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The edifice of Holocaust literature is vast, yet does not satisfactorily explain why the Nazis accepted the economic cost of embarking upon the destruction of the Jewish people, diverting scarce manpower and transport to a programme of mass murder while the outcome of the war still hung in the balance. The answer must lie in the deranged centrality of Jewish persecution not merely to National Socialist ideology, but to Germany’s policies throughout the global conflict. The Nazis were always determined to exploit the licence granted to a government waging total war to fulfil objectives that otherwise posed difficulties even for a totalitarian regime. Goering asserted at a key party meeting on 12 November 1938, following Kristallnacht: ‘If, in the near future, the German Reich should come into conflict with foreign powers, it goes without saying that we in Germany should first of all let it come to a showdown with the Jews.’

At that time, Nazi policy still promoted the emigration of Reich Jews, but a November 1939 article in the SS journal Schwartze Korps asserted the commitment to ‘the actual and definitive end of Jewry in Germany, its total extermination’. Many such remarks were made openly and publicly by leading Nazis: Hitler made his notorious ‘prophecy’ in a speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, asserting that war would result in ‘the annihilation of European Jewry’. He sought to make it plain that every Jew within his reach was a hostage for the ‘good behaviour’ of the Western Powers. If the British and French declined to acquiesce in his ambitions – above all if they chose to oppose these with force – the consequences would be their responsibility.

The Western Powers treated such remarks as hyperbolic. Even when Hitler embarked on his rampage of hemispheric conquest, the democracies found it difficult to conceive that the people of a highly educated and long-civilised European society could fulfil their leaders’ extravagant rhetoric and implement genocide. Despite mounting evidence of Nazi crimes, this delusion persisted in some degree until 1945, and even for a time afterwards.

The Nazi T4 euthanasia programme, which began in July 1939, killed German and Polish inmates of psychiatric units, categorised as ‘unfit for further existence’, at a rate of some 5,000 a month in 1940. Most were gassed, though some were shot, under Gestapo and SS supervision with assistance from doctors; between four and five thousand of the 70,000 victims were Jewish. The T4 programme was historically important, because at an early stage it demonstrated the German government’s willingness to undertake an annihilatory process, minutely bureaucratised from Berlin, to eliminate a sub-group surplus to the Third Reich’s requirements. Once one minority had been slaughtered wholesale, no further moral barrier stood in the path of the Holocaust: the dilemmas facing the Nazi leadership related only to timing and logistical feasibility.

For more than two years after war came, the priority of securing victory was held to require postponement of an absolute elimination of European Jewry. Between August 1939 and the summer of 1942, when the death camp programme achieved full capacity, the Nazis contented themselves with killing large numbers of people in many countries on an arbitrary and opportunistic basis. During the first months after German troops entered Poland, some 10,000 Poles were murdered – a mixture of Jews and non-Jews deemed inimical to German interests. Five designated SS Einsatzgruppen – death squads – followed the armoured spearheads. Their commanders were granted generous discretion about selecting victims, which some exploited to eliminate prostitutes, gypsies and the mentally ill. Around 60,000 Polish Jewish soldiers were segregated from their fellow PoWs and earmarked for later disposal; all Poland’s 1.7 million Jews were designated for resettlement in ghettos. Early in 1940, the Nazis embarked on the enforced removal of 600,000 Jews from areas of the country now incorporated in the Greater Reich; the deportees were