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By Root 1434 0

his signature to any documents concerning extermination, and to use only word of mouth in giving directions – was known within the regime to favour whichever policy was harshest towards the Jews. Although he attached his name to any number of Führer directives and Führerbefehlen (orders), such was the criminal magnitude of the Holocaust that he distanced himself as far as possible from personal blame, to the extent that his apologists even attempt to argue that he wasn’t responsible. No German official’s career ever suffered from being over-enthusiastic for genocide and many – such as Obergruppenführer (Lieutenant-General) Reinhard Heydrich – prospered because of their anti-Semitic fanaticism. When in mid-August 1941 SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and Heydrich gave written instructions to escalate the killing of Jewish women and children as well as men in ever larger pogroms in eastern Europe, it happened, starting in Lithuania.19

Massacres of Jews – often through shooting at the edge of pits that had been dug by the victims themselves or by Russian POWs – took place at Ponary near Vilnius (55,000 killed), Fort IX near Kovno (10,000), Babi Yar ravine outside Kiev (33,771), Rumbula near Riga (38,000), Kaunas (30,000) and many other places. In all, around 1.3 million people died at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen before the more industrialized processes were adopted. We know the numbers because they sent back detailed reports of their massacres, which Hitler certainly saw and occasionally made tangential reference to in his discussions with lieutenants. On 25 October 1941, for example, at dinner with Himmler and Heydrich, Hitler said: ‘Let no one say to me, we cannot send them into the swamp… It is good if our advance is preceded by fear that we will exterminate Jewry.’ This was probably a reference to the SS reports of drowning Jewish women and children by their thousands in the Pripet Marshes.

The Wehrmacht both knew about and actively co-operated in the work of the Einsatzgruppen, despite its post-war protestations of innocence that fooled a number of prominent Western historians, including Basil Liddell Hart. After Babi Yar, Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau issued an order celebrating the ‘hard but just punishment for the Jewish sub-humans’ and Rundstedt signed a directive to senior officers along much the same lines. Equal complicity in genocide was exhibited by Field Marshal von Leeb, Field Marshal von Manstein – who wrote, ‘The Jewish–Bolshevist system must now and forever be exterminated’ – and General Hoepner, who ordered ‘the total annihilation of the enemy’, whom he identified as the Jews and Bolsheviks. The Germans had a long history of dealing viciously and arbitrarily with ‘undesirable’ elements among the domestic population of occupied territories, including suspected francs-tireurs in the Franco-Prussian War, Herero tribesmen in 1904–8 and Belgian civilians in the Great War. In 1940, some 3,000 black African soldiers were massacred after they had surrendered in the fall of France.20

The somewhat haphazard, semi-public mass killings by the Einsatzgruppen had their drawbacks, principally the sheer amount of ammunition expended, the odd escapee and the very occasional distaste felt by the SS men themselves, all of which Himmler wished to minimize. This meant that by the late summer and autumn of 1941 the Nazi High Command were keen to adopt a far more efficient method of conducting genocide. Therefore on 3 September 1941, in the cellars of Block 11 at the Oświęcim barracks to the west of Kraków in Poland – known to history by its German name of Auschwitz – 250 prisoners, mostly Poles, were poisoned using Zyklon B crystallized cyanide gas, hitherto used for anti-lice fumigation of clothes and buildings. Although gas vans, mass shootings and various other methods continued to be employed in the east, the use of Zyklon B in gas chambers became the primary way that the Nazis attempted, in the words of Heydrich, to provide ‘the final solution to the Jewish question in Europe’. In Hitler’s library there was