How Hitler got away with murder

How Hitler got away with murder


Saul Friedlander's The Years of Extermination traces the Nazis' insidious campaign of genocide and Europe's failure to stand up for the Jews, says Tim Gardam

Sunday September 16, 2007
The Observer


Buy The Years of Extermination at the Guardian bookshop

The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945
by Saul Friedlander
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £30, pp896

In the summer of 1941, Herman Kruk was living in Lithuania. He had fled Warsaw two years earlier to escape the German invasion. This time he decided to stay, and wrote in his diary: 'If I am going to be a victim of fascism, I shall take pen in hand and write a chronicle ... The Germans will turn the city fascist. Jews will go into the ghetto - I shall record it all. My chronicle ... must become the mirror and the conscience of the great catastrophe.'

Saul Friedlander's The Years of Extermination pieces together the shards of personal testament from thousands such as Kruk, salvaged from the ghettoes, thrown from trains, the records of victims, perpetrators and bystanders, all framed within the cold statistics of the Nazi bureaucratisation of terror. This is the second volume of his life's work. Part monument of record, part intimate anecdotal history, his account piles layer on layer of detail garnered from otherwise unremembered lives, people who themselves ended, almost invariably, as corpses piled into the death pits.
Friedlander is a world authority on the Holocaust but he is also a survivor: hidden as a Jewish child in occupied France in a Catholic convent. His intellectual discipline may be that of the historian but his writing is animated by the passion of memory that only his generation can fully express.

'The goal of historical knowledge,' he writes, 'is to domesticate disbelief.' But in the history of the extermination of a European civilisation, he believes that disbelief is the only morally coherent starting point to what happened, a visceral response that should never be domesticated.

Friedlander argues that anti-Semitic ideology lies at the heart of everything the Nazis did. He sets himself against the historiography which argues that the genocide was just a secondary consequence of the wider policies of Lebensraum, and sustaining the German war economy. In this sense, he agrees with Goebbels, who wrote in 1944: 'A long-term policy in this war is only possible if one considers it from the standpoint of the Jewish question.' Friedlander meticulously charts the formulation of the Final Solution. The rhetoric of extermination may have preceded any active planning to carry it out. The mass killings of Jews in the East were at first simply undistinguished by-products of 'the war of extermination' and the destruction of 'Judaeo-Bolshevism' but they were no different in intention from the industrial genocide that followed.

At one point Friedlander admits that 'there is something profoundly disturbing yet rapidly numbing' in his task. 'History seems to turn into a series of mass killing operations and, on the face of it, little else.' Friedlander's real purpose lies in laying bare not the administrative machinery of genocide, but the failure of nerve at every level to confront it.

The Nazi state first achieved the isolation of millions from their neighbours through the ever-increasing weight of official vindictiveness. Jews gradually were restricted in their shopping hours, their schools, their use of telephones, cars, bicycles, electrical appliances; they had to build their own air-raid shelters, use their own cobblers, were denied fruit, gingerbread, chocolate, pets, white bread, furs and tobacco. Even so, when, in the East, the exterminations had begun, Jews in the West could still live out for a time a restricted life without a sense of immediate danger amid neighbours who at a personal level were sometimes sympathetic but disengaged. The bleakness of this book comes above all from its portrait of the collective timidity of so many, with whom it is uncomfortably possible to identify. They may have been distressed at what they saw but, in the face of the state's brutality and the success of its propaganda machine on popular opinion, they feared first for themselves. Jewish persecution, argues Friedlander, could not have been taken to its genocidal extremes without the personal obsession of Adolf Hitler; yet the course it took only became possible because of endemic European anti-Semitism. 'Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews.'

Friedlander charts chronologically the undeviating path that led month by month from everyday administrative cruelties to the industrial mass murder of Auschwitz. His method allows us to share with the diarists that growing sense of disbelieving recognition as it unfolds. The relentless narrative helps to explain the paralysis of Jews unable to accept what was happening until it was too late to escape, and also to concede how difficult it was for others to decide at what point to risk their own safety by taking a stand.

Friedlander is on occasion too dismissive of the many small, often ineffective, individual acts of solidarity and courageous defiance he records. They remain the only redemptive moments in his narrative. He does not spare the Jews themselves for their lack of solidarity: the Zionists in Palestine considered the European catastrophe primarily in terms of its implications for the future establishment of a Jewish state. He does not really confront the greatest puzzle of his narrative: why, when faced with the certainty of imminent mass extermination, was there so little resistance by the victims in the killing grounds themselves?

Nonetheless, Friedlander never allows us to miss his most important point: the Nazis very nearly succeeded in the total extermination of European Jewry. One of the most eloquent diarists, Victor Klemperer, wrote in 1943, as the tide of war turned: 'The terrible end is imminent. They will perish, but, perhaps, probably, they will have time to annihilate us first.' The minority who survived lived on in the shadow of 6 million who died, one and a half million under the age of 14. As the survivors themselves now vanish, this massive work constructs a towering moral challenge to all our assumptions about the resilience of humane instincts in the face of fear and unimaginable cruelty. It leaves one cold for hours afterwards.