In 1941 Hitler ordered the extermination of the "Jewish-Bolshevist intelligentsia" and the elimination of every potential enemy in the occupied Eastern territories. He was fully aware of mass executions of Jewish civilians in these territories.

In mid September 1941 Hitler ordered the beginning of mass deportations from Germany to ghettos in Eastern Europe. During autumn 1941 and the following winter, when preparation for the Final Solution in Europe were in full swing, Hitler spoke at various occasions openly about the annihilation of the Jews in Europe.

From a number of letters and speeches of SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler it becomes clear, that he referred to the Holocaust as a task which he had to carry out on the behalf of the highest authority in the Third Reich - Adolf Hitler.

In 1941, Himmler summoned Rudolf Hoess, SS Kommandant of the largest killing center ever created, the death camp Auschwitz. He told him that "the Fuhrer had given the order for a Final Solution of the Jewish Question" and that "we, the SS, must carry out that order."

In December 1942, Himmler sent a note to Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo, in which he stated:

"The Fuhrer gave orders that the Jews and other enemies in France should be arrested and deported. This should take place, however, only once he has spoken with Laval about it. It is a matter of 6-700.000 Jews."

Private diaries of Nazi propaganda maestro Joseph Goebbels and Himmler unearthed from the secret Soviet archives show that Adolf Hitler personally ordered the mass extermination of Jews on December 12, 1941, during a meeting of Nazi German regional governors in the chancellery.

As Goebbels wrote: "With regards to the Jewish Question, the Fuhrer decided to make a clean sweep ..."

At the Klessheim conference on the 17 and 18 April 1943, according to the protocol, Hitler noted, in regard to the Jews in Poland: "If the Jews there don't want to work they will be shot. If they cannot work, they must rot. They should be treated like tubercular bacillus which could attack healthy bodies. That is not cruel - if one keeps in mind that even innocent natural beings like hares and deer must be killed so that no damage occurs."

In Germany concentration camps were set up after 1933 to detain without legal procedure Jews, Communists, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others. During world war II extermination, or death, camps were established for the sole purpose of killing men, women, and children.

In the most notorious camps - Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor and Majdanek in Poland, Buchenwald and Dachau in Germany - more than 6 million people, mostly Jews and Poles, were killed in gas chambers. Millions of others were also interned during the war, and a large proportion died of gross mistreatment, malnutrition, and disease.

Louis Bülow   ©2004-06
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