David Moffie was awarded his degree in medicine at the University of Amsterdam on September 18, 1942. In a photograph taken at the event, Professor C. U. Ariens Kappers, Moffie’s supervisor, and Professor H. T. Deelman stand on the right of the new MD, and assistant D. Granaat stands on the left. Another faculty member, seen from the back, possibly the dean of the medical school, stands just behind a large desk. In the dim background, the faces of some of the people crowded into the rather cramped hall, family members and friends no doubt, are barely discernible. The faculty members have donned their academic robes, while Moffie and Granaat wear tuxedos and white ties. On the left side of his jacket Moffie displays a palm-size Jewish star with the word Joodinscribed on it. Moffie was the last Jewish student at the University of Amsterdam under German occupation.1
The usual terms of praise and thanks were certainly uttered according to academic ritual. We do not know whether any other comments were added. Shortly thereafter Moffie was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He survived, as did 20 percent of the Jews of Holland; according to the same statistics, therefore, most of the Jews present at the ceremony did not.
The picture raises some questions. How, for example, could the ceremony have taken place on September 18, 1942, when Jewish students were excluded from Dutch universities as of September 8? The editors of Photography and the Holocaust found the answer: The last day of the 1941–42 university year was Friday, September 18, 1942; the 1942–43 semester started on Monday, September 21. The three-day break allowed Moffie to receive his degree before the ban on Jewish students became mandatory.2
Actually the break was limited to precisely one weekend (Friday, September 18–Monday, September 21), meaning that the university authorities agreed to use the administrative calendar against the intention of the German decree. This decision signaled an attitude widespread at Dutch universities since the fall of 1940; the photograph documents an act of defiance, on the edge of the occupier’s laws and decrees.
There is more. The deportations from Holland started on July 14, 1942. Almost daily Germans and local police arrested Jews on the streets of Dutch cities to fill the weekly quotas. Moffie could not have attended this public academic ceremony without having received one of the seventeen thousand special (and temporary) exemption certificates the Germans allocated to the city’s Jewish Council. The picture thus indirectly evokes the controversy surrounding the methods used by the heads of the council to protect—for a time at least—some of the Jews of Amsterdam while abandoning the great majority to their fate.
In the most general terms we are witnessing a common enough ceremony, easy to recognize. Here, in a moderately festive setting, a young man received official confirmation that he was entitled to practice medicine, to take care of the sick, and as far as humanly possible, to use his professional knowledge in order to restore health. But, as we know, the Jood pinned to Moffie’s coat carried a very different message: Like all members of his “race” throughout the Continent, the new MD was marked for murder.
Faintly seen, the Jood does not appear in block letters or in any other commonly used script. The characters were specially designed for this particular purpose (and similarly drawn in the languages of the countries of deportation: Jude, Juif, Jood, and so on) in a crooked, repulsive, and vaguely threatening way, intended to evoke the Hebrew alphabet and yet remain easily decipherable. And it is in this inscription and its peculiar design that the situation represented in the photograph reappears in its quintessence: The Germans were bent on exterminating the Jews as individuals, and on erasing what the star and its inscription represented—“the Jew.”
Here we perceive but the faintest echo of a furious onslaught aimed at eliminating any trace of “Jewishness,” any sign of the “Jewish spirit,” any remnant of Jewish presence (real or imaginary) from politics, society, culture, and history. To this end the Nazi campaign deployed, in the Reich and throughout occupied Europe, propaganda, education, research, publications, films, proscriptions, and taboos in all social and cultural domains, in fact every existing method of erasure and stamping out, from the rewriting of religious texts or opera libretti tainted by any speck of Jewishness to the renaming of streets carrying the names of Jews, from the banning of music or literary works written by Jewish artists and authors to the destruction of monuments, from the elimination of “Jewish science” to the “cleansing” of libraries, and, as foretold by Heinrich Heine’s famous dictum, from the burning of books to that of human beings.
I
The “history of the Holocaust” cannot be limited only to a recounting of German policies, decisions, and measures that led to this most systematic and sustained of genocides; it must include the reactions (and at times the initiatives) of the surrounding world and the attitudes of the victims, for the fundamental reason that the events we call the Holocaust represent a totality defined by this very convergence of distinct elements.
