The Years of Extermination

"Winner"

"Friedländer, a professor of history at UCLA, was born in Prague and his family moved to France in 1940. He himself survived the war in a Catholic monastery, even converting temporarily to Catholicism. But his parents were caught and eventually killed by the Nazis. His experiences surely influence the way he writes about the Holocaust. The Years of Extermination is a book of enormous erudition, brilliant exposition and emotional sensitivity. It weaves an analysis of the Nazi campaign to eliminate the Jews with the story of the life and death of the Jews themselves. The voices of the victims are unforgettable as they are crushed by the racism of German society and overwhelmed by the power and determination of the Nazi racial state, both of which were determined to be rid of them. You feel the hopelessness of the persecuted Jews, and shudder with terror at the Nazi assault. I think about the Holocaust as the most extreme case of genocide. After all, it gave rise to the concept of genocide in the work of Raphael Lemkin and the international law against genocide, passed unanimously by the UN. But other cases of genocide were also relevant both to the thinking of Lemkin and to the framers of the convention. In order to understand the origins, processes and effects of genocide, the Holocaust needs to be compared with other episodes over time and space. I do not think the Holocaust is “unique”, as some scholars do, or that comparing it with other cases diminishes its impact or importance. Comparison – including identifying dissimilarities – is at the core of explanation. It seems that every case of genocide contains within itself the sources of denial. Perpetrators immediately try to hide the enormity of their crime and deny its existence. At the same time, there is no one explanation for Holocaust denial. There is a kind of perverse pleasure that some writers take in denial. There are also those in both victim and perpetrator communities who simply cannot abide Jewish claims to special victimhood in the Holocaust. There are anti-semites and anti-Zionists who shroud their hatred of the Jews in Holocaust denial, and so on. I personally don’t think that Holocaust denial should be against the law. Of course I’m not happy about it, and I think deniers should, depending on the circumstances, be criticised, vilified, ignored or marginalised. But I don’t think, for example, that it was a good thing for David Irving to be convicted of breaking the law and sent to jail in Austria for Holocaust denial."