Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-1949

by David Cesarani

David Cesarani’s Final Solution is a magisterial work of history that chronicles the fate of Europe’s Jews. Based on decades of scholarship, documentation newly available from the opening of Soviet archives, declassification of Western intelligence service records, as well as diaries and reports written in the camps, Cesarani provides a sweeping reappraisal that challenges accepted explanations for the anti-Jewish politics of Nazi Germany and the inevitability of the “final solution.” The persecution of the Jews, as Cesarani sees it, was not always the Nazis’ central preoccupation, nor was it inevitable. He shows how, in German-occupied countries, it unfolded erratically, often due to local initiatives. For Cesarani, war was critical to the Jewish fate. Military failure denied the Germans opportunities to expel Jews into a distant territory and created a crisis of resources that led to the starvation of the ghettos and intensified anti-Jewish measures. Looking at the historical record, he disputes the iconic role of railways and deportation trains. From prisoner diaries, he exposes the extent of sexual violence and abuse of Jewish women and follows the journey of some Jewish prisoners to displaced persons camps. David Cesarani’s Final Solution is the new standard chronicle of the fate of a heroic people caught in the hell that was Hitler’s Germany.

Genres: History, Holocaust, Nonfiction, World War II, War, European History, Politics

1056 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2015

About the author

David Cesarani OBE was an English historian who specialised in Jewish history, especially the Holocaust.

Reviews

[Geevee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many books are badged as the definitive, the standard or the must read on a subject. I'd not want to suggest David Cesarani's is the definitive book on the Final Solution as research and archives will over time change or add new information to develop our understanding. But, I would wholeheartedly suggest that if you read just one book on this terrible subject you would not go far wrong with this.

It is mammoth and packed with information and a list of sources, notes and index that is itself the size a decent non-fiction book. Yet for its weight - both the actual book and its author's scholarly qualifications - it just so readable. Readable as it gives such depth and detail whilst remaining clear in both the events it describes and its aim of tracking and recording the fate of the Jews between 1933-49.

With just a few pages into the book I realised I had not read a better introduction to the complexities and evolution of what became the final solution. The late Mr Cesarani's approach and arguments he presents in the book are explained with an insight that references huge bodies of work, including the late 20th and early 21st century writing by names such as Longerich, Burleigh, Kershaw, Wachsmann and Friedlander, alongside many sources; this latter greatly expanded with access to the old USSR's archives.

From 1933, that first fateful year of the Nazi regime, the story of many varied elements often so loosely connected come together to clash and crash into people's lives - the people in charge have ideas and ideals but no real plans for what they want, and so a swirling catastrophe begins to build speed and intensity. We see how news of the regime is reported across the world. We read of Jewish organisations in Britain and the US trying to raise funds to help; we also see other Jews less happy to help and we see an unwillingness by Britain, America and others not wishing to change immigration rules or accept many Jews for fear of upsetting "balances" or domestic groups. The years pass and for the Jews misery, cruelty, despair and death abound.

The story touches Nazi propaganda, legislation, life experience from Jews, Nazis and others such as foreign journalists, trade envoys and politicians. As we move from pre-war to total war the author, so ably in a concise (for the scale of this book) overview, shows how the Nazi regime approached government in Western countries (Holland, Beligium, Denmark and France (incl Vichy)) and how this influenced approaches to the Jews in 1940-41. The background & plans for the removal of Jews to Madagascar is covered and how this plan, along with offering Jews for ransom from the USA, delayed ghettoisation. With the war pressing into every German aspect of society and people's lives the Jews are needed for work to satiate the military's supply needs. Evacuations and exportations happen at pace; all the while with differing policies and a hotch-potch of plans and aproaches throughout the Third Reich.

Poland looms large in this book and as Operation Barbarossa (the German invasion of Russian) gets underway the sheer scale of killing is so astonishingly large. There are sickening figures on how many died; how people were killed; who killed them and what they did with the bodies, the clothes and the valuables. The Ghettoes make their appearances and a whole new dynamic surfaces with war production to the fore with Jews making clothes, boots, pillows and even servicing army vehicles, all the while struggling to eat, to function and survive. Privilege, education, money, sect, sex and even internal Jewish order police for example are tickets to life and pitch Jew against Jew. To highlight this in January 1942 in the Lodz Ghetto there are 162K Jews. Food & fuel shortages abound but for the Nazi's it is a very productive area. The Jewish leaders of the ghetto are told they must fit in 20k more. They agree to take 10K but still must make room for these people. A Jewish resettlement commission of medical & respected figures draw up lists of those selected to leave to make room for the newcomers. On the day these ten thousand must report to leave the ghetto only half show, and so using their own police, the Order Service, the Jews seize the other deportees, and once finished 10,103 Jews are taken on 14 transports each of consisting of 20 freight cars are taken to their end at Chelmno. Horrifying in deed, choice and recounting.

The war widens and inevitably as we know from history turns against the Nazi regime and the German people. We cover countries all across the Reich and see how they caught, interned, moved and deported Jews. How they categorised, treated, conned, informed and betrayed by just simply forcing people out of their homes, jobs and hiding places and into camps, and most often onto trains that took them on cramped, intolerably long journeys to concentration camps, ghettos and death camps. By this stage in the book the reader knows the SS alone did not ghettoise, rape, torture and kill Jews: Wehrmacht, Einsatzkomando, Ordnung-Police, Police Battalions, Romanians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Russians, Poles, Bulgarians, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Ukranians, French, Italians, Germans and many, many others did.

The sheer desparation of the Jews shouts from the book's pages. The anger, the hurt and the shame too. To describe the terrible ordeals that people are pitted into and against the author describes how moral standards withered in step with physical decay. In his private journal Oskar Rosenfeld, the then 60yr old former Prague correspondent for the London Jewish Chronicle, documented the corruption at every level of ghetto society. He wrote how at the end of April 1943 he briefly noted the case of a man who murdered a 13 year-old girl for food. He also reported people adopting children to claim extra rations but eating the food themselves.

As war turns to 1943 and beyond Auschwitz looms large in the story. Again a messy creation with no coherent plan with internees already there building and more re-building as we read of trainloads of people disgorged from foul and inhumane railway cars to be selected for labour or mostly death: instant gassing or sometimes beating or shooting.

The private battles of Jews is recorded, some from well-known sources others (to me at least) less so, as they live and work in death camps, or struggle to keep upright and productive in labour camps or factories; some escape and astonishly some even record their lives whilst in captivity.

The final chapters deal with the allied advances, the implosion of Germany, the peak of the Final solution and then the bizarre repatriation or movement to Germany of many Jews to work in factories for the war effort. This then sees many forced march or put on trains as the allies close in. and they are shot, beaten, burnt or left to die as guards disappear. Liberation comes, but for far too many it is too late. For the survivors succour and peace are varied experiences with some Jews moving to new lives and lands, others return to old homes amonst the people who had seen them betrayed or seized. Other are interned until 1947 in places such as Germany, Russia, Greece and Cyprus (this latter by the British) as we see complexities around new world orders and geo-politics take shape.

It is not an easy read. At times, even having read much on this terrible subject, visited some of the sites and lived in or visited a few cities mentioned in the book, I was aghast, appalled and ashamed of my fellow hman beings, and that I was wanting to read more. But to not read is to forget and that is something we should never do given the horror, hate and violence European men and women did to other European men and women less than 100 years ago just a few miles across the English Channel from where I now write.

