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Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? "Final Solution" in History [Verso World History Series] by Mayer, Arno [Verso,2012] [Paperback] Reprint
Analyzes the circumstances that led to the Holocaust, discusses the prewar political and social order, and looks at genocide in European history
Unknown Binding
First published December 24, 1988
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About the author
Arno J. Mayer
16 books27 followersA specialist in modern Europe, diplomatic history, and the Holocaust, Arno Joseph Mayer was Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Emeritus, at Princeton University. A self-proclaimed "left dissident Marxist", Mayer's major interests were in modernization theory and what he called "The Thirty Years' Crisis" between 1914 and 1945.
After fleeing the Nazi conquest of Europe in 1940, Mayer became a naturalized citizen of the United States and enlisted in the United States Army. During his time in the Army, he was trained at Camp Ritchie, Maryland and was recognized as one of the Ritchie Boys. He served as an intelligence officer and eventually became a morale officer for high-ranking German prisoners of war. He was discharged in 1946. He received his education at the City College of New York, the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva and Yale University. He was professor at Wesleyan University (1952–53), Brandeis University (1954–58) and Harvard University (1958–61). He taught at Princeton University beginning in 1961.
After fleeing the Nazi conquest of Europe in 1940, Mayer became a naturalized citizen of the United States and enlisted in the United States Army. During his time in the Army, he was trained at Camp Ritchie, Maryland and was recognized as one of the Ritchie Boys. He served as an intelligence officer and eventually became a morale officer for high-ranking German prisoners of war. He was discharged in 1946. He received his education at the City College of New York, the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva and Yale University. He was professor at Wesleyan University (1952–53), Brandeis University (1954–58) and Harvard University (1958–61). He taught at Princeton University beginning in 1961.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
May 30, 2022
I’m in awe at just how inadequate and distorted our understanding of Nazism, fascism, and Hitler are. Arno Meyer here reveals an extremely well-crafted, dialectical analysis of the onset of the second world war and the ensuing violence. He makes a really compelling case for the “dress rehearsal” of the Nazi Judeocide occurring in Eastern Europe during the counterrevolutionary war waged by the Western powers against the Soviet Union, and provides what I would consider to be the best account of twentieth century fascism and anti-Semitism I've ever read.
It’s refreshing to see a historical text like this that doesn’t fall into the trap of exceptionalizing individuals but rather views them as ideological products of history. By emphasizing the anti-communism that formed the basis of Nazi ideology, Mayer explains in great detail how Operation Barbarossa ultimately unleashed a systematic extermination of Jews that was until then absent from the Nazi program of persecution and violence but found fertile soil in the General Crisis of the Second Thirty Years War.
“The assault on the Jews was unquestionably intertwined with the assault on Bolshevism from the very outset. But this is not to say that it was the dominant strand in the hybrid “Judeobolshevism” that Barbarossa targeted for destruction. In fact, the war against the Jews was a graft onto or a parasite upon the eastern campaign, which always remained its host, even or especially once it became mired deep in Russia.”
Everyone should be required to read this book. It completely changed my understanding of the connection between anti-Semitism and fascism, and we need a better understanding if we're going to fight its current and future iterations.
It’s refreshing to see a historical text like this that doesn’t fall into the trap of exceptionalizing individuals but rather views them as ideological products of history. By emphasizing the anti-communism that formed the basis of Nazi ideology, Mayer explains in great detail how Operation Barbarossa ultimately unleashed a systematic extermination of Jews that was until then absent from the Nazi program of persecution and violence but found fertile soil in the General Crisis of the Second Thirty Years War.
“The assault on the Jews was unquestionably intertwined with the assault on Bolshevism from the very outset. But this is not to say that it was the dominant strand in the hybrid “Judeobolshevism” that Barbarossa targeted for destruction. In fact, the war against the Jews was a graft onto or a parasite upon the eastern campaign, which always remained its host, even or especially once it became mired deep in Russia.”
Everyone should be required to read this book. It completely changed my understanding of the connection between anti-Semitism and fascism, and we need a better understanding if we're going to fight its current and future iterations.
May 16, 2019
A powerful historical book that covers in detail the Holocaust of World War Two. Mayer takes an unusual approach in looking at the reason for the Holocaust, one more scholarly than from personal experience. He states, correctly, there is a school of thought that says Hitler and the Nazis planned the extermination of the Jews from day one.
Through an incredibly detailed review of available evidence, Mayer makes the sound argument that the decision to exterminate the Jewish people came as a result of a number of circumstances. Most of these circumstances stem from the Nazi war on Russia - and their failure in that theater of war. It is posited that had Germany been able to defeat Russia, they were prepared to simply make Greater Germany Judenfrei by shipping all Jews over the Urals.
