The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: people/h/hitler.adolf/fuehrer-order-01

Holocaust-deniers claim that they wish to "revise" history to point
out that there is no known _written_ order from Hitler to exterminate
Jews. This is of course nothing new.  Consider this passage from
_The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich_, by William Shirer, from 1960.
Pages 964-965:

   As it worked out, the "final solution" was what Adolf Hitler had
   long had in mind and what he had publicly proclaimed even before
   the war started.  In his speech to the Reichstag on January 30,
   1939, he had said:
      If the international Jewish financiers ... should against
      succeed in plunging the nations into a world war the result will
      be ... the annihilation of the Jewish race throughout Europe.
   This was a prophecy, he said, and he repeated it five times,
   verbatim, in subsequent public utterances.  It made no difference
   that not the "international Jewish financiers" but he himself
   plunged the world into armed conflict.  What mattered to Hitler
   was that there was now a world war and that it afforded him, after
   he had conquered vast regions in the East where most of Europe's
   Jews lived, the opportunity to carry out their "annihilation."  By
   the time the invasion of Russia began, he had given the necessary
   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.  All the evidence shows that it was most probably given
   verbally to Goering, Himmler and Heydrich, who passed it down
   during the summer and fall of 1941.  A number of witnesses
   testified at Nuremberg that they had "heard" of it but none
   admitted ever seeing it.

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