LAURENCE REES: But since there is no written order linking Hitler with the Holocaust, is it possible to argue that all of this might possibly have been originated at the Himmler, Heydrich level? Originated by them in the hope of pleasing Hitler? How certain can we be that Hitler is ultimately responsible for the Holocaust?
SIR IAN KERSHAW: Well, he’s the head of that state so could be regarded as having overall responsibility for what happens in that state. In particular in that type of leadership state where the leader’s word is actually taken more or less as law. But actually it goes beyond that, because it’s not just a matter of Hitler’s rhetoric and the fact that, as the death camps are involved in their grisly business in slaughtering millions of Jews in 1942 and ’43, Hitler actually repeats his so-called prophecy, publicly, on several occasions. But even that then is a rhetorical statement you could say. But beneath that then there are things which everybody from Himmler downwards says – he speaks about a commission, he’s following up a commission, he speaks about – as always people do – about following the wishes of the Fuehrer and so on.
This is a regime that doesn’t write down things – Hitler is a very un-bureaucratic type of leader so what you will not expect from this is a set of cabinet minutes where Hitler has said ‘right, now I’m taking the decision here and now to exterminate the Jews.’ It just simply didn’t work like that, but Hitler’s fingerprints are all over all the main steps in that. And also when it comes to all the crucial steps, such as deporting the Jews from Germany to the East into the Lodz Ghetto for example, the deportation of the Reich Jews could not be taken without Hitler’s authorisation. The imposition of the yellow star on the sleeve of German Jews in September 1940 couldn’t happen unless Hitler approved of it.
So all these steps also needed Hitler’s authorisation and approval, so it is actually just stretching credulity too far to believe that in this absolutely critical development of moving to all out genocide, where Hitler’s been speaking throughout his entire career about the need to destroy the Jews, that this somehow happens without him approving of it, authorising it and just not even knowing about it, just is not believable.
LAURENCE REES: Could we put it the other way round then, and say that this simply couldn’t have happened, if it hadn’t been for Hitler?
SIR IAN KERSHAW: Again I think you say that if you put the proposition that way: ‘no Hitler no Holocaust’, I would agree with that. By the time we’re speaking about, now in 1941 and ’42, of course you’ve got a momentum we’ve been talking about that’s built up of, in particular, the police apparatus which has its own momentum, but that momentum itself has come from a whole number of steps prior to that which Hitler has backed and approved of and ok’d at every stage and given his imprimatur to, given his authorisation to, has legitimised.
So, as the head of the state he’s actually represented these policies which have been carried in that way, so in this sense you can, I think, truly say that Hitler was absolutely essential to the carrying out of the Holocaust. So Hitler is a necessary but not sufficient cause of the overall explanation but still you’d say or I would say ‘no Hitler no Holocaust.’