Nazi Germany and The Jews is written in two large volumes: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (published in 1977) and The Years of Extermination, 1939-1945 (pubished in 2007).
Saul Friedlander aims to balance the ideologies on three levels: personal, party, and people, excluding the psychology of the leader of the Nazi regime, because he thinks much has previously been written about Adolf Hitler. But he does discuss Hitler’s ideological obsession with racial anti-Semitism, which Friedlander calls ‘redemptive anti-Semitism.’ Friedlander’s approach is a collective history through personal truths and individual fates.
Friedlander examines history through a chronological lens. The focus is on a year-by-year account, which loses some of the continuity of the events in each country across Europe (a country-by-country account), but tries not to become disjointed. It’s a fine balance.
Beginning in 1933 with the exodus of Jews, initially from Germany as Hitler rises to power in January, Friedlander moves in Volume 2 to their mass murder as the Nazi regime occupies countries and regions. Friedlander also discusses the impacts by sectors – creatives, legal professions, religious leaders, business people, academics, and so on. He also briefly discusses the persecution of other groups, such as communists, Jehovahs, homosexuals, habitual criminals, asocials, and people with disabilities. He also includes the convergence of the worldwide economic crisis in central and eastern Europe and its sequel – the decade-long unemployment.
He predominantly uses diaries as his sources of information, many ending abruptly – ‘their chronicles, their reflections, their witnessing … will take center stage.’
Therefore, this history is a personal history taken from a human rights angle at significant turning points in history.
Both volumes are very difficult to read in terms of content and complexity, but are important for their focus on people, actions, inactions, and implications. Saul Friedlander expertly writes in clear, but not concise, narratives that embody the essence and soul of individuals and the ripple effects of atrocities across a broad and wide panorama of discriminations, persecutions, deportations, and deaths.
MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights, aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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