Soluzione finale. Lo sterminio degli ebrei nella storia europea by Arno J. Mayer

Soluzione finale. Lo sterminio degli ebrei nella storia europea Reviews

• 
  Zach Carter

  I’m in awe at just how inadequate and distorted our understanding of Nazism, fascism, and Hitler are. Arno Meyer here reveals an extremely well-crafted, dialectical analysis of the onset of the second world war and the ensuing violence. He makes a really compelling case for the “dress rehearsal” of the Nazi Judeocide occurring in Eastern Europe during the counterrevolutionary war waged by the Western powers against the Soviet Union, and provides what I would consider to be the best account of twentieth century fascism and anti-Semitism I've ever read.
  
  It’s refreshing to see a historical text like this that doesn’t fall into the trap of exceptionalizing individuals but rather views them as ideological products of history. By emphasizing the anti-communism that formed the basis of Nazi ideology, Mayer explains in great detail how Operation Barbarossa ultimately unleashed a systematic extermination of Jews that was until then absent from the Nazi program of persecution and violence but found fertile soil in the General Crisis of the Second Thirty Years War.
  
  “The assault on the Jews was unquestionably intertwined with the assault on Bolshevism from the very outset. But this is not to say that it was the dominant strand in the hybrid “Judeobolshevism” that Barbarossa targeted for destruction. In fact, the war against the Jews was a graft onto or a parasite upon the eastern campaign, which always remained its host, even or especially once it became mired deep in Russia.”
  
  Everyone should be required to read this book. It completely changed my understanding of the connection between anti-Semitism and fascism, and we need a better understanding if we're going to fight its current and future iterations.
• 
  N.N. Heaven

  A powerful historical book that covers in detail the Holocaust of World War Two. Mayer takes an unusual approach in looking at the reason for the Holocaust, one more scholarly than from personal experience. He states, correctly, there is a school of thought that says Hitler and the Nazis planned the extermination of the Jews from day one.
  
  
  
  Through an incredibly detailed review of available evidence, Mayer makes the sound argument that the decision to exterminate the Jewish people came as a result of a number of circumstances. Most of these circumstances stem from the Nazi war on Russia - and their failure in that theater of war. It is posited that had Germany been able to defeat Russia, they were prepared to simply make Greater Germany Judenfrei by shipping all Jews over the Urals.
  
  
  
  With Russia stopping Germany in 1941, before Russia defeating them in 1942 at Stalingrad and subsequently stifling the last ditch efforts in 1943, the Germans fell into a cycle of slaughter that chiefly destroyed six million Jews.
  
  
  
  While not an easy read, this is a very important book and in this day and age, it should be read by every single person when they turn eighteen. The scourge of Nazis and White Power is not part of the past. It is here today and the world must stand up to it and put it back in the dustbin of history where it resided only for the 50 or 60 years after 1945.
  
  
  
  My Rating: 5 stars
  
  
  
  Reviewed by: Mr. N
• 
  David

  Reminds me of revisionist histories of the USSR, except the latter serve to combat fascist lies about socialism, while Mayer combats liberal lies about fascism. De Hakenkruistocht shines where it emphasizes the functionality, continuity and breaks within the classes committing the Holocaust. The economic background of Kristallnacht (which led to the quick subsequent release of the 30,000 jews interned after the events) and other pre-1941 events creates a narrative that in all its plausibility is more discomforting than the standard view of Nazi Germany as a relentless and absolutely judeocidal murder machine. His final essay-speech, given as a defense against accusations of anti-semitism, is a sober appeal to combat World War mysticism in favour of a rigorous dialectical historiography.
  
  Bad thing is that Mayer doesn't deign to cite anything - the reader is presented with an extensive bibliography at the end, but nothing is directly cited. I have no reason to distrust his writings, but I don't see why he'd go to the length of researching and writing this book, only to make the documents and sources themselves as opaque as possible.
  
  (full review pending)
  
  
  
  
• 
  Yonis Gure

  It's difficult to think of a better book to read after Snyder's Bloodlands. Where Snyder focuses mainly on the geographical overlap between two monstrous killing machines, there isn't much by of an explanatory thesis for why the Final Solution took place. Why, when for so long the goal had first been territorial resettlement, then slave-labour, did the Nazis ultimately turned to the destruction of European Jewry tout court ?
  
  Mayer views the Judeocide as the end result of a "holy war" against Bolshevism from 1914-1945, reaching its climax after the failures of Barbarossa and Operation Blue. In other words, Hitler's anti-bolshevism and his seeing the Jews as the breeding ground for communism, added with the failure to subdue Soviet Russia (the greatest apotheosis of Judeo-bolshevism) is what brought about the murder of the jews in Europe. In this view, Mayer historicizes the Final Solution, and situating it alongside the Crusades and Thirty Years of 1618-1648.
  
