David Cesarani (1956–2015)

David Cesarani was a historian, he died just after this book was published.

It is now late January and I have only just finished this book. I started it in mid November. It is over 1000 pages, you cannot call this a quick and easy read. It is not quick and definitely not easy.

As per the title, this book details what happened to the Jews from 1933 to 1949. I think one of the main characteristics of this book would be that the writing is devoid of emotion. I read someone else describing this book as cold. And yet, it is this plain recounting of facts does that serves to invoke the most deepest and traumatic of human emotions in the reader.

The book details how many people were killed, how they were killed, and who killed them, in great detail. I could relate some of these details but I wont because if you have children reading what happened to Jewish children will reduce you to tears and give you nightmares.

The other outstanding characteristic of this book is that it details exactly how it all came to pass. We all think we have a fair idea of what happened to the Jews, I certainly did until I read this book.

This book gives the context for many of the actions. Germany had been subject to the Nazi view of the Jews for many years before the war. Once Hitler came to power they subverted the entire education system to teaching the Nazi view of the world, its history and the Jews, the media and indeed everything else was subsumed into this vision. Whilst some of the Nazis involved in the early mass killings were shocked by what they were seeing, by the time that the Hitler Youth came online as soldiers their indoctrination was so thorough that Jews were not seen as even being human, literally, they could be treated and killed like animals and indeed they were.

The German army was fundamentally different to other armies. Where a British or American soldier is given explicit orders, German soldiers are just told what the overall objective is and then left to work it out for themselves. The results of this are unpredictable but often produces outstanding results. The German command deployed the learning and strategies that this methodology produced across the entire army. Where the British army went on to repeat the same mistakes over and over the German army became better and smarter as time went on. This principle also served in the annihilation of the Jews. Ideas were spread based their effectiveness.

At the beginning of the book he says that this book will dispel many myths about the Holocaust, like:

Adolf Hitler never intended to kill the Jews.
The "Jewish Problem" whilst being his obsession was never top of his priorities. The war always took precedence.
The Germans never had an "efficient killing machine". It was all ad hoc and badly thought out (until the very end).
The German population was complicit with the entire unfolding of the final solution.
The English and Americans knew what was happening to the Jews and did nothing.
The Jews were killed by the Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians and the Germans.

It was the Ukrainians that first demonstrated how effective mass killings could be by killing 50,000 men, women and children in 3 days in Poland. They showed the Germans a savagery that shocked some Nazis, but this methodology was soon spread to other areas. Populations of small towns and villages were encouraged to drag out their Jews and publicly humiliate them and worse. The Germans soon learned that people needed very little encouragement to do this. This method too soon spread. They also learned that they needed very few field staff to accomplish some of their objectives with local populations only too willing to help.

The other occupied races, while they may not have actually killed Jews, were wholeheartedly involved in the mass deportations of Jews in the knowledge that none of these people were coming back.

At the time that the extermination camps were operating the consensus among the British population was they didn't want any Jewish refugees and that "someone" had to solve the Jewish Problem.

Jewish businesses were a major part of the German economy and other economies in Europe. When the Jews were rounded up and deported it disrupted the economies on a great scale and the Germans needed the money in the economies. The infamous Kristallnacht resulted in 16,000 Germans being made unemployed because of the destruction of Jewish businesses.

The "spontaneous" rising up of the populations against the Jews frustrated some Nazis who needed them as slave labour, hostages and economic assets. The German solution was to Aryanise Jewish businesses, houses and assets, that meant simply replacing Jews with Germans. One day you had Jewish neighbours then you didn't. Everyone learned early on not to ask questions about where the Jews went and what happened to them but returning soldiers left no doubt about their fate.

If all that sounds conflicting and confusing, it really was. There was no central idea or plan on how to deal with the Jews. There was no Nazi masterplan!, it was chaotic and badly managed. One group of Nazi command wanted intact Jewish populations for slave labour and hostages while another wanted them gone and all that happened at the same time. There was often conflict between the various groups each with the own hidden agendas.

The simple fact is that no-one liked, wanted or needed the Jews. Not the English, not the Americans, no-one in Europe wanted any Jews in their country. By and large they were already hated before the war began. Those few brave souls who sheltered or helped individual Jews risked their lives to do so. If caught they were sent immediately to the camps.

The details of the slaughter is mind numbing in it s scope and variety, at times I had to put it down for a bit. Some things I read made me physically feel like vomiting something I have never experienced from reading before.

Towards the end of the book he starts dealing with events when finally the whole world knows about the camps and their horrors. It is in the papers everywhere. The Americans and The English went to great lengths to do nothing. In 1943 the Americans were taking aerial photos of the camps yet when the Jews asked the Americans and the English to bomb the camps and the rail lines they refused, they said they couldn't fly that far yet the aerial photos proved that they could. The English said that they had more important things to do.

