no mistake, the Nazis WERE evil, but they believed themselves to be do-gooders who provided solutions to the problems the average German faces. Did the German people know what they were getting into in 1933? Sure, they were willing to view Jews as the scapegoats for the Depression, but did they hate Jews enough to kill them? This book challenges the "Hitler's Willing Executioners" theory, because although Hitler touted a Final Solution in Mein Kampf, that wasn't interpreted by him or his companions as outright genocide until 1941.
And 2.) Holocaust deniers use this fact, that the "Final Solution" in the 30s meant population dispersal rather than genocide, and then they play the "Well, if you were lied to in high school about the original intentions of the Nazis, what else were you lied to about? (hint hint, you were lied to about the Holocaust period!)" card to gain confidence w/ the unsuspecting listener, and then convert this person into a Holocaust denier. It is important that we know the facts about the Holocaust, so that the uninitiated in deep WWII history won't be hoodwinked w/ "gotcha" facts by Holocaust deniers.
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