First and foremost I would like to thank my agent, Peter Robinson, without whose unstinting support and friendship this book would neither have been started nor completed. Georgina Morley has been a patient and understanding editor, whose suggestions made the finished product shorter and better. I must also thank Nicole Foster for copy editing, Nicholas Blake for overseeing production, and Martin Lubikowski for the maps.
The book has benefited from the staff and resources of the three great libraries and archives that cover its subject. At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, I would like to thank Paul Shapiro, the director of the Centre for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Suzanne Brown-Fleming, Jürgen Matthäus, and Martin Dean. During visits to the Centre, often unannounced and informal, Jürgen and Martin have generously given their time to discuss my work, answer questions, and offer suggestions. I am especially grateful to Jürgen, who shared with me the fruits of a major USHMM archival find, the diary of Alfred Rosenberg, before it was published. During a sabbatical at the USHMM I was able to meet Jeffrey Herf when he was completing his book about the place of the Jew and anti-Semitism in Nazi wartime propaganda. Jeffrey is both an ally and a stimulating colleague. At Yad Vashem in Jerusalem I was fortunate to have been able to spend time with David Bankier, head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research, before his untimely death. Dan Michmann, the current director of the Institute, has been a constant source of information and a challenging critic of my ideas. Rob Rozett, director of the Library, read an early version of the manuscript and made many wise comments, often drawing my attention to new publications in the field. David Silberklang, editor of Yad Vashem Studies, commissioned me to write a number of reviews and other pieces that have helped clarify my thinking on historiography; his editorial comments have always been valuable. Rob and David are also dear friends and have welcomed me, and my family, into their homes many times. One of the compensations for working on such grim material for so long is that over this time our families have come to know one another and our friendships have deepened. Thanks to my visits to Yad Vashem and also my involvement with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (formerly the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Remembrance, Education and Research) I have also had the opportunity to discuss aspects of my work with Yehuda Bauer, whose fund of knowledge and insight is peerless. The Wiener Library in London has been an indispensable, local resource and I would like to thank its director, Ben Barkow, and the head librarian, Kat Hübschmann, for their hospitality and unfailing assistance. Needless to say, all three institutions would not function without many members of staff, too numerous to list: I would just like to say a big Thank You to all of them.
Aspects of this research have been presented in lectures and I would like to thank the organizers of these events and acknowledge the feedback they garnered. In 2011 as the Wilkenfeld Family Lecturer in Holocaust Education at the Sidney Jewish Museum I benefited from the advice and insight of my host, Konrad Kwiet. The following year, Milton Shain, director of the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Cape Town, invited me to an unusual gathering at the city’s wonderful Jewish Museum at which ‘Holocaust historians’ were invited to reflect on the autobiographical dimension of their work. Over the course of several days I enjoyed the company and conversation of Steven Aschheim, Doris Bergen, Christopher Browning, Richard J. Evans, Robert Erikson, Steven T. Katz, Michael Marrus, Antony Polonsky, and Karl Schleunes. Despite having met each other on various occasions in different circumstances, this was a particularly fruitful and reflective encounter. In 2014 I was invited to deliver the Raul Hilberg Memorial Lecture at the University of Burlington, Vermont. Francis Nicosia and Jonathan Heuner were perfect hosts, but they also made valuable observations on my paper attempting to bring together the history of the war and the fate of the Jews. Jerold D. Jacobson, who generously supports the lecture series, proved an incisive critic as well as a jolly dinner companion. Jacques Fredj, director of the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, has invited me to address audiences there on several occasions, which has also given me the opportunity to use the resources of the centre’s library and archive. Our post-lecture conversations at a restaurant around the corner are always a highlight of these visits. In 2015, Guri Schwarz enticed me to a conference on remembrance of the Holocaust held at the new Memoriale della Shoah in Milan. This gave me the chance to explore the bleak, subterranean freight yard from which over a thousand Italian Jews were deported. The participants in the conference included Tal Bruttmann, whose path-breaking research earlier led me to revision the plight of Jews during the last phase of the German occupation of France. A few months later, at the invitation of Antony Polonsky, I attended a three-day conference to mark the opening of the permanent exhibition of Polin – the new museum of Polish Jewish history in Warsaw. The conference heard from a cadre of Polish historians who, since 1990, have transformed the way we understand the fate of Polish Jews. The fruits of their research pepper the footnotes of this book. In this connection I would like to acknowledge the impact of publications and presentations by Jan T. Gross and Jan Grabowski, whom I had occasion to meet during their visits to London and elsewhere. Their pioneering and courageous work has had a huge influence on my approach to the subject. Finally, I would like to thank Stephen Feinberg, recently retired from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, for inveigling me into educational events in Washington, Kaunus, and Budapest. Steve has been a superb sparring partner for many years and, once again, it mitigates the darkness of the subject to know that through it I became friends with him and his no less feisty partner, Patt Moser.