A long review but perhaps more for me to write about my feelings in reading the book as opposed to try and tell you why you should consider reading it.

I will finish by saying it is a fine read. It is a fine book and one where I learnt a great deal. One that will remain on the best books I have ever read list. The late David Cesarani's book The Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-49 is for me the definitive.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exhaustive, and exhausting, history of the Holocaust. David Cesarani presents the progress of the Holocaust as uncoordinated and muddled, its progress shaped by Germany’s fortunes in the war. Although undoubtedly comprehensive, and a monumental piece of work, at times I found the sheer amount of detail overwhelmed both me and the story of the Jews.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have an extensive library on the Holocaust or the Shoah or whatever you wish to call one of the most unpleasant and cruel episodes in human history. It has fascinated me ever since I was almost physically sick at the age of 12 when I came across the story of Nazi medical experimentation.

But my interest has never been ghoulish nor, at the other extreme, a search for meaning where there is none. Nor am I Jewish where identity itself makes objectivity difficult, almost inhuman. To be an objective Jewish historian of the events of 1933 to 1949 is in itself a triumph of the spirit.

My interest is fundamentally political. Not simply about a pompous assertion that it should never happen again, as if stating things were the same as things actually happening, but about how this thing came to be and what it tells us about our species.

From this perspective, the late David Cesarani's 800 or so page history is easily the book I would most recommend others to read. It is a triumph of the spirit to which I referred earlier, both objective as good history should be and humane.

His thesis has long been my thesis not so much from my researches into this story but arising from my own experience of practical politics - things get out of control, people do not question their condition and the obsessions of the powerful becomes the careers of the middling sort.

At the centre of the narrative is war and imperialism. The mythology of the Nazi era is that everything is about the Jews. To add insult to injury, it turns out that it wasn't, at least until quite late in the day. Hitler was viciously antisemitic but his prior concern was Germany's 'greatness'.

In this story, the Jews are simply in the way and, more tragically, increasingly trapped in a total war that could not be won. It went on for far too long under conditions where history had positioned vast numbers of innocent people as the 'enemy within'.

The best of the book is in the first third which tells a story less often told about a people - the German Jews - who were drawn into hell like a frog in water that slowly boils. Their position was not made easier by the lack of clarity in Nazi policy.

The official line, well beyond the foundation of the first ghettos after the invasion of Poland, was emigration not extermination. Extermination emerged as a crisis of food, as a specific rage by the Fuhrer and as a security fear and competed to the end with the desire for slave labour.

Cesarani is convincing on the sheer ramshackle nature of the horror, its marginality, its clumsiness and its chaos. Anyone who holds to the myth of German efficiency will be disabused by this book. What the Germans had was a demonic destructive will to survive.

I say Germans advisedly because they were drawn by circumstances into complicity with horror just like the Jews - as frogs in slowly boiling water - with an additional disturbing aspect of the case, the propensity of the young to jump the queue of life through a narcissistic radicalism.

I have elsewhere produced a fairly detailed essay on one modern issue - the alleged collaboration between Zionism and Nazism - which can be found at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tppr-e... and which draws a great deal on this book.

I refer you to that essay for more on the trajectory that Cesarani describes until roughly 1940 and the immediate aftermath of the brutal invasion of Poland where Jews were murdered politically rather than racially as suspected communists (though the two categories were conflated by Nazis).

From this point on, the book becomes very grim reading indeed, to the point where listening to Remainers accuse their opponents of being Nazis (merely for short term political advantage in the recent Brexit debate) strikes one as an utterly obscene and ignorant use of history.

The catalogue of horrors is not unbelievable - unless you are a very stupid observer of human nature - but it is all staggeringly callous and cruel. The levels of human suffering involved in the continental war, not just Jews of course, suggests nothing less than species breakdown.

And breakdown is what this is all about. A turn of the century German promoted beyond his administrative and intellectual capacity but with enormous will and native intelligence seized control of a militaristic culture and turned it into a machine for imperial aggrandisement.

He was trying to do what the British Empire had done over 400 years in four. He relied on shock tactics which in turn used a sort of defensive deluded brutality, wiping out any threat before it could mobilise. What he did not reckon on was the resilence of his Soviet enemy.

A war expected to be over within a year dragged on for four and the Jews, already positioned as the cultural enemy, were trapped, their only value being slave labour as radical Nazis in the SS seized control of the agenda and developed a strategy of selective and then total extermination.

These monsters, bureaucrats, ideologues and corrupt businessmen in equal proportion, made use of barbarian Eastern European ethnic militia, turned Jews on Jews to exploit their labour value and organise the transports to death camps, and slaughtered civilians like farm animals.

So much is well known and the book makes hard reading even to a tough old observer of human folly such as myself but Cesarani usefully contextualises everything so we do not fall into the trap of being voyeurs in a theatre of death in which sentiment overwhelms our analysis of causation.

He places the death camps in the context of the ghetto and exploitative labour system, the fear of partisans, the failure of emigration strategies (actually the preferred Nazi option which has lead to the confusion over alleged Zionist complicity) and Western democratic politics and military failures

He gives us the story of the fate of individual Jews under every area of occupation, eliminating some of the myths along the way (the 'heroic' Danish evacuation is not actually at all what it seems) and showing the complexity of individual national responses.

Some come out of it better than others - the Italians were lazy enough to resist Nazi claims for quite a while, the Slovak fascists seemed to be unexpectedly protective of their own Jews, the Hungarians too seemed to have resisted for as long as possible attacks on their sovereignty.

The Belgians did their best, the Romanians acted like thieving maniacs and then reversed policy later and the Poles could be as antisemitic as their occupiers and so on and so forth - the point is that the Nazis were trying to cope with an occupation that drained them from within.

The Wehrmacht was simply a machine for war with no particular interest in the Jews either way. They just wanted to be sure that the SS nut cases did not redirect resources and have negative effects on the war effort - and Hitler tended to agree.

The book tends to confirm me in my view that all these horrors happened because Hitler and his ravings sent a signal that permitted and encouraged extermination (or slave labour if more useful) but, even to him, the Jewish problem was only one facet of the conduct of imperial war.

Cesarani does not end his book with liberation because liberation scarcely took place. He takes the story of the Jews in Europe through to 1949. At one point, the British had more Jews in camps than the Nazis had in 1938/1939 albeit under generally better conditions.

The tragic push to Palestine, of no interest to most Jews under Nazi rule, became a necessity. There was no home left for Jews. The Western Powers were not exactly callous but rather preoccupied with coping with the aftermath of war and with new enmities and barely gave Jews a thought.

A gap in the book is the experience of the Jews who fled to the Soviet Union and then returned in force to Poland after the war. Their experience of Polish anti-semitism made them a driving element in the creation of Israel but many had never had experience of ghettos and death camps.

The Soviet exiled Jews had a harsh time of it but they were not enslaved or murdered as Jews were under the Nazis and we could have done with as much space being given to Soviet liberation of the East as Western liberation of the Jews in Germany. The Red Army, as so often, gets forgotten.

