Each week, the Gaggle Book Club recommends a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—uploads a pdf version of it.

Our practice is that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.

Today's book club selection is Arno J. Mayer's "Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The Final Solution in History." Published in 1988, Mayer's work challenged mainstream interpretations of the Holocaust.

Mayer, a historian specializing in modern European history, rejected the conventional view that the Holocaust was from the outset a long-planned, ideologically driven extermination program. Instead, he argued that the genocide of European Jews was not predetermined but rather emerged as a contingent response to the failure of Nazi Germany’s war against the Soviet Union.

Mayer sought to place the Holocaust in the broader context of World War II, Nazi war aims and, given his Marxism, class struggle. Mayer argued that historians were overly overly obsessed with Hitler’s antisemitism thus arrived at their preordained conclusion that the Holocaust was its inevitable outcome.

Mayer was also influenced by earlier structuralist historians of Nazi Germany, such as Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen, who had argued that Nazi policies evolved in response to wartime conditions and were not preordained. However, Mayer took this argument further, suggesting that the Holocaust was not originally central to Nazi goals and only emerged in response to the collapsing war effort.

Mayer argues correctly that Nazi antisemitism was deeply intertwined with its anti-Bolshevism. The Bolsheviks were identified as Jews, and Hitler and the Nazis set out to destroy the Soviet Union and to liquidate en masse the its Jewish-Bolshevik elites. The expansion of this program into the much larger genocidal project of extermination of the Jews as a whole took place in response to the failure of Operation Barbarossa in late 1941. As Germany’s Blitzkrieg strategy failed, and the Wehrmacht faced severe resistance from the Soviet Red Army, the Nazis redirected their frustrations toward Jews as scapegoats.

Among Mayer's claims are that the ghettoization of Jews in Poland was initially meant as a temporary measure, not as part of an extermination policy. Mayer downplays the significance of Auschwitz as an extermination camp, portraying it instead as primarily a labor camp--at least until the later stages of the war. Mayer also argues that the shift to industrialized killing (gas chambers) came gradually and without a clear master plan.

Mayer places the Holocaust within the larger context of 20th-century political violence, comparing it to Stalinist purges and other state-led mass killings. He suggests that antisemitism was not the sole or even primary driving force behind the Holocaust—rather, it was a reaction to war, ideological struggles and economic crises.

Whether you accept Mayer's arguments or you don't, the book is a fascinating read, and a useful correction to the oversimplified accounts of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.