  Just read this book, and essential read and it will fundamentally re-orient how you view, what Hobsbawm called, "the age of extremes" in the 20th century.
• 
  Angel Martinez

  Great book to read if you're interested in the Nazi conspiracy theory of "Judeobolshevism" and want to learn how the Nazi hatred of the Jews is related to Nazi anti-communism. Specifically, the book focuses on WWII's Eastern Front, the forced migration policies of the German regime, Poland & Hungary's place within Germany's designs in Eastern Europe, and the antisemitism of Europe. I enjoyed how the author took it all the way back to the Crusades of the 11th century to analyze the Judeophobia of Europe, the elites and miscreants who participated and backed that Judeophobic violence, and the tensions within Central Europe that "demanded" this bloodletting.
• 
  Cary Brecher

  reuired reading for anyone seeking to understand world history in the modern era
• 
  Tawney

  Are you serious Mayer? Not a footnote for all of us left wondering where someone could come up with these ideas? Not even one? I know functionalism is in vogue, but really. Oh and the Final Solution was put into practice when Germany was winning the war in Russia, so that sort of invalidates a few things.
• 
  Julio Pino

  In von Trotta's film on Hannah Arendt, HANNAH, focusing on her travails during and after the publication of EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL, there's a crucial scene when Arendt's secretary brings her the latest correspondence she's received on the book and lays it out in three stacks: "Stack number one is people praising you. Stack number two is people who hate you, and stack number three in people who want you dead". (If you want proof of this backlash just read the opening pages of Saul Bellow's 1968 novel, MR. SAMMLER’S PLANET. While strolling through the streets of New York, the elderly Mr. Sammler savages Arendt for daring to suggest a banal creature could have killed half a million Jews.) Arno Meyer of Princeton History Department faced a similar retribution, although as far as I know no death threats, when he published WHY DID THE HEAVENS NOT DARKEN? THE "FINAL SOLUTION" IN HISTORY. (Yes, those quotation marks are important. Please read on.) First, a bit of background. Meyer prided himself on playing the intellectual gadfly. In THE PERSISTENCE OF THE ANCIEN REGIME he showed how long the aristocracy had clung to power from England to Russia and how late modernity had come to Europe. "It took two world wars and the Holocaust to finish off aristocratic ways in politics, culture and whole nations". Why did WHY DID THE HEAVENS NOT DARKEN chap so many people's rear ends? Arno went beast mode and uttered two unmentionable thoughts, and unprintable before the 1970s: 1. The Holocaust, defined as the total extermination of European Jewry, was improvised, not essential or even present at the creation of the Nazi regime in 1933; hence the quotation marks around "final solution". In fact, segregation and expulsion, as happened in Nazi occupied Poland, was the preferred solution until 1941. Heresy! 2. The years 1941-1942 turned the final solution towards physical extermination due to the failure of Hitler's crusade against Soviet Russia. Anti-Communism, not anti-semitism per se, is the key that turned the lock towards the Holocaust. Hitler could now argue rationally that the Soviet enemy was really "Judeo-Bolshevik" and that by destroying the U.S.S.R. the Germans would simultaneously erase Jewry from Europe. However, it took German losses and retreat on the Eastern Front to make this nightmare come true. For Meyer, no Soviet regime=no Holocaust. Did Hitler actually believe this? It's important to note that while during the war he often spoke of Churchill and Roosevelt as being "stooges for a Jewish cabal" he never once made this accusation against Stalin. Meyer thinks it made no difference. Anti-Bolshevism was the shibboleth needed to engage both the SS and the Army in mass killings, and those killings, usually by firing squad or burning down villages, turned into death camps only after the Nazis began to lose, and not just in Russia. From Italy to Hungary to Vichy France Jews were rounded up and shipped to their deaths after victory receded from the minds of the Nazis, including Hitler. This heavy tome may enrage you, and that would please the late Arno Meyer, but it is crucial reading matter for understanding how and why genocides happen, including, sadly, today.
• 
  Jim

