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Reviewed by:
  • The Holocaust: Roots, History, and Aftermath
  • Brenda Melendy
The Holocaust: Roots, History, and Aftermath, David M. Crowe (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2008), xvi + 524 pp., pbk. $49.00.

Historians may ask whether we really need another Holocaust textbook. David Crowe's The Holocaust: Roots, History, and Aftermath answers that question with a resounding yes. This recent addition to the ever-expanding historiography provides not only a broad and useful overview, but it comes packaged with a strong narrative and extensive bibliographic support for university and law school students. While a thesis in a textbook can be elusive, Crowe skillfully synthesizes scholarship in the subfields of Holocaust history (for instance, Henry Friedlander on the euthanasia program, and Omer Bartov and others on the role of the Wehrmacht) to advance his own overall argument: the Holocaust was a race war, and its deadly reach extended as broadly as Germany's military campaigns themselves. Though this argument is not new, the value of this book lies in the mustering of the literature to support it: extensive detailed evidence from every aspect of the Holocaust is systematically laid out for the reader. The Holocaust: Roots, History, and Aftermath could become a "go to" book for professors and students alike.

The first three chapters cover the "roots" of the Holocaust. To start, Crowe adds significantly to briefer, more formulaic approaches by providing an expansive Jewish history from its ancient beginnings through the rise of racialist antisemitism in the early twentieth century, a history largely unfamiliar to many students. Crowe then turns to an exploration of the origins of Hitler's antisemitism, examining and discounting (for instance) stories such as Hitler's purported fear that he might possibly have Jewish ancestry himself. While chapter three admirably describes the antisemitic climate in which Hitler's worldview took shape, Crowe doesn't answer definitively (could anyone have?) the question raised at the chapter's outset, "What caused Hitler's anti-Semitism?" [End Page 146]

Crowe then takes the reader to the killing years themselves, beginning with the period 1939-1941 (what he designates the "intermediary stage" of the Holocaust) in this phase of the Nazi "race war" against the disabled, the Roma, the Poles, and Polish Jews. He explains in detail the system of ghettos created in German-occupied Poland. Crowe engages numerous complexities, for instance the dilemmas faced by the Judenräte (Jewish councils) in their forced collaborative functions. Crowe devotes special coverage to the Cracow ghetto, a focus of his scholarship elsewhere, illuminated through his personal interviews with Stella Müller-Madej, one of the ghetto's survivors. Crowe ties the evolving history of the ghettos (their industries, their demographics, and other facets) to the progress of the war, keeping events in their chronological order so students clearly see how events affected each other.

As Timothy Snyder recently has pointed out, Auschwitz is not even half of the story when it comes to the scale of murder in the Holocaust. Crowe fully explores the camps, but he also introduces the new student of the Holocaust to the full extent of "the ignored reality":1 over several chapters Crowe reveals how the Third Reich killed more Holocaust victims by shooting than by gassing. The text delineates the variety of killing units, from the Einsatzgruppen, to "volunteer" auxiliaries in Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine, to collaborators in Hungary and Romania and independent killers in Slovakia, Croatia, and Serbia. The death camps do not escape Crowe's attention. Auschwitz, perhaps more appropriately regarded as an anomaly than the representative symbol of the Holocaust, is carefully presented in all its notoriety—its construction, the development of the gas chambers, the selections, the other-worldly combination of camp, subcamp, and satellite camp, the hospital wards and medical experiments, the Romani family camps, and so on and on. There are many familiar tales here since there were many Auschwitz survivors to tell them. But Crowe also relates the histories of other camps, including those with few survivors: the Operation Reinhard camps (Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec), Chelmno, and Majdanek. Their histories, together with Crowe's accounts of the liquidation of the ghettos and the contrasting progress of the Holocaust in Western...

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