Introduction

The Holocaust has never been so ubiquitous. It has never been studied so extensively, taught so widely, or taken with such frequency as a subject for novels and films. On 1 November 2005, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted 27 January as International Holocaust Remembrance Day so that it is now commemorated almost universally, held up as the global benchmark for evil, as the ultimate violation of human rights and crimes against humanity. The seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the concentration camps was marked with ceremonies attended by heads of state and church leaders alongside the frail, shrinking band of survivors.¹

However there is a yawning gulf between popular understanding of this history and current scholarship on the subject. This is hardly surprising given that most people acquire their knowledge of the Nazi past and the fate of the Jews through novels, films, or earnest but ill-informed lessons at school, which frequently rely on novels for young adults or their filmic versions. Misconceptions are reinforced by the edited and instrumentalized versions purveyed by campaigning bodies and the constellation of organizations devoted to education and commemoration. Although these efforts are made in good faith, they are subordinate to extraneous agendas, be it the desire to cultivate an inclusive national identity or the laudable determination to combat anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia and other forms of political, religious or ethnic intolerance. Some lazily draw on an outdated body of research, while others utilize state-of-the-art research but downplay inconvenient aspects of the newer findings.²

It is easier to arrange one-day visits to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where an estimated 960,000 Jews were murdered, than to Treblinka, where some 860,000 Jews were killed in a shorter space of time, let alone to the broadly dispersed but omnipresent killing fields of Belarus and Ukraine, where around one and half million Jews were shot to death. Conscientious educators preparing and accompanying the flying visits to Auschwitz and Birkenau strive to frame the concentration and extermination camp within the larger history of the genocide inflicted on the Jews, but the emotional charge that imprints the historical data on the mind is inevitably shaped by physically witnessing this one site. Notwithstanding the intense preparation, the other locations where most Jews suffered, died, and were done to death remain distant. As a result the customary narrative is lopsided. The emphasis on deportations to death camps, particularly from western Europe and particularly to Auschwitz, overshadows the benighted experience of Jews in Polish ghettos. Yet the number of Jews incarcerated in the ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz in 1940–1 exceeds the combined Jewish populations in France, Belgium and the Netherlands at the same time. More Jews died in Warsaw than were deported from France to the killing sites of eastern Europe. More Jews were shot within walking distance of their homes in Kiev on 29–30 September 1941 than were forced to endure the horrendous five-day journey in box-cars from transit camps in Belgium to death camps in Poland. Yet one of the most typical Holocaust memorials is a freight car mounted on a segment of rail track.³

The use of survivor testimony routinely trumps the dissemination of scholarship. Survivors may only be able to illuminate a tiny corner of the sprawling historical tragedy from their own experience, but they were there, so their every word is highly charged. However, the use of survivor testimony in educational and commemorative settings swerves comprehension in the direction of a small cadre whose experiences are unrepresentative.

It is trite to remark that as survivors they are atypical of what the majority of Jews endured under Nazi rule. More pertinently, the passage of time dictates that they could only have experienced the Nazi years as children, teenagers or young adults. They observed the dilemmas of adults and can report on how things were for their mothers, fathers, grandparents and older relatives, but they cannot testify to what it felt like to be a middle-aged person confronted by persecution and unnatural death. They can only offer an echo of what it meant to lose homes and businesses, the painfully acquired achievements of a lifetime or several generations. Young people were largely insulated from, or took no direct part in, the internecine struggles that typified life in Jewish communities under ruthless pressure to divide one from another: those fit to work from those unfit, those with resources from those with none, those with contacts amongst the authorities from those bereft of patronage. They witnessed but did not feel the emotions of adults trying to protect children and loved ones, the despair and rage that accompanied helplessness and, ultimately, loss.

