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David Cesarani
The untimely passing of Professor David Cesarani struck his closest friends in Jerusalem like the proverbial bolt of lightning on a clear day. Not that we were unware that he had been diagnosed with bone cancer and had undergone the necessary surgery. But from communications with him and his family, it looked like the surgery had been successful and he was well on the road to full recovery. The prognosis — especially given the excellent shape he seemed to be in as a marathon runner and long-distance cyclist—looked very good. David seemed to draw encouragement from our expressions of concern and was hopeful that in time he would be back to himself completely. So the news of his death was an enormous shock. Perhaps even more surprising was the cause: heart disease. Apparently David’s avid athletics had masked the existence of the heart disease from which he was suffering. Many months later it is still very difficult to come to terms with his death.
I had the great privilege of meeting David professionally over twenty years ago when he first invited me to give a paper at a confer- ence he had organized for the Wiener Library in London, marking fifty years since the Holocaust in Hungary. Very quickly our professional relationship blossomed into a close friendship that included our fami- lies. Especially earlier in his career, David would stay at our home after conferences, when he needed a place in Jerusalem so that he could remain in the city to conduct research at Yad Vashem. Whenever I was in London, his home became my base as well, most recently in the spring of 2015, when I was attending meetings at University College London/ Royal Holloway for a research project. Then, too, I enjoyed the warm hospitality of the Cesarani “bed and breakfast.”
In his essay, “Autobiographical Reflections on Writing History, the Holocaust and Hairdressing,” Cesarani provides a narrative of his personal story and how it led him to become a Holocaust scholar.1 Born in 1956, his upbringing was far from traditionally Jewish. His parents were ideologically Communist — though more in sentiment than in practice. Yet their political leanings actually provided a Jewish ambiance in the home, since many of their friends were Jews who shared a similar orientation. Thus, Cesarani’s Jewish consciousness led him to a stint volunteering on a kibbutz in Israel. He became a lifelong supporter of Israel, although his initial burst of idealism was replaced by a more sober and nuanced understanding of the country, its challenges, and imperfections.
More decisively for his career, it also led him to the study of British Jewry. Educated at Cambridge, Columbia University, and Oxford, his work in that field lay the foundation for his first foray into Holocaust studies, when he was asked to do research for the All-Party Parliamentary War Crimes Group that, in 1986, began to explore the subject of Britain and Nazi war criminals who had reached its shores. By the time the Committee’s report was completed two years later, Cesarani had begun to make a name for himself as a scholar of the Holocaust. Owing to the fact that his entry into the subject was not through Ger- man history, but through British and British Jewish history, Cesarani brought sensibilities from both subjects to his engagement with the Holocaust. Over the course of his academic career, he taught at Leeds, Queen Mary College, Southampton, and Royal Holloway.
Over time Cesarani’s contribution to scholarship, education, and public commemoration of the Holocaust was very substantial. As a historian who engaged with the public, he played a leading role in fostering greater awareness of the Holocaust in the UK. Not only was he active in advocating the prosecution of Nazi war criminals who had reached the shores of Great Britain, but he was also interviewed frequently in the media on Holocaust-related issues. He reviewed many books in the most prestigious publications, played a leading role in establishing a Holocaust memorial day and in setting up the permanent exhibit about the Holocaust at the Imperial War Museum, and served as a member of the UK’s delegation to IHRA (the International Holocaust Remem- brance Alliance, formerly Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research). For his contribution to fostering awareness of the Holocaust in Great Britain, Cesarani was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 2005.
As important as he was in the position of public historian, Cesarani’s role as a serious scholar was even more significant. This essay focuses on his contribution to the study of the Holocaust; it does not deal with the other main subject of his interest, British Jewry.
Unlike many who research and write about the Holocaust and become subject specialists in a particular aspect or issue, Cesarani had a very broad perspective and wide-ranging understanding. Tracing his publications from the 1990s, until his last book, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–49, published only a few months after his passing, one can see how this last book, a comprehensive history of the Holocaust, is a culmination of his previous work. It integrates his own earlier scholarship, writing, and a vast amount of reading.2
A number of motifs run through Cesarani’s writing. He demonstrates complexity, breaks down myths and misconceptions, and shuns idealizations; he ties the events of the Holocaust and its aftermath firmly to the events of the war, and, indeed, lucidly shows that events must be understood in their context; he consistently represents the perspective of the Jewish victims, primarily by presenting their voices; and he clearly articulates his own voice, usually with wit and style.
