Final Solution by David Cesarani review – the Holocaust on the hoof (original) (raw)

On 28 August 1942, Abraham Lewin, a middle-aged schoolteacher trapped inside the Warsaw ghetto, received shattering news of the fate of fellow Jews, his wife Luba among them, who had recently been rounded up and deported to an unknown location. The crammed trains had gone to Treblinka, Lewin heard from a prisoner who had escaped from what was then the most lethal Holocaust camp, where most new arrivals were dead and buried within hours. In just a few weeks, more than 200,000 Jews from Warsaw were slaughtered there; such was the killers’ frenzy that the grounds were strewn with discarded clothes and corpses. “God! Are we really to be exterminated down to the very last of us?” Lewin wrote that day in Warsaw. “This is without doubt the greatest crime ever committed in the whole of history.”

How to explain this crime, the signature crime of the past century, is a question that has occupied survivors and scholars ever since. Why did the Nazi regime murder up to 6 million Jews during the second world war? The most common answer is that, consumed by murderous antisemitism, Hitler and other Nazi leaders developed an early blueprint for mass extermination and then put it into practice, relentlessly and unwaveringly. There was a “straight path”, in other words, from the murderous rants of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in the 1920s to the gas chambers in the 1940s. But as David Cesarani explains in his masterful synthesis of recent scholarship, historians now tend to see the path to the Holocaust as “twisted”. In fact, they don’t see a single path at all; there were many paths and dead-ends, detours and reversals on the way to Auschwitz. Cesarani aimed to bring this conclusion to a wider readership, bridging the “yawning gulf” between academic research, which has become ever more nuanced, and popular knowledge, which lags behind. Few were better placed to undertake such an ambitious project than Cesarani, a peerless public historian of the Holocaust. This book, completed just before his sudden death last autumn, aged 58, is his legacy – his last major study and his finest.

In the prewar years, the new German rulers took countless steps to exclude Jews from the “national community”, inch by inch, taking away their jobs, their property and their future; previously respectable members of society became paupers and outcasts. But what appears in retrospect like a coherent policy was anything but. As Cesarani shows, Nazi anti-Jewish measures were often improvised and muddled, driven by competing visions and political rivalries. It was only in the late 1930s, after the watershed of the Kristallnacht pogrom, that anti-Jewish policy was more centrally coordinated, aiming to “kick the Jew out of Germany”, as Hitler’s henchman Reinhard Heydrich declared. But there was still no definite plan. As late as autumn 1941, after the war had delivered millions more Jews into Nazi hands and the mass murder of Soviet Jews had begun, the regime was still unsure about its ultimate goal. “Were Jews to be expelled, placed in ghettos, or put to death?” asks Cesarani.

At times, he pushes his point – the Holocaust on the hoof – too far, and underplays the effectiveness of Nazi measures. But he is right to stress the open-ended nature of anti-Jewish policy until well into the war: it is not entirely fanciful to believe that, had the Third Reich defeated Britain and gained supremacy of the seas in 1940, Nazi rulers would have gone ahead with their monstrous scheme to dump Jews on the island of Madagascar. The fact that Auschwitz was not inevitable is crucial, not least for our understanding of Jewish reactions at the time: if even the Nazis themselves were not sure what the Final Solution would be, how could their victims have known?

The fate of the Jews was finally decided, Cesarani argues, in late 1941. The failure of the blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union had scuppered the last territorial “solution” still on the table: expulsion to Siberia. Meanwhile, Hitler’s reckless declaration of war against the United States – one of the centres of the Jewish world conspiracy, in his deluded mind – meant that holding European Jews hostage to deter the US from entering the conflict was now pointless. As Joseph Goebbels put it when he summarised a secret speech Hitler made on 12 December 1941: “The world war is here, the destruction of the Jews must be the inevitable consequence.” Some historians would point to other pivotal moments during the decisive months of 1941-42, when the Holocaust took shape. And they would argue that Nazi leaders took some key decisions during times of euphoria, rather than at times of crisis and military failure, as Cesarani suggests. And yet, there can be no doubt that the Holocaust was inextricably linked to the war. After all, Hitler always saw the war as also a war against the Jews. As Cesarani concludes, the Holocaust “was rooted in antisemitism but it was shaped by war”. The course of the conflict also influenced the implementation of the genocidal programme, which proceeded in fits and starts until Germany lay in ruins, and the great majority of Jews under Nazi control had been murdered.

Cesarani paints this picture of death and destruction with great erudition and empathy, using a fine brush on a vast canvas. It stretches from the rise of the Nazis to the early postwar years, from Hitler’s bunker to the vermin-infested bunks of Auschwitz, from Berlin to far-away Corfu, Tunis and Jerusalem. It shows the victims’ daily degradation and suffering, without flinching from the worst scenes, such as sexual abuse and rape (far more common than often thought, Cesarani emphasises). It depicts the throng of perpetrators and bystanders, as well as the collaborators, who were driven by greed as much as by racism. “For the Germans 300 Jews are 300 enemies of humanity,” one local outside Vilnius wrote in 1941; “for the Lithuanians they are 300 pairs of shoes, trousers and the like”. This is just one of many voices of onlookers and victims – taken from contemporary diaries and letters – to emerge from the book. The history of the Holocaust could be told through gut-wrenching SS statistics alone, such as the 20,952kg of golden wedding rings the killers robbed in Galicia. But Cesarani also puts faces to these figures, like that of Lewin, one of the 450,000 people in the Warsaw ghetto (where more Jews died than were deported from across France to death camps in the east).

Lewin’s diary encapsulates the dreams and fears of the victims, written when his own future was still uncertain. On 2 June 1942, he noted with an air of optimism that the allied bombing raids on German cities made “the pulse beat faster”, raising hopes that “the war will be over soon”. But the war did not end fast enough to save him. “Over our heads hangs the perpetual threat of total annihilation,” Lewin wrote in despair on 11 January 1943, and a couple of days later, his voice was silenced forever.