BOOK REFERENCE

Book reference

Christopher Browning, Origins of the Final Solution

Introduction

Christopher R. Browning has worked for three decades to dissect the political decision-making processes that led to the Holocaust. His newest book presents the summation so far. Since it appears as part of a series published by the Israeli memorial Yad Vashem and titled "The Comprehensive History of the Holocaust," it begins, without further introduction, on September 1, 1939. It ends in March 1942, at which point, in the author's view, the "Final Solution" had been decided upon for certain.

The book is clearly structured, well written, and free of internationalist determinism. Its strength lies in the author's remarkable precision and eye for detail, and therein lies also its weakness, in this case. One problem is that Browning occasionally includes older essays in the text without integrating them into the thematic structure of the book. Thus, the reader asks in confusion why, after the mass murders in the Soviet Union have already been dealt with, the text suddenly jumps back (p. 334) to a portrayal of the German occupation and persecution of Jews in Serbia in all its extreme personal and institutional complexity.

The American historian Christopher Browning creates a complete, integrated view from the latest research to the radicalization of Nazi Jewish policy, which took place between the war in 1939 and in 1942 that began the systematic murder of European Jews to extermination camps. The interpretations of experiments are systematically persecuted by the Master Plan to the random, spontaneous escalation of anti-Jewish measures in the chaos of war. He describes the close relationship with the escalation of the Nazi regime initially victorious course of the war and the central role in Hitler's unleashing of the genocidal "final solution". Browning work is already regarded as a milestone of Holocaust research.

Critical Review

Browning builds his case and presents a stunning portrait of what he sees as the evolution of a demographic policy driven by ideology and bureaucracy, implemented by brutally unchecked violence. In a stunningly concise opening background chapter, he outlines the evolution of hatred of Jews from its religious origins in early Christianity to its social manifestations under the “modernization crisis” and to its racist form in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Once again, with excruciating detail, he examines the evolution of policy to the Final Solution, seemingly day by day in some cases. A policy of inconsistencies, bayed by military victories over Poland and then Russia, emboldened Adolf Hitler to the mass murder not only of Jews but also of total populations to achieve Lebensraum for Germans. By the summer of 1941, the machinery had grown more technically proficient as the Germans searched for the most efficient methods of murder.

Overall, the study seems too detailed and too oriented toward the activities of individual and sometimes secondary participants. Ultimately the origins of the Final Solution cannot be dealt with in sentences such as "Wirth led Eichmann and Hofle along a small forest path on the left side of the road" ...