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interconnections and fusions ofanticommunism with anti-Semitism from
Mein
Kampf
to 1945; he subordinates the Nazis' mounting persecution of the Jews
to their increasing frustration at losing the war to the hated Bolsheviks; and
he perceives "the mass slaughter of the Jews ... as an integral part of an
enormous historical convulsion, [as] the foremost but by no means the only
victims ... [of] the ultimate horror and atrocity in an exceptionally violent
and savage half century." To be more precise, Mayer postulates the period
from 1914 to 1945 as a thirty-year war, similar to the Thirty Years War of
the seventeenth century. Then too, maintains Mayer, civil and political soci–
ety, intellectual and cultural life were in crisis, and religion contributed to the
singular destructiveness and ferocity of that war. By recounting that at that
time about a million men died in battle or from battle wounds and eight million
from famine, and that this was a larger percentage of the population than
succumbed to the Nazis' fanaticism against "Judeo-Bolshevism," he manages
to relativize Hitler's genocide of the Jews, which many consider a unique
event.
According to Mayer, the Nazis' "anti-Semitism was one of several
central creeds of an essentially syncretic ideology, the others being social
Darwinism, the geopolitics of eastern expansionism and anti-Marxism." Anti–
Semitism became ever more ferocious, he argues, with the progression of the
war against the Soviet Union, when with the conquest of Poland, and later of
Soviet territories, more and more Jews carne under German control, most of
them unassimilated, unacculturated, and poor. Mayer supplies the gruesome
facts and statistics (although in less detail than Raul Hilberg in
Unanswered
Questions)
about the roundups, the transports, and the various types of
deaths in the extermination camps. But Mayer's thesis will hold or fall on
some of these "details," such as, for instance, the date of the order to exter–
minate the Jews.
The decision concerning the Final Solution, states Christopher Browning
in
Unanswered Questions,
is a matter of probability rather than certainty:
there are no written records, and Hitler, Himmler, and Heidrich
all
died.
One can only extrapolate from events, documents and testimony by people
who were not central. Browning demonstrates (by means of documents and
testimony) that Hitler's virulent anti-Semitism did not include plans for the
Final Solution until 1941, that there were a series of decisions taken during
that year - in the spring to murder the Russian Jews who would fall into
German hands during the coming invasion and in the summer to extend the
killing process to all European Jews. He refers to documents of October
1941, to meetings of euthanasia experts with Eichmann and Heidrich,
which go into the difficulties of
rail
transportation to Siberia, into the impend–
ing death of millions of people through starvation. He documents the Nazis'
pervasive attempts to keep these plans secret - which contributed to the fact
