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Reviewed by:
  • Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews
  • Katrin Paehler
Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Peter Longerich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), xiii + 645 pp., cloth $34.95.

Peter Longerich has published a remarkable book. The odds were stacked against it, as the book is, at its core, his twelve-year-old Habilitationsschrift; yet, Longerich has turned this possible disadvantage to his advantage. The book combines the best features of a Habilitationschrift—painstaking research and complete mastery of the field—with the benefit that a long publication delay can offer: the opportunity to revise and update. Some 600-odd pages long, the book synthesizes many different strands of historiography, leading to a bold new interpretation based on extensive research. Ultimately, Longerich’s integrative approach to hotly contested matters is highly successful.

Longerich’s study enters the crowded field of works dealing with the so-called genesis of the Final Solution and pushes our understanding in new directions. The study is an offshoot of the debates that defined the field for decades; Longerich began his work just as the increasingly contentious discussions between intentionalists and functionalists crested. He completed and eventually revised the book at a time when different but structurally similar dichotomies defined the debates: center versus periphery; ideology versus rationality; and ordinary men versus ordinary Germans. Longerich’s goal was to move beyond these pairings of factors. In his view, they are not mutually exclusive; rather, they are “different aspects of the same phenomenon” and “illuminate . . . historical reality in complementary, even interdependent ways” (pp. 3–4). Attempting first to describe and then to analyze the “complex processes of the persecution of the Jews,” Longerich takes the almost untranslatable, contemporaneous concept of Judenpolitik as his starting point (p. 4). Other German historians of the Holocaust have utilized the concept, but Longerich takes the analysis to new levels.

Longerich defines several key elements of Judenpolitik. The term describes the Nazis’ long-term goals and strategies for the realization of the utopia of a racially homogenous society, but it must be understood also as a separate policy area, akin to economic policy, for example. As such, it was not immune to the kinds of influences that impact traditional areas of policy. Indeed, Judenpolitik was part of the broader matrix of policy fields but tended to penetrate them. After all, the Nazis understood all policies in racist terms and redefined them accordingly. Finally, Judenpolitik was never static; it underwent substantial changes, and was shaped by its own internal dynamics. In other words, Nazi Germany’s shockingly successful Judenpolitik cannot be understood in terms of diligently followed orders from above. Rather, it emerged from a dynamic interplay with other fields and its own internal dynamics. It was also dependent on active protagonists who—able to intuit their leaders’ expectations—took the initiative based on a broad consensus among the policy’s most prominent architects. Judenpolitik, Longerich argues, was central to the National Socialist project; its uniqueness can be found here. [End Page 303]

Rather than try to find a smoking gun in the form of an order for the extermination of all Jews, Longerich focuses his attention on the various phases of Nazi Judenpolitik. Longerich’s key term is “parallel.” On the basis of much documentary evidence, he outlines the parallel, sometimes seemingly contradictory policies as well as the basic patterns that unified Judenpolitik and drove its escalation. In particular, he identifies four stages of escalation between fall 1939 and summer 1942 during which the Nazi leadership “developed and set into motion a program for the systematic murder” of Europe’s Jews (p. 422).

Longerich locates the turning point in the “Final Solution” in fall 1939, much earlier than most other historians. He argues that once the transformative potential of the prewar Judenpolitik—which focused on the “de-Jewification” of the greater Reich—had been exhausted, the new plans for a “Jewish reservation” in the Lublin District and eventually farther east indeed became plans for extermination. Hostage scenarios aside, the goal of these plans was “to annihilate the vast majority of the Jews” over the course of a longer period after the war’s end (p. 424...

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