Final Solution: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews

Rating:
Summary: hidden brilliance
Review: A brilliant and innovative thesis about the origins of genocide in Nazi Germany, but it is unfortunately presented in a very undigested form and without a captivating narrative. I hope someone will use this material in a more user-friendly manner.

Rating:
Summary: hidden brilliance
Review: A brilliant and innovative thesis about the origins of genocide in Nazi Germany, but it is unfortunately presented in a very undigested form and without a captivating narrative. I hope someone will use this material in a more user-friendly manner.

Rating:
Summary: How the nazis planned the final solution.
Review: A most excellent insight. The author deals mainly with the period September 1939 to the Wannsee meeting in January 1942, making use of new material which has come to light. He illustrates with meticulous attention to detail how those entrusted with the grisly task - Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann, Frank etc - moved inexorably to their final position of Jewish extermination. The problems they had to deal with en route, including opposition from those who wanted to keep the Jews alive for indefinite slave labor and the economic expectancy of those Germans recently moved from "liberated" territories back to the Reich, are recounted in all their complex detail. The final chapter gives a selection of pertinent remarks from the murderers themselves. I have never read a more incisive and readable account of the incremental steps leading up to the Final Solution.

Rating:
Summary: How the nazis planned the final solution.
Review: A most excellent insight. The author deals mainly with the period September 1939 to the Wannsee meeting in January 1942, making use of new material which has come to light. He illustrates with meticulous attention to detail how those entrusted with the grisly task - Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann, Frank etc - moved inexorably to their final position of Jewish extermination. The problems they had to deal with en route, including opposition from those who wanted to keep the Jews alive for indefinite slave labor and the economic expectancy of those Germans recently moved from "liberated" territories back to the Reich, are recounted in all their complex detail. The final chapter gives a selection of pertinent remarks from the murderers themselves. I have never read a more incisive and readable account of the incremental steps leading up to the Final Solution.

Rating:
Summary: Learn from history
Review: Learning about Nazis will help to understand the intentions behind aggressive war policy. German historian Goetz Aly a few years ago has written most remarkable books about economical and political interests behind Nazi warfare - "Final Solution" is one of them. Taking care of almost negliged documents he shows how well planned and designed German strategical considerations in World War II have been.

Rating:
Summary: The "Final Solution: as last resort
Review: This excellent book concisely documents the "Final Solution" as the end result of a failed and inept German population policy. Ethnic Germans from many different countries were imported to parts of the occupied East to create a Greater Reich. To make way Poles and other ethnic groups were deported further east. To make way for the Poles, Jews (at the very bottom of German racial categoies) were first deported and then ghettoized and then killed. The Germans' inability to physically remove the Jews out of German territory eventually led them to try to exterminate them literally. Although this books claims not to deny or qualify the "Holocaust" I think it shows that genocide was the result of an unobtainable ethnic cleansing and not an ad hoc master plan. Ironically some of the Germans' former victims have recently found themselves trying to enact similiar (albeit smaller-scale) policies and have found themselves goingdown the same road as the Germans.