Holocaust, from the ground up

By Ian Kershaw

Yale University Press. 400 pp. $32.50

Reviewed by Desmond Ryan

In the summer of 1941, Rolf-Heinz Hoppner, a senior security official in German-occupied Poland, wrote to Adolf Eichmann with what he felt was a helpful suggestion on what to do with the 300,000 Jews in his province.

"There is a danger this winter that the Jews can no longer all be fed," Hoppner wrote. "It is to be seriously considered whether the most humane solution might not be to finish off those Jews not capable of working with some sort of fast-working preparation. This would, in any event, be more pleasant than letting them starve."

The ghastly and perverted reasoning cloaked in the tone of bureaucrats trying to come up with a solution for a knotty problem in logistics is a soul-chilling instance of the kind of detail that makes Sir Ian Kershaw such a special historian of the Holocaust.

In

Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution

, he once again demonstrates how much can be revealed by a fresh perspective and approach to the ineradicable stain of Nazi Germany.

Traditional views of the Holocaust, reinforced in the popular imagination by many movies and books over the years, present it as the work of a smoothly organized system of mass murder initiated and overseen by Hitler and his circle. That take was, for example, typically and brilliantly epitomized by the German documentary

The Wannsee Conference

.

Here, in real time, the meeting of senior Nazi officials that established the machinery of the Holocaust was meticulously re-created. The film's devastating impact stems from the officials' being entirely consumed by how something is to be done. The morality of what they are about to do never comes up for discussion.

Kershaw disputes this entrenched conception and has long argued that to really understand what went on in Germany under Hitler - how it could possibly have happened in a supposedly civilized modern nation state - you must start from the ground up rather than the top down.

In his superb two-volume life of Hitler, Kershaw, a professor at the University of Sheffield in England, addressed the Führer's story through the intense and detailed scrutiny of the social and political context in which he rose and fell.

It required a staggering amount of research and refined collation and endless trolling through records, memoranda, diaries, court documents and other sources. The Nazi regime kept track of popular opinion and the German fondness for paperwork has been a boon to Kershaw and other historians who have taken the same tack.

In

Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution

, Kershaw gathers together essays he has penned over the last three decades and presents them in three sections: Hitler and the Final Solution, Popular Opinion and the Jews in Nazi Germany, and The Final Solution in Historiography.

What emerges from these fascinating pages, which stand as a complementary volume to Kershaw's Hitler biography, is an infinitely more complex picture.

Kershaw argues that in the upper echelons of the party and government, officials were acting on Hitler's anti-Semitic tirades rather than on direct orders of extermination from Hitler passed down a chain of command. No written order from Hitler has ever been found. Rather, the officials worked to fulfill his oft-stated wish for the annihilation of the Jews.

It was more a process, Kershaw notes, of "the transmission belt between Hitler's own inner convictions that the war would bring about the final destruction of European Jewry and the actions of his underlings determined to do all they could to 'work towards the Führer,' in turning Hitler's presumed wishes into reality."

Kershaw's tracing of that amorphous and sometimes haphazard process is masterly, as is his assessment of the response of the ordinary German to the appalling result. The reaction ranged all the way from heartfelt endorsement to opposition, and Kershaw depicts its range with subtlety and complexity.

Three decades ago, Ian Kershaw was an obscure young medieval historian. He decided to switch his focus from the Middle Ages to the darkest age in human history.

Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution

affirms the wisdom of his choice and adds to an already imposing achievement that has been as illuminating as it has been unsparing in its assessment of the plunge into the abyss.