This history is understandably written as German history in many cases. The Germans, their collaborators, and their auxiliaries were the instigators and prime agents of the policies of persecution and extermination and, mostly, of their implementation. Furthermore, German documents dealing with these policies and measures became widely accessible after the Reich’s defeat. These immense troves of material, hardly manageable even before access to former Soviet and Eastern bloc archival holdings, have, since the late 1980s, naturally reinforced still further the focus on the German dimension of this historiography. And, in the eyes of most historians, an inquiry concentrating on the German facet of this history seems more open to conceptualization and to comparative forays, less “parochial” in other words, than whatever can be written from the viewpoint of the victims or even that of the surrounding world.
This German-centered approach is of course legitimate within its limits, but the history of the Holocaust requires, as mentioned, a much wider range. At each step, in occupied Europe, the execution of German measures depended on the submissiveness of political authorities, the assistance of local police forces or other auxiliaries, and the passivity or support of the populations and mainly of the political and spiritual elites. It also depended on the willingness of the victims to follow orders in the hope of alleviating German strictures or gaining time and somehow escaping the inexorable tightening of the German vise. Thus the history of the Holocaust should be both an integrative and an integrated history.
No single conceptual framework can encompass the diverse and converging strands of such a history. Even its German dimension cannot be interpreted from one single conceptual angle. The historian faces the interaction of very diverse long- or short-term factors that can each be defined and interpreted; their very convergence, however, eludes an overall analytic category. A host of concepts have surfaced over the last six decades, only to be discarded a few years later, then rediscovered, and so on, particularly in regard to Nazi policies per se. The origins of the “Final Solution” have been attributed to a “special course” (Sonderweg) of German history, a special brand of German anti-Semitism, racial-biological thinking, bureaucratic politics, totalitarianism, fascism, modernity, a “European civil war” (seen from the Left and from the Right), and the like.
Reviewing these concepts would demand another book.3 In this introduction I will essentially limit myself to defining the road taken here. Nonetheless, a few remarks regarding two contrary trends in the present historiography of the Third Reich in general and of the “Final Solution” in particular become necessary at this point.
The first trend considers the extermination of the Jews as representing, in and of itself, a major goal of German policies, whose study, however, requires new approaches: the activities of midlevel actors, the detailed analysis of events in limited areas, specific institutional and bureaucratic dynamics—all meant to throw some new light on the workings of the entire system of extermination.4 This approach has added greatly to our knowledge and understanding: I have integrated many of its findings into my own more globally oriented inquiry.
The other trend is different. It has helped, over the years, to uncover many a new trail. Yet, in regard to the study of the Holocaust, each of these trails eventually branches out from the same starting point: The persecution and extermination of the Jews of Europe was but a secondary consequence of major German policies pursued toward entirely different goals. Among these, the ones most often mentioned include a new economic and demographic equilibrium in occupied Europe by murdering surplus populations, ethnic reshuffling and decimation to facilitate German colonization in the East, and the systematic plunder of the Jews in order to facilitate the waging of the war without putting too heavy a material burden on German society or, more precisely, on Hitler’s national-racial state (Hitlers Volksstaat). Notwithstanding the vistas sporadically opened by such studies, their general thrust is manifestly incompatible with the central postulates underlying my own interpretation.5
In this volume, as in The Years of Persecution, I have chosen to focus on the centrality of ideological-cultural factors as the prime movers of Nazi policies in regard to the Jewish issue, depending of course on circumstances, institutional dynamics, and essentially, for the period dealt with here, on the evolution of the war.6
The history we are dealing with is an integral part of the “age of ideology” and, more precisely and decisively, of its late phase: the crisis of liberalism in continental Europe. Between the late nineteenth century and the end of World War II, liberal society was attacked from the left by revolutionary socialism (which was to become Bolshevism in Russia and communism throughout the world), and by a revolutionary right that, on the morrow of World War I, turned into fascism in Italy and elsewhere, and into Nazism in Germany. Throughout Europe the Jews were identified with liberalism and often with the revolutionary brand of socialism. In that sense antiliberal and antisocialist (or anticommunist) ideologies, those of the revolutionary right in all its guises, targeted the Jews as representatives of the worldviews they fought and, more often than not, tagged them as the instigators and carriers of those worldviews.
