The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939‐1945 Peter Heinegg YOU ARE NOT OF THE CASTLE, YOU ARE NOT OF THE VILLAGE, YOU ARE NOTHING : Saul Friedländer : HarperCollins , 2007 . xxvi +870 pp. $39.95 The line deserves to be quoted in the original German—as Friedländer does with many crucial statements by the Nazis in this indispensable history: “Sie sind nicht aus dem Schloß, Sie sind nicht aus dem Dorfe, Sie sind nichts.” The words come from the landlady, speaking to the protagonist in Kafka’s The Castle. Before being quoted by Friedländer, they were also memorably invoked by Hannah Arendt in her 1943 essay, “The Jew as Pariah.” (The landlady goes on to say, “But unfortunately you are something: a stranger, someone who’s superfluous and everywhere in the way.”) It is the perfect epigraph for the Holocaust, that untellable story that generations of writers keep trying to get a grip on. The broad outlines and countless details of the Shoah may now be “known,” but the bafflement continues. Friedländer is, of course, one of those most distinguished of such writers. Born in Prague to a highly assimilated, German‐speaking Jewish family in 1932, he survived the war disguised as a Catholic at the boarding school of Saint‐Béranger in Montluçon in central France. His parents (he was an only child) were not so lucky: they failed in their attempts to cross the Swiss border and were deported and gassed in Auschwitz. After the war Friedländer (who briefly thought of becoming a priest before learning of his Jewishness and the fate of his parents) made his way to Israel, where he became a historian, later dividing much of his time between Tel Aviv University and U.C.L.A. He has written a heart‐wrenching memoir (in French) When Memory Comes (1978) and, among his many other books, the brilliant predecessor to this one, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume I: The Years of Persecution, 1933‐39 (1997). Amid the vast and spreading expanse of Holocaust literature, the three volumes of the late Raul Hilberg’s Destruction of the European Jews (latest edition, 2003) stand as the single greatest monument; but Friedländer’s work bears comparison to it. (He had fuller access to ex‐Soviet archives than Hilberg, as well as to the enormous historiography that Hilberg himself helped generate.) Friedländer stresses three intersecting dimensions of the Holocaust: the ideological, the institutional, and the personal (from witnesses who survived, like Primo Levi, Otto Klemperer and Filip Müller, and others who did not, like Etty Hillesum and Calel Perechodnik), building them into a grand tragic narrative in a style at once passionate and controlled. Friedländer sees Hitler as above all a prophet of “redemptive anti‐Semitism,” preaching “three different and suprahistorical creeds”: “the ultimate purity of the racial community, the ultimate crushing of Bolshevism and plutocracy, and the ultimate millennial redemption.” The last of these, needless to say, derives from Christianity, and Friedländer illuminates the horrific irony of the practically total failure by European Christian leaders to resist or even criticize Nazism. Conventional wisdom looks for a convenient symbolic launching of the Final Solution (such as the Wansee Conference), and then leaves Hitler behind to recount its “technical” implementation in Einsatzgruppen shootings and the death camps. By contrast, Friedländer shows how closely Hitler followed the progress of the genocide, and how until the last moments of his life he continued to preach (to wild applause) his demented vision, for example in a speech given on May 26, 1944, to a group of newly appointed “National Socialist guidance” officers, “If our opponents are victorious in this struggle, the entire German people will be eradicated. Bolshevism would slaughter millions and millions and millions of intellectuals. Anyone not dying through a shot to the neck would be deported. The children of the upper classes would be taken away and eliminated. This entire bestiality has been organized by the Jews.” The Holocaust was also a supremely “cultural” crime in that it required the massive coordination of military leaders, common soldiers, bureaucrats, educators, lawyers, medical and scientific personnel, and...