Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Read Online Free

‘Final Solution’ has evidently reached the limits of what
    is provable but above all because any attempt to identify a decision taken at a
    single moment in time runs counter to the extreme complexity of the processes
    that were in fact taking place. The truth is that those with political responsibility
    propelled forward, step by step, a highly complicated decision-making process in
    which a series of points where it was escalated can be identified.
    This has a number of consequences for a depiction of the genesis of the ‘Final
    Solution’. First, if we abandon the model that sees a single decision as the trigger
    for the murder of the European Jews and if we advance beyond the notion of a
    cumulative process of radicalization that had got out of control and could no
    longer be steered by anyone, then the various phases in Nazi Judenpolitik take on
    new significance. New perspectives are revealed that show the years 1939 to 1941
    as a phase in which the National Socialist regime was already considering
    genocidal projects against the Jews that appear all the more sinister in the light
    of the racially motivated programmes of mass murder that were already been
    carried out against the Polish population and the ‘congenitally ill’. It also becomes
    clearer how in the period from spring 1942 onwards the lives of several million
    Jewish people depended on how the Nazis’ Judenpolitik developed. Large Jewish
    communities could be saved (as they were in France, Italy, Denmark, Old
    Romania, and Bulgaria) or they were lost (as in Hungary and Greece). Bitter
    conflicts were also fought over the fate of Jewish forced labour groups. It needs to
    be made clear that even after the Europe-wide ‘Final Solution’ had been initiated
    the continuing development of Judenpolitik depended on a chain of decisions and
    did not merely consist in the ‘implementation’ of a single decision that had
    already been taken.
    However, when we treat the period 1939 to 1945 as one in which a series of
    decisions regarding Judenpolitik were being taken rather than restricting our
    analysis to a ‘decision-making period’ of a few months, then we also need to
    take the years 1933 to 1939 into consideration as a preparatory period for the phase
    in which the annihilation of the Jews took place. In the years preceding the war the
    institutions were created that were to organize the genocide during the war, and
    this was the period in which Judenpolitik was developed and radicalized and in
    which the regime learned how to deploy this new field of politics in a variety of
    ways for its own purposes.

    Introduction
    7
    The second effect of seeing the emergence of the ‘Final Solution’ as a complex
    process rather than as the outcome of a single decision, if we follow the suggestions of
    Gerlach, Aly, and others and take into consideration new thematic approaches to the
    analysis of the persecution of the Jews, is that it becomes necessary to see Judenpolitik as systematically interlinked with the other central thematic areas, notably in
    domestic policy but ultimately also with German hegemony on the continent of
    Europe. For the war years this means that we need to take account of German
    policies on alliances and inner repression across the whole of Europe, and of the
    issues of work, food production, and financing the war. It is necessary to show how
    these areas were redefined in a racist and specifically anti-Semitic sense, and to show
    how even during the war the Nazi system was attempting to establish the basis for a
    racist Imperium in which the murder of the Jews was the lowest common denom-
    inator in a series of alliances led by Germany. This implies, of course, a very broad
    programme of research that would exceed the scope of a single monograph. The
    present study will restrict itself to exploring in outline how such linkages functioned.
    Thirdly, if we accept that the decision-making process within Nazi Judenpolitik
    did not come