The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942(Comprehensive History of the Holocaust)

Published by the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, and Yad Vashem, Jerusalem In 1939, the Nazi regime’s plans for redrawing the demographic map of Eastern Europe entailed the expulsion of millions of Jews. By the fall of 1941, these plans had shifted from expulsion to systematic and total mass murder of all Jews within the Nazi grasp. The Origins of the Final Solution is the most detailed and comprehensive analysis ever written of what took place during this crucial period—of how, precisely, the Nazis’ racial policies evolved from persecution and “ethnic cleansing” to the Final Solution of the Holocaust. Focusing on the months between the German conquest of Poland in September 1939–which brought nearly two million additional Jews under Nazi control—and the beginning of the deportation of Jews to the death camps in the spring of 1942, Christopher R. Browning describes how Poland became a laboratory for experiments in racial policies, from expulsion and decimation to ghettoization and exploitation under local occupation authorities. He reveals how the subsequent attack on the Soviet Union opened the door for an immense radicalization of Nazi Jewish policy—and marked the beginning of the Final Solution. Meticulously documenting the process that led to this fatal development, Browning shows that Adolf Hitler was the key decision-maker throughout, approving major escalations in Nazi persecution of the Jews at victory-induced moments of euphoria. Thoroughly researched and lucidly written, this groundbreaking work provides an essential chapter in the history of the Holocaust.

About the Author :
Christopher R. Browning is Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. He is the author of numerous books on Nazism and the Holocaust, including Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers and Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.

Review :
"This work is by far the most incisive analysis of the decisions that gave rise to the annihilation of the Jews in Nazi Europe."--Raul Hilberg, Appointee to the President's Commission on the Holocaust and to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, and author of The Destruction of the European Jews. "Extraordinary. Browning's is the first volume of Nebraska's authoritative and monumental Comprehensive History of the Holocaust, a series of at least fifteen volumes to be published over the next decade... Browning---one of the world's greatest scholars of the Holocaust, and the author of the meticulous, nuanced, and disturbing Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland---has taken on the most contentious and knotty aspect of the Final Solution: how and why Nazi policy evolved, in the brief period between the autumn of 1939 and the autumn of 1941, from the persecution and planned expulsion of Jews to the detailed strategy of systematically murdering all Jews within Germany's grasp... Browning has obviously mastered every pertinent document available---from archives in Germany, the United States, the former Soviet Union, and Israel---and assimilated them all into his sometimes day-by-day account of the development of Nazi policy. In sifting the evidence he makes clear what's known and what's not, what's probable, what's possible, and what's unlikely; with rigor and unusually incisive writing style he places events, decisions, and debates in a precise historical context, paying heed both to strict chronology and to more amorphous considerations... And above all, with exactitude he lays bare his own suppositions as he transparently builds his arguments and his narrative. A masterpiece of the historian's art." March 1, 2004, issue of The Atlantic Monthly The entire review will be viewable when the March 1 issue of The Atlantic Monthly is posted online on February 17. Now available is a fascinating interview with Christopher Browning on The Atlantic Monthly's website, "Atlantic Unbound." http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2004-02-11.htm "Superb...[Browning] has created an eloquent, painstaking narrative of how the Final Solution evolved until it 'could evolve no further in concept. It remained only to be implemented through action.'" Joshua Rubenstein:, Bookshelf, 23 March 2004