On the contrary, what survivors offer is a wonderful example of how youthful traumas can be overcome. They show how it is possible to rebuild in one generation what was mercilessly destroyed in the previous one. Inspiring testimony such as this inevitably carries a redemptive message. No matter how unpleasant or unvarnished the content, the age of the speaker, and the courage they show in recalling horrendous times bestows on them a heroic aura. They are envoys from a fearful distant past, bearing a message of hope – that survival and recuperation is possible whatever the odds against them.⁴

Commemorative events, especially those with survivors present, are naturally constructed to avoid sensitive and conflicted subjects. They steer around phenomena like the corruption of life in the ghettos and the moral degradation of camp inmates. They skirt awkward questions of forced cooperation with the German authorities or acts of premeditated revenge. They maintain a discreet silence over instances of voluntary infanticide, sexual exploitation amongst the Jews, rape and even cannibalism. Yet all these things occurred at times in ghettos, camps, urban hideouts and forest sanctuaries. Educational programmes have more latitude and ambition when confronting such touchy issues, but since they are designed to inoculate against racism, the emphasis is on the crimes of the Germans, their allies and accomplices or the indifference of ‘bystanders’. To dwell on the terrible things that Jews did to Jews would be tantamount to ‘blaming the victims’, a variety of prejudicial thinking that ‘Holocaust education’ is itself supposed to expunge. Ironically, these are the very areas currently being explored by responsible, conscientious researchers.⁵

The nomenclature is itself increasingly self-defeating. The Holocaust, capitalized here to signify the cultural construction rather than the historical events to which it is assumed to refer, has come to imply a unitary event characterized by systematic procedures and a uniformity of experience. But newer histories point to the nuances between different countries, regions, districts, and even adjacent villages. They are more sensitized to variations over time, breaking it down into locales and segments, each with distinctive characteristics that could accentuate the chances of life or death. Certain historians argue that a number of overlapping genocides raged within The Holocaust. Romania, for example, embarked on murderous ethnic cleansing against local Jews to suit a national agenda that was distinctive from, and even cut across, German aspirations. Perspectives on the catastrophe are changing, yet this is barely reflected in the reproduction of an agreed but ageing narrative.⁶

This book grew out of a concern about the discord between, on the one side, evocations of The Holocaust in popular culture, education and its commemoration and, on the other, the revelations by researchers in many disciplines, operating within and outside an academic framework. The divergence has become acute since the 1990s, thanks to the vastly increased volume of research that followed the end of the Cold War and the opening of archives in eastern Europe. Access to these new archives facilitated individual scholarship and enabled teams to investigate Jewish slave labour and the fate of Jewish property and assets. Over a dozen countries organized historical commissions to deal with accusations about their wartime record. Their example was followed by financial institutions and industrial corporations. The result was a flood of weighty reports, scholarly articles, and monographs, not to mention accounts by journalists, politicians and activists. Around the turn of the century, historians including Michael Burleigh, Ian Kershaw, Peter Longerich, Christopher Browning, Richard Evans and Saul Friedländer wove this new material into fresh narratives of Hitler’s life, the Third Reich, and the destruction of the Jews. They were outstanding works of synthesis and original insight. While several enjoyed healthy sales world-wide, others had little impact beyond the circle of aficionados.⁷

A number of TV documentaries distilled the new work, although the richness of the original research and some of its shocking implications remained locked away in detailed monographs. There were also several shorter histories that necessarily required analysis, generalization and the recital of bare facts, with the effect that something quintessentially bloody became metaphorically bloodless.⁸ Moreover, in his two-volume history of the persecution and extermination of the Jews, Saul Friedländer raised the bar for all historians tackling the subject. Friedländer set out to construct an ‘integrated history’ that encompassed the perspectives, actions and reactions of the Jews, those who tormented them, and those who observed the unfolding horrors either close-up or from a distance. By drawing on a multitude of contemporary sources he attempted to recover the contingency of events and the chaotic experience of Jews caught up in them, not knowing why things were happening or how they would end.⁹

This account too strives for an ‘integrated history’, but the focus is primarily and unapologetically on the Jews. It also sets out to challenge the traditional concepts and periodization that have until now framed constructions of The Holocaust.

