Available:*
Library | Item Barcode | Shelf Number | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Batavia - Richmond Memorial Library | 34020002746269 | 940.5318 FRIE | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... North Tonawanda Public Library | 34120004481012 | 940.5318 FRIE | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
An authoritative and magisterial survey on the Holocaust by one of the world's leading experts "A masterful synthesis that draws on a lifetime of learning and research."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The extermination of the Jews triggers disbelief. This volume presents a thorough historical study of the events that extends beyond the usual analysis of German policies, decisions, and measures that led to this most systematic and sustained of modern genocides. It includes the reactions of the surrounding world--authorities, populations, churches, social elites--related facets of everyday life throughout the continent, and their individual expressions.
The history of the victims is an intrinsic part of this overall context; their attitudes found expression in both collective responses and individual testimonies. Here, the individual voices are weaved into the narrative and are the main carriers of disbelief: Some of them end in liberation; most are cut short by extermination.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In the second volume of his essential history of Nazi Germany and the Jews, one of the great historians of the Holocaust provides a rich, vivid depiction of Jewish life from France to Ukraine, Greece to Norway, in its most tragic period, drawing especially on hundreds of diaries written by Jews during their ordeal, depicting a world collapsing on its inhabitants, along with the thousands of humiliating persecutions that Jews suffered on their way to extermination. Friedlander also provides insightful discussions of the many interpretive controversies that still surround the history of Nazi Germany. He has been party to many of the debates, and he remains attuned to the most recent historical research. Friedlander knows the bureaucratic workings of the Third Reich as well as anyone, but refuses to see in that alone the explanation for the Holocaust. Instead, he focuses largely on cultural and ideological factors. He considers other factors, such as "the crisis of liberalism," but these were not the essential motives for the Holocaust, which, Friedlander says, was driven by sheer hatred of Jews, by "a redemptive anti-Semitism" espoused by Hitler, a belief that Germans could thrive only through the utter destruction of Jews. This is a masterful synthesis that draws on a lifetime of learning and research. (Apr. 10) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
It can be argued that we are in danger of a Holocaust overload--that is, the constant revisiting of the topic, deadening sensitivities to the real horrors of racial genocide. On the other hand, there is a need to keep reminding the world precisely what was done to Jews under the Nazi regime. That is just what Friedlander seeks to do in his second volume on the topic. He grew up in Nazi-occupied France and is now a professor of history at UCLA. Here he takes a broad view of the war against the Jews. The actions of the Nazi state are closely examined, but he also places the Holocaust within the broader context of European politics and racial attitudes. He eloquently illustrates the millions of individual tragedies through extensive use of Jewish diaries. He avoids delving into the motivations for the anti-Semitism of Hitler and his cohorts; for him, such blind hatred is beyond true comprehension. The deeper problem is comprehending why people were willing to become a part of such an affront to decency. --Jay Freeman Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN 1997, Saul Friedländer published "The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939," the first of his projected two-volume history of "Nazi Germany and the Jews." In the introduction to that volume, he announced his intention of "establishing a historical account of the Holocaust in which the policies of the perpetrators, the attitudes of surrounding society and the world of the victims could be addressed within an integrated framework." Such a framework has indeed been missing from most historical accounts of this most difficult and challenging of subjects. They have focused either on the processes of decision-making and their implementation or on the world of suffering and death experienced by the victims. Friedländer's first volume stood out from most other work in this field because it successfully combined both of these aspects. And his second volume does so as well. It now establishes itself as the standard historical work on Nazi Germany's mass murder of Europe's Jews. And yet "The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945" is no ordinary academic book. True, Friedländer seems to have read virtually every printed source and secondary work on his vast subject in English, German and French. His judgments are scrupulous and levelheaded. And he treats the historical controversies that have raged around so many of the topics he covers with untiring fair-mindedness. He writes without a trace of polemic or of facile retrospective moralizing. The book meticulously satisfies every requirement of professional historical writing. What raises "The Years of Extermination" to the level of literature, however, is the skilled interweaving of individual testimony with the broader depiction of events. Friedländer never lets the reader forget the human and personal meanings of the historical processes he is describing. By and large, he avoids the sometimes unreliable testimony of memoirs for the greater immediacy of contemporary diaries and letters, though he also makes good use of witness statements at postwar trials. The result is an account of unparalleled