London, Monday, May 10, 2004
Book Review
Slow Route to
Murder
A
new history offers two explanations for the
Holocaust
THE
ORIGINS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION: The Evolution of Nazi
Jewish Policy 1939-1942 by Christopher R Browning with a
contribution by Jürgen Matthäus (Heinemann,
£25)
by David
["Ratface"]
Cesarani
CHRISTOPHER Browning is no ordinary
historian. His appearance as an
expert
witness
[initial fee
paid him by Lipstadt:
£27,632.12] in the
libel
case that David Irving
launched against Deborah
Lipstadt was one nail in
Irving's legal coffin. Whatever tricks Irving tried, he
could not derail Browning's
calm, precise delivery of facts establishing that the
genocide happened.
Browning, who had previously given expert testimony in
the trials of Nazi war criminals, presented a winning
combination of forensic precision with the historian's
skill of telling a story clearly and powerfully
 David
Irving comments:
AS I pointed out in my comment on his article
in the Atlantic Monthly, Browning has
finally come round to the solution that I first
proposed in Hitler's
War in 1977
-- that Hitler was largely in the dark about
what is now called the Holocaust, and certainly
issued no order for the systematic extermination
of the Jews.
I am not aware that I tried
any tricks in cross-examining Browning; in fact
I assured him in my opening remarks that there
were no hidden traps in my questions of him. He
was one of the most respectable witnesses, and
hearing him testify was an enjoyable experience
for myself and the defence alike (if not for
Lipstadt, who appeared thoroughly bored
throughout the entire three-month
proceedings).
That said: What an extraordinary
thing, that in this book Browning reproduces two
different, wildly conflicting, irreconcilable
opinions on the all important question, whether
the mass killing of Jews was systematic or not.
That was one central point of the Lipstadt
trial, in fact.
"Ratface" Cesarani writes:
"The fact remains that until spring 1942 Jews in
one part of Europe were being slaughtered while
others were left unmolested."
That is true. It was shown
quite clearly at the trial that this moratorium
on killing German Jews in the east resulted from
an explicit order from Hitler's HQ that such
mass liquidations had to cease.
Eventually even Browning and
Cesarani will have to reproduce what the
signals
intercepted from Nov 30 to Dec 3, 1941 by
British codebreakers show on this score.
 Historian
Christopher Browning was the only expert
witness hired by Deborah Lipstadt who impressed
by his obvious knowledge and objectivity.
|
This blend of talents is perfectly displayed in his
analysis of how, in only two years, Nazi "Jewish policy"
went from coerced emigration to industrial genocide.
Although his book is one in a multi-volume history
planned by Yad Vashem, the Israeli memorial and research
institute, it smashes many nostrums about the Nazi "war
against the Jews". Unlike Daniel
Jonah Goldhagen's simplistic indictment of the
Germans, for many people it will make uncomfortable
reading.
Browning
shows that the German conquest of Poland was decisive in
radicalising Nazi policy. But this was "not the result of
any long-held blueprint". Hitler and his minions made up
policy as they went along, with chaotic results. They
wanted to shove all German and Polish Jews into a
"reservation" in south-east Poland, but they also wanted
to evict Poles from areas annexed to the Reich and settle
ethnic Germans in their place. More than half a million
Poles were brutally removed to provide homes and farms
for these Volksdeutsche. By comparison the highly
urbanised Jews got off lightly
Nazi plans went awry because not even the ruthless SS
could move millions of Poles and Jews simultaneously and
Himmler realised there was a limit to the
displaced humanity that he could dump in the laps of
other Nazi satraps. For, at this stage, the Nazis did not
intend genocide against the Jews. They herded them into
squalid city districts and segregated them from the
population, but only until they could be shifted
elsewhere.
When the Germans overran western Europe, the Nazi
leadership anticipated sending the additional Jews to
Madagascar,
then a French colony After that plan failed, thanks to
the defiance of the Royal Navy they looked eastward
again. Nazi race planners confidently expected that the
coming war with the Soviet Union would be a walkover,
leaving them free to ship all of Europe's Jews to
Siberia.
THE war against the USSR was always going to be genocidal
but the primary victims were destined to be the Russians.
Nazi economists blithely calculated that 30 million
Russians would starve to death in the occupied territory
while food and raw material were extracted for the German
army and the home front.
Hitler dreamed of Russia becoming a Garden of
Eden for the Aryans. Of course, there would be no room
for Jews. During preparations for the onslaught, SS
killing squads were briefed to shoot communist officials
and Jewish men. Yet weeks passed before selective mass
shooting turned into annihilation. German historian
Jürgen Matthäus contributes a
frightening chapter on this phase. From a scrutiny of the
available sources, he detects, contrary to Browning, an
incoherent, locally and regionally varied sequence of
measures" against the Russian Jews. According to
Matthäus, there was no clear order to wipe out
entire Jewish communities until late August 1941. The
turning point came partly as a response to German
military reverses and security fears.
In a demonstration of what
good history is about,
even if it may
perplex some readers, when
Browning resumes the story he presents a different
explanation of the same events.
He argues, from an equally close reading of the
documents, that Hitler simultaneously decided to escalate
the killings in Russia and commission a plan to
exterminate every Jew in Europe. He did this in mid-July
1941 when he was intoxicated by the prospect of imminent
victory.
Browning acknowledges that other historians disagree
with him and admits to a "seeming
ambiguity" in what followed, possibly because it
took time to devise mechanisms to carry out genocide on
the scale envisaged at the Wannsee
Conference. The fact remains that until spring 1942
Jews in one part of Europe were being slaughtered while
others were left unmolested.
There can be little dissent from his damning verdict
on the pusillanimous response shown by the German army --
the only force capable of opposing Hitler's will, -- or
the compliance of the German people. When it came to the
mass murder of Jews, "there was no political cost to the
popularity of the regime".
• David Cesarani's book Eichmann:His Life and
Crimes will be published by Heinemann in August.
Our dossier on
Christopher Browning
write to David Irving