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Read Nazi Germany And The Jews: The Years Of Extermination, 1939-1945 (2007)

Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination, 1939-1945 (2007)

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4.21 of 5 Votes: 2
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ISBN
0060190434 (ISBN13: 9780060190439)
Language
English
Publisher
harpercollins

Nazi Germany And The Jews: The Years Of Extermination, 1939-1945 (2007) - Plot & Excerpts

I started reading this book during the summer (just after I finished the first volume). A dense and horrible read that one cannot truly describe with any type of justice. I've personally been to many of the sites in this book describes in such descriptively nauseating detail. Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka are all sights that have horribly come alive in my memories which were once dominated by serene natural beauty almost untainted by the terror which occured 65 years before my visit; untainted of course by an inability to truly understand what happened. This work, though informative as to how the genocide unfolded every step of the way, has answered my technical questions yet has raised more rhetorical, ethical, and psychological questions as to how Germany could descend to the depths of hell that it did. Perhaps the random smattering of nightmares I've endured after coming home from said trip, and reading this book as a sort of a desperate search for pesonal answers dictates that I'll never find the answers I'm looking for. Despite the sorrow, the anger and the downright puzzlement that one finds when trying to understand the material written in this book, it still remains a must read. You can't help but lose a bit of your humanity when studying and trying to understand things like genocide. It's not hard to see how people brimming with hope about the future of our race can have their most valiant hope crushed by learning what we're truly capable of. However, the consequences of human beings forgetting what happened, not to mention the valuable lessons of warning signs of upcoming trouble in terms of genocide is certainly worth the price. Far be it from me to argue with Prof. Friedländer, I do have a couple of issues concerning the book. Today, studies of the USSR and specifically the time of Stalin's massive purge are trying to come to grips with what occured, how it occured and why. There seems to be 3 main camps which authors of Soviet history stick to. There's the great man of history camp which belive it all must be pinned on Stalin. There's the revisionist camp which essentially believes society is to blame and the 2nd revisionist camp which believes that the problems where systematic; a result of the political system that soviet citizens were a part of that allows for belief in authority figures despite what criminality lay behind the orders coming from the very top. These systems allow for community, an ideology, pride and other types of things that people crave which draws them closer in. These types of systems also are usually within authoritarian structures which combines fear and propaganda. As it turns out this seems to be a lethal recipe for collaborationism. Clearly, it isn't hard to correlate these three camps to Nazi Germany. Frankly, the most alluring camp for political scientists and historians alike has to be the third, the systematic approach to widespread personality cults within authoritarian structures. In the dying pages it also looks as though Friedländer also takes a similar approach. However, where my issue arises is how he deals with the Catholic Church. The church certainly was an important entity, however Friedländer seemed to have put the church on a pedestal it didn't deserve to be on. Many times Friedländer recites activist priests who hid Jews or gave sermons which landed the priest in a camp yet his writing seems to ask why over and over the church or individual parishes failed to help the Jewish people as if priests were impervious to persecution which we all know wasn't true. Furthermore, Friedländer routinely calls out the Pope for weak or non-existent statements against the extermination process as if it could've mattered when previous denunciations resulted in nothing, if not persecution of priests. Despite the moral teachings of Christ, the clergy in the church are men just as much as the rest of anyone else; privy to the same biases (certainly against Jews) but also the fears any other man could have. Considering the systematic pressures against everyone in society, it seems just a tad unfair that Friedländer would try to hold a higher moral standard for priests than other citizens in a time where moral standards were either non-existant due to prejudice or fear. As a person who is no friend of the Catholic Church I find it strange defending them to a degree (don't get me wrong, a lot of priests, especially in Poland participated) however I feel that it was necessary. Despite the issue concerning the church, the work was extremely well done. Friedländer effortlessly blends fact with diary entries personalizes the gruesome and almost distant facts that accompany them. It by no means gives an understanding of what these people truly went through, but it's at least a step. Saul Friedländer's two volume Work Nazi Germany and the Jews certainly isn't for the faint of heart. However, one should truly make the attempt. It's one of the darkest chapters in human history and deserves to be remembered.

I was really disappointed with this book. Granted, this is a hard topic to tackle, simply due to the magnitude of victims, and the extent of brutality; however, the author really did not, in my opinion, do justice to his subject. Strangely, the author slams every conceivable population for their part in the Holocaust - I never thought I'd read a book where the pope appeared more anti-Semitic than Hitler, but so it was. The Jewish community also gets a good heaping helping of blame in this book, which is just ridiculous. Not only were the author's arguments on this point extremely facile ("The Pope didn't say anything, so he was secretly in cahoots with the Nazis; the Jewish community didn't organize any huge resistance, so they cooperated in their ultimate demise"), but they did not take into account many of the important factors of the time (German post-WWI mentality, reluctance of the other European nations to get into another war, etc.). Many arguments from other historians are dismissed out of hand, while documents from the Nazi party are used as the sole reference for some conclusions. I was also reminded of the infamous quote, "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." Though the author did include some eyewitness accounts (mainly diary entries), these did not assuage the feeling that I was reading through a list of numbers. Again, I know this is a VERY hard thing to do in regards to the Holocaust, due simply to the sheer number of victims; however, perhaps if the book had been written in a less clinical tone throughout, it might have helped. To end on a more positive note, I appreciated that Friedlaender included the original German and Italian texts of some passages; granted, I couldn't understand all of them, but it was nice to get a sense of the original statements, if that makes sense. It also seemed to be a very well-researched book.My advice: stick with "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," and with the accounts of people who actually lived through the atrocity (Elie Wiesel is an amazing author, and "Night" gives a much better account of the concentration and extermination camps than this book did).