With Russia stopping Germany in 1941, before Russia defeating them in 1942 at Stalingrad and subsequently stifling the last ditch efforts in 1943, the Germans fell into a cycle of slaughter that chiefly destroyed six million Jews.
While not an easy read, this is a very important book and in this day and age, it should be read by every single person when they turn eighteen. The scourge of Nazis and White Power is not part of the past. It is here today and the world must stand up to it and put it back in the dustbin of history where it resided only for the 50 or 60 years after 1945.
My Rating: 5 stars
Reviewed by: Mr. N
Through an incredibly detailed review of available evidence, Mayer makes the sound argument that the decision to exterminate the Jewish people came as a result of a number of circumstances. Most of these circumstances stem from the Nazi war on Russia - and their failure in that theater of war. It is posited that had Germany been able to defeat Russia, they were prepared to simply make Greater Germany Judenfrei by shipping all Jews over the Urals.
With Russia stopping Germany in 1941, before Russia defeating them in 1942 at Stalingrad and subsequently stifling the last ditch efforts in 1943, the Germans fell into a cycle of slaughter that chiefly destroyed six million Jews.
While not an easy read, this is a very important book and in this day and age, it should be read by every single person when they turn eighteen. The scourge of Nazis and White Power is not part of the past. It is here today and the world must stand up to it and put it back in the dustbin of history where it resided only for the 50 or 60 years after 1945.
My Rating: 5 stars
Reviewed by: Mr. N
May 12, 2018
Reminds me of revisionist histories of the USSR, except the latter serve to combat fascist lies about socialism, while Mayer combats liberal lies about fascism. De Hakenkruistocht shines where it emphasizes the functionality, continuity and breaks within the classes committing the Holocaust. The economic background of Kristallnacht (which led to the quick subsequent release of the 30,000 jews interned after the events) and other pre-1941 events creates a narrative that in all its plausibility is more discomforting than the standard view of Nazi Germany as a relentless and absolutely judeocidal murder machine. His final essay-speech, given as a defense against accusations of anti-semitism, is a sober appeal to combat World War mysticism in favour of a rigorous dialectical historiography.
Bad thing is that Mayer doesn't deign to cite anything - the reader is presented with an extensive bibliography at the end, but nothing is directly cited. I have no reason to distrust his writings, but I don't see why he'd go to the length of researching and writing this book, only to make the documents and sources themselves as opaque as possible.
(full review pending)
Bad thing is that Mayer doesn't deign to cite anything - the reader is presented with an extensive bibliography at the end, but nothing is directly cited. I have no reason to distrust his writings, but I don't see why he'd go to the length of researching and writing this book, only to make the documents and sources themselves as opaque as possible.
(full review pending)
July 26, 2022
It's difficult to think of a better book to read after Snyder's Bloodlands. Where Snyder focuses mainly on the geographical overlap between two monstrous killing machines, there isn't much by of an explanatory thesis for why the Final Solution took place. Why, when for so long the goal had first been territorial resettlement, then slave-labour, did the Nazis ultimately turned to the destruction of European Jewry tout court ?
Mayer views the Judeocide as the end result of a "holy war" against Bolshevism from 1914-1945, reaching its climax after the failures of Barbarossa and Operation Blue. In other words, Hitler's anti-bolshevism and his seeing the Jews as the breeding ground for communism, added with the failure to subdue Soviet Russia (the greatest apotheosis of Judeo-bolshevism) is what brought about the murder of the jews in Europe. In this view, Mayer historicizes the Final Solution, and situating it alongside the Crusades and Thirty Years of 1618-1648.
Just read this book, and essential read and it will fundamentally re-orient how you view, what Hobsbawm called, "the age of extremes" in the 20th century.
Mayer views the Judeocide as the end result of a "holy war" against Bolshevism from 1914-1945, reaching its climax after the failures of Barbarossa and Operation Blue. In other words, Hitler's anti-bolshevism and his seeing the Jews as the breeding ground for communism, added with the failure to subdue Soviet Russia (the greatest apotheosis of Judeo-bolshevism) is what brought about the murder of the jews in Europe. In this view, Mayer historicizes the Final Solution, and situating it alongside the Crusades and Thirty Years of 1618-1648.
Just read this book, and essential read and it will fundamentally re-orient how you view, what Hobsbawm called, "the age of extremes" in the 20th century.
October 30, 2024
Great book to read if you're interested in the Nazi conspiracy theory of "Judeobolshevism" and want to learn how the Nazi hatred of the Jews is related to Nazi anti-communism. Specifically, the book focuses on WWII's Eastern Front, the forced migration policies of the German regime, Poland & Hungary's place within Germany's designs in Eastern Europe, and the antisemitism of Europe. I enjoyed how the author took it all the way back to the Crusades of the 11th century to analyze the Judeophobia of Europe, the elites and miscreants who participated and backed that Judeophobic violence, and the tensions within Central Europe that "demanded" this bloodletting.