To a large extent these motifs were already present in Cesarani’s first book about the Holocaust, Justice Delayed: How Britain Became a Refuge for Nazi War Criminals (1992), based on his work with the All-Party Commission.3 It was a pioneering work about how the Holocaust and war crimes were understood in Britain. Perhaps its most important contribution is to proffer an explanation as to why the British allowed so many collaborators in the murder of the Jews into the UK and why the issue remained dormant for so long.
To begin his explanation Cesarani provides several layers of context. He describes the chaotic situation of the myriads of displaced persons after the war, as well as the mind-set of British military and civilian officials; the Western Allies, for whom the war criminals were German and Austrian, and East European collaborators were far from a priority; and, more specifically, the collaborators from the Baltic States about whom he writes: “There was enormous confusion about who they were, their military history and what should be done with them.”4
The British Foreign Office was wary of returning them to the Soviets, since their repatriation was equated with recognition of the Soviet takeover of the Baltic States. These Baltic émigrés were even frequently treated with respect as victims of the Soviets, although there were also suspicions about their wartime activities. An official screening policy apparently was never implemented. So owing to laxity and indifference on the part of the British government, Cesarani writes, many Balts who had served in the Waffen-SS and had played a role in the Holocaust were simply allowed to disappear into German society. Eventually quite a few ended up in the UK.5
Laxity and indifference, he argues, were augmented by other factors, such as a need for laborers and the lobbying by émigrés who were already in the UK. The Balts were considered “Good Human Stock,” as were Ukrainians soon afterward, echoing eugenic and racist theories. Jews, however, were excluded from various immigration and labor schemes proposed at the time, and this, according to Cesarani, derived from a combination of the backlash over the issue of Palestine, racism, and antisemitism.6
Another significant contribution of this book is its skill at connecting the postwar discussion to wartime events. Cesarani’s nuanced analysis of collaboration in Eastern Europe is an excellent early sum- mary of this complex subject. As Cesarani writes, whereas the immediate trigger for many of the men to join the Germans was their desire to escape the lethal conditions of German POW camps, many of them were also motivated by a connected set of ideas: the belief that the Jews were responsible for the crimes committed by the Soviet regime in the areas they took over in the first months of the war; fierce anti-communism; the hope to gain independence through the Nazis; and deeply entrenched antisemitism.7 Once they switched sides, many felt no compunctions about taking part in the genocidal murder of the Jews.
Their murderous activities occurred primarily in the framework of the systematic mass shootings carried out under the auspices of the SS and ORPO and the deportation roundups in East European ghettos. To illustrate the extreme cruelty and barbarism of these operations, Cesarani presents first-hand accounts by Jews. In this way he portrayed the horror engendered by the perpetrators and ensured that the victims’ voices would be heard and that they would be regarded not as mere objects but as individuals.8
One part of the story that particularly ruffles our sensibilities today is the absorption of the entire Waffen-SS Galizien Division, which remained mostly intact south of Rimini in Italy, into the UK in May 1947, in order to avoid their repatriation to the Soviet Union. Cesarani’s astute analysis shows that, although there was some protest in Britain, since something of their role in the Holocaust was known, and the Home Office tried to bar the division members from being deemed civilians so as to block their entry into the UK, the division did arrive. By the end of 1948, almost all of its 8,300 members in the UK were either on the way to being granted British citizenship or were immigrating to Canada. Only thirty-two members of the division were denied the right to settle in Britain because of their wartime records.9
As Cesarani bluntly writes: “The transportation of the 14th Waffen-SS Galizien Division to Britain in May 1947 was not a covert operation, but the division’s history was sanitized and efforts were made to minimize its public profile.”10
Cesarani saw his subjects in their broader contexts. With regard to the decades-long lack of consciousness of the issue of the war criminals in the UK, he attributed this in large part to the way news of the Holocaust reached the UK. Whereas the extermination camps and mass-killing fields were in Eastern Europe, which fell under Soviet domination, the camps that became known in the UK were mainly those in which Jews were a minority of the prisoners. Thus, many in Britain did not clearly see the Jews as the primary victims of Nazism, and the subject of war crimes against the Jews began to surface only when this perception began to change in the 1980s.11
Cesarani examines at length the heated debates in both houses of Parliament and in the media around the War Crimes Bill adopted on May 10, 1991. He notes that the law’s passage was “one of the longest, most emotional and fiercely contested campaigns in post-war political history.”12 And twenty-five years later, Cesarani’s insight still reverberates in the book’s closing paragraph:
If the evolution of the new Europe has any lessons, it is that the past cannot be repressed and the pluralism of nation states is ignored at enormous risk…Justice delayed may not be justice denied, after all; but history denied will never lead to justice.13
In January 1992, Cesarani organized a symposium for the Weiner Library to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, resulting in the book The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation. The conference took place as the understanding of the development of the “Final Solution” was being refined through new research and debate. This set the stage for a clearer understanding that would go beyond the then still-heated “Intentionalist-Functionalist” debate. In his introduction Cesarani evokes this juncture in his framing of the Wannsee Conference:
Although the significance of the Wannsee Conference was over-rated for many years and has since been downgraded to little more than a platform for Heydrich to display his powers, its fiftieth anniversary provided a point of departure for scrutinizing the origins and implementation of the Final Solution.14
Two years later Cesarani organized another conference, marking fifty years since the destruction of Hungarian Jewry, published as Genocide and Rescue: The Holocaust in Hungary. The conference subject is one of the most contentious chapters in the history of the Holocaust, owing largely to the fact that it occurred so near the end of the war. Thus, the conference and subsequent volume drew attention to and shed new light on many controversial issues. These included the role of Hungarians and Hungarian society in the persecution and murder; information and knowledge about the murder of the Jews; Jewish responses to that murder; and rescue. The conference papers reflected research in newly available material in recently opened archives in former Communist countries.
