The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (review)

Book Reviews 137 conspiracy of misinformation on the part of the Home Office, the Jewish community, and refugee relief organizations, all ofwhom had an interest in minimizing the numbers of refugees who were said to be arriving in the country. Sherman again stresses the comparative generosity of view towards Jewish refugees on the part ofBritish consular officers in Germany and Austria (there is more evidence now available to support that general conclusion) as compared with the "rigid, unsympathetic administration by American consuls of their country's immigration regulations." The text of the book remains substantially the same as in the previous edition, but a useful supplementarybibliography has been added, as have some evocative photographs. Sherman's book is out of tune with much of the recent literature on the subject-but that does not mean it is wrong. The more critical view of British policy now common perhaps reflects current sociopolitical preoccupations rather than an altogether disinterested analysis of the historical evidence. The British record on these issues was admittedly rather different, certainly less impressive, during World War II, but it is a mistake automatically to extrapolate back into the prewar period. In the judgment of this reviewer Sherman's central argument remains unassail· able. It should be added that the book is written with a rare felicity: it is a pleasure to read. Bernard Wasserstein Oxford Centre for Hebrew. and Jewish Studies .The Origins ofNazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution, by Henry Friedlander. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. 421 pp. $34.95. Henry Friedlander's long-awaited book is the first systematic attempt to link specifically defined Nazi practices of negative selection affecting human beings not deemed worthy of life. He does this by emphasizing three factors. First, although he professes not to deal with physicians or medicine per se (meaning that he did not intend to write a text from the point of view of medicine), he clearly demonstrates that the Nazis' practices were medical in nature or, biopolitically inspired, the outgrowth of a peculiar German medical Zeitgeist. This applies most obviously to forced sterilization, to what the Nazis euphemistically termed"euthanasia," and even to the selection on the ramp of death camps, as a result ofwhich Jews were sent into gas chambers. Second, although these connections 138 SHOFAR Winter 1997 Vol. 15, No. 2 have been known for some time, Friedlander treats those three stages of negative selection not only as being interrelated, but also as logically staggered plateaus. Implicitly, he even applies a logic to the distinctive victim groups: at the most general level, sterilization could affect almost any member ofthe German citizenry, provided he or she was inflicted with a certain (believed to be hereditary) disorder, to prevent congenitally diseased offspring. At the following level, "euthanasia" could strike institutionalized patients, many of whom might already have been sterilized, and some ofwhom, as World War II was proceeding apace, were chosen because they were institutionalized andJewish. Next, selection on the ramp affected Jews (and later Gypsies) exclusively, thus was a function of genocide and at the core of what today we know to have been the Holocaust. Third, the element oftiming is important. The Nazi sterilization laws were promulgated in July 1933, coming into effect the following January. "Euthanasia" was not practical and therefore not implemented until the beginning of the war-a war which justified many extraordinary measures even for the most disbelieving of ordinary Germans. The mass killings, mostly through gas, occurred after the war theater had moved well into the east; significantly, Hitler wanted to catch and destroy "European Jewry," which was mainly settled in the east, and being erected on Polish territory the killing centers were well out of the view of civilian (ordinary) Germans. Friedlander deals with all these stages and sequences in an uncommonly meticulous fashion, to a point where at times he becomes overly technical and his pages make for somewhat tedious reading. But be this as it may, to tell his story as it must be told, he builds on a wealth of literature from the more recent past, as it applies to each of the discrete phenomena and time periods, adding documentary...