vividness and power that reads like a novel. Friedländer's witnesses run into scores if not hundreds, and range from well-known figures like Anne Frank and Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Jewish administration of the Warsaw Ghetto, to more obscure individuals like Mihail Sebastian, a Romanian writer in his 30s, who recorded the descent of his country into its own barbarous version of genocide, and Raymond-Raoul Lambert, an Alsatian veteran of the French Army in World War I. Their haunting words chronicle the horror and disbelief of European Jewry as it slid down through discrimination and persecution to deportation and death. "If my life ends," the Warsaw religious teacher Chaim Kaplan wrote not long before he was taken away to perish in the gas chambers of Treblinka, "what will become of my diary?" Like many others cited in this book, it survived not least by chance, having been smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto into the hands of the Polish underground resistance movement, from where it eventually found its way to New York and publication in the 1960s. The writings of diarists like Kaplan, committed to paper in conditions of terrible adversity, provide much of the human dimension of this remarkable book: they did not write in vain. These people were the victims, Friedländer argues, not of anonymous processes generated in the machinery of Nazi and SS administration, but of one man above all: Adolf Hitler. Friedländer is critical of the recent, voluminous literature, mainly by a younger generation of German historians, that attempts to depict the extermination program as the outcome of coldly rational processes of decisionmaking by administrators, "experts" and officials in the German-occupied areas of Eastern Europe, who decided that the Jews would have to be killed so that the limited food supplies available in the area could go to the Germans, or to make room for German settlers or Germans left homeless by Allied bombing raids. Such arguments do not explain the manic obsessiveness with which Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and the man in charge of implementing the extermination program, tracked down Jews to arrest and kill, even traveling to Germany's ally Finland to try and persuade its government to surrender that country's tiny Jewish population, which was of no objective economic or strategic importance to Germany at all. Nor do these arguments do justice to the virulent language of hatred used by the Nazi leaders, Hitler and Goebbels in particular, when they spoke, as they did almost unceasingly, of the Jews. Friedländer devotes a good deal of space to quoting Hitler at length, showing clearly his personal obsession with the forces of international Jewry that, in his mind, lay behind the actions of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. It was the Jews, he believed, who had fomented the war launched (in reality by himself) in September 1939. As the United States committed itself ever more firmly to the Allied side in the summer and fall of 1941, Hitler delivered one tirade after another against the Jewish conspiracy he thought lay behind Roosevelt's policy. It was at this point that he escalated his persecution of the Jews first to deportation to the East and then to mass murder and total extermination. The German defeat by the Red Army at the Battle of Stalingrad in February 1943, blamed by Hitler yet again on the Jews, raised his anti-Semitic fury to fresh heights. The Jews, he declared, were driven by their innate racial instinct to subvert civilization everywhere. "The modern peoples have no option left," he said in May, as the genocide was reaching its height, "but to eliminate the Jews." Millions of entirely innocent and largely unsuspecting people across Europe paid for such violent fantasies with their lives. The diaries and letters cited in the book show graphically how even as the prospective Jewish victims began to fear the worst, they continued to hope for the best; only a small minority found their way into hiding or resistance. As for the mass of non-Jewish citizens in Germany and other parts of Europe, indifference was the commonest reaction. Police and other state officials in most occupied countries cooperated willingly in the roundups and deportations; in some parts of Europe, notably Poland, Romania and Croatia, native anti-Semitism made its own brutal contribution to the genocide. Friedländer's narrative sweeps across an entire continent, encompassing every country affected by the Nazi drive for domination. In Bulgaria and Slovakia, popular outrage at the genocide forced governments initially willing to collaborate to change their stance. Leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in a number of countries played a part in articulating such feelings, and individual priests in Germany and elsewhere sometimes paid for their courageous opposition with their lives. But Friedländer makes it equally clear that many clerics, particularly senior church leaders who feared that open criticism of the genocide would bring down the wrath of the Nazis on them, remained silent and inactive, except where Jewish converts to Christianity were concerned. In some areas - particularly Croatia - nationalist clergymen egged on the murder squads with their own brand of religiously inspired anti-Semitism. Pope Pius XII, the subject of an earlier book by Friedländer, does not come out well, but what strikes the reader yet again is the exemplary evenhandedness with which Friedländer weighs the arguments on both sides in an area that has become more controversial than most in recent years. The book's chapters are organized chronologically, each covering a period of several months. This has the disadvantage of breaking up many of the narratives, so that, for example, if one wants to follow what happened in the Netherlands, or in Romania, or even in Germany itself, one has to search through