Over the duration of this book I have participated in numerous conferences where I have had the opportunity to hear the latest findings delivered by doctoral students as well as veterans in the field. In particular I would like to mention the tri-annual conference series Beyond Camps and Forced Labour, which is jointly organized by Suzanne Bardgett, the Imperial War Museum, London; Johannes-Dieter Steinert, Wolverhampton University; Jessica Reinisch, Birkbeck, University of London; and the Centre for Holocaust Research at Royal Holloway, University of London. The gatherings that have taken place every three years at the Imperial War Museum since 2003 have provided a showcase for new research on the experience of Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution during and in the aftermath of the war. Much of this work has since been published and found its way into the footnotes and bibliography of this book. I have been fortunate to attend successive Lessons and Legacies conferences organized by the Holocaust Educational Foundation, Chicago. I would like to thank Theodore Zev Weiss, who inspired this unique, bi-annual gathering of scholars, for urging me to attend and participate. To do so was to enter an extraordinary community of researchers who were both supportive and challenging. It would be impossible to mention all those involved in the conferences and the sessions, but I would like to mention Wendy Lower, Mark Roseman, Omer Bartov, and Gershon Greenberg, with whom I have enjoyed memorable conversations that sharpened my thinking. The Kagan Fellowship scheme of the Conference for Material Claims against Germany Inc. – named in honour of the late Saul Kagan, a doughty fighter for the rights of survivors, whom I was privileged to meet several times – has supported the doctoral research of dozens of young scholars from around the world. As a member of the fellowship committee I was invited to attend the annual workshops for the award holders, held in either Washington or Jerusalem, and mentor the fellows – but I consistently learned more from them than I could ever have imparted in return. The fellows are too numerous to mention individually but the scheme has already led to the completion of many fine theses and a small shelfload of books, some of which are cited in this work.
At this point I would like to acknowledge what I have learned from the doctoral students whom I have been lucky enough to supervise at Royal Holloway, University of London: Salvatore Garau, who worked on early fascism; Daniel Tilles, who researched fascist anti-Semitism and Jewish responses in 1930s Britain; Katarzyna Person, who studied assimilated, Polonized Jews and converts in the Warsaw ghetto; Russell Wallis, who shed light on British public and governmental responses to the persecution of German Jews; Yoav Heller, who explored the fate of Jewish twins in Birkenau and the role of their protector, Zvi Spiegel; Rachel Century, who probed the beliefs and functions of women who provided secretarial support to the German army, SS, and occupation authorities; Dorota Mas, currently working on Nazi elite schools; and Rachel Pistol, examining the internment of ‘enemy aliens’ in the USA and Britain. I am delighted and proud that Salvatore Garau, Daniel Tilles, Katarzyna Person, and Russell Wallis, have already published monographs based on their doctoral research; more books are to follow. Katarzyna read an early version of the manuscript and saved me from numerous howlers concerning Polish Jewry. During my visit to Warsaw in May 2015, Katarzyna took me to Treblinka so that I could explore the site. While Katarzyna did the guiding, her mother kindly did the driving. We were accompanied by Suzanne Bardgett and it was a sobering, instructive, and deeply moving experience.
These students were drawn to Royal Holloway partly by the outstanding MA in Holocaust Studies and the activities of the Centre for Holocaust Research. The Centre boasts a unique concentration of expertise in the subject and since I joined it in 2004 I have learned a great deal from my colleagues, past and present. So I would like to thank Peter Longerich, Dan Stone, Bob Eaglestone, and Barry Langford, who combine academic excellence with collegiality to an extent that is all too rare in universities these days. I am privileged to hold a research chair at Royal Holloway, and would also like to express my gratitude to a succession of superb departmental heads – Justin Champion, Sara Ansari, and Jonathan Phillips – who have supported my work (both academic and extra-mural) and tenaciously defended the highest values of a research-led History Department. My colleague Rudolf Muhs read sections of the manuscript and helped me to sort out tricky questions of title and rank in Nazi Germany as well as offering sensitive advice on how to present the crisis of German Jews after 1933. Over the years, Rudolf and Daniel Beer have made the long car journey from Royal Holloway to north-west London both enlightening and enjoyable.
