2008 Mark Lynton History Prize Finalist

2008 Mark Lynton History Prize Finalist

Saul Friedlander
for The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (HarperCollins Publishers)

Judges' Citation

"Saul Friedlander's monumental study of the Holocaust bears witness to the sheer and simple power of what we call 'the record' to tell an otherwise unimaginable story.   The Years of Extermination is the culmination of a forty-year commitment to documenting what happened to Europe's Jews in the first half of the twentieth century, and how and why it happened; and it is a mark of Friedlander's immense achievement that he has done this without polemics and with a profound sense that, at the end the day, facts are the only argument that counts.  He has reconstructed the six years of the Final Solution, detail by devastating detail—from the official archives and reportage, from the letters, memoirs, and voices of the people who participated in it, and from the testimony of survivors.  His work is definitive.  With his deeply cautionary scholarship, he has put to rest the question that has haunted scholars since the first death camp was liberated in 1944:  Everybody knew.”

Judges for the Mark Lynton History Prize Winner

Fred Anderson, professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder; Caroline Elkins, associate professor of history at Harvard University; and Jane Kramer, European correspondent for The New Yorker.

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