While he was preparing this volume, Cesarani was also deep into researching the biography of Arthur Koestler, as reflected in his introduction. His opening sentence says much about Cesarani’s approach to history: integrating individual stories into wider contexts. “One man’s experiences may serve as a point of entry into one of the most appall- ing human tragedies of this century.” He then provides a thumbnail portrait of Arthur Koestler as a refugee, author, and advocate of doing whatever could be done to rescue Jews from the unfolding Holocaust that was engulfing them. When the machinery of destruction struck the Hungarian Jewish community, he expresses Koestler’s “nauseating frustration of seeing attempts to save them come to nothing.”15
Always cognizant of the importance of the history of the Holocaust for the contemporary world, Cesarani’s introduction also addresses the then fresh, murderous events in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda:
In spite of repeated instances of mass murder and genocide since 1945 the world has never witnessed anything like the Hungarian disaster. Without intending to belittle by one iota the scale and depth of human suffering which they involved, the similarities between “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia or the genocide in Rwanda and the events in Hungary are superficial. What surface parallels do exist only highlight the profound differences. Yet it is useful and potentially important to understand the differences since in spite of everything, these recent disasters still happened. 16
This early articulation of how to approach the Holocaust in the age of genocide, and the need for comparative analysis of different cases of genocide, is still shared by many members of the community of Holocaust and Genocide scholars today.
Cesarani’s massive biography, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind, published in 1998, is not a study of the Holocaust per se, though the Holocaust years and their effect constitute a substantial portion of the story. The sections about the Holocaust period add a great deal to our understanding of how people, cognizant of and sensitive to the unfolding events, understood them, and were influenced by them. Moreover, it adds significant details to the portrait of advocates for action to aid Jews, a subject to which Cesarani would return in a later book.
This research project began as a study of the Jewish aspects of Koestler and ended up looking at him more completely, as a man. Having closely read Koestler’s extensive bibliography and having trawled an equally extensive archive, Cesarani charts not only his literary achievements, their background and impact, but he also delves deep into his psyche. He portrays his zigzagging political and ideological orientations, from Revisionist Zionism, to Communism, to anti-Com- munist, back to Zionism, and to a renunciation of his Jewishness. In unravelling Koestler’s complex personality and Jewish identity, Cesarani concludes that his conflicted self was representative of intellectuals, particularly Jewish intellectuals, of his time.
Despite his conclusion about Koestler’s troubled personality, Cesarani praises his contributions: five novels; two autobiographical books; reportage; the history of science; and more. “The scope of his interests, catholicity of tastes and polymathic skills is in itself remarkable.”17
The period from the Nazi seizure of power until the end of the Holocaust made a great impression on Koestler, leading him back to Zionism. In light of the persecution of German Jewry and the growth of antisemitism throughout much of Europe, he now viewed the Jewish return to the Land of Israel in very practical terms, as “a small state in which Jews could find sanctuary.”18 Moreover, Koestler’s personal experiences and encounters greatly colored his writing during that time. His wartime books, Darkness at Noon, Scum of the Earth, and Arrival and Departure, related his anti-Communism, his experiences as a Spanish Civil War internee in the La Vernet camp, and his experiences as a refugee in North Africa and Portugal, respectively. Koestler learned of the Bund Report about the massacre of the Jews of Poland in the summer of 1942, and Polish courier Jan Karski a few months later. Koestler wrote a script for the BBC, “Jewish Massacre,” which was ascribed to Karski and was broadcast in June 1943; in January 1944, he published an article in The New York Times Magazine, “On Disbelieving Atrocities.”