From 1999 to 2001, I was involved in the creation of a Holocaust memorial day for the UK and served for six years as a trustee for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. Throughout this period, and subsequently in various roles, I have taken part in numerous discussions about both the past and how best to commemorate it. I cannot list all those who have enriched my thinking in these debates, but I must single out Ben Helfgott, a survivor of the Piotrków ghetto and numerous camps, who is the honorary president of the HMD Trust as well as long-serving chair of the ‘45 Aid Society. Thanks to the Trust, on 27 January every year since 2001 I have been able to join Ben, mingling with survivors and former refugees, hearing their stories and learning from their experiences. Ben has been a constant source of inspiration as well as a crucial ‘reality check’. No less important, his children became family friends and his grandchildren the school-friends of my children. For many years I have also been a historical consultant to the Holocaust Educational Trust, which published my first attempt at a brief history of the Holocaust. HET gave me the opportunity to test out my ideas on generations of young people enrolled in its Ambassador programme and made possible a key visit to Bergen-Belsen on the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the camp. I would like to thank Karen Pollock, HET director, for embracing me in its work, and Andy Pearce, Alex Maws, and Martin Winstone for making me think harder about history and memory.
I have participated in many radio, television, and film documentaries, but a few must be mentioned as specially informative, intellectually challenging, and rewarding. Thanks to Adam Kemp of Aeon Productions, who produced Death Camp Treblinka: Survivors’ Stories for the BBC in 2012, I was able to meet and interview Kalman Tiegman and Samuel Willenberg, the last survivors of the uprising in Treblinka, as well as Samuel’s equally redoubtable wife, Ada. It was a privilege to be associated with the restoration of Sidney Bernstein’s uncompleted 1945 film German Concentration Camps. Factual Survey, conducted by a team at the Imperial War Museum under the meticulous direction of Toby Haggith, from whom I learned as much about the liberation of Belsen as about the film that British cameramen made of it. The story of that film is at the core of Night Will Fall, a Spring Films/BFI production, for which André Singer interviewed me in the grounds of Buchenwald on a cold and windy morning – an educational experience in itself. As the historical consultant for Jusqu’au dernier. La destruction des Juifs d’Europe (broadcast in the UK as Annihilation), directed by William Karel and Blanche Finger for Zadig Production, under the benign supervision of Paul Rozenberg, I was able to test some of the ideas that made their way into this book, although the documentary series itself offers a variety of perspectives by leading experts. In 2011, I contributed to a French TV documentary on Adolf Eichmann. The filming took place in the apartment of Annette Wieviorka, with whom I have collaborated on several conferences and who has always offered bracing perspectives on the fate of Jewish people in France as well as wider questions on the history and memory of the Jewish catastrophe. Lastly, I must thank Richard Overy, who was my tutor in modern European history at Queens’ College in the late 1970s. Richard gave me a solid grounding in the historian’s craft and we have been exchanging ideas and arguing with one another about history and politics ever since. Richard may be partially responsible for my becoming a historian but neither he nor anyone mentioned above is responsible for the content of this book: the errors and the opinions are all my own.
In the closing stages of this book, I joined Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg and his son Amos on a research trip to Lublin, Ostrov-Lubelski, Lubartov, Majdanek and Belzec. Jonathan, the rabbi of the New North London Synagogue and senior rabbi to the Masorti Movement, is an old friend from university days who officiated at my marriage to Dawn Waterman and blessed my children, Daniel and Hannah. He has shared with me his passion for understanding and chronicling the tragic history of Europe’s Jews and provided endless wisdom and guidance on every aspect of life. On Friday nights and Shabbat lunches, his wife, Nicola Solomons, the CEO of the Society of Authors, has nourished me with advice on the book trade and bowls of her delicious home-made soup. They know well how all-consuming it can be to write a book and this one has taken far too much time away from those I love most, Dawn, Daniel, and Hannah. It is for them, all the same.
Over several decades I have become acquainted with many former refugees from Nazi Germany and survivors of the ‘final solution’, some of whom I got to know well or stayed in touch with for extended periods. I did not always appreciate the significance of what they were telling me about those times, but in the course of writing this book my thoughts were frequently interrupted by recollections of what they said. I cannot know whether they would have agreed with all or any of this book, but it has been enriched by hearing of their experiences and listening to their reflections. It is dedicated to their memory: Joseph ‘Joey’ Burmanis, Ernst Fraenkel, Hugo Grynn, Yisrael Gutman, Trudi Levi, Yogi Maier, Roman Halter, Hans Jackson, Stephen Roth, and Kalman Tiegman.
David Cesarani, 2015
Publisher’s Note
David Cesarani died while Final Solution was still in preparation. The publishers are deeply grateful to Professor Richard J. Evans and Andras Bereznay for their assistance and care in completing the text and maps for publication.