There is one other aspect of the book that is worth noting - its treatment of the claim that the Jews were weak in their response to the Nazi threat. I have referred twice to the slowly boiling frog analogy but the Nazis were immensely good at deception and manipulation.

They controlled resources and information (the key to power) and used fear and reward to ensure that Jews selected other Jews for death until only the fit young men were left. The Nazi strategy in this respect was never very clear to the victims.

Most Jews simply had no weapons, limited or no means of survival outside the camps (escapers might live less long than the inmates of the ghetto or even the camps), little information and were concerned with protecting immediate family and simply getting enough food.

Eventually the remaining fit young men with sufficient resource figured out strategies for revolt in the Warsaw Ghetto (1943), Treblinka and Sobibor (1944). These revolts may have been failures but they frightened the Nazis who began to see that their strategies were unsustainable.

The real monstrosity lies not just in the killing, the rapes, the cruelties but in what I started with - the politics of the situation, the pot in which the poor frogs, Jewish and German, were being boiled. It is the politics in this book that bears more scrutiny than the horrors.

Two societies lived in a state of false consciousness about each other. German Jews considered themselves part of what it was to be German and so were excessively tolerant of the bad treatment of Ostjuden (the French Jews were similarly dismissive of German Jewish and other refugees).

The Germans developed a mental map of the Jews as threat that had some small basis in history, as we have discussed in the link above, but generalised it from the historical abstract to encompass an entire people, effectively innocent of the claims made against them.

Before the war, most Germans seem to have been happy to discriminate yet disliked obvious cruelty or maltreatment. Kristallnacht nearly back-fired on the regime. Hitler was not enthusiastic about it - it was a typical bit of theatre from Goebbels.

With war everything changed. The soldiery witnessed and participated in mass murder 'for security reasons', the sheer number of Ostjuden on new German territory unnerved the population and the opportunity for plunder began to become generalised within German society.

At a certain point, the war switched from a war of empire in which the Jews were to be pushed out of Reich territory eastwards into a war of survival in which the Jews came to be seen as a 'race' that would exact an awful revenge if Germany was defeated.

But the original war on the Jews was less about their extermination and more about their total despoliation to deal with budgetary and then German welfare problems. From there, their poverty became a burden on a State that was suffering shortages as well as a perceived security risk.

Killing off burdensome mouths and enslaving the fit (albeit to the point of becoming unfit) became 'logical' as did handing over Jewish clothing and property to the victims of Allied bombing. Ideology. necessity and chaos are the stuff of such nightmares.

The politics lies in the complete collapse of order other than the order of bribery and terror. Plunder and greed seem to have been more influential even than race hate - Nazi occupation became part half-baked chaotic pogrom, part exploitative business racket and part lunacy.

So there we have it - all the committees against anti-semitism are probably worth very little against the business of avoiding war, maintaining the rule of law under conditions of equality for all and ensuring that there are enough resources to go around.

Cesarani is right to draw our attention to the way that the exigencies of war turned something distinctly unpleasant into murderous savagery, rape and plunder. I am right to draw your attention to the role of young ideologues in creating the justifications for hell.

All in all, a sound introduction to the subject that avoids the trap of allowing the horror to overwehelm the need to understand. As a result, the horror hits home all the harder for not being based on anything rational or organised at all. This is our species up against the wall.

[Stuart Yellop · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Cesarani - his memory for a blessing - was a prominent Jewish historian. Inevitably, his role and his ethnicity would lead him to the greatest cataclysm to befall his people. It's the period of history most discussed and least understood. With his swansong study, Mr. Cesarani exposes a terrible truth: much of what we know about the Holocaust has been distorted by propaganda, slander, and fiction.

There are essential truths everyone should know: the Holocaust is the greatest crime of the twentieth century, and the greatest genocide in human history. Those who say otherwise - or claim it never happened - do so at the expense of victims, half of whom being Jews. However, popular understanding has suffered for poor scholarship, even by noted academics.

Misunderstanding was inevitable. Most of us learned of the Holocaust from a Hollywood film, such as 'Schindler's List' or 'The Pianist'. (There's a nine-hour documentary called 'Shoah', but few have seen it.) With his book, Mr. Cesarani makes a bold statement, redressing a misconception: the Holocaust didn't begin in 1942, when the slaughter started. It began nine years earlier.

There's another reason for details being distorted. During reconstruction, Europeans and Americans wanted to play down their involvement, or their reluctance to intervene. Mr. Cesarani makes clear there were many chances for the Allies to delay, thwart, or stop the slaughter but, for many reasons, were unable or unwilling to do so.

Another misconception is the accepted date at which the Holocaust ended. In a stroke of genius, Mr. Cesarani chooses to discuss the aftermath. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were displaced by the Nazis - and their allies - leading to a logistical nightmare. Indeed, many Jews remained in repurposed camps for years while the world debated where to send them.

With 'Final Solution', David Cesarani exposes an error in anti-Semitism. Sweeping through Europe, Nazis became the custodians of six million despised people, but their answer to the 'Jewish Question' made an assumption: Jews are monolithic. National and cultural divisions were not so much ignored as revelatory. In the end, the Holocaust was a terrible success, but also a catastrophic failure - which only compounds the tragedy.

[Angela Tiu · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me approximately 3 weeks to finish this massive tome. The subject matter is one I've always been weirdly fascinated by. I went on a 3-week (hey, look at that) tour around Europe in 2013 and two of the stops in our itinerary included Amsterdam and Berlin. A visit to the Anne Frank museum in Prinsengracht got me to finally buy and read her diary which started this whole fascination with all things related to the Holocaust. A visit to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin and the Sachsenhausen concentration camp further cemented it.

It just defies all understanding how one man and one nation could have carried out genocide on such a scale and no one thought to intervene. This book really drove that point home. It was like a maternal rebuke to the "great powers" saying "you could have done something, but you didn't." It seemed to me that the fate of an entire people was deliberated so coldly, and tied together with deliberations over the outcomes of war and military strategies. No one ever stopped to think that this was about human lives. It just further underscores my belief about politics, that it is something I would never understand. I don't know how everyone is able to justify the destruction of an entire race for the benefit of the greater good.

And Hitler. I hope he is writhing in hell somewhere. A hell that I hope entails a daily experience of what the Jews experienced in Auschwitz-Birkenau, starting with the roll call, labor, food deprivations, exposure to extreme weather, abuse and degradation then culminating with a "shower" in one of the gas chambers. In fact, i hope he experiences a never ending groundhog day of these horrors in hell. He is the most despicable person in history and i cannot believe he was allowed to lead a nation. I am ashamed to say he is a member of the human race.

Someone once told me that the germans would forever be apologising for the holocaust. I dont think that lot falls solely to the Germans. There are a few hypocrites exposed by this book. I think the british and americans deserve a slice of the blame as well. In fact, as members of the human race we should all spend the rest of our lives apologising for the holocaust.

Anyway, i know im supposed to review the book and not the subject matter. It was well-written but daunting. There were so many names to remember and it wasnt exactly written in a linear fashion. It didnt follow a timeline but more like a theme. It often went back and forth so you never quite know whether this happened before that happened or whatever. What the book is is detailed, atmospheric and relentless in its account of the fate that befelled the Jews. Its profoundly disturbing and something that i wont be forgetting anytime soon.

