The Years of Extermination

It took me a while, but I finally finished Saul Friedlander's massive study of the "Final Solution" of Nazi Germany, titled The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. The book won a Pulitzer Prize. It is an eminently readable book for the non-academic, but it can be slow going, as it has so many different names and particularly numbers, mostly totals of Jews that have been either deported to concentration camps or killed, or both.

Friendlander structures the book as a narrative in a chronology, from the invasion of Poland in 1939 to the last days in Hitler's bunker. He writes that the first victims were the disabled, who were rounded up and shot. The Jews, initially, were to be resettled on Madagascar. Eventually, though, the attitude taken was that the extermination of every last Jew in Europe was necessary.

Friendlander does not write sentimentally. He can begin a chapter like a slap in face: "On September 29, 1941, the Germans shot 33,700 Kiev Jews in the Babi Yar ravine near the city." He also, and I think was the larger point of the book, doesn't hold back in his opinion that there are many culpable for this tragedy, not just Hitler and his minions. He makes it clear that the German citizens knew exactly what was happening to Jews, as Himmler practically said as much in his speeches. The increasingly byzantine and insane rules that Jews were subject to--they couldn't own radios, bicycles, binoculars. Couldn't go to school, use shops. They couldn't even have pets, and the pets they did have weren't just taken away, they were killed. Also, the Nazi fascination with breeding comes across as so bizarre, as those with a partial Jewish ancestry (mischlinge) were dealt with in strange and seemingly arbitrary ways.

Also coming under fire in this book is the Catholic hierarchy. The Pope and other cardinals throughout Europe are mentioned from time to time, but Friedlander sums it up in these devastating lines: "Although sporadic protests by some Catholic bishops or Protestant religious leaders did take place, the vast majority of Catholic and Protestant authorities remained publicly silent in the face of the deportation of the Jews and the growing knowledge of their extermination. Whatever the reasons for it may have been, the pope's silence contributed to the lack of open protest by Catholic prelates in various countries, including Germany."

Friedlander is also not interested in exploring the psychology of the event. There is no "how could this happen?" He writes: "There is no point in probing once more 'the mind of Adolf Hitler' or the twisted emotional sources of his murderous obsessions. It has been attempted many times without much success...the major question that challenges us all is not what personality traits allowed an 'unknown corporal' of the Great War to become the all-powerful leader Adolf Hitler, but rather why tens of millions of Germans blindly followed him to the end, why many still believed in him at the end, and not a few, after the end." This murderous anti-Semitism was not limited to Germany, either, as Friedlander points out that many other countries gleefully participated: Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, France. All were more than happy to seize the opportunity to rid their land of Jews.

The book has an immense cast of characters, many of who are well known from the voluminous number of books and films that have created around the Holocaust. We meet Anne Frank, Klaus Barbie, Josef Mengele, the brothers who aided Jews that are the basis of the upcoming film Defiance, Raoul Wallenberg, and Amon Goeth, the camp commandant in Schindler's List (no mention of Oskar Schindler, though). I think the most effective witnesses are the many diarists, like Anne Frank, that Friedlander makes use of. I think the most poignant passage in the entire book was written by a sixteen-year-old boy who would eventually die in a camp. His name was Moshe Flinker:

"It is like being in a great hall where many people are joyful and dancing and also where there are a few people who are not happy and who are not dancing. And from time to time a few people of this latter kind are taken away, led to another room and strangled. The happy dancing people in the hall do not feel this at all. Rather, it seems as if this adds to their joy and doubles their happiness."