The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution / Edition 1

by Christopher R. Browning

Overview

The Nazi Holocaust haunts the modern imagination as one of the most compelling examples of the human capacity for organized atrocity on a mass scale. This authoritative account of the evolution of Nazi Jewish policy from 1939 to 1942 seeks to answer some of the fundamental questions about what actually happened and why, between the outbreak of war and the emergence of the Final Solution. Christopher Browning's account assesses the historians' interpretations and offers his own insights, based on detailed case studies that uncovered important and telling new evidence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521558785
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/30/1995
Series:	Canto original series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.47(d)

Table of Contents

Part I. The Prelude to Genocide: 1. Nazi resettlement policy and the search for a solution to the Jewish question, 1939–1941; 2. Nazi ghettoization policy in Poland, 1939–41; Part II. Conflicting Explanations: 3. German technocrats, Jewish labor, and the Final Solution: a reply to Götz Aly and Susanne Heim; 4. The holocaust as by-product? A critique of Arno Mayer; 5. 'Intentionalism' and 'Functionalism': the decision for the Final Solution reconsidered; Part III. The Perpetrators: Accommodation, Anticipation and Conformity: 6. Bureaucracy and mass murder: the German administrator's comprehension of the Final Solution; 7. Genocide and public health: German doctors and Polish Jews, 1939–1941; 8. One day in Józefów: initiation to mass murder.

Editorial Reviews

"...a handy stocktaking of scholarship on some key questions about the Holocaust." Central European History

"...the clarity as well as economy with which he writes, his firm grasp of the evidence and the balanced judgment he brings to its interpretation make this a most impressive performance....[Browning] uses his flair for uncovering new archival material to throw light on the attitudes and roles of a variety of people who became invlved in carrying out the Final Solution....Christopher Browning places himself in the front rank of historians of the Holocaust." Times Literary Supplement

"...well written, densely footnoted, and a significant contribution to understanding the critical events that led to the gas chambers." German Studies Review

"A magisterial, rigorously meditated study of how the industrialized murder of millions got under way." The New York Times Book Review

"...an impressive collection of essays by one of the foremost historians of the Holocaust." Dimensions

"Browning's arguments provide a sensible balance to those interpretations of the origins of the Holocaust that have focused exclusively on either Hitler or the Nazi system." Johnpeter Horst Grill, History

"A meticulously researched, harrowing look at the evil humanity is capable of." Doug Wyatt, Savannah (GA) News/Press

From the Publisher