Holocaust (1933–1945) personal intentions were not murderous from the start, for they were The shift in Germany’s fortunes of war against the Allied powers in 1942 added urgency to Hitler’s parallel war against the Jews Starting systematically from 1942, Jews who had been earlier herded into urban ghettos by Nazi overseers and local collaborators were shipped out of the ghettos to concentration camps, including new death camps then coming on line for the explicit purpose of industrialized mass murder The full nightmare of the Shoah would soon be reached The use of euphemism about the Holocaust persisted to the top of the Nazi hierarchy, from Adolf Hitler through Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, and many others directly involved in its most noxious and heinous acts Even the vulgar Nazi term “extermination” helped portray Jews as vermin, and thus helped to justify mass murder One top Nazi who was not shy about committing his murderous thoughts to paper or to openly speak of them to Wehrmacht officers or to Party and government officials was Heinrich Himmler But most shied away in public from expressing the full brutality of language required to describe their crimes They also shrouded their deeds in quasi-legality, bending laws or writing new ones to fit the desired outcomes of deportation and mass murder of Jews Later Holocaust deniers thus purveyed the canard that no historian has yet produced a written order from Hitler initiating the “final solution.” Yet, everyone involved in carrying it out knew that it was their leader’s fiercest wish (“es war des Führers Wunsch”), as indeed it was also their own If they did not know the mechanics and machinery of the murder plan before the Wannsee Conference (January 20, 1942), they knew beyond doubt by the time it ended Hitler also outlined his intentions clearly in 1939 before the invasion of Poland, and again to several hundred top Wehrmacht commanders on March 30, 1941, when he spoke frankly about their moral duty to conduct a “war of annihilation” in the east against all identified as enemies of the Reich The killing program accelerated with the German invasion of Poland in 1939 (Operation FALL WEISS) Extraordinary and sweeping German victories in Poland and later in the western Soviet Union gave the worst Nazi fanatics control of most Jews in Europe As the Wehrmacht advanced into new territories, it was closely followed by special SS murder squads operating under the military euphemism Einsatzgruppen (Special Action Groups) These ruthless death commandos went on “Jew hunts” in the countryside, ferreting out refugees in the smallest hamlets In all, the Einsatzgruppen probably killed 1,500,000 Jews They also routinely murdered Communists and Roma More Jews were herded into overcrowded ghettos in the cities The largest was in Warsaw There, they awaited more systematic killing machinery in the death camps that would be built by the SS from early 1942 A controversy grew within the SS as to whether it was preferable to kill all Jews immediately, or work the able bodied to death in SS-run slave labor camps In either case, the long-term ambition was to “resettle” (kill) all Jews in Germany and then in German-occupied Europe The lands thus “cleansed” and “Jew-free” would be resettled with “racially pure” members of the German Volk Those incapable of work—the very old, children, mothers and their infants—were butchered as soon as possible, in mass shootings in the villages or as soon as the “selection” was made 532