Notes

Abbreviations of Archives Cited

BArch	Bundesarchiv
BayHStA	Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv
FAH	Familien-Archiv Hügel (Historisches Archiv Krupp, Essen)
HHStAW	Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden
Nds. HStAH	Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover
PRO	Public Record Office, Kew
StAN	Staatsarchiv Nürnberg
ZStL	Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen in Ludwigsburg

Prologue

1 Previously unpublished testimony. For ease of recognition, testimony which has been gathered for the documentary series which I wrote and produced over the last twenty-five years is shown in this book in the present tense – that is, he (or she) says, rather than said.

Chapter 1: Origins of Hate

1 BayHStA, Abt. IV, R W GrKdo, Bd 50/08. In English in J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945, vol. 1: The Rise to Power 1919–1934, University of Exeter Press, 1991, pp. 12–14.

2 See Brigitte Hamann, Hitlers Wien. Lehrjahre eines Diktators, Piper, 1996.

3 See Thomas Weber, Hitler’s First War, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 177.

4 John 7:1.

5 Ibid. 8:59.

6 Ibid. 8:44.

7 Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 27. The authors point out also that ‘From 1959 to 1963, Pope John XXIII removed from the liturgy this and other passages offensive to Jews.’

8 Martin Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies, 1543, in Luther’s Works, vol. 47, Fortress Press, 1971, pp. 268–93.

9 Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, 1781, in English in Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (eds.), The Jews in the Modern World: A Documentary History, Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 30.

10 George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, Howard Fertig, 1998, p. 149.

11 Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Land und Leute, 1854, vol. 1 of A Natural History of the German People as a Basis for a German Social Politics, in English in Michelle Facos, An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art, Routledge, 2011, p. 271.

12 Quoted in Susanne Karstedt, ‘Strangers, Mobilisation and the Production of Weak Ties: Railway Traffic and Violence in Nineteenth-Century South-West Germany’, in Barry S. Godfrey, Clive Emsley and Graeme Dunstall (eds.), Comparative Histories of Crime, Willan Publishing, 2003, pp. 89–109, here p. 93.

13 David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema: 1933–1945, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 105.

14 Ibid., p. 107.

15 Laurence Rees, The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler, Ebury Press, 2012, p. 44.

16 Previously unpublished testimony.

17 Alyssa A. Lonner, Mediating the Past: Gustav Freytag, Progress, and German Historical Identity, 1848–1871, Peter Lang, 2005, says that Soll und Haben was ‘one of [the] – if not the – most widely read books of the [nineteenth] century’, p. 37.

18 Quoted in Alex Bein, The Jewish Question: Biography of a World Problem, Associated University Presses, 1990, p. 617.

19 Heinrich Class writing as Daniel Frymann, Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’: Politische Wahrheiten und Notwendigkeiten (If I Were Kaiser: Political Truths and Necessities), 4th edn, Dieterich, 1913. In Harry Pross (ed.), Die Zerstörung der deutschen Politik: Dokumente 1871–1933, trans. Richard S. Levy, Fischer, 1959.

20 Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, 1855, in English in The Inequality of the Human Races, William Heinemann, 1915.

21 Algernon Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale, Introduction, in Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1, Elibron Classics, 2005, first published by F. Bruckman, Munich, 1911, pp. v–vi.

22 Ibid., p. 350.

23 Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936, Hubris, Penguin, 2001, p. 660 n. 116.

24 Mosse, German Ideology, p. 104.

25 BArch NS 33/89, p. 41, The Reichsführer SS (SS-HA/ZK./Az. B 17a), Berlin, 11 April 1938, regarding selection of candidates as SS leaders, mailing list V. Also see Tom Segev, Soldiers of Evil: The Commandants of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Diamond Books, 2000, p. 97.

26 Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius, Macmillan, 1869, Introduction, p. 1.

27 Alfred Ploetz, Die Tüchtigkeit unsrer Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen (The Efficiency of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak), quoted in Peter Watson, The German Genius, Simon & Schuster, 2011, p. 434.

28 Calculation by Professor Richard Levy of the University of Chicago, in his 15 May 1996 review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, http://www.vho.org/aaargh/engl/crazygoldie/reviews96.html.

29 Robert Weinberg, ‘The Pogrom of 1905 in Odessa: A Case Study’, in John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza (eds.), Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 248–89.

30 Joshua Sobol, Weiningers Nacht, Europa-Verlag, 1988, pp. 145–6.

31 BArch R 8034 III/295, Reichslandbund Pressearchiv, Lup-Lz, p. 11a, R. Tag Z. Nr. 121, 13 March 1910, Lueger speech, 11 January 1894, state parliament of Lower Austria.

32 See Hamann, Hitlers Wien.

33 Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, p. 67.

34 Ibid., p. 96.

35 Quoted in Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century, Yale University Press, 2006, p. 84.

36 Ibid., p. 87.

37 Rathenau letter, 4 August 1916, quoted in Antony Loewenstein, My Israel Question, Melbourne University Press, 2007, p. 130.

38 Quoted in Nigel Jones, The Birth of the Nazis: How the Freikorps Blazed a Trail for Hitler, Constable & Robinson, 2004, pp. 194–5.

39 See Rees, Charisma, p. 22. The passage quoted here also includes previously unpublished testimony from Fridolin von Spaun.

40 Previously unpublished testimony.

Chapter 2: Birth of the Nazis

1 Robert Waite, Vanguard of Nazism, W. W. Norton, 1969, p. 206.

2 Rudolf von Sebottendorff, Bevor Hitler kam. Urkundliches aus der Frühzeit der nationalsozialistischen Bewegung, Deukula-Verlag Grassinger, 1933, pp. 41–3.

3 Ibid., pp. 57–60.

4 Joseph Howard Tyson, Hitler’s Mentor: Dietrich Eckart, his Life, Times, & Milieu, iUniverse, 2008, p. 50.

5 Ibid., p. 15.

6 Auf gut deutsch. Wochenschrift für Ordnung u. Recht, ed. Dietrich Eckart, vol. 1, 1919, no. 2, p. 18.

7 Ibid., vol. 2, 1920, no. 30/34, p. 392.

8 Balthasar Brandmayer, Meldegänger Hitler 1914–1918, Walter, 1933, pp. 71–2. In English in Laurence Rees, The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler, Ebury Press, 2012, p. 13.

9 Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974, p. 133.

10 Quoted by Margarate Plewnia, Aufdem Weg zu Hitler, Schünemann Universitätsverlag, 1970, p. 67. She in turn quotes Albert Zoller, Hitler privat – Erlebnisbericht seiner Geheimsekretärin, Droste, 1949, p. 118. In English in Rees, Charisma, p. 47.

11 Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944, Phoenix Press, 2000, p. 217, night of 16–17 January 1942.

12 Ibid.

13 Tyson, Hitler’s Mentor. See also Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn (eds.), Hitler. Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905–1924, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980, p. 117. Otto Dietrich, 12 Jahre mit Hitler, Isar Verlag, 1955, p. 178. BArch NS 26/514, Letter of Gottfried Grandel to the main archive of the NSDAP, Freiburg i. B., 22 October 1941.

14 Ernst Deuerlein (ed.), Der Aufstieg der NSDAP 1919–1933 in Augenzeugenberichten, Rauch, 1968, p. 60. In English in J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945, vol. 1: The Rise to Power 1919–1934, University of Exeter Press, 1983, p. 14.

15 Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn (eds.), Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905–1924, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980, p. 366, speech by Hitler at a NSDAP meeting in Rosenheim, 21 April 1921.

16 N. H. Baynes (ed.), Speeches of Adolf Hitler: Early Speeches, 1922–1924, and Other Selections, Howard Fertig, 2006, p. 17, speech of 12 April 1921.

17 Ibid., p. 42, speech of 18 September 1922.

18 Ibid., p. 13, speech of 12 April 1922.

19 Ibid., p. 30, speech of 28 July 1922.

20 Ibid., p.17, speech of 12 April 1922.

21 Ibid., p. 21, speech of 28 July 1922.

22 A. Hitler, ‘Rathenau und Sancho Pansa’, Völkischer Beobachter, 13 March 1921, p. 2.

23 Previously unpublished testimony.

24 Rees, Charisma, pp. 30–31.

25 Previously unpublished testimony.

26 Previously unpublished testimony.

27 Sönke Neitzel, Tapping Hitler’s Generals: Transcripts of Secret Conversations 1942–45, Frontline Books, 2013, p. 67, words of General Ludwig Crüwell.

28 Baynes (ed.), Speeches of Adolf Hitler, pp. 15–16, speech of 12 April 1922.

29 Ibid., p. 42, speech of 18 September 1922.

30 Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 13.

31 ‘An die Brüder der USP., MSP., KPD.’, Deutscher Sozialist, Folge 1, 4 June 1920, in Julius Streicher, Ruf zur Tat. Aufsätze aus den Kampfjahren 1920–1922, Verlag Der Stürmer, 1937, pp. 11–13. Also see Randall L. Bytwerk, Julius Streicher, Cooper Square Press, 2001, p. 10.

32 Bytwerk, Streicher, p. 2.

33 StAN, Polizeipräsidium Nürnberg-Fürth 541, doc. 187, Copy of a judgment against Streicher, court of lay assessor at the district court Schweinfurt, for an offence against religion, 5 September 1922.

34 Ibid., doc. 103, Report from 22 December 1922 on the meeting of the National Socialists on 21 December 1922 in the Kulturverein in Nuremberg.

35 Ibid., City Council of Kitzingen to the state police department Nuremberg-Fürth, 16 May 1922, ‘Remarks from the meeting of the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft in the Kolosseumssaal in Kitzingen on 7 May 1922. From a speech by the elementary teacher J. Streicher from Nuremberg’.

36 Hitler’s Table Talk, p. 154, night of 28–29 December 1941.

37 Nuremberg Trial Proceedings, vol. 12, p. 308, 115th day, Friday 26 April 1946. Also Bytwerk, Streicher, p. 15.

38 Ibid., Nuremberg, and also Rees, Charisma, p. 49.

39 Deuerlein (ed.), Aufstieg, p. 146. In English in Noakes and Pridham (eds.), Nazism, vol. 1, pp. 25–6.

40 Peter Viereck, ‘Stefan George’s Cosmic Circle’, Decision, October 1941, p. 49.

41 Rees, Charisma, p. 76.

42 Werner Jochmann (ed.), Nationalsozialismus und Revolution. Dokumente, Europäische Verlags-Anstalt, 1963, pp. 88–9, Hitler Memorandum of 7 January 1922. In English in Noakes and Pridham (eds.), Nazism, vol. 1, p. 23.

43 Baynes (ed.), Speeches of Adolf Hitler, p. 40, Hitler speech of 28 July 1922.

44 BArch N 1126/8, Leseliste No. 107.

45 BArch N 1126 141 K, Himmler’s diary entry for 12 January 1922. Originals in Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, California.

46 Ibid., entry for 24 June 1922.

47 Ibid., entry for 22 November 1921.

48 Ibid., entry for 27 May 1922.

49 Ibid., entry for 7 June 1922.

50 For example, at the December 1924 general election, the biggest party was the Social Democrats with 26 per cent of the vote. They were opposed to the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis, as were parties like the German People’s Party with 10.1 per cent, the Communist Party with 9 per cent and the German Democratic Party with 6.3 per cent.

51 Rees, Charisma, p. 37.

52 Albrecht Tyrell (ed.), Führer befiehl … Selbstzeugnisse aus der ‘Kampfzeit’ der NSDAP. Dokumentation und Analyse, Droste, 1969, pp. 281–3. In English in Noakes and Pridham (eds.), Nazism, vol. 1, pp. 34–5.

Chapter 3: From Revolution to Ballot Box

1 Words of Ernst Hanfstaengl, quoted in article in Der Spiegel by Jan Friedmann, 23 June 2010: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/adolf-hitler-s-time-in-jail-flowers-for-the-fuehrer-in-landsberg-prison-a-702159.html.

2 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Houghton Mifflin, 1971, pp. 118–19.

3 Ibid., pp. 180–81.

4 Ibid., p. 57.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., p. 63.

7 Ibid., p. 59.

8 Ibid., p. 65.

9 Ibid., pp. 62–3.

10 Ibid., p. 206.

11 Ibid., p. 305.

12 Aldous Huxley, ‘Notes on Propaganda’, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, December 1936.

13 Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 679.

14 Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944, Phoenix Press, 2000, 25 October 1941, p. 87.

15 Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 65.

16 First published in Völkischer Beobachter, 22 April 1922. Also see Laurence Rees, The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler, Ebury Press, 2012, p. 29.

17 A remark in conversation with General Ludendorff. See Wilhelm Breucker (Ludendorff’s adjutant), Die Tragik Ludendorffs, Rauschenbusch, 1953, p. 107; also in English in J. R. C. Wright, ‘Above Parties’: The Political Attitudes of the German Protestant Church Leadership 1918–1933, Oxford University Press, 1974, p. 78; also see Rees, Charisma, p. 135.

18 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, Phoenix Press, 1995, p. 150. Also see Rees, Charisma, pp. 135–6.

19 Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil I: Aufzeichnungen 1923–1941, vol. 9, K. G. Saur, 1998, pp. 233–5, entry for 8 April 1941. Also see Rees, Charisma, p. 138.

20 Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations 1932–1945, vol. 2, 1935–1938, Bolchazy-Carducci, Hitler speech of 23 November 1937, p. 980.

21 Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 232.

22 Ibid., p. 316.

23 Ibid., p. 255.

24 Ibid., p. 654.

25 Konrad Heiden, Introduction, ibid., p. xv.

26 Roger Moorhouse, His Struggle: Hitler in Landsberg Prison, 1924, Endeavor Press, 2015. Kindle edition, location 556–600.

27 Otto Leybold, Governor of Landsberg Prison, ‘Report on Adolf Hitler’, September 1924, at http://alphahistory.com/nazigermany/hitlers-prison-report-1924/.

28 Moorhouse, His Struggle, Kindle edition, location 625–31.

29 Kurt Lüdecke, I Knew Hitler, Jarrolds, 1938, pp. 217–18. Also see Rees, Charisma, p. 66.

30 Report, Der Nationalsozialist (TLeipzig), vol. 1, no. 29 from 17 August 1924, quoted in Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn (eds.), Hitler. Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905–1924, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980, p. 242.

31 Dennis Mack Smith, Mussolini: A Biography, Vintage, 1983, p. 172. Also see Rees, Charisma, p. 64.

32 Previously unpublished testimony.

33 Previously unpublished testimony.

34 Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil I, vol. 1/1, K. G. Saur, 2004, pp. 116–17, entry for 31 March 1924.

35 Ibid., p. 312, entry for 8 June 1925.

36 Ibid., p. 50, entry for 14 November 1923.

37 Ibid., p. 121, entry for 10 April 1924.

38 Ibid., p. 147, entry for 10 June 1924.

39 Laurence Rees, The Nazis: A Warning from History, BBC Books, 1997, p. 33.

40 Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil I, vol. 1/1, p. 108, entry for 17 March 1924.