Whereas he was unsuccessful in helping his wife, Dorothea Ascher, from whom he was separated, and who was stranded in France, he did succeed in arranging an aliyah certificate for his mother, who was in Hungary when the Germans invaded in March 1944. Both his wife and mother survived. In Britain Koestler became close to Chaim Weizmann, and, at the end of 1944, he went to Palestine. This resulted in the novel, Thieves in the Night, set there just before the outbreak of the war.19 Cesarani writes: “The shattering events of 1942–4 turned Koestler back on his Jewish roots… At a crucial moment in the history of Europe and Koestler’s own life he chose to act as a Jew.”20
Cesarani’s detailed portrait of Koestler is not only an elucidation of many aspects of the man; it also shows that in the countries beyond Nazi domination there were public intellectuals, refugees like Koestler, who comprised a kind of bridge between the events of the Holocaust and the societies in which they lived. Studying the activities and thoughts of such people can shed light on how information about the fate of the Jews was received in the “free world.”
In 2002, Cesarani and Paul Levine edited a conference volume titled ‘Bystanders’ to the Holocaust: A Reevaluation; in many ways this broadened the theme of response that percolated through much of the Koestler biography.21 His own article, “Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Towards a Taxonomy of Rescuer in a ‘Bystander’ Country–Britain 1933–45,” is a nuanced elucidation of the many factors that brought twelve of the leading advocates of aid to Jews to engage in their activities.22
Cesarani demonstrates how factors like religion, philosemitism, age, generation, and ideology were not shared by the rescuers and cannot be used to explain their actions in all cases. He suggests that what they did share were the facts that all of them were “doers,” they were cosmo-politan, and they felt personal responsibility. In addition, each of them was familiar enough with Germany and Central Europe that they did not feel that events were taking place, in Neville Chamberlain’s words, in a “far away land about which we know little.” Instead the rescue advocates empathized with the victims.23 The editors’ concluding remarks argue for subtlety in understanding the so-called bystanders, for recognizing the more objective contextual factors that influenced them and for trying to evaluate what actions were possible.24
Perhaps one of Cesarani’s most important books is his 2004 biography of one of the symbols of Holocaust criminals, Adolf Eichmann. Cesarani successfully achieves his declared intention in Eichmann: His Life and Crimes25 of revising the popular image of Eichmann, characterizing him more accurately, and integrating him more appropriately into the history of the Holocaust and the development and implemen- tation of the “Final Solution.” At the time he was preparing the book, other works appeared that had begun this process, perhaps most importantly Yaacov Lozowick’s Hitler’s Bureaucrats, about Eichmann and his staff.26
Around the time of his trial, Eichmann was alternately portrayed as a satanic bureaucrat seething in hatred — for example, by prosecutor Gideon Hausner and popular writers — or as a demented individual scarred by his childhood, serving another crazy individual; or, as an “everyman,” as argued by Hannah Arendt. At the same time the Nazi regime was regarded as a well-oiled bureaucratic machine. This was the situation until the 1980s, when several important studies emerged to show otherwise.
Cesarani provided a necessary corrective, showing that Eichmann was neither a small cog in the machinery of murder nor an unbridled beast. Nor was Eichmann an all-powerful director or decision-maker; he was a manager: “He managed genocide in the way that the CEO of any corporation would run a multi-national company.”27
And in one of his most important observations, demonstrated clearly throughout the book, Cesarani writes: “Eichmann was not insane, nor was he a robotic receiver of orders. He was educated to geno- cide and chose to put what he learned into operation.”28
Eichmann was not a key decision-maker within a monolithic order. Rather, he
adapted to policy that was not of his making, that threw into reverse machinery he had established, and implicitly repudiated the premises on which it was based. Moreover, until the Wannsee Conference there was no assurance that this new departure would meet with success or redound to his benefit. If we look at Eichmann as a middle-ranking player, a subordinate, operating in an arena of conflicting power elites and policy-makers, rather than the executor of a centrally determined and inexorable policy, then his reactions become less incredible, though no less reprehensible and, indeed, more human…He was relieved that the Wannsee Conference had assured him a role in the new phase of ‘Jewish policy’. His job as an ‘emigration expert’ disappeared, but he was vouchsafed a key role in the implementation of new policy...Following the Wannsee Conference, Adolf Eichmann became the managing director of the greatest single genocide in history.29
Although decision making was in the hands of Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich, Eichmann
still exercised a specially malign influence. Time and again he intervened to limit the type and number of Jews to be exempted from deportation. In the case of the Netherlands, for months he fought efforts to exclude the thousands of Jewish diamond work- ers, even though they were critical to the economy.30
Cesarani shows that Eichmann had not been a particularly vicious antisemite when he first joined the SS, but changed over time. Contrary to Eichmann’s popular image as a desk murderer, Cesarani shows that he was frequently away from his desk visiting sites of persecution and murder, among them Auschwitz. He had particular responsibility for the Theresienstadt Ghetto, which he visited often. With the German occupation of their ally Hungary in March 1944, Eichmann was given the task of managing the deportation of that country’s Jews on site: “Here he used all of his experience to successfully coordinate the logistics among different people and agencies, some of whom would have liked to have taken over his role.”31
If, at the beginning of his career, Eichmann was dedicated to his job and conformed closely to SS ideals of behavior, Cesarani demonstrates that, by 1944, in Hungary, he had changed. In Budapest Eichmann lived the good life, eating delicacies, drinking liquor, and womanizing.
