Review: Nazi Germany and the Jews
Jewish Author Delivers Objective Portrayal
Before World War II, Jews in Nazi Germany suffered a resurge in anti-Semitism. Author Saul Friedlander offers an objective account in his book.
A driving force compelled Saul Friedlander to analyze the world of Nazi Germany: his parents’ death at Auschwitz. Despite this incredibly close tie to the Holocaust, Friedlander delivers a strong, objective account of the Jews in Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939. Friedlander is also the author of other volumes on Nazism, including his personal memoir When Memory Comes.
By dividing his book into two sections, A Beginning and an End, and The Entrapment, Friedlander effectively breaks down the distinct separation between the years of 1933-1936 and 1936-1939. He also cleverly weaves his tale with a wide variety of viewpoints. From the chilling diary entries of Joseph Goebbels, to the British ambassador’s take on his interview with Hitler, to the strange dreams of a Mischling, Friedlander delivers on his promised thesis, that of incorporating the stories and accounts of several participants instead of merely one or two viewpoints. The most notable views are those of the victims themselves. Their stories, told through the eyes of scholars, Jewish newspapers, and ordinary men and women, reveal the bewilderment and naivety over their systematic segregation and persecution.
We see Friedlander’s main idea of redemptive anti-Semitism throughout the pages of Nazi Germany and the Jews. As he himself defines it, “the struggle against the Jews is the dominant aspect of a worldview in which other racist themes are but secondary appendages” (p. 87) in redemptive anti-Semitism. Friedlander expands upon this idea by referring several times to the speeches of Hitler and other Nazi leaders and their reference to the Jews’ worldwide conspiracy.
What is compelling about this book is the subtle tension Friedlander entwines within the text from the first steps of oppression down to the eve of World War II. Yet Friedlander, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, does not allow himself to play on our sympathies. Instead, he presents the facts for what they are, quoting primary and secondary sources again and again from his extensive bibliography of journals, letters, newspaper articles, and international narratives, to name but a few.
However, a puzzling question runs through most of the book. Friedlander frequently addresses the baffling situation of the refusal of many Jews to leave Germany. Why, after the rampant anti-Semitic views and increasing segregation and persecutory laws, did Jews remain? Friedlander suggests that the majority of Jews felt the storm would pass, that the Nazis would go no further than the existing segregation laws or that liberal democracy would rush to their rescue if the situation turned dire.
It is a question numerous historians have grappled with. Yet Friedlander focuses on what is perhaps the central answer. Hitler’s master of tactics, as Friedlander points out, reveals each step taken against the Jews as carefully and meticulously planned. It soon became imperative to know one’s ancestry and more importantly, that the ancestry in question be the purest of all races, the Aryan race. After all, Nazi ideology “drew its strength from the purity of its blood and from its rootedness in the sacred German earth” (p. 33). A national scrambling for ancestral records ensued. Friedlander delivers several accounts of the meticulous scrutiny one’s heritage endured and of the tragedies that occurred when the records did not meet the criteria. He also explains the criteria used to identify a Jew, relating the surprising and in-depth methods used by the Nazis to determine race. In revealing such information, Friedlander gives us a glimpse into how the Nazi mind functioned. Although it is a chilling view, it nevertheless is imperative to understanding Friedlander’s work.
If the years of 1933-1936 primarily focused on stabilizing the Regime from the affects of Germany’s severe depression following World War I, then 1936-1939, as the second half of the book explains, saw Jews at the center of a surge of not only German, but international anti-Semitism. The early segregation led to the Nuremberg Laws, and steadily escalated into more violence against the Jews, particularly with the Kristallnacht pogrom of November, 1938.
Friedlander also uncovers the cunning pattern Hitler established throughout the 1930s. Hitler’s name would never be directly linked to the orders given for the brutality and persecution of the Jews, even though he himself gave the orders or, at the very least, confirmed them. The world outside of Nazi Germany did not know of his true intentions. It is a revealing portrait of Hitler’s made genius.
But what is fundamentally important to Friedlander’s work is his skillful blending of varying viewpoints, thus giving the work the mark of objectivity. This allows the reader to see cause and effect, action and reaction, without being blinded by the author’s slanted views in a subject matter already filled with emotion.
Compelling in its richness of sources and language, Nazi Germany and the Jews is highly readable from the scholarly standpoint down to the average person interested in Nazi Germany or Holocaust history. Friedlander displays the mark of a true historian by adhering to objectivity within a subject so close to him. Not only are the facts presented in a clear, concise way, but they are also void of sensationalism. This book is undoubtedly destined to be the definitive work on the Jews in Nazi Germany, if it is not already.
Source:
Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939. HarperCollins, New York, 1997.
