The Final Solution

The Final Solution clarifies the key questions surrounding the attempt by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews. Drawing on important new research, these authoritative essays focus on the preconditions and antecedents for the 'Final Solution' and examine the immediate origins of the genocidal decision. Contributors also examine the responses of peoples and governments in Germany, occupied Europe, the USA and among Jews worldwide. The controversial conversions of this study challenge many of our accepted ideas about the period.

Pp. vii-xxxiii contain Friedländer's introduction, which did not appear in the original German edition.

Chicago is gone. In one day, a nuclear bomb levels the city and in one day, the American public demands nothing less than the toppling of every Islamic government in the Middle East. The fury of the American war machine is unleashed and one after another the Muslim countries fall. The terrorists are beaten, and they know it. Their desperation forces them to grapple at any possible way to survive. Half a world away, a New Jersey company has secretly perfected a time machine. But the secret leaks out and the terrorists begin to formulate a new plan...a plan to kill America before it ever becomes a superpower.

This volume presents a comprehensive, multifaceted picture both of the destructive dynamic of the Nazi leadership and of the attitudes and behavior of ordinary Germans as the persecution of the Jews spiraled into total genocide.

The Holocaust is frequently depicted in isolation by its historians. Some of them believe that to place it in any kind of comparative context risks diminishing its uniqueness and even detracts from the enormity of the Nazi crime. In reality, such a restricted understanding of "uniqueness" has pulled the Holocaust apart from history and set up barriers to a better understanding of the racial onslaught unleashed within the Third Reich and its conquered territories. Working against the grain of much earlier writing, this innovative new history combines a detailed re-appraisal of the development of the genocide of the Jews, a full consideration of Nazi policies against other population groups, and a comparative analysis of other modern genocides. The Holocaust is portrayed as the culmination of a much wider history of European genocide and ethnic cleansing, from the late nineteenth century onwards. Ultimately, Bloxham shows that an explanation for the Holocaust rooted exclusively in Nazism and anti-Semitism is inadequate when set against one that is both prepared to give due weight to the immediate circumstances of the Second World War in eastern Europe and to situate the Jewish genocide within the broader patterns of human behavior in the late-modern world.

The Origins of the Final Solution is the most detailed, careful, and comprehensive analysis to date of the descent of the Nazi persecution of the Jews into mass murder: the Holocaust. Arguing that genocide was not a preconceived plan but rather a discovered possibility, Christopher Browning explains how Hitler's decision to murder the Jews en masse emerged in stages and by a process of elimination that gradually foreclosed plans for their expulsion from Europe. Only in the interval between late September and late October 1941 did the desire to "remove" the Jews intersect with the discovery of acceptable means of killing them on a large scale and with the euphoria of expected victory in Russia, all of which followed on from two years of 'race war' and 'racial imperialism' in eastern Europe that prepared 'ordinary Germans' for this fateful task.

This book explores the complex causes that led to the perpetration of the most significant genocidal crime in modern history: the Holocaust. The origin of this enquiry lies at the point where the utopia of the civilizing process failed to deliver: how could Auschwitz-Birkenau be possible? Daniel Rafecas builds a concise but explanatory narration supported by a strong, not obvious hypothesis —the Holocaust was not arrived at as the result of the willingness of a handful of anti-Semitic fanatics led by Adolf Hitler, but through the overcoming of successive stages across which the criminal decisions regarding the Jewish question were radicalized. Such decisions were gradually processed and rationalized by dozens of thousands of officials involved in the destruction process. This thorough chronicle of the relevant events covers the world war conflict (particularly, the dramatic circumstances that characterized the invasion of the Soviet Union), as well as the key role played by the state bureaucracy in charge of implementing anti-Jewish policies (the SS of Heinrich Himmler). And it sheds light over the path travelled by the Nazi regime towards the consummation of the Final Solution, a process that could only be possible as a result of the progressive trampling of basic human rights, which is typical of authoritarian states. With an austere but didactic style, Daniel Rafecas offers a historical synthesis that is essential to those English-speaking readers who, coming from any area of knowledge, approach this subject, worried by what Rafecas defines as the great black hole of Modernity.