February 25, 2024
A JEWISH HISTORIAN OFFERS SOMETIMES-CONTROVERSIAL VIEWS ON THE HOLOCAUST
History Professor Arno Mayer wrote in the ‘Personal Preface’ to this 1988 book, "Any student of contemporary history has an obligation to disclose his or her subjective values. This obligation is all the more imperative for a Jewish historian of Nazi Germany’s genocide of the Jews who is sworn… to seek critical distance, but not cold detachment… This book bears the imprint of my origins as a west European Jew… In the very early morning hours of May 10, 1940, as the armies of Nazi Germany crashed into France and the Low Countries, my parents put my sister, my grandfather, and myself in a car, and the five of us set out from Luxembourg… my father secured our American immigration visas and then illegally brought … transit visas… my maternal grandparents… were transported to … Theresienstadt… My grandfather died… but my grandmother was among … 17,000 emaciated and terrorized inmates liberated by the Red Army…[in] 1945.” (Pg. vii-x)
He states, “while the Reich’s conjoined war of conquest and ideological crusade were an outgrowth of the internal dynamics of the Nazi regime, it took the impasse and failure of the blitzkrieg against Soviet Russia to release the full fury of both. Certainly, Hitler and the Nazi ideology, including radical anti-Semitism, were a necessary precondition for the Judeocide. But in and of themselves they would not have been sufficient to bring it about.” (Pg. 12) He observes, “while anti-Semitism made considerable strides in … Rumania and … Hungary, it did not become murderous until after both countries became Nazi Germany’s satellites in the war against the Soviet Union… They did so of their own accord… Collaboration with Nazi Germany braced rather than dictated or defined their projects.” (Pg. 89)
He recounts, “[In 1938] The condition of the Jews still appeared to be short of catastrophe. The old-established Jewish middle classes … remained confident that with time and mounting foreign pressure bureaucratic and economic rationality would temper the Nazi regime and cure it of its anti-Semitic mania.” (Pg. 165) He notes, “The invasion of the Soviet Union brought a quantum jump in the scale and intensity of the suffering inflicted on the Jews… The gradual miscarriage of Barbarossa shook the … Nazi fundamentalists and their accomplices, with the result that they turned to venting their rage on the Jews.” (Pg. 234-235)
He acknowledges that “No written document containing or reporting an explicit command to exterminate the Jews has come to light thus far… In the meantime, the presumption must be that the order or informal injunction to mass-murder Jews was transmitted orally. More than likely, Hitler gave the general enabling signals … His coded signals were translated into concrete orders and diffused by leaders of the SS.” (Pg. 235-236)
He reports, “during the first five weeks of the eastern campaign more Jews were killed or sent to their death than during the twenty-two months since the outbreak of war… In the early, triumphant days of Barbarossa the Jewish massacres were the product of random pogroms rather than of an official plan or warrant for systematic genocide. The main malfeasants … took advantage of the crusading war against the Soviet Union and exploited the residues of age-old Judeophobia … The killing of Jews was not their end purpose; it may not even have been one of their foremost objectives…” (Pg. 263-264)
He says of the Göring-Heydrich letter of July 31, 1941, “There is nothing in these instructions, either explicit or implicit, to indicate that by directing Heydrich to prepare an overall and definitive solution---a final solution---of the ‘Jewish problem,’ Göring was asking him to prepare for the immediate or eventual mass murder of Jews… Needless to say, the reverses of Barbarossa radically changed the context in which Göring’s orders would be discussed, elaborated, and implemented.” (Pg. 291-292)
He suggests, “the Wannsee Conference … was held at an unexpectedly trying moment in the history of the Third Reich… At the same time that Nazi Germany’s leaders decided to go to any length in … the war against the Soviets, they resolved to step up the war against the Jews… For a while some Nazis continued to look to the defeat of the Soviet Union to provide space for the resettlement of Jews deep in the interior of Russia. Paradoxically, in this perspective military [victory] was the precondition for Jewish survival. To be sure, the Jews in that case would have suffered cruelly and disproportionately while the war lasted. Still, victory would have kept open the historical possibility of a significant remnant of Jews enduring, if only to be ghettoized… the longer and harder the fighting … the more catastrophic the consequences for the Jews. Such was, after all, Hitler’s grimly insistent private and public prophecy.” (Pg. 306) He summarizes, “the ‘Final Solution’ may be said to have been forged … in the crucible of the abortive crusading war against Soviet Russia and ‘Judeobolshevism,’ which in eastern Europe created the context of extreme cruelty and destruction apart from which the Judeocide would have been unthinkable…” (Pg. 314)
