The Nazis Wrote It Down, and That's How We Know

On January 20, 1942, fifteen men sat down to lunch in a lakeside villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. The meeting ran about ninety minutes. Reinhard Heydrich chaired it. Adolf Eichmann took the minutes.

The minutes listed, country by country, the Jews of Europe: about eleven million people, from Ireland to the Soviet Union. The men at the table were civil servants and SS officers, and they were there to coordinate the logistics of killing every one of them.

Thirty copies of the protocol were made. One survived. American prosecutors found copy sixteen in German Foreign Ministry files in 1947. It's still the cleanest single window into how a modern state decided to murder a people.

What happened

Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered about six million Jews. That was roughly two-thirds of the Jews living in Europe. More than a million of the dead were children.

It didn't begin with gas. It began with laws: the 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of citizenship. Then came boycotts, the November 1938 pogrom called Kristallnacht, the ghettos of occupied Poland, and starvation and disease behind the walls.

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen followed the army and shot Jews at the edge of town, into ravines and pits. At Babi Yar outside Kyiv, on September 29 and 30, 1941, the Germans' own report counted 33,771 Jews killed in two days.

Then came the camps built to kill. Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka existed for almost nothing else. Auschwitz-Birkenau combined a slave-labor camp with a killing center. About 1.1 million people died there, roughly a million of them Jews.

The victims weren't only Jews. Roma, Polish civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, the disabled and others were murdered too. But only the Jews were marked, as a people, for total annihilation. That's the line that defines the Holocaust.

The paper trail

Here's the part that surprises people. The Nazis kept books.

In October 1943, Heinrich Himmler stood before SS generals in Posen, Poland, and spoke openly about the "extermination of the Jewish people." The speech was recorded. Karl Jäger, commander of a killing unit in Lithuania, sent his superiors a tally of the dead that ran to more than 137,000 names and numbers. Trains were scheduled. Property was inventoried. Gold teeth were weighed.

The regime was so confident in its own righteousness that it filed the paperwork. When Germany collapsed, the Allies captured tons of it.

Written from inside

The victims kept records too, at terrible risk.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum organized a secret archive, code-named Oneg Shabbat. His team gathered diaries, posters, underground newspapers, eyewitness accounts and ration cards. In 1942 and 1943 they sealed them in metal boxes and milk cans and buried them. Ringelblum was murdered in 1944. Two caches were dug up from the rubble, in 1946 and 1950. Tens of thousands of pages came out of the ground.

A Polish army officer named Witold Pilecki did something almost no one would do. In September 1940 he deliberately got himself arrested so he could be sent to Auschwitz, then built a resistance network inside and smuggled out reports. He escaped in April 1943. After the war, Poland's communist regime tried him and executed him in 1948. He should be as well known as any soldier of that war.

In August 1944, prisoners forced to work in Auschwitz's killing operation, the Sonderkommando, took four photographs in secret. They passed the film out in a toothpaste tube. Four blurry frames, taken at the risk of a man's life, are among the only images of the killing in progress.

The hard parts

The world had information, and it didn't act fast enough. That's the honest record.

In June 1939 the liner St. Louis reached Havana and then Florida carrying 937 Jewish refugees. Cuba and the United States turned the ship away. It went back to Europe. Historians have traced hundreds of those passengers to deaths in the Holocaust.

In 1943, the Polish resistance courier Jan Karski slipped into the Warsaw Ghetto and a camp, then carried what he'd seen to London and Washington. He met President Roosevelt in July. The reports were real and the reaction was slow.

Allied reconnaissance planes photographed Auschwitz in 1944, but analysts were looking for factories. Nobody read the photos for the killing center until the 1970s.

None of this erases what the Allies did next. It was American, British and Soviet soldiers who ended it. But the failures are part of the record, and a record you edit for comfort isn't one.

The men who said no

The choice was always there.

In July 1942, in the Polish village of Józefów, Reserve Police Battalion 101 got orders to shoot Jewish civilians. Their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, reportedly offered the older men a chance to step out. Historian Christopher Browning, who studied the unit's postwar interrogations in Ordinary Men, found that only about a dozen of nearly five hundred did. The rest did what they were told. The ones who refused weren't punished severely. That's the damning detail.

Others chose differently at a far higher price. In October 1943, when the Germans moved to round up Denmark's Jews, ordinary Danes hid them and ferried roughly seven thousand across the water to Sweden in fishing boats. In Markowa, Poland, a farmer named Józef Ulma and his pregnant wife Wiktoria hid eight Jews in their home. In March 1944, German police shot the Jews, then the Ulmas and their six children.

The Israeli memorial Yad Vashem has honored more than 28,000 people as Righteous Among the Nations. They were a minority. They were also proof that it could be done.

Get it on record now

When American troops reached the camp at Ohrdruf in April 1945, General Dwight Eisenhower walked through it himself. He then cabled Washington asking that members of Congress and American journalists come see it for themselves. He ordered photographs and film. His reasoning, as he later explained it, was that someday someone would claim it never happened.

On April 15, CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow broadcast from Buchenwald. "I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it," he said. "For most of it, I have no words."

At Nuremberg, the main trial opened in November 1945. Chief U.S. prosecutor Robert Jackson understood that testimony can be attacked, so the case leaned heavily on the Nazis' own documents. In his opening statement he said the crimes were "so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated."

Rudolf Höss, the longtime commandant of Auschwitz, testified in 1946. He described the killing without evasion. Poland tried him and hanged him at Auschwitz in 1947.

Why the evidence matters

Denial isn't an old problem. In 2000, a London court heard a libel suit brought by the writer David Irving against historian Deborah Lipstadt, who'd called him a denier. The judge examined his work line by line and ruled that Irving had deliberately distorted the evidence. The paper trail held. That's what it's for.

Commentary: The Holocaust ended in 1945, but the hatred behind it didn't. When a mob chants for the destruction of Jews, or a campus shrugs at it, or someone claims atrocity footage is staged, the playbook is the same one the deniers have used for eighty years. Eisenhower's instinct was right. You answer lies with documents, photographs, testimony and names.

That's also why the survivors' accounts and the perpetrators' paperwork should be read by every American, and why we should be unembarrassed about saying the plain thing: this happened, here's how we know, and a free people owes it to the dead to keep the record straight. The same instinct drives the people who wrote everything down on the frontier. And the American answer that followed Pearl Harbor is part of the same story, because it's the reason the camps were ever opened.

If you want to do something with this, read one primary source this month. Höss's testimony, a survivor memoir, or the Wannsee protocol, which runs about fifteen pages. Then tell your kids what you found.