Gerald Reitlinger

Reitlinger's best known work, his study of the French art market. "Reitlinger's interest in this subject was prompted by what he considered to be the decline of taste in art, which he attributed to a redistribution of wealth and to the inflated price of individual reputation" (ODNB). Educated at Oxford and the Slade School, Reitlinger travelled extensively in the Near East and Asia in the 1920s and 30s, participating in the excavations at Kish and Hira, and appearing in Robert Byron's account of his excursion to Athos, The Station, under the name of Reinecker. During this period he began his remarkable collection of Syrian and Persian pottery of the Timurid, Isnik, and Safavid periods, which he expanded throughout his life, and which now forms a key part of the Ashmolean Ceramic Collection. Reitlinger became famous after the Second World War for his studies of the Holocaust - The Final Solution, and The SS Alibi of a Nation.

The SS--short for the German Schutzstaffeln--was a far-flung organization, of which the Gestapo was only one branch, that served as the tyrannical expression of Nazi bureaucracy, a politics of terror. Germans in high places still use the SS as a standard excuse for the acts of murder, extortion, and genocide that were facts of daily life under the Nazis. Reitlinger explores the complex social machinery that allowed the SS to operate--the administration and internal rivalries, the SS field divisions, German military intelligence, and the organization of the concentration and death camps. He shows how the SS was embedded in the basic government of the country during those years and how its members were not so much lunatic killers as loyal citizens doing the bidding of a country that had gone insane. Powerful, objective, and based on original German documents and interviews--including information from Himmler's statistician--this book rejects the SS as an alibi for a nation's responsibility in the most far-reaching racial massacre in history.

This is a classic work on the German occupation of Russia together Alexander Dallin's fine work. Reitlinger has composed a comprehensive study of the chaotic and in the end ineffective Nazi rule of Russia during World War II. Reitlinger exposes the labyrinth that made it nearly impossible for the Germans to control the areas they occupied, areas they could have ruled with more control had they been in tune with the local population, a significant amount which welcomed them as liberators. He also examines how Russia was exploited by the Germans, for slave labor, for foodstuffs, even for manpower for the Wehrmacht. The sections on the Vlasov Army and other collaborationist movements is especially enlightening, subjects that even now forty years after this book was written have not been examined thoroughly. The only drawback to this text is time and the authors now dated use of English jargon. Reitlinger probably did not have access to documents or evidence that later writers had the privelege of using...or in some cases not using. There are some errors, but this is a fine work and well worth reading...it provides a solid foundation to begin study of this subject.

Final Solution” is not an account that will find favor in the new Eastern Europe. Dividing many of his chapters into one slow year at a time, Cesarani achieves a sense of profound claustrophobia by tracing the extreme difficulty of hiding without being caught, blackmailed, denounced and handed over to the Germans in most of occupied Eastern Europe. In Poland, he writes, “village elders, mayors, police officials, firemen, forest rangers and upstanding citizens all took part in Jew-hunts and sought to profit from the mythical wealth of the Jews.” So too did sections of the resistance and partisan movements in Poland and Ukraine. For the approximately 250,000 Jews in Poland who went into hiding, it was the near-hostile environment that made their chances of survival so slim: “Making it through 1943 and into 1944,” Cesarani writes, “was a mountainous challenge.” Robbing Jews continued after their deaths, as people dug into the ash pits of Sobibor and Treblinka looking for valuables that the SS had missed.