The Camp at Auschwitz (OOFonFlemingBk)

The
Jewish media and the New York Times received Dr
Gerald Fleming’s book well.

December 28, 1984

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

Date: December 28, 1984,
Friday, Late City Final Edition Section C; Page 32,
Column 5; Weekend Desk Byline:

By D. J. R. Bruckner

HITLER AND THE
FINAL SOLUTION.

By Gerald Fleming. 219 pages. University of
California Press. $15.95.

IN
“Hitler’s
War,”
published in 1977, the English historian
David Irving argued that Hitler did not
know of the extermination of European Jews until
late 1943, two years after it had begun. His
thesis is provocative; it throws light on a
battle among serious historians about how the
Nazi Government in Germany worked from 1933 to
1945. Text:

One school of thought, represented by such
German historians as Klaus Hildebrand and
Karl Dietrich Bracher, holds that Hitler absolutely dominated the Government and that what distinguished his dictatorship from all others was precisely his personality.

On the other side, historians like Hans Mommsen and Martin
Broszat argue that the Nazi regime was chaotic and that local initiatives were later expediently woven into strands of national policy. Mr. Mommsen, among others, has doubts that there ever was an order from Hitler for the Final Solution.

In “Hitler and the
Final Solution” (originally published in
German two years ago), Gerald Fleming of the
University of Surrey sets out to prove Hitler’s personal responsibility for the extermination of the Jews. His sometimes flamboyant writing and the structure of his book as a kind of thriller will annoy some historians, but he certainly succeeds in his purpose.

No written order from
Hitler commanding the Final Solution has
survived. That problem is compounded by a
directive issued in 1941 by Martin Bormann,
Hitler’s deputy, that “only written Führer
orders” should be followed on racial policies.

Mr. Fleming points out that Bormann is not to be believed on this question; Bormann, he says, was a key figure in an elaborate effort to disguise any participation by Hitler in the mass murders, an effort that even included the invention of code words in official documents. In fact, Mr.

Fleming’s demonstration of the sanitation of the language used in reports on the progress of the Final
Solution is one of the more telling items in his indictment, and it goes a long way toward supporting his contention that a search for a written order from Hitler is a wasted and distracting effort.

His argument that the timing of changes in
Hitler’s racial policies cannot be understood except as part of a deliberate policy of extermination is also persuasive. By the end of
1941, the notorious Einsatzgruppen under the command of Heinrich Himmler had shot to death one million Jews during the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Himmler had even watched the execution of 120 at Minsk in
August of that year, after which he ordered his men to find a more efficient means of killing. The better means was gas; it was to be used on at least four million people in the next four years.

When the war began in 1939, emigration of Jews from Germany and areas it controlled was halted, and by late 1941 even sanitized Nazi documents began talking about a “final territorial solution”
– deportation of Western European Jews to nations in Eastern Europe that the Nazis had conquered.
But, of course, exterminations had already begun there, not only in the Soviet Union, but also in
Latvia and Poland.

In January 1942, there was a conference of leading military and nonmilitary Nazi chiefs at Wannsee;
Adolf Eichmann said the talk was about extermination, and it was clear to everyone that the order for it came directly from Hitler. By that summer, Eichmann had scheduled trains to deliver 1,000 Jews a day to
Auschwitz from the Netherlands, France and Belgium.

The transportation of German Jews there and to other locations, under the guise of sending them to work camps, was already well under way.

Some revisionist
historians have argued that it was Himmler who
devised and ordered the Final Solution. Mr.

Fleming uses previously known testimony,
supported by that of German participants who are
still living, to demonstrate that Himmler on
several occasions, in front of witnesses who
included hundreds of army officers, said
specifically that the mass murders were a
“terrible duty” imposed on his men which had to
be carried out because the orders came directly
from Hitler.

Mr. Fleming even produces a typed report sent directly by Himmler to Hitler in December 1942 in which Himmler reports 363,000
Jews executed in the Soviet Union between August and November.

This kind of evidence he supplements with sworn testimony about coded signals being received in the Ukraine over Hitler’s name specifically ordering liquidation of all Jews in the area, and a recently unearthed report on
Auschwitz written in May 1943 by a Nazi S.S. officer in which the extermination of up to 10,000 Jews a day is specifically said to be done on Hitler’s own orders.

There is much more evidence here. Mr. Fleming has done fine detective work on documentation, he has found surviving Nazis not previously heard from, and he analyzes the documentation and personal statements to produce satisfactory proof that the systematic murder of the Jews of Europe was Hitler’s decision, that he ordered it and kept close watch on its progress.

The revisionist historians may go on arguing about the nature of the Nazi regime, but on this question it is hard to imagine they can find much room to argue unless they can produce documents and testimony to specifically refute Mr. Fleming point by point.

Copyright 1999 The
New York Times Company© Focal Point 1999