The Holocaust: A Warning From History

As the full-scale program of annihilation got under way, it brought to the fore a 35-year-old SS lieutenant colonel who had attended the Wannsee conference but who, with deference appropriate to his position as recording secretary for the meeting, had spoken not a word. He was an industrious functionary named Adolf Eichmann, and he was lucky enough to have as his mentor Reinhard Heydrich himself. Eichamann had joined the SS in 1932 while pursuing an indifferent career as an Austria-based traveling salesman. In 1933, following Hitler's rise to power, he had moved to Germany and begun a year of training in two SS camps in Bavaria. He applied for a job in the counterintelligence branch of the SS, which Heydrich had recently set up. Eichmann's first assignment was to collect information on the Freemasons and other groups the Nazis considered potentially subversive. But he soon became fascinated by the Jews, and to study them in depth he went so far as to learn a smattering of Hebre

With the "success" of both the killing squads in the east and the starvation in the ghettos in German-occupied Poland, a new prospect presented itself to Hitler, Himmler and the SS: blood need not be shed in any German street, or risk taken of local protests at violence done to the Jews of Germany. Instead, those German Jews who had not managed to emigrate before the outbreak of war would be deported to the east: either to the ghettos on Polish soil, where they would be left to suffer and starve with the local population, or to killing sites in the east. Tens of thousands of Jews had been murdered between June and October 1941 in the Ratomskaya ravine on the outskirts of Minsk, in the Rumbula forest outside Riga, and in the nineteenth century Tsarist forts surrounding the city of Kovno -- principally the Ninth Fort. German Jews would be sent to these destinations: they would never be seen again in the streets of Greater Germany, and their distant fate could be kept a secret.

Four SS Einsatzgruppen, of 3,000 men each, followed in the wake of the German armies that invaded the Soviet Union. Their mission was to insure the security of the operational zone; that is, to prevent resistance by civilians. These were police of a very special nature, given an additional task by their chief, Reinhard Heydrich. They were to round up and liquidate not only Bolshevik leaders but all Jews, as well as gypsies, "Asiatic inferiors" and "useless eaters," such as the deranged and incurably sick. To supervise this mass killing, Heydrich and Himmler had been inspired to select officers who, for the most part, were professional men. They included a Protestant pastor, a physician, a professional opera singer and numerous lawyers. The majority were intellectuals in their early thirties and it might be supposed such men were unsuited for this work. On the contrary, they brought to the brutal task their considerable skills and training and became, despite qualms,