Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers

by Christopher R Browning and Christopher R. Browning

Book Overview

Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers focuses on controversial issues in current Holocaust scholarship. How did Nazi Jewish policy evolve during the first years of the war? When did the Nazi regime cross the historic watershed from population expulsion and decimation (ethnic cleansing) to total and systematic extermination? How did Nazi authorities attempt to reconcile policies of expulsion and extermination with the wartime urge to exploit...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 052177490X
• ISBN13: 9780521774901
• Release Date: February 2000
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

based on Nazi documents

This short book, unlike many books on the Holocaust, is based on internal Nazi documents, and tries to give readers a feel for how Nazi policy both evolved at the top and was implemented at the bottom. The beginning of the book seeks to answer the question: when did the Nazis settle upon genocide? The 1939-40 documents analyzed by Browning suggest that Nazis envisioned expelling Jews to Magadascar or the remotest reaches of Eastern Europe; by contrast, sometime in 1941 Hitler and Himmler apparently agreed on mass extermination. Then Browning seeks to address the question of how much leeway local authorities had to avoid these policies; often, local commanders were more interested in exploiting Jewish labor than in extermination. Browning concludes that local authorities could drag their feet, but could not affirmatively resist clear orders from above. The last essays focus on the role of individual German police battalions who participated in killing squads. Browning concludes that the majority of these men were not ideologically motivated to murder Jews- but that typically a few were, and the rest just followed orders and could even avoid participation themselves as long as they did not interfere with the murder going on around them.

Startling Look At The Men Who Accomplished The Holocaust!

In a six-essay series originally devised as lectures, the author takes the reader deep into the hearts and minds of the men who engineered the Holocaust. As in his earlier work, he argues persuasively and with an army of facts and figures that the decision to eradicate all of Europe's Jews from the face of the planet was an incrementally derived decision. This argument is very much like that made by Gerhard Weinberg in his massively documented history of WWII, "A World At Arms", although Browning's argument is much more detailed and substantiated. Weinberg posited that it wasn't until the Wehrmacht began to have horrendous logistics problems early in the occupation of Poland, Latvia, and Estonia during Operation Barbarossa that they began to think in terms of a systematic and deliberate program of extermination of the Jews. Until that point the Nazi command had been more favorably disposed toward using indigenous populations as slave labor and working and/or starving them to death, rather than killing them outright. Here too Browning argues about three key issues surrounding the decision to proceed with the Holocaust; first, that the Nazi hierarchy itself was divided in terms of strategy and objectives about the resolution of the "Jewish Question"; second, that it was seen as highly advantageous to the national socialist cause to employ their skills and labor as long as possible in support of the war effort, and finally, that the actual implementation of the fragmented policy was further fragmented and "ad-libbed" at the field level by local commanders or police authorities. Browning uses a virtual flood of documentation and data to substantiate his various positions, and marshals a convincing argument on behalf of the notion that indeed the resulting mass murders of the Holocaust were more likely the production of a series of small but fateful conclusions made incrementally to solve immediate and pressing logistical and tactical situations the Nazi hierarchy faced at particular moments than it was the result of some long-standing grand and evil scheme to systematically annihilate the Jews. Of course, it is in one very real sense an academic issue, since all of the indigenous Jews (as well as everyone else in the areas of interest to the Nazis along the eastern front in Poland and the Ukraine already pre-designated as new settlement areas for Germans would die at the hands of the Nazi regime. The question at hand is whether it would be through slave labor, starvation, and exposure to the elements, or through more active and murderous intervention by way of the death camps. One must also remember that there were also large numbers of German Jews being transported both within and without the country to concentration camps. The same issues of intent apply to them, as well. Certainly Browning's efforts here will not end the long-standing debate. It is, however, a critical contribution to informing the direction

New insight into a perennial theme.

As new written sources from the early 1940s continue to turn up regularly in Russia and in its former Soviet satellites, historians are able to refine the history of the Jewish holocaust. Christopher Browning is at the forefront of this academic work. In his latest book, based on a series of lectures, he has a close look at when senior nazidom actually determined on a policy of destruction. He convincingly argues it was October 1941. There is an excellent chapter on Starachowice labor camp in Poland in which survivor memories and new documentary evidence are shown to be complementary. For those who want a followup to Browning's previously published work, for example on reserve police batallion 101, there is a final chapter in which the author slightly modifies his previous conclusions on the mindset of the killers. I think it is fair to say that this scholarly book is meant for advanced students of the holocaust, or at least those with a fair knowledge of the historiography.

Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers

This is an excellent book that gives you an in depth in formative view of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. I recommend this book to people that are interested in the topic and students, teachers, and anyone else.