  A difficult read, for three reasons. First, as much as I can rail against authors who go crazy with footnotes, making the reading of their work a pain in the ass since each page is awash in references, I wholeheartedly disagree with writing a history book such as this with no footnotes at all. I am not calling Mayer's depth scholarship into question just his method of presentation. Second, I struggled to follow his arguments and questioned his opinions on some of his historical analysis and theoretical concepts. Third, and most importantly for me, I completely disagree with his premise. It is easy to look at swaths of history, or to look at large, specific historical events with such a general or wide-ranging view as to make them indistinguishable from their surroundings, or to minimize individuals believing they are merely tools or parts of a larger machine, but I don't look at the The Final Solution or Adolf Hitler in this manner. Yes, Hitler and his Nazis killed other people besides Jews, and the machinery of annihilation accelerated around the time of the failures at Stalingrad, but Mayer's discussions of Bolshevism, Marxism, and the like are entirely too sweepingly general and tend to make one think/believe genocides are driven by grand social, political, or economic forces when they are almost exclusively detailed, victim-specific, planned and carried out willingly and purposefully operation by hate-filled human beings preying on victims they deem unworthy or sub-human or evil. Hitler's fears of Bolshevism or Communists were real, but so was his driving hatred of the Jews. Did Hitler and the Nazis attempt to exterminate all the Bolsheviks, or all the communists? No. And there is ample evidence that the killings of Nazi-defined "undesirables" (homosexual men, the mentally unfit, etc.) were just the practice runs (gas vans, mass shootings, pogroms) for the eventual massively efficient genocide of the Jews. Practice in two ways: practice for the best methods, but more importantly practice for the world's response to such killings. And while the methods would be changed and perfected, much to Hitler's glee, the utter lack of response - actionable, not verbal - from the world's leaders spoke volumes about the deep-seated hatred and widespread anti-Semitism the world over. Look at Churchill and Balfour in the early 1920's.
  Anyway. I digress.
  Mayer has done his homework, and there are those that agree with his thesis. I am not one of those people. Hitler was a uniquely awful person. One could say historical trends and -isms allowed him to take power (in much the same way Trump did in the USofA), but ignoring his planning as the source of the Final Solution, and its breadth and depth and horror, does not ring true and just absolves him of his agency. Hitler did this because he hated Jews, not because he feared the spectre of Bolshevism or Communism. In my opinion, at least.
• 
  Simon B

  A thorough assessment of one of the 20th century's most horrendous crimes. The harrowing, gloomy topic meant I had trouble getting through this, putting it aside for weeks at a time. But at least Hitler is dead by the end. The book's distinctive argument is that Nazi anti-Semitism developed into a wholesale genocidal extermination of Jews only really from the winter of 1941/42. This vengeful 'Judeocide' followed Nazi setbacks in its totemic invasion of the Soviet Union. It escalated in its barbarity as German defeat grew more certain. Why Did The Heavens Not Darken has a great bibliography but I'm not a fan of Mayer's choice to do without footnotes/endnotes.
  
  

  "The Judeocide was forged in the fires of a stupendous war to conquer unlimited Lebensraum from Russia, to crush the Soviet regime, and to liquidate international bolshevism. The regular Wehrmacht and the special Waffen-SS first blazed the trail for the Einsatzgruppen and then exercised the power of last resort over the territories and populations surrounding the extermination sites. Without Operation Barbarossa there would and could have been no Jewish catastrophe, no "Final Solution." Not that the Jews went unscathed in the period between the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and the invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941. During this early phase of the Second World War, between 5,000 and 1 0,000 Jews, virtually all of them adult males, were murdered individually, and twice to three times that many Jews of both sexes died of malnutrition and disease, above all in the ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz. But this killing was neither systematic nor comprehensive: it affected a small percentage of several Jewish communities and it was confined to German-occupied Poland."
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  Differengenera

  i liked this, i found it to be a good left-leaning survey of a period i don't know as well as i should, but i read a twitter thread from a historian about how the premise (germany as ancien régime as opposed to capitalist power) is BS, so, there's that
• 
  David Bisset

  This is a powerful treatment of the Holocaust within the context of a Thirty Years War. I find his thesis convincing. This is historical writing of superlative quality.
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  Peter Landau

  The clash between the study of history and the construction of a public memory.
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  Dave

  "Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?"" is a moving, powerful history of the Final Solution enforced by Nazi Germany against the Jewish population of Europe during the Second World War. Arno Mayer offers an interesting, if controversial, look at the Holocaust as part of the overall history of Hitler's rise to power and the war that followed. He asserts that while Hitler was always anti-semitic, the actual plans for the destruction of European Jewry developed over time -- from the loss of civil rights, to segregation to the ghettos, to outright extermination -- particularly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union began to unravel. Mayer's conclusions may be open to discussion, but his synopsis of the facts of what he calls the Judeocide are solidly documented. This is not a light book by any means -- the sheer horror of the concentration/extermination camp system is a chilling experience to read about. However, while the subject is difficult to digest, I firmly recommend this book to anyone who wishes to learn more about one of the darkest moments of human history.
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  Laurel

  This was a course required book, which we were then forced to write a ten page paper exploring Mayers main arguments. I feel that even after reading & writing about this book that I still do not fully comprehend Mayers thesis. My personal take on the book is that it explores the Holocaust in a very dry, personally opinionated manner which he chooses to not back up with annotated facts. The reading would be much more pleasurable if you could in turn read some sources he used.
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  Jayden gonzalez

  had a great time reading about the holocaust in the opening days of my winter break.
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  mark eden

  Well thank god my Hebrew ancestors left Germany in 1819.