In the atmosphere of national resentment following the defeat of 1918 and, later, as a result of the economic upheavals that shook the country (and the world), such an evolution acquired a momentum of its own in Germany. Yet, without the obsessive anti-Semitism and the personal impact of Adolf Hitler, first in the framework of his movement, then on the national scene after January 1933, the widespread German anti-Semitism of those years would probably not have coalesced into anti-Jewish political action and certainly not into its sequels.
The crisis of liberalism and the reaction against communism as ideological sources of anti-Semitism, pushed to their extreme on the German scene, became increasingly virulent throughout Europe, the Nazi message thus garnering a positive response from many Europeans and a considerable phalanx of supporters beyond the shores of the old Continent. Moreover, antiliberalism and anticommunism corresponded to the stances adopted by the major Christian churches, and traditional Christian anti-Semitism easily merged with and bolstered the ideological tenets of various authoritarian regimes, of fascist movements, and partly of some aspects of Nazism.
Finally, this very crisis of liberal society and its ideological underpinnings left the Jews increasingly weak and isolated throughout a continent where the progress of liberalism had allowed and fostered their emancipation and social mobility. Thus the ideological background here defined becomes the indirect link between the three main components of this history: National Socialist Germany, the surrounding European world, and the Jewish communities scattered throughout the Continent. However, notwithstanding the German evolution to which I briefly alluded, these background elements in no way suffice to address the specific course of events in Germany.
II
The peculiar aspects of the National Socialist anti-Jewish course derived from Hitler’s own brand of anti-Semitism, from the bond between Hitler and all levels of German society, mainly after the mid-thirties, from the political-institutional instrumentalization of anti-Semitism by the Nazi regime and, of course, after September 1939, from the evolving war situation. In The Years of Persecution, I defined Hitler’s brand of anti-Jewish hatred as “redemptive anti-Semitism”; in other words, beyond the immediate ideological confrontation with liberalism and communism, which in the Nazi leader’s eyes were worldviews invented by Jews and for Jewish interests, Hitler perceived his mission as a kind of crusade to redeem the world by eliminating the Jews. The Nazi leader saw “the Jew” as the principle of evil in Western history and society. Without a victorious redeeming struggle, the Jew would ultimately dominate the world. This overall metahistorical axiom led to Hitler’s more concrete ideological-political corollaries.
On a biological, political, and cultural level, the Jew strove to destroy the nations by spreading racial pollution, undermining the structures of the state, and, more generally, by heading the main ideological scourges of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Bolshevism, plutocracy, democracy, internationalism, pacifism, and sundry other dangers. By using this vast array of means and methods, the Jew aimed at achieving the disintegration of the vital core of all nations in which he lived—and particularly that of the German Volk—in order to accede to world domination. Since the establishment of the National Socialist regime in Germany, the Jew, aware of the danger represented by the awakening Reich, was ready to unleash a new world war to destroy this challenge to his own progress toward his ultimate aim.
These different levels of anti-Jewish ideology could be formulated and summed up in the tersest way: The Jew was a lethal and active threat to all nations, to the Aryan race and to the German Volk. The emphasis is not only on “lethal” but also—and mainly—on “active.” While all other groups targeted by the Nazi regime (the mentally ill, “asocials” and homosexuals, “inferior” racial groups including Gypsies and Slavs) were essentially passive threats (as long as the Slavs, for example, were not led by the Jews), the Jews were the only group that, since its appearance in history, relentlessly plotted and maneuvered to subdue all of humanity.
This anti-Jewish frenzy at the top of the Nazi system was not hurled into a void. From the fall of 1941, Hitler often designated the Jew as the “world arsonist.” In fact the flames that the Nazi leader set alight and fanned burned as widely and intensely as they did only because, throughout Europe and beyond, for the reasons previously mentioned, a dense underbrush of ideological and cultural elements was ready to catch fire. Without the arsonist the fire would not have started; without the underbrush it would not have spread as far as it did and destroyed an entire world. It is this constant interaction between Hitler and the system within which he ranted and acted that will be analyzed and interpreted, as it was in The Years of Persecution. Here, however, the system is not limited to its German components but penetrates all the nooks and crannies of European space.
For the Nazi regime the anti-Jewish crusade also offered a number of pragmatic benefits at a political-institutional level. For a regime dependent on constant mobilization, the Jew served as the constant mobilizing myth. The anti-Jewish drive became ever more extreme along with the radicalization of the regime’s goals and then with the extension of the war. It is in this context that we shall be able to locate the emergence of the “Final Solution.” As we shall see, Hitler himself modulated the campaign against the Jew according to tactical goals; but once the first intimations of defeat appeared, the Jew became the core of the regime’s propaganda to sustain the Volk in what soon appeared as a desperate struggle.