The camps themselves were varied in both their intent and mechanics. Camps also came and went as the cleansing progressed, once an area was cleared the camp(s) were closed. Often to be re-opened as the chaos around clearances continued. Some camps were decorated more like holiday camps with pretty little stations and signs saying, "This way to the showers". Staff too were trained to give the illusion that the camp was merely a staging post and the showers were necessary to decontaminate the Jews as they passed through. The showers though were lethal. A single trainload of over 1200 men, women and children would be dead with an hour..

The book goes to 1948 because that is when the camps are finally emptied and the Jews set free. Between 1945 and 1948, the Jews were still locked in camps but now they were fed and clothed and their guards were British. They were not free though.

Some were released if the could prove their identity and nationality, a difficult task when all they had was the rags they stood in. Some of those who managed this returned to their home towns and tried to reclaim their houses and property. In Poland they were simply murdered. No-one wanted to give anything back and no-one cared about more dead Jews. Of all the property stolen almost none of it was returned. More to the point, most of the survivors did not want to return to the towns that had so badly treated them.

A lot of the Jews still held prisoner wanted to go to Palestine but that was controlled by the British and they had closed the borders to Jews from Europe. Finally in 1948 under pressure from America they relented and the remaining Jews went to Palestine. Probably what is not so well known is that they then set about getting rid of the Palestinian Arabs in much the same manner that they had been subject to, but that is another story.

Everything claimed as fact in the book is backed up with footnotes and bibliography.

It is hard to summarise or even give a solid impression about a book as big and complex as this for even I have simplified some of this to make it coherent. I don't imagine that anyone who reads this will want to read the book and I would not recommend it unless you have a real interest in finding out more. This is not casual read or a holiday book and requires a strong stomach.

After Germany was defeated the Allies mandated that by law Germany would teach the Holocaust in every German school. And they do, but I fear that they (and us) have been taught a simplified, sanitised, version of events that puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of the Germans alone and leaves out the uncomfortable facts that implicate everyone else.

Finally, you know that bit in horror movies where the main protagonist has left his friends or loved ones in the safe hands of one of the "good guys' and then finally it dawns on him that the "good guy" was all along the axe murderer......well, I have a son who lives in Germany and he would fail the ethnicity test that sealed the fate of the Jews.

I want to shout out to him, "RUN MAX, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE".… (mehr)

David Cesarani’s Final Solution is a magisterial work of history that chronicles the fate of Europe’s Jews. Based on decades of scholarship, documentation newly available from the opening of Soviet archives, declassification of Western intelligence service records, as well as diaries and reports written in the camps, Cesarani provides a sweeping reappraisal that challenges accepted explanations for the anti-Jewish politics of Nazi Germany and the inevitability of the “final solution.” The persecution of the Jews, as Cesarani sees it, was not always the Nazis’ central preoccupation, nor was it inevitable. He shows how, in German-occupied countries, it unfolded erratically, often due to local initiatives. For Cesarani, war was critical to the Jewish fate. Military failure denied the Germans opportunities to expel Jews into a distant territory and created a crisis of resources that led to the starvation of the ghettos and intensified anti-Jewish measures. Looking at the historical record, he disputes the iconic role of railways and deportation trains. From prisoner diaries, he exposes the extent of sexual violence and abuse of Jewish women and follows the journey of some Jewish prisoners to displaced persons camps. David Cesarani’s Final Solution is the new standard chronicle of the fate of a heroic people caught in the hell that was Hitler’s Germany. (fonte: amazon)… (mehr)

Veel historici hebben de geschiedenis van de holocaust verteld, maar op de persoon Eichmann heeft men nooit echt vat kunnen krijgen. Zijn verhaal mag als bekend worden verondersteld: de oorlogsmisdadiger en architect van de Endlösung ontsnapte in 1946 uit Amerikaanse gevangenschap en zat vijf jaar lang ondergedoken in Duitsland voor hij naar Argentinië wist te vluchten. Daar werd hij in 1960 door de Israëlische geheime dienst opgespoord. Na het beroemde proces in Israël werd hij in 1962 veroordeeld en ter dood gebracht.
Lange tijd werd Eichmann gezien als de verpersoonlijking van de 'banaliteit van het kwaad': een nauwgezette, ambtelijke uitvoerder van orders van hogerhand. De auteur geeft Eichmann een gezicht en laat zien dat de kille bureaucraat veel sterker en actiever betrokken was bij de vernietiging van de joden in Europa dan tot dusver werd aangenomen. Daarbij maakt hij gebruik van tot nu toe geheim gebleven bronnen, zoals Eichmanns autobiografie, die in handen is van zijn zoon. Ook sprak de auteur met talloze mensen die Eichmann hebben gekend, onder wie het Duitse echtpaar dat hem onderdak bood in de jaren na de oorlog.
Met deze baanbrekende biografie vult de auteur een belangrijke lacune in de geschiedschrijving van het Derde Rijk, en corrigeert hij definitief het beeld van een een van de belangrijkste architecten van de holocaust.… (mehr)