Review: Final Solution

By David Cesarani
Macmillan, £25

Can the content of a book be entirely untouched by the circumstances of its writing? Surely not, and Final Solution is poignant for being shot through with the sense of an ending - tragically, David Cesarani did not live to see its publication. Yet the book is forward-looking and challenges readers to think afresh about this most agonising of histories.

It is also uncompromising in recognising the poor state of popular understanding of the subject and the "earnest but ill-informed" way the Holocaust is taught in schools.

The core of his argument is that historians have misunderstood the place of anti-Jewish policies in Hitler's priorities. Nazi Germany was not, Cesarani argues, the "racial state" depicted by Michael Burleigh and other scholars; it was, above all, the war-making state. Hitler's extreme hatred of Jews came into focus only with the German defeat in 1918.

He blamed the debacle on supposed Jewish treachery and even argued in Mein Kampf that, had 12,000–15,000 Jews been gassed at the start of the First World War (the number reflects Jewish participation in the armed forces), the war might have been won. Jews would not be allowed to interfere with the next war, which would rebuild and enhance Germany's greatness.

Cesarani stresses that the Holocaust was not the goal of making war, but that "in material terms, the war against the Jews was a side-show. It was ill-planned, under-funded, and carried through haphazardly at breakneck speed".

In the 1970s and '80s, an argument raged about whether Hitler had always intended the murder of the Jews, or whether it was the result of competing branches of the Nazi infrastructure vying for Hitler's approval by developing ever more radical "solutions".

It has also been questioned whether the Holocaust was triggered by military success or failure. Cesarani draws the debate back to these earlier disputes, coming out on the side of a sort of attenuated functionalism (in competing branches) and the view that military failure, or at least its threat, was key.

His reconstruction challenges the modern cliché of the Holocaust as industrialised, scientific killing carried out by white-coated technicians of death. The reality was that this genocide was the epitome of grubby, cheap, sordid improvisation always teetering on the edge of chaos.

One should not pass over the odd choices of the book's title (employing the preferred Nazi euphemism) and time-frame (1933-1949). A marketing ploy, perhaps? Also important to note, there is no original research here; the book draws entirely on published sources, many of them far from recent.

Regardless of that, what we have is a masterpiece that will probably become the standard work for students. It may well displace Saul Friedlander's huge volumes - simply because Cesarani's is so dense with fascinating detail, so very well written, and so passionately and compellingly argued.

Small errors occur - for instance, there were certainly more than two Jewish schools in Berlin in 1938-9. Sometimes, the judgments are a little unbalanced - Germans are condemned for responding to information from the east with "insouciance" while, a few pages on, American indifference is gently (and unpersuasively) explained away.

This mighty, 1,000-page book is a mature and major work. Despite a few quirks, it is deeply impressive and underlines what a loss the Jewish community and the world of scholarship have sustained.