What do you think?
Rate this book
The Holocaust in History
Discusses Hitler's anti-Semitism, collaborationist governments, public opinion in Nazi Europe, death camp victims, the Jewish resistance, and the liberation of concentration camps
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
3 people are currently reading
189 people want to read
About the author
Michael R. Marrus
45 books5 followersMichael Robert Marrus, CM FRSC is a Canadian historian of France, the Holocaust and Jewish history. He was born in Toronto and received his BA at the University of Toronto in 1963 and his MA and PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964 and 1968. He is a Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto.
Marrus is an expert on the history of French Jewry and anti-semitism. He co-wrote with Robert Paxton a book on Vichy France that shows that the anti-semitism of Vichy was not imposed by the Germans, that at times Vichy was more brutal towards the French Jews than the Germans and the French state played a leading and indispensable role in organizing the deportation of Jews to death camps. Furthermore, Marrus and Paxton argued that Vichy was more brutal than other European states occupied by the Germans.
Marrus's book the Holocaust in History is a well-regarded historiographical survey. Marrus wants the Holocaust to be seen as tragedy for humanity, not just Jews. In his book, Marrus was able to offer a synthesis such as the Functionalist vs Intentionalist views of the origins of the Holocaust.
In 2001, after failing to gain access to the Vatican archives from the period after 1923, the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission disbanded amid controversy. Unsatisfied with the findings, Marrus said the commission "ran up against a brick wall.... It would have been really helpful to have had support from the Holy See on this issue."
Professor Michael Marrus was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2008.
Marrus married Randi Greenstein in 1971 and has three children.
~from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_...
Marrus is an expert on the history of French Jewry and anti-semitism. He co-wrote with Robert Paxton a book on Vichy France that shows that the anti-semitism of Vichy was not imposed by the Germans, that at times Vichy was more brutal towards the French Jews than the Germans and the French state played a leading and indispensable role in organizing the deportation of Jews to death camps. Furthermore, Marrus and Paxton argued that Vichy was more brutal than other European states occupied by the Germans.
Marrus's book the Holocaust in History is a well-regarded historiographical survey. Marrus wants the Holocaust to be seen as tragedy for humanity, not just Jews. In his book, Marrus was able to offer a synthesis such as the Functionalist vs Intentionalist views of the origins of the Holocaust.
In 2001, after failing to gain access to the Vatican archives from the period after 1923, the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission disbanded amid controversy. Unsatisfied with the findings, Marrus said the commission "ran up against a brick wall.... It would have been really helpful to have had support from the Holy See on this issue."
Professor Michael Marrus was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2008.
Marrus married Randi Greenstein in 1971 and has three children.
~from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 11, 2014
This was a reread, or really, a re-skim, to remind myself of a few facts. I do recommend this short book as a great introduction to the subject. It covers a lot of crucial aspects. I will mention a few here.
1. The Uniqueness of the Holocaust.
You will know that there is a tendency nowadays to say that the Holocaust is comparable to other genocidal events, like the Rwanda massacres, and other mass killings which were not genocidal, like the Khmer Rouge's killing orgy 1975-77. The uniqueness proposed for the Holocaust is problematic. Sometimes to say the Holocaust is unique is a theological or a political statement, rather than a historical statement. There is a Jewish exclusivity in some historians which is dangerous, as millions of gentiles died too.
But if uniqueness = unprecedented then historians can frame an answer. Marrus examines in detail the Armenian genocide by the Turkish government. He mentions that Armenians continued to live in Istanbul throughout the period, and at the end of it 140,000 Armenians were still living in Turkey, one tenth of the original population. The genocide lacked the totality of the Nazis and the ambition to exterminate every last Jew. In this respect the Jews’ fate was unique – the Holocaust included the old, the sick, women, babies. The Wannsee conference listed even the smallest Jewish communities, in Ireland and Albania (the SS carefully noted the existence of 200 Albanian Jews who were eventually to be rounded up and sent to the ovens)
2. The Final Solution: the Straight Path or the Twisted Road.
There is huge division amongst historians: the intentionalists say it was always Hitler’s and others’ intention to physically liquidate the Jews; and the functionalists, who say the Final Solution arose bit by bit, in response to changing situations on the ground. The intentionalists' problem is that they have to rely on Hitler’s paranoid rhetoric in speeches and in Mein Kampf.
Hitler’s speech on 20 January 1939 to the Reichstag:
If the international Jewish financiers outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of the Jews, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
But historians can find no actual planning of the genocide before 1941.
