ABSTRACT
In 1942, Reinhard Heydrich assembled a number of senior officials and SS officers in Berlin and told them that he had been appointed to prepare and implement ‘the final solution of the Jewish question’. The Wehrmacht was not invited. Most historians agree that the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 does not mark the starting point of the Holocaust. The systematic murder of the Jews was already under way by then. Since the beginning of the 1960s, there has been a wealth of serious scholarship on both the destruction process and the Hitler era. Although it was Andreas Hillgruber who in 1969 stressed the close connection between the Nazi racial policy and the course of the war, historians have not yet closely linked the history of the Holocaust with that of the Second World War, as Michael R.Marrus observed twenty years later. I agree with his observation. An analysis of the broad pattern of racism in the Nazi ideology, not only anti-Semitism, and its transformation during the war, of the linkage between the concepts of Volksgemeinschaft (national community) and Lebensraum with that of racial purification, of the interaction between the euphoria over Barbarossa and the Europe-wide mass murder of Jews, and of the Wehrmacht as an instrument of destruction, is still on the historical agenda. Only when we give as much attention to the war years as to the period before 1939 can we arrive at both an adequate interpretation of the Third Reich and a deeper understanding of what happened to European Jewry.
