HISTORIANS OF THE Third Reich have tried for years to search for the essential smoking gun — the document that shows unequivocally the moment when Hitler ordered the genocide of Europe’s Jews to begin. From everything we know about Hitler’s practice of dictatorship, such a document does not exist. There was perhaps, as Peter Longerich, author of this new study of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, suggested in an earlier volume, an “unwritten order”. But probably not even an order. Everything that could be known has been examined with forensic thoroughness.
What we have are Hitler’s prompts and nudges to those on the anti-Semitic front line to promote ever more radical solutions to the “Jewish question”. About his own paranoid vision of a world Jewish conspiracy that pitted German against Jew in
