Sincere but safe stance

Lauthor of The Holocaust (Viking Penguin, £25), is the great TV producer who made The Nazis: A Warning from History Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’. But television and scholarship are different. Which is not to say that this book is bad. It isn’t. It’s readable, sincere, surprisingly emotional, but somewhat unchallenging. You would do better by turning to one of the three really indispensable surveys of the subject — those by Raul Hilberg, Saul Friedlander and David Cesarani.

Rees recites the important facts and walks us through the central episodes, illustrating them with statements from survivors and refugees, perpetrators and witnesses along with some plangent commentary.

But when he interprets events, he sticks with the well-worn theory that the Holocaust developed slowly from an initial desire to get the Jews out of Germany and its empire, to an eventual mass murder that was not Hitler’s plan at the start.

In similar vein, Rees is not persuasive on the question of when and how the decision for the Holocaust was taken, a critical issue for gradualists like him.

He dismisses Hitler’s notorious speech of 30 January 1939 as marking the decision — Hitler threatened that the outbreak of a world warwouldmeantheannihilationof the Jews in Europe. For Rees, “annihilation” in this instance means no more than being forced out — which stretches the definition of the German word,

to breaking-point. But he later goes on to discuss an entry in Josef Goebbels’s diary for 13 December 1941 in which Goebbels describes Hitler addressing a group of Gauleiters following the declaration of war on the USA.

Hitler apparently referred back to his 1939 speech and declared that now that world war was a reality, the annihilation of the Jews was inevitable.

Rees comments here that “there was no ambiguity in Hitler’s words” and “this was thus a pivotal moment”. But there is really no difference between the two instances of Hitler’s threat. To coin a phrase, annihilation means annihilation. So, if we want to follow Rees’s argument, we have to take him on trust rather than being persuaded by evidence.

By contrast, David Cesarani’s dramatic description of the Holocaust as a “side-show” to Germany’s overall war aims may be contentious, but it’s also good history because of the way he draws it out of the available evidence.

Rees is an easier read than Cesarani, but Cesarani will provoke, stimulate and ultimately teach you more.

We have to take him on trust rather than evidence

Laurence Rees