The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 [Hardcover]

The Holocaust, at least in its final form, was an improvisation. There is no doubt that virulent anti-Semitism was a core feature of Nazi ideology and that elimination of Jews from any society dominated by the Nazis was an essential goal of the Nazis. In the years prior to WWII, the chosen instruments, however, were legal discrimination, coercion but not mass murder, and intense pressure to force Jews to emigrate from Germany. As with other aspects of Hitler's goals and policies, he and his underlings had not thought ahead as to how they would realize their ultimate objective of purging German (and European) society of Jews. The great success of the German military in 1939-1941 acted as a spur and radicalizing force in Nazi Jewish policy. The conquest of Poland, and later much of the Soviet Union, with their large populations of Jews, meant that the prewar solutions were inadequate. What followed were a set of expedients; forced emigration and starvation, ghettoization and starvation, mass executions by shootings, and early experiments with mass murder by gassing. Flushed with apparent victory in the fall of 1941, Hitler and his minions made the decision that none of the previous measures were satisfactory and embarked on the policy of developing extermination camps.
Browning and Matthaus not only chart the development of these measures and provide judicious analyses of the available data on how and when decisions were made by the Nazis, they also provide great and important detail on the context in which decisions occurred. The development of mass murder by gassing, for example, occurred in the Nazi eugenic campaigns, another aspect of their ideology of 'racial hygiene.' The murderous campaigns against Jews in occupied Poland are set in the context of the German effort to reduce Polish society to a rural proletariat that would be used as a source of cheap labor for the Reich. Yet another aspect of racial hygiene and part of the Nazi effort to guarantee Lebensraum in Eastern Europe. Indeed, the Nazi campaign against Jews is comprehensible only as part of a broader racist ideology and effort to obtain lebensraum. The Jews, unfortunately for them, occupying the central place in the Nazi demonology.
Several other important issues are dealt with. The complicity of the German Armed Forces. The role of public opinion in Germany. The competition between those of the Nazis who wished to proceed directly to murder and those who wished to extract some economic value prior to murder. The "polycratic" nature of the Nazi state and Hitler's decision making methods. All of these important topics are analyzed thoughtfully.
In many respects, this important book is profoundly dispiriting. Many portions are simply painful to read. This book makes clear the incredibly destructive consequences of ideologies demonizing other human beings and provides considerable insight into how such acts occur.

Browning identifies the five weeks between September 18 and October 25, 1941, as the climactic turning point in Nazi policy. By then the close circle around Hitler knew what he expected of them. They were aware that no European Jews were to escape the anti-Jewish measures that had once been planned for after the war and that the goal of these measures was the physical destruction of the Jewish people--men, women, children.

Although the cluster of fatal decisions in the fall of 1941 was the culmination of a series of events which began with the invasion of Poland 25 months earlier, it was Operation Barbarossa--the war of destruction against "Jewish Bolshevism"--that set in motion the German genocide against Soviet Jews and dramatically changed the tone and pace of Nazi policy and practice.

As Browning makes clear, Hitler himself was the driving force behind the Final Solution. "His obsession with the Jewish question ensured that the Nazi commitment would not slacken, that the search for a final solution one way or another to the problem would not be neglected or be indefinitely postponed."

As the embodiment of Nazi ideology and the constant inciter of the party faithful, Hitler exerted enormous pressure on the regime to implement his wishes. No leading Nazi could prosper who did not appear to take the Jewish question as seriously as he did himself. This pressure stimulated "a competition among the faithful and ambitious to advance ever more radical proposals and to carry out Jewish policy in an ever more brutal and comprehensive manner."

It was not Hitler's style to micromanage or even to give orders. He preferred to have his subordinates carry out his wishes without him needing to oversee their work. "Where would I be," he said, "if I would not find people to whom I can entrust work which I myself cannot direct, tough people of whom I know they take the steps I would take myself. The best man is for me the one who bothers me least by taking upon himself 95 out of 100 decisions."

This important, thoroughly researched book is part of Yad Vashem's Comprehensive History of the Holocaust project that "seeks to summarize research findings on the Holocaust during the generations following the war." As the middle volume of three volumes to be devoted to an examination of the development of Nazi Jewish policy, this book will come after a volume on the prewar years and before a volume on the implementation of the Final Solution. The rest of the volumes in the series will cover the impact of the Holocaust on the individual national Jewish communities of Europe.

Browning (and Matthaus) have succeeded admirably in their goal of broadening our understanding of this part of the road to the Holocaust, and their work will no doubt be definitive for many years to come.

Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, author of The Destruction of the European Jews, calls this book "by far the most incisive analysis of the decisions that gave rise to the annihilation of the Jews in Nazi Europe."

--reviewed by Charles Patterson, author of ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust

The key turning point was the decision to invade the Soviet Union. In the months beforehand plans were drawn up that assumed the deaths of millions, even tens of millions of Soviets from starvation and dispossession. Within days of the invasion the SS Einsatzgruppen were murdering thousands of people. At the same time other Nazis, other allies and local populations in the Baltic and Ukraine carried out massacres of male Jews on their own initiative. By August women and children were being included across the occupied Soviet Union, though not everywhere. By October plans were being drawn up to create gas chambers and by January 1942 the Wansee Conference was held. By March 1942 the Nazis were systematically moving to slaughter every Jew in Europe from Ireland to Vladivostok. When was the decision made to do all this? Browning makes four important points. First, there was no big bang of the origins of the Final Solution, no single decision which launched everything. Second, the planning for Barbarrossa, with mass executions, mass expulsions and mass starvation on a level previously unforeseen, clearly implied the genocide of the Jews, if not their absolute extinction. Third, Nazi decision making policy was "an unsytematical dialectical interaction of mutual radicalization between central and local authorities...as well as decisions and orders from above; and intuition, initiative, and experimentation, as well as obedience from below." Fourth, one cannot just concentrate on Hitler and Himmler, one must look also at the military, civil administration, the bureaucracy, economists and collaborators. The role of anti-communism in the war against Germany's most dangerous foe was of special importance. Having pointed out how polycratic struggles and local initiative set the stage for genocide and how previous plans for expulsion had been consistently thwarted until 1941, Browning then presents a theory for Hitler's role, in two stages. In July 1941 Hitler moved towards the Final Solution in a euphoria of victory, but then stopped plans for deportations in August when the Wehrmacht's offensive was delayed. But in September, the military situation improved, the euphoria returned and it was in this six-week period until the end of October that Hitler decided to kill every Jew the Nazis could get their hands on.

This summary does not go into the immense detail and considerable nuance that Browning provides on every point from popular opinion to the setting up of the first death camps to the role of the euthanasia program where many exterminators started their career. Some details stand out. As the Holocaust was about to make their work redundant, the professional anti-Semitic bureaucrats added a new round of petty restrictions of Jewish life, such as a 1941 rule in Dresden that prevented Jews from buying cut flowers. Later we learn of how, in order to meet their anti-partisan hostage quotas, the Germans in Serbia started shooting male Jews in Serbia out of hand. One of the people behind this policy, Field Marshall List, was not only not Nazi "but a highly cultured and deeply religious man" who was praised by the future pope John XXIII for his attempts to alleviate famine and military mistreatment in Greece. But the prejudices of his caste against guerrillas and Serbs made him push an open door to genocide. Indeed one of the most dispiriting things in this book is that no-one in the vast Nazi machine seems to have stopped to point out how evil it was to murder millions of innocent people.