Final Solution by David Cesarani review – the Holocaust on the hoof

Why did the Nazi regime murder up to 6 million Jews during the second world war? This masterful overview argues that the Reich’s plans were often improvised and muddled

On 28 August 1942, Abraham Lewin, a middle-aged schoolteacher trapped inside the Warsaw ghetto, received shattering news of the fate of fellow Jews, his wife Luba among them, who had recently been rounded up and deported to an unknown location. The crammed trains had gone to Treblinka, Lewin heard from a prisoner who had escaped from what was then the most lethal Holocaust camp, where most new arrivals were dead and buried within hours. In just a few weeks, more than 200,000 Jews from Warsaw were slaughtered there; such was the killers’ frenzy that the grounds were strewn with discarded clothes and corpses. “God! Are we really to be exterminated down to the very last of us?” Lewin wrote that day in Warsaw. “This is without doubt the greatest crime ever committed in the whole of history.”

How to explain this crime, the signature crime of the past century, is a question that has occupied survivors and scholars ever since. Why did the Nazi regime murder up to 6 million Jews during the second world war? The most common answer is that, consumed by murderous antisemitism, Hitler and other Nazi leaders developed an early blueprint for mass extermination and then put it into practice, relentlessly and unwaveringly. There was a “straight path”, in other words, from the murderous rants of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in the 1920s to the gas chambers in the 1940s. But as David Cesarani explains in his masterful synthesis of recent scholarship, historians now tend to see the path to the Holocaust as “twisted”. In fact, they don’t see a single path at all; there were many paths and dead-ends, detours and reversals on the way to Auschwitz. Cesarani aimed to bring this conclusion to a wider readership, bridging the “yawning gulf” between academic research, which has become ever more nuanced, and popular knowledge, which lags behind. Few were better placed to undertake such an ambitious project than Cesarani, a peerless public historian of the Holocaust. This book, completed just before his sudden death last autumn, aged 58, is his legacy – his last major study and his finest.

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