(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)April 25, 2007

Ten years in the making and anxiously awaited, Saul Friedlander’s second volume of the Holocaust, The Years of Extermination, displays the author’s unique talents as a meticulous scholar, insightful analyst and artful chronicler of the past.

Born and raised in Prague, Friedlander survived Hitler’s war against the Jews hidden in a French Catholic boarding school. Emigrating to Israel in ?, he today holds joint appointments at Tel Aviv University and UCLA. Without the slightest hint of pathos or sentimentality, relying heavily on their testimonies [of one kind or another], he consistently weaves into his chronicle the perspective of the Shoah’s Jewish victims.

Taking into account and countering much recent scholarship, Friedlander re-focuses attention on the role of anti-Semitism in explaining the murderous campaign of the Nazis and their collaborators. While accepting that economic motives played a part in Hitlers campaign against the Jews, he believes that there are enough contradictions to warrant further assessment:

“But why should the Jews have been exterminated in the face of the demands of the Wehrmacht for skilled labor and economic arguments, unless entirely different reasons motivated the master of the Reich and the multitude of his acolytes and supporters? Unavoidably, the questions leads us back once again to the phantasmal role played by “the Jew” in Hitler’s Germany and the surrounding world.”

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