41 Ibid., pp. 108–9, entry for 20 March 1924.

42 Ibid., p. 201, entry for 19 August 1924.

43 Ibid., p. 253, entry for 23 December 1924.

44 Ibid., pp. 326–7, entry for 14 July 1925.

45 Ibid., Teil II: Diktate 1941–1945, vol. 2, K. G. Saur, 1996, pp. 498–9, entry for 13 December 1941.

46 Ibid., Teil I, vol. 1/1, p. 108, entry for 17 March 1924; pp. 326–7, entry for 14 July 1925.

47 Peter Longerich, Goebbels, Vintage, 2015, pp. 62–3.

48 Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil I, vol. 1/2, K. G. Saur, 2004, pp. 55–6, entry for 15 February 1926.

49 Ibid., p. 73, entry for 13 April 1926.

50 Gerhard L. Weinberg (ed.), Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf, Enigma Books, 2006, p. 234, Kindle edition, location 3978.

51 Ibid., p. 234, location 3986.

52 Ibid., p. 129, location 2367.

53 Völkischer Beobachter, no. 35, 12 February 1927, quoted in Detlef Mühlberger, Hitler’s Voice, vol. 1: Organisation and Development of the Nazi Party, Peter Lang, 2004, p. 240.

54 Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags, vol. 395, docs 13717–18, 24 March 1928. Also in Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 15.

55 Previously unpublished testimony.

56 Albrecht Tyrell (ed.), Führer befiehl … Selbstzeugnisse aus der ‘Kampfzeit’ der NSDAP, Gondrom, 1991, pp. 235–6. In English in J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945, vol. 1: The Rise to Power 1919–1934, University of Exeter Press, 1983, p. 55.

57 Uriel Tal, ‘Political Faith’ of Nazism Prior to the Holocaust, Tel Aviv University, 1978, p. 28. Rees, Charisma, pp. 81–2.

58 Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations 1932–1945, vol. 1: 1932–1934, Bolchazy-Carducci, 1990, p. 112, Hitler speech, 27 January 1932.

59 Previously unpublished testimony.

60 Previously unpublished testimony.

61 Rees, Nazis, p. 74.

62 Previously unpublished testimony.

63 Rees, Nazis, p. 46.

64 David Redles, ‘Nazi End Times: The Third Reich as Millennial Reich’, in Karolyn Kinane and Michael A. Ryan (eds.), End of Days: Essays on the Apocalypse from Antiquity to Modernity, McFarland, 2009, pp. 173–96, here p. 182.

65 Der Angriff, 9 September 1929, quoted in Longerich, Goebbels, pp. 91–2.

66 Nds. HStAH, Hann. Des. 310 I A, Nr. 35. In English in Noakes and Pridham (eds.), Nazism, vol. 1, p. 76.

67 Status report of the district president of Hanover to the Interior Minister of the Reich for the months of December 1934/January 1935, 4 February 1935, in Klaus Mlynek (ed.), Gestapo Hannover meldet … Polizei- und Regierungsberichte für das mittlere und südliche Niedersachsen zwischen 1933 und 1937, Verlag August Lax, 1986, p. 315. Original source of Mlynek: Nds. HStAH, Hann. 180 Hannover Nr. 799, ff. 191–203.

68 Laurence Rees, Selling Politics, BBC Books, 1992, p. 24.

69 Previously unpublished testimony.

70 Lion Feuchtwanger, ‘Wie kämpfen wir gegen ein Drittes Reich?’ (How Do We Struggle against a Third Reich?), Welt am Abend, 21 January 1931. In English in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg (eds.), The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, University of California Press, 1994, p. 167.

71 Heinrich Mann, ‘Die deutsche Entscheidung’ (The German Decision), Das Tagebuch, vol. 12, no. 51, 19 December 1931. In English in Kaes, Jay and Dimendberg, Weimar Republic Sourcebook, pp. 164–6.

72 Previously unpublished testimony and Rees, Nazis, 1997, p. 171.

73 Strasser speech, Berlin Sportpalast, 23 October 1931, CV-Zeitung. Blätter für Deutschtum und Judentum. Organ des Central-Vereins deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens e. V., Berlin, 11 December 1931, vol. X, no. 50, p. 572.

74 Otto Meissner, Aufzeichnung über die Besprechung des Herrn Reichspräsidenten mit Adolf Hitler am 13. August 1932 nachmittags 4.15, quoted in Walther Hubatsch, Hindenburg und der Staat. Aus den Papieren des Generalfeldmarschalls und Reichspräsidenten von 1878 bis 1934, Musterschmidt, 1966, p. 338. In English in Noakes and Pridham (eds.), Nazism, vol. 1, p. 104.

75 Max Domarus, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945. Kommentiert von einem deutschen Zeitgenossen, vol. 1: Triumph, R. Löwit, 1973, p. 158, Meissner to Hitler, 24 November 1932.

76 Konrad Heiden, Adolf Hitler. Das Zeitalter der Verantwortungslosigkeit. Eine Biographie, Europa-Verlag, 1936, p. 278.

77 Jewish Telegraphic Agency report, 3 August 1934.

78 Evening Standard interview, 16 May 1933. Also see Jewish Telegraphic Agency report of the same date.

79 Völkischer Beobachter, Norddeutsche Ausgabe, vol. 46, no. 6, 6 January 1933, p. 1. Also Domarus, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen, vol. 1, p. 175.

Chapter 4: Consolidating Power

1 Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil I: Aufzeichnungen 1923–1941, vol. 2/3, K. G. Saur, 2006, p. 119, entry for 30 January 1933.

2 Laurence Rees, Their Darkest Hour, Ebury Press, 2007, pp. 206–7, but also includes some previously unpublished testimony.

3 Previously unpublished testimony.

4 Previously unpublished testimony.

5 Excerpts from the diaries of Mrs Luise Solmitz, 4 January 1932 to 5 March 1933, in Werner Jochmann, Nationalsozialismus und Revolution. Ursprung und Geschichte der NSDAP in Hamburg 1922–1933. Dokumente, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1963, pp. 400–32, here pp. 422–3.

6 Previously unpublished testimony.

7 Previously unpublished testimony.

8 Rees, Darkest Hour, p. 136. But also includes some previously unpublished testimony.

9 Previously unpublished testimony.

10 Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations 1932–1945, vol. 1: 1932–1934, Bolchazy-Carducci, 1990, pp. 246–7, Hitler speech, 10 February 1933.

11 Ibid., p. 253, Hitler speech, 15 February 1933.

12 Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil I, vol. 2/3, p. 137, entry for 28 February 1933.

13 Previously unpublished testimony.

14 Domarus, Hitler (English edn), vol. 1, pp. 298–302.

15 Völkischer Beobachter, no. 89, 30 March 1933, quoted in Max Domarus, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945. Kommentiert von einem deutschen Zeitgenossen, vol. 1: Triumph, R. Löwit, 1973, pp. 251–2.

16 Laurence Rees, The Nazis: A Warning from History, BBC Books, 1997, p. 105.

17 Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945, Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 95–7.

18 Jürgen Matthäus and Mark Roseman (eds.), Jewish Responses to Persecution, vol. 1: 1933–1938, AltaMira Press/US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2010, CV press release dated 24 March 1933, in CV-Zeitung, 30 March 1933, document 1-5, p. 15.

19 Rees, Nazis, pp. 71–2, together with previously unpublished testimony.

20 Ibid., pp. 72–3, together with previously unpublished testimony.

21 Previously unpublished testimony.

22 Previously unpublished testimony.

23 US Holocaust Museum figures, http://www.ushmm.org/.

24 Yahil, Holocaust, p. 92.

25 Previously unpublished testimony.

26 Previously unpublished testimony.

27 Reich Statistical Office Figures for 1933, quoted in J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945, vol. 2: State, Economy and Society 1933–1939, Exeter University Press, 1991, p. 522.

28 StAN, LG Ansbach, Strafprozessakten, Große Strafkammer 50/34, Bär, vol. II, p. 185, Testimony of Kurt Adolf Bär, 14 April 1934.

29 Ibid., p. 63, Testimony of Marie Breinl, 4 April 1934.

30 BayHStA, StK 6410, pp. 100–101, 103–4, 105, 113, 127, 128, 146, 147, Verdict in the action against Kurt Bär and accomplices on violation of the public peace on 14 July 1934.

31 BayHStA, MInn 73708, p. 48, Report on the events in Gunzenhausen on 25 March 1934, by the senior prosecutor at the district court in Ansbach.

32 Ibid., pp. 15–16, Letter from the deputy of the Supreme SA leader of the government of Central Franconia, 27 March 1934.

33 BayHStA, StK 6410, p. 160, The Minister of the Interior of the Reich in Berlin to the state chancellery of the Free State of Bavaria in Munich, 25 July 1934.

34 Ibid., p. 73, Indictment, 11 August 1934, against Kurt Bär and two others for murder and attempted murder.

35 BayHStA, MJu 23436 Office of U.S. Chief of Counsel, APO 124 A, U.S. Army, Memo to: Commanding Officer, Company B, Third Military Government Regiment, APO 170, U.S. Army, subject: Murder of German Jewish Subject. From the interrogation of Dr Benno Franz Theodor Martin taken at Nürnberg on 19 October 1945.

36 Barbara Distel and Ruth Jakusch (eds.), Concentration Camp, Dachau 1933–1945, Comité International de Dachau, 16th edn, 1978, p. 40.

37 E. F. M. Durbin and John Bowlby, Personal Aggressiveness and War, Routledge, 2007, p. 134.

38 Matthäus and Roseman (eds.), Jewish Responses to Persecution, vol. 1, Kurt Rosenberg, diary entry for 20 and 31 August 1933, document 2-2 LBINY AR 25279, pp. 37–8.

39 Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Little, Brown, 2015, p. 30.

40 Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, 13 March 1933, quoted in Peter Longerich, Himmler, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 150.

41 See here.

42 Distel and Jakusch (eds.), Dachau, p. 48, document on the release of Johann Deller, 12 October 1934.

43 Göring testimony, 18 March 1946, 84th day Nuremberg trials, http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/Goering1.html.

44 Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, Phoenix Press, 2001, p. 71.

45 Tom Segev, Soldiers of Evil: The Commandants of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Diamond Books, 2000, p. 28.

46 Christopher Dillon, Dachau and the SS: A Schooling in Violence, Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 37.

47 Previously unpublished testimony and Rees, Nazis, p. 51.

48 Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, 13 March 1933, quoted in Longerich, Himmler, p. 150.

49 Max Abraham, Juda verrecke. Ein Rabbiner im Konzentrationslager (Death to Juda: A Rabbi in a Concentration Camp), reprinted in Irene A. Diekmann and Klaus Wettig (eds.), Konzentrationslager Oranienburg. Augenzeugenberichte aus dem Jahre 1933, Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 2003, pp. 117–67, here p. 128.

50 Max Abraham, Juda verrecke. Ein Rabbiner im Konzentrationslager, Druck- und Verlagsanstalt Teplitz-Schönau, 1934, p. 154.

51 Landesamt für Bürger- und Ordnungsangelegenheiten Berlin, Reg. No. 50909, Entschädigungsakte Max Abraham.

52 Manchester Guardian, 1 January 1934, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/01/dachau-nazi-germany-second-world-war.

53 Hans Beimler, Im Möderlager Dachau, available online (in German) at https://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/germanica/Chronologie/20Jh/Beimler/bei_da00.html.

54 Amper-Bote, 7 September 1933, in Dillon, Dachau, p. 228.

55 Previously unpublished testimony.

56 Previously unpublished testimony.

57 Previously unpublished testimony.

58 Previously unpublished testimony. He expands on this belief in Rees, Nazis (1997 edn), p. 53.

59 Previously unpublished testimony.

60 Dillon, Dachau, p. 44.

61 Franciszek Piper, Auschwitz 1940–1945: Central Issues in the History of the Camp, vol. 3: Mass Murder, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2000, p. 71.

62 Ibid.

63 Dillon, Dachau, p. 52.

64 Ibid.

65 Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, BBC Books, 2005, p. 25. Also see Danuta Czech, ‘The Auschwitz Prisoner Administration’, in Yisreal Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (eds.), The Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press, 1998, p. 364.

66 Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, p. 78.

67 Ibid., pp. 65–6.

68 Als sozialdemokratischer Arbeiter im Konzentrationslager Papenburg, Verlagsgenossenschaft ausländischer Arbeiter in der UdSSR, 1935, p. 20. (See note 70.)

69 Wolfgang Langhoff, Die Moorsoldaten. 13 Monate Konzentrationslager, Aufbau-Verlag, 1947, pp. 251–2.

70 Als sozialdemokratischer Arbeiter im Konzentrationslager Papenburg was written by a former prisoner of Börgermoor and was credited only as ‘anonymous’ in order to protect his family. The preface of the book, vouching for its accuracy, was written by Willi Bredel, another concentration camp inmate.

71 Als sozialdemokratischer Arbeiter, p. 35.

72 Rudolf Diels, Lucifer ante Portas … es spricht der erste Chef der Gestapo …, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1950, pp. 260–62.

73 Langhoff, Moorsoldaten, pp. 251–2.

74 Als sozialdemokratischer Arbeiter, p. 51.

75 Langhoff, Moorsoldaten, pp. 251–2.

76 Report by Max Hempel, quoted in Hans-Peter Klausch, Tätergeschichten. Die SS-Kommandanten der frühen Konzentrationslager im Emsland, Edition Temmen, 2005, p. 231.

77 In English in J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945, vol. 1: The Rise to Power 1919–1934, University of Exeter Press, 1991, p. 175.

78 Dillon, Dachau, p. 88.

79 Wachsmann, KL, p. 83.

Chapter 5: The Nuremberg Laws

1 Previously unpublished testimony.

2 Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Little, Brown, 2015, p. 90.

3 Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi–Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945, Yale University Press, 1994, p. 9.

4 Aaron Berman, Nazism, the Jews, and American Zionism, 1933–1948, Wayne State University Press, 1990, p. 39.

5 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Houghton Mifflin, 1971, p. 325; also see Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War Two and the Holocaust, Belknap Press, 2006, p. 75.

6 See here.

7 Previously unpublished testimony.

8 Laurence Rees, The Nazis: A Warning from History, BBC Books, 1997, p. 75, together with previously unpublished testimony.

9 Herbert Michaelis et al. (eds.), Ursachen und Folgen. Vom Deutschen Zusammenbruch 1918 und 1945 bis zur staatlichen Neuordnung Deutschlands in der Gegenwart, vol. IX, Wendler, 1964, p. 397. In English in J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945, vol. 2: State, Economy and Society 1933–1939, Exeter University Press, 1991, p. 530.

10 Noakes and Pridham (eds.), Nazism, vol. 2, pp. 531–2.

11 Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations 1932–1945, vol. 2: 1935–1938, Bolchazy-Carducci, 1992, p. 706, Hitler speech, 15 September 1935.

12 Jewish Post, Indiana, 13 September 1935, https://newspapers.library.in.gov/cgi-bin/indiana?a=d&d=JPOST19350913-01.1.1.