As a result of the mobilizing function of the Jew, the behavior of many ordinary German soldiers, policemen, or civilians toward the Jews they encountered, mistreated, and murdered was not necessarily the result of a deeply ingrained and historically unique German anti-Jewish passion, as has been argued by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen;7 nor was it mainly the result of a whole range of common social-psychological reinforcements, constraints, and group dynamical processes, independent of ideological motivations, as suggested by Christopher R. Browning.8
The Nazi system as a whole had produced an “anti-Jewish culture,” partly rooted in historical German and European Christian anti-Semitism but also fostered by all the means at the disposal of the regime and propelled to a unique level of incandescence, with a direct impact on collective and individual behavior. “Ordinary Germans” may have been vaguely aware of the process or, more plausibly, they may have internalized anti-Jewish images and beliefs without recognizing them as an ideology systematically exacerbated by state propaganda and all the means at its disposal.
Whereas the essential mobilizing function of the Jew was manipulated by the regime and its agencies, a second function—no less crucial—was more intuitively furthered. Hitler’s leadership has often been defined as “charismatic,” as based on that quasiprovidential role attributed to charismatic leaders by the populations that follow them. We shall return throughout the following chapters to the bond between the Nazi leader, the party, and the Volk. Suffice it to mention here that Hitler’s personal hold on the vast majority of Germans stemmed from and expressed, as far as the content of his message went, three different and suprahistorical salvation creeds: The ultimate purity of the racial community, the ultimate crushing of Bolshevism and plutocracy, and the ultimate millennial redemption (borrowed from Christian themes known to all). In each of these traditions the Jew represented evil per se. In that sense Hitler’s struggle turned him into a providential leader as, on all three fronts, he was fighting against the same metahistorical enemy: the Jew.
Within the German and European context (dominated by Germany), institutional struggles for power, generalized scrambling for spoils, and the impact of socially embedded vested interests mediated the ideological fervor. The first two elements have often been described and interpreted in any number of studies, and they will be thoroughly integrated in the forthcoming chapters; the third, however, less frequently mentioned, appears to me to be an essential aspect of this history.
In the highly developed German society and at least in part of occupied Europe, even Hitler’s authority and that of the party leadership had, in the implementation of any policy, to take into account the demands of massive vested interests, whether those of party fiefdoms, industry, the churches, peasantry, small businesses, and the like. In other words the imperatives of anti-Jewish ideology had also to be attuned to a multiplicity of structural hurdles deriving from the very nature and dynamics of modern societies as such.
Nobody would dispute such an obvious point; its significance derives from an essential fact. Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews (some of the Christian churches declared that converted Jews were part of the flock, up to a point); to the contrary, many social constituencies, many power groups were directly involved in the expropriation of the Jews and eager, be it out of greed, for their wholesale disappearance. Thus Nazi and related anti-Jewish policies could unfold to their most extreme levels without the interference of any major countervailing interests.
III
On June 27, 1945, the world-renowned Jewish Austrian chemist Lise Meitner, who in 1939 had emigrated from Germany to Sweden, wrote to her former colleague and friend Otto Hahn, who had continued to work in the Reich. After mentioning that he and the scientific community in Germany had known much about the worsening persecution of the Jews, Meitner went on: “All of you have worked for Nazi Germany and never tried even some passive resistance. Certainly, to assuage your conscience, here and there you helped some person in need of assistance but you allowed the murder of millions of innocent people, and no protest was ever heard.”9 Meitner’s cri de coeur, addressed through Hahn to Germany’s most prominent scientists, none of them active party members, none of them involved in criminal activities, could have applied as well to the entire intellectual and spiritual elite of the Reich (with some exceptions, of course) and to wide segments of the elites in occupied or satellite Europe. And what applied to the elites applied more easily (again, with exceptions) to the populations. In this domain, as already mentioned, the Nazi system and the European context were tightly linked.