The reappraisal begins with the term itself, a term that arguably is well past its sell-by date. This is not due to the politicization of the word and arguments over what it means, although these are certainly good enough reasons to retire it. To some historians the appellation connotes the Nazi persecution and mass murder of Jews and other victims of the lethal racial-biological policies implemented by the National Socialist regime. It is commonly taken to also embrace the deliberate mass death of over three million Red Army personnel taken prisoner of war in the wake of the German invasion of the USSR in 1941. Other historians point to the plans adumbrated by certain Nazi officials for the destruction or deliberate starvation of Polish and Russian populations to suggest that they were in part, and potentially in whole, victims of The Holocaust. Many Jewish historians insist that the term be limited to the Jewish victims of specifically anti-Semitic measures. In Israel the word Shoah is preferred because, as a Hebrew word, it automatically tends to refer to Jews only. In this respect it echoes the Yiddish terminology favoured by many survivor-historians immediately after 1945, such as ‘churban’, although they also made free use of the Yiddish equivalent of words such as catastrophe and destruction. However, Yiddish authors wrote unselfconsciously while those who use Shoah do so deliberately to denote a Jewish event. Since the word is both Judeocentric and embodied in the official Israeli memorial day Yom ha-Shoah, such usage is frequently taken to indicate a supposedly ‘Zionist’ version, in which Jew-hatred is ineradicable, genocide was inevitable, and the only security for Jews lies in statehood.¹⁰

This ideological dispute over meaning is not, however, the real problem. Rather, the ubiquity of a standardized version under the rubric of The Holocaust in popular culture and education has created a received wisdom about what it was. The expectations conjured up by the word are then often confirmed and reinforced by the rituals of commemoration.

In this standardized version, to which I have myself contributed, The Holocaust was the outcome of racist and anti-Semitic policies that were implemented in Germany by the Nazis and then imposed on countries they conquered or adopted by the allies they made. It unfolded in stages. First the Jews of Germany were subjected to discrimination and exclusion from 1933 to 1938. Persecution intended to encourage emigration intensified into forced migration from Germany and Austria in 1938–9. With the coming of war the German authorities began expelling Jews from the Greater Reich and areas they conquered. Throughout 1939–40 Jews in German-occupied Poland were concentrated in ghettos, forced to live under appalling conditions. The physical annihilation of Jewish communities began with the invasion of Russia in 1941, followed by the deportation of Jews from all over Europe to death camps in Poland from 1941 to 1944. It ended with death marches during the last months of Hitler’s Reich. Along the way, the Jews were demonized and dehumanized in propaganda and forced to resemble the reviled image of ‘the Jew’ in centuries-old stereotypes as well as more modern prejudicial representations.

It has become an article of faith that The Holocaust involved the systematic use of state power, modern bureaucratic methods, scientific thinking, and killing methods adapted from industrial production systems. For example, the website of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (of which I was a trustee for several years), responsible for overseeing the annual commemorative and educational activities in Britain around the 27 January anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, states that ‘Between 1941 and 1945, the Nazis attempted to annihilate all of Europe’s Jews. This systematic and planned attempt to murder European Jewry is known as the Holocaust.’ The interlocking set of assumptions inherent in the nomenclature is so potent that it is almost impossible to begin a historical work, a novel or a film bearing the label ‘Holocaust’ without anticipating how it will pan out, a phenomenon that Michael André Bernstein labelled ‘backshadowing’.¹¹

This reassessment challenges these widely accepted preconceptions. It starts by showing that the Nazi Party did not come to power because of anti-Semitism. Of course it was an anti-Semitic party, but it had few concrete ideas about what to do with the German Jews if it took office. During its first years in government, Judenpolitik – anti-Jewish policy and measures – was marked by improvisation and muddle. There is a paradox here. Adolf Hitler and the core of Nazi true-believers were convinced that ‘the Jews’ were the enemy within and that they were at war with ‘international Jewry’, yet the strength of this often adumbrated conviction did not express itself clearly or directly in practice. By contrast, Hitler was unwavering in the pursuit of his oft-stated goal to restore German power. Economic and social policy was determined by this objective as much as it guided diplomacy and the policy of rearmament. Even racial policy was so intertwined with Hitler’s belligerency that it is hard to say what came first: war and conquest to provide the basis for a healthy Volk or a healthy Volk capable of sustaining war and conquest? The key to understanding the paradox lies in the phantasm of the ‘Jewish enemy’. Hitler and his acolytes believed that to succeed they had to break the ‘power’ of the Jews in Germany and intimidate world Jewry. Sanctions against German Jews were not just intended to ruin them and drive them out of Germany, they were a threatening gesture to ‘international Jewry’. Once the Third Reich was actually at war, the Jews were perceived as both hostages and combatants. Hence diplomacy, military preparations, and waging war were functions of the struggle with Jewry. Policy was perpetually informed by the fantasy of the ‘Jewish enemy’ even if particular measures were not explicitly anti-Jewish.¹²