13 Domarus, Hitler (English edn), vol. 2, p. 707, Göring speech, 15 September 1935.

14 Hans Mommsen, ‘The Realization of the Unthinkable: “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question” in the Third Reich’, in Michael R. Marrus (ed.), The Nazi Holocaust, vol. 3: The ‘Final Solution’: The Implementation of Mass Murder, Meckler, 1989, pp. 224–53, here p. 223.

15 This interpretation is suggested not by Mommsen but by the present author.

16 Reinhard-M. Strecker, Dr. Hans Globke. Aktenauszüge, Dokumente, Rütten & Loening, 1961, p. 115, quoted in Noakes and Pridham (eds.), Nazism, vol. 2, p. 541.

17 Supplementary Decree of the Reich Citizenship Law, 14 November 1935. Noakes and Pridham (eds.), Nazism, vol. 2, pp. 538–9.

18 Quoted in Max Domarus, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945. Kommentiert von einem deutschen Zeitgenossen, vol. 1: Triumph, R. Löwit, 1973, p. 538, Hitler speech, Reichstag, 15 September 1935. Also in Domarus, Hitler (English edn), vol. 2, p. 707.

19 Völkischer Beobachter, 16 September 1935.

20 Previously unpublished testimony.

21 In the words of the parents of Lucille Eichengreen.

22 Laurence Rees, Their Darkest Hour, Ebury Press, 2007, pp. 191–2, together with previously unpublished testimony.

23 Adam Tooze, Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, Penguin, 2007, p. 65.

24 Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936, Hubris, Penguin, 2001, p. 558.

Chapter 6: Education and Empire-Building

1 There are many different English translations of völkische in this context – ‘people’s’, ‘racist’, ‘ethnic’, ‘folkish’ are just some of the attempts at conveying what the word meant at this time. ‘Ethnic’ is probably the nearest to the original meaning.

2 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Houghton Mifflin, 1971, p. 404.

3 Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Sopade) 1934–1940. Zweiter Jahrgang, 1935, Verlag Petra Nettelbeck/Zweitausendeins, 1980, p. 1043.

4 Martin Broszat et al. (eds.), Bayern in der NS-Zeit, Oldenbourg, 1977, vol. 1, pp. 466–7. Also see J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945, vol. 2: State, Economy and Society 1933–1939, Exeter University Press, 1983, p. 546.

5 Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations 1932–1945, vol. 2: 1935–1938, Bolchazy-Carducci, 1992, pp. 700–701, Hitler speech, 14 September 1935.

6 Previously unpublished testimony.

7 Previously unpublished testimony.

8 Laurence Rees, Their Darkest Hour, Ebury Press, 2007, p. 193, together with previously unpublished testimony.

9 Previously unpublished testimony.

10 Gregory Wegner, Anti-Semitism and Schooling under the Third Reich, Routledge, 2002, Kindle edition, location 4325–31.

11 Ernst Hiemer, Der Giftpilz, Stürmerverlag, 1938.

12 Fritz Fink, The Jewish Question in Education, 1937, at http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/fink.htm. Also see Wegner, Anti-Semitism, location 1618–43.

13 Previously unpublished testimony. Boehm-Tettelbach’s assertion that lawyers in Berlin were ‘mostly’ Jews is false – German Jewish lawyers were never a majority.

14 David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema, Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 122. Also see Helga Grebing, Der Nationalsozialismus: Ursprung und Wesen, Isar Verlag, 1959, p. 65.

15 Völkischer Beobachter, Bayernausgabe, 7 August 1929, p. 1.

16 Previously unpublished testimony.

17 Welch, Propaganda, p. 123.

18 Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, Pan, 2001, p. 381.

19 Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution, University of North Carolina Press, 1995, p. 62.

20 Figures from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, http://www.ushmm.org/learn/students/learning-materials-and-resources/mentally-and-physically-handicapped-victims-of-the-nazi-era/forced-sterilization.

21 Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Basic Books, 2000, p. 29.

22 Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, Harvard University Press, 2003, p. 105. Also see Boaz Neumann, ‘The Phenomenology of the German People’s Body (Volkskörper) and the Extermination of the Jewish Body’, New German Critique, vol. 36, no. 1, 2009, pp. 149–81.

23 Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 78.

24 Rees, Darkest Hour, p. 192.

25 Laurence Rees, The Nazis: A Warning from History, BBC Books, 1997, p. 74.

26 Previously unpublished testimony.

27 Daily Express, 17 September 1936.

28 In his article, Lloyd George asserted that ‘the German temperament takes no more delight in persecution than the British’, and expressed the hope that in future ‘Goebbels’ ranting speeches will not provoke another anti-Jewish manifestation’.

29 Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate, Little, Brown, 2014, p. 33.

30 Previously unpublished testimony.

31 Previously unpublished testimony.

32 Sunday Express, 19 June 1938, quoted in article by Edie Friedman, ‘Britain as Refuge: The Real Story’, 23 October 2008, https://www.thejc.com/britain-as-refuge-the-real-story-1.5676.

33 Segev, One Palestine, pp. 37-9.

34 Domarus, Hitler (English edn), vol. 2, p. 938, Hitler speech, 13 September 1937.

35 Hildegard von Kotze and Helmut Krausnick (eds.), Es spricht der Führer. 7 exemplarische Hitler-Reden, Mohn, 1966, pp. 123–77, Rede Hitlers vor Kreisleitern auf der Ordensburg Vogelsang am 29. April 1937.

36 Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil I: Aufzeichnungen 1923–1941, vol. 4, K. G. Saur, 2000, pp. 429–30, entry for 30 November 1937.

37 Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series C, vol. V, no. 490.

38 Nuremberg Trial Document 46-EC.

39 Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil I, vol. 3/2, K. G. Saur, 2001, pp. 251–2, entry for 15 November 1936.

40 J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945, vol. 3: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination, Exeter University Press, 2006, pp. 72–9.

41 Joachim Fest, Hitler, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974, p. 42.

42 Richard S. Geehr, Karl Lueger: Mayor of Fin de Siècle Vienna, Wayne State University Press, 1990, p. 181.

43 Ibid., p. 200.

44 Kurt von Schuschnigg, Austrian Requiem, Victor Gollancz, 1947, pp. 21, 23.

45 Previously unpublished testimony and Rees, Nazis, p. 107.

46 Max Domarus, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945. Kommentiert von einem deutschen Zeitgenossen, vol. 1: Triumph, R. Löwit, 1973, p. 803, Hitler speech, Reichstag, 20 February 1938.

47 Völkischer Beobachter, Norddeutsche Ausgabe, 26 February 1938, p. 2.

48 Previously unpublished testimony.

49 Previously unpublished testimony.

50 Previously unpublished testimony.

51 Previously unpublished testimony.

52 Rees, Nazis, p. 114.

53 Ibid., p. 112.

54 Ibid., p. 114.

55 William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, pp. 110–11.

56 Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Little, Brown, 2015, p. 140.

57 Ibid., p. 177.

58 Ibid.

59 Jürgen Matthäus and Mark Roseman (eds.), Jewish Responses to Persecution, vol. 1: 1933–1938, AltaMira Press/US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2010, Report to the Jewish Telegraph Agency in Paris on persecution in Austria in June 1938, document 10-7, pp. 283–4.

60 Shirer, Berlin Diary, p. 109, entry for 19 March 1938.

61 Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil I, vol. 5, K. G. Saur, 2000, p. 225, entry for 23 March 1938.

62 David Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, Vintage, 2005, p. 61.

63 Ibid., p. 65.

64 Ibid., p. 67.

65 Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 106.

Chapter 7: Radicalization

1 Max Domarus, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945. Kommentiert von einem deutschen Zeitgenossen, vol. 1: Triumph, R. Löwit, 1973, pp. 845–6, Hitler speech, 6 April 1938.

2 Ibid., p. 845, Hitler speech, Klagenfurt Festival Hall, 4 April 1938.

3 Ibid., p. 844, Hitler speech, Graz, 3 April 1938.

4 See here.

5 Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944, Phoenix Press, 2002, pp. 142–5, here p. 144, 13 December 1941.

6 Ibid., p. 145.

7 Domarus, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen, vol. 1, p. 606, Hitler speech, 14 March 1936.

8 Ibid., p. 848, Hitler speech, 9 April 1938.

9 Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 92.

10 Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Little, Brown, 2015, p. 177.

11 Y. Arad, Y. Gutman and A. Margaliot (eds.), Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland and the Soviet Union, Bison Books, 1999, pp. 98–9.

12 Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon and Chana Schütz (eds.), Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation, University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 25.

13 To be faithful to both the history and the different sensitivities of today, in this book the word ‘Gypsy’ will be used when discussing Nazi policy and ‘Sinti and Roma’ when referring more generally to the individuals concerned.

14 Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 2–3.

15 Aristotle Kallis, Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe, Routledge, 2009, p. 55, words of Albert Krantzius, at the start of the sixteenth century.

16 Ibid.

17 Cesare Lombroso, Die Ursachen und Bekämpfung des Verbrechens, Bermühler, 1902.

18 Lewy, Nazi Persecution, p. 7.

19 Previously unpublished testimony.

20 Previously unpublished testimony.

21 Lewy, Nazi Persecution, p. 42.

22 Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 120–21. Also see Lewy, Nazi Persecution, pp. 135–8.

23 Permanent exhibition at Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial.

24 Christian Goeschel and Nikolaus Wachsmann (eds.), The Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933–1939: A Documentary History, University of Nebraska Press, 2012, pp. 204–5.

25 Report from the police post of St Johann, Austria, 12 January 1939, quoted in Lewy, Nazi Persecution, pp. 61–2.

26 M. James Penton, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Third Reich, University of Toronto Press, 2004, pp. 275–84.

27 Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, BBC Books, 2005, p. 210, together with previously unpublished testimony.

28 Michel Reynaud and Sylvie Graffard, The Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Nazis: Persecution, Deportation, and Murder, 1933–1945, Cooper Square Press, 2001, p. 21.

29 Wachsmann, KL, p. 126.

30 Reynaud and Graffard, Jehovah’s Witnesses, pp. 89–90.

31 Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, Phoenix Press, 2001, pp. 88–9.

32 Ibid., p. 89.

33 Ibid., p. 91.

34 Reynaud and Graffard, Jehovah’s Witnesses, p. 31.

35 Previously unpublished testimony.

36 Bradley F. Smith and Agnes F. Peterson (eds.), Heinrich Himmler. Geheimreden 1933 bis 1945 und andere Ansprachen, Propyläen Verlag, 1974, pp. 93–4, 96–7, speech to SS group leaders on 18 February 1937.

37 Völkischer Beobachter, Bayernausgabe, 2 August 1930 (182. Ausgabe, 43. Jg.), p. 1.

38 Testimony of Wolfgang Teubert and Emil Klein, quoted in Laurence Rees, The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler, Ebury Press, 2012, pp. 127–8.

39 Völkischer Beobachter, 1 July 1934, and Rees, Charisma, p. 127.

40 Wachsmann, KL, pp. 127–8.

41 See http://www.ushmm.org/learn/students/learning-materials-and-resources/homosexuals-victims-of-the-nazi-era/persecution-of-homosexuals. The museum estimates that 5,000–15,000 homosexuals were sent to concentration camps.

42 Wachsmann, KL, p. 134.

43 Domarus, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen, vol. 1, p. 870, Hitler order, 30 May 1938.

44 Adam Tooze, Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, Penguin, 2007, p. 255.

45 PRO FO 371/22530, 13 March 1938, quoted in Fiona Horne, ‘Explaining British Refugee Policy, March 1938–July 1940’, thesis, University of Canterbury, New Zealand, 2008, p. 5.

46 Major Sir George Davies, Conservative MP for Yeovil, speaking in the House of Commons on 22 March 1938, PRO FO 372/3282.

47 Martin Gilbert, Exile and Return, Lippincott, 1978, p. 203. Spoken in a Cabinet Committee on Refugees, 20 July 1938.

48 David Clay Large, And the World Closed its Doors, Basic Books, 2004, p. 72.

49 G. S. Messersmith, Berlin, to William Phillips, Undersecretary of State, Washington, 26 June 1933, George S. Messersmith Papers in the University of Delaware Library, http://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/6176.

50 Joseph S. Nye Jr, Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era, Princeton University Press, 2013, p. 38.

51 Clay Large, And the World Closed its Doors, p. 70.

52 Diaries of William Lyon Mackenzie King, entry for 29 March 1938, http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/politics-government/prime-ministers/william-lyon-mackenzie-king/Pages/item.aspx?IdNumber=18924&.

53 Ibid., entry for 29 June 1937. After the Anschluss, King did remark in his diary that he could not ‘abide’ the Nazis’ ‘oppression of Jews’ but nonetheless felt that the world would still come to see Hitler as ‘a very great man-mystic’: see Mackenzie King diary, entry for 27 March 1938. After Kristallnacht, he wrote that he had ‘sympathy’ for the Jews ‘in their plight’: see Mackenzie King diary, entry for 23 November 1938.

54 Ibid., entry for 30 June 1937.

55 Jürgen Matthäus and Mark Roseman (eds.), Jewish Responses to Persecution, vol. 1: 1933–1938, AltaMira Press/US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2010, WJC Memorandum, July 1938, USHMMA RG 11.001 M.36, reel 106 (SAM 1190-1-257), document 11-3, pp. 314–18.

56 Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews 1933–1946, W. W. Norton, 2009, p. 99, Roger Makins, Memorandum 25 March 1938, PRO FO 371/2231.

57 Emanuel Melzer, No Way Out: The Politics of Polish Jewry, 1935–1939, Hebrew Union College Press, 1965, p. 90.

58 David Cymet, History vs. Apologetics: The Holocaust, the Third Reich, and the Catholic Church, Lexington Books, 2010, p. 125.

59 Golda Meir, My Life, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975, p. 127.

60 Francis R. Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, Transaction, 2013, p. 125.

61 Winston Churchill speaking in a House of Commons debate, 23 May 1939, Hansard, vol. 347, col. 2178. See Daniel Todman, Britain’s War: Into Battle 1937–1941, Allen Lane, 2016, pp. 162–6.

62 Cabinet Committee Minutes, PRO CAB 24/285, 20 April 1939; also see correspondence to Winston Churchill reporting that the British Minister in Bucharest was ‘strongly anti-Semite’, despite the ‘persecution’ of Jews there. Quoted in Gilbert, Exile and Return, p. 226.

63 Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933–1938, L. & O. Dennys, 1982, p. 35.

64 Ibid., p. 9, Blair letter dated 13 September 1938.

65 William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, p. 120, entry for 7 July 1938.

66 Völkischer Beobachter, 13 July 1938, and Rees, Charisma, p.189.

67 Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations 1932–1945, vol. 2: 1935–1938, Bolchazy-Carducci, 1992, p. 1153, Hitler speech, 12 September 1938.

68 Joshua D. Zimmerman, The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939–1945, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 20.

