Inconvenient
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The Missing Hitler "Orders"
As shocking as it may seem, no order for the extermination of the Jews written or authorized by Adolf Hitler has ever been discovered. Popular media frequently suggests that there is a significant amount of material from Hitler's hand that ordered a vast extermination program. The historical evidence is just the opposite. The result of this situation is that many historians presume that the order was transmitted orally or through "winks and nods." Such a position is purely theoretical and is often used to support a predetermined historical or political bias. What follows is a series of quotes from various historians, writers and thinkers who have examined this question. "There does not exist then, anything like a written order signed
by [Hitler] for the extermination of the Jews in Europe." "Despite the great harvest of Nazi documents captured by the Allies
at the end of the war, it is precisely the documents concerning the
process of the formation of the idea of the final solution of the
Jewish question that are missing, to the point that up until the
present it is difficult to say how, when, and exactly by whom the order
to exterminate the Jews was given." "For in the table talk, the speeches, the documents or the recollections
of participants from all those years not a single concrete reference
of [Hitler's] to the practice of annihilation has come down to us. No
one can say how Hitler reacted to the reports of the Einsatzgruppen,
whether he asked for or saw films or photos of their work, and whether
he intervened with suggestions, praise, or blame. When we consider that
he ordinarily transformed everything that preoccupied him into rampant
speechmaking, that he never concealed his radicalism, his vulgarity,
his readiness to go to extremes, this silence about the central concern
of his life- involving, as it did in his mind, the salvation of the
world - seems all the stranger." "Insofar as no one has yet discovered a written trace of this order
[to liquidate the Jews under German control] in the sources which have
been exploited up to the present, and insofar as it seems unlikely,
it is incumbent on the historian to date it as precisely as possible
by appealing to interpretation. Since the methods and the hypotheses
on this subject are very numerous, we find ourselves confronted with
very diverse opinions." "For the want of hard evidence -- and in 1977 I offered, around the
world, a thousand pounds to any person who could produce even one wartime
document showing explicitly that Hitler knew, for example, of Auschwitz.
My critics resorted to arguments ranging from the subtle to the sledgehammer
(in one instance, literally). They postulated the existence of Fuehrer
orders without the slightest written evidence of their existence. ...Of
explicit, written, wartime evidence, the kind of evidence that could
hang a man, they have produced not one line." "To the present day a written order by Hitler regarding the destruction
of the European Jewish community has not been found, and, in all probability,
this order was never given." " The New York Times' ... editorial (December 2, 1942)
claimed that 'Of Germany's 200,000 Jews in 1939 all but 40,000 have
been deported or have perished,' while going on to assert that 'according
to evidence in the hands of the [U.S.] State Department, an order of
Adolf Hitler demanding the extermination of all Jews in all territories
controlled by Germany' was known to exist. Researchers nearly 40 years
later were still searching for that order, or information leading to
anyone who might have ever seen it at any time." "No written document containing or reporting an explicit command
to exterminate the Jews has come to light thus far. This does not of
course mean that such direct evidence will not appear in the future.
In the meantime, the presumption must be that the order or informal
injunction to mass-murder Jews was transmitted orally." "The process by which total extermination replaced resettlement in
Madagascar or 'the East' as the so-called final solution of the Jewish
question remains unclear. No written order by Hitler for the extermination
of the Jews has been discovered and the evidence of an oral order is
only indirect. The chronology of the development of the extermination
programme is also confused." "The archives torn from the bowels of the Third Reich, the depostions
and accounts of its chiefs permit us to reconstruct in their least detail
the birth and the development of its plans for aggression, its military
campaigns, and the whole range of processes by which the Nazis intended
to reshape the world to their pattern. Only the campaign to exterminate
the Jews, as concerns its completion, as well as in many other essential
aspects, remains steeped in fog. Psychological inferences and considerations,
third- or fourth-hand accounts, allow us to reconstruct the developments
with a considerable verisimilitude. Certain details, nevertheless, will
remain unknown forever. As concerns the concept proper of the plan for
total extermination, the three or four principal actors are dead. No
document remains, and has perhaps never existed." "What became known in high Nazi circles as the Fuehrer Order on
the Final Solution apparently was never committed to paper -- at
least no copy of it has yet been unearthed in the captured Nazi documents.
" "One cannot fix the exact moment when Hitler gave the order- without
doubt never drawn up in writing - to exterminate the Jews." |