Nazi Germany and the Jews

At Jewish gatherings, I have heard the view expressed innumerable times that the Holocaust is likely to be forgotten once the survivors die off. However reasonable this view may be, the precise opposite has actually occurred. It would be no exaggeration to say that the Holocaust is the best-known historical event of the twentieth century, the one modern event in which there is universal interest. For many of today's university students (the great majority of whom are not Jewish) the Holocaust is often more real and more fully internalised than any other event of the Second World War, including those in which their own grandparents directly participated. Unlike most other historical events there is little sign that this almost obsessive interest is abating as the years pass: if anything the opposite seems true.

With the sharp rise of interest in the Holocaust in recent decades has come a literal floodtide of books (and works of art, films and plays) on every aspect of the genocide of the Jews - so many that it is simply impossible to read everything. The two books reviewed here represent the mainstream of where serious historical study of the Holocaust is situated at the present time. Saul Friedländer's Nazi Germany and the Jews was published to great acclaim in 1997, and now appears in paperback. Friedländer, who teaches in Israel and California, is also to bring out a second volume of this work, covering the genocide of the Jews during the war. Essentially, this present work is a synthesis of previous scholarship at the highest possible level of lucidity and judgement, which will plainly be the standard work on the topic for many years. Rather remarkably, there is no obvious work which has attempted to tell the story of the Jews in Nazi Germany prior to the war in this multi-faceted way. Friedländer does draw welcome attention to the 'redemptive' nature of Nazi antisemitism, the sense that the Nazis were liberating Germany from a powerful enemy rather than sadistically persecuting the weak. He is also well aware that there was a 'twisted road to Auschwitz', and that the Nazi policy of forcing Jews to emigrate is the precise opposite of their programme after 1940 of imprisoning Jews prior to genocide. If this work can be criticised at all, it is regarding just those teleological aspects which almost inevitably arise when considering the pre-war period, that genocide appears inevitably to unfold on a step-by-step basis and be the end result of all that came before. Yet it is very doubtful if any German Jews at all suspected what lay ahead, and most expected their situation gradually to normalise. In part because of these factors, only a small minority actually emigrated until they were compelled to leave after Kristallnacht.