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that no one spelled out the final means to reach the Final Solution. Still,
Browning proves that when Heidrich, in November 1941, invited the par–
ticipants to the Wannsee Conference which took place in January 1942 to
coordinate the actual plans, he sent along a copy of Goring's July 31st
authorization.
Mayer, however, contends that the anti-Jewish furor was closely re–
lated to the war, and that it intensified after the race to Moscow that fall
(called operation "Barbarossa" and based on the expansionist, millennial ide–
ology of the Third Reich) miscarried in December 1941. And he holds that
"the Nazi fanatics fastened upon the Jews as the most reachable and vulner–
able incarnation of'Judeo-bolshevism'
after
their first major defeat. Had the
course of the war turned in favor of the Germans, I wonder, would they
then have stopped the systematic starvation ofJews, the forced labor, and
the process of extermination? Or, as Mayer infers, would they have desisted
and arranged for transportation to Madagascar if the French had agreed to
give up this colony for the resettlement of the Jews? These are just a few of
the many moot questions. But even if fewer Jews had been exterminated,
Hitler's and the other Nazi leader's obsession with ridding the world of all
Jews would not have let up, as Mayer shows by concluding his book with
Hitler's last ravings against the Jews. Thus Mayer seems to contradict his
own central argument - that Hitler primarily was fighting Bolshevism and
that the Jews were the "all-purpose scapegoats ... the victims of the venge–
ful
fury
generated in the course of a monstrous and disastrous 'holy war'."
Both Mayer's and Furet's books are based on solid, historical research.
But the breakdown of killings into tens or hundreds of thousands - by star–
vation, shooting, cremation, gassing, and on the various war fronts - points to
the dehumanizing elements pervasive in
all
of Holocaust history. Of course,
this is how objective history must be written. But it leaves out the distress,
the agonies each of these millions must have experienced and which the
survivors continue to live with. My mother, for instance, who barely
managed to catch the last boat leaving Italy for America in 1940, waited
until last year to show me three unopened letters she had sent to her mother
who was still in Vienna, in November and December 1941: the handwriting
on the back of the first one said "Return to Sender.
Nach Polen abgereist."
On
the others, a similar message already was stamped.
Questions of the German population's "guilt," of course, must remain
speculative. Still,
ho~
could the postal employees in the Third Reich not
wonder where all these Jews without forwarding addresses had travelled to?
How much did the railway employees (who directed regular as well as
special trains) really know? Were they suspicious when they saw so many
miserable people in cattle cars as they passed them to be loaded under the
noses ofSS guards carrying guns and sticks?
