Adolf Hitler

The Holocaust happened on Hitler’s authority. He did not personally pull the triggers and did not, on the surviving documentary record, sign the order to begin the killing. None of this reduces his responsibility. He was the head of state, he had been calling for the destruction of European Jewry in public for two decades, and the killing was carried out by men who took their orders from him through a chain of command he had built. The case against him does not require a signed paper. It rests on what he said, what he authorised, what he tolerated, and what he encouraged in others.

What he had been saying

Hitler had been calling for the destruction of European Jewry in public from at least 1922. Mein Kampf, written in prison in 1924 and published in 1925, contained the framework: Jews were a parasitic race that had stabbed Germany in the back in 1918 and would have to be removed for the German nation to recover. The book sold poorly at first and is sometimes treated as if its arguments were not seriously held. They were. The same arguments appear, in nearly identical language, in Hitler’s public speeches in 1927, 1933, 1939 and 1942. He told the German public, year after year, exactly what he intended.

The most-quoted single statement is the Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939, on the sixth anniversary of his appointment as Chancellor. He said, in front of the Reichstag and on broadcast radio, that if international Jewish finance succeeded in plunging the nations into another world war, the result would be the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. The speech was given seven months before the war began. He repeated the prophecy on its anniversary every year of the war that followed, in 1940, 1941, 1942 and 1943. He treated it as a promise. The Holocaust was, by his own framing, the keeping of that promise.

What he authorised

The authorisation pattern is well-documented even though no single signed Hitler order exists. The 31 July 1941 letter from Göring to Heydrich, instructing Heydrich to make the necessary preparations for an overall solution to the Jewish question, was issued because Göring had received the authorisation from Hitler in person; Göring had no separate authority to commission a project of this scale. The Wannsee Conference of January 1942 communicated a policy that the participants understood had already been settled at the top of the regime. Himmler’s Posen speeches of October 1943, in which he explicitly described the killing as a Führer order, are the closest the documentary record comes to a formal attribution of responsibility, and they were spoken to assembled SS officers as a statement of fact.

The lack of a signed paper was deliberate. The regime under Hitler operated through what the historian Ian Kershaw called working towards the Führer: subordinates anticipated his wishes, acted on them, and received private confirmation in conversation. This made the chain of command more flexible, more deniable, and more brutal. Hitler ran the killing without a signature on any of it. Everyone who needed to know, knew.

What he knew, and when

Hitler was briefed on the killing operation regularly. Himmler reported to him at intervals through 1941 and 1942. Goebbels’s diary, which survived, contains repeated entries describing private conversations with Hitler in which Hitler discussed the killing programme in detail. The 27 March 1942 entry, in particular, has Hitler describing the prophet of his 1939 speech as proving accurate, and observing that around 60 per cent of the Jews of the General Government would have to be killed and only 40 per cent could be put to work. Goebbels recorded the conversation with approval. Hitler was, on this and similar evidence, fully informed about the scale, the methods, and the geographic spread of the killing.

He chose not to visit the killing sites. He preferred not to see the work being done. The avoidance was personal squeamishness rather than ignorance. He could discuss the killing in detail in private conversation while declining to look at the gas chambers. The two coexisted.

How he influenced the men below him

Hitler did not need to issue detailed orders because the men around him competed to anticipate his wishes. Himmler ran the killing programme as the implementation of what he understood to be Hitler’s will. Heydrich convened Wannsee on the same understanding. Eichmann organised the deportations. Hans Frank ran the Generalgouvernement, the German colonial administration of occupied Poland. Globocnik ran Operation Reinhard. Each of these men acted, in his own framing, to please the Führer. Goebbels, Göring, Speer and the wider senior leadership operated in the same way. The system depended on the certainty of each subordinate that doing what Hitler wanted would advance his career, and that doing anything else would not. Hitler did not have to demand the killing. He had only to indicate that he wanted it. The apparatus around him produced it.

This pattern made Hitler more, not less, responsible. He had built a system in which his unspoken wishes had the force of law. The deniability was structural. He could not, when the war was lost, point to any single document that incriminated him. He did not need to incriminate himself in writing because everyone around him already knew what he wanted. The system was the most efficient possible mechanism for translating private antisemitic obsession into industrial mass killing.

What he refused to stop

Several moments in the war demonstrated, by what Hitler did and did not do, that he treated the killing as a primary war aim. In 1944 the German army was retreating on every front, the railways were under increasing Allied air pressure, and rolling stock was urgently needed for military traffic. Hitler authorised the diversion of trains to the Hungarian deportations of May to July 1944, in which around 437,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz at the cost of military rail capacity that the Wehrmacht needed. The military argument was overwhelming; the political will to kill the Hungarian Jews was overriding. The decision was Hitler’s.

His political testament, dictated in the bunker on 29 April 1945, with Soviet shells falling on the Reich Chancellery above, repeated the antisemitic theme of his entire career. He blamed international Jewry for forcing the war on Germany. He commanded his successors to continue the racial struggle. He killed himself the next day. The killing of European Jewry was, even at the moment of his suicide, the central thing he wanted his successors to remember about his life.

What it adds up to

The Holocaust did not happen because of one man. It happened because a complex industrial society had been organised over a decade to make it happen. But that decade of organisation was conducted in the service of one man’s stated intention. He had told everyone what he wanted to do. He had built the apparatus for doing it. He had encouraged the men around him to go further than he himself was willing to put on paper. He had refused to stop the killing even when it cost him military resources he urgently needed. He had killed himself with the killing of European Jewry as the central public boast of his political career.

The argument over Hitler’s personal responsibility for the Holocaust has been complicated by historians for sixty years. The argument is, at one level, a real historical question; at another level, it is a category error. The Holocaust was Hitler’s policy. The men who carried it out were carrying it out for him. Without Hitler the Holocaust would not have happened. Anyone arguing otherwise has to explain how the Holocaust would have happened without him. They cannot.

See also

Sources

  • Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
  • Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination, HarperCollins, 2007
  • Joseph Goebbels diary, particularly the entry of 27 March 1942
  • Adolf Hitler, Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939
  • Heinrich Himmler, Posen speeches, 4 and 6 October 1943
  • USHMM: Adolf Hitler