Functionalists, however, present
a picture of the Third Reich as a maze of competing power groups, rival bureaucracies, forceful personalities and diametrically opposed interests engaged in ceaseless clashes with each other. They see Hitler as a brooding and sometimes distant leader, who intervened only spasmodically, sending orders crashing through the system like bolts of lightning.
(I think that is a brilliant description of the Third Reich.)
Was Hitler capable of long term planning on this or any other matter?
The functionalists therefore say that the SS in the famous 1942 Wannsee conference take over a process which has already broken out in occupied Soviet areas. These historians ask why the Final Solution had to wait until 1942 to get going. Their answer is that
competing Nazi agencies put forward one proposal after the next, proposals that continually shattered against practical obstacles.
For instance, getting rid of the Jews by shipping the whole lot of them off to Madagascar! This was seriously considered at one point.
There is general agreement that the decision on the Final Solution was taken between March and Autumn 1941. What finally precipitated the decision, however, is likely to remain a mystery says Marrus.
The functionalists ask the question: what accounts for the widespread elimination of inhibitions to mass murder? They find antisemitic indoctrination plainly insufficient. They say:
- There was an extensive division of labour associated with the entire process which helped perpetrators diffuse their own responsibility.
- The perpetrators themselves had no special characteristics; the essential element was the structure into which they fit. (and see Christopher Browning's brilliant book Ordinary Men for harrowing confirmation of this.)
- They thought of themselves as merely skilled technicians and often seemed genuinely surprised when, years later, they were branded as accomplices to mass murder.
- The process began with euthanasia of the physically and mentally handicapped.
3. Hitler's Collaborators
There is a very useful chapter surveying the degree of collaboration, and many surprising things are discovered.
- French resistance or no, Marrus says the French collaborated to "a high degree".
- In Denmark and Italy the governments were able to put significant legal obstacles in the way of anti-Jewish policies. The Danes smuggled 800 Jews to Sweden.
- Croatia and Romania on the other hand were especially antisemitic
- but Romania spared its own Jewish population.
- and Bulgaria is unique – there were more Jews alive there after the war than before.
- The tragedy of Hungary is hard to contemplate - there the Jews were not deported, and it looked like they would survive, until the Nazis invaded in March 1944.
4.Bystanders.
Almost everyone who lived through the period of the Holocaust, observing it from either near or far, will readily testify that information concerning the Nazi murder of the Jews, when it first came out, seemed absolutely unbelievable – impossible (Jacob Katz).
To some, news of the Holocaust was everywhere; to others, the truth remained hidden until after the war. By early 42 reports regularly reached England about widespread massacres in Poland and the USSR, but the presence of such information does not mean that it was known.
Judge at Nuremburg:
One reads these accounts again and again – and yet remains the instinct to disbelieve, to question, to doubt. (Of course, this tendency is still with us, and fuels the deniers'poisonous propaganda.) Martin Gilbert argues that until the escape of 4 Jews in mid-44 Auschwitz remained successfully hidden.
Finally : 17 December 1942: a formal declaration by 12 national governments simultaneously declared in Washington, Moscow and London refers to "Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe", a goal that the German authorities "are now carrying into effect". It could hardly have been clearer, yet from then on the story is full of occasions when people either forgot or rejected what they once knew or showed signs of not having absorbed fully what the declaration clearly stated. Even in Palestine, the Jewish community of 500,000 showed a reluctance to believe and a slowness to grasp – amazingly, since the 500,000 were 80% Eastern European.
In January 1945 Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army. In May 45 a report on the camp was issued by the Soviets. The report did not contain the word Jew.
*
For anyone wanting a really good introduction to a complex subject, and doesn't want to read one of the 800 page monsters like Leni Yahil or Martin Gilbert, look no further.
1. The Uniqueness of the Holocaust.
You will know that there is a tendency nowadays to say that the Holocaust is comparable to other genocidal events, like the Rwanda massacres, and other mass killings which were not genocidal, like the Khmer Rouge's killing orgy 1975-77. The uniqueness proposed for the Holocaust is problematic. Sometimes to say the Holocaust is unique is a theological or a political statement, rather than a historical statement. There is a Jewish exclusivity in some historians which is dangerous, as millions of gentiles died too.
