Hitler and the Holocaust, by Robert S. Wistrich

New York: The Library, 2001. 295 pp. $19.95. Robert Wistrich has an impressive track record with his research and writings about antisemitism. Hitler and the Holocaust is part of a new series of Modern Library Chronicles that features titles on significant subjects in history and conceptual issues in the humanities. Wistrich's work falls somewhere between a text adaptable for a course on the Holocaust and popular reading. It is clearly written and incorporates an array of contemporary historiographical controversies, which not only makes it up to date, also suggests to those uninitiated who might pick up the book that there are indeed interesting and serious interpretative controversies involving this subject. Wistrich's volume, however, may be a bit mistitled, as it is less focused upon Hitler and more on the Holocaust. The author makes it clear that the Holocaust is unthinkable without Hitler. But he also emphasizes the millenarian weltanschauung that lay at the base of Nazi ideology, and that erlosung (redemption), a word heard infrequently in writings about the Holocaust, depended upon endlosung, the final solution (p. xii). Wistrich also takes special note of the modernity concept derived from authors like Zygmunt Bauman. The reality of mass murder, however, was a blend of the refined, technological concepts and some of the barbaric methods of the Einsatzgruppen. The author recognizes some of the merits of Daniel Goldhagen's controversial thesis about eliminationist anti-Semitism, recognizes, correctly, that such hatred was stronger in the states that surrounded Germany before 1933. He agrees with Goldhagen that German views about Jews were a central element in the Holocaust, but not with his simplistic explanations of how this came about nor with the exclusive importance he attached to this factor (p. 233). Wistrich's discourse includes some discussion of Jan Gross' provoking examination of the killing of the Jewish community in Jedwabne by Polish neighbors. Wistrich's work, along with the recent monograph by David Kerzer, The Popes Against the Jews, serves to renew the discourse about Christian antisemitism. Using the images of the Jew created by Christianity, Wistrich asserts that the Holocaust became a pan-European event with millions of participants across Europe. Unlike many books on the subject, however, this one opens not with a discussion of early persecution of Jews, rather with an analysis of the Gypsy (p. 6). This is not a flippant maneuver, rather a well-thought-out introduction as it removes the question of the other victims at the outset. While the gypsy question moved back and forth from being classified as asocial to race, the Jewish question was more demonological and hence lent itself to being rendered as a struggle between two chosen peoples (p. 8). As noted, Hitler and the Holocaust is not a biography of Hitler. Hitler enters the text on page 34 and is chancellor by page 48. Obviously, he is part of the discourse for the rest of the book, not necessarily at the forefront. Enough is said, however, about Hitler's views, whether from his boyhood in Linz or his writings in Mein Kampf, to reiterate his basic antagonism toward the Jews. Little is said about some recent theories of post-traumatic stress disorder, such as in Ron Rosenbaum's Explaining Hitler, that the future fuhrer may have suffered in World War I. By 1939, Wistrich sees German Jews as having been defined not merely as outcasts, as socially dead people (p. 65). Once this perception was created through law, the potentiality for toleration of subhumans became less. Thus the author asserts, in a rather deterministic probably correct way, that [t]he mood was ripe for a revival of the apocalyptic anti-Semitism that identified Jews with the subhuman criminal underworld (p. 66). Wistrich also creates a neat chronology of Hitler's attitude toward the final solution beginning with Kristallnacht in 1938. …