ABSTRACT
When Russian armies occupied Berlin in May 1945 they brought defeat to the Third Reich and an end to the war in Europe. The world then discovered the enormity of one of the greatest of the ‘crimes against humanity’ of the twentieth century. This was what the German Nazi state under Adolf Hitler between 1941 and 1945 called the Endlösung (or Final Solution; see Roseman 2002 and Browning 2004). This ‘final solution’ of the ‘Jewish problem’ saw more than 3 million Jews gathered up after 1941 from all over occupied Europe and killed in four purpose-built ‘death camps’. Millions more had already been liquidated, especially in Poland and Russia, by mass shootings carried out in the wake of invading German armies. Yet the ‘final solution’ was only part of a larger policy exercise designed to create a ‘racially hygienic’ society in Germany. Children and adults with physical and mental disabilities, psychiatric patients, Russians, Poles and Sinti, homosexuals and people with ‘antisocial tendencies’ had all been swept up into camps or clinics and killed (Burleigh 1994). The Nazis’ policy used all of the resources of modern government, including scientific research, universities, modern industrial technology and the resources of a large bureaucracy. For some it is an inexplicable event defying rational explanation. For others it is just one instance of a much larger problem of crimes by states committed against humanity (Robertson 1999).
