On January 20 1942, a group of middle-ranking German civil servants met at a villa on the shores of Lake Wansee, just outside Berlin. The away day had already been postponed once because the convenor, SS chief Reinhart Heydrich, had other pressing business. There is nowhere like the Wansee Villa which quite captures the truth of Hannah Arendt’s phrase about the banality of evil; these functionaries were tasked with solving the logistical problems involved in the elimination of millions of people, including an entire ethnic group. Their bureaucratic notes and calculations, later typed up into neat minutes, became a blueprint with a prosaic title: the Final Solution.
In his powerful new book, former BBC producer Chris Hale explores the simple (but controversial) question of the extent to which the Holocaust was a singularly German project. Some historians claim that arguably the greatest crime in human history arose from particular features in the history, culture and character of Germany and could not have been perpetrated by others. Hale suggests otherwise. While Adolf Hitler focused on the pragmatic goal of creating more living space, and might have been content with some sort of Teutonic hegemony in the East, this was not enough for Heinrich Himmler. According to Hale, the Reichsführer-SS regarded the war as “merely the prelude to the ethnic transformation of Eurasia as a Nordic Empire”. While, for Hitler, Nazism was primarily a project about German domination, Himmler was happy to recruit
non-Germans into the SS if they were
of the right stock and espoused the right ideology.
Himmler soon realised that Germany was incapable of executing the Holocaust on its own. It would need help – a lot of help. At first, it was the Einsatzgruppen – or local special action squads – who operated under licence from their new overlords in German-controlled territories. But it was not long before they were organised into an industrial SS killing machine eagerly joined by Jew-hating xenophobes from Latvia to Ireland and from Finland to Romania.
We know from the apologists who sit in national assemblies and the European Parliament that there are those who are willing to excuse the perpetrators of the Holocaust. The savagery of Anders Behring Breivit in Norway was a chilling reminder that there are those who would like to repeat it. For their opponents, complacency is not an option and if the best history helps to illuminate the present, then Hitler’s Foreign Executioners does that in spades. It helps explain how the Holocaust was a European – and not just a German – phenomenon and should be read by anyone who wants to understand more about the roots of the far right in Europe today
