The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (review)

Saul Friedländer has long confronted the nearly insuperable challenges of representing the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. With this book he meets that challenge, achieving something that is not “business as usual” Holocaust historiography, but a history that integrates not only the actions of the perpetrators, but also the reactions of the surrounding world and those of victims who did not survive, giving the latter a seldom-heard voice. The result is an innovative and elegantly written work embracing the story of perpetrators, bystanders (some of whom become perpetrators themselves), and victims.

The stories of victims who did not survive are the most difficult to retrieve, but Friedländer has unearthed some three dozen diaries kept contemporaneously by victims. These accounts, including one by a teenager in the Lodz ghetto and another by a Sonderkommando inmate in Auschwitz, evoke a contemporaneity that necessarily eludes testimonies produced later. Such chronicles, Friedländer says, are like “lightning flashes” illuminating for a moment the darkness of the surrounding landscape. He memorializes these chroniclers in the final pages, listing by name those he has identified.

Without perpetrators, of course, there would have been no victims. Even in an “integrated” history the perpetrators remain central. In explaining what motivated Nazi murderers, Friedländer insists upon the centrality of ideological and cultural factors, including an antisemitism that he describes as obsessive and “redemptive.” At the head of the murderous perpetrators stood Adolf Hitler, whom Friedländer characterizes as living in a mythical world in which he acted as the prophet of a messianic antisemitism and, ultimately, the critical decision-maker for mass murder. As a prophet Hitler is for Friedländer the bearer of a “suprahistorical salvation creed” that called for purifying the German Volk, crushing Bolshevism and big capitalism, and promising Germans an “ultimate millennial redemption” in a world refashioned by Nazi racial ideology (p. xx). The author dismisses without much comment those who would place economic or “modernizing” impulses at the forefront of perpetrator motivations.

Within the Nazis’ mythical world, Friedländer explains, Hitler left subordinates latitude to pursue their own “Jewish policies,” all of them believing, correctly, that they were acting in accord with the Führer’s wishes. Thus the widespread murders beginning in Poland in September 1939, and their escalation on Soviet territory following the invasion of June 1941, were often the products of lowerlevel initiative, but always with Hitler’s approval. The ultimate transition to the “Final Solution,” however, was, as Friedländer explains it, another matter: “Crossing the line from local operations to overall extermination required [and received] the go-ahead signal from the supreme authority” (p. 286).

Specialists will take particular interest in Friedländer’s approach to the timing of Hitler’s decision to give that ultimate “go-ahead.” Scholars disagree on this question, although it is not, it should be pointed out, the most important one confronting those trying to understand the Holocaust. Christopher Browning, for one, argues that the beginnings of Hitler’s decision to exterminate all of European Jewry came during the “victory euphoria in mid-July [1941].”¹ Friedländer disagrees, arguing that the “decision [was] taken during the last three months of 1941,” with Hitler’s December 11 declaration of war on the United States being a decisive factor. In evidence he cites Joseph Goebbels, who in a diary entry of December 12 quotes Hitler as having told a conference of Gauleiters the day before that “the world war is here; the extermination of the Jews must be its necessary consequence” (pp. 279–80). Only a few days before, Germany’s offensive on Moscow had stalled and the Soviet counterattack had been launched. Now, with the war beginning to go badly, the dangers of a continued Jewish presence on the home front and in the conquered areas were perceived to be immediate. The Jews, after all, had stabbed Germany in the back during the Great...