Himmler note puts Hitler in planning for ‘Final Solution’

ASSOCIATED PRESS

BERLIN – A Berlin historian who found SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s appointment book in KGB archives says it may help settle the debate over whether Adolf Hitler personally ordered the extermination of Europe’s Jews.

The discovery has made headlines across Germany this week, where newspapers declared the “Final Solution” proven. But other historians say the researcher may be reading too much into a sketchy diary entry.

Nazi leaders decided on the extermination plan at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin on Jan. 20, 1942. But Hitler did not attend that secret meeting and the lack of a signed order or other evidence of his involvement has led to competing theories on the exact origin of the Holocaust.

Right-wing revisionists have argued that Hitler was unaware of the killings, a view rejected by mainstream historians.

Most believe that discussions by top Nazis on how to get rid of Europe’s Jews began in 1941 at the latest, either in January or in midJuly.

But in the latest edition of Werkstatt Geschichte, a historical journal, Christian Gerlach argues the Himmler diary puts the decision later and directly in Hitler’s hands.

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Gerlach notes the Wannsee Conference was initially scheduled for Dec. 9,1941, to discuss deportations of German Jews and decide who would be considered a Jew.

It was postponed, however, after the Dec. 7 bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan, a Nazi ally. Germany and the United States declared war on each other Dec. 11.

On Dec. 12, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary that in a meeting that day, Hitler recalled a 1939 speech in which he prophesied that the Jews of Europe would not survive another world war.

“Only with Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States did the war become a world war for Germany,” Gerlach wrote.

Himmler’s office diary, which Gerlach says he found in a Moscow archive while researching Nazi policies in occupied Belarus, records a meeting on Dec.18 with Hitler.

Their first point of discussion was key. Himmler wrote: “Jewish question – to be wiped out as partisans.”

Himmler had been using the partisan excuse to justify killing Jews in the Soviet Union since summer 1941.

Taken with the developments of the days previous, Gerlach insists Himmler was referring to a “basic decision of Hitler’s to murder all the Jews of Europe.”

© Associated Press. Reproduced from The Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 21, 1998

THE WORLD’S media – all the usual suspects – seized upon this news that At Last a document had been found to disprove David Irving, who had irritatingly claimed since 1975 that no historical proof existing linking Hitler to the Holocaust. Many newspapers identified him by name.

The actual document however proves less substantial than the media reports suggested. It is reproduced on this Website. As genocide expert Dr John Fox now points out, it refers to a completely different historical episode.