Eichmann was not the sadistic, lustful beast that the press later made him out to be, but he certainly was not a dull-witted clerk or a robotic bureaucrat, either. Power, the power of life and death, corrupted Eichmann. By 1944, he was rotten from the inside out.32
A large section of the biography examines the capture and trial of Eichmann in 1961. Cesarani is able to deconstruct central aspects of the trial and the man based on knowledge accrued since the trial. He is frequently able to point out when Eichmann was lying, or when he was telling the truth but the prosecutor and judges thought he was lying. Cesarani is quite critical of the prosecution, whose strategy was to wear down Eichmann and cast him as a very senior player in the murder. But alongside Cesarani’s biting criticism, he also tries to explain why they misunderstood so much.
Unfortunately, the prosecution interpreted many of the documents wrongly. Due to the limitation of historical knowledge at the time and the way the charges were framed, the prosecutor accused Eichmann of crimes he did not commit and refused to take seriously his disavowals of responsibility. Eichmann was forced blatantly to deny documents because the prosecution read meanings into them that they did not have. This made him look worse than he was even in reality and, in retrospect, reduced the trial to the level of farce.33
Cesarani’s summation of Eichmann recasts him as a man of his times — human yet not mundane. This opens an important window onto Nazi behavior and adds to our understanding of at least some of the men who perpetrated the Holocaust.
The inevitable conclusion is that Eichmann did not object to inflicting horrible suffering on Jews or consigning them to certain death. There was no aspect of the Nazi treatment of the Jews that bothered him enough on prudential, legal or moral grounds to warrant rebellion, resistance or evasion when he was required to implement it.… The key to understanding Adolf Eichmann lies not in the man, but in the ideas that possessed him, the society in which they flowed freely, the political system that purveyed them, and the circumstances that made them acceptable.34
As Cesarani writes in Justice Delayed, for many in the UK Bergen-Belsen symbolized Nazi persecution. With that in mind, he and Suzanne Bardgett of the Imperial War Museum organized a conference marking the seventieth anniversary of the camp’s liberation that later appeared as the book Belsen 1945: New Historical Perspectives.35
Cesarani’s contribution, “A Brief History of Bergen-Belsen,” makes important points regarding those new perspectives.36 He explains the camp’s transformation from a prisoner-of-war camp into one for Allied nationals whom the Nazis hoped to exchange for German nation- als stuck in Allied territory after the start of the war. Among such camp prisoners were Jews holding British Palestinian citizenship or aliyah certificates who were to be exchanged for the Templers (Germans who had settled in Palestine), and Jews with nationality outside of Nazi- dominated Europe. Challenging the common wisdom, Cesarani sees the camp as a missed rescue opportunity by the Allies.