Ghetto, forced labor camp, concentration camp: All of the elements of the National Socialists’ policies of annihilation were to be found in Riga. This first analysis of the Riga ghetto and the nearby camps of Salaspils and Jungfernhof addresses all aspects of German occupation policy during the Second World War. Drawing upon a broad array of sources that includes previously inaccessible Soviet archives, postwar criminal investigations, and trial records of alleged perpetrators, and the records of the Society of Survivors of the Riga Ghetto, the authors have produced an in-depth study of the Riga ghetto that never loses sight of the Latvian capital’s place within the overall design of Nazi policy and the all-of-Europe dimension of the Holocaust.

Examines the responses of the Paris Jewish organizations to the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazi-occupied French government

This edition is the first of its kind to offer a basic collection of facsimile, English language, historical articles on all aspects of the extermination of the European Jews. A total of 300 articles from 84 journals and collections allows the reader to gain an overview of this field. The edition both provides access to the immense, rich array of scholarly articles published after 1960 on the history of the Holocaust and encourages critical assessment of conflicting interpretations of these horrifying events. The series traces Nazi persecution of Jews before the implementation of the "Final Solution", demonstrates how the Germans coordinated anti-Jewish activities in conquered territories, and sheds light on the victims in concentration camps, ending with the liberation of the concentration camp victims and articles on the trials of war criminals. The publications covered originate from the years 1950 to 1987. Included are authors such as Jakob Katz, Saul Friedländer, Eberhard Jäckel, Bruno Bettelheim and Herbert A. Strauss.

Fanatical anti-Semitism and the persecution of Jews ended in the Holocaust's horrific legacy, the murder of nearly 6 million Jews. Author Ann Byers analyzes the factors that led to the persecution of Jews, as well as the rise and fall of Hitler's Third Reich.

In early 1947, American officials in Germany stumbled across a document. Headed "Secret Reich matter," it summarized the results of a meeting of top Nazi officials that took place on January 20, 1942, in a grand villa on the shore of Berlin's Lake Wannsee.

Memoirs of Rubin, who relates her own experiences in the Holocaust as well as those of her husband and other members of their hasidic family. Rubin (nee Teitelbaum-Horowitz) was born in the 1920s in Sighet and raised in Szollos, Ruthenia (now Vinohradiv, Ukraine). In June 1944, soon after her marriage, she and her family were deported to Auschwitz. Her father was murdered in 1941 in a massacre at Kamenetz-Podolsk; her mother was gassed on arrival at Auschwitz. Rubin was sent for a short time to the Krotingen labor camp, near Riga, and then to Stutthof. She was taken on a death march, during which she was liberated. She was reunited after the war with her husband, Rabbi Menachem Rubin, who survived Auschwitz working in an armaments factory and was later injured at Ebensee. Like other members of his family, he took great risks to observe religious practices. His two brothers and a sister also survived. Chana Rubin's uncle, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum (the Satmar Rebbe), and his wife Feige, were saved by Rudolf Kasztner.

Tracing the rise of racist and eugenic ideologies, Henry Friedlander explores in chilling detail how the Nazi program of secretly exterminating the handicapped and disabled evolved into the systematic destruction of Jews and Gypsies. He describes how the so-called euthanasia of the handicapped provided a practical model for the later mass murder, thereby initiating the Holocaust. The Nazi regime pursued the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, and the handicapped based on a belief in the biological, and thus absolute, inferiority of those groups. To document the connection between the assault on the handicapped and the Final Solution, Friedlander shows how the legal restrictions and exclusionary policies of the 1930s, including mass sterilization, led to mass murder during the war. He also makes clear that the killing centers where the handicapped were gassed and cremated served as the models for the extermination camps. Based on extensive archival research, the book also analyzes the involvement of the German bureaucracy and judiciary, the participation of physicians and scientists, and the nature of popular opposition.

The Germans and the Final Solution stand as the fullest assessment to date of the attitudes of the German public to the Nazi policy of antisemitism and its genocidal conclusion. David Bankier's pathbreaking work will be widely read by scholars and students of contemporary European Jewish history and the history of Nazi Germany.