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

Part of The Comprehensive History of the Holocaust, sponsored by Yad Vashem, The Origins of the Final Solution is the second of three projected volumes on the development and perpetration of the Shoah. It focuses on the period between the invasion of Poland and full implementation of the "Final Solution." Wisely, the series editors decided to separate efforts to capture the complexities of perpetration from the experiences of the victims, to be covered in subsequent volumes.

The choice of Browning as primary author of this volume speaks to his central position in the past three decades of scholarly debate. Although other prominent scholars still differ over significant details, his evolutionist position includes the consensus that exists among them and transcends the old intentionalist-functionalist dialectic. His sources strikingly reveal just how far and deep scholars have delved into the subject. The accumulated wealth of such detailed studies contributes equally with primary sources to produce this comprehensive overview.

Throughout the book, Browning refutes the simplistic idea of any long-range blueprint for the actual Holocaust. Yet he emphasizes the centrality of Hitler's inherently murderous ideology to the ultimate destruction of the "Jewish race" in particular, and of millions of Untermenschen who stood in the way of a racially pure empire. He shows that the road to extermination began with the invasion of Poland, their new "laboratory of racial policy." "By the end of September the Nazis had developed a grandiose program of demographic engineering. . . . It was not the result of any long- held blueprint" (p. 27). "Hitler had merely to annunciate the guiding ideological principles and express the depth of his emotional antipathy toward Poles and Jews; it could be left to his ambitious chieftains, especially . . . Himmler and Heydrich, to give them concrete shape" (p. 28). A broader consensus in German society that favored "a German empire in the east based on racial and social Darwinist principles" produced a sufficient number of helpers eager to seize this opportunity. This broad support "was one foundation upon which the future consensus for the mass murder of the Jews would be built" (p. 28). Thus, the pattern for the rest of the story was set.

From the beginning, ghettoization was seen as a temporary measure, preliminary to expulsion but not part of a premeditated plan for extermination. Although most administrators yearned to be rid of the Jews, those determined to exploit their victims economically prevailed over those bent on a policy of attrition, at least for the time being. Until the war against the Soviet Union, the ghetto served as a laboratory for inhuman excesses and warped many SS and policemen into brutality. Enthusiasm for vast programs of population engineering, and the frustration of those programs, made resettlement operations ever more brutal, while also revealing the futility of resettlement as a solution.

During the buildup to the invasion of the Soviet Union, all involved anticipated ever more murderous solutions to population problems in the East. Browning posits several points of scholarly consensus about this process. It was prolonged and incremental. Continuity was more important than the discontinuities. Nazi decision-making was more amorphous and unstructured than any top-down model can capture. To get the whole picture, one must look beyond Hitler and the SS to consider the roles of the military, civil administration, ministerial bureaucracy, economic planners, local collaborators, and police auxiliaries. Finally, most scholars agree that "there was no decision or order for the murder of all Soviet Jews before the invasion" (p. 214).

Matthäus's primary contribution is a chapter titled "Operation Barbarossa and the Onset of the Holocaust, June-December 1941." He finds continuity in expectations about the East that built upon experiences in World War I and the association of Jews with Bolshevism. He argues that Nazi propaganda effectively built on such perceptions and generated support...