ABSTRACT
David Cesarani’s Final Solution is the latest major synthetic history of the Holocaust. By contrast with others, Cesarani explains the unfolding of the ‘Final Solution’ in relation to Nazi Germany’s war effort. The relative de-emphasis on Judenpolitik is striking from a historian who spent much of his career trying to make readers understand the significance of the persecution of the Jews. Indeed, on a cursory glance, Cesarani’s book resembles nothing so much as Arno Mayer’s controversial work, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? (1988), which regarded the ‘Judeocide’ as a ‘by-product’ of the war. Less controversially, Gerhard Weinberg has argued for many years that the Holocaust is inseparable from its military context. This chapter explains, through a discussion of change in historiography, why the intertwining of the war and the Holocaust has become a consensus position in a way that would have surprised historians, not least Cesarani himself, a decade or two ago.