Unlike most previous narratives, this account contests whether Nazi anti-Jewish policy was systematic, consistent or even premeditated. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s historians argued whether Hitler always intended to destroy the Jews of Europe or whether the genocide emerged ‘bit by bit’ as a by-product of other processes. Whereas the one school argued that Nazi policy was driven by a Judeophobic obsession tempered by shrewd opportunism, the other maintained that anti-Jewish policy was sharpened by competition between competing elites and agencies in the Third Reich, a process of ‘cumulative radicalization’. In the 1990s a consensus developed that instated ideology and anti-Semitism at the heart of the Nazi project while acknowledging that in practice anti-Jewish policy might not develop in a linear fashion due to competing priorities from other sectors of society or the economy, institutional rivalries, and the perennial issue of feuding personalities. However, even this middle way – exemplified in the work of the German historian Peter Longerich – reads into Nazi policymaking a purposefulness that it lacked. While it is possible to locate programmatic statements from key players, particularly in the SS, there was no overall, centralized, coherent policy or practice until late 1938. While there may have been a broad anti-Semitic consensus within the Nazi movement and throughout the institutions of government, and even if policy tended in one direction towards ever-harsher measures, this does not mean that one thing led to another logically, necessarily, or even deliberately.¹³

History is replete with examples of unintended consequences and contingency. This is the ‘cock-up theory’ of history or the Cleopatra’s nose version. Could it be that what happened in the past was the result of chance occurrences, such as the seductive beauty of a queen? It may seem offensive to think about the Jewish fate in this way, but the alternative is to assume that events could not have had any other outcome – which has implications for how we regard the behaviour of the Germans, their accomplices, the Jews, and those who observed the dire situation. It also runs against the grain of what historians have revealed about the central mission of Hitler and the Third Reich: making war.

Recent work by military historians has exposed the Reich’s erratic preparations for war, the good fortune it enjoyed from 1938 to 1941, and the inadequacy of its response when the tide of war turned thereafter. New campaign studies demonstrate that German victories in 1940–1 were not the inevitable result of greater resources, industrial efficiency, superior arms, and better military leadership. The operational doctrine of the German army and its tactical accomplishments were more advanced than the forces it engaged and, in some areas, it enjoyed a technological edge. Overall, however, the German armed forces achieved decisive victories mainly thanks to the mistakes of their opponents. No one was more surprised by the speed and totality of the German triumph in France in 1940 than the Germans themselves.¹⁴

What has this to do with the fate of the Jews? Well, since war was Hitler’s overweening preoccupation and the raison d’être of the Nazi state, if we have to reconsider the inevitability of German military victories in 1939–42, then surely it is appropriate to re-examine the apparently inexorable progress of anti-Jewish policies.

The German way of warfare and the campaigns of the Second World War suggest more than a different way of thinking about the Third Reich. Until quite recently, historians of the war tended to ignore the fate of the Jews or at best included it as a subset of Nazi occupation policies. Conversely, Holocaust historians treated the war merely as the reason why more Jews fell under Nazi domination, while the prolonged fighting gave the Nazis more time to kill them and delayed the moment of liberation for the remnant. Typically, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 was the only point at which Holocaust historians deemed the course of the war to intersect with the unfolding of Nazi anti-Jewish policies. Since the earliest histories of the ‘Final Solution’ it has been held that Hitler invaded the USSR in order to obtain ‘living space’ and to destroy the Bolshevik regime that he conflated with the menace of ‘Jewish power’. Hence the mass murder of male Jews on Soviet territory was an integral part of the invasion plan, which soon escalated into the massacre of entire communities and, eventually, morphed into a European-wide programme of annihilation.¹⁵

