The Years of Extermination
by Saul Friedländer
Summary
The Years of Extermination covers the Holocaust from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 to its end in 1945, the second half of Saul Friedländer's two volume history of Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews. Friedländer argues against the idea that Hitler carried a master plan for extermination from the writing of Mein Kampf onward, a position historians call intentionalism in its strongest form. He reads the documentary record instead as showing a decision that hardened only after 1941, as invasion, ideology and the practical machinery of occupation converged, and he traces that hardening year by year through ghettos, deportations and the camps.
What sets the book apart from a conventional institutional history is how closely Friedländer interweaves the perpetrators' bureaucratic records with the diaries and letters of Jewish victims across occupied Europe, moving between a Nazi administrative memo and a teenager's private account of hunger or fear within the same chapter. The historian Richard J. Evans praised this method directly, describing Friedländer's skill at interweaving individual testimony with the broader depiction of events as the book's real achievement, and it is that juxtaposition, official policy on one page and a single family's experience of it on the next, that gives the book its force.
Reading The Years of Extermination means moving through nearly nine hundred pages of dense, document based history, demanding but never abstract, since a reader is never allowed to lose sight of the individuals behind the statistics. It suits a reader who has already grappled with the outline of the Holocaust and wants the fullest scholarly account available of how the killing actually proceeded, told by a historian who was himself a child survivor of the period he studies.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Saul Friedländer the 2008 Prize for General Nonfiction for The Years of Extermination, published in April 2007 by HarperCollins as the completion of the two volume project he began with The Years of Persecution in 1997. The finalists that year were Allan Brandt's The Cigarette Century, on the tobacco industry, and Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise, on twentieth century classical music. Friedländer had already won Germany's Leipzig Book Fair Prize for nonfiction for the same book in 2007.
Friedländer, born in Prague in 1932, survived the war hidden in France after his parents were deported and killed at Auschwitz, and that history shaped both volumes without ever becoming their subject directly. The Years of Extermination is widely regarded among historians as the standard synthesis of Holocaust scholarship as it stood in the mid 2000s, and it remains a staple citation in later academic histories of the period.