Final Solution

This reappraisal will show that by ignoring the war, Holocaust historians have missed the single most important thing that determined the fate of the Jews – more important even than Hitler’s anti-Semitism. Hatred of the Jews was essential to his self-identity, but Hitler also saw himself as a warrior. Wriiten just before his death in 2015, David Cesarani's Final Solution is an intelligent and thought-provoking short history of the Holocaust. Not only does he draw together and engage with the latest scholarly research, making extensive use of previously untapped resources such as diaries and letters from within the ghettos and camps (many of them in Polish or Yiddish and therefore previously largely inaccessible to Anglo-American scholars) but by adopting a rigorously Judeocentric approach the whole narrative of the march to genocide and its aftermath the book presents a subtly different timeline which casts afresh the horror of the period and engenders a significant re-evaluation of the how and why. Eschewing some of the more fevered theses about the guilt of the perpetrators (and indeed recasting how wide that net should be spread), David Cesarani's measured and skilful negotiation of a crowded field is, as a result, all the more devastating. ‘This is a book as hard to read as a set of Human Rights Watch reports. But it’s difficult not to be first moved and then overwhelmed by the mere listing of what happened, and in this respect Cesarani… has fulfilled his ambition of reclaiming the killings of Jews for another generation.’ – The Guardian