Final Solution

September 15, 2016
In a sweeping historical reappraisal, Cesarani (Disraeli, 2016, etc.), who died in 2015, asserts that the Nazi extermination of Jews was not inevitable but rather a consequence of Germany's military losses.What the Nazis wanted was to rid Europe of Jews through "a combination of forced emigration and expulsion" to a conquered territory: Poland, French-controlled Madagascar, or Siberia. Only when Germany suffered military failures did rampant, virulent anti-Semitism result in a plan to kill Jews. That plan was abetted by "local populations" eager to lay their hands on Jewish property and possessions in economically "straitened, uncertain" times. "Greed not anti-Semitism motivated many people to align themselves with the German occupiers," writes Cesarani, who claims that Hitler was not made chancellor due to anti-Semitism, although "it was essential to the core activists of the Nazi party." The author follows Nazi policy before and during the war to reveal confusion, within Germany and among the international community, about Hitler's "domestic policy, the economy, and international relations." Before the full-blown war, Nazi degradation and intimidation of Jews, including pogroms, made the front pages of American and British newspapers, but those nations held back from offering visas for Jews, which would have afforded refuge. Cesarani insists many pogroms were spontaneous, "ill thought out and counterproductive," resulting "in a backlash at home and abroad." When civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois visited Germany in 1935, he wrote publicly that Nazi racism against Jews "surpasses in vindictive cruelty and public insult anything I have ever seen; and I have seen much." In 1939, Hitler predicted that a world war would result in "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe," but Cesarani insists this rhetoric did not result in a plan for death camps until much later. When mass killings became government policy, they were crude and haphazard, countering the myth of "genocidal technology." Cesarani's overwhelming evidence of brutality makes this book unbearably painful to read and makes his analysis hard to accept. Even before an official plan, Hitler's anti-Semitic rants inspired his army and his nation. A highly learned but problematic examination of Nazi decision-making.

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November 1, 2016

This posthumous release by Holocaust historian Cesarani (Major Farran's Hat) asserts that Nazi policy developed as a result of the events of World War II, an idea well within the mainstream of recent Holocaust historiography. More controversial is the author's argument that Adolf Hitler's tactics were initially predicated on the assumption of a quick victory that would enable the Nazis to expel the Jews beyond "German living space." The decision for genocide was, therefore, the result of a failure of Nazi policy goals, rather than the result of Hitler's desire to create a racial utopia. Some scholars would counter that Hitler's quest for global hegemony would likely make it impossible to expel the Jews beyond German living space, and thus a massacre was inevitable under any circumstances. VERDICT This comprehensive account provides a good balance between the big picture of Nazi policy and the events of war, along with individual portraits of both victims and perpetrators. Cesarani's analysis is less convincing when describing the relationship between anti-Semitic ideology and the genocidal impulses of many Europeans. Recommended for libraries that specialize in the topic.--Frederic Krome, Univ. of Cincinnati Clermont Coll.

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2016
Recent histories recounting the extermination of European Jews have tended to describe it as an almost inevitable result of Nazi anti-Semitism as, with calculating and ruthless logic, the Nazi plan proceeded, step-by-step. Cesarani (Disraeli, 2016) describes the Holocaust as far from inevitable and efficient, but no less horrible. He writes that Hitler's war against the Jews was erratic, random, and often left to the whims and discretion of local military or civilian authorities. Well before the death camps were established, more than a million Jews had died, many of them slaughtered in the Soviet Union by special murder squads operating alongside the Wehrmacht. There the killings were often encouraged and sometimes led by local anti-Semites. Even after the Wannsee Conference, in 1942, the called-for Final Solution was carried out fitfully. As late as 1945, Jews were being rounded up and sent to labor camps instead of death camps. As Cesarani repeatedly stresses, this in no way lessens the enormity of the carnage, but it certainly offers a well-researched and provocatively different perspective on the Holocaust.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)