The Holocaust: A Warning From History

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 ...