Persecution and murder, even mass murder, became the industrial-scale slaughter
of the Holocaust as a direct consequence of Germany’s military victories. Until 1941,
most of Europe’s Jewish population was not under German control. The invasion of the
Soviet Union changed that situation. Persecution in Germany in the 1930s escalated to a
campaign of mass murder in Poland in 1939, a policy that continued in the wake of the
German advance in Russia in 1941. But the Holocaust proper, the change from murder
squads (Einsatzkommandos) to murder factories, was effected in 1942. The new policy
of wholesale murder, genocide, and of the industrial process to achieve it in dedicated
death camps such as Auschwitz was decided at the notorious Wannsee Conference of
20 January 1942, convened by Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler’s SS deputy.
Hitler himself was careful never to affix his signature to a document ordering genocide.
As a result, there are scholars, as well as apologists, who argue that he did not know what
was going on. That is unconvincing (Longerich, 2005). The Holocaust, as the genocidal
programme was to be known to history, was always implicit in Nazi ideology, and the
intention to carry it through was articulated guardedly in Hitler’s speeches and explicitly
in conversations with his intimates. It was opportunistic in that Germany could imple-
ment genocide only when it controlled most of the Jewish population of Europe. The war
provided both the political and the ethical cover for the programme, as well as the historic
opportunity. The death camps with gas chambers were invented to solve the ‘problem’
of how to kill people in numbers that overwhelmed the physical and moral–psychological
capacities of the SS murder squads. But the policy of genocide itself was anything but
improvised. In the 1930s, Hitler might have been amenable to a policy of mass Jewish
emigration, but by 1939 such an option was neither logistically nor politically feasible.
The Holocaust always lurked as a strong probability in Hitler’s firm commitment to the
seizure of land in the East to provide a racially pure Aryan state.
From a narrowly strategic perspective, as has been said, the Holocaust may be viewed
as a costly irrelevance. It tied up invaluable manpower and railway assets, and above all
it blackened further the already dark reputation of the regime. Indeed, so heinous was the
policy of industrial-scale killing that the Allies initially were sceptical of the reports of
genocide that they received. Recall that the Holocaust proper was perpetuated from 1942
to 1945, albeit in succession to a growing record of mass murder in the earlier years. The
murder of Jews and others contributed nothing at all strategically positive for the German
war effort. That said, it must not be forgotten that Hitler’s was an ideological war. His
Germany was not fighting to improve its competitive place in the hierarchy of nations.
Rather, he was fighting to conquer first Europe and then the whole world. Cleansing
Europe of its Jewish inhabitants was not simply a bonus generated by military success:
it was at the heart of what gave military success its purpose and meaning. Hitler may
have loved war, but he had a definite and sincerely held political and cultural vision. The
Holocaust was a cultural necessity for Nazi Germany. It cannot be understood in strategic
terms, save as a vital part of the Nazi vision that could be enabled only as consequence
of strategic success. It is worth noting that in addition to the 6 million Jews who were
murdered, at least a further 6 million people died in concentration camps and in the
network of Germany’s slave labour camps and industrial facilities. Also, as was noted
earlier, at least 3.3 million Russian POWs died.
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