But if uniqueness = unprecedented then historians can frame an answer. Marrus examines in detail the Armenian genocide by the Turkish government. He mentions that Armenians continued to live in Istanbul throughout the period, and at the end of it 140,000 Armenians were still living in Turkey, one tenth of the original population. The genocide lacked the totality of the Nazis and the ambition to exterminate every last Jew. In this respect the Jews’ fate was unique – the Holocaust included the old, the sick, women, babies. The Wannsee conference listed even the smallest Jewish communities, in Ireland and Albania (the SS carefully noted the existence of 200 Albanian Jews who were eventually to be rounded up and sent to the ovens)
2. The Final Solution: the Straight Path or the Twisted Road.
There is huge division amongst historians: the intentionalists say it was always Hitler’s and others’ intention to physically liquidate the Jews; and the functionalists, who say the Final Solution arose bit by bit, in response to changing situations on the ground. The intentionalists' problem is that they have to rely on Hitler’s paranoid rhetoric in speeches and in Mein Kampf.
Hitler’s speech on 20 January 1939 to the Reichstag:
If the international Jewish financiers outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of the Jews, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
But historians can find no actual planning of the genocide before 1941.
Functionalists, however, present
a picture of the Third Reich as a maze of competing power groups, rival bureaucracies, forceful personalities and diametrically opposed interests engaged in ceaseless clashes with each other. They see Hitler as a brooding and sometimes distant leader, who intervened only spasmodically, sending orders crashing through the system like bolts of lightning.
(I think that is a brilliant description of the Third Reich.)
Was Hitler capable of long term planning on this or any other matter?
The functionalists therefore say that the SS in the famous 1942 Wannsee conference take over a process which has already broken out in occupied Soviet areas. These historians ask why the Final Solution had to wait until 1942 to get going. Their answer is that
competing Nazi agencies put forward one proposal after the next, proposals that continually shattered against practical obstacles.
For instance, getting rid of the Jews by shipping the whole lot of them off to Madagascar! This was seriously considered at one point.
There is general agreement that the decision on the Final Solution was taken between March and Autumn 1941. What finally precipitated the decision, however, is likely to remain a mystery says Marrus.
The functionalists ask the question: what accounts for the widespread elimination of inhibitions to mass murder? They find antisemitic indoctrination plainly insufficient. They say:
- There was an extensive division of labour associated with the entire process which helped perpetrators diffuse their own responsibility.
- The perpetrators themselves had no special characteristics; the essential element was the structure into which they fit. (and see Christopher Browning's brilliant book Ordinary Men for harrowing confirmation of this.)
- They thought of themselves as merely skilled technicians and often seemed genuinely surprised when, years later, they were branded as accomplices to mass murder.
- The process began with euthanasia of the physically and mentally handicapped.
3. Hitler's Collaborators
There is a very useful chapter surveying the degree of collaboration, and many surprising things are discovered.
- French resistance or no, Marrus says the French collaborated to "a high degree".
- In Denmark and Italy the governments were able to put significant legal obstacles in the way of anti-Jewish policies. The Danes smuggled 800 Jews to Sweden.
- Croatia and Romania on the other hand were especially antisemitic
- but Romania spared its own Jewish population.
- and Bulgaria is unique – there were more Jews alive there after the war than before.
- The tragedy of Hungary is hard to contemplate - there the Jews were not deported, and it looked like they would survive, until the Nazis invaded in March 1944.
4.Bystanders.
Almost everyone who lived through the period of the Holocaust, observing it from either near or far, will readily testify that information concerning the Nazi murder of the Jews, when it first came out, seemed absolutely unbelievable – impossible (Jacob Katz).
To some, news of the Holocaust was everywhere; to others, the truth remained hidden until after the war. By early 42 reports regularly reached England about widespread massacres in Poland and the USSR, but the presence of such information does not mean that it was known.
Judge at Nuremburg:
One reads these accounts again and again – and yet remains the instinct to disbelieve, to question, to doubt. (Of course, this tendency is still with us, and fuels the deniers'poisonous propaganda.) Martin Gilbert argues that until the escape of 4 Jews in mid-44 Auschwitz remained successfully hidden.
Finally : 17 December 1942: a formal declaration by 12 national governments simultaneously declared in Washington, Moscow and London refers to "Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe", a goal that the German authorities "are now carrying into effect". It could hardly have been clearer, yet from then on the story is full of occasions when people either forgot or rejected what they once knew or showed signs of not having absorbed fully what the declaration clearly stated. Even in Palestine, the Jewish community of 500,000 showed a reluctance to believe and a slowness to grasp – amazingly, since the 500,000 were 80% Eastern European.
In January 1945 Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army. In May 45 a report on the camp was issued by the Soviets. The report did not contain the word Jew.
*
For anyone wanting a really good introduction to a complex subject, and doesn't want to read one of the 800 page monsters like Leni Yahil or Martin Gilbert, look no further.