Tragically when they had the opportunity to rescue Jews from Bergen-Belsen by means of these deals, officials in the Allied countries either failed to recognize the danger that Jews were facing or placed a higher priority on maintaining the blockade of Germany and eschewed any negotiations with the enemy. In this respect, Belsen is as much a part of the story of Allied reactions to the genocide waged against the Jews as it part of that story itself.37
Here Cesarani again shows his mastery at crafting short, poignant human descriptions that are illustrative of major points. In just a few short words he evokes the great suffering in Bergen-Belsen:
At the best of times the camp could barely cope with the numbers it had originally been designed to hold. The “star camp” possessed one washroom with 12 taps for 4,000 inmates, and the number of prisoners rocketed during early 1945. The “prisoners’ camp” had no sanitary facilities at all and no water supply.38
In the years 2010–2012, Cesarani co-edited three conference books on the postwar period. The first two, subtitled Landscapes after Battle, dealt with survivors and the issue of justice, politics, and memory in the immediate postwar period. The third addressed the issue of the supposed silence of the survivors after the Holocaust.39 His introduc- tion to the first volume of Landscapes after Battle broaches a subject that was just then coming to the fore, and was reflected in books by Tony Judt, Keith Lowe, and Ian Buruma. The fact was that, contrary to popular belief, the end of war did not bring immediate peace; rather, Europe remained a scene of tumult and violence long after the fighting officially ended.40
In his articles in the second volume of Landscapes after Battle and in After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence, Cesarani discusses early memoirs by survivors, showing that much had been written and had been published immediately after the war. Although he was not the first to demonstrate this,41 his article “A New Look at some Old Memoirs: Early Narratives of Nazi Persecution and Geno- cide,” goes beyond merely debunking the myth of silence, as he seeks to understand the myth’s origins.42 Thus, he presents a groundbreaking analysis of the memoirs’ impact at the time. His answer as to why the myth of silence arose is as concise as it is convincing:
[T]he chief reason for the recession of interest in the story of Jewish suffering and resistance under Nazi domination is that by the end of the 1940s there had simply been too much about it. It was not for lack of interest that demand dried up: the market was satiated. People had heard enough.43
Cesarani explains that memoirs published during the war itself, like Mary Berg’s diary, were harnessed to war propaganda. Moreover, her diary was edited by S. L. Schneiderman toward this end, and so it is unclear exactly how he changed the text. “[A]t best,” Cesarani writes, “Mary incorporated second-hand sources to chronicle the ghetto clearances and the 1943 uprising. At worst, Schneiderman included material he had culled from other sources and attributed it to her.”44 Like all documents, Cesarani points out, memoirs must be read critically.
Cesarani also demonstrates that the early memoirs actually traveled far around the world. The book The Root and the Bough: The Epic of an Enduring People,45 “… symbolizes the extraordinary achievement of Jews cooperating globally to present the widest possible audience with a true picture of the recent catastrophic events.” The editor Leo Schwarz was helped by “Lucy Dawidowicz, Philip Friedman, the Central Historical Commission in Munich, the CDJC in Paris, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, and Yad Vashem. He also made use of numerous Yiddish publications, especially Fun Letzten Khurbn.”46
By the time he was working on Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–49, Cesarani had researched, convened conferences, and published numerous books and articles about many of the central issues in the study of the Holocaust. This included editing a six-volume compendium of scholarly articles about the Holocaust for Routledge in 2004.47 His talents as a historian and writer, his wide reading, and the network of leading Holocaust historians with whom he routinely interacted, situated him very well to tackle writing an up-to-date one- volume history of the Holocaust. His great contribution to the field of Holocaust studies in this volume is not only in offering a cutting-edge narrative and analysis, but also in providing fresh and often thought- provoking perspectives. His well-honed modus operandi — eschewing idealization and myths; exploring history from a multiplicity of perspectives, while still giving a prominent voice to the Jewish victims; placing the unfolding of the Holocaust in its wider historical context, especially the run-up to the war and the war itself; using fine details to illustrate more general ideas; and always favoring complexity over simple explanations — resonates throughout the book.
Although since the start of the twenty-first century, other books have been published that could be considered to be one-volume histories, Cesarani’s stands out. Unlike Peter Longerich’s outstanding monograph Holocaust: the Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, 48 which focuses on the perpetration of the Holocaust, Cesarani also probes events from the perspective of the Jews. In this way he is more similar to Saul Friedländer,49 who weaves a history from a multiplicity of perspectives, although Cesarani’s presentation is more systematic. His book is written in a way that makes it easier to use in the classroom.