[Lee Osborne · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of those rare books I'm awarding 5 stars, because of the profound impact it had on me.

As you can see, this book took me some time to read, both because it was long but mainly because the content is extremely distressing. It traces Nazi persecution of Jews from its ideological roots in the aftermath of the First World War, right through to the late 1940s, as the few survivors of the Holocaust attempted to rebuild their lives.

We all know the basics of what happened, but the level of sheer brutality this book describes is truly astonishing. I am left in no doubt that this was the greatest crime in history. Even those that survived lost everything - their homes, livelihoods, families and health. Truly evil things were done on a scale that is almost impossible to comprehend.

This book follows real people through the war and the way they suffered and died through Nazi persecution. The author writes in an admirably readable and concise way, without editorialising - it's really not necessary, the facts speak for themselves.

Moving, shocking, important and an extremely relevant book for our times. Anyone who insists on racial or religious inferiority for any group is starting off on the road that ends at the gas chambers, and we need to make a stand against them.

Sadly the author died before this book was published, but he's left us a work that will hopefully make many more fully aware of what happened shockingly recently. An essential read.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A staggering and detailed chronicle of the murder of millions of Jews by the Nazis. Cesarani's examination of the Holocaust is depressing, frightening and essential and a major work of scholarship from the late historian. Let it stand as a warning to all of us, as well as an appropriate memorial to its author.

[Andrewh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an impressive book, though David Cesarani sadly died before completing it [at 58], so it was finished by Richard Evans. Aside from synthesising the huge mass of research on the history of the Nazis’ assault on European jewry (which he does not call ‘The Holocaust’, as he thinks that implies a structured policy of genocide, which he says was not the true case), he also brings out much of the human stories that make history more real. The growth of the German policy up to the outbreak of the war was perhaps the most interesting part, to my mind - the litany of killing is hard to read and absorb, as it is beyond normal comprehension.

The book starts with the election of Hitler’s Nazi party on a clear anti-semitic platform in 1933, though many German Jews, who were highly integrated, thought that they were protected by the law. Hitler soon got rid of any such restraints, via the convenience of the Reichstag fire, and then laid the foundations for his totalitarian rule. This was also the start of Judenpolitik in Germany. Cesarani makes good use of personal accounts, in particular that of Victor Klemperer’s Diaries, to show the gradual erosion of Jewish rights to work and almost to exist in Nazi Germany over the ensuing years. The Kristallnacht in 1938, when Nazi thugs rampaged through the streets smashing up Jewish property (after a Nazi was killed in Vienna, following the Anschluss), led to great international concern but little action – funds were raised to help but the UK and US kept a firm lid on immigration. The annexed Austrian state in fact led the way in violence against their Jewish population, with much more severe actions than were then taking place in Germany. In 1938, he notes, there was no plan as yet to begin an extermination campaign against the Jews – the plan was to force the jews to emigrate (after stripping them of their assets), and the idea of using Madagascar was floated by Himmler as a solution.
Cesarani notes that the first use of mobile gas chambers was during euthanasia of mentally ill people and those with disabilities, which was a precursor to their use against the Jews, but it was the invasion of Poland in 1939 that set the Nazis on the road to what would be called the final solution – they practised indiscriminate killing of Jews (and Poles) in that campaign and began to set up medieval style ghettos to prevent racial mixing, with unhygienic conditions (which led to thousands of deaths). These were also, he notes, sources of economic value to the local governors, and to Jewish criminals, but the real change in policy was brought about by the invasion of Russia in late 1941, a strategic move that was forced on Hitler to some degree by the need for resources as well as his long-term plan for removing the Jewish population to the East.
Cesarani’s cental argument takes off here – that the Final Solution was the result of a Hitler’s insane view of the Soviet Union being ruled by/in league with ‘International Jewry’, as indeed were the Western powers in his view, and his military need to secure resources in the East to fight on two fronts. The genocide was always secondary to those aims, in this view. The war in the East was initially highly successful, aided and abetted by local fascist and nationalist groups (notably in the Baltics and Ukraine), who were keen to overturn Soviet rule and happy to implement anti-Jewish pogroms. However, once the Soviets started to have some success in holding back the German advance and their huge supply lines were being cut off by partisans, the Nazi leadership saw the further elimination of Jews (whom they considered behind all the partisan attacks and the Soviet leadership) to be a key strategy – both for ideological reasons (ensuring racial purity and the survival of the Volk) and for practical reasons (to save food, which was in short supply). Again, Cesarani reiterates that the Nazis were reacting to events rather than carrying out a plan. The liquidation program in the East was initially carried out by indoctrinated Einstatzgruppen with local partisan assistance and was an orgy of barbaric violence and looting, with mass rape and shootings, but with no structure.
The Soviet pushback against the invasion, which meant that the war was inevitably going to last into 1942, also had an effect on the program. The details of the mass shootings, often into open pits and conducted by drunk soldiers, is horrifying and mind-numbing – 2000 here, then 300 per day there, and so on, in remorseless fashion. It is necessary to make the point that it was haphazard (and horrific) but was not the result of ruthless German efficiency, as is often seen to be the case. People were given licence to act abominably, with no restrictions, and they did so, it seems, and also enriched themselves by stealing the possessions and property of their victims. As the author notes, the locals of Lithuania, Romania, Ukraine and Byelorussia were, if anything, even more savage and cruel than the Germans were in this pogrom.

The various death camps are described in some detail but there is more space given to the bureaucracy of the running the occupied territories and the many new ghettoes, which were managed as profitable ‘businesses’ in many instances, and the way that the war effort always created a tension in the Nazis between the need for (slave) labour and their absurd belief that the Jews were a critical ‘security threat’ and must be eliminated from Europe – Hitler’s constant refrain. As the war turned against the Germans after 1942, this became stronger and led to even more use of the extermination camps, despite the worldwide condemnation of these actions and the allies’ threats to put the Nazis on trial for their crimes after the war. Cesarani is clear that the Allies knew what was taking place from at least 1942 and did little about it, with the US/UK having a strict policy on refugees and also there being a general Allied view that these actions were only undermining the Nazis’ military efforts. There was also very little practical that could be done for people in the camps, in their view, but Cesarani states that more could have been done to get people out of countries under occupation, in western Europe at least.