Holocaust historians felt under little obligation to pay attention to the progress of arms on the German side because they believed that Nazi anti-Semitism and racial policy trumped military imperatives. They maintained that the slaughter of Jews in Poland and Russia deprived the Nazis of a valuable labour resource, while the use of trains to send Jews from the four corners of Europe to death camps in Poland diverted valuable rolling stock from the war effort. In fact, both these notions are incorrect. Although Jews did provide skills and labour in some places for a time, they were never indispensable and hardly contributed to essential aspects of the Nazi war machine. The Germans and their allies were desperately short of locomotives and rolling stock by 1941, but the number of special trains used to carry Jews was a minute proportion of the total volume of rail traffic and the army always had priority. The deportation of Jews was routinely stopped to ensure that supplies flowed to the front but no military action was ever suspended to ensure that the shipment of Jews to the gas chambers continued without interruption. When the shortage of labour in the Reich became acute, the Jews were perceived as a valuable resource. The Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944 partly to get their hands on Jewish labour; military exigencies drove anti-Jewish policy, not the other way round.¹⁶

This reappraisal will show that by ignoring the war, Holocaust historians have missed the single most important thing that determined the fate of the Jews – more important even than Hitler’s anti-Semitism. Hatred of the Jews was essential to his self-identity, but Hitler also saw himself as a warrior. He regarded the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 as the turning point in his life and he was shaped by his experience of the trenches. Germany’s defeat in 1918 so scarred him that in his messianic quest to restore Germany’s power he was fanatically committed to avoiding any repeat of the conditions that engendered the country’s collapse. These fixations guided his personal direction of the war, which became increasingly heavy handed from mid-1941 onwards.¹⁷

Since he blamed the Jews for Germany’s downfall, once the Fatherland was again at war Hitler presided over a regime that monitored Jewish activity closely, removed Jews from any function in society or the economy in which they could sabotage the war effort or poison morale, limited the resources they consumed, expelled them from German living space, and, when that was not possible, liquidated them. He made strategic and even tactical decisions in the light of how he believed the Jews were assaulting Germany. His global strategy, such as it was, cannot be disentangled from his world view. In effect he was fighting two wars at the same time, although in his warped perception they were actually the same.¹⁸

Hitler’s conduct of this dual war is not the only reason that military matters demand closer attention. Although his personal interventions were crucial, he did not shape Germany’s military traditions. Regardless of the Führer’s meddling, the German way of warfare had catastrophic implications for the Jews of Europe.

The strategic and operational doctrines that were developed in the era of Frederick the Great were passed from one generation of Prussian generals to another until they were encoded in the DNA of Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Germany was a medium-sized economic and military power, occupying an unfavourable geo-strategic location in the middle of Europe, surrounded by potential enemies but without easily defensible natural borders. Consequently, in the event of an inter-state conflict it was necessary to assemble a powerful army, concentrate it against the main enemy, and combine manoeuvre with overwhelming force to knock them out as quickly as possible. Campaigns had to be rapid and decisive because the country could not sustain large armies in the field for a long drawn-out conflict. To achieve the knock-out blow, the Prussian tradition dictated the encirclement and total destruction of the strongest enemy units. The general staff otherwise paid little attention to strategic issues. If the German armies were operationally successful, strategic issues would sort themselves out: there was simply no alternative to victory. If Germany failed to achieve a decisive outcome in the opening campaign it would have enemies on all sides that were better supplied and able to fight a war of attrition. This was what happened in 1914 when, indeed, the generals had no answer.¹⁹