69 Leonidas E. Hill (ed.), Die Weizsäcker Papiere 1933–1950, Propyläen Verlag, 1974, p. 142.

70 Longerich, Holocaust, pp. 106–7.

71 Domarus, Hitler, vol. 2 (English edn), p. 1223, Hitler speech, 9 October 1938.

72 Matthäus and Roseman (eds.), Jewish Responses to Persecution, vol. 1, letter from Josef Broniatowski, Częstochowa (Poland), no date (most likely early November 1938), document 12-2, pp. 345–7.

73 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Penguin, 1997, p. 228.

74 Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil I: Aufzeichnungen 1923–1941, vol. 6, K. G. Saur, 1998, p. 180, entry for 10 November 1938.

75 This testimony is previously unpublished, but also see Laurence Rees, The Nazis: A Warning from History, BBC Books, 1997, pp. 75–6, and Rees, Charisma, pp. 191–2.

76 Previously unpublished testimony.

77 Ruth Levitt (ed.), Pogrom: November 1938. Testimonies from ‘Kristallnacht’, Souvenir Press/The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, 2015, p. 33, report B12.

78 Gendarmerie-Station Muggendorf Monthly Report, 26 November 1938, in Walter H. Pehle (ed.), November 1938: From Reichskristallnacht to Genocide, St Martin’s Press, 1991, p. 39. Quoted in ‘Reactions to Kristallnacht’ at www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org.

79 Levitt (ed.), Pogrom, pp. 86–7, report B66.

80 Previously unpublished testimony.

81 Levitt (ed.), Pogrom, pp. 28–9, report B8.

82 ‘Juden, was nun?’, Das Schwarze Korps. Zeitung der Schutzstaffeln der NSDAP, Organ der Reichsführung SS, Berlin, 24 November 1938, issue no. 47, vol. 4, front page.

83 ‘Dieses Pack ist schlimmer!’, Das Schwarze Korps. Zeitung der Schutzstaffeln der NSDAP, Organ der Reichsführung SS, Berlin, 17 November 1938, issue no. 46, vol. 4, front page.

84 ‘Damit wir uns recht verstehen …’, Das Schwarze Korps. Zeitung der Schutzstaffeln der NSDAP, Organ der Reichsführung SS, Berlin, 1 December 1938, issue no. 48, vol. 4, p. 2.

85 ‘Das genügt fürs erste!’, Das Schwarze Korps. Zeitung der Schutzstaffeln der NSDAP, Organ der Reichsführung SS, Berlin, 24 November 1938, issue no. 47, vol. 4, p. 14.

86 ‘Juden, was nun?’, Das Schwarze Korps, 24 November 1938.

87 David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–49, Macmillan, 2016, p. 214.

88 Previously unpublished testimony.

89 PRO CAB 27/624 32, 14 November 1938, quoted in Rees, Charisma, p. 221.

90 Previously unpublished testimony.

91 Source of English translation: Stenographic Report of the Meeting on ‘the Jewish Question’ under the Chairmanship of Field Marshal Goering in the Reichs Air Force Ministry, 12 November 1938, in United States Chief Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, vol. IV, United States Government Printing Office, 1946, Document 1816-PS, pp. 425–57.

92 Longerich, Holocaust, p. 115.

93 Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations 1932–1945, vol. 3: 1939–1940, Bolchazy-Carducci, 1997, pp. 1447–9, Hitler speech, 30 January 1939.

94 Conversation between Hitler and the Hungarian Foreign Minister Count Csáky on 16 January 1939, 5–6 p.m., Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik 1918–1945, Serie D, vol. V: Polen, Südosteuropa, Lateinamerika, Klein- und Mittelstaaten, Juni 1937–März 1939, Imprimerie Nationale, 1953, p. 305.

95 Minutes of the meeting of the Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister Chvalkovský with Hitler on 21 January 1939, 5–6 p.m., Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik 1918–1945, Serie D, vol. IV: Die Nachwirkungen von München, Oktober 1938–März 1939, Imprimerie Nationale, 1951, pp. 170–71.

96 James Mace Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia, Cornell University Press, 2013, p. 177.

97 Ibid., p. 185.

98 Previously unpublished testimony.

99 Previously unpublished testimony.

100 David Dilks (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, OM, 1938–1945, Cassell, 1971, p. 161, entry for 20 March 1939.

101 American Presidency Project: 15 April 1939, press conference, www.presidency.ucsb.edu.

102 Domarus, Hitler, vol. 3 (English edn), pp. 1585–92.

103 Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series D, vol. VII, pp. 200–204, meeting of 22 August 1939. Also see J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945, vol. 3: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination, Exeter University Press, 1991, pp. 739–43.

Chapter 8: The Start of Racial War

1 Laurence Rees, World War II: Behind Closed Doors, BBC Books, 2008, p. 32.

2 Jürgen Matthäus, Jochen Böhler and Klaus-Michael Mallmann (eds.), War, Pacification, and Mass Murder, 1939: The Einsatzgruppen in Poland, Documenting Life and Destruction: Holocaust Sources in Context, Rowman & Littlefield, 2014, p. 44, document 5: Diary notes by SS Hauptsturmführer Erich Ehlers, Einsatzgruppe II, for 1 to 5 September 1939.

3 Ibid., p. 54, document 12: Report by Helmuth Bischoff, leader of Einsatzkommando 1/IV, on his deployment in Bydgoszcz, 7 and 8 September 1939, undated (late 1939), IPNW, NTN 196/180.

4 Laurence Rees, The Nazis: A Warning from History, BBC Books, 1997, pp. 127–8.

5 Ibid., p. 130.

6 Previously unpublished testimony.

7 Tomasz Szarota, ‘Poland under German Occupation 1939–1945’, in Bernd Wegner (ed.), From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia, and the World, 1939–1941, Berghahn Books, 1997, pp. 47–61, here p. 54.

8 Laurence Rees, The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler, Ebury Press, 2012, p. 251.

9 Matthäus, Böhler and Mallmann (eds.), War, Pacification, and Mass Murder, p. 29.

10 Alexander B. Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity, University Press of Kansas, 2003, p. 16.

11 Ibid., pp. 66–7 and 129.

12 Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, Heinemann, 2004, pp. 36–7. David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–49, Macmillan, 2016, p. 257.

13 Previously unpublished testimony.

14 Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 151–2.

15 Christopher Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 8, Hans Frank speech, 25 November 1939.

16 Ibid., p. 6.

17 Previously unpublished testimony.

18 Rees, Nazis, p. 139.

19 Browning, Origins, p. 57.

20 Rees, Charisma, p. 294, Goebbels diary entry for 24 January 1940.

21 Testimony of Fritz Arlt, published here for the first time. But see also Arlt’s testimony in Rees, Nazis, pp. 151–2, and Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, BBC Books, 2005, p. 34.

22 Rees, Nazis, p. 136.

23 Previously unpublished testimony.

24 Browning, Origins, p. 93.

25 Himmler memo, 15 May 1940, ‘Some Thoughts on the Treatment of the Alien Population in the East’, J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945, vol. 3: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination, Exeter University Press, 1991, p. 934.

26 See here.

27 Tatiana Berenstein et al. (eds.), Faschismus – Getto – Massenmord. Dokumentation über Ausrottung und Widerstand der Juden in Polen während des zweiten Weltkrieges, Röderberg-Verlag, 1960, pp. 78–81, here p. 81. Circular of the district president of Kalisz, Uebelhoer, 10 December 1939. Also printed in Dokumenty i materialy z czasów Okupacji Niemieckiej w Polsce, vol. 3: Getto Lódzkie, Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Centralnej Żydowskiej Komisji Historycznej, 1946, pp. 26–31.

28 Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides (eds.), Łódź Ghetto: Inside a Community under Siege, Viking, 1989, p. 11, Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak.

29 Previously unpublished testimony.

30 Rees, Nazis, p. 153.

31 Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, Indiana University Press, 2008, p. xxxiv.

32 Ibid., p. 21.

33 Yehuda Leib Gerst, From the Straits (Hebrew), Jerusalem: Safra Fund, 1949, p. 26, quoted in Michal Unger, Reassessment of the Image of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, Yad Vashem, 2004, p. 8.

34 Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron and Josef Kermisz (eds.), The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, Elephant, 1999, pp. 236–7, entry for 17 May 1941.

35 Rees, Nazis, p. 154. Testimony of Egon Zielke.

36 Previously unpublished testimony.

37 Longerich, Holocaust, p. 136.

38 See here.

39 Previously unpublished testimony, but also see Rees, Nazis, p. 83.

40 Browning, Origins, p. 186.

41 Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Basic Books, 1986, p. 280. Brack was a failed medical student.

42 Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution, University of North Carolina Press, 1995, p. 75.

43 Ibid., p. 81.

44 C. F. Rüter et al. (eds.), Justiz und NS-Verbrechen. Sammlung deutscher Strafurteile wegen nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen 1945–1966, vol. XXVI, Amsterdam University Press/K. G. Saur, 2001, pp. 555–83, here pp. 558–9. Also quoted in Ernst Klee, Euthanasie im NS-Staat. Die ‘Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens’, S. Fischer Verlag, 1983, pp. 84–5.

45 Klee, Euthanasie, p. 118.

46 Karsten Linne (ed.), Der Nürnberger Ärzteprozeß 1946/47. Wortprotokolle, Anklage- und Verteidigungsmaterial, Quellen zum Umfeld, Mikrofiche-Edition/K. G. Saur, 1999, ff. 2687–8, transcript of Hans Heinrich Lammers’ testimony, Nuremberg Medical Case, 7 February 1947. Also note that preliminary experiments with carbon monoxide as a killing agent were made in the Warthegau in November 1939. Browning, Origins, p. 188.

47 Lifton, Nazi Doctors, p. 72.

48 See, for example, Józef Paczyński’s testimony, p. 255.

49 Lifton, Nazi Doctors, p. 72.

50 Figures from the Sonnenstein Museum.

51 Michael Grabher, Irmfried Eberl. ‘Euthanasie’ Arzt und Kommandant von Treblinka, Peter Lang, 2006, p. 35. Original in Hearing of Aquilin Ullrich in Frankfurt, 10 October 1962, HHStAW 631a, no. 1726.

52 Ute Hofmann and Dietmar Schulze, ‘… wird heute in eine andere Anstalt verlegt’. Nationalsozialistische Zwangssterilisation und ‘Euthanasie’ in der Landes-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Bernburg – eine Dokumentation, Regierungspräsidium Dessau, 1997, p. 111.

53 Grabher, Eberl, p. 105. Original in Hearing of Heinrich Bunke in Frankfurt, 17 April 1962, HHStAW 631a, no. 1666.

54 Hans-Walter Schmuhl, ‘Brain Research and the Murder of the Sick: The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research, 1937–1945’, in Susanne Heim, Carola Sachse and Mark Walker (eds.), The Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 99–119, here p. 113.

55 Quoted in http://chgs.umn.edu/histories/documentary/hadamar/ignorance.html, University of Minnesota, Center for Holocaust Studies.

56 Ernst Klee (ed.), Dokumente zur ‘Euthanasie’, S. Fischer Verlag, 1985, p. 125.

57 Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder, Pimlico, 1995, p. 54.

58 Longerich, Holocaust, p. 138.

59 Browning, Origins, pp. 188–9.

60 Ibid., pp. 191–2; but note that one Jewish hospital at Bendorf-Sayn was exempt from this – these patients were later killed as part of the Final Solution.

61 Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Little, Brown, 2015, pp. 231–2.

62 http://www.buchenwald.de/en/457/.

63 Wachsmann, KL, pp. 221–5.

64 Previously unpublished testimony.

65 Previously unpublished testimony.

66 Previously unpublished testimony.

67 Previously unpublished testimony.

68 Previously unpublished testimony.

69 Noakes and Pridham (eds.), Nazism, vol. 3, pp. 932–4.

70 Yitzhak Arad, Yisrael Gutman and Abraham Margaliot (eds.), Documents on the Holocaust, University of Nebraska Press, 1999, pp. 216–18, Rademacher memo, 3 July 1940.

71 Ibid., p. 218, Frank speech, 12 July 1940.

72 Kurt Pätzold, Verfolgung, Vertreibung, Vernichtung. Dokumente des faschistischen Antisemitismus, Reclam, 1991, pp. 269–70.

73 Arad et al. (eds.), Documents, pp. 216–18, Rademacher memo, 3 July 1940.

74 Longerich, Holocaust, pp. 162–4.

75 Charles Burdick and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (eds.), The Halder War Diary, 1939–1942, Greenhill Books, 1988, p. 76, entry for 3 November 1939.

76 Georg Mayer (ed.), Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb. Tagebuchaufzeichnungen und Lagebeurteilungen aus zwei Weltkriegen, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1976, pp. 187–8, entry for 9 October 1939.

77 David Jablonsky, Churchill and Hitler: Essays on the Political–Military Direction of Total War, Frank Cass, 1994, p. 155; also see Alexander Pollak, Die Wehrmachtslegende in Österreich. Das Bild der Wehrmacht im Spiegel der österreichischen Presse nach 1945, Böhlau, 2002, p. 62.

78 Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series D, vol. VII, pp. 200–204, Hitler speaking to his military commanders at Berchtesgaden, 22 August 1939. Also see Noakes and Pridham (eds.), Nazism, vol. 3, pp. 739–43.

79 Max Domarus, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945. Kommentiert von einem deutschen Zeitgenossen, vol. 2: Untergang, R. Löwit, 1973, pp. 1422, 1425–6, Hitler speech, 23 November 1939.

80 Ibid., pp. 1553, 1558, Hitler speech, 19 July 1940.

81 Burdick and Jacobsen (eds.), Halder War Diary, pp. 241–6, entry for 31 July 1940.

Chapter 9: Persecution in the West

1 The figure 4,500 is the total suggested by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (www.ushmm.org) – 3,500 citizens of the country and 1,000 refugees. Yad Vashem suggest a lower total of 3,500 (www.yadvashem.org). Yehuda Bauer, American Jewry and the Holocaust: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee 1939–1945, Wayne State University Press, 1981, p. 53, suggests 3,500 in 1939 and 2,000 in 1940.

2 Gustav Simon was head of the civil administration of Luxembourg and Gauleiter of neighbouring Moselland.

3 Bauer, American Jewry pp. 53–5.

4 Emmanuel Debruyne, ‘The Belgian Government-in-Exile Facing the Persecution and Extermination of the Jews’, in Jan Láníček and James Jordan (eds.), Governments in Exile and the Jews during the Second World War, Vallentine Mitchell, 2013, pp. 197–212, here p. 201.

5 Laurence Rees, Their Darkest Hour, Ebury Press, 2007, p. 165.

6 Lieven Saerens, ‘Antwerp’s Attitude toward the Jews from 1918 to 1940’, in Dan Michman (ed.), Belgium and the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, 1998, pp. 159–94, here pp. 192–3.

7 Laurence Rees, Selling Politics, BBC Books, 1992, pp. 18–25.

8 Ibid., p. 24.

9 Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944, Phoenix Press, 2002, p. 99, entry for 30 October 1941.

