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The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945
Trade paperback. Gerald Reitlinger. A Perpetua Book; no. 4021. The Third Reich and the Final Solution.
622 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1961
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December 12, 2025
AN EXCELLENT HISTORIAL RECOUNTING/COMMENTARY ON THE HOLOCAUST
Historian Gerald Reitlinger wrote in the first chapter of this 1953 book, “‘The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem’ was a code-name for Hitler’s plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe. It was used by German officials after the summer of 1941 in order to avoid the necessity of admitting to each other that such plans existed, but previously the expression had been used quite loosely in varying contexts, the underlying suggestion always being emigration. It is probable but by no means certain that the choice of terms had been in the first place Adolf Hitler’s… A glance at Hitler’s writings and speeches shows that there were TWO Jewish problems… Firstly there was ‘the conspiracy of World Jewry,’ by which Hitler meant the power of Jewish-led international finance to do Germany harm… Secondly, there was ‘sub-human Jewry,’ the proletarian Jewish masses… which had contaminated German blood and would still do so, unless checked.” (Pg. 3)
He explains, “I have purposely avoided the word ‘Genocide,’ which was coined at the International Nuremberg Trial of 1945-6 and used by the prosecution throughout the subsequent Nuremberg trials. I consider that this hybrid combination of a Greek and a Latin word is no asset to the English language as it says nothing which cannot be conveyed by plain speech.” (Pg. 8)
He asks, “Is one really to believe that Hitler would have financed Jewish emigration during the war merely to honor the Schacht loan or that the Allies would have accepted Jews from the Reich throughout the wartime blockade? And even if the Allies accepted some 300,000 Jews, who were under Hitler’s rule in January 1939, what of the subsequently occupied territories where over four million perished?” (Pg. 21)
He suggests, “The part of the Führer Order concerning the execution of Jews was at any rate never put on paper and even those to whom it was passed were not all informed at the same time… [Two] extermination camp commanders… were briefed in the same month in the course of a lecture, given by Heydrich to a select audience… But another of these commanders… only learnt of this part of the Führer Order when serving in Russia … at which time massacres of Jews had already begun on all sectors of the front.” (Pg. 81-82)
He notes, “the sterilization-certificate holders were not molested… [but] the sterilizations were mostly a fraud. The stamped cards, that freed the owners from wearing the Jewish badge, had for the most part been sold them by Gestapo agents. This… throws some light on Hitler’s complete failure to eradicate Jewish blood by extending the Final Solution to the partners of mixed marriage and their children. Even at the end of the war… it was only possible to deport a few thousand Jews in mixed marriages and those, too, under privileged conditions. Had Germany won the war, the climate would have been still more unfavorable for extending the Final Solution. This, like the euthanasia program for the insane and incurable, was one of Hitler’s defeats.” (Pg. 179)
About ‘resettlement in the East,’ he notes, “There was a very large exemption list, which included Jews with valid employment certificates, Jews municipally employed not only by the Jewish Council but also by the welfare associations, besides Jews who could not be moved from hospital. The extent of the exemptions anaesthetized the will to resist, for the individual strove to acquire and keep his protective scrap of paper as if it had some permanent value.” (Pg. 260)
He observes, “The Final Solution, which was applied so successfully in Central and Eastern Europe, failed in France because of the sense of decency in the common man, who, having suffered the utmost depths of self-humiliation, learnt to conquer fear.” (Pg. 328)
Of the role of Pope Pius XII, he observes, “An open protest would have stimulated the SS... Pius XII never renounced the 1933 concordat with Hitler and ... denounced the National-Socialist system only after the surrender of Germany. In the view of the present author, this failure to notice that Jews were being herded to their death… proceeded … from plain fear. On September 10th Rudolf Rahn, the Ambassador … had to fly to Berlin to stop Hitler from occupying the Vatican City. For many months Hitler was free to do this and thereby destroy the immense strength of the Pope’s diplomatic immunity.” (Pg. 353)
He reports, “The famine-stricken exodus from Buchenwald when the Americans arrived, the cartloads of unburied corpses… were far surpassed by what the British troops found at Belsen… it may well have been the deliberate work of a single man… Captain Moes had charge of all matters pertaining to the ‘exchange Jews.’ … Moes would not remove these Jews in order to make more room… because the typhus epidemic made movement impossible.” (Pg. 465)
