Why? Explaining the Holocaust

W W Norton, £20 Reviewed by Howard Cooper

ICAME TO this book with some s c e p t i c i s m. I t s b o l d t i t l e seemed to offer the impossible: coherent explanations for one of the most disputed and emotionally fraught historical questions of the 20th century: How was the annihilation of twothirds of Europe’s Jews planned and carried out — and allowed to happen — in less than 60 months in the heart of a continent that at the time represented the most ethically developed and culturally sophisticated civilisation the world had ever seen?

Primo Levi once wrote that, on arrival at Auschwitz, his question “Why?” about some act of random savagery was met with the response: “Here there is no why”. But professor of Holocaust Studies Peter Hayes has written a magisterial survey of great precision and fluency that does go a long way towards answering many key questions surrounding this dreadful period of history. He looks at why the Jews were the primary victims, while acknowledging the attacks on other minority groups including Roma and Sinti, Slavs, homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses. How the underlying cultural and religious history of European antisemitism was utilised by Hitler allows the author to address a second “‘Why?” — why the Germans?

German national shame after the First World War and the economic crises of the 1920s created a febrile atmosphere ripe for a dominating leader to offer solutions to a nation’s problems. Antisemitism didn’t bring Hitler into power — but he was able to use it to focus blame. But why did that escalate into murder? Hayes’s third question allows him to trace the piecemeal development of Germany’s anti-Jewish policies, from social exclusion to genocide — which, he argues, was not inevitable.

This provokes his fourth question: why was the annihilation, once a “final solution” had been decided upon, so swift and sweeping? In a compelling survey, replete with facts and statistics, Hayes traces the journey from bullets to industrialised murder by gas. Here, as so often in this deeply researched book, I kept encountering information that took me aback: three-quarters of the six million who died were gone in just 20 months (June 1941-February 1943); 90 per cent of Europe’s Jewish children aged 16 and under perished. Holocaust deniers need to get off the internet and read this book.

A fifth question — why didn’t Jews fight back more often? — reviews this contentious issue with sensitivity, compassion and a lack of moralising about the ways in which Jewish resist- ance happened or failed to happen in various countries, ghettoes and camps.

Why survival rates differed from country to country, and why help from the outside was so limited, are questions also examined with care and detailed scholarship.

At some profound emotional level, the Holocaust necessarily remains incomprehensible. But Hayes’s tour de force shows how much there is to say and know before we reach that point. His book should be in every school and college library, every synagogue library, and the bookshelf of every household that values the truth in a “post-truth” era.

Why was the Final Solution so swift and sweeping?’