The Holocaust: A Warning From History

On January 3, 1946, in Courtroom 600 of the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg, 38-year-old Otto Ohlendorf sat in the witness box before the International Military Tribunal. An economist and senior SS official, Ohlendorf was questioned by American prosecutor John Harlan Amen about the activities of Einsatzgruppe D, the mobile SS killing unit he had commanded on the Eastern Front. Ohlendorf did not deny the killings. Instead, he described them with the detached precision of an administrator. He testified that between June 1941 and June 1942, the units under his command had reported killing approximately 90,000 people, including men, women, and children. The victims were overwhelmingly Jews. Ohlendorf was highly educated. He had studied law and economics at the universities of Leipzig and Göttingen and subsequently worked as an economist and researcher. In 1939, at approximately 32 years of age, he became head of Amt III of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), the SS department responsible...

The combined leadership of the state and the party in the incorporated area of occupied Poland provided far greater influence for the party than was the case in the "Old Reich," and Hitler's attitude towards policy in the incorporated territories was typical. The Führer placed great value on giving his Gauleiter the "necessary freedom of action" to carry out their difficult tasks. He stressed "that he only demanded a report from the Gauleiter after ten years that their area was German, that is purely German. He would not ask about the methods they had used to make the area German, and it was immaterial to him if sometime in the future is were established that the methods to win this territory were not pretty or open to legal objection." The inevitable consequence of this broad mandate - though it was alleged that it ran counter to Hitler's intention - was competition between Arthur Greiser and his arch-rival Albert Forster to be the first to announ...

Colonel-General Johannes Blaskowitz wrote the most forthright and courageous denunciations of the horrendous outrages of the SS in Poland. In reports to Colonel-General Walther von Brauchitcsh, the Commander-in-Chief of the German Army, Blaskowitz detailed the "criminal atrocities, maltreatment, and plundering carried out by the SS, police, and administration. He castigated the "animal and pathological instincts" of the SS which had brought the slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews and Poles. Blaskowitz feared "immeasurable brutalization and moral debasement" if the SS could not be brought under control, but this appeared to be increasingly impossible within Poland "since they can well believe themselves officially authorized and justified in committing any act of cruelty." The response by Brauchitsch was weak-kneed and, effectively, a justification for the policy authorized by Hitler, and it was fateful. The general compromised the position of the a...

At the end of the first week of the invasion of Poland, Reinhard Heydrich was in a rage, at least he was reported to be. What upset the head of the Gestapo was the legalities of the military courts, despite 200 executions a day; Heydrich was demanding that shooting or hanging be done without trial. "The nobility, clerics, and Jews must be done away with,' he reportedly said. Reports of atrocities were not long in arriving, and by 10-11 September 1939 there were accounts of an SS massacre of Jews who had been herded into a church, as well as of an SS shooting of large numbers of Jews. On 12 September, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, told General Wilhelm Keitel that he heard "that extensive shootings were planned in Poland and that especially the nobility and clergy were to be exterminated." Keitel replied "that this matter had already been decided by the Führer." The Chief of Staff, General Franz Halder, had by then been heard to say that ...

Hitler had his "mission" - destroying Germany's enemies, both internal and external, undoing the stain of defeat and humiliation in 1918, and restoring national greatness - and now he had his war. "In war Nazism came into its own," writes Ian Kershaw. "The Nazi movement had been born out of a lost war. As with Hitler personally, the experience of that war and erasing the stain of defeat were at its heart. 'National renewal' and preparation for another war to establish the dominance in Europe which the first great war had failed to attain drove it forwards. The new war now brought the circumstances and opportunities for the dramatic radicalization of Nazism's ideological crusade. Long term goals seemed almost overnight to become attainable policy objectives. Persecution which had targeted usually disliked social minorities was now directed at an entire conquered and subjugated people. The Jews, a tiny proportion of the German population, were not...

Germany and Russia stunned the world on August 24, 1939, by announcing that they had agreed to a non-aggression pact. The pact was seen as the death warrant for any prospect of alliance with Britain and France. The British and French had been seeking a mutual assistance treaty for more than four months.  The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, colloquially named after Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, was an agreement officially titled the "Treaty of Non-aggression between the Third German Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" and signed in Moscow in the early hours of August 24, 1939 (but dated August 23). It was a Non-Aggression Pact between the two countries and pledged neutrality by either party if the other were attacked by a third party. Each signatory promised not to join any grouping of powers that was "directly or indirectly aimed at the other party." The Soviet Union had been unable to reach a ...