As things got worse for Germany, they got exponentially worse for its Jewish population. Rations in the ghettos plummeted, furs were expropriated in the dead of winter and Jewish families evicted from their homes to make way for Aryans dispossessed by the bombing.
This book asks huge questions, and hints at answers. Did Roosevelt actively court the attack on Pearl Harbor to bring America into the war? Did Churchill have a hand in the fact that nobody in Coventry was warned about the devastating imminent bombardment? The one it moves tentatively towards is: did the second world war accelerate or even bring about the Final Solution?
These are serious questions — but by not engaging with secondary sources, and not offering a narrative line or a direct argument about causation or motive, Baker sidesteps a degree of responsibility. He meticulously cites his sources, but does rather less by way of testing them. And by arranging the dots so that the reader irresistibly joins them up — there are many deft touches of tendentious colour — the author is able to have his cake and eat it. It makes this reader, at least, uneasy.
Narrative history, arguably, imposes an artificial order on a sequence of chaotic and irrational events. Baker’s method, therefore, can be seen enshrining in its formal structure a deliberate challenge to the idea that the history of the second world war made any sense. But it also runs the risk of inviting the reader to impose an occult order: it is, to follow the analogy of painting, a form of historical impressionism. Narrative history makes its judgments explicit, and thereby leaves them open to challenge.
Baker offers unanswerable evidence, though, that the prosecution of the war by the Allies was in many details as bestial as that by the Nazis, and sometimes a good deal worse. We are invited to shake our heads at the idiotic rhetoric, the exterminatory hatred, the savage and callous tit-for-tat, the determination at every turn to escalate on the logic that if violence wasn’t working you simply needed more of it and nastier.
Comments
Eoin Lynch
April 24th, 2008 3:52pmIt's quite a pity that a historian wasn't used to review this book.Sam Leith is out of his depth.Any undergraduate worth his salt can rubbish the claims in this book as they have been used before by the likes of David Irving.
The Nazis did not come to power in 1933 with the intention of murdering all of Europe's Jews.Their plan was to make life so unbearable through pogroms and legal oppression for German Jews to flee.However their plans for living space brought millions of Jews into their sphere and their plans became more radical with deportation to Poland,Madagascar and Russia were all offered for the solution to the 'Jewish question'.Once it became clear that the Soviet Union was not going to be defeated so easily the Nazis embarked on the Holocaust.
Churchill was not a war monger but foresaw that appeasing the Nazis was useless as Chamberlain and the arch appeaser Stalin found to their cost.Only Churchill could have bullied and directed every department of state for the goal of victory.
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DG Forbes
April 24th, 2008 12:00pmChurchill may have revelled in the war but he didn’t start it. It was begun by predessors whose patience snapped and who broke with a long policy of appeasement, deciding on the evidence that pacifism didn’t work with someone like Hitler and likely never would. Chamberlain then sided with Churchill in the cabinet struggle of May 1940 with Halifax over whether we should fight or surrender on Hitler’s terms (compare the fate of France shortly after). Of course, that was a choice but people at the time chose freely not to make it and they assumed the corollary that total war needed to be met by total war. Didn’t the same Miss Partridge say elsewhere that it was essential the war should be won to save the intellectuals? The facts are what you chose to make of them in a contest at this distance that’s unlikely to change anyone’s mind. For example, it’s an article of faith with moral absolutists that area bombing was not only a war crime but was ineffective as a weapon against the German economy. That’s not what Speer or Jodl said, according to the literature. The further the war recedes, the easier it becomes to distort what happened through the lens of contemporary moral fashion. As Leith said, Baker knew where he was going to arrive when he sat down to write. That’s okay; Leith’s own prevarications have a distinctly nastier smell. Incidentally, what would have been the ‘right’ thing to do if we had signed a deal with Hitler and he then went on to attack the Soviet Union?
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