He observes, “For the Jewish displaced persons in 1945-48 the lesson to be learnt was the one that had confronted the Warsaw Ghetto survivors early in in 1943. The future could no longer be awaited with the ancient resignation of the East. Only through a new use of privation and a new use of loyalty would existence be endured at all. In the trials of a newly-created nation and not in the up-to-date installation at Birkenau lay the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem.” (Pg. 482)
He notes, “It is difficult to believe that there existed any fully conscious beings in Germany or German-occupied Europe in the last two years of the war who did not know that most of the Jews had disappeared and who had not heard some story they had been shot or gassed. Nor do I suppose that there was anybody who did not have a friend who knew somebody else who had seen a massacre. More than a hundred million people must have known such things and whispered about them, and yet they could not make the climate unpleasant for the few thousands who carried them out. That, however, need surprise no one. It is as easy for a hundred million persons to be frightened of a secret police force as it is for one.” (Pg. 483-484)
Of those who carried out the Final Solution, he suggests, “They were, it is probable, mostly no more cruel and callous than the German or, indeed, the human race as a whole; but they were a great deal more frightened and a great deal more lacking in artifice. Cruelty and unreason were implicit in the system that had brought them employment and advancement, and to both they had to do lip-service. After they had occupied their desks for some years, they had to invent a mumbo-jumbo language about biological material, inferior strains of blood, ‘asocial’ and ‘unlaborworthy’ types, and so forth---to hide from themselves what they were doing.” (Pg. 485-486)
He concludes, “This, alas, is a book of much evidence and few summations; a book of facts, from which as yet little conclusion can be drawn. But these facts, so far as they can be pieced together, provide analogies that may be of value at the present day. For, while we live in a world where police States abound, these police States do not leave their office correspondence lying about. But here was a police State on the vastest scale, which left documents by the hundred ton and key witnesses by the thousand.” (Pg. 488)
This book will be of great interest to those studying the Holocaust.
Historian Gerald Reitlinger wrote in the first chapter of this 1953 book, “‘The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem’ was a code-name for Hitler’s plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe. It was used by German officials after the summer of 1941 in order to avoid the necessity of admitting to each other that such plans existed, but previously the expression had been used quite loosely in varying contexts, the underlying suggestion always being emigration. It is probable but by no means certain that the choice of terms had been in the first place Adolf Hitler’s… A glance at Hitler’s writings and speeches shows that there were TWO Jewish problems… Firstly there was ‘the conspiracy of World Jewry,’ by which Hitler meant the power of Jewish-led international finance to do Germany harm… Secondly, there was ‘sub-human Jewry,’ the proletarian Jewish masses… which had contaminated German blood and would still do so, unless checked.” (Pg. 3)
He explains, “I have purposely avoided the word ‘Genocide,’ which was coined at the International Nuremberg Trial of 1945-6 and used by the prosecution throughout the subsequent Nuremberg trials. I consider that this hybrid combination of a Greek and a Latin word is no asset to the English language as it says nothing which cannot be conveyed by plain speech.” (Pg. 8)
He asks, “Is one really to believe that Hitler would have financed Jewish emigration during the war merely to honor the Schacht loan or that the Allies would have accepted Jews from the Reich throughout the wartime blockade? And even if the Allies accepted some 300,000 Jews, who were under Hitler’s rule in January 1939, what of the subsequently occupied territories where over four million perished?” (Pg. 21)
He suggests, “The part of the Führer Order concerning the execution of Jews was at any rate never put on paper and even those to whom it was passed were not all informed at the same time… [Two] extermination camp commanders… were briefed in the same month in the course of a lecture, given by Heydrich to a select audience… But another of these commanders… only learnt of this part of the Führer Order when serving in Russia … at which time massacres of Jews had already begun on all sectors of the front.” (Pg. 81-82)