The rationale that Cesarani puts forth for writing the book challenges the reader from the start:
The Holocaust has never been so ubiquitous. It has never been studied so extensively, taught so widely or taken with such frequency as a subject for novels and films…. However there is a yawning gulf between popular understanding of the history and current scholarship on the subject…the customary narrative is lopsided. The emphasis on deportations to death camps, particularly from western Europe to Auschwitz, overshadows the benighted experience of Jews in Polish ghettos. Yet the number of Jews incarcerated in the ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz, in 1940–1 exceeds the combined Jewish populations in France, Belgium and the Netherlands at the same time. More Jews died in Warsaw than were deported from France to the killing sites of eastern Europe. More Jews were shot within walking distance of the homes in Kiev on 29–30 September 1941 than were forced to endure the horrendous five-day journey in box-cars from transit camps in Belgium to death camps in Poland. Yet one of the most typical Holocaust memorials is a freight car mounted on a segment of rail track.50
Cesarani further explains that commemoration does not touch on more sensitive topics, such as sexual exploitation, the corruption of life in ghettos and camps, and even Jews who turned against other Jews. Indeed, he felt a need to provide a solid up-to-date resource for the interested public, especially because of the dissonance between the reflection of the Holocaust in popular culture, education, and commemoration, and, “the revelations by researchers in many disciplines, operating within and outside an academic framework.”51
As a basic history of the Holocaust, the book covers some welltrod ground. However, even regarding subjects about which much has been written, Cesarani frequently adds a new voice, a new interpretation, or a new approach. For example, in his discussion of the boy- cott of Jews in Germany soon after the Nazis came to power, Cesarani suggests that the boycott did not coalesce because the Nazis disdained international opinion but, rather, was restricted precisely because they cared about it. Neither was it principally an outlet for SA pressure to act against the Jews and their wealth but a response to the belief that the foreign boycott was proof of Jewish solidarity and financial control. Convinced of the veracity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Nazis thought that if they squeezed one part of world Jewry the other parts would, “be forced to pay for its relief from pressure. Equally, if Jews were threatened in one place they could make a government somewhere else react. From this point onward these principles as- sumed an a priori status in Nazi thinking.”52
Cesarani emphasizes that as this is a book about the Holocaust, Jews are at its epicenter.53 To highlight the difference between Jews and other victims of Nazi racist ideology, he cites the fact that, during the war in the west, black colonial soldiers were often slaughtered by the Germans in the trenches or field of battle, but those taken prisoner were to be repatriated and not slaughtered. This illustrates, “a fundamental difference between the perception of Jews and others inserted by the Germans into racially defined categories. The Jews were a powerful, dangerous, mortal enemy in a way that other racially differenti- ated groups were not.”54
Cesarani argues that historians too often overlook the crucial context of the war to understanding Judenpolitik. Whereas he is not the first to say this, his argument resounds throughout the book; he adds that for Hitler even more important than the antisemitism that lay at the core of his identity was his self-image as a warrior.55
By late July and into August 1941, Cesarani argues, it was clear to German military commanders that they had underestimated the Soviet Union and that they were in trouble. For example, the victory in Kiev left them with only half of their tanks running and no quick way to replace them. At the same time partisan warfare grew; Jews were seen as Bolsheviks and hence were considered either partisans or their supporters. This led to a greater emphasis on the ideological aspect of the war against the Bolsheviks, and perforce, as General Wilhelm Keitel declared at the time, against the Jews. Thus, Cesarani illustrates that the unfolding war contributed to a radicalization of anti-Jewish policy and the extension of murder to Jewish women and children in August.56
In Cesarani’s estimate the war influenced not only German Judenpolitik but also Allied attitudes and actions regarding the Jewish victims. Cesarani writes bitingly and provocatively about the last year of the war:
The Germans were able to pursue a murderous Judenpolitik into the autumn of 1944 because the Allies failed to end either the war or the slaughter of the Jews. Crucially for the course of the war and, therefore, Jewish survival chances, Hitler grimly soldiered on while in neither the east nor the west were the Allies able to convert their enormous victories of the summer months into a knock-out blow. If German military failure had doomed the Jews in the first half of the war, they now suffered the consequences of Allied military failure.57
As in his biography of Eichmann, Cesarani shows that the Nazi regime was far from a well-oiled machine; in fact, he calls it “dysfunctional.” He also shows convincingly that the regime’s dysfunctionality greatly affected anti-Jewish policies.
…its fragmented leadership was constantly trying to accomplish a great deal in a short time with limited resources. Personalities and policies tugged in opposite directions, cut across one another and just ran out of steam… Judenpolitik didn’t appear coherent or purposeful because it wasn’t; it was improvised, unplanned and, hence, unpredictable.58
This was true before the war, once it began, and into the period when the “Final Solution” coalesced.59 Eventually, however, the war brought a certain theoretical clarity and
coherence to Nazi anti-Jewish policy. Germany was now involved in a global conflict engineered by the Jews, fighting a war, against Jewish-Bolshevism in Russia, against the Jewish-communist fifth column across Europe, and Jewish plutocracy in the USA and Britain.
As Goebbels wrote concerning what Hitler said on December 12, 1941, at a meeting of party bosses: “The world war is here, the destruction of the Jews must be the inevitable consequence.”60 In the field, however, the machinery of murder remained unoiled.