Regarding the attitudes and reactions of bystanders, the answers to some fundamental issues still remain partly unclear due either to the very nature of the questions or to the lack of essential documents. The perception of the events among the various populations of bystanders, for example, still remains elusive in part. Yet a vast amount of documentary material will show that while in Western Europe, in Scandinavia, and in the Balkans perceptions concerning the fate of the deported Jews may have been hazy until late 1943 or even early 1944, this was not the case in Germany itself and of course not in Eastern Europe either. Without preempting the forthcoming interpretations, there can be little doubt that by the end of 1942 or early 1943 at the latest, it became amply clear to vast numbers of Germans, Poles, Belorussians, Ukrainians, and Balts that the Jews were destined for complete extermination.
More difficult to grasp is the sequel of such information. As the war, the persecution, and the deportations moved into their ultimate phase, and as knowledge of the extermination spread ever more widely, anti-Semitism also grew throughout the Continent. Contemporaries noted this paradoxical trend, and its interpretation will become a dominant issue in part 3 of this volume.
Notwithstanding all the problems of interpretation, the attitudes and reactions of bystanders are amply documented. Confidential SD reports (by the Security Service, or Sicherheitsdienst, of the SS about the state of public opinion in the Reich) and reports of other state or party agencies offer an altogether reliable picture of German attitudes. Goebbels’s diaries, one of the main sources concerning Hitler’s constant obsession with the Jews, also deal systematically with German reactions to the Jewish issue as seen from the top of the regime, while soldiers’ letters give a sample of the attitudes expressed at the bottom, so to speak. In most occupied or satellite countries, German diplomatic reports offered regular surveys concerning the state of mind of the populations in the face of the deportations, for example, as did official sources from the local administrations, such as the rapports des préfets in France. Individual reactions of bystanders, also as noted by Jewish diarists, will be part of the overall picture, and at times local diaries, followed throughout an entire period, as in the case of the Polish physician Zygmunt Klukowski, offer a vivid picture of an individual’s insights into the changing overall scene.
Among the questions about the bystanders that continue to elude us as a result of the unavailability of essential documents, the attitude of the Vatican and, more specifically, that of Pope Pius XII remain to this day at the top of the list. Despite a vast secondary literature and the availability of some new documents, historians’ inability to get access to the Vatican archives represents a major constraint. I shall deal with the pope’s attitude as thoroughly as present documentation allows, but historians face an obstacle that could have been yet has not been eliminated.
In its own framework, separate from the detailed history of German policies and measures or from a recounting of the attitudes and reactions of bystanders, the history of the victims has been painstakingly recorded, first during the war years and, of course, since the end of the war. Though it did include surveys of the policies of domination and murder, it did so only sketchily. The emphasis from the outset aimed at the thorough collecting of documentary traces and testimonies regarding the life and death of the Jews: the attitudes and strategies of Jewish leadership, the enslavement and destruction of Jewish labor, the activities of various Jewish parties and political youth movements, the daily life in the ghettos, the deportations, armed resistance, and mass death in any one of the hundreds of killing sites spread throughout occupied Europe. Although soon after the war contentious debates and systematic interpretations became, together with the ongoing collection of traces, an integral part of this historiography, the history of the Jews has remained a self-contained world, mostly the domain of Jewish historians. Of course the history of the Jews during the Holocaust cannot be the history of the Holocaust; without it, however, the general history of these events cannot be written.10
In her highly controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt put part of the responsibility for the extermination of the Jews of Europe squarely on the shoulders of the various Jewish leadership groups: the Jewish Councils, or Judenräte.11 This largely unsubstantiated thesis turned Jews into collaborators in their own destruction. In fact any influence the victims could have on the course of their own victimization was marginal, but some interventions did take place (for better or worse) in a few national contexts. Thus, in several such settings, Jewish leaders had a limited yet not entirely insignificant influence (positive or negative) on the course of decisions taken by national authorities. This was noticeable, as we shall see, in Vichy; in Budapest, Bucharest, and Sofia; possibly in Bratislava; and of course in the relations between Jewish representatives and the Allied and neutral governments. Moreover, in a particularly tragic way, Jewish armed resistance (at times Jewish communist resistance groups, such as the small Baum group in Berlin), be it in Warsaw or Treblinka and then in Sobibor, may have brought about an accelerated extermination of the remaining Jewish slave labor force (at least until mid-1944) despite the acute need for workers in the increasingly embattled Reich.