He notes, “the sterilization-certificate holders were not molested… [but] the sterilizations were mostly a fraud. The stamped cards, that freed the owners from wearing the Jewish badge, had for the most part been sold them by Gestapo agents. This… throws some light on Hitler’s complete failure to eradicate Jewish blood by extending the Final Solution to the partners of mixed marriage and their children. Even at the end of the war… it was only possible to deport a few thousand Jews in mixed marriages and those, too, under privileged conditions. Had Germany won the war, the climate would have been still more unfavorable for extending the Final Solution. This, like the euthanasia program for the insane and incurable, was one of Hitler’s defeats.” (Pg. 179)
About ‘resettlement in the East,’ he notes, “There was a very large exemption list, which included Jews with valid employment certificates, Jews municipally employed not only by the Jewish Council but also by the welfare associations, besides Jews who could not be moved from hospital. The extent of the exemptions anaesthetized the will to resist, for the individual strove to acquire and keep his protective scrap of paper as if it had some permanent value.” (Pg. 260)
He observes, “The Final Solution, which was applied so successfully in Central and Eastern Europe, failed in France because of the sense of decency in the common man, who, having suffered the utmost depths of self-humiliation, learnt to conquer fear.” (Pg. 328)
Of the role of Pope Pius XII, he observes, “An open protest would have stimulated the SS... Pius XII never renounced the 1933 concordat with Hitler and ... denounced the National-Socialist system only after the surrender of Germany. In the view of the present author, this failure to notice that Jews were being herded to their death… proceeded … from plain fear. On September 10th Rudolf Rahn, the Ambassador … had to fly to Berlin to stop Hitler from occupying the Vatican City. For many months Hitler was free to do this and thereby destroy the immense strength of the Pope’s diplomatic immunity.” (Pg. 353)
He reports, “The famine-stricken exodus from Buchenwald when the Americans arrived, the cartloads of unburied corpses… were far surpassed by what the British troops found at Belsen… it may well have been the deliberate work of a single man… Captain Moes had charge of all matters pertaining to the ‘exchange Jews.’ … Moes would not remove these Jews in order to make more room… because the typhus epidemic made movement impossible.” (Pg. 465)
He observes, “For the Jewish displaced persons in 1945-48 the lesson to be learnt was the one that had confronted the Warsaw Ghetto survivors early in in 1943. The future could no longer be awaited with the ancient resignation of the East. Only through a new use of privation and a new use of loyalty would existence be endured at all. In the trials of a newly-created nation and not in the up-to-date installation at Birkenau lay the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem.” (Pg. 482)
He notes, “It is difficult to believe that there existed any fully conscious beings in Germany or German-occupied Europe in the last two years of the war who did not know that most of the Jews had disappeared and who had not heard some story they had been shot or gassed. Nor do I suppose that there was anybody who did not have a friend who knew somebody else who had seen a massacre. More than a hundred million people must have known such things and whispered about them, and yet they could not make the climate unpleasant for the few thousands who carried them out. That, however, need surprise no one. It is as easy for a hundred million persons to be frightened of a secret police force as it is for one.” (Pg. 483-484)
Of those who carried out the Final Solution, he suggests, “They were, it is probable, mostly no more cruel and callous than the German or, indeed, the human race as a whole; but they were a great deal more frightened and a great deal more lacking in artifice. Cruelty and unreason were implicit in the system that had brought them employment and advancement, and to both they had to do lip-service. After they had occupied their desks for some years, they had to invent a mumbo-jumbo language about biological material, inferior strains of blood, ‘asocial’ and ‘unlaborworthy’ types, and so forth---to hide from themselves what they were doing.” (Pg. 485-486)
He concludes, “This, alas, is a book of much evidence and few summations; a book of facts, from which as yet little conclusion can be drawn. But these facts, so far as they can be pieced together, provide analogies that may be of value at the present day. For, while we live in a world where police States abound, these police States do not leave their office correspondence lying about. But here was a police State on the vastest scale, which left documents by the hundred ton and key witnesses by the thousand.” (Pg. 488)
This book will be of great interest to those studying the Holocaust.
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