What do You think about Nazi Germany And The Jews: The Years Of Extermination, 1939-1945 (2007)?

Barnes & Nobles impulse acquisition 2008-05-19, largely swayed due to the gauche Pulitzer emblem.A pretty solid companion to Shirer, which glosses over most of the destruction of European Jewry (the authority here is of course Hilberg's three-volume 1985 update to his classic The Destruction of the European Jews, and honestly I'd have expected Friedländer to use his access to modern Soviet sources to great effect in distinguishing himself from Hilberg, especially given the six (6!) bibliographic references to the latter's work), and a good introduction to the subject in a single volume. It does tend to run together a bit.
—Nick Black

Excellent, in-depth examination of factors surrounding the darkest years of the 20th century. The author's use of diaries throughout was brilliant, and I am in total awe that so many diaries were rescued and preserved. New York Times, 24 June 2007:"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....I plan to read "volume one" -- The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939, and Friedländer's biography. The librarian in me would like to read a book on the diaries, and how they survived....
—Carolyn O'Hara

(Note: This is a review for Volume II of Saul Friedlander's "Nazi Germany and the Jews". This volume is "The Years of Extermination." Volume I is entitled "The Years of Persecution." I did not realize there WAS a Volume I until I was far into this book. I will go back and read it at some point, but I have many other books waiting on my reading list. These are large books and, frankly, rather depressing.)Whoa. This book is, essentially, the definitive chronicle of the Holocaust. It is heavily informed by diaries, and the chronological nature of the book follows many diarists up until their deaths (other than a very few who did survive). This results in an intense combination of large-scale analysis of policy, public opinion, and historical events, mixed with first person eyewitness to persecution, brutality, and murder. This is not a short read. It took me about 3 weeks of regular reading to get through it, but that is due purely to length (and the desire to preserve my own mental health). The writing itself can get bogged down at times with numbers and dates, and can become confusing in terms of names, but those are very, very minor criticisms of what is otherwise an outstanding history.Friedlander spends a good portion of time analyzing the conduct of the Roman Catholic Church, and of religious organizations and institutions in general. He seems very interested (as am I) in truly understanding the motivations behind the Church's actions (and frequent lack thereof). I do begrudge the Pope his precarious political position, being inside a fascist state allied to the Reich, but in the end I think that the actions of Church leadership were utterly reprehensible. What small protest was made was almost exclusively for the protection of converted Catholics of Jewish descent. (Yes, some, even many, individual members of the clergy did an extraordinary amount of work selflessly protecting Jews. But in doing so, they were sometimes actively acting against Church decrees) I have also come to the conclusion that the idea that the average German citizen "didn't know" is absolutely ridiculous. Of course they knew. At BEST, they "didn't want to know." But claims of pure ignorance are nothing but post-war smoke screen, and an attempt to assuage their own guilt. Now, do I think they could have done anything about it? Probably not. Not in a fascist police state, which made it difficult to coordinate resistance activities. However, when it comes down to it, I think that the average German just didn't care. At least not enough to make a fuss. Anti-semitism was a deep part of culture in large sections of Europe anyway, and this was only exacerbated by the propaganda efforts of the Nazi Party. You see this in some of the language used by civilians, soldiers, and clergy alike: it was "horrible," but "they only brought it on themselves." Or, "they started the war" and now they were "getting what they deserved."This book cannot even begin to scratch the surface of the complexities of the Holocaust. But it is, in my opinion, about the best that a single volume could attempt to do. It's very readable, and while maintaining a good deal of impartiality still manages to have an enormous emotional impact. Simple passages about how on such and such a day in the Ukraine, an Einsatzgruppen shot 25,000 men, women, and children. Just, wow, how do you even process that? The number of "6 million Jews killed" gains so much more impact when numbers like 25,000 killed in two days, or 4,000 being killed PER DAY in Auschwitz are presented to you. A million is a number too large to really imagine. But when you imagine 25,000, and realize that this is only killing out of thousands...Again, it's impossible to really address the Holocaust in a single book. But I think the quote by Stefan Ernest, a Jew hiding on the "Aryan" side of Warsaw, which Friedlander places at the beginning is a good way to put it:"The struggle to save myself is hopeless... But that's not important. Because I am able to bring my account to its end and trust that it will see the light of day when the time is right... And people will know what happened... And they will ask, is this the truth? I reply in advance: No, this is not the truth, this is only a small part, a tiny fraction of the truth... Even the mightiest pen could not depict the whole, real, essential truth."
—Chris

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