As it Really Was in Yad Vashem Studies, Volume XXXIV

As It Really Was: Christopher R. Browning, with contributions by J Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942

This article argues that while Christopher R. Browning provides a definitive account of the emergence of the “Final Solution,” his massive evidence can be interpreted differently by different scholars, as is the case with co-author Jürgen Matthäus’s much more functionalist interpretation. The article further points out that such reconstructions of the Holocaust tell us very little about how the genocide itself transpired, and suggests that this can only be accomplished by relying on evidence from the Jewish victims, whose testimonies can “rescue” the event from the Nazi bureaucratic abstractions that have often led historians to write strictly perpetrator-focused accounts.