He observes, “Nazi Germany’s vast and violent impressment of labor all over Europe … condition[ed] Gentiles and Jews to accept as normal the forced deportations and resettlements… which became the visible and commonplace sides of the Judeocide. Auschwitz and Majdanek… became living proof of the … inseparability, of labor exploitation and extermination.” (Pg. 329)
He asserts, “It is neither to justify nor to minimize the indelible infamy of the extermination camps to insist that … they had not been planned by the Nazis from the very first. To be sure, without the peculiar ideology and mentality of National Socialism … these killing centers could not have been conceived, let alone put into practice… The growth of the six centers of mass killing coincided with the refounding and expansion of the concentration-camp system, which was part of the Nazi regime’s rush to fight its crusading war to the death… the Nazis did not … force the growth of their stockades of slave labor with a view to creating a combined camouflage, pretext, and catalyst for the wholesale murder of innocent noncombatants.” (Pg. 348) He observes, “By forcing unfit Jews to accompany Jewish men and women who were impressed for forced labor, the Nazis condemned the former to a quick ‘natural’ death… Selection upon or after arrival was merely the logical consequence and implementation of this prior warrant for destruction… At Auschwitz---and Majdanek---the idea and practice of gassing only developed. But for the Jews Auschwitz was an unqualified inferno even without gas chambers.” (Pg. 362)
Of course, the most controversial part of the book are these passages: “Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable. Even though Hitler and the Nazis made no secret of their war on the Jews, the SS operatives dutifully eliminated all traces of their murderous activities and instruments. No written orders for gassing have turned up thus far. The SS not only destroyed most camp records, which were in any case incomplete, but also razed nearly all killing and cremating installations well before the arrival of Soviet troops. Likewise, care was taken to dispose of the bones and ashes of the victims. Most of what is known is based on the depositions of Nazi officials and executioners at postwar trials and on the memory of survivors and bystanders. This testimony must be screened carefully, since it can be influenced by subjective factors of great complexity. Diaries are rare… But additional evidence may still come to light… the Soviet archives may well yield significant … evidence when they are opened… In the meantime, there is no denying the many contradictions, ambiguities, and errors in the existing sources… although it must be emphasized strongly that such defects are altogether insufficient to put in question the use of gas chambers in the mass murder of Jews at Auschwitz…
“Just as the fact of the Jewish ordeal at Auschwitz is not contingent on the use of gas chambers, so the crime of gassing does not turn upon the exact number of Jews gassed… To date there is no certainty about who gave the order, and when, to install the gas chambers for the murder of Jews at Auschwitz… there is a strong presumption that the order was issued and received orally. Whether Hitler himself ever FORMALLY issued or approved the writ to exterminate the Jews remains uncertain, though it is well-nigh inconceivable that it could have been given and executed WITHOUT his approval or against his will.” (Pg. 362-363)
He adds, “There is a distinction between dying from … ‘normal’ causes and being killed by shooting, hanging, phenol injection, or gassing… [But] this distinction [should not] be used to extenuate and normalize the mass murder at Auschwitz. The Nazi leaders decided to transport frail and sick Jews… to Auschwitz in full awareness of … the deadly conditions there… Besides, from 1942 to 1945… more Jews were killed by so-called ‘natural’ causes than by ‘unnatural’ ones… But many questions remain open… How many of them were condemned to die a ‘natural’ death and how many were deliberately slaughtered? And what was the proportion … among those gassed? We have simply no answers to these questions at this time.” (Pg. 365-366) He notes, “The four out-and-out killing sites---Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka---have none of the ambiguities of Auschwitz and Treblinka.” (Pg. 376)
Although controversial for its ‘functionalist’ interpretations, this book will be “must reading” for anyone studying the Holocaust.