Hitler and his martial advisers absorbed the lesson that there was no point holding back military assets if the country would be doomed in a long war, and that it was necessary to be absolutely ruthless in order to secure victory in the shortest possible time. But from the start of hostilities in 1939 they were confounded. Instead of isolating and fighting Poland, they found themselves confronted with a war on two fronts. Although it was relatively straightforward to defeat the Polish armies, in the west they faced two imperial powers with vastly greater resources. Hitler was lucky in his enemies, though, and more by luck than judgement scored an astonishing victory in the spring and summer of 1940. This success turned out to be an illusion. Britain, with her massive imperial hinterland, refused to surrender and Germany lacked the means to finish her off. Hitler proposed to solve his strategic dilemma by invading Russia, thereby denying Britain the hope of assistance from the last major land power on the continent. The German army then prepared for an assault modelled on the successful campaign in the west, popularly known as the ‘blitzkrieg’. Yet the conditions in western Europe conducive to that style of warfare simply did not obtain in eastern Europe. Furthermore, the planning by the German general staff was astonishingly slapdash. The result was a military disaster in the autumn and winter of 1941 that condemned Germany to a war it could never win.²⁰

The Jews paid the price for German military failure. The preferred solution to the ‘Jewish question’ from 1939 to 1941 was a combination of forced emigration and expulsion. As the Germans conquered one country after another they hoped to exploit their territories or possessions as a dumping ground for unwanted Jews: first a corner of occupied Poland, then French-controlled Madagascar, and finally the land beyond the Urals. After Operation Barbarossa foundered, the Siberian solution remained a mirage. Germany’s defeat in Russia in 1941 not only removed the option of ejecting millions of Jews from areas under German control, it had a domino effect across the continent. Plunging morale at home led the Nazi leaders to step up actions against the German Jews. Party bosses clamoured for Jews to be deported, freeing up apartments for bombed-out German families. To make room for ‘Reich Jews’ in ghettos in the east, local Nazi rulers prepared to massacre the Polish Jews packed within their confines. Jewish civilians in occupied Russia were perceived as a security threat from the inception of Operation Barbarossa, but as the military position worsened and German supply lines were plagued by Russian marauders Jews became prime targets for pacification operations. Finally, military failure created a resource crisis for the German army and the home front. There was not enough food for both the men under arms and the civilian population. The shortfall was met in part by depriving the populations in occupied Europe of food and fuel. Given Nazi racial predilections, the peoples of Poland and the USSR were condemned to the most drastic reductions in food supply; but the Jews were subjected to a policy that amounted to forced starvation.²¹

Hitler had repeatedly threatened that if Germany found itself in a world conflict, the Jews would be punished. With the German declaration of war on the United States on 11 December 1941, the war became global. Jews ceased to be hostages whose lives were held as a guarantee of American non-intervention; instead, they became culprits who deserved sanguinary retribution. Ultimately, the course of the war rather than decisions within the framework of anti-Jewish policy triggered the descent into a Europe-wide genocide.²²

The German way of war sheds light on the fate of the Jews in other important respects. Historians have long argued over the balance between decision-making at the centre of the Nazi regime and the actions of satraps at its periphery. Did the Führer initiate measures or react to prompts from his entourage? Did central agencies in Berlin formulate solutions to the ‘Jewish problem’ or did they respond to pressure from below? There has been a similar debate about the role of middle-level officials and experts. The stereotypical depiction of mindless drones obeying orders has been replaced by investigation into how much autonomy they had. Ian Kershaw has suggested that Hitler set broad policy goals through the expression of wishes and left it up to his subordinates to make them a reality. Since success was judged in terms of realizing the aspirations of the leader, at all levels of the regime personnel ‘worked towards’ the Führer. Moreover, individuals competed to devise the speediest, most thoroughgoing means to gratify the leadership.²³

The notion of ‘working towards the Führer’ resembles the German military doctrine of Auftragstaktik, according to which superior officers issued broad objectives to their subordinates and left it to them to use their initiative and familiarity with local conditions to fulfil the goal. It is hardly surprising that the ethos of Auftragstaktik pervaded the ranks of the Nazi Party and its agencies. Hitler was made by his time in the army. He surrounded himself with men who had years of military service under their belt. Younger Nazis who regretted missing out on the Great War adopted a martial approach to life and work. They rejected democratic processes and consensual decision-making in favour of charismatic leadership, individual toughness, goal-oriented conceptions, and decisive gestures. The men who framed and carried out anti-Jewish policy repeatedly followed this behaviour pattern. The Nazi system did not operate either by simple delegation or ‘working towards the Führer’; rather, it gave junior operatives scope for interpreting broad orders for the attainment of objectives in the light of operational and tactical conditions.²⁴