In 1943, Himmler closed the Sobibor and Treblinka death camps (where they had been heroic revolts and escapes by prisoners) and made efforts to erase their very existence, building ‘farms’ on the land, but at the same time billeting soldiers there to prevent locals from scouring the land for leftover valuables (pillaging valuables was always a big part of the death camps' activity). This left Auschwitz-Birkenau as the remaining extermination camp and its work is described in chilling detail. Then, in 1944, with the war turning against Germany, with D-Day and the massive losses in the East, the previous policy of removing all Jews from German soil was revoked and prisoners from camps were sent back to Germany as slave labour. Then in late 1944, Himmler ordered the SS to stop to killing Jews and to preserve inmates as a pretext for opening channels of communication with the Allies – prisoners were ordered to dismantle the crematoria (in anticipation of losing the war, and in order to use the prisoners as bargaining chips with the Allies).
The Nazis' Jewish policy was, as ever, incoherent and made up on the hoof, and there was no structured plan for evacuating the camps and the prisoners of often just marched out, in the snow, often to die en route to the next holding camp, or be killed in random massacres by guards, panicking. Himmler proceeded to attempt unilateral peace negotiations with the allies in April 1945 (just before Hitler’s death), claiming he had never sought the destruction of the Jews – Hitler found out and stripped him of his offices.
As Cesarani notes, the persecution of the Jews only ended with the Allied occupation, as opposed to the ‘liberation from the camps’. The reality was many Jews lived as displaced persons in Allied camps after the war that were not hugely different environments, and there was little done to help people find their families or possessions. The Nuremberg trials were also notable for the lack of focus on the genocide of the Jews, with emphasis on the crimes against the allies. Cesarani concludes the huge book with a short chapter on these issues, and notes that the final solution was a haphazard affair, largely driven by Hitler’s insane anti-semitism, but also facilitated by the chaos of war and the willingness of many occupied peoples in Europe to help (most of the personnel in the death camps were not Germans, he notes). Later, after the war was ended, the Jews then became a pawn in the Cold War between the Western Allies and the Soviets.
Despite the horrendous subject matter, this is a readable book and should be read by anyone who wants to understand the enormity of the crimes committed in the war, but the early chapters are the most important for understanding how it was possible for such a policy to come to pass in a highly developed state.

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am starting a sabbatical next month, during which I hope to finish writing a play about one specific event during the Shoah. That said, this has been a lifelong interest. As a theatre director, I have done multiple plays dealing with the events that engulfed first Germany and then the world: Good, A Shayna Maidel, The Diary of Anne Frank, I Never Saw Another Butterfly and others. You might call these microcosmic views of the event.

Cesarani has written an almost unbearable macrocosmic treatment that easily takes its place alongside Lucy Dawidowicz's The War Against the Jews, Martin Gilbert's works and others. His writing style is prosaic, but as he moves easily from one part of Europe to another, covering the way in which the Jews were exterminated --- and what the Nazis themselves thought they were doing --- it beggars description that human beings could have (1) done this to other human beings and (2) collaborated with the various Germans to ensure that they were successful. The idea that the Polish resistance avoided helping the Warsaw Ghetto's struggle is horrifying. And Cesarani is even-handed, bringing attention to the various Jewish councils who also aided the process of their own communities' destruction.

This was a very difficult book to read through. But it is undeniably one of the most successful studies of the Shoah, and should be an indispensable starting point for anyone studying it.

Highly recommend.

[Chris Jaffe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is very informative and exhaustive (at times exhausting) account of the Holocaust from the rise of the Nazis until the post-war situation with DPs (Displaced Persons) had been worked out.

Cesarani argues that the Holocaust was not simply a case of anti-Semitism, though clearly that was a huge factor. It also stemmed from the war itself. Hitler and the Nazis were always heavily anti-Semitic but they rarely had clear long-range plans, and created policies on what was often an ad hoc, seemingly spur of the moment basis. The key turning point, he argues, was when the war began to go South for the Nazis. That led to a harder line on Jews. It's not a coincidence the Wannsee Conference came shortly after they were checked in Russia. This was largely because Hitler always saw the war in terms of Aryans vs. world Jewry, so if the war is going poorly, take a harsher line on Jews in revenge. (At a certain point in time, Cesarani's argument seems muddled to me. He argues the Holocaust isn't just anti-Semitism, but the other factors that led to it are also caused by anti-Semitism. It's thus a combination of direct anti-Semitism and indirect anti-Semitism, but I think he pushes his point too far.

Sometimes he does a decent job. For instance, on pages 700-701, he looks at the 1944 invasion of Hungary, a move scholars have long found insane. (Why attack an ally in order to kill some of its people when the war's going so poorly?) Ceesarani notes practical benefits: it ensured Hungary stayed an ally; it gave Germany access to Jewish wealth and labor - much more forcefully that had been the case, and it did strengthen the overall German case for the war - that it was to fight world Jewry. Armies need a motive, no matter how perverse the motive might sound.

Looking over the book itself .... Many Germans found an appeal to Hitler's talk of Aryan unity. Boycotts by England and the US in response to Nazi anti-Semitism just convinced Hitler of the international power of Jews. France wasn't happy with Jews entering there.

From 1934 to the middle of 1935, not much was done with Germany's Jews. Then came the Nuremberg Laws. 1936 was quiet on the surface, but with Nazis gaining power though. Belligerence went up after the Olympics. The Palestinians began an uprising there. Jews kept leaving Germany. The economy for Jews collapsed in Germany. By early 1938, those left felt helpless and isolated, with suicides increasing.

War preparation led to more persecution. Then Austria was taken, led to sudden brutality. The Nazis were convinced Jews were unpopular everywhere. Anti-Semitism was also taken up by the governments of Romania, Italy, and Hungary. Polish Jews were mass expelled from Germany. Night of the Broken Glass happened, and thousands went to camps. Jewish businesses came to a complete end. German Jews were now in penury.

War came. Hitler saw it as a continuation of anti-Jewish policies. Polish Jews were treated as part of a conspiracy against Germany. Soldiers had grown up under Nazi rule and were primed to hate Jews. Hazy plans existed to put Jews on a reservation, like the Navajo. Ghettos were built, with Lodz as the model. They were overcrowded, had little food, bad sanitation, crime, and winteres were hell. Social solidarity collapsed and even cannibalism occurred. There was no privacy. Killing of handicapped Germans began, but then ended - but it was a step to mass murder of Jews. UK and exile Polish governments both downplay the murder of Jews. Germany wins in the west. No plans for the countries taken. There was talk of putting Jews in Madagascar, but it was never a serious idea. Anti-Semitism was up in France. A Dutch general strike ended up hurting Jews.

Hitler invades the USSR, and that was the key turning point for the Holocaust. The invasion was in part caused by a lack of food in Europe. It was a war of colonial extraction, among other things. Lithuanians aided the mass murder of Jews. Romania killed Jews. As partisans began and Russia was an issue, the Nazi policy towards Jews became more murderous. The massacred peaked at Kiev in late September. Jews in many towns were nearly wiped out. Property was confiscated. Anti-Semitic propoganda was constant after June 1941. Out came the yellow stars, and Germany deported its Jews. French Jews went to ghettos. Havoc existed for Balkan Jews. A vague goal of putting all Jews in the USSR's interior faded as the invasion failed. There was a food crisis and a security crisis. The US was becoming a possible enemy. Hitler felt it was now time for an out-an-out destruction of the Jews.

The Wannsee Conference took place as the war went badly. Death camps went up. Jews were sorted into groups based on war needs. Ghetto deportations happened. Moral standards went down and Jews were robbed of all dignity. Political/communal, and even family solidiarities broken down in the ghettos.

Stalingrad brought hope to Jews and hurt German morale. But the Germans just saw Jews as more of a threat and hatred of Jews became a defining feature of their wartime alliances. Goebbels played up fear of Jewish revenge and fears of German defeat. Jews were deported from southern France. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was put down. Cesarani says that wiping out Jews wasn't just ideology but also security. Again, I think this just displaces the ideology. It's BECAUSE of the ideology that Jews became a security issue.

