|
|
|
Why Did the Heavens Not Darken
by Arno Mayer
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Pantheon (1988-12-24)
ISBN: 0394571541
EAN: 9780394571546
Dewey Decimal #: 940.531503924
Hardcover: 492 pages
Edition: 1st
Release Date: 1988-12-24
SKU: 20216
Condition: Used: Good
Comments: Hardback. Dust Jacket Condition: Good. All pages clean and unmarked.
|
Customer Reviews
|
the previous review is better than mine
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-02-12
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Mayer's book is essential reading for most who have a stereotyped view of WWII. Note particularly his use of the word Judeocide instead of Holocaust (a term coined I think by Lucy Davidowitz in anger over Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem--I may be mistaken) "Holocaust" was a word never used to describe the destruction of European Jewry until the sixties-to that I can testify. Personally I believe Hitler's primary aim was the destuction of the Soviet Union and the Jews "were in the way" the second largest cohort of people murdered by the Nazis were Soviet Prisoners of war 3.6 million. I think Mayer could have been even bolder but that is my prejudice. A great book and a fine review by the previous reviewer.
|
|
The anti-thesis of Goldhagen
Rating (5)
Date: 1998-10-06
29 out of 32 customers found this reveiw helpful
I suggest you read A. Mayer's book chapter for chapter with Goldhagen's. Mayer's book takes on the question of the final solution from the point of view that the two fronts, and therefore the two regions of European Jewry were dealt with in different ways. German anti-semitism as well as the worlds anti-semitism weighed out a heavier toll on those Jews in the East than those in the West. Nations allowed Western Jews into their countries, but closed their boarders to the Eastern Jews. And as the Nazis war machine progressed it installed death camps in Poland, the East. But, no Death Camps are built in France,Belgium, or Austria. The East was reserved for the final solution. Mayer, does not believe Hitler had planned the final solution but developed it as he went along. Case in point, Hitler at first expelled Jews to the four corners of the World, trying to get them out of Germany. If the Final solution was Hitler's end all allong why scatter the population you plan to exterminate? Mayer delves into these questions. He does not let Germans off the hook, nor the rest of the world. Goldhagen's work is the exact opposite of Mayer's book. Goldhagen believes in the final solution from Hitler's inception onward in Germany. He puts the blame intirely on the Germans of that period and no one else. He does not distuinguish from the different fronts. And, he unties the history of the Nazis from the Germans of today. His most defining chapter is that of the einzatzgruppe. It is the horror of these special battalions that decimated the Eastern Jewish population and caused a need for the Nazis to create camps to put those they had not been able to kill in the first onslaught. The basis of this comes from another book by Browning that is from the police reports interviewing the Germans that were in these special forces. In Brownings book he looks at the evil doers themselves and how they justified, broke down, and how the majority of them became murders. These three books I highly recommend.
|
|
|
|
|