So you assume and this as you see from internal correspondence, it is clear, Himmler, next year, reports to Hitler that we killed 365,000 partisans, of which 350,000 of them were Jewish. This was complete lunacy. If that was one group, which was not capable of carrying out successful partisan activities were the Jews. Now I will come back to this and talk about Jewish partisans but you can understand that Jews, living in they were not very successful. But in any case, at this time, when the partisan movement became successful, by that time, very few Jews left but they were talking to themselves this way. We have evidence that in 1944, Nazi leaders writing to one another that our greatest enemies are the Jews, at the time when most Jews were already dead. Now, this is madness. This is what I want to stress, the madness of the Nazi enterprise. This is crazy stuff, what were these people thinking? We killed men because they are partisans, and in order for us to carry out our mission, we have to reduce the possibility of resistance. What about children, how about women, how about old people? They do agonize over it for a few days. They come up with their explanation. If we don't kill the children, they will take revenge on us when they grow up. We kill the women because they would have to be fed, and it's easier to kill them than to feed them. So there are steps here. Even at this point, when we've really reached the apogee because this is the, I will be arguing a little later today but the most horrendous period of the Holocaust was the second half of 1941. But you can see the step by step, how they arrived at it and how long it took. You know this discussion about intentionalist and structuralist and intentionalists say that it was already inherent in Hitler's program in the 1920s. Then indeed, as Michael Feiler rightly pointed out, it's very important that Hitler said in January 1939 that if the Jews will push the world into another devastating war, it will be the Jews who will be exterminated. Yes, the Nazis in the course of the 1930s were talking all the time how to get rid of the Jews but getting rid of the Jews, and actually shooting them, it's not easy, even for crazy Nazis, it doesn't come easily. For us, the character of understanding of this ordinary man and I am using the title of the book, what they were doing, or how they saw themselve,s it seems to me, is the central question of the Holocaust, as far as I'm concerned. Let me read something from Himmler, which is relevant for us. Now, to be sure, this, Himmler was saying this in October 1943, and he was talking to the officers, people who were responsible for the organization of the mass killing. By the way, this speech survives in a gramophone recording and it can be found on the Internet. I am quoting Himmler now. I also want to refer here very frankly to a very difficult matter. We can now very openly talk about this among ourselves and yet we will never discuss this publicly. Let us thank God we have within us enough self evident fortitude never to discuss it among us and we never talked about it. Every one of us was horrified, and yet, every one of us clearly understood that we will do it next time, when an order is given, and then it becomes necessary. I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the extermination of the Jewish people. This is something that is easily said. The Jewish people will be exterminated, says every party member. This is very obvious, it is in our program. Elimination of Jews, extermination, a small matter and then they turn up, upstanding 80 million Germans and each one has his decent Jew. They say the others are all swine but this particular one is a splendid Jew but none has observed it, endured it, most of us here know that what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other. When there are 500 or even there are 1,000, to have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person with exceptions due to human weaknesses has made this tough and it is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of. Because we know how difficult it would be for us if we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and rebel rousers in every city but with bombings, with the burden and with the hardships of the war. The interesting thing is that the Nazis had a tendency to feel sorry for themselves, how difficult it is to do. Indeed, let's see, how was it done? The Ansatz commander would ride into town, they ordered the Jews to gather together, they received help from the local population of finding Jews, took them out of the town, and killed them. Whether they killed them, one by one with in the neck, or concentrated fire, it varied, there were different methods. There was the so called sardine method, in which the Jews were compelled to dig it a grave, a hole in which the Jews were made to lie down in one way and then they were shot one by one. Then came the next row where the leg went to the head and the head to the leg and they were shot and then, when there were three or four of these rows, the ditch was covered up. Now, on occasion, they had help of local auxiliaries, especially in the Ukraine. Mostly for carrying out the most distasteful tasks, such as shooting children. One particular event took place outside of Kiev, where they gathered something like 33,000 or 34,000 Jews, this is September 1941, and shot them. This is at Babi Yar. This, so far up to this point, it was the largest number of massacre in any given moment all at once. Now, I will come back to this, what the population knew and what the population participated in what was going on but at the moment, my interest is still the people who carried out these tasks. They were supplied with alcohol. That made it easier. In the case of Babi Yar, evidently, the massacre took place two days and the personnel was changing every three or four hours. So you had to shoot people only for three or four hours, then you can go home and drink. What was evident of the Nazi leadership, the Nazi leadership made it clear that they disapprove of clear examples of sadism. Even though you have to amuse yourself with a little particular sports machen, make a sport out of it, it's okay but actually enjoying it, that was not the behavior of a good Nazi. You had to do it because this was your task. Now, why did people do it? Those who said that, actually, I would rather go to the front, could have done it. That is, you were not forced, you were not punished if you wanted to opt out. To be sure, you would have been sent to the front, which had it's disadvantages, such as the likelihood of dying was much greater and the massacres went on. Now ultimately, starting in the fall of 1941, extermination camps were set up but one reason and, of course, I am talking about a different occasion but one reason for setting up extermination camps was to make the task easier for the perpetrator. Because think of it, it's an unseemly task to work in an extermination camp but still this hands on of actual having to shoot old people, children, is somehow even more difficult to take than the behavior of concentration camp guards who made the concentration camps, extermination camps, function. There is something personal about actually shooting people and then, of course, this is a remarkable phenomenon, that the victims were overwhelmingly more numerous than the perpetrator. That is, four or five Germans and an auxiliary group was enough to kill thousands and the system worked. So, as I was saying, there were several waves. The first wave was is more disorganized in the first months and then in the winter, and this went on as long as the war went on. First, they buried people in mass graves but when it become clear, in 1944, that they were losing the war, they had an organized action to dig up the graves to get the bodies and burn them in such a way as there would be one layer of bodies, one of layer fire, of wood doused with gasoline and burn them. But of course, there was so many bodies that eliminating the evidence was, of course, impossible and plenty remained. Now whether the extermination was more determined at the time when they were already losing the war or in the first stages, this is a somewhat debated issue but we do know that it never stopped.