Incorporating recent research about Nazi anti-Jewish policies, Cesarani shows how measures against the Jews were intertwined with policies regarding local populations in the East, ethnic Germans, food and food shortages, security fears, and the economic despoliation and exploitation of the Jews. Regarding Poland in 1939, and through the first half of 1941, he expounds that measures on the ground were to a great extent simply expediencies. For example, the establishment of the Lodz ghetto in 1940,
…was never the fulfillment of a deliberate, long-term policy for- mulated by the Nazi leadership. Rather, it was a desperate expedient launched by local administrators in response to the failure of deportation plans and the impoverishment of the Jewish popula- tion which was, itself, the by-product of German measures.
“[P]ushing them behind a wall where they would be out of sight,” was the best solution that regional and local Nazi leaders could devise for the moment.61
He demonstrates that “Operation Reinhard,” the drive to murder the Jews of the Generalgouvernement, came into being on the background of Himmler’s security fears. These were exacerbated after the Baum Group attacked an anti-Soviet exhibit, Heydrich was murdered, and there was a fear of a food shortage in Poland because the thrust into the Soviet heartland was not advancing as planned.62
In the context of the expansion of Auschwitz in 1942, Cesarani corrects a common misunderstanding regarding Jewish forced labor. When it became clear to Himmler that the war would not be short, he decided that he could strengthen the SS by expanding prisoner labor in camps, especially by exploiting more Jews to the hilt. But Cesarani explains that, whereas this “became known colloquially as ‘annihilation through labour,’” there was no such comprehensive program. “The notion was applied retrospectively and inaccurately to the fate of the Jews. In actuality, work offered a lifeline to them and more would sur- vive in labour camps than as fugitives from ghettos.”63 This idea has been articulated by other scholars in recent years.64
Resting on both older and more recent scholarship, Cesarani explains that, despite low chances for survival, Jews were active is seeking ways to remain alive. Regarding Poland he writes:
The chances for Jewish survival in Poland were indeed slim and the abysmal rate of success has obscured the efforts of those who attempted evasion or concealment. Yet recent studies reveal that… a significant proportion of the town and village Jews in the General Government sought to evade the roundups in mid to late 1942 by fleeing to woodland and constructing hideouts. The Polish Canadian historian Jan Grabowski estimates that as many as 250,000 Jews sought to evade the deportations in this way. But barely 50,000 were alive at the end of the war.65
This low survival rate was tightly bound up with the attitude of the local population and the denunciation and betrayal that the Jews suffered: “To the majority of Poles and Ukrainians, Jews were perceived not as humans in dire need of assistance, but as commodities to be traded or a source of enrichment.”66
This led to Cesarani’s counterintuitive conclusions about survival, based on the research of David Silberklang and Jan Grabowski:
Due to the persistence of the German police in relentlessly hunting Jews and the attitude of the Polish or Ukrainian populations (depending on the region), until late 1943 it was statistically safer to be in a labour camp. Tragically, the death camp revolts jeopar- dized the relative safety of Jews who were in slave labour installa- tions across the General Government and even further afield.67
Nonetheless, even during the drive to kill off Jewish forced laborers in Poland in “Operation Erntefest” in the autumn of 1943, some pockets of Jews survived because of their economic value to SS leaders; for example, those in the Kraśnik camp.68
Cesarani avoids letting the characterization of Jewish activism bolster an idealized view of Jewish responses, showing that Jewish behavior was far from idyllic. He writes extensively of the suffering in the Warsaw ghetto and the moral degeneration that resulted in its wake. Alongside attempts to improve conditions and to create culture, Cesarani details the class distinctions, corruption, theft, prostitution, and other ills that became endemic in the ghetto.69 He brings in many voices of Jewish victims in order to give a multi-faceted picture and especially to evoke the nearly unfathomable suffering.
Undoubtedly, sometime in the future a new one-volume history of the Holocaust will eclipse Cesarani’s, especially if it continues the line he set of integrating new scholarship, deconstructing myths and common misconceptions, presenting new interpretations, and humanizing the actors in this horrific drama. But for the foreseeable future, this volume is the most up-to-date. Given its clarity of thought and readability, it should serve scholars, students, and the general public well. Indeed, Cesarani’s body of writing will remain an essential source of information, knowledge, and wisdom in the historiography of the Holocaust, and his legacy represents the best the historical profession has to offer.
It is fitting to end with a turn of phrase representative of Cesarani’s great ability to evoke a scene, its tone, and a personality in a few words. In the Koestler biography he describes a 1946 meeting in Paris between Koestler and André Malraux, the French novelist and later minister of culture: “Malraux got drunk on vodka and was consequently even more incomprehensible than usual.”70
May David Cesarani’s memory be blessed.
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