several different chapters to piece the story together. But for the reader who persists from beginning to end, this structure has the benefit of enabling one to see the connections between what was happening at any one time in different parts of the Continent, to link it to the state of play of military affairs during the war (which Friedländer usefully sketches in at various points) and to follow the slow development of Nazi policy and its implementation as it unfolded over time. In a celebrated exchange with the German historian Martin Broszat many years ago, Friedländer argued that, faced with such events, no historian could or should remain neutral. Born in Prague into a Jewish family in 1932, Friedländer grew up in hiding in France during the war, and his personal history gives him an unusually strong identification with his subject. Broszat, who had spent much of his career compiling or overseeing expert witness reports in German war crimes prosecutions and had a vested interest in preserving the appearance of neutrality, disagreed. The practical consequences of Friedländer's stance are apparent: the personal testimonies of Hitler's Jewish victims create an overwhelming impression of suffering and cast a lurid light on the policies and actions of the Nazis and their helpers. The downside of this is that the experiences of the perpetrators are presented perhaps less fully than they might have been. Their testimony is generally used to describe the conditions they created rather than (with the obvious exception of Hitler himself) to chart their personal beliefs, motives or impressions. The attitudes and behavior of the German people also remain unexplained, and are presented in a sweeping and undifferentiated way that does scant justice to the nuances and complexities that recent historical work has uncovered. And the book's focus on the sufferings of the Jews pushes the broader context of Nazi racial policy - which includes the mass murder of millions of Soviet prisoners of war, the systematic extermination of the Polish intelligentsia, the killing of about 200,000 mentally ill or handicapped Germans, the annihilation of a large part of Europe's Gypsies - possibly too far into the background. For as a good deal of recent work has shown, the Third Reich's genocidal policies toward the Jews have to be understood as part of a larger policy aimed at the ethnic reshaping of Europe. Comparisons with these other victims would have made it evident that the Jews occupied a special place in the exterminatory mentality of the Nazis; they were perceived not as a regional obstacle but as a global threat, not as inferior beings like insects but as powerful enemies, whose very existence anywhere was a terrible danger to the future of the German race. Still, to have broadened the focus too much would have made this already very lengthy and complex book almost unmanageable. Friedländer succeeds in binding together the many different strands of his story with a sure touch. He has written a masterpiece that will endure. The Jews were regarded not as inferiors but as powerful enemies who threatened the German race. Richard J. Evans is professor of modern history at Cambridge University and the author of "The Third Reich in Power."
Choice Review
Friedlander (UCLA) has written a riveting, readable account of Hitler's decision to annihilate the Jews of Europe, as well as his victims' reactions as described in diaries and letters. The volume continues the author's earlier work, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (CH, May'97, 34-5252). Together, the books should become the standard work on the steps leading to the Holocaust. Friedlander argues that Hitler was the architect of the Final Solution. Obsessed with the Jews, Hitler prophesied on the eve of WW II that should war break out, it would result in the extermination of the Jews. This prophecy was not hyperbole, but a warning repeated many times during the war, driven by Hitler's belief that Jews were the principal evil in Western history and that without a German victory, the Jews would ultimately dominate the world. Friedlander brands Hitler's anti-Jewish hatred "redemptive anti-Semitism," defined as Hitler's belief that "beyond the immediate ideological confrontation with liberalism and communism, which he claimed was invented by Jews and for Jewish interests, he perceived his mission as a kind of crusade to redeem the world by eliminating the Jews." Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. J. Fischel emeritus, Messiah College
Library Journal Review
A follow-up to the excellent Nazi Germany and the Jews, from a historian who witnessed the Holocaust firsthand. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Years of Extermination Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 Chapter One September 1939-May 1940 "On Friday morning, September 1, the young butcher's lad came and told us: There has been a radio announcement, we already held Danzig and the Corridor, the war with Poland was under way, England and France remained neutral," Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary on September 3. "I said to Eva [that] a morphine injection or something similar was the best thing for us; our life was over." 1 Klemperer was of Jewish origin; in his youth he converted to Protestantism and later on married a Protestant "Aryan." In 1935 he was dismissed from the Technical University in Dresden, where he taught Romance languages and literature; yet he went on living in the city, painstakingly recording what happened to him and around him. The British and French responses to the German attack remained uncertain for two days. "Annemarie brought two bottles of sparkling wine for Eva's birthday," Klemperer reported on September 4. "We drank one and decided to save the other for the day of the English declaration of war. So today it's the turn of the second one." 2 In Warsaw, Chaim Kaplan, the director of a Hebrew school, was confident that this time Britain and France would not betray their ally as they had betrayed Czechoslovakia in 1938. On the first day of the war Kaplan sensed the apocalyptic nature of the new conflict: "We are witnessing the dawn of a new era in the history of the world. This war will indeed bring destruction upon human civilization. But this is a civilization that merits annihilation and destruction." 