No Written Order from Hitler to Exterminate Jews

The claim is technically correct on its specific point. No written order signed by Adolf Hitler instructing the killing of European Jewry has been found in the German archives, and no historian claims one has been found. The deniers’ use of this fact is the move of treating the absence of one specific kind of document as the absence of the operation. The operation existed. The chain of authority for it ran from Hitler to Himmler to Heydrich and through them to the operational SS. Hitler issued his orders verbally, in face-to-face meetings, often with no third-party present and no minute taken. This was the Hitler operating style across the entire German government, well-documented by his civil servants, generals and ministers. The argument that the killing did not happen because no Hitler signature is on a kill-the-Jews memorandum is the argument that nothing Hitler ordered verbally ever happened.

How Hitler issued orders

The Hitler decision-making style is one of the most studied aspects of the Third Reich. Hitler did not generally issue written orders for major decisions. He held meetings, often with one or two senior subordinates, and gave verbal instructions; the subordinates then went away and implemented those instructions through their own bureaucratic channels. The Hitler Chancellery (the Reichskanzlei) maintained no comprehensive record of his instructions. The Führer Headquarters at Wolfsschanze, the Berghof and elsewhere produced limited paperwork. The principal exceptions were major public Führer Decrees (Führererlasse) on matters of state structure, which were drafted formally and signed; and, in the military sphere, Führer Directives (Führerweisungen) for major military operations, which were drafted by the OKW and signed.

The killing of European Jewry was not the kind of operation that produced a Führer Decree, because Hitler’s express policy was that it not be discussed in writing. Himmler’s order to all SS officers, repeated in his Posen speech of 4 October 1943, was that the operation was a matter of strict secrecy and was not to be referred to in correspondence. This was the documented policy. To expect a written Hitler order on a matter that the regime’s own documented policy specified must not be put in writing is to expect the regime to have failed at its own document-control practice.

The verbal-order trail

The verbal orders, by contrast, are documented in the testimony of those who received them. Rudolf Höss, in his Nuremberg testimony of 15 April 1946 and his Polish trial testimony of 1947, said that Himmler had personally summoned him to Berlin in summer 1941 and told him: “The Führer has ordered the final solution of the Jewish question. We, the SS, must carry out this order.” Höss had not seen a written order; he had been told verbally by Himmler that there was one and that Hitler had given it. Adolf Eichmann, in his Jerusalem trial testimony of 1961 and in the Sassen tapes of 1957, gave the same chain of authority. Eichmann said that Heydrich had told him in autumn 1941: “The Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews.” Heydrich had been told the same thing, by Himmler, in turn citing Hitler. The chain of verbal orders was attested by every senior officer who survived to testify.

The Höss and Eichmann attestations were given by men who had no incentive to invent the chain. They were on trial for their lives. The chain implicated them as having acted on orders, which was the only available defence. They could have invented (in Eichmann’s case, they sometimes did invent) any number of details about the operation; they could not have invented the chain of authority because the chain of authority was the structure of an organisation that had hundreds of further witnesses, all of whom would have known if the chain had been falsified.

The corroborating documents

The verbal-order chain is also corroborated by the surviving documents that were not the missing kill-order memo. The Göring authorisation of 31 July 1941 to Heydrich, instructing the preparation of “a comprehensive solution” to the Jewish question, is a written document on Reichsmarschall letterhead, signed by Göring, addressed to Heydrich. It is one document upstream of the operational planning. The Wannsee Protocol of January 1942 is the inter-ministerial coordination document. The Höfle Telegram of January 1943 is the operational tally document. The Korherr Report of March 1943 is the running statistical report to Himmler. None of these is the Hitler signature the deniers demand, but together they document an operation that is implementing a policy that someone at the top has authorised.

Himmler’s own diary, the Goebbels diary, the Hitler speeches and the Posen recording all attest, at different documentary levels, that Hitler was the source of the policy. The pattern of attribution from Himmler to Hitler in the contemporary documents is consistent and pervasive. The argument that this is all coincidence, and that Hitler was being credited for an operation he did not in fact authorise, requires the listener to believe that Himmler’s diary, Goebbels’s diary, Hitler’s own public speeches, the Höss testimony, the Eichmann testimony, and the entire SS chain of command, were all in error about who had authorised them. This is impossible.

The historiography

The standard scholarly position is set out in Christopher Browning’s The Origins of the Final Solution (2004), which traces the evolution of the Hitler decisions across 1941; in Peter Longerich’s The Unwritten Order (2001), which deals specifically with the absence of the written order and its meaning; and in the various Hitler biographies. The historiography is unanimous that Hitler was the source of the policy, that the verbal-order trail is documented, and that the absence of a written order is the consequence of Hitler’s documented operating style and of the regime’s documented secrecy policy on this specific operation. The deniers cite the absence as evidence; the scholars treat it as evidence of the regime’s success in not putting the order in writing.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it sets a documentary bar (a Hitler-signed extermination order) that the regime explicitly designed not to produce, and then treats the regime’s success in not producing it as evidence that the operation did not happen. Every other element of the documentary record (the Göring authorisation, the Wannsee Protocol, the Höfle Telegram, the Korherr Report, the Himmler diary, the Goebbels diary, the Hitler speeches, the Höss testimony, the Eichmann testimony) is dismissed as not being the missing memo. To accept the denial is to accept that no documented historical operation can ever be established without a single specific kind of document, even when that kind of document was deliberately not produced. The standard is set to be unmeetable.

How did Hitler actually issue orders? What did Höss attest? What did Eichmann attest? Where can the chain of verbal authority be read?

See also

• Adolf Hitler
• Heinrich Himmler
• Adolf Eichmann
• Rudolf Höss
• Reinhard Heydrich
• The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution

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Sources

• Hermann Göring to Reinhard Heydrich, authorisation for the “comprehensive solution to the Jewish question”, 31 July 1941, Nuremberg Document PS-710
• Wannsee Conference Protocol, 20 January 1942, House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial, Berlin
• Höfle Telegram, 11 January 1943, decoded by GCHQ Bletchley Park, file HW 16/23, The National Archives, Kew
• Richard Korherr, Die Endlösung der europäischen Judenfrage, March and April 1943, Nuremberg Document NO-5193
• Heinrich Himmler, Posen speech to SS officers, 4 October 1943, audio recording in the Bundesarchiv, Koblenz; Nuremberg Document PS-1919
• Heinrich Himmler, Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42, edited by Peter Witte and others, Hamburger Edition, 1999
• Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher, edited by Elke Fröhlich, K. G. Saur, 1993 to 2008
• Rudolf Höss, testimony at the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 15 April 1946, in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, vol. 11, Nuremberg, 1947
• Rudolf Höss, Kommandant in Auschwitz, edited by Martin Broszat, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1958
• Adolf Eichmann, testimony at his trial, Jerusalem, 1961, transcript in The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem, State of Israel, 1992 to 1995
• Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, Knopf, 2014
• Peter Longerich, The Unwritten Order: Hitler’s Role in the Final Solution, Tempus, 2001
• Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, W. W. Norton, 2000
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Adolf Hitler” and “Hitler’s Role in the Holocaust”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org