Product Description

A great historian crowns a lifetime of thought and research by answering a question that has haunted us for more than 50 years: How did one of the most industrially and culturally advanced nations in the world embark on and continue along the path leading to one of the most enormous criminal enterprises in history, the extermination of Europe's Jews?

Giving considerable emphasis to a wealth of new archival findings, Saul Friedlander restores the voices of Jews who, after the 1933 Nazi accession to power, were engulfed in an increasingly horrifying reality. We hear from the persecutors themselves: the leaders of the Nazi party, the members of the Protestant and Catholic hierarchies, the university elites, and the heads of the business community. Most telling of all, perhaps, are the testimonies of ordinary German citizens, who in the main acquiesced to increasing waves of dismissals, segregation, humiliation, impoverishment, expulsion, and violence.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #75977 in Books
• Published on: 1998-04-01
• Released on: 1998-03-10
• Original language: German
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780060928780
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Extermination.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The first of a two-volume study on Hitler's Final Solution, this important work comes from a noted Holocaust survivor.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
This first of two volumes will be followed by The Years of Extermination. In explaining his particular mode of historical narration in the two works, Friedlander says that at the basic level, he follows the chronological sequence of the events--their prewar evolution in this volume, their monstrous wartime culmination in the next. Utilizing substantial new documentation (there are almost 100 pages of notes and a bibliography), the author examines not only Hitler, Nazi Party officials and functionaries, the business and professional elite, members of the Christian establishment, and the Jews but also ordinary Germans. Friedlander assesses Nazi attitudes and policies and the function of Hitler's ideology in the implementation of the Nazi regime's anti-Jewish measures. Friedlander's ambitious and scholarly work is an important contribution to understanding why Germany, one of the most advanced nations in Europe, would embark on a systematic attempt to destroy the Jews. George Cohen

Customer Reviews

Intriguing Study Of Nazi Persecution of Jews 1933-1939
This first in a two volume work by acclaimed historian is a remarkably objectivean , comprehensive and scrupulously scholarly work and represents a very critical contribution to historians' efforts to comprehend just how and why one of the most civilized and sophisticated countries in Europe descended into the systematic attempt to exterminate the Jews. The book proceeds along a chronological axis in recounting the slow but inexorably tightening of restrictions on the Jewish population within Germany during the years of the mid to late 1930s.

While centering his account of what went wrong in Nazi Germany during the pre-war years, he also humanizes his narrative considerably by interspersing individual accounts of people caught confused and unaware of what was really occurring in the crucible of cultural change. As substantiated in other recent accounts such as Victor Klemperer's "I Shall Bear Witness", Jews were very slow to recognize just how malevolent and serious the national Socialists were about ridding Germany of its Jewish population and also nationalizing and "Aryanizing" their resources and assets.

It is important to note that the author does not overlay any overall interpretive spin of his own, intent more on presenting the best evidence of what was going on than in coming to any premature general interpretation of what the mass of evidence in total might mean. This is not to suggest he offers no interpretation; on the contrary, he offers a series of brilliant insights in various aspects of the evidence. But unlike other recent authors like Goldhagen, he makes no sweeping interpretative conclusions based on all of the evidence he presents. Also, one must remember that this is the first of two volumes, and one would expect that he intends to fully conclude his systematic and chronological presentation of all of the available evidence before engaging in that sort of interpretative analysis.

In sum, I find this work to be an excellent book that is engaging, well-written and argued, and a joy to read despite its tragic and dispiriting subject matter, and a book that offers an amazing look at a wide variety of different perspectives and social situations within the Third Reich as it descended into the abyss. After finishing this volume I immediately ordered the second volume, which is slated for formal publication release later this year. This is a work that belongs on the bookshelf of any serious student of the Holocaust.

Thorough, authoritative .. a must read
This book presents one of the most balanced, comprehensive, and authoritative analyses of the pre-war Nazi era I have read. As usual, Friedlander avoids the pitfalls of either a purely intentionalist or functionalist position and chooses to present the reader with something in between. This book is a must read for anybody seriously interested in understanding Nazi policy and ideology vis-a-vis German Jewry.

Excellent, informative, absorbing, and different.
Perhaps the enduring value of Friedlander's book is its focus on the sociology of the holocaust and its origins in the corruption of social institutions, which provides a lesson--and a warning--for all seemingly stable, civilized societies. This, after all, should be the "message" of the holocaust for non-Jews, as much as for Jews. The information in this book, weaving together facts and figures with the occasional poignant human interest story to illustrate a point, is quite different from the standard holocaust historical writing of who did what to whom, when and how, and is therefore a quantum leap in our understanding of the phenomenon which shall nevertheless forever remain ultimately incomprehensible. While I appreciate the comment of the reviewer who found the language tough going, sometimes, that reader might find, it is worth the rough going. Unfortunately, they will only find that out when they have finished, and are able to look back on the voyage of discovery which they have completed. This book is such a voyage. Personally, I look forward with much anticipation to the second volume. --Irving Wiesen.