History is littered with genocide but none compares to the diabolism of the Third Reich, writes Kevin Myers
Die Endlosung, the final solution, the extermination of Europe's Jews, was administratively agreed upon at the Wannsee conference in Berlin in January 1942. Hitler had probably made up his mind to exterminate world Jewry after he had declared war against the US the month before. But before the 15 pencils and pads were laid neatly around the large mahogany table in the lakeside Wannsee mansion, the momentum towards genocide had been gathering from deep within European history.
Widespread anti-Semitism was but one factor in the creation of the necessary psychology for mass murder. After all, it had long existed in Europe. The Jews had been chased out of England and Spain in the middle ages and had sought refuge in the vast and relatively unpopulated tracts around the Vistula. Subsequently, anti-Semitism had remained a feature of most societies - but without it being expressed in terms of organised mass murder.
The arrival of Leninist totalitarianism brought with it the great enabling idea that the state - not law, nor monarch nor pontiff - was the supreme authority. And this was not some uniquely Christian perversion. The notion that the population of the state could be murderously engineered was first enunciated by the Jewish Bolshevist Gregory Zinoviev in September 1918.
"To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must win over to our side 90 million out of the hundred millions of the inhabitants of Russia under the Soviets. As for the rest of them, we have nothing to say to them: they must be exterminated."
The annihilation of class enemies became a commonplace under the Soviet Union: but though mass murder became a feature of the purges, the primary purpose of the infamous Gulag was to supply the state with free labour. The idea of a death camp, where the state used industrial principles to maximise the output of not economic products but dead humans, was the singular achievement of the Third Reich.
Of course, killing one's tribal enemy is as old as mankind. Dead Philistines and Egyptians brought a sombre joy to the authors of the Old Testament. Even the term genocide applies to earlier events. The Mongols are said to have killed 35 million Chinese peasants in the 14th century, and though modern Turkey hotly disputes the word to describe the Armenian massacres in 1915 - largely, as it happens, by Kurds - many historians feel the term fits. But nothing in history quite compares with the Third Reich's diabolism.
The Final Solution actually began with a euthanasia programme in German hospitals. Eight thousand children were killed with the barbiturate luminol.
Other experiments revealed the efficacy of gassing. The gun also proved useful: the final programme to rid the Reich of the mentally ill involved shooting 50,000 patients.
When in January 1939, Hitler publicly promised the extermination of the Jewry of Europe in the event of war, he had probably still not decided on the wholesale murder of the entire population of Jews. More likely, what he had in mind was the elimination of the Jews of the east and the deportation to Madagascar of the "civilised" Jews of Germany.
That option was ruled out by the continued maritime dominion of the Royal Navy: hence, as his "Jewish problem" mounted with his victories in the East, the Final Solution.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of this programme was its irrationality - though to be sure, it was not entirely irrational. Jews who could work experienced an even worse fate than those who were killed outright: they were worked to death.
But there was nonetheless something bizarrely dysfunctional about reducing doctors, physicists and engineers to manual slave labour. To have used their intellect would, of course, have undermined the underlying thesis of the "untermensch".
Contrary to popular mythology, Nazi Germany was not a single monolith, remorselessly and ruthlessly obeying orders from the apex. The general tone was set by Hitler, but his will was imposed through a myriad of competing agencies. Even the implementation of the Final Solution involved many organisations, orchestrated by the formal host of the Wannsee conference, Adolf Eichmann. Even individuals involved varied startlingly. The elimination of Jews could be executed by the exquisitely-mannered, Mozart-loving Catholic intellectual Artur Seyss-Inqart, the butcher of the Netherlands, or by his fellow Austrian, Odilo Globocnik, a violent and personally disgusting brute whom his fellow Nazis loathed.
It is this mix, where the mannered and outwardly cultivated consorted with the truly barbaric, which made the Third Reich so utterly evil. Thus the unspeakable was fastidiously recorded: Idi Amin meets bureaucracy. On December 29th, 1942, Hitler received a report from Himmler written using a special large typeface because of the Führer's failing eyesight. It declared that in the Ukraine alone, special units had executed 363,211 Jews; and in all that murderous filth, someone was counting. But it was the fate of the Jews of Salonika which underlines the military insanity of the Final Solution. Using scarce railway resources at the height of the war, 45,000 were sent the 1,600 km to the muddy horrors of Auschwitz. Just three survived.
From the opening days of the war, anti-Semitism had been its keynote, as the Volkdeutsche Selbschultz - auxiliary units of ethnic Germans in Poland - fell on their Jewish neighbours, and murdered them simply because they were Jews.
They were the pioneers for all that followed. Two million Soviet Jews shot or gassed in situ. Half a million Polish Jews killed in their ghettoes. Up to two million Jews killed in Treblinka. Nor was it a German affliction alone. Ukrainians and Balts in particular were enthusiastic Jew-killers, and Romanian fascists murdered a quarter of a million Jews.
So Auschwitz stands as a useful concrete symbol of the greatest crime in Europe's history: but the Final Solution could anyway have occurred without it. Moreover, it had been foreshadowed by Stalin's camps, and its liberation did not spell the end of murderous racism on the continent.
Incredibly, the first post-war anti-Semitic pogrom occurred in Poland a few months later, and the glories of Bosnia lay half a century ahead.