Harvest of Hate: The Nazi Program for the Destruction of the Jews of Europe

by Léon Poliakov and Poliakov

Book Overview

Here is a horrifying, clear-cut story of the Nazi program to exterminate the Jews, detailing the origins of the anti-Semitic movement in Germany, and outlining the various histories of the ghettos,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0896040062
• ISBN13: 9780896040069
• Release Date: January 1979
• Publisher: Schocken Books Inc
• Length: 350 Pages
• Weight: 0.98 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Extermination of the Jews as a Prelude to the Extermination of the Poles and Other Slavs

Leon Poliakov, a French Jew, provides the reader with an information-packed one-volume encyclopedia of the Holocaust. He covers such diverse topics as the rise of Nazism, the early persecutions of Jews, the development of what has become known as industrial genocide, Allied successes in freeing some Jews, Himmler's second thoughts on the extermination of Jews, and much more. He mentions the attempts of Max Naumann, a German Jew, to effect reconciliation between German Jews and the Nazis (pp. 10-11). Unfortunately Poliakov, with some exceptions (see below), frequently lapses into standard Polonophobic and anti-Christian formulations. On the other hand, he makes the connection between recent German behavior and German attitudes that had long predated Hitler: "For decades, innumerable philosophers, journalists, and teachers had exalted the Prussian ideal of inflexible hardness and blind obedience--while the solemn Hegel himself deified the state. For a century the Jahns, the Arndts, the Lists, the Treitschkes, and the von Bernhardis had proclaimed the superiority of the German race and urged Germany on to new and joyous wars." (p. 284). Poliakov presents evidence that contradicts the common stereotype of most Poles being indifferent to the sufferings of Jews. It also counters historian Yisrael Gutman's contention that common sufferings did not bring Poles and Jews any closer. The following is from a February 1940 letter from General Johannes Blaskowitz to von Brauchitsch: "The violence publically perpetrated against the Jews is not only provoking in the basically pious Polish people a deep disgust with their perpetrators; it is also creating a profound pity for the Jewish population, to whom the Poles were more or less hostile until now." (p. 42). In 1936, Polish Cardinal August Hlond described Jews as "freethinkers, vanguards of Bolshevism, etc." for which he has been reviled as an anti-Semite ever since. It is interesting to note that Poliakov, using different words and employing a positive spin, makes basically the same generalization as did Cardinal Hlond. After listing several prominent Jewish Communists (e. g., Karl Marx), he writes: "These last remind us that it is in the Jewish tradition to be attracted to critical and reforming tendencies and to make common cause with the disinherited." (p. 9). Poliakov devotes some attention to "Jewish passivity." He cites two different German documents in which German soldiers are cautioned to closely watch captive Poles and Russians, and to do so while fully armed. This is in explicit contradistinction to the watching of captive Jews (p. 226). On a larger scale, Jewish leaders long believed that the persecution of Jews could be stopped through the payment of massive bribes to the Gestapo (p. 99). Ironically, for all the talk about Poles and Jews being "unequal victims", the Germans never saw any need to "protect" the Poles from being "defiled" by Jews: "On the other hand, certain sacral meas