10 Rees, Selling Politics, p. 24, Goebbels diary entry for 5 July 1941.

11 Previously unpublished testimony.

12 Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, BBC Books, 2005, p. 217. Though note that around twenty Jewish refugees were handed over to the Nazis. The Danish Prime Minister apologized for this in 2005 on behalf of Denmark.

13 Hans Fredrik Dahl, Quisling: A Study in Treachery, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 222.

14 See here.

15 Jeroen Dewulf, Spirit of Resistance: Dutch Clandestine Literature during the Nazi Occupation, Camden House, 2010, p. 48.

16 Bob Moore, Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands 1940–1945, Arnold, 1997, p. 195, Broadcast on Radio Oranje, 2 October 1943.

17 Jacob Presser, Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry, Souvenir Press, 2010, p. 25.

18 140,000 is the estimated number of Jews liable for deportation under the Nazi administration. See www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio/timeline-dutch-history/holocaust.

19 Presser, Ashes in the Wind, pp. 27–8.

20 Willem Ridder, Countdown to Freedom, Author House, 2007, p. 252.

21 Testimony of Hetty Cohen-Koster, then a law student at Leiden University, http://www.news.leiden.edu/news-2015/hetty-cohen-koster-was-present-at-cleveringas-speech.html.

22 Ernest R. May, Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France, I. B. Tauris, 2000, p. 283, Gamelin talking to General Edouard Réquin.

23 Ibid., p. 386.

24 Quoted in David Carroll, ‘What It Meant to Be “a Jew” in Vichy France: Xavier Vallat, State Anti-Semitism, and the Question of Assimilation’, SubStance, vol. 27, no. 3, 1998, pp. 36–54. Also see Olivier Wieviorka, Orphans of the Republic: The Nation’s Legislators in Vichy France, Harvard University Press, 2009, p. 195.

25 Ralph W. Schoolcraft III, ‘Darquier de Pellepoix’, in Richard S. Levy (ed.), Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution, vol. 1, ABC Clio, 2005, pp. 161–2, here p. 162.

26 Yves Beigbeder, Judging War Crimes and Torture: French Justice and International Criminal Tribunals and Commissions, 1940–2005, Martinus Nijhoff, 2006, pp. 143–7.

27 Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 5.

28 See the Guardian, 3 October 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/03/marshal-petain-nazi-zealous-anti-semitism.

29 Renée Poznanski, ‘The Jews of France and the Statutes on Jews, 1940–1941’ at www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/courses/life_ghettos/pdfs/reading5.pdf.

30 Vicki Caron, ‘The Path to Vichy: Antisemitism in France in the 1930s’, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, J. B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Annual Lecture, 20 April 2005, pp. 1–2.

31 Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French and the Jews, Bison Books, 1999, p. 3.

32 Jérôme Carcopino, Souvenirs de sept ans, Flammarion, 1953, p. 359; Also Marrus and Paxton, Vichy, p. 85.

33 Bella Gutterman and Naomi Morgenstern, The Gurs Haggadah: Passover in Perdition, Devora Publishing and Yad Vashem, 2003, p. 17.

34 Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, Heinemann, 2004, pp. 89–93.

35 Ibid., p. 92.

36 Ibid., p. 90.

37 J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945, vol. 3: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination, Exeter University Press, 2006 edn, p. 471.

38 Laurence Rees, The Nazis: A Warning from History, BBC Books, 1997, pp. 141–2.

39 Sybille Steinbacher, ‘In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Murder of the Jews of East Upper Silesia’, in Ulrich Herbert (ed.), National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies, Berghahn Books, 2000, pp. 276–305, here p. 284.

40 David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–49, Macmillan, 2016, p. 274.

41 Laurence Rees, World War II: Behind Closed Doors, BBC Books, 2008, p. 80.

42 David Stahel, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East, Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 73.

43 Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, Indiana University Press, 2008, p. 109.

44 Christopher Browning, Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 33.

45 Previously unpublished testimony.

46 Browning, Genocide, p. 36, Palfinger’s report of 7 November 1940.

47 Previously unpublished testimony.

48 Trunk, Łódź Ghetto, p. 83, document no. 55 YI-1212, April 1940, Rumkowski to the Łódź Mayor.

49 Ibid., p. 111.

50 Michal Unger, Reassessment of the Image of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, Yad Vashem, 2004, p. 37 n. 82.

51 Jacob Sloan (ed.), Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, from the Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, iBooks, 2006, p. 19, entry for 12 February 1940.

52 Ibid., p. 17, entry for 7 February 1940.

53 Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron and Josef Kermisz (eds.), The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, Elephant, 1999, p. 100, entry for 16 and 17 December 1939.

54 Ibid., p. 112, entry for 28 January 1940.

55 Ibid., p. 104, entry for 31 December 1939 and 2 January 1940.

56 Cesarani, Final Solution, p. 339.

57 Sloan (ed.), Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, p. 120, entry for January 1941.

58 Previously unpublished testimony.

59 Browning, Genocide, p. 38.

60 Hilberg et al. (eds.), Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, p. 239, entry for 21 May 1941.

61 Ibid., p. 247, entry for 9 June 1941.

62 Nuremberg Trial Files, vol. 31, Minutes of meeting on 2 May 1941, document 2718-PS, p. 84. Rees, Auschwitz, p. 53.

63 Nuremberg Trial Files, vol. 36, Political-Economic Guidelines, pp. 135–7.

64 Goetz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002, pp. 63–4.

65 Ibid., p. 237. Rees, Auschwitz, p. 54.

66 At population levels of 2016.

67 Hitler’s Table Talk, p. 33, 17 September 1941.

68 Ibid., p. 38, 23 September 1941.

69 Charles Burdick and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (eds.), The Halder War Diary, 1939–1942, Greenhill Books, 1988, p. 346, 30 March 1941.

70 Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936–1945, Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000, p. 359.

71 Noakes and Pridham (eds.), Nazism, vol. 3 (2006 edn), pp. 478–9.

72 Ibid., p. 479.

73 Vivien Spitz, Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans, First Sentient Publications, 2005, pp. 190–94.

74 Ibid., p. 195.

75 Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Basic Books, 1986, p. 279.

76 See Paul Eggert, pp. 98–9.

77 Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil I: Aufzeichnungen 1923–1941, vol. 9, K. G. Saur, 1998, p. 210, entry for 29 March 1941.

78 This ‘new’ Croatia with 25,500 Jews also included Bosnia-Herzegovina with 14,000 Jews. In total there were around 80,000 Jews in the former Yugoslavia and 72,000 in Greece.

79 Esther Gitman, When Courage Prevailed: The Rescue and Survival of Jews in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–1945, Paragon House, 2011, pp. 12–13.

80 Ibid., p. 17.

Chapter 10: War of Extermination

1 Laurence Rees, The Nazis: A Warning from History, BBC Books, 1997, p. 175. Full text of letter at United States, Department of State, Publication No. 3023, Nazi–Soviet Relations 1939–1941: Documents from the Archives of the German Foreign Office, Government Printing Office, 1948, pp. 349–53.

2 Elke Fröhlich, ‘Joseph Goebbels und sein Tagebuch’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 35, no. 4 (1987), Goebbels diary entry for 16 June 1941.

3 Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, Penguin, 2007, pp. 452–60.

4 See here.

5 Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, BBC Books, 2005, p. 56, Heydrich’s directive of 2 July 1941.

6 Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 186.

7 Robert van Voren, Undigested Past: The Holocaust in Lithuania, Rodopi, 2011, p. 27. Around 13.5 per cent of those deported to the Soviet Union were Jews – a disproportionately high number compared to the proportion of Jews in the overall population.

8 Laurence Rees, Their Darkest Hour, Ebury Press, 2007, pp. 11–12.

9 David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–49, Macmillan, 2016, p. 362.

10 Michael MacQueen, ‘Lithuanian Collaboration in the “Final Solution”: Motivations and Case Studies’, in Lithuania and the Jews: The Holocaust Chapter, Symposium Presentations, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004.

11 Testimony from The Nazis: A Warning from History, Episode 5: Road to Treblinka, written and produced by Laurence Rees, first transmission October 1997, BBC2.

12 Aleks Faitelson, The Truth and Nothing But the Truth: Jewish Resistance in Lithuania, Gefen Books, 2006, p. 26.

13 Testimony from The Nazis: A Warning from History, Episode 5: Road to Treblinka, written and produced by Laurence Rees, first transmission October 1997, BBC2.

14 Rees, Nazis, pp. 179–82.

15 Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess, ‘The Good Old Days’, Konecky & Konecky, 1991, p. 31.

16 Ibid., pp. 24–7.

17 Peter Longerich, The Unwritten Order, Tempus, 2005, p. 113.

18 Jean Ancel, The History of the Holocaust in Romania, Yad Vashem, 2011, p. 215. Protocol of the talk between Hitler and Antonescu in Munich, in Documents on German Foreign Policy, vol. 12, doc. 614, p. 1006.

19 Ancel, Romania, pp. 445–6.

20 Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944, Ivan R. Dee, 2008, p. 74; Kindle edition, location 1738–45.

21 Ancel, Romania, p. 453.

22 Ancel, ibid., p. 455, says 8,000, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum says ‘at least 4,000’. Figure from US Holocaust Memorial Museum, http://www.ushmm.org/information/museum-programs-and-calendar/first-person-program/first-person-podcast/haim-solomon-hiding-during-the-pogrom-in-iasi.

23 Ioanid, Holocaust in Romania, p. 81; Kindle edition, location 1884–90.

24 Ancel, Romania, pp. 230–32.

25 Previously unpublished testimony.

26 Previously unpublished testimony.

27 Testimony of Emilio Büge, Sachsenhausen Museum, and Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Little, Brown, 2015, pp. 262–5.

28 Testimony of unknown inmate, discovered in 1954, Sachsenhausen Museum.

29 Previously unpublished testimony.

30 Peter Löffler (ed.), Bischof Clemens August Graf von Galen. Akten, Briefe und Predigten 1933–1946, vol. 2: 1939–1946, Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1988, pp. 876–8. Original in Bistumsarchiv Münster, Fremde Provenienzen, A 8, Niederschrift der Predigt des Bischofs von Münster, Sonntag, den 3. August 1941, in der St. Lambertikirche in Münster.

31 Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936–1945, Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000, pp. 424–5.

32 Previously unpublished testimony.

33 Kershaw, Hitler: Nemesis, p. 426.

34 Cesarani, Final Solution, p. 284. Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War, Allen Lane, 2008, pp. 93–101.

35 Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944, Phoenix Press, 2000, p. 5, night of 5–6 July 1941.

36 Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, Heinemann, 2004, pp. 309–10.

37 Ibid., p. 240.

38 Götz Aly, ‘Final Solution’: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews, Arnold, 1999, p. 214.

39 Previously unpublished testimony, but see also Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, BBC Books, 2005, pp. 64–5.

40 Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, University of Nebraska Press, 2009, p. 165.

41 Previously unpublished testimony.

42 Laurence Rees, War of the Century, BBC Books, 1999, pp. 93–4.

43 The city of Lwów had many different names in the twentieth century. For example, it was called Lemberg by the Germans, Lviv by Ukrainians and Lvov by the Russians. The spelling used here is the Polish version, because at the start of the war this was the name of the city. The figure of 4,000 for the pogrom in 1941 is the estimate by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

44 Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 526.

45 Previously unpublished testimony and Rees, Auschwitz, pp. 63–6.

46 Rees, Darkest Hour, p. 13.

47 Alfonsas Eidintas, Žydai, Lietuviai ir Holokaustas, quoted in MacQueen, ‘Lithuanian Collaboration in the “Final Solution”: Motivations and Case Studies’.

48 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 63.

49 Rees, Nazis, p. 190.

50 Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary, Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 24, entry for 4 August 1941.

51 Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess, ‘The Good Old Days’, Konecky & Konecky, 1991, p. 179.

52 Anatoly Podolsky, ‘The Tragic Fate of Ukrainian Jewish Women under Nazi Occupation, 1941–1944’, in Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel (eds.), Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, Brandeis University Press and University Press of New England, 2010, pp. 94–107, here p. 99.

53 Rees, Nazis, p. 213, together with previously unpublished testimony.

54 Previously unpublished testimony.

55 Leonid D. Grenkevich, The Soviet Partisan Movement, 1941–1944: A Critical Historiographical Analysis, Frank Cass, 1999, p. 75.

56 Manus I. Midlarsky, The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 147.

57 Rees, Darkest Hour, p. 68, together with previously unpublished testimony.

58 Kershaw, Hitler: Nemesis, p. 467.

59 Peter Witte et al. (eds.), Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42, Hans Christians Verlag, 1999, p. 195.

60 Previously unpublished testimony.

61 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 68, together with previously unpublished testimony.

62 Ibid.

63 ‘Leben eines SS-Generals. Aus den Nürnberger Geständnissen des Generals der Waffen-SS Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski’, Aufbau, vol. XII, no. 34, 23 August 1946, p. 2.

64 Recollection of former SS General Karl Wolff, The World at War, Thames Television, 27 March 1974, quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy, Collins, 1986, p. 191.

65 Previously unpublished testimony.

66 Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, Pan, 2001, p. 614.

67 Browning, Origins, p. 283. Also Longerich, Himmler, p. 534. A total of 120 inmates of the hospital were gassed five weeks later.

68 Testimony of Wilhelm Jaschke, Vilsbiburg, 5 April 1960, BArch 202, AR-Z 152/159. And Rees, Auschwitz, p. 69.

69 Previously unpublished testimony, and Rees, Auschwitz, p. 71.

70 Tooze, Wages of Destruction, pp. 482–3.

71 Ibid., p. 483.

72 Previously unpublished testimony.

73 Previously unpublished testimony.

74 Previously unpublished testimony.

75 Longerich, Holocaust, p. 315.

76 J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945, vol. 3: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination, Exeter University Press, 2006, p. 481.

77 Peter Klein (ed.), Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion 1941/42. Die Tätigkeits- und Lageberichte der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, Hentrich, 1997, p. 342.

78 Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil II: Diktate 1941–1945, vol. 1, K. G. Saur, 1996, p. 269, entry for 19 August 1941.

79 Browning, Origins, pp. 281–2.

80 Der Prozess gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Internationalen Militärgerichtshof, Nürnberg, 14. November 1945–1. Oktober 1946, vol. XXXII, Nuremberg, 1948, document 3663-PS, p. 436.

81 Ibid., document 3666-PS, p. 437.

82 Hitler’s Table Talk, pp. 56–7, evening of 13–14 October 1941.

83 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 67.

84 Previously unpublished testimony.

85 Rees, Nazis, p. 222.

86 Hitler’s Table Talk, pp. 31–5, night of 17–18 September 1941.

87 Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, vol. 4: 1941–1945, Bolchazy-Carducci, 2004, p. 2491, Hitler speech, Berlin Sportpalast, 3 October 1941.

88 Ioanid, Holocaust in Romania, p. 120; Kindle edition, location 2726–34.

89 Ansel, Romania, p. 243.

90 Hitler’s Table Talk, p. 67, 17 October 1941.

91 Noakes and Pridham (eds.), Nazism, vol. 3, pp. 519–20.

92 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 76.