The Allies stumbled late in the war, and that extended the Holocaust, leading to that many more killings. For instance, Hungary was occupied. When camps were closed down, it led to death marches (which weren't intended as such, but became as such under the conditions). By the way, Hungarians supported the round up for their Jews. The last ghettos were liquidated. The continued killings were a reason Hitler wouldn't surrender - if the war is against world Jewry, then he was still making some progress as long as Jews were being killed).

The war ended. Jews were in DP camps, but often no place to go. There were some massacres of Jews after the war. The US still had its quota laws, and the UK didn't want to put them in Palestine for fears of giving credence to Zionism. But many ended up going there anyway. Few Jews received any compensation for their financial losses.

A lot of good points, but I think Cesarani pushes his argument too far. Much of the non-ideological reasons he gives the for Holoaust were still at least partially driven by ideology.

[Natalie Wood · Rating 4 out of 5]

The late Anglo-Jewish historian David Cesarani not only led the development of modern ‘Holocaust consciousness’, he fairly overturned the study of the period in several ways.

These included a revision of the history of Bergen -Belsen concentration camp “showing how it had … only become involved with the Final Solution in the late stages of the war”.

More startling yet, said Cesarani’s friend and colleague Professor Dan Stone, delivering the introductory paper at a memorial conference he convened in April 2017, was his posthumously published book Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–49.

In this, he first “stressed the extent to which public awareness, knowledge and, especially, commemoration of the Holocaust had become dangerously decoupled from scholarly knowledge” and then attempted “a myth-busting exercise: the Holocaust was not an ‘industrial genocide’ but a messy and brutal affair; the Nazis were not ‘ice-cold’ and ‘rational’ (as they liked to see themselves) but behaved reactively and chaotically; the murder of the Jews was not the only thing on their minds; indeed it could be and was shaped more by the circumstances of the war than by any plan to comb the continent of Europe in a straightforward and systematic way”.

————
Professor Cesarani may well have felt that public Holocaust commemorations had become ‘decoupled’ from scholarship but his absence must have been felt more and more keenly in recent months.

He would surely have played an important role at recent events like the interment of Holocaust victims’ remains at Bushey Cemetery, London and would even now be giving a clear lead in the recent, increasing struggle against political antisemitism in the U.K.

As I observe that the publication of these conference papers could not be more timely, I hear nothing but the echo of hollow laughter.

However, I feel compelled to point out in conclusion that almost four years since the death of Professor Cesarani, inter alia, the author of The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, that the JC’s current editor and staff daily pen the unending first drafts of the history of 21st century antisemitism. And so it goes ….

** Dan Stone, Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London is a former editor of Patterns of Prejudice and edited the journal’s issue devoted to papers delivered at the conference he arranged in Professor Cesarani’s name

[Marc · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkably well written book about the fate of the jews between 1933 and 1949. Also about as complete as can be expected.

At about a third in the book almost becomes unbearable, and that is before operation Barbarossa has even started, after which things become much worse. It is not an easy read.

The book follows, by design, eyewitnesses from the time and not all survive. This makes it somewhat different from eyewitness accounts created by survivors afterwards as this also shows attitudes at the time through that particular lens. Most people, especially in the early years, had no idea what was coming. And even at the end it’s shown as almost unbelievable through contemporary eyes.

It is a chronological read, but the different chapters are well set-up and can be read and understood individually. I kept a phone nearby to be able to read some background info, and to look up whether the perpetrators were brought to justice.

Review is for the dutch version.

[Justin Sarginson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The definitive account of the suspicion, violation and murder of the Jews by many parties during the 1930s & 40s. David Cesarani's account pulls no punches as it shines the light of the truth on who and why so many innocent people were murdered. To David's credit, he breaks boundaries by detailing how the Jews fought, denounced and betrayed themselves, which tells it's own tale of misery. This account should be read by everyone and the story should never be stopped being told. Heartbreaking.

[Deborah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't really add more than what the critics have written other than to say it was a very compelling, articulate and complete history of the beginning to the conclusion of the assault and extermination of our people in Nazi Germany and the countries under its control.

There are similarities about the rise of authoritarianism to our current political situation. Hitler was elected too.

[Christian Ohlsson · Rating 5 out of 5]

So necessary to read in these days. So well written and interesting. So very sad and heartbreaking to read about the process that lead to the worst genocide we hopefully ever will see. This may never be forgotten. Never.

[Toby · Rating 5 out of 5]

As harrowing and exhausting a read as I've ever experienced. We should all read this.

[David Railton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meticulous detail undoubtedly, but this, for me, gets in the way of the human tragedy. The individual stories and the sheer scale of the atrocities are harrowing, but lost somewhat in the detail.

[Dead John Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Cesarani was a historian, he died just after this book was published.

It is now late January and I have only just finished this book. I started it in mid November. It is over 1000 pages, you cannot call this a quick and easy read. It is not quick and definitely not easy.

As per the title, this book details what happened to the Jews from 1933 to 1949. I think one of the main characteristics of this book would be that the writing is devoid of emotion. I read someone else describing this book as cold. And yet, it is this plain recounting of facts does that serves to invoke the most deepest and traumatic of human emotions in the reader.

The book details how many people were killed, how they were killed, and who killed them, in great detail. I could relate some of these details but I wont because if you have children reading what happened to Jewish children will reduce you to tears and give you nightmares.

The other outstanding characteristic of this book is that it details exactly how it all came to pass. We all think we have a fair idea of what happened to the Jews, I certainly did until I read this book.

This book gives the context for many of the actions. Germany had been subject to the Nazi view of the Jews for many years before the war. Once Hitler came to power they subverted the entire education system to teaching the Nazi view of the world, its history and the Jews, the media and indeed everything else was subsumed into this vision. Whilst some of the Nazis involved in the early mass killings were shocked by what they were seeing, by the time that the Hitler Youth came online as soldiers their indoctrination was so thorough that Jews were not seen as even being human, literally, they could be treated and killed like animals and indeed they were.

The German army was fundamentally different to other armies. Where a British or American soldier is given explicit orders, German soldiers are just told what the overall objective is and then left to work it out for themselves. The results of this are unpredictable but often produces outstanding results. The German command deployed the learning and strategies that this methodology produced across the entire army. Where the British army went on to repeat the same mistakes over and over the German army became better and smarter as time went on. This principle also served in the annihilation of the Jews. Ideas were spread based their effectiveness.

At the beginning of the book he says that this book will dispel many myths about the Holocaust, like:

Adolf Hitler never intended to kill the Jews.
The "Jewish Problem" whilst being his obsession was never top of his priorities. The war always took precedence.
The Germans never had an "efficient killing machine". It was all ad hoc and badly thought out (until the very end).
The German population was complicit with the entire unfolding of the final solution.
The English and Americans knew what was happening to the Jews and did nothing.
The Jews were killed by the Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians and the Germans.

It was the Ukrainians that first demonstrated how effective mass killings could be by killing 50,000 men, women and children in 3 days in Poland. They showed the Germans a savagery that shocked some Nazis, but this methodology was soon spread to other areas. Populations of small towns and villages were encouraged to drag out their Jews and publicly humiliate them and worse. The Germans soon learned that people needed very little encouragement to do this. This method too soon spread. They also learned that they needed very few field staff to accomplish some of their objectives with local populations only too willing to help.

The other occupied races, while they may not have actually killed Jews, were wholeheartedly involved in the mass deportations of Jews in the knowledge that none of these people were coming back.