History Professor Arno Mayer wrote in the ‘Personal Preface’ to this 1988 book, "Any student of contemporary history has an obligation to disclose his or her subjective values. This obligation is all the more imperative for a Jewish historian of Nazi Germany’s genocide of the Jews who is sworn… to seek critical distance, but not cold detachment… This book bears the imprint of my origins as a west European Jew… In the very early morning hours of May 10, 1940, as the armies of Nazi Germany crashed into France and the Low Countries, my parents put my sister, my grandfather, and myself in a car, and the five of us set out from Luxembourg… my father secured our American immigration visas and then illegally brought … transit visas… my maternal grandparents… were transported to … Theresienstadt… My grandfather died… but my grandmother was among … 17,000 emaciated and terrorized inmates liberated by the Red Army…[in] 1945.” (Pg. vii-x)
He states, “while the Reich’s conjoined war of conquest and ideological crusade were an outgrowth of the internal dynamics of the Nazi regime, it took the impasse and failure of the blitzkrieg against Soviet Russia to release the full fury of both. Certainly, Hitler and the Nazi ideology, including radical anti-Semitism, were a necessary precondition for the Judeocide. But in and of themselves they would not have been sufficient to bring it about.” (Pg. 12) He observes, “while anti-Semitism made considerable strides in … Rumania and … Hungary, it did not become murderous until after both countries became Nazi Germany’s satellites in the war against the Soviet Union… They did so of their own accord… Collaboration with Nazi Germany braced rather than dictated or defined their projects.” (Pg. 89)
He recounts, “[In 1938] The condition of the Jews still appeared to be short of catastrophe. The old-established Jewish middle classes … remained confident that with time and mounting foreign pressure bureaucratic and economic rationality would temper the Nazi regime and cure it of its anti-Semitic mania.” (Pg. 165) He notes, “The invasion of the Soviet Union brought a quantum jump in the scale and intensity of the suffering inflicted on the Jews… The gradual miscarriage of Barbarossa shook the … Nazi fundamentalists and their accomplices, with the result that they turned to venting their rage on the Jews.” (Pg. 234-235)
He acknowledges that “No written document containing or reporting an explicit command to exterminate the Jews has come to light thus far… In the meantime, the presumption must be that the order or informal injunction to mass-murder Jews was transmitted orally. More than likely, Hitler gave the general enabling signals … His coded signals were translated into concrete orders and diffused by leaders of the SS.” (Pg. 235-236)
He reports, “during the first five weeks of the eastern campaign more Jews were killed or sent to their death than during the twenty-two months since the outbreak of war… In the early, triumphant days of Barbarossa the Jewish massacres were the product of random pogroms rather than of an official plan or warrant for systematic genocide. The main malfeasants … took advantage of the crusading war against the Soviet Union and exploited the residues of age-old Judeophobia … The killing of Jews was not their end purpose; it may not even have been one of their foremost objectives…” (Pg. 263-264)
He says of the Göring-Heydrich letter of July 31, 1941, “There is nothing in these instructions, either explicit or implicit, to indicate that by directing Heydrich to prepare an overall and definitive solution---a final solution---of the ‘Jewish problem,’ Göring was asking him to prepare for the immediate or eventual mass murder of Jews… Needless to say, the reverses of Barbarossa radically changed the context in which Göring’s orders would be discussed, elaborated, and implemented.” (Pg. 291-292)
He suggests, “the Wannsee Conference … was held at an unexpectedly trying moment in the history of the Third Reich… At the same time that Nazi Germany’s leaders decided to go to any length in … the war against the Soviets, they resolved to step up the war against the Jews… For a while some Nazis continued to look to the defeat of the Soviet Union to provide space for the resettlement of Jews deep in the interior of Russia. Paradoxically, in this perspective military [victory] was the precondition for Jewish survival. To be sure, the Jews in that case would have suffered cruelly and disproportionately while the war lasted. Still, victory would have kept open the historical possibility of a significant remnant of Jews enduring, if only to be ghettoized… the longer and harder the fighting … the more catastrophic the consequences for the Jews. Such was, after all, Hitler’s grimly insistent private and public prophecy.” (Pg. 306) He summarizes, “the ‘Final Solution’ may be said to have been forged … in the crucible of the abortive crusading war against Soviet Russia and ‘Judeobolshevism,’ which in eastern Europe created the context of extreme cruelty and destruction apart from which the Judeocide would have been unthinkable…” (Pg. 314)
He observes, “Nazi Germany’s vast and violent impressment of labor all over Europe … condition[ed] Gentiles and Jews to accept as normal the forced deportations and resettlements… which became the visible and commonplace sides of the Judeocide. Auschwitz and Majdanek… became living proof of the … inseparability, of labor exploitation and extermination.” (Pg. 329)
He asserts, “It is neither to justify nor to minimize the indelible infamy of the extermination camps to insist that … they had not been planned by the Nazis from the very first. To be sure, without the peculiar ideology and mentality of National Socialism … these killing centers could not have been conceived, let alone put into practice… The growth of the six centers of mass killing coincided with the refounding and expansion of the concentration-camp system, which was part of the Nazi regime’s rush to fight its crusading war to the death… the Nazis did not … force the growth of their stockades of slave labor with a view to creating a combined camouflage, pretext, and catalyst for the wholesale murder of innocent noncombatants.” (Pg. 348) He observes, “By forcing unfit Jews to accompany Jewish men and women who were impressed for forced labor, the Nazis condemned the former to a quick ‘natural’ death… Selection upon or after arrival was merely the logical consequence and implementation of this prior warrant for destruction… At Auschwitz---and Majdanek---the idea and practice of gassing only developed. But for the Jews Auschwitz was an unqualified inferno even without gas chambers.” (Pg. 362)