May 24, 2017
My brilliant marketing professor at the Harvard Business School (Ted Levitt) often reminded us "if you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there." This is particularly crucial as I move into those aspects of my novel where my fictional characters Berthold Becker and Anna Gorska react to the persecution of Jews and try to tell the world so that those who had power would act to stop Hitler before he accomplished his goal of total annihilation.
Michael Marrus' book, published in 1987, is the best outline I have read of the origins and evolution of what Karl Schleunes called the "twisted road to Auschwitz". So I think I have my best understanding yet as to where my characters are going to go, and thus I have guidance for the road(s) they will take and how they will fare along the way. This is an exciting moment for me as I plan my work for the months ahead.
Since I started A Flood of Evil with the 1945 trial of Berthold at Nuremberg, and since everyone knows about the Holocaust, the essence of my story in the sequel I am now writing (covering the years 1934 through 1945) must be the journey, and since Hitler was not stopped during those years, it must in many ways be a journey of failure ... but ... may it not be true that the greatest humanity of which we are capable arises, not from our successes, but from our failures?
MORE TO COME ...
Michael Marrus' book, published in 1987, is the best outline I have read of the origins and evolution of what Karl Schleunes called the "twisted road to Auschwitz". So I think I have my best understanding yet as to where my characters are going to go, and thus I have guidance for the road(s) they will take and how they will fare along the way. This is an exciting moment for me as I plan my work for the months ahead.
Since I started A Flood of Evil with the 1945 trial of Berthold at Nuremberg, and since everyone knows about the Holocaust, the essence of my story in the sequel I am now writing (covering the years 1934 through 1945) must be the journey, and since Hitler was not stopped during those years, it must in many ways be a journey of failure ... but ... may it not be true that the greatest humanity of which we are capable arises, not from our successes, but from our failures?
MORE TO COME ...
February 13, 2015
A well written study of the Holocaust, which the writer defines as 'the systematic mass murder of European Jewry by the Nazis'. As such, it is very biased towards the Jewish experience.
Googling suggests that this definition is an ongoing debate. In this book, only passing reference is made to Romanies, Soviet prisoners, Slavs, Poles, homosexuals and many more, who all suffered the same fate. I understand that the whole murder process started with mentally ill Germans and carried on to include all people that the Nazis defined as 'sub-human' but only after 1941 when the Nazis decided that expulsion from Nazi held territory was impossible.
My personal opinion is that the Holocaust is considered such a special event in the history of genocide because a supposedly civilised society in Western Europe carried it out.
Googling suggests that this definition is an ongoing debate. In this book, only passing reference is made to Romanies, Soviet prisoners, Slavs, Poles, homosexuals and many more, who all suffered the same fate. I understand that the whole murder process started with mentally ill Germans and carried on to include all people that the Nazis defined as 'sub-human' but only after 1941 when the Nazis decided that expulsion from Nazi held territory was impossible.
My personal opinion is that the Holocaust is considered such a special event in the history of genocide because a supposedly civilised society in Western Europe carried it out.
April 15, 2022
The book is a really comprehensive work on different views of historians regarding several aspects of the Holocaust and broke some assumptions I'd made or recalled from what I'd learned about a decade ago in high school. I read this because my International Criminal Law professor required us to write a book report on a book related to the subject and he approved this. I think a lot of it still went over my head because I am not mired in the subject or really the subject of history in general.
I gave it three stars because it's good at what it is trying to do. Maybe that's worth more, I don't typically rate. But as a law student about to graduate that really just wants to get through the Bar and didn't go to law school to write book reports, this was a slog for me to get through. Maybe if I'd had the option of reading in smaller bite sized pieces rather than the time crunch I have to now write a ten page paper on this, it would've been easier to get through. Not that I regret reading it -- there were aspects I definitely still found interesting.
So laymen on the subject, this may not be the book for you. For people that are interested in studying the Holocaust academically, I think this is a good summation several aspects.
I gave it three stars because it's good at what it is trying to do. Maybe that's worth more, I don't typically rate. But as a law student about to graduate that really just wants to get through the Bar and didn't go to law school to write book reports, this was a slog for me to get through. Maybe if I'd had the option of reading in smaller bite sized pieces rather than the time crunch I have to now write a ten page paper on this, it would've been easier to get through. Not that I regret reading it -- there were aspects I definitely still found interesting.
So laymen on the subject, this may not be the book for you. For people that are interested in studying the Holocaust academically, I think this is a good summation several aspects.
August 7, 2009
Good reference book. I would suggest this book for educators who are planning to teach the Holocaust
October 21, 2015
A 200 page research paper that we had to read for my Holocaust class.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews