The Rise of Hitler and the Foundations of Antisemitism

After reading Greg's post I've decided to start posting chronologically.
As he rightly said it is a journey.
If journeys are to have an end then surely they must first have a beginning; why not then start at the beginning?
It's as good a place as any.
With Roosevelt's death, the end of the war and disintegration of the wartime alliance and the start of the Cold War.
Everyone here has accepted the truth about the Cold War.
It was a mostly fictive construct.
A refinement of a concept as old as human civilization.
A modernist riff, -a little habanera perhaps? with a sombre jazzy tinge, A Rhapsody in Red White and Blue, the opening note soaring, twisting chameleon like. First its a train clanking downtown, then across the vast plains of America, only to grow wings to burst rocket-likethrough the clouds.
Into the atmosphere beyond.
For we are all human and we all breathe the same air.- on the ageless melody.
The cosmetic clash of civilisations refined for the post modern, post atomic age.
Roosevelt's death was one of the turning points of the century.
He had built up a genuine rapport with Stalin. Stalin trusted him( whatever trust meant to Stalin) Stalin actually liked Roosevelt. A strange pair. The cultured blueblood from the Social Register and the cunning Georgian revolutionary.
If Stalin liked Roosevelt, he respected Churchill. Churchill the adventurer, the old anti Communist , who had called for " Bolshevism to be strangled in its cradle" who had sent British men, tanks, guns and money to aid the White counter-revolutionaries.
Who had sent the British destroyer HMS Marlborough to the Crimea in 1921 to rescue the surviving Romanovs.
Churchill wanted to preserve the British Empire.
Roosevelt didn't. Although vaguely worded the United Nations charter spoke of self determination.
The Age of the European Colonial Empires was past 
Roosevelt accepted this. Many historians, many observers, many people who were actually there genuinely believed Roosevelt was serious.
Working with the Soviet Union to build a new world, not just out the ashes of the old, but one worthy of those ashes.
A new world to justify the ruins of the old.
Then Roosevelt died. Truman turned up to Potsdam. The haberdasher from Missouri.
The Senator from Pendergast. Who'd met Roosevelt all of two times as VP, Jimmy Byrne's having to hurriedly brief the new President on the Manhattan Project.
Then Atlee won the British Election 
He came to power wanting to build a new Britain. Fiercely unsentimental, unromantic and even though a product of the British public school system that had built duty to the Empire up into a religion unto itself he was an avowed anti Imperialist.
He was more concerned with nationalisation at home than with keeping distant far flung nations under the British flag 
All Stalin wanted was security.
Stalin was probably one of the least sentimental humans ever, he was fully cognizant of the vast American superiority. America was the colossus of the world .The only nuclear power. While Stalin presided over a