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• The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945
Saul Friedlander

Harper Perennial, 2008 - 896 pages

average customer review:based on 21 reviews
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   highly recommended  highly recommended






Exhaustive and exhausting

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,


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The Indelible Memory of the Dead

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.


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This is no light treatment: over 800 pages of detail

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.


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A Magisterial Accomplishment

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.


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Comprehensive History and Documentation of Jewish Extermination

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.


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