Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 » (Reprint)

Born in Prague, Saul FriedlÄnder spent his boyhood in Nazi-occupied France. He is a professor of history at UCLA, and has written numerous books on Nazi Germany and World War II.

The last word on the Holocaust by the world's leading expert on the subject.

The extermination of the Jews of Europe triggers disbelief. This volume presents a thorough historical study of the events while attempting to keep some of the traces of the primary sense of disbelief.

The work is based on a vast array of contemporary sources and recent historical literature. Its interpretive framework is founded on the lethal impact of several converging factors: The growing crisis and the collapse of liberal democracy throughout continental Europe on the eve of the war and during its first year, and the anti-Semitic tradition it exacerbated; the raging anti-Jewish campaign of Adolf Hitler's Germany and the readiness of its leader, at a given point in time, to implement his extermination threats against the Jews; the course of the war that became total in 1941 and offered Hitler the context and the circumstances to launch the "Final Solution."

The Holocaust as history extends beyond the usual analysis of German policies, decisions, and measures that led to this most systematic and sustained of modern genocides. It includes the reactions of the surrounding world (authorities, populations, churches, social elites), related facets of everyday life throughout the continent, and their individual expressions. All these elements demand, as is attempted here, one single integrated narration.

The history of the victims is an intrinsic part of this overall context; their attitudes (hope, despair, passivity, collaboration, and resistance) found expression in both collective responses and individual testimonies. Here, the individual voices are weaved into the overall narrative and are the main carriers of disbelief: Some of them end in liberation, most are cut by extermination.

The New York Times - Richard J. Evans

What raises The Years of Extermination to the level of literature, however, is the skilled interweaving of individual testimony with the broader depiction of events. Friedländer never lets the reader forget the human and personal meanings of the historical processes he is describing. By and large, he avoids the sometimes unreliable testimony of memoirs for the greater immediacy of contemporary diaries and letters, though he also makes good use of witness statements at postwar trials. The result is an account of unparalleled vividness and power that reads like a novel.

Acknowledgments     xi
Introduction     xiii
Terror (Fall 1939-Summer 1941)
September 1939-May 1940     3
May 1940-December 1940     65
December 1940-June 1941     129
Mass Murder (Summer 1941-Summer 1942)
June 1941-September 1941     197
September 1941-December 1941     261
December 1941-July 1942     329
Shoah (Summer 1942-Spring 1945)
July 1942-March 1943     399
March 1943-October 1943     469
October 1943-March 1944     539
March 1944-May 1945     601
Notes     665
Bibliography     795
Index     849