Of course, the most controversial part of the book are these passages: “Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable. Even though Hitler and the Nazis made no secret of their war on the Jews, the SS operatives dutifully eliminated all traces of their murderous activities and instruments. No written orders for gassing have turned up thus far. The SS not only destroyed most camp records, which were in any case incomplete, but also razed nearly all killing and cremating installations well before the arrival of Soviet troops. Likewise, care was taken to dispose of the bones and ashes of the victims. Most of what is known is based on the depositions of Nazi officials and executioners at postwar trials and on the memory of survivors and bystanders. This testimony must be screened carefully, since it can be influenced by subjective factors of great complexity. Diaries are rare… But additional evidence may still come to light… the Soviet archives may well yield significant … evidence when they are opened… In the meantime, there is no denying the many contradictions, ambiguities, and errors in the existing sources… although it must be emphasized strongly that such defects are altogether insufficient to put in question the use of gas chambers in the mass murder of Jews at Auschwitz…
“Just as the fact of the Jewish ordeal at Auschwitz is not contingent on the use of gas chambers, so the crime of gassing does not turn upon the exact number of Jews gassed… To date there is no certainty about who gave the order, and when, to install the gas chambers for the murder of Jews at Auschwitz… there is a strong presumption that the order was issued and received orally. Whether Hitler himself ever FORMALLY issued or approved the writ to exterminate the Jews remains uncertain, though it is well-nigh inconceivable that it could have been given and executed WITHOUT his approval or against his will.” (Pg. 362-363)
He adds, “There is a distinction between dying from … ‘normal’ causes and being killed by shooting, hanging, phenol injection, or gassing… [But] this distinction [should not] be used to extenuate and normalize the mass murder at Auschwitz. The Nazi leaders decided to transport frail and sick Jews… to Auschwitz in full awareness of … the deadly conditions there… Besides, from 1942 to 1945… more Jews were killed by so-called ‘natural’ causes than by ‘unnatural’ ones… But many questions remain open… How many of them were condemned to die a ‘natural’ death and how many were deliberately slaughtered? And what was the proportion … among those gassed? We have simply no answers to these questions at this time.” (Pg. 365-366) He notes, “The four out-and-out killing sites---Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka---have none of the ambiguities of Auschwitz and Treblinka.” (Pg. 376)
Although controversial for its ‘functionalist’ interpretations, this book will be “must reading” for anyone studying the Holocaust.
June 18, 2024
reuired reading for anyone seeking to understand world history in the modern era
Read
February 5, 2009Are you serious Mayer? Not a footnote for all of us left wondering where someone could come up with these ideas? Not even one? I know functionalism is in vogue, but really. Oh and the Final Solution was put into practice when Germany was winning the war in Russia, so that sort of invalidates a few things.
May 6, 2023
In von Trotta's film on Hannah Arendt, HANNAH, focusing on her travails during and after the publication of EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL, there's a crucial scene when Arendt's secretary brings her the latest correspondence she's received on the book and lays it out in three stacks: "Stack number one is people praising you. Stack number two is people who hate you, and stack number three in people who want you dead". (If you want proof of this backlash just read the opening pages of Saul Bellow's 1968 novel, MR. SAMMLER’S PLANET. While strolling through the streets of New York, the elderly Mr. Sammler savages Arendt for daring to suggest a banal creature could have killed half a million Jews.) Arno Meyer of Princeton History Department faced a similar retribution, although as far as I know no death threats, when he published WHY DID THE HEAVENS NOT DARKEN? THE "FINAL SOLUTION" IN HISTORY. (Yes, those quotation marks are important. Please read on.) First, a bit of background. Meyer prided himself on playing the intellectual gadfly. In THE PERSISTENCE OF THE ANCIEN REGIME he showed how long the aristocracy had clung to power from England to Russia and how late modernity had come to Europe. "It took two world wars and the Holocaust to finish off aristocratic ways in politics, culture and whole nations". Why did WHY DID THE HEAVENS NOT DARKEN chap so many people's rear ends? Arno went beast mode and uttered two unmentionable thoughts, and unprintable before the 1970s: 1. The Holocaust, defined as the total extermination of European Jewry, was improvised, not essential or even present at the creation of the Nazi regime in 1933; hence the quotation marks around "final solution". In fact, segregation and expulsion, as happened in Nazi occupied Poland, was the preferred solution until 1941. Heresy! 2. The years 1941-1942 turned the final solution towards physical extermination due to the failure of Hitler's crusade against Soviet Russia. Anti-Communism, not anti-semitism per se, is the key that turned the lock towards the Holocaust. Hitler could now argue rationally that the Soviet enemy was really "Judeo-Bolshevik" and that by destroying the U.S.S.R. the Germans would simultaneously erase Jewry from Europe. However, it took German losses and retreat on the Eastern Front to make this nightmare come true. For Meyer, no Soviet regime=no Holocaust. Did Hitler actually believe this? It's important to note that while during the war he often spoke of Churchill and Roosevelt as being "stooges for a Jewish cabal" he never once made this accusation against Stalin. Meyer thinks it made no difference. Anti-Bolshevism was the shibboleth needed to engage both the SS and the Army in mass killings, and those killings, usually by firing squad or burning down villages, turned into death camps only after the Nazis began to lose, and not just in Russia. From Italy to Hungary to Vichy France Jews were rounded up and shipped to their deaths after victory receded from the minds of the Nazis, including Hitler. This heavy tome may enrage you, and that would please the late Arno Meyer, but it is crucial reading matter for understanding how and why genocides happen, including, sadly, today.
August 11, 2023
A difficult read, for three reasons. First, as much as I can rail against authors who go crazy with footnotes, making the reading of their work a pain in the ass since each page is awash in references, I wholeheartedly disagree with writing a history book such as this with no footnotes at all. I am not calling Mayer's depth scholarship into question just his method of presentation. Second, I struggled to follow his arguments and questioned his opinions on some of his historical analysis and theoretical concepts. Third, and most importantly for me, I completely disagree with his premise. It is easy to look at swaths of history, or to look at large, specific historical events with such a general or wide-ranging view as to make them indistinguishable from their surroundings, or to minimize individuals believing they are merely tools or parts of a larger machine, but I don't look at the The Final Solution or Adolf Hitler in this manner. Yes, Hitler and his Nazis killed other people besides Jews, and the machinery of annihilation accelerated around the time of the failures at Stalingrad, but Mayer's discussions of Bolshevism, Marxism, and the like are entirely too sweepingly general and tend to make one think/believe genocides are driven by grand social, political, or economic forces when they are almost exclusively detailed, victim-specific, planned and carried out willingly and purposefully operation by hate-filled human beings preying on victims they deem unworthy or sub-human or evil. Hitler's fears of Bolshevism or Communists were real, but so was his driving hatred of the Jews. Did Hitler and the Nazis attempt to exterminate all the Bolsheviks, or all the communists? No. And there is ample evidence that the killings of Nazi-defined "undesirables" (homosexual men, the mentally unfit, etc.) were just the practice runs (gas vans, mass shootings, pogroms) for the eventual massively efficient genocide of the Jews. Practice in two ways: practice for the best methods, but more importantly practice for the world's response to such killings. And while the methods would be changed and perfected, much to Hitler's glee, the utter lack of response - actionable, not verbal - from the world's leaders spoke volumes about the deep-seated hatred and widespread anti-Semitism the world over. Look at Churchill and Balfour in the early 1920's.
Anyway. I digress.
Mayer has done his homework, and there are those that agree with his thesis. I am not one of those people. Hitler was a uniquely awful person. One could say historical trends and -isms allowed him to take power (in much the same way Trump did in the USofA), but ignoring his planning as the source of the Final Solution, and its breadth and depth and horror, does not ring true and just absolves him of his agency. Hitler did this because he hated Jews, not because he feared the spectre of Bolshevism or Communism. In my opinion, at least.
Anyway. I digress.
Mayer has done his homework, and there are those that agree with his thesis. I am not one of those people. Hitler was a uniquely awful person. One could say historical trends and -isms allowed him to take power (in much the same way Trump did in the USofA), but ignoring his planning as the source of the Final Solution, and its breadth and depth and horror, does not ring true and just absolves him of his agency. Hitler did this because he hated Jews, not because he feared the spectre of Bolshevism or Communism. In my opinion, at least.
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January 30, 2025This is an essential book to read for anyone seeking to understand the tragedy that befell Europe between the years of 1933-1945. Excellent to read along side 'Bloodlands', 'Human Smoke',the works of Nolte or any more standard history of the war. Mayer situates the Second World War in the context of what he refers to as a general Thirty Years War on the continent and goes even further than that, recasting the Nazi drive into the Soviet Union as a sort of ideological crusade against what the Nazis referred to as 'judeobolshevism'. Mayer departs from the mainstream view of the Holocaust as something prefigured by the anti-Semitism of Nazi ideology and seeks to place in the context of the war. While virulent antisemitism was always a part of Nazi ideology, the exterminationist phase of the Reich only began when the tide of the war had already turned outside Moscow. This exterminationist element was always in competition with productivist elements of the Nazi state, who sought to harness the great masses of Eastern European Jewry for the economic ends of the war.