93 Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides (eds.), Łódź Ghetto: Inside a Community under Siege, Viking, 1989, p. 175, Diary of Shlomo Frank, entries for 19 and 23 October 1941.

94 Ibid., p. 171, Diary of David Sierakowiak, entry for 17 October 1941.

95 Ibid., pp. 178–81, Notebook of Oskar Rosenfeld.

96 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 85.

97 Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, Indiana University Press, 2008, p. 217.

98 Helmut Heiber, ‘Aus den Akten des Gauleiters Kube’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 4, no. 1 (1956), p. 75.

99 Kershaw, Hitler: Nemesis, p. 486.

100 Aly, ‘Final Solution’, p. 214.

101 Statement by Walter Burmeister, 24/01/1961, p. 3, BArch ZStL 203 AR-Z 69/59, vol. 4. (ZStL is the central legal administration office dealing with National Socialist crimes in Ludwigsburg.)

102 Browning, Origins, p. 367.

103 Longerich, Holocaust, p. 282.

104 Although note that two smaller camps – at Maly Trostenets and Bronna Gorá – were established in Belarus where Jews were murdered. Maly Trostenets started operation in May 1942 – its chief function to murder the Jews of Minsk. Bronna Gorá in western Belarus began killing Jews from the surrounding area shortly afterwards. Though the exact number killed in these camps is unknown, neither approached the scale of the Operation Reinhard camps.

105 Hitler’s Table Talk, p. 87, 25 October 1941.

106 Browning, Origins, p. 362.

107 Testimony from 8 November 1961, BArch ZStL 203 AR-Z 69/59, vol. 3, pp. 5–6. And Rees, Auschwitz, p. 92.

108 Dr Goebbels, ‘Die Juden sind schuld!’, Das Reich, no. 46, 16 November 1941, pp. 1–2.

109 For Professor Christopher Browning’s own detailed analysis, see his Origins, pp. 358–73.

110 Hitler’s Table Talk, pp. 57–8, night of 13–14 October 1941.

111 Patrick Montague, Chełmno and the Holocaust, I. B. Tauris, 2012, p. 34.

112 See here.

113 Michael Thad Allen, ‘The Devil in the Details: The Gas Chambers of Birkenau, October 1941’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, Autumn 2002, pp. 189–216. Rees, Auschwitz, pp. 82–3.

Chapter 11: The Road to Wannsee

1 Account by V. S. Pronin, President of the Moscow Soviet, Voenno-istoricheskii Zhurnal, vol. 10 (1991), pp. 335–41.

2 Max Domarus, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945. Kommentiert von einem deutschen Zeitgenossen, vol. 2: Untergang, R. Löwit, 1973, pp. 1773, 1779, Hitler speech, 8 November 1941.

3 Laurence Rees, World War II: Behind Closed Doors, BBC Books, 2008, p. 114.

4 Domarus, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen, vol. 2, pp. 1773–4.

5 Ibid., pp. 1804, 1808, Hitler speech to the Reichstag, 11 December 1941.

6 Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil II: Diktate 1941–1945, vol. 2, K. G. Saur, 1996, pp. 498–9, entry for 13 December 1941.

7 Werner Präg and Wolfgang Jacobmeyer (eds.), Das Diensttagebuch des deutschen Generalgouverneurs in Polen 1939–1945, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1975, pp. 452–9, here p. 457.

8 Patrick Montague, Chełmno and the Holocaust, I. B. Tauris, 2012, p. 22.

9 Ibid., p. 43.

10 Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, Heinemann, 2004, p. 417.

11 Ibid., p. 372.

12 Montague, Chełmno, p. 64.

13 Browning, Origins, p. 418.

14 Eugen Kogon et al., Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas, S. Fischer Verlag, 1983, pp. 122–3. Also J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945, vol. 3: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination, Exeter University Press, 1991 edn, p. 1140.

15 Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, BBC Books, 2005, p. 91.

16 Montague, Chełmno, p. 59.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., pp. 65–6.

19 Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, Indiana University Press, 2008, p. 370, Rumkowski’s speech of 20 December 1941, document no. 122: YI-1221.

20 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 91.

21 Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, vol. 3, pp. 1127–34.

22 David Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, Vintage, 2005, p. 114.

23 Browning, Origins, p. 406.

24 Cesarani, Eichmann, p. 114.

25 Sister Margherita Marchione, Consensus and Controversy: Defending Pope Pius XII, Paulist Press, 2002, p. 71.

26 Laurence Rees, War of the Century, BBC Books, 1999, pp. 78–80.

27 Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, Pan, 2001, p. 571, cited in Jost Dülffler, Deutsche Geschichte 1933–1945, Kohlhammer, 1992, p. 125.

28 Domarus, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen, vol. 2, pp. 1828–9, Hitler speech, Berlin Sportpalast, 30 January 1942.

29 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 97.

30 Previously unpublished testimony.

31 Quoted in Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess, ‘The Good Old Days’, Konecky & Konecky, 1991, p. 255.

32 Browning, Origins, p. 420.

33 Rudolf Reder, Belzec, Auschwitz Museum, 1999, p. 115.

34 Ibid., pp. 118–20.

35 Ibid., pp. 124–5.

36 Ibid., p. 130.

37 Ibid., pp. 132–3.

38 Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil II, vol. 3, K. G. Saur, 1994, pp. 557–63, entry for 27 March 1942.

39 Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 295.

40 Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi–Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945, Yale University Press, 1994, p. 66.

41 See Wisliceny’s post-war testimony in Slovakia, 6–7 May 1946 (Statny oblastny archive v Bratislave, Fond Ludovy sud, 10/48) and 12 August 1946 (Statny oblastny archive v Bratislave, Fond Ludovy sud, 13/48), plus Koso’s testimony of 11 April 1947 (Statny oblastny archive v Bratislave, Fond Ludovy sud, 13/48).

42 Domarus, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen, vol. 2, pp. 1828–9, Hitler speech, Berlin Sportpalast, 30 January 1942.

43 Previously unpublished testimony.

44 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 108.

45 Previously unpublished testimony.

46 Previously unpublished testimony. Also see Rees, Auschwitz, p. 108.

47 Previously unpublished testimony.

48 Previously unpublished testimony.

49 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 110.

50 Previously unpublished testimony.

51 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 114.

52 Previously unpublished testimony.

53 Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Little, Brown, 2015, p. 299.

54 Previously unpublished testimony.

55 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 114.

56 Hoess, Commandant, pp. 149–50.

57 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 207.

58 Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder, Pimlico, 1995, pp. 111–12.

59 Ibid., pp. 113–14.

60 Ibid., p. 131.

61 Klee et al., ‘The Good Old Days’, p. 232.

62 Jules Schelvis, Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp, Berg, 2007; see Chapters 3, 4 and 5, but in particular pp. 63–6.

63 Even though a number of the Soviet POWs were not from Ukraine, they were collectively known in the camp as ‘Ukrainians’ and so that usage is adopted here.

64 Rees, Auschwitz, pp. 210–11.

Chapter 12: Search and Kill

1 Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 88. Vallat made this statement at his trial after the war, though it was ‘almost identical’ to a speech he had given in sping 1942.

2 Ibid., p. 90.

3 Ulrich Herbert, ‘The German Military Command in Paris and the Deportation of the French Jews’, in Ulrich Herbert (ed.), National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies, Berghahn Books, 2000, pp. 128–62, here p. 139.

4 Ibid., p. 140.

5 Ibid., p. 143.

6 David Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, Vintage, 2005, pp. 139–40.

7 Marrus and Paxton, Vichy, p. 243.

8 Serge Klarsfeld, French Children of the Holocaust, New York University Press, 1996, p. 34.

9 Marrus and Paxton, Vichy, pp. 233–4.

10 Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French and the Jews, Bison Books, 1993, p. 99. Dannecker is the source for the Laval quotation; Laval’s words to the Council of Ministers six days later also tally with this previous statement reported by Dannecker.

11 Previously unpublished testimony. Also see Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, BBC Books, 2005, pp. 126–31.

12 Klarsfeld, French Children, p. 45. Marrus and Paxton, Vichy, p. 263.

13 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 130.

14 Previously unpublished testimony.

15 Previously unpublished testimony.

16 Previously unpublished testimony.

17 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 132, together with previously unpublished testimony.

18 Previously unpublished testimony.

19 Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–65, Indiana University Press, 2000, pp. 92–3.

20 Marrus and Paxton, Vichy, p. 261.

21 Margherita Grassini Sarfatti, My Fault: Mussolini as I Knew Him, ed. Brian R. Sullivan, Enigma Books, 2014, p. 84.

22 Susan Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue and Survival, University of Nebraska Press, 1996, p. 77. Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution, University of Wisconsin Press, 2006, pp. 159–60.

23 Marrus and Paxton, Vichy, p. 317.

24 Ibid.

25 Nuto Revelli (ed.), Mussolini’s Death March: Eyewitness Accounts of Italian Soldiers on the Eastern Front, Kansas University Press, 2013. See in particular the testimony of Bartolomeo Fruttero in Warsaw, pp. 219–20.

26 Bob Moore, Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands 1940–1945, Arnold, 1997, p. 91.

27 Jacob Presser, Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry, Souvenir Press, 2010, p. 142. And Moore, Victims and Survivors, p. 93.

28 Presser, Ashes, p. 147.

29 Ibid.

30 Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, Pimlico, 2001, pp. 46–7.

31 Michael Fleming, Auschwitz, the Allies and Censorship of the Holocaust, Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 106.

32 Ibid., p. 107, note from Maurice Perlzweig of the WJC, in late September 1942.

33 See Jan Karski’s testimony, pp. 288–9.

34 Fleming, Auschwitz, p. 116, Anthony Eden, House of Commons, 17 December 1942.

35 Testimony from Gerhart Riegner in Reputations: Pope Pius XII: The Pope, the Jews and the Nazis, produced by Jonathan Lewis, executive producer Laurence Rees, transmitted on BBC2 in 1995.

36 This translation taken from Reputations: Pope Pius XII. See also http://catholictradition.org/Encyclicals/1942.htm.

37 Translation of letter at http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2012/07/70th-anniversary-of-pastoral-letter-of.html.

38 http://www.patheos.com/blogs/labmind/2011/01/archbishop-de-jong-the-cost-of-speaking-up.html?repeat=w3tc.

39 Research for Reputations: Pope Pius XII.

40 Testimony from Reputations: Pope Pius XII, transmitted on BBC2 in 1995.

41 See Phayer, Catholic Church, p. 94. Phayer contends that the argument that de Jong’s protest caused the deportation of baptized Jews ‘rings hollow’ and that ‘The archbishop’s protest was simply an excuse the Nazis used to seize these Jewish converts prematurely.’

42 Moore, Victims and Survivors, p. 79, quoting the work of Dr Jacob Presser.

43 Testimony from Witold Złotnicki in Reputations: Pope Pius XII, transmitted on BBC2 in 1995.

44 Livia Rothkirchen, ‘The Churches and the Deportation and Persecution of Jews in Slovakia’, in Carol Rittner, Stephen D. Smith and Irena Steinfeldt (eds.), The Holocaust and the Christian World, Yad Vashem, 2000, pp. 104–7.

45 James Mace Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia, Cornell University Press, 2013, p. 232.

46 Rothkirchen, ‘Persecution of Jews in Slovakia’.

47 Mace Ward, Jozef Tiso, pp. 234–6.

48 Testimony from Jan Karski in Reputations: Pope Pius XII, transmitted on BBC2 in 1995.

49 Peter Longerich in Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 362, gives a figure of 52,000 Jews in Belgium at the end of 1940.

50 Ibid., p. 372.

51 Hans Fredrik Dahl, Quisling: A Study in Treachery, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 287.

52 Figures from the Norwegian Royal Commission (NOU 1977: 22) quoted in ibid.

53 Ladislaus Hory and Martin Broszat, Der kroatische Ustascha-Staat 1941–1945, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1964, pp. 120–21.

54 Ibid., pp. 101–2. Original: Nuremberg document NOKW-1071.

55 Ibid., p. 99.

56 Der Prozess gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Internationalen Militärgerichtshof, Nürnberg, 14. November 1945–1. Oktober 1946, vol. XV, p. 327.

57 Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik 1918–1945, Serie E: 1941–1945, vol. VII, 1. Oktober 1943 bis 30. April 1944, doc. no. 352, pp. 658–60.

58 Randolph L. Braham, The Hungarian Labor Service System 1939–1945, East European Quarterly, 1977, p. 28. Also see Robert Rozett, Conscripted Slaves: Hungarian Jewish Forced Labourers on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, Yad Vashem, 2013, pp. 158–63.

59 Cesarani, Eichmann, p. 151.

60 I. C. Butnaru, The Silent Holocaust: Romania and its Jews, Greenwood Press, 1992, p. 138.

61 Ibid., p. 139.

62 Bernhard R. Kroener, Rolf-Dieter Müller and Hans Umbreit, Organization and Mobilization in the German Sphere of Power: Wartime Administration, Economy, and Manpower Resources 1942–1944/5, vol. 5, issue 2 of Germany and the Second World War, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 855. Also Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, Penguin, 2007, p. 587.

63 Cesarani, Eichmann, p. 152.

64 Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, vol. 4: 1941–1945, Bolchazy-Carducci, 2004, pp. 2679–80, Hitler speech, 30 September 1942.

65 Lothar Gall (ed.), Krupp im 20. Jahrhundert. Die Geschichte des Unternehmens vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis zur Gründung der Stiftung, Siedler, 2002. Werner Abelshauser, Rüstungsschmiede der Nation? Der Kruppkonzern im Dritten Reich und in der Nachkriegszeit 1933 bis 1951, pp. 267–472, here p. 412. Original in FAH, 5 C 48.

66 Domarus, Hitler (English edn), vol. 4, p. 2687, Göring speech, 4 October 1942, in Berlin.

Chapter 13: Nazi Death Camps in Poland

1 There were also camps in Belarus, for example, at Maly Trostenets and Bronna Gorá where Jews were murdered, but neither had fixed gas chambers.

2 Tatiana Berenstein et al. (eds.), Faschismus – Getto – Massenmord. Dokumentation über Ausrottung und Widerstand der Juden in Polen während des zweiten Weltkrieges, Röderberg-Verlag, 1960, p. 303. In English in J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945, vol. 3: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination, Exeter University Press, 1991, pp. 1159–60.

3 Léon Poliakov and Joseph Wulf, Das Dritte Reich und seine Diener, Ullstein, 1983, pp. 471ff. Also in document 170-USSR, in Der Prozessgegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Internationalen Militärgerichtshof, Nürnberg, 14. November 1945–1. Oktober 1946, vol. XXIX, 1949, pp. 385ff. Stenographic report of the meeting of Reich Marshal Göring with the Reich Commissioners for the occupied territories and Military Commanders on the food situation, 6 August 1942.

4 Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, Penguin, 2007, p. 545.

