The Holocaust: A Warning From History

Adolf Hitler was at the zenith of his power in 1940, but he did not have enough power to bring the war to the conclusion he wanted. Within Germany he was powerless to prevent the governance of the Reich from slipping increasingly out of control. The tendencies already evident before the war - unresolved Party-State dualism, unclear or overlapping spheres of competence, proliferation of ad hoc establishment of improvised "special authorities" in specific policy areas, administrative anarchy - were now sharply magnified. It was not that Hitler was a weak dictator, his power was recognized and acknowledged on all fronts, and nothing of significance was undertaken in contradiction to his known wishes. His power was immense, opponents were demoralized and without hope, and there was no conceivable challenge that could be mounted. The slippage from control did not mean a decline in Hitler's authority, but it did mean that the very nature of that authority had built into it the ...

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...