#12 and #13

I have learned an enormous amount about the Holocaust from two extraordinary books, Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office and Christopher Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp. Browning provides us with the plight of Jewish slave laborers in one small Polish town, and argues strongly for the logic of the Jewish survival through labor policy. Wildt carefully studies a large number of officials in the Security Service - mostly trained in the humanities, law and social sciences and preparing for racial war since their radical student days - who get their opportunity in the East to solve the "Jewish question." We clearly see that what we call the Final Solution was primarily a series of operations spearheaded by the SS - far too many with PhDs - against Polish and Russian Jews.