When SS officers commenced planning and implementing the genocidal assault on Europe’s Jews in the course of 1942, they did so using quasi-military concepts. The aim was to annihilate the Jews in one campaign by the application of overwhelming force. However, it was dogged by the same limitations that were simultaneously hampering the operations of the Wehrmacht: ambition was brought up short by lack of resources. Having failed to exterminate Europe’s Jews in ‘one blow’ they faced evasion, concealment and resistance. Apart from a few exceptional cases, Jews were never again to prove such an easy target. This reappraisal shows how during 1943 and 1944 the Germans fought their war against the Jews under the same exigencies that they fought the Allies: with overstretched manpower and unreliable allies, dependent on fanatical but erratic auxiliaries motivated by plunder rather than ideological convergence. Conversely, it pays greater heed to forms of Jewish self-defence, including flight, the construction of hiding places, camouflage (or ‘passing’ as an ‘Aryan’), and armed confrontations.

One of the major themes to emerge from research since the 1990s is the extent to which despoliation and economic exploitation underpinned the anti-Jewish policy of the Nazis, their allies and collaborators. For the Germans, the confiscation of Jewish wealth was an important supplementary source of funding for the voracious war economy. The expropriation of Jewish homes, furniture, furnishings, household articles and clothing supplied the needs of poor Germans and families whose own residences had been destroyed by bombing. State-run theft helped to pay for the construction of a more egalitarian society, albeit one that limited material benefits to the racially chosen. Later, it helped to stave off popular discontent and buy the complaisance of the Volk even when the war turned sour. However, by widening the circle of those who benefited from persecution and genocide, recent research has called into question the notion of ‘bystanders’ as passive onlookers whose culpability was limited to a sin of omission.²⁵

The distribution of loot amongst Germany’s collaborators strengthened their attachment to the Third Reich. By encouraging local populations to plunder their Jewish neighbours, the Germans inveigled them into complicity with persecution and genocide. Throughout occupied Europe, the Germans succeeded in transforming the Jews into ‘fair game’. By putting a price on the head of Jewish fugitives and creating opportunities for exploiting those in hiding, they transmuted Jews into commodities, an economic resource to be exploited by populations living in straitened, uncertain times. Greed not anti-Semitism motivated many people to align themselves with the German occupiers. Jew-hatred became as much a justification for despoliation as a motive. Those who enriched themselves at the cost of the Jews became committed to an anti-Jewish stance regardless of their previous intentions or feelings about Jewish people. The steady intensification of anti-Jewish feeling during the war was undoubtedly a product of German propaganda, but it was also a consequence of German-orchestrated plunder. Fear of restitution played a role in the hostility directed at Jewish survivors by people liberated from German rule while in possession of purloined Jewish property. Inverting the traditional narratives that begin with the origins of modern anti-Semitism, this one suggests that avarice engendered prejudice. Looking for the roots of Jew-hatred in religious traditions, culture and ideology overlooks the most powerful and rapid device for generating antipathy: the guilty feelings that accompany ill-gotten gains.²⁶

Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the latest research is the light it throws on the rape of Jewish women and the sexual exploitation of Jews in ghettos and camps, in hiding and on the run. Early reports by survivors tended to be quite frank about sexual relationships and abuse. As time passed, however, this facet of Jewish life under the Nazis became veiled in silence. Eventually researchers stopped even looking for or asking about it. A myth developed according to which Nazi doctrines of racial hygiene, the ban on sexual contacts between Jews and Aryans, had actually forestalled the mass rape of Jewish women. Now, thanks to a new generation of women historians, greater interest in immediate post-war testimony, and increased awareness of rape in wartime, that reticence has been put aside. Innovative research shows that German racial inhibitions were patchy at best and, in any case, did not extend to Germany’s allies in the field. And sometimes Jews preyed upon Jews. Sex, however, was not always violent and forced. It may appear to be in the worst possible taste to dwell on sexuality during a genocide, but consensual sexual relations offered comfort and escapism. Many diarists remark on their own love affairs or observe the frenzied coupling of others, in the bleakest circumstances. As this account will show, as long as life went on so did love and lust.²⁷