5 Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 570. Also see pp. 561–8 for his analysis of the reasons behind Himmler’s 19 July statement.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid., pp. 564 and 572.

8 Felix Kersten, The Kersten Memoirs, 1940–1945, Hutchinson, 1956, pp. 132–4, entry for 16 July 1942. These memoirs have to be treated with considerable care and are not always reliable. This section, however – also quoted in part by Adam Tooze in Wages of Destruction, p. 526 – is credible.

9 Joseph Poprzeczny, Odilo Globocnik: Hitler’s Man in the East, McFarland, 2004, pp. 320–21. Also Longerich, Himmler, pp. 583–4.

10 Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron and Josef Kermisz (eds.), The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, Elephant, 1999, pp. 381–5.

11 Ibid., p. 385.

12 Jacob Sloan (ed.), Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, from the Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, iBooks, 2006, p. 292, entry dated ‘June 1942’.

13 Ibid., pp. 330–31 (no precise date given).

14 Abraham Lewin, A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto, Fontana, 1990, p. 145, entry for 1 August 1942.

15 Previously unpublished testimony.

16 Auschwitz was the only place where more Jews were murdered, but unlike Treblinka Auschwitz was never solely a death camp.

17 Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, BBC Books, 2005, p. 162.

18 Michael Grabher, Irmfried Eberl. ‘Euthanasie’ Arzt und Kommandant von Treblinka, Peter Lang, 2006, pp. 70–71, letter from Irmfried Eberl to Ruth, 20 June 1942, HHStAW 631a, no. 1631.

19 Ibid., p. 73, letter from Irmfried Eberl to Ruth, 30 July 1942, HHStAW 631a, no. 1631. Also quoted in Ute Hofmann and Dietmar Schulze, ‘… wird heute in eine andere Anstalt verlegt’. Nationalsozialistische Zwangssterilisation und ‘Euthanasie’ in der Landes-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Bernburg – eine Dokumentation, Regierungspräsidium Dessau, 1997, pp. 67–8.

20 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 162.

21 Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, 1999, p. 84.

22 Ibid., p. 85.

23 Ibid., p. 87.

24 Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder, Pimlico, 1995, pp. 160–61.

25 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 163.

26 Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess, ‘The Good Old Days’, Konecky & Konecky, 1991, p. 244.

27 Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, p. 96.

28 Sereny, Darkness, p. 161.

29 Volker Rieß, ‘Christian Wirth – der Inspekteur der Vernichtungslager’, in Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Gerhard Paul (eds.), Karrieren der Gewalt. Nationalsozialistische Täterbiographien, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2004, pp. 239–51, here p. 247. Original in BArch 208 AR-Z 252/59, vol. 9, pp. 1689ff., hearing of Josef Oberhauser, 13 December 1962.

30 Previously unpublished testimony.

31 Previously unpublished testimony.

32 Laurence Rees, The Nazis: A Warning from History, BBC Books, 1997, p. 165.

33 Previously unpublished testimony.

34 Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, p. 190.

35 Laurence Rees, Their Darkest Hour, Ebury Press, 2007, p. 94.

36 In conversation with author; see ibid., p. 94.

37 Tomasz Kranz, Extermination of Jews at Majdanek Concentration Camp, State Museum, Majdanek, 2010, p. 13.

38 Ibid., p. 59.

39 Previously unpublished testimony.

40 Testimony from Touched by Auschwitz, written and produced by Laurence Rees, transmitted on BBC2, 20 January 2015.

41 Previously unpublished testimony.

42 Testimony displayed at the State Museum, Majdanek.

43 Elissa Mailänder, Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence: The Majdanek Concentration Camp, 1942–1944, Michigan State University Press, 2015, p. 242.

44 Ibid., pp. xi–xiii.

45 The total for Treblinka is given in the decoded telegram as 71,355, but this is an obvious misprint, as in order to get the total contained in the telegram of 1,274,166 the number killed at Treblinka has to be 713,555 – a number that is also confirmed as credible by other documentary evidence.

46 PRO HW 16/10.

Chapter 14: Killing, and Persuading Others to Help

1 Laurence Rees, War of the Century, BBC Books, 1999, p. 128.

2 Charles Burdick and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (eds.), The Halder War Diary, 1939–1942, Greenhill Books, 1988, p. 646, entry for 23 July 1942.

3 Rees, War of the Century, p. 159.

4 Max Domarus, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945. Kommentiert von einem deutschen Zeitgenossen, vol. 2: Untergang, R. Löwit, 1973, p. 1916, Hitler speech, Berlin Sportpalast, 30 September 1942.

5 FDR address 12 February 1943, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/casablan.asp.

6 Theodore S. Hamerow, Why We Watched: Europe, America, and the Holocaust, W. W. Norton, 2008, p. 349. The Roosevelt–Noguès and the Roosevelt–Giraud Conversations at the President’s Villa, noon and 4:20 p.m., 17 January 1943, Roosevelt Papers, McCrea Notes, in Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conferences at Washington 1941–1942 and Casablanca 1943, US Department of State, 1968, pp. 608–11.

7 Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil II: Diktate 1941–1945, vol. 7, K. G. Saur, 1993, p. 454, entry for 2 March 1943.

8 Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, Stanford University Press, 1995, pp. 321–6.

9 Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936–1945, Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000, p. 582.

10 Andreas Hillgruber (ed.), Staatsmänner und Diplomaten bei Hitler. Zweiter Teil. Vertrauliche Aufzeichnungen über Unterredungen mit Vertretern des Auslandes 1942–1944, Bernard & Graefe, 1970, pp. 234–63, here pp. 238, 240, 245, 256–7, meeting on 16 April and 17 April 1943.

11 Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil II, vol. 8, K. G. Saur, 1993, p. 225, entry for 7 May 1943.

12 Record by SS-Oberführer Veesenmayer, in Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik 1918–1945, Serie E: 1941–1945, vol. VI, 1. Mai bis 30. September 1943, pp. 78–80, here p. 79.

13 Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil II, vol. 8, pp. 236, 238, entry for 8 May 1943.

14 Domarus, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen, vol. 2, p. 2003, communiqué concerning the meeting of Hitler and King Boris, 3 April 1943.

15 Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, Heinemann, 2004, p. 212. Also Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 663–4.

16 Previously unpublished testimony.

17 Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, BBC Books, 2005, p. 176.

18 Previously unpublished testimony.

19 This is a suspiciously exact figure, to be treated with caution. (The fact that it is the same forwards as backwards only adds to that suspicion.)

20 Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Little, Brown, 2015, p. 316.

21 Jadwiga Bezwińska and Danuta Czech (eds.), Amidst a Nightmare of Crime, Howard Fertig, 1992, p. 47, deposition of Alter Feinsilber (also known as Stanislaw Jankowski).

22 Previously unpublished testimony.

23 Bezwińska and Czech (eds.), Amidst a Nightmare, p. 52.

24 Previously unpublished testimony.

25 Previously unpublished testimony.

26 Dr Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, Penguin, 2012, p. 24.

27 Previously unpublished testimony.

28 Nyiszli, Auschwitz, p. 42.

29 Previously unpublished testimony.

30 Previously unpublished testimony.

31 Bezwińska and Czech (eds.), Amidst a Nightmare, p. 119.

32 Ibid., p. 56, deposition of Alter Feinsilber.

33 Ibid.

34 Previously unpublished testimony.

35 Rees, Auschwitz, pp. 236–7.

36 Bezwińska and Czech (eds.), Amidst a Nightmare, p. 119.

37 Previously unpublished testimony.

38 Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial, Indiana University Press, 2002, p. 80.

39 Testimony from Touched by Auschwitz, transmitted on BBC2, 20 January 2015, and previously unpublished testimony.

40 Previously unpublished testimony.

41 Previously unpublished testimony.

42 Previously unpublished testimony.

43 Bezwińska and Czech (eds.), Amidst a Nightmare, p. 59.

44 Kurt Jonassohn, with Karin Solveig Björnson, Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations in Comparative Perspective, Transaction, 1999, p. 283.

45 Wim Willems, In Search of the True Gypsy: From Enlightenment to Final Solution, Routledge, 2013, p. 251.

46 Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, Gypsies under the Swastika, University of Hertfordshire Press, 2009, pp. 38–9.

47 Kershaw, Hitler: Nemesis, p. 584.

48 Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil II, vol. 8, p. 288, entry for 13 May 1943.

Chapter 15: Oppression and Revolt

1 Testimony from The Nazis: A Warning from History, Episode 6: Fighting to the End, written and produced by Laurence Rees, first transmission October 1997, BBC2.

2 Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, vol. 4: 1941–1945, Bolchazy-Carducci, 2004, p. 2818, Hitler speech, 10 September 1943.

3 Martin Gilbert, The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust, Black Swan, 2003, p. 439.

4 Susan Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue and Survival, University of Nebraska Press, 1996, p. 81.

5 Renzo De Felice, ‘Hunting Down the Jews’, in Stanislao G. Pugliese (ed.), Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and the Resistance in Italy: 1919 to the Present, Rowan & Littlefield, 2004, pp. 200–206, here p. 202.

6 José M. Sánchez, Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy, Catholic University of America Press, 2002, p. 143.

7 Testimony from Reputations: Pope Pius XII: The Pope, the Jews and the Nazis, produced by Jonathan Lewis, executive producer Laurence Rees, transmitted on BBC2 in 1995.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Zuccotti, Italians and the Holocaust, p. 133.

11 Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965, Indiana University Press, 2000, pp. 240–45.

12 Figures from Zuccotti, Italians and the Holocaust, p. xxv. Note this is the figure for those who died. The estimate on p. 274 is for the number deported to Auschwitz.

13 Zuccotti, Italians and the Holocaust, pp. 235–6.

14 Previously unpublished testimony.

15 Previously unpublished testimony.

16 Emmy E. Werner, A Conspiracy of Decency: The Rescue of the Danish Jews during World War II, Westview Press, 2002, p. 49.

17 Previously unpublished testimony.

18 Michael Mogensen, ‘October 1943 – The Rescue of the Danish Jews’, in Mette Bastholm Jensen and Steven L. B. Jensen (eds.), Denmark and the Holocaust, Department for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2003, pp. 33–61, here p. 45.

19 Previously unpublished testimony.

20 Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, BBC Books, 2005, pp. 221–2.

21 Mogensen, ‘Rescue’, p. 33. See also Leni Yahil, The Rescue of Danish Jewry: Test of a Democracy, The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969.

22 The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gives a figure of 72,000 Jews in Greece at the time of the occupation and ‘nearly 60,000’ who died in the Holocaust: https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005778. Steven B. Bowman, The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940–1945, Stanford University Press, 2009, p. 77, states that nearly 90 per cent of Greek Jewry perished.

23 Bowman, Agony of Greek Jews, p. 177.

24 David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–49, Macmillan, 2016, p. 600. Also see Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece, Yale University Press, 2001, for a description of the deportation of the Jews from Salonica, pp. 238–46.

25 Previously unpublished testimony.

26 Israel Cymlich and Oskar Strawczynski, Escaping Hell in Treblinka, Yad Vashem, 2007, p. 167.

27 Laurence Rees, The Nazis: A Warning from History, BBC Books, 1997, p. 170.

28 Previously unpublished testimony.

29 Cymlich and Strawczynski, Escaping Hell in Treblinka, p. 178.

30 Yankel Wiernik, A Year in Treblinka, General Jewish Workers’ Union of Poland, 1945, Chapter 13. www.zchor.org/treblink/wiernik.htm.

31 Previously unpublished testimony.

32 Thomas Toivi Blatt, From the Ashes of Sobibor, Northwestern University Press, 1997, p. 129.

33 Cesarani, Final Solution, pp. 676–7. Although this impact should not be exaggerated. Very few Dutch Jews survived Auschwitz.

34 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 210.

35 Previously unpublished testimony.

36 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 214.

37 Previously unpublished testimony.

38 Rees, Auschwitz, pp. 214–15.

39 Previously unpublished testimony.

40 Previously unpublished testimony.

41 Previously unpublished testimony.

42 Blatt, Ashes of Sobibor, p. 167.

43 Ibid., p. 222.

44 Previously unpublished testimony.

45 Tatiana Berenstein et al. (eds.), Faschismus – Getto – Massenmord. Dokumentation über Ausrottung und Widerstand der Juden in Polen während des zweiten Weltkriegs, Röderberg-Verlag, 1960, p. 352, Circular by SS and Police Chief of Warsaw district, 13 March 1943.

46 Cymlich and Strawczynski, Escaping Hell in Treblinka, p. 58.

47 Ibid., p. 61.

48 Naomi Baumslag, Murderous Medicine: Nazi Doctors, Human Experimentation, and Typhus, Praeger, 2005, p. 117.

49 Statistics taken from Gunnar S. Paulsson, Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940–1945, Yale University Press, 2002, pp. 2–9 and 231.

50 Ibid., p. 231.

51 Previously unpublished testimony.

52 Joshua D. Zimmerman, The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939–1945, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 9–10.

53 Gian P. Gentile, How Effective Is Strategic Bombing? Lessons Learned from World War II to Kosovo, New York University Press, 2001, pp. 59–60.

54 Domarus, Hitler (English edn), vol. 4, p. 2819, Hitler speech, 10 September 1943.

55 BArch NS 19/4010. Also reproduced in Bradley F. Smith and Agnes F. Peterson (eds.), Heinrich Himmler. Geheimreden 1933 bis 1945 und andere Ansprachen, Propyläen Verlag, 1974, pp. 162–83, here pp. 169–70.

56 Rees, Auschwitz, pp. 215–16. Also see Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, 1999, p. 366.

57 Tomasz Kranz, The Extermination of Jews at Majdanek Concentration Camp, Majdanek, 2010, p. 64.

58 Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 382.

59 Testimony of Henryk Nieścior, State Museum, Majdanek, permanent exhibit.

60 Kranz, Majdanek, p. 66.

61 Der Prozess gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Internationalen Militärgerichtshof, Nürnberg, 14. November 1945–1. Oktober 1946, vol. XXXIV, 1949, doc. 4024-PS, pp. 58–92, here p. 72.

62 Ibid., pp. 69–70, Himmler letter, 30 November 1943.

63 Zuccotti, Italians and the Holocaust, pp. 185–6.

64 Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder, Pimlico, 1995 edn, p. 261.

Chapter 16: Auschwitz

1 More Jews were sent to the ‘family camp’ in two subsequent transports in December 1943 and March 1944 – giving a final total of 17,500 inmates.

2 Previously unpublished testimony.

3 Previously unpublished testimony.

4 Dr Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, Penguin, 2012, p. 35.

5 Previously unpublished testimony.

6 Previously unpublished testimony.

7 Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, BBC Books, 2005, p. 187.

8 Previously unpublished testimony.

9 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 187.

10 Wolfgang U. Eckart and Hana Vondra, ‘Disregard for Human Life: Hypothermia Experiments in the Dachau Concentration Camp’, in Wolfgang U. Eckart (ed.), Man, Medicine, and the State: The Human Body as an Object of Government Sponsored Medical Research in the 20th Century, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006, pp. 157–66, here p. 163.

