How Hitler reached the final solution.

• Author: Williamson, David
• Position: Literary Scene - Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany

"... The Nazis were fantasizing--basically planning to redesign the demographic map of Eastern Europe by moving all sorts of populations from here to there and eliminating those they thought superflous...."

AMONG ALL THE HORRORS of human history, almost nothing rivals the "Final Solution." Nazi Germany's attempt to rid Europe of Jews; first by expelling them and then, when that tailed to work fast enough, by murdering them--men, women, and children of all ages How human beings could do such a thing to others staggers the imagination and will be discussed and agonized over forever, not merely by Jews, but anyone with a heart and conscience.

Although much is known about the Holocaust from eyewitness accounts, research, books, movies, and the news media, a lot more remains to be explored. Part of that exploration is uncovered in The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 by Christopher R. Browning, Frank Porter Graham professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Browning has made a career of studying modern German history, and Nazism in particular. At present, he is studying Jewish factory slave labor camps in Starachowice in central Poland for another book. His previous works include Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland; Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony: The Path to Genocide; Nazi Policy Jewish Labor; German Killers: Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution: and The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office.

He says he undertook his latest book two decades ago as a cornerstone of a more than 20-volume comprehensive history of the Holocaust, a project sponsored by Yad Vashemm, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, museum, and research center Most other participating authors are Israeli scholars working on national Jewish communities throughout Europe.

"When we started, no one knew, of course, that the communist regimes of Eastern Europe were about to collapse and that all sorts of closed archives, suddenly would come open to us," Browning recalls. "Although I basically finished my work in 1989, I had to rewrite it extensively because of the great windfall of documents. There were "all sorts of new things to investigate."

Commentators already are describing the book as having an "unusually incisive writing style" and as being extraordinary" and a masterpiece of the historian's art,"...