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cigars. Wannsee, writes Roseman, was ‘a signpost indicating that genocide had become official policy’. Before Wannsee, only 10 per cent of the total number of Jewish victims of Hitler had so far been killed, but in the next twelve months a further 50 per cent were liquidated. ‘Not only did everybody willingly indicate agreement,’ Eichmann testified in 1961, ‘but there was something else, entirely unexpected, when they outdid and outbid each other, as regards the demand for a final solution to the Jewish question.’ The experts discussed how the policy was to be carried out with minimum disruption to the war effort, and these bureaucrats were just as guilty as the medical orderlies who poured the Zyklon B crystals into the gas chambers. Conventional morality bypassed both sets of people, even though a majority of the state secretaries were cultured, educated men with academic doctorates who could hardly claim to have been desensitized by a brutal society. The Holocaust could not have been carried out without the willing co-operation of scientists, statisticians, demographers and social scientists supporting this ‘radical experiment in social engineering’, all operating in an utter moral vacuum. Here was an amoral caste of technocrats presenting learned papers that advocated ‘population adjustments’, the ‘resettlement’ of ‘useless mouths’ and the removal of ‘inferior persons’.62 It culminated in the Generalplan-Ost, a general plan for an eastern Europe populated according to Hitler’s dream of German settler–farmer–warriors, with a servile workforce.

Although Hitler spoke ceaselessly of the two millennia of European civilization and culture that were threatened by the Jews, by far the most central aspect of that culture – indeed its fons et origo – was anathema to him. Goebbels recorded in his diary entry of 29 December 1939:

The Führer is deeply religious, though completely anti-Christian. He views Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a deposit [Ablagerung] of the Jewish race. Both have no point of contact to the animal element, and thus, in the end, they will be destroyed. The Führer is a convinced vegetarian, on principle… He has little regard for homo sapiens. Man should not feel so superior to animals. He has no reason to.63

The destinies of Europe were therefore being run by a man who – when alone with his closest colleague – predicted that both Christianity and Judaism ‘will be destroyed’ because of their lack of regard for animals, and who had ‘little regard’ for the human race. For those Christians who looked the other way during the Holocaust, or who tacitly supported it because of the supposed collective guilt of the Jews for the death of Christ – who was anyway crucified by Gentiles, in the shape of the Romans – there is some irony in the fact that, had Hitler prevailed, Christianity would eventually have faced its worst purges in Europe since the days of Ancient Rome. (As for Hitler’s love of animals, some half a million horses died during his Operation Barbarossa.)

Himmler visited Auschwitz on 17 July 1942, telling SS officers openly that evening that the wholesale massacre of European Jewry was now Reich policy. Two days later he ordered the death of all Poland’s Jews, with the exception of those few who were ‘fit for work’, who would be worked to the verge of death, and then gassed. ‘The occupied Eastern zones are being cleansed of Jews,’ wrote Himmler on 28 July. ‘The Führer has laid the implementation of this very difficult order on my shoulders.’ He certainly had an efficient and enthusiastic lieutenant in Reinhard Heydrich, whom Hitler called ‘the man with the iron heart’, meaning it as a term of praise. His victims called him ‘the man with the icy stare’. His blond good looks, undoubted intelligence and utter fanaticism helped him to a position in the Third Reich whereby he might eventually have been Hitler’s successor as the next Führer if he had survived and Germany had won the war.

Born in Halle of musical parents, and a gifted violinist himself, Heydrich was an able sportsman and