In terms of its basic historical significance, the interaction between the Jews of occupied and satellite Europe, the Germans, and the surrounding populations took place at a more fundamental level. From the moment the extermination policy was launched, any steps taken by Jews in order to hamper the Nazi effort to eradicate every single one of them represented a direct countermove, be it on the tiniest individual scale: Bribing officials, policemen, or denouncers; paying families in order to hide children or adults; fleeing to woods or mountains; disappearing into small villages; converting; joining resistance movements; stealing food—anything that came to mind and led to survival meant setting an obstacle in the path of the German goal. It is at this microlevel that the most basic and ongoing Jewish interaction with the forces acting in the implementation of the “Final Solution” took place; it is at this microlevel that it mostly needs to be studied. And it is at this microlevel that documents abound.
The history of the destruction of the European Jews at the individual level can be reconstructed from the perspective of the victims not only on the basis of postwar testimonies (court depositions, interviews, and memoirs) but also owing to the unusually large number of diaries (and letters) written during the events and recovered over the following decades. These diaries and letters were written by Jews of all European countries, all walks of life, all age groups, either living under direct German domination or within the wider sphere of persecution. Of course the diaries have to be used with the same critical attention as any other document, especially if they were published after the war by the surviving author or by surviving family members. Yet, as a source for the history of Jewish life during the years of persecution and extermination, they remain crucial and invaluable testimonies.12
It is difficult to know whether during the early stages of the war most Jewish diarists started (or went on) writing in order to keep a record of the events for the sake of future history; but as the persecution turned harsher, most of them became aware of their role as chroniclers and memorialists of their epoch, as well as interpreters of and commentators on their personal destiny. Soon hundreds, probably thousands, of witnesses confided their observations to the secrecy of their private writings. Major events and much of the daily incidents, attitudes, and reactions of the surrounding world—which these diarists recorded—merged into an increasingly comprehensive albeit at times contradictory picture. They offer glimpses into attitudes at the highest political levels (in Vichy France and Romania, for example); they describe in great detail the initiatives and daily brutality of the perpetrators, the reactions of populations, and the life and destruction of their own communities, but they also record their own everyday world: Intense expressions of hope and illusions surface; the wildest rumors, the most fantastic interpretations of the events are considered plausible, at least for a while. For many the catastrophic events also become a test of their former beliefs, of the depth and significance of their ideological or religious commitments, of the values that guided their lives.
Beyond their general historical importance, such personal chronicles are like lightning flashes that illuminate parts of a landscape: They confirm intuitions; they warn us against the ease of vague generalizations. Sometimes they just repeat the known with an unmatched forcefulness. In the words of Walter Laqueur: “There are certain situations which are so extreme that an extraordinary effort is needed to grasp their enormity, unless one happened to be present.”13
Up to this point the individual voice has been mainly perceived as a trace, a trace left by the Jews that bears witness to and confirms and illustrates their fate. But in the following chapters the voices of diarists will have a further role as well. By its very nature, by dint of its humanness and freedom, an individual voice suddenly arising in the course of an ordinary historical narrative of events such as those presented here can tear through seamless interpretation and pierce the (mostly involuntary) smugness of scholarly detachment and “objectivity.” Such a disruptive function would hardly be necessary in a history of the price of wheat on the eve of the French Revolution, but it is essential to the historical representation of mass extermination and other sequences of mass suffering that “business as usual historiography” necessarily domesticates and “flattens.”14
Each of us perceives the impact of the individual voice differently, and each person is differently challenged by the unexpected “cries and whispers” that time and again compel us to stop in our tracks. A few incidental reflections about already well-known events may suffice, either due to their powerful eloquence or their helpless clumsiness; often the immediacy of a witness’s cry of terror, of despair, or of unfounded hope may trigger our own emotional reaction and shake our prior and well-protected representation of extreme historical events.
Let us return to Moffie’s photograph, to the star sewed to his coat, with its repulsive inscription, and to its meaning: The new MD, like all the carriers of this sign, was to be wiped off the face of the earth. Once its portent is understood this photograph triggers disbelief. Such disbelief is a quasivisceral reaction, one that occurs before knowledge rushes in to smother it. “Disbelief” here means something that arises from the depth of one’s immediate perception of the world, of what is ordinary and what remains “unbelievable.” The goal of historical knowledge is to domesticate disbelief, to explain it away. In this book I wish to offer a thorough historical study of the extermination of the Jews of Europe, without eliminating or domesticating that initial sense of disbelief.