From It Can Always Get Worse:
To summarise briefly: why the Holocaust happened is straightforward—because Adolf Hitler wished it to—but how and when
the decision was taken is debated. The debate turns largely on whether
there was a Führer Order for the Holocaust. While no such document has
ever been found, this is not surprising. There was extensive destruction
of Nazi documentation, and Hitler routinely conveyed orders verbally
anyway, so, if there was a Führer Order, it was almost certainly never
written down in the first place. Accentuating the difficulties, the
surviving records are written according to a euphemistic official Nazi
discourse that leaves room for interpretation, and Hitler—like Lenin—deliberately cultivated uncertainty within the regime about his role in the worst crimes.
Historians
are broadly divided into two camps, those who argue for a moment
between July and December 1941 when a Führer Order was issued, and those
who argue there was no “moment”, but rather an iterative process
between Hitler at the centre and various lower officials in the occupied
territories, where the Führer endorsed, rather than originated, the
escalatory steps of the Shoah.
In assessing the evidence historians are working with in coming to these divergent conclusions, one aspect I highlighted was:
SS
operatives involved in implementing the Final Solution … have uniformly
testified that their orders came directly from Hitler. There is no
reason to doubt the SS men were substantially correct, that Hitler stood
behind the fundamental decision for the Holocaust and every decision of
significance as it escalated. But it does not settle the question of a
Führer Order because none of the SS officials heard Hitler’s verbal
instruction(s) personally; they all heard of Hitler’s will through
[Heinrich] Himmler. And Himmler did not specify to his subordinates
whether, during his increasingly frequent face-to-face meetings with Hitler from the summer of 1941 onwards, the Führer had approved or initiated genocidal measures. (Read more.)
Will there be another genocide? From Welcome to Absurdistan:
Fourteen years ago I published a book one chapter of which entirely dealt with the forests fires curently
raging across Canada choking the lungs of Americans from Maine to
Chicago. It was published by Harper Collins in New York, and received a
good old fashioned push by their PR department.
I woke up
at 4 am to get on drive time in Texas and Atlanta. I must have spoken to
30 million people - in theory - the PR kept me up on the numbers each
radio host had, I spoke to the big names, including the sainted Dennis
Prager which pleased HC no end. In each interview I hit the major
highlight of the book - the most shocking crime against people and
nature - outlining how “natural regulation” installed by the UN FAO
(Food and Agriculture Organization) had made the forests thick,
desiccated: visualize a whole bunch of unthinned little trees leaching
all the water from the soil, fire ladders growing up the trees, just
waiting for a lightning strike or stupid “activist” kid to trigger
conflagration.
All over the world, these policies, these
regulations had been forced in a series of iniquitous meetings where
entire nations were placed under the rule of weedy, stupid, vicious
idiots who called themselves “scientists” employed in Turtle Bay, who
had, courtesy of the Rockefellers and a bunch of other malignant
families - basically the ones holding the debt of the New York Federal
Reserve - crowned themselves Lords of Nature. And, as I began to
understand, planned to take it all from us. (Read more.)
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