11 Ibid.

12 Maura Phillips Mackowski, Testing the Limits: Aviation Medicine and the Origins of Manned Space Flight, Texas A&M University Press, 2006, p. 94.

13 Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Little, Brown, 2015, p. 334.

14 Previously unpublished testimony.

15 Previously unpublished testimony.

16 Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle 1939–1945: From the Archives of the Auschwitz Memorial and the German Federal Archives, I. B. Tauris, 1990, p. 591.

17 Previously unpublished testimony.

18 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 143.

19 Ibid., p. 167.

20 Previously unpublished testimony.

21 Hermann Langbein, Der Auschwitz-Prozess. Eine Dokumentation, Neue Kritik, 1995. See the testimony of Konrad Morgen in Frankfurt am Main on 8 March 1962, at the Auschwitz trial, ibid., pp. 143–5.

22 Max Domarus, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945, vol. 2: Untergang, R. Löwit, 1973, p. 2083, Hitler speech, 30 January 1944.

23 Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 193.

24 Ibid., pp. 210–11.

25 Laurence Rees, The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler, Ebury Press, 2012, p. 381.

26 Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, ‘Hitlers Ansprache vor Generalen und Offizieren am 26. Mai 1944’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, vol. 20, no. 2 (1976), pp. 141–61, here p. 156, Hitler’s address to generals and officers, 26 May 1944. In English in Peter Longerich, The Unwritten Order, Tempus, 2005, p. 212.

27 Clive Emsley, Eric Johnson and Pieter Spierenburg (eds.), Social Control in Europe, vol. 2, Ohio State University Press, 2004, p. 312.

28 David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–49, Macmillan, 2016, p. 727.

29 Previously unpublished testimony.

30 Previously unpublished testimony.

31 Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides (eds.), Łódź Ghetto: Inside a Community under Siege, Penguin, 1991, p. 328.

32 Ibid., p. 329.

33 Ibid., p. 331.

34 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 102.

35 Previously unpublished testimony.

36 Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, Indiana University Press, 2008, p. 281, Josef Zelkowicz’s description of the September Action, ‘In Those Nightmarish Days’, no. 102: YI-54.

37 Trunk, Łódź Ghetto, p. 246.

38 Laurence Rees, Their Darkest Hour, Ebury Press, 2007, pp. 109–10.

39 Lucjan Dobroszycki (ed.), The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto 1941–1944, Yale University Press, 1984, p. 252, entry for 14 September 1942.

40 Previously unpublished testimony.

41 Previously unpublished testimony.

42 Testimony from The Nazis: A Warning from History, Episode 4: The Wild East, written and produced by Laurence Rees, first transmission October 1997, BBC2.

43 Trunk, Łódź Ghetto, p. 250.

44 Patrick Montague, Chełmno and the Holocaust, I. B. Tauris, 2012, p. 162.

45 Dobroszycki (ed.), Chronicle of Łódź Ghetto, p. 534, entry for 25 July 1944.

46 Note also the timing of the change from sending the Łódź Jews to Chełmno to sending them to Birkenau. That’s because by the start of August the mass killing of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz was over and the gas chambers of Birkenau now had the spare capacity to kill the Łódź Jews.

47 Max’s father had died in the ghetto; see here.

48 Previously unpublished testimony.

49 Previously unpublished testimony.

50 Michal Unger, Reassessment of the Image of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, Yad Vashem, 2004, p. 13.

51 Rees, Auschwitz, pp. 104–5.

52 Ibid.

Chapter 17: Hungarian Catastrophe

1 Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil II: Diktate 1941–1945, vol. 11, K. G. Saur, 1994, pp. 396, 399–400, entry for 4 March 1944.

2 Ibid., p. 348, entry for 25 February 1944.

3 Simo Muir and Hana Worthen (eds.), Finland’s Holocaust: Silences of History, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Also Elina Suominen’s work, Kuoleman laiva s/s Hohenhörn (Death Ship S/S Hohenhörn), WSOY, 1979, and Luovutetut: Suomen ihmisluovutukset Gestapolle (The Extradited: Finland’s Extraditions to the Gestapo), WSOY, 2003, the latter title written under her married name Elina Sana.

4 The Finns signed an armistice with the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom on 19 September 1944.

5 Previously unpublished testimony.

6 Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, Wayne State University Press, 1994, p. 110.

7 David Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, Vintage, 2005, p. 167.

8 Previously unpublished testimony.

9 Previously unpublished testimony.

10 Previously unpublished testimony.

11 Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi–Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945, Yale University Press, 1994, pp. 150–51.

12 Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, BBC Books, 2005, p. 230.

13 Gerald Jacobs, Sacred Games, Hamish Hamilton, 1995, pp. 63–7.

14 Previously unpublished testimony.

15 Previously unpublished testimony.

16 Ilana Rosen, Sisters in Sorrow: Life Histories of Female Holocaust Survivors from Hungary, Wayne State University Press, 2008, pp. 192–3.

17 Previously unpublished testimony.

18 US Holocaust Memorial Museum figures, https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007728.

19 Previously unpublished testimony.

20 Previously unpublished testimony.

21 Previously unpublished testimony.

22 Testimony from Touched by Auschwitz, written and produced by Laurence Rees, transmitted on BBC2, 20 January 2015.

23 Previously unpublished testimony.

24 Franciszek Piper, Auschwitz: How Many Perished?, Frap Books, 1996, p. 53, writes of 438,000 Hungarian Jews taken to Auschwitz (from within Hungarian wartime borders), but Mirek Obstarczyk of Auschwitz museum informs me that the figure is now revised to 430,000.

25 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 235.

26 SIME report no. 1 on the interrogation of Joel Brand, 16–30 June 1944, file no. SIME/P 7769, PRO FO 371/42811. Also Rees, Auschwitz, p. 227.

27 Bauer, Jews for Sale? p. 178.

28 Ibid., p. 186.

29 Ibid., p. 166.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid., p. 167.

32 Himmler, Hitler and the End of the Reich, produced by Detlef Siebert, executive producer, Laurence Rees, transmitted on BBC2, 2001.

33 Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 720.

34 Document discovered by the research team of Himmler, Hitler and the End of the Reich, PRO HW 1/3196.

35 Testimony from Himmler, Hitler and the End of the Reich, transmitted on BBC2, 2001.

36 Previously unpublished testimony.

37 Previously unpublished testimony.

38 Rees, Auschwitz, pp. 243–4.

39 Testimony from Himmler, Hitler and the End of the Reich, transmitted on BBC2, 2001.

40 Bauer, Jews for Sale?, pp. 158–9.

41 Previously unpublished testimony.

42 Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial, Indiana University Press, 2002, pp. 145–6.

43 Filip Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, Ivan R. Dee, 1999, p. 121. Also quoted in part in van Pelt, Case for Auschwitz, p. 149.

44 We can’t know for certain if the Pope had read the Vrba–Wetzler report before sending his note to Horthy, but it is very likely he knew about it, since Vrba met a papal representative in Bratislava on 20 June 1944.

45 Testimony from Reputations: Pope Pius XII: The Pope, the Jews and the Nazis, produced by Jonathan Lewis, executive producer Laurence Rees, transmitted on BBC2 in 1995.

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid.

48 Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 407–8, Goebbels diary entry for 27 April 1944.

49 Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader, Penguin, 2009, p. 342.

Chapter 18: Murder to the End

1 PRO FO 371/42809, online at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/worldwar2/theatres-of-war/eastern-europe/investigation/camps/sources/docs/5/transcript.htm.

2 Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum (eds.), The Bombing of Auschwitz, St Martin’s Press, 2000, Martin Gilbert, The Contemporary Case for the Feasibility of Bombing Auschwitz, p. 70. And see Martin Gilbert’s lecture to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 8 November 1993, http://www.winstonchurchill.org.

3 Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, BBC Books, 2005, pp. 248–52.

4 Neufeld and Berenbaum (eds.), The Bombing of Auschwitz, p. 68. Rees, Auschwitz, p. 248.

5 Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi–Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945, Yale University Press, 1994, p. 195.

6 Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, Pimlico, 2001, p. 127.

7 Testimony from Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, Episode 5, written and produced by Laurence Rees, transmitted on BBC2, February 2005.

8 Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial, Indiana University Press, 2002, pp. 155–6. Simonov’s first report on Majdanek was released by the Soviet embassy in Washington on 29 August 1944.

9 Filip Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, Ivan R. Dee, 1999, p. 153.

10 Henryk Świebocki, Auschwitz, 1940–1945: Central Issues in the History of the Camp, vol. 4: The Resistance Movement, Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum, 2000, pp. 244–9, and Franciszek Piper, Auschwitz, 1940–1945: Central Issues in the History of the Camp, vol. 3: Mass Murder, Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum, 2000, pp. 186–7.

11 Ibid.

12 Testimony from Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, Episode 5, transmitted on BBC2, February 2005.

13 Previously unpublished testimony.

14 Testimony from Touched by Auschwitz, transmitted on BBC2, 20 January 2015.

15 Świebocki, Auschwitz, vol. 4, pp. 232–3.

16 While Italy, Bulgaria and Romania were allies of Nazi Germany, the Finns considered the arrangement with the Nazis to be one in which they were ‘co-belligerents’, not formal allies.

17 Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936–1945, Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000, pp. 728–31.

18 David Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, Vintage, 2005, pp. 189–92.

19 See the testimony of Kurt Becher, 10 July 1947, cited in Eichmann Interrogations: Trial of Adolf Eichmann, Jerusalem, vol. VIII, pp. 2895–6. Online at http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Testimony-Abroad/Kurt_Becher-04.html note 42.

20 Laurence Rees, World War II: Behind Closed Doors, BBC Books, 2008, p. 326.

21 Max Domarus, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945, vol. 2: Untergang, R. Löwit, 1973, p. 2152, Hitler proclamation, 25 September 1944.

22 Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, vol. 4: 1941–1945, Bolchazy-Carducci, 2004, pp. 2965–6, Hitler speech, delivered by Himmler, 12 November 1944.

23 Ibid., p. 2993, Hitler’s New Year 1945 proclamation to the Wehrmacht.

24 Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle 1939–1945: From the Archives of the Auschwitz Memorial and the German Federal Archives, I. B. Tauris, 1990, p. 783, report of Józef Cyrankiewicz and Stanislaw Klodiński, 17 January 1945.

25 Previously unpublished testimony.

26 Previously unpublished testimony.

27 Previously unpublished testimony.

28 Previously unpublished testimony.

29 Andrzej Strzelecki, Auschwitz, 1940–1945: Central Issues in the History of the Camp, vol. 5: Epilogue, Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum, 2000, pp. 29–36.

30 Previously unpublished testimony.

31 Previously unpublished testimony.

32 Shmuel Krakowski, ‘Massacre of Jewish Prisoners on the Samland Peninsula – Documents’, Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 24 (1994), pp. 349–87, here p. 367. See also Janina Grabowska, K. L. Stutthof, Temmen, 1993, p. 60.

33 Schoschana Rabinovici, Dank meiner Mutter, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009, pp. 220–47.

34 Daniel Blatmann, Die Todesmärsche 1944/45. Das letzte Kapitel des nationalsozialistischen Massenmords, Rowolth Verlag, 2010, p. 203.

35 Irene Sagel-Grande, H. H. Fuchs and C. F. Rüter, Justiz und NS-Verbrechen. Sammlung deutscher Strafurteile wegen nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen 1945–1966, vol. XIV, University Press Amsterdam, 1976. Massenvernichtungsverbrechen in Lagern, KZ Stutthof, Herbst 1944 (Lfd. Nr. 446: LG Bochum vom 16.12.1955, 17 Ks 1/55), pp. 147–234, here pp. 156–60.

36 Ian Kershaw, The End: Germany 1944–45, Allen Lane, 2011, p. 234.

37 Strzelecki, Auschwitz, vol. 5, pp. 35–6.

38 Kershaw, The End, p. 334.

39 Previously unpublished testimony, and from Rees, Auschwitz, p. 270.

40 Testimonies held at Lund University, Sweden, Testimony no. 22 at www.ub.lu.se/en/voices-from-ravensbruck-3.

41 Ibid., http://www3.ub.lu.se/ravensbruck/interview18.pdf.

42 Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Little, Brown, 2015, p. 568.

43 Laurence Rees, Their Darkest Hour, Ebury Press, 2007, p. 112.

44 Rees, Auschwitz, p. 272.

45 Testimony from Himmler, Hitler and the End of the Reich, transmitted on BBC2, 2001.

46 Ibid.

47 Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil II: Diktate 1941–1945, vol. 15, K. G. Saur, 1995, p. 514, entry for 15 March 1945.

48 Ibid., p. 521, entry for 16 March 1945.

49 Ibid., p. 564, entry for 22 March 1945.

50 Reproduced in Felix Kersten, Totenkopf und Treue. Heinrich Himmler ohne Uniform. Aus den Tagebuchblättern des finnischen Medizinalrats Felix Kersten, Mölich, 1952, pp. 358–9, Himmler to Kersten, 21 March 1945.

51 Leaflet 2 of the White Rose protest, http://www.white-rose-studies.org/Leaflet_2.html. Hans and Sophie were both caught and executed in February 1943.

52 http://db.yadvashem.org/righteous/family.html?language=en&itemId=9221536.

53 Estimate of Johannes Tuchel, head of the German Resistance Memorial Center, http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/press/2007/museum-created-germans-hid/.

54 Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 229–30.

55 Ian Kershaw, ‘The Persecution of the Jews and German Popular Opinion in the Third Reich’, Yearbook of Leo Baeck Institute, vol. 26 (1981), pp. 261–89, here p. 284. Also Laurence Rees, The Nazis: A Warning from History, BBC Books, 1997, p. 223.

56 Previously unpublished testimony.

57 Previously unpublished testimony and from Rees, Darkest Hour, p. 210.

58 Previously unpublished testimony.

59 Felix Kersten, The Kersten Memoirs, Hutchinson, 1956, pp. 286–90.

60 Testimony from Himmler, Hitler and the End of the Reich, transmitted on BBC2, 2001.

61 Kershaw, Hitler: Nemesis, p. 819.

62 Domarus, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen, vol. 2, pp. 2236–7, 2239, Hitler’s Political Testament, 29 April 1945.

63 Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944, Phoenix Books, 2002, p. 221, 18 January 1942.

64 Interview with Professor Sir Ian Kershaw conducted by Laurence Rees in 2009 for the educational website WW2History.com, http://ww2history.com/experts/Sir-Ian-Kershaw/Hitler-and-the-Holocaust.

65 See, for instance, pp. 259–60 for Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil II, vol. 3, K. G. Saur, 1994, pp. 557–63, entry for 27 March 1942.

66 Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 731.

67 Previously unpublished testimony.

Postscript

1 http://ww2history.com/experts/David-Cesarani/Hitler-s-ruthlessness-vs-Stalin-s.

2 Laurence Rees, Their Darkest Hour, Ebury Press, 2007, pp. viii–ix.

3 Ibid., especially p. ix.