3 Kaplan was convinced that ultimately Nazism would be defeated but that the struggle would entail enormous losses for all. The Hebrew school director also grasped the peculiar threat that the outbreak of the war represented for the Jews. In that same September 1 entry, he added, "As for the Jews, their danger is seven times greater. Wherever Hitler's foot treads there is no hope for the Jewish people." Kaplan quoted Hitler's notorious speech of January 30, 1939, in which the Nazi leader threatened the Jews with extermination in case of world war. The Jews were thus more eager than most to take a hand at common defense: "When the order was issued that all the inhabitants of the city must dig shelter trenches for protection from air raids, the Jews came in numbers. I, too, was among them." 4 On September 8 the Wehrmacht occupied Lodz, the second largest Polish city: "All of a sudden the terrifying news: Lodz has been surrendered!" Dawid Sierakowiak, a Jewish youngster, barely fifteen, recorded. "All conversation stops; the streets grow deserted; faces and hearts are covered with gloom, cold severity and hostility. Mr. Grabinski comes back from downtown and tells how the local Germans greeted their countrymen. The Grand Hotel where the General Staff is expected to stay is bedecked with garlands of flowers: [Ethnic German] civilians--boys, girls--jump into the passing military cars with happy cries of Heil Hitler! Loud German conversations in the streets. Everything patriotically and nationalistically [German] that was hidden in the past now shows its true face." 5 And in Warsaw again, Adam Czerniaków, an employee of the Polish foreign trade clearinghouse and an active member of the Jewish community, was organizing a Jewish Citizens Committee to work with the Polish authorities: "The Jewish Citizens Committee of the capital city of Warsaw," he wrote on September 13, "received legal recognition and was established in the Community building." 6 On September 23 he further noted: "Mayor Starzynski named me Chairman of the Jewish Community in Warsaw. A historic role in a besieged city. I will try to live up to it." 7 Four days later Poland surrendered. The voices of many Jewish chroniclers will be heard in this volume, and yet all of them, as different as they may be, offer but a faint glimpse of the extraordinary diversity that was the world of European Jewry on the edge of destruction. After a steady decline of religious observance and an increase in the uncertainties of cultural-ethnic Jewishness, no obvious common denominator fitted the maze of parties, associations, groups, and some nine million individuals, spread all over the Continent, who nonetheless considered themselves Jews (or were considered as such). This diversity resulted from the impact of distinct national histories, the dynamics of large-scale migrations, a predominantly urban-centered life, a constant economic and social mobility driven by any number of individual strategies in the face of surrounding hostility and prejudice or, obversely, by the opportunities offered in liberal surroundings. These constant changes contributed to ever-greater fragmentation within the Diaspora, mainly during the chaotic decades that separated the late nineteenth century from the eve of World War II. Where, for example, should one locate young Sierakowiak, the Lodz diarist? In his diary entries, started just before the beginning of the war, we discover an artisan family steeped in Jewish tradition, Dawid's own easy familiarity with this tradition and yet, at the same time, a strong commitment to communism ("The most important things are school work and studying Marxist theory," he wrote somewhat later). 8 Sierakowiak's divided world was not untypical of the multiple and at times contradictory allegiances coexisting in various segments in Jewish society on the eve of the war: Liberals of various nuances, Social Democrats, Bundists, Trotskyites, Stalinists, Zionists of all possible stripes and factions, religious Jews sparring in endless dogmatic or "tribal" feuds, and, until the end of 1938, a few thousand members of fascist parties, particularly in Mussolini's Italy. 9 Yet for many Jews, mainly in Western Europe, the main goal was social and cultural assimilation into surrounding society, while maintaining some elements of "Jewish identity," whatever that meant. All these trends and movements should be multiplied by any number of national or regional idiosyncrasies and internecine struggles, and, of course, by a high count of sometimes notorious individual oddities. Thus the old and terminally ill Sigmund Freud, who had fled from Vienna to London after the Anschluss . . . The Years of Extermination Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 . Copyright © by Saul Friedlander. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedlander All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | p. xi |
| Introduction | p. xiii |
| Part I Terror (Fall 1939-Summer 1941) | |
| 1 September 1939-May 1940 | p. 3 |
| 2 May 1940-December 1940 | p. 65 |
| 3 December 1940-June 1941 | p. 129 |
| Part II Mass Murder (Summer 1941-Summer 1942) | |
| 4 June 1941-September 1941 | p. 197 |
| 5 September 1941-December 1941 | p. 261 |
| 6 December 1941-July 1942 | p. 329 |
| Part III Shoah (Summer 1942-Spring 1945) | |
| 7 July 1942-March 1943 | p. 399 |
| 8 March 1943-October 1943 | p. 469 |
| 9 October 1943-March 1944 | p. 539 |
| 10 March 1944-May 1945 | p. 601 |
| Notes | p. 665 |
| Bibliography | p. 795 |
| Index | p. 849 |