The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (review)

In some of his earlier work, Browning discussed "Nazi Resettlement Policy and the Search for a Solution to the Jewish Question, 1939–1941."¹ Later, he wrote "From 'Ethnic Cleansing' to Genocide to the 'Final Solution': The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, 1939–1941" and "Nazi Policy: Decisions for the Final Solution."² Always focusing on details, these essays are masterpieces of historical research and writing. Now he has delved more deeply into these issues. With his characteristically meticulous research and reasoning, Browning has written what will quickly become a classic in Holocaust studies.

Browning builds his case and presents an awesome portrait of what he sees as the evolution of a demographic policy driven by ideology and bureaucracy, implemented by brutally unchecked violence. In a stunningly concise opening background chapter, he outlines the evolution of hatred of Jews from its religious origins in early Christianity to its social manifestations under the "modernization crisis" and to its racist form in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Once again, with excruciating detail, he examines the evolution of policy to the Final Solution, seemingly day by day in some cases. A policy of inconsistencies, buoyed by military victories over Poland and then Russia, emboldened Adolf Hitler to the mass murder not only of Jews but also of total populations to achieve Lenbensraum for Germans. By the summer of 1941, the machinery had grown more technically proficient as the Germans searched for the most efficient methods of murder.

In a lengthy contribution, Matthaeus reveals the horrifying specifics of the Einsatzgruppen (SS mobile killing units) Aktionen. These special units, supplemented by police reserve units, like Police Battalion 101—the subject of Browning's Ordinary Men (New York, 1992)—and in some cases in collaboration with Wehrmacht troops, ultimately murdered approximately 1.4 million Jews between June 1941 and December 1942. Matthaeus argues convincingly that the decisions of mass murder and genocide—the shift from implied genocide in July to the immediacy of killing in August—emerged locally from individual commanders and place-specific circumstances. After the fanciful plans of mass expulsion to Madagascar and a "reservation" near Nisko, Poland, Matthaeus finds no direct, explicit order to annihilate Jewish communities until the end of August 1941, when the German armies began to suffer military reverses in the east.

Subtly disagreeing with Matthaeus, Browning uses the same sources to draw different conclusions regarding a plan devised by Hitler and his confidantes immediately following the dramatic initial victories against the Soviet Union in July 1941. Early in the book, Browning echoes a theme that he had advanced in The Path to Genocide, that Hitler seemed to create a climate, an ambiguous atmosphere giving a "green light" to Nazis in Poland; "the restraints . . . were now lifted" (25). Like Matthaeus, Browning believes that the decision for the destruction of the European Jews moved "through a series of final solutions—first anticipating a judenfrei Germany by emigration, then a judenfrei Europe by expulsion, then the concept of mass murder which could only be implemented in 1941" (424). Hitler's "twin obsessions," ideologically driven, of Lebensraum and the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Question," coalesced, "radicalized under the spur of victory and opportunity." From October 1941 to March 1942, the Germans frantically brought an administratively efficient, industrialized genocide into reality. In a sly final sentence, with faint sarcasm for a previous antagonist, Browning concludes that "'ordinary' Germans would not shrink from implementing Hitler's Final Solution" (433).