Mayers work caused a great stir upon release due to the broad challenge it presented to mainstream Holocaust narratives. The historical and political study of the Holocaust is perhaps the most difficult one in all of human history to discuss freely without raising the rancor of what Norman Finklestein has referred to as 'the Holocaust Industry'. Mayer did ultimately run afoul of this group but to me it is not clear that there is good reason for that. This is not a book of Holocaust denial. There is nothing in this book that suggests that the Nazis were anything less vicious than what their worst historical critics would contend. What Mayers work does is seek to situate the Holocaust in the broader context of the war and bring understanding to an episode that is beyond comprehension in scale, scope, and horror.
Mayers work caused a great stir upon release due to the broad challenge it presented to mainstream Holocaust narratives. The historical and political study of the Holocaust is perhaps the most difficult one in all of human history to discuss freely without raising the rancor of what Norman Finklestein has referred to as 'the Holocaust Industry'. Mayer did ultimately run afoul of this group but to me it is not clear that there is good reason for that. This is not a book of Holocaust denial. There is nothing in this book that suggests that the Nazis were anything less vicious than what their worst historical critics would contend. What Mayers work does is seek to situate the Holocaust in the broader context of the war and bring understanding to an episode that is beyond comprehension in scale, scope, and horror.
May 15, 2024
A thorough assessment of one of the 20th century's most horrendous crimes. The harrowing, gloomy topic meant I had trouble getting through this, putting it aside for weeks at a time. But at least Hitler is dead by the end. The book's distinctive argument is that Nazi anti-Semitism developed into a wholesale genocidal extermination of Jews only really from the winter of 1941/42. This vengeful 'Judeocide' followed Nazi setbacks in its totemic invasion of the Soviet Union. It escalated in its barbarity as German defeat grew more certain. Why Did The Heavens Not Darken has a great bibliography but I'm not a fan of Mayer's choice to do without footnotes/endnotes.
"The Judeocide was forged in the fires of a stupendous war to conquer unlimited Lebensraum from Russia, to crush the Soviet regime, and to liquidate international bolshevism. The regular Wehrmacht and the special Waffen-SS first blazed the trail for the Einsatzgruppen and then exercised the power of last resort over the territories and populations surrounding the extermination sites. Without Operation Barbarossa there would and could have been no Jewish catastrophe, no "Final Solution." Not that the Jews went unscathed in the period between the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and the invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941. During this early phase of the Second World War, between 5,000 and 1 0,000 Jews, virtually all of them adult males, were murdered individually, and twice to three times that many Jews of both sexes died of malnutrition and disease, above all in the ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz. But this killing was neither systematic nor comprehensive: it affected a small percentage of several Jewish communities and it was confined to German-occupied Poland."
February 22, 2020
i liked this, i found it to be a good left-leaning survey of a period i don't know as well as i should, but i read a twitter thread from a historian about how the premise (germany as ancien régime as opposed to capitalist power) is BS, so, there's that
January 31, 2025
Even as a historian who has read extensively about WW2 and the crimes perpetrated, I hadn't heard of this book until last year. That's embarrassing for me, and I wish I had known because the book helped me see the topic from a different angle. A masterpiece.
April 24, 2021
This is a powerful treatment of the Holocaust within the context of a Thirty Years War. I find his thesis convincing. This is historical writing of superlative quality.
March 10, 2024
The clash between the study of history and the construction of a public memory.
February 20, 2016
"Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?"" is a moving, powerful history of the Final Solution enforced by Nazi Germany against the Jewish population of Europe during the Second World War. Arno Mayer offers an interesting, if controversial, look at the Holocaust as part of the overall history of Hitler's rise to power and the war that followed. He asserts that while Hitler was always anti-semitic, the actual plans for the destruction of European Jewry developed over time -- from the loss of civil rights, to segregation to the ghettos, to outright extermination -- particularly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union began to unravel. Mayer's conclusions may be open to discussion, but his synopsis of the facts of what he calls the Judeocide are solidly documented. This is not a light book by any means -- the sheer horror of the concentration/extermination camp system is a chilling experience to read about. However, while the subject is difficult to digest, I firmly recommend this book to anyone who wishes to learn more about one of the darkest moments of human history.
March 19, 2014
This was a course required book, which we were then forced to write a ten page paper exploring Mayers main arguments. I feel that even after reading & writing about this book that I still do not fully comprehend Mayers thesis. My personal take on the book is that it explores the Holocaust in a very dry, personally opinionated manner which he chooses to not back up with annotated facts. The reading would be much more pleasurable if you could in turn read some sources he used.
December 14, 2016
had a great time reading about the holocaust in the opening days of my winter break.
May 2, 2019
Well thank god my Hebrew ancestors left Germany in 1819.
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