At the time that the extermination camps were operating the consensus among the British population was they didn't want any Jewish refugees and that "someone" had to solve the Jewish Problem.

Jewish businesses were a major part of the German economy and other economies in Europe. When the Jews were rounded up and deported it disrupted the economies on a great scale and the Germans needed the money in the economies. The infamous Kristallnacht resulted in 16,000 Germans being made unemployed because of the destruction of Jewish businesses.

The "spontaneous" rising up of the populations against the Jews frustrated some Nazis who needed them as slave labour, hostages and economic assets. The German solution was to Aryanise Jewish businesses, houses and assets, that meant simply replacing Jews with Germans. One day you had Jewish neighbours then you didn't. Everyone learned early on not to ask questions about where the Jews went and what happened to them but returning soldiers left no doubt about their fate.

If all that sounds conflicting and confusing, it really was. There was no central idea or plan on how to deal with the Jews. There was no Nazi masterplan!, it was chaotic and badly managed. One group of Nazi command wanted intact Jewish populations for slave labour and hostages while another wanted them gone and all that happened at the same time. There was often conflict between the various groups each with the own hidden agendas.

The simple fact is that no-one liked, wanted or needed the Jews. Not the English, not the Americans, no-one in Europe wanted any Jews in their country. By and large they were already hated before the war began. Those few brave souls who sheltered or helped individual Jews risked their lives to do so. If caught they were sent immediately to the camps.

The details of the slaughter is mind numbing in it s scope and variety, at times I had to put it down for a bit. Some things I read made me physically feel like vomiting something I have never experienced from reading before.

Towards the end of the book he starts dealing with events when finally the whole world knows about the camps and their horrors. It is in the papers everywhere. The Americans and The English went to great lengths to do nothing. In 1943 the Americans were taking aerial photos of the camps yet when the Jews asked the Americans and the English to bomb the camps and the rail lines they refused, they said they couldn't fly that far yet the aerial photos proved that they could. The English said that they had more important things to do.

The camps themselves were varied in both their intent and mechanics. Camps also came and went as the cleansing progressed, once an area was cleared the camp(s) were closed. Often to be re-opened as the chaos around clearances continued. Some camps were decorated more like holiday camps with pretty little stations and signs saying, "This way to the showers". Staff too were trained to give the illusion that the camp was merely a staging post and the showers were necessary to decontaminate the Jews as they passed through. The showers though were lethal. A single trainload of over 1200 men, women and children would be dead with an hour..

The book goes to 1948 because that is when the camps are finally emptied and the Jews set free. Between 1945 and 1948, the Jews were still locked in camps but now they were fed and clothed and their guards were British. They were not free though.

Some were released if the could prove their identity and nationality, a difficult task when all they had was the rags they stood in. Some of those who managed this returned to their home towns and tried to reclaim their houses and property. In Poland they were simply murdered. No-one wanted to give anything back and no-one cared about more dead Jews. Of all the property stolen almost none of it was returned. More to the point, most of the survivors did not want to return to the towns that had so badly treated them.

A lot of the Jews still held prisoner wanted to go to Palestine but that was controlled by the British and they had closed the borders to Jews from Europe. Finally in 1948 under pressure from America they relented and the remaining Jews went to Palestine. Probably what is not so well known is that they then set about getting rid of the Palestinian Arabs in much the same manner that they had been subject to, but that is another story.

Everything claimed as fact in the book is backed up with footnotes and bibliography.

It is hard to summarise or even give a solid impression about a book as big and complex as this for even I have simplified some of this to make it coherent. I don't imagine that anyone who reads this will want to read the book and I would not recommend it unless you have a real interest in finding out more. This is not casual read or a holiday book and requires a strong stomach.

After Germany was defeated the Allies mandated that by law Germany would teach the Holocaust in every German school. And they do, but I fear that they (and us) have been taught a simplified, sanitised, version of events that puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of the Germans alone and leaves out the uncomfortable facts that implicate everyone else.

Finally, you know that bit in horror movies where the main protagonist has left his friends or loved ones in the safe hands of one of the "good guys' and then finally it dawns on him that the "good guy" was all along the axe murderer......well, I have a son who lives in Germany and he would fail the ethnicity test that sealed the fate of the Jews.

I want to shout out to him, "RUN MAX, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE".

[Donald Schopflocher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Final Solution is a long and detailed chronicle of the fate of European jewry from 1933 through to the end of the war(and slightly beyond). It is largely chronological though it runs into difficulty keeping this chronology once shipments to extermination camps begin in 1942 due to the large number of locations from which Jews were transported, and reverts to rotating through locations and offering shorter chronologies. It is replete with short quotations from the better known and more articulate Jews, as well as some from some Nazis and collaborators. Concentration camps, ghettoes, transit stations, extermination camps, and work camps are clearly separated and delimited. Numbers are everywhere presented in the chronology, and make the horror of the Holocaust all the more incomprehensible and mind numbing.

Cesarani has a perspective: he uses the concept of Judenpolitik, policies about Jews, as a lens, and argues convincingly that these policies were chaotic, inconsistent, sometimes contradictory, and unfolded mainly as a response to the progress of Hitler’s military ambitions and the events of the war, and as actions taken by individual Nazis (as well as Axis allies) in response to unclear directives and intuitions about the leaders’ wishes. While Hitler and the leadership clearly remain monsters, the notion that the Holocaust was undertaken as a well planned operation undertaken with military precision is totally debunked.

The short Conclusion is a succinct statement of this perspective and a very high level summary. Rereading it periodically will keep the main features well anchored in memory.

[Graceann · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this exhaustive (and exhausting) deep, deep dive into the Shoah, the late David Cesarani covers everything you can imagine, and much that you can't, about the preparation for, execution of, and aftermath of the murder of at least six million people.

I learned some important things about my reading preferences in the considerable amount of time it took me to read Final Solution. I'm clearly much more able to gather references for further study when it's relayed to me in the narrative of personal experience. Large, door-stopping overviews are fantastic if I'm trying to put together a whole picture, but the individual testimonies are where I find the information that sticks with me and helps my thinking mature as I move forward in the world. The endnotes and bibliography in Final Solution were invaluable to me for the purposes of following up on the diaries and testimonies of people who were victimized during this time.

If I were recommending study materials for a course on the subject, this book would certainly be at the top of any list I created. As a layperson, however, I found it overwhelming, very difficult to grasp and, eventually, exceedingly laborious to read. It seems quite silly, now, given what the people being written about went through, for me to say “I found this hard to read,” but I did. I'm glad I challenged myself with this material, but I'm sure I'll be forgiven if my next few choices are short and undemanding.

[Paul C. Stalder · Rating 4 out of 5]

A moving tome that focuses primarily on first hand accounts of those who suffered under the Nazi regime. This focus provides Cesarani with fascinating insights into the true horror of Jewish murder and persecution during the Second World War. There was much I learned while reading this book; and some that was unlearned. You cannot approach any conversation about WWII the same after reading this book. While it is a lengthy, and at points tasking, read, it is worth it.

[Annie Horman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible amount of detail, it’s really hard to comprehend what happened and translate those numbers on a page into human lives.

