The fate of the Jews, 1933 – 49
My version: Paperback
Genre: Non-Fiction The Holocaust, WWII
Publisher: Macmillan, Pan Books
First published: 2016
ISBN: 978-0-330-53537-3
Pages: 796 (plus glossary, bibliography, notes, index)
Bought
From the cover:
The Holocaust has never been so widely commemorated, but our undestanding of the accepted narrative has rarely, if ever, been questioned. Here, David Cesarani arhues that Hitler’s extermination of the Jews was neither planned or inevitable. As the war went against the Third Reich, the persecution of Europe’s Jews escalated from discrimination to genocide. Drawing on a vast array of sources, dating from the earliest days of Nazi Germany, to the post-war displacement camps, Final Solution recounts the terrible fate of Europe’s Jews, often in their own words. Resting on decades of scholarship, it is compelling, authoritative, and profoundly disturbing.
David Cesarani’s book Final Solution is a masterful overview of the Holocaust, which argues that the Reich’s plans were often improvised and muddled. A lot of the time, reactive, rather than always pro-active, as most people would think. The book is a synthesis of recent scholarship and aims to bridge the gap between academic research and popular knowledge. Cesarani was a peerless public historian of the Holocaust, and this book is his legacy – his last major study and his finest.
It is truly a monumental work of scholarship, obviously the culmination of decades of research and writing and is a comprehensive and authoritative account of the Holocaust, from the rise of the Nazis to the end of World War II and its aftermath. However, the book is also a coherent and comprehensive account of the Holocaust, written with clarity and precision. It traces a path across a vast mass of material – new and old – demonstrating with urgency and verve how Hitler’s progress towards mass extermination of the Jews was never pre-planned or preordained. Cesarani’s uses his ability to bring coherence to the confusion of the genocide, to connect all the narratives to geopolitical events and eventually leads us to (perhaps) rethinking our views of the Holocaust.
As I hinted at above, Cesarani’s book is notable for its breadth and depth. It examines the Holocaust from multiple perspectives, including the perpetrators, the victims, and the bystanders. It also explores the role of ideology, economics, and military strategy in shaping the course of events, in a clear and engaging style, making his complex subject matter accessible to a wider audience. Cesarani is also always scrupulously fair and objective in his analysis. He does not shy away from controversial topics, such as the role of Jewish councils in the Holocaust or the extent of collaboration by local populations.
One of the things I thought that makes Cesarani’s book so powerful is his use of personal stories and eyewitness accounts. He brings the reader face-to-face with the victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust, making it impossible to ignore the human cost of this tragedy.
All in all, Cesarani’s book is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand the Holocaust. It is a masterpiece of historical scholarship and a powerful testament to the resilience of the human spirit, a superb history that is both moving and overwhelming. It is nothing short of a must-read for anyone interested in the history of the Holocaust.
A little background about the author:
David Cesarani was a British historian who specialised in Jewish history, especially the Holocaust. He was born on November 13, 1956, in London, United Kingdom. He studied history at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and earned a master’s degree in Jewish history at Columbia University in New York. He completed his doctorate at St Antony’s College, Oxford, where he researched aspects of the history of the interwar Anglo-Jewish community.
Cesarani held positions at the University of Leeds, at Queen Mary University of London, and at the Wiener Library in London, where he was director for two periods in the 1990s. He was a professor of Modern Jewish history at the University of Southampton from 2000 to 2004 and research professor in history at Royal Holloway, University of London from 2004 until his death.
Cesarani was a prolific author and wrote several biographies, including Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1998). He was awarded the Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to Holocaust education and advising the government on the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.
You can (and should) buy Final Solution by David Cesarani from Amazon
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