Hitler's Shadow War: The Holocaust and World War II (review)

Hitler's Shadow War makes two major arguments. First, the "Final Solution" was driven by Adolf Hitler and his immediate subordinates rather than second-echelon figures in the Nazi police establishment. Second, the war against the Jews took precedence, when necessary, over the war against the Red Army and Western Allies. In this sense, Donald M. McKale has updated and perhaps even revived older "intentionalist" arguments by Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Gerald Fleming, and others. He does so not by drawing on new archival sources—indeed none are cited—but by synthesizing the past decade's secondary work while citing older published documents that many may have forgotten. The book serves as a reminder that older arguments can remain valid despite the discovery of new sources and that the least complicated explanations are sometimes quite strong.

For the early years of Nazism, McKale relies on Karl A. Schleunes's "Twisted Road to Auschwitz" thesis that, despite the long-held Nazi desire for a Germany free of Jews, there was no coherent plan of action in 1933. Party radicals wished to proceed immediately against Jews, but the genuine Nazi belief in powerful Jewish wire-pullers abroad necessitated a certain amount of caution and sham legality. The author does not, however, let ordinary Germans off easily. Drawing on recent work by Robert Gellately and Evan Bukey, McKale points out that the antisemitism in Nazi campaign rhetoric was no hidden agenda, that small businessmen actively pursued profit in the wreckage of Jewish-owned businesses, and that if some Germans and Austrians were repulsed by the wave of anti-Jewish legislation that culminated in Kristallnacht, it was never apparent in any meaningful action. The regime's radical eugenic intent was apparent in the 1934–39 sterilization of more than 350,000 men and women, including, on Hitler's secret orders, 500 children born to German women and fathered by French African troops stationed in the Rhineland after World War I.

McKale reminds readers that Hitler made no secret of his ultimate intentions toward the Jews; the author revives several German statements from published diplomatic sources that supplement Hitler's famous Reichstag prophecy of January 1939. Weeks after Kristallnacht, Hitler told the South African defense minister that "the Jews would disappear from Europe." He told Czech foreign minister Frantisek Chvalkovsky that "with us the Jews would be destroyed." The author shows that if the attack on Poland did not introduce the systematic murder of European Jewry, it brought significant slaughter; more than 5,000 may have been murdered in the first fifty-five days of the war by the Order Police, Einsatzgruppen, Death's Head troops, and even Wehrmacht members. RSHA Chief Reinhard Heydrich nevertheless noted on September 21, 1939, that the recent antisemitic events were a "stage" leading to a "final goal" of Jewish policy that "must be kept strictly secret." Further inspired by his regime's successful murder of German and Jewish handicapped persons, Reichsführer-SS Himmler raised the idea of mass extermination of Jews by means of poison gas as early as December 19, 1939. According to McKale, emigration to Madagascar or Lublin, or even mass sterilization, were never taken seriously as alternatives to efficient slaughter.

Indeed, drawing on Richard Breitman's and Charles W. Sydnor's research on Himmler and Heydrich, McKale suggests that serious discussion of mass annihilation may have begun as early as December 1940, during discussions of what became Operation Barbarossa. Shortly thereafter, in January 1941 according to postwar interrogations, top Nazi officials discussed such a comprehensive solution. By March 1941 the decision for systematic mass murder surely had been made; at the end of that month Hitler warned his generals that the next war would be one of extermination. Einsatzgruppen officers Otto Ohlendorf and Walter Blume would later testify that in May and June 1941 they received secret orders to shoot all Jews in the USSR. And just as the notion...