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however, was less patient: he saw swift eradication of Jews in the occupied territories both as a national priority and a means of extending his personal authority. He flaunted his mandate as Reichskommissar ‘for the strengthening of the German nation’, even though at that stage Hitler had made no decision about ‘Germanisation’ of occupied Soviet territory. It may sound trite to emphasise the centrality of the influence of the SS upon the Holocaust, but it is nonetheless necessary. The most powerful fiefdom in Nazi Germany pursued the extinction of the Jews almost heedless of its impact on the country’s war-making. As John Lukacs has observed, Himmler focused far more single-mindedly on this objective than did Hitler.

In September 1941, the Führer confirmed Himmler’s victory in his contest with Alfred Rosenberg for authority over eastern Europe: the Reichsführer SS was given explicit licence to conduct ethnic cleansing in the east. This decision marked the onset of the Third Reich’s systematic campaign of genocide. Amid expectations of looming victory, commitments were made that became significant impediments to Germany’s war effort when faced with the rising spectre of defeat. Yet they were never reversed: Himmler pursued the extermination of Jews with a concentration of purpose conspicuously absent from every other aspect of Nazi policy-making. Any rational assessment of Germany’s predicament in late 1941 demanded dedication to winning the war, above all against the Soviet Union. If this was achieved, the Third Reich could thereafter order its polity as it wished; if not, then National Socialism was doomed. But Himmler committed the SS to a task which could contribute nothing to German victory, and indeed diverted resources from its achievement.

Through the autumn and into the winter of 1941, the pace of slaughter accelerated: scores of towns and villages were systematically purged of Jews. In October, when a Soviet ‘stay-behind’ commando blew up the Romanian army’s newly established headquarters in Odessa, Romanian troops assisted by German SS killed some 40,000 of its Jews. On the 18th and 19th, the SS murdered all 8,000 Jewish inhabitants of Mariupol, and a week later another 1,800 in Taganrog. Week after week the process continued, in towns the world had never heard of – Skadovsk and Feodosiya, Kerch and Dzhankoy, Nikolayev and Kherson. Mental-asylum patients were killed as a matter of course, whatever their religious affiliation. The SS also shot large numbers of prisoners whom they identified as ‘of Asiatic appearance’, and began the work of murdering gypsies, which became systematic in 1942. PoW camps were combed for Russian Jews and commissars; those identified, at least 140,000 in all, were removed and shot. It seems important to emphasise that by the time the Final Solution was agreed, at least two million Soviet PoWs had already been killed or allowed to die. All moral barriers to mass murder had been broken down, ample precedent for wholesale killing established, before the major massacres of Jews were ordained.

In the winter of 1941, administrative confusion persisted about whether Jews capable of forced labour service should be kept alive. Local commanders adopted diverse policies: in Kaunas 1,608 men, women and children ‘ill or suspected of being infectious’ were murdered on 26 September, followed by a further 1,845 in a ‘punishment operation’ on 4 October, and 9,200 more after a new screening on 29 October. On 30 October, the head of the German civil administration in Slutsk in western Russia made a formal protest to the general commissioner in Minsk about the massacre of the city’s Jews. ‘One simply could not do without the Jewish craftsmen,’ he said, ‘because they were indispensable for the maintenance of the economy … All vital enterprises would be paralysed with a single blow if all Jews were liquidated.’

His complaints, he said, had been brushed aside by the commander of the police battalion carrying out the killings, who expressed astonishment ‘and explained that he had received instructions