NONFICTION - Sept. 14, 1986

THE WAR AGAINST THE JEWS, 1933-1945, Tenth Anniversary Edition by Lucy S. Dawidowicz (Free Press: $22.95; 466 pp.). Lucy Dawidowicz’s “The War Against the Jews” documents the transformation of Hitler’s anti-Semitism from intention to implementation and shows how the Nazi program of annihilation overwhelmed the culture, experience and resources of European Jewry, leaving the victims with little room to mobilize or resist. Because she does not think any significant documents have been revealed over the last decade, Dawidowicz has not revised the book. She has, however, added a critical discussion of recent books that have challenged her thesis and a supplementary bibliography.

Dawidowicz, of course, critiques the pseudo-historical disclaimers of the Holocaust’s actuality and clearly bad historians, such as David Irving, but her main targets are “neorevisionist” German scholars who deny Hitler’s responsibility for the Holocaust. They use a structural-functional framework to argue that the Holocaust was the unplanned, unintentional outcome of a hodgepodge of institutions. She is convinced, however, that the integrity of Holocaust scholarship, grounded on a moral perspective of human responsibility for events, will triumph. Her book is a formidable champion of that cause.