[Billy Gunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Massive book on a massive subject. Quite political, this is NOT another Holocaust Survivor point of view volume. David Cesarani in my view is on of THE world leading experts on the subject of Hitler, Nazism and the Holocaust.

If you're looking to see how the Genocide of the Jews and to some extent of the German people themselves came to being then this might be a very good book to read.

Here you will not see with graphic depictions the life within the Concentration Camps and Death Camps, there are rightly many books charting this and the depravity of some human minds. Cesarani does cover this of course but he also challenges the views, opinions and consequently raise more questions than I started with... That's great because I want/need to discover more!

For life in Concentration camps the list of Authors is long. Primo Levi, Laurence Rees, Max Hastings...

For how this blackest moment of history came to exist Cesarani has it nailed, Peter Longerich, Saul Friedländer... To name just a few.

In all "Final Solution" is a very readable book. Intense? Challenging? Well that's surely subjective and personal. I'm glad I spent the time reading it. It is a big volume, but it's broken down into parts.

On a lighter note, the weight does give your arms a good work out too!

[Dez Sellin-Mcwatters · Rating 5 out of 5]

My motivation for reading this book came after visiting the former Saschenhausen concentration camp late last year. We did a walking tour with a local Jewish German man who was very descriptive and knowledgeable of the holocaust/fate of the Jews.

This book provides a readable recollection of events between 1933 and 1949. The book is quite difficult to put down as it engages the reader wholeheartedly into the events in which unfolded. I still cannot come to grips with the fact that this mass genocide and the Hitler regime was less than 100 years ago. Definitely a book which makes you appreciate the life we live in today and also makes you think about the atrocities those before us endeavoured.

[Hannah Scott-Ravikumar · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tour de force. I was lucky enough to hear David Cesarani lecture, and several points he brought up in those lectures surfaced in this book (albeit in much more detail). Compassionately written. This book challenges several pre-conceived notions about the Holocaust/Shoah, and argues that the Shoah is inseparable from World War II, and that the Shoah was shaped by the war. David Cesarani doesn't miss anything. This is, I believe (and I don't use these words lightly) THE definitive history of the Holocaust.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. The in depth look into what the Jewish population went through should be read by everyone. Yes, it is a sad, sad, book filled with death on almost every page, but that has got to be remembered throughout history. Do wish there was more on how the Allies handled the problem. That was the only part that seemed short.

[Dw Duke · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book was excellent though it was quite detailed. It is quite a bit of information to absorb in just one reading. Yet, it contains very important information about the nature of circumstances leading up to the Holocaust and during the Holocaust. One can see anti-Semitism rising over the 30's and the reaction to the response around the world.

[Ken Sampson · Rating 5 out of 5]

[19 Apr 2004] What a book? - a gruelling, difficult, massive, almost overwhelming, comprehensive, exceptionally detailed and wide-ranging 800 pages of the worst of human evil. This is without doubt the work to go to in any attempt to get closer to an understanding (if that's possible) of the holocaust. The book is written clearly in a chronological order with a straight-forward text and good pace. It is meticulously researched and brings together tons of archive material, multiple eye-witness testimony and years of experience studying the subject into an account accessible to the general reader. The book is a skilful blend that forces the reader to focus on the factual, while it plays with your emotions.

Factually, this book is incredibly informative. It systematically explodes the myth that Hitler and the Nazi party had a pre-determined 'final solution.' The scene that emerges from the pages is one of incompetence, opportunism, failure, individual psychopathy and contagious social violence, building into a tidal wave of evil that engulfed an entire race and touched millions of essentially 'normal' people with despicable evil. The fact that lurking under the respectable, civilised surface of western Europeans - all of us - when the time was right and the contexts lined up - was an evil waiting to burst-out informs of tribalism, violence and a complete betrayal of humanity.

Emotionally, this book will leave you exhausted. Overwhelmed by the enormity of its size, the task ahead and the gruelling material to be transversed it starts off by shocking you with the graphic descriptions of an individual murder here or gross-racism there and develops rapidly into the slaughter of ten thousand here, gassing babies there and suddenly you realise you've changed. The shock has gone, the compassion is blunted and distance sets in. When you are brutalised sufficiently you become brutal. The allies were not practically involved in evil, but one wonders if the lack of early action to prevent it was just a variation of racism?

In essence, this book tells it as it was - the story of the Jews 1933 to 1949, it tells you what happened, and how, but steers away from why? Perhaps we will never understand it, but then of course, we waste time trying, as it is self-evident when we say that 'the only thing required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.' There were a lot of people at the time - good people - who did nothing. If a book can replicate the experiences described by evoking in some small and insignificant way a particular emotional reaction in the reader then it is clearly an exceptional book.

[Govaert · Rating 4 out of 5]

In dit lijvig meesterwerk geeft de schrijver een exhaustief overzicht van het tragische lot van de Joden. De gebeurtenissen worden gesitueerd in een ruimere context en tijdsvenster dan juist WWII. Al ligt uiteraard het zwaartepunt van de genocide in de oorlogsjaren.
De auteur toont treffend aan hoe de nazi’s niet zo nodig zelf alle vuile werk dienden op te knappen. Al te vaak springen lokale antisemitische groeperingen en burgers mee in de bres, uit overtuiging maar net zo vaak uit opportunisme of afgunst.
De auteur weerlegt zeer nadrukkelijk het aspect van de grondige voorbereiding. Net zo vaak was de vernietiging van de Europese joden een samenspel van toevalligheden en improvisatie waar vervolgens via hineininterpretierung een voorbedacht plan overheen werd verzonnen.
Pijnlijk toont de auteur aan hoe strenge migratiewetgeving in zowat alle Europese landen en Amerika beletten dat Joden reeds in de jaren dertig veiliger oorden konden opzoeken.
Minpuntjes. Helaas wel. Het boek veronderstelt een uitgebreide voorkennis over de opkomst van het nazisme en het verloop van de oorlog. Hoewel wellicht een bewuste keuze had de toevoeging van enig kaartmateriaal en tabellen de leesbaarheid van het boek ten goede gekomen. Niet iedere lezer heeft noodzakelijkerwijs dergelijke naslagwerken in zijn thuisbibliotheek ter beschikking.

[Ian Malcomson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is definitely the source to go to for all things related to Hitler's evil regime. It makes the case that total war after 1941 was intricately linked to the evolution of the Final Solution. The fate of the Jews within the Third Reich got worse as the losses piled up for the Nazi war machine on three fronts. This book is loaded with documented facts, anecdotes and razor-sharp analysis on how Nazidom came about and how it inevitably failed at incredible cost to Jewry and the nation. Cesarani's argument that Hitler's plans to purge society of Jews were so crackpot and chaotic that they could only eventually fail is the easy part of this work to grasp; the real challenge for the reader might be grappling with the depths of depravity he and his henchmen were prepared to go to make the fantasy happen. I come away from reading this study firmly convinced that many average Germans had to be very complicit in the Holocaust from the start. Without their fanatic support for Arayanization, anti-semitism, and the dehumanizing of minorities, the Nazis would not have been able to go as far as it did with the Final Solution. A sobering and informative read about what happens when a society buys into fanatical nationalism. Even when the war was over, the Jews struggled for years to return to some sense of normalcy because the West was not readily prepared to grant them nationhood.