In order to avoid lengthy digressions I have dispensed with discussions of what previous historians wrote and why they were either pioneers or erroneous. However, readers can use the endnotes to locate my sources and I have indicated where there are significant divergences between these interpretations and my own. I have also limited the exegesis of Nazi decision-making, summarizing what seems to be the historical consensus as to why the Jews suffered as they did at the hands of others. The source material and secondary literature is international and vast, but for the sake of manageability and ease of access I have restricted my references mainly to English-language texts.

This book deals with the fate of the Jews, not of ‘other victims’ of Nazi political repression and racial-biological policies. Several other groups endured social exclusion, incarceration in concentration camps, and mass murder. However, the rationale for the persecution of these groups differed radically from the intentions that underlay anti-Jewish policy. Even though homosexual men and women, Germans of African descent, and the severely mentally and physically disabled were all disparaged in Nazi racial thinking, and depicted as a threat to the strength and purity of the Volk, only the Jews were characterized as an implacable, powerful, global enemy that had to be fought at every turn and finally eliminated. When Hitler reiterated his determination to avert a collapse similar to that which brought down Germany in 1918, he referred to the danger posed by Jews rather than any other element of society.²⁸

What follows is a chronological narrative and apart from sections where I analyse particular questions or themes, the analysis is implicit in the structure. I have tried to give the reader a sense of the contingent and chaotic course of what we know as history, but what was experienced at the time as a bewildering present and an uncertain future. In order to capture this sensation, I have drawn on letters, diaries, reports and documents from the time. I have used post-war testimony sparingly and, as far as possible, used statements composed not too long after the events they describe.

Finally, a word about periodization. The story begins conventionally enough in 1933, with a glance back to Hitler’s career and the antecedents of the Third Reich. But it concludes with a brief epilogue covering the years 1945 to 1949. I have chosen to end in this way rather than to offer readers the customary coda hinging on the liberation of the camps and the end of the war in Europe on 8 May 1945 because this is not how Jews saw the diminution of their travails. Thousands of Jews were freed from Nazi domination nearly a year before the war ended; amongst them were the first to chronicle the catastrophe and to collect records concerning the fate of the Jews, without knowing how or when the war would end. Thousands of Jews who were released from Nazi captivity once Germany was defeated did not enjoy complete freedom for months or years afterwards. Instead, they were penned into camps for ‘Displaced Persons’. Jews continued to die of wounds, disease and malnutrition in huge numbers for weeks after their murderous Nazi guards were removed. Thousands more who attempted to reach Palestine ran into the Royal Navy blockade mounted to prevent Jews entering the territory, which was administered by Britain under a mandate from the League of Nations. They ended up behind barbed wire in detention camps at Athlit, near Haifa, and on Cyprus. In 1947 the British were holding more Jews behind barbed wire than the Germans had been in 1937.

For the Jews, as against the Allied armies and the peoples of Europe liberated from Nazi rule, the end of the war did not mark an end to death or suffering. To the mass of survivors in refugee camps, 8 May 1945 heralded the opening of a liminal period during which they began the task of rebuilding their lives and reconstructing their communities without any certainty about where they would ultimately be able to settle. Jewish citizens who were fortunate to emerge into freedom in their own countries faced an uphill battle to recover their rights, property, assets, and even children, who had been placed with Christian families or handed into the custody of convent schools. The struggle for restitution and reparation was carried forward alongside efforts to achieve justice against the Nazi criminals and their collaborators. Yet political circumstances were frequently uncongenial to a full or adequate judicial reckoning. In this sense The Holocaust did not end when the guns fell silent. The neat conclusion implied by the term is as much in need of reappraisal as the implied uniformity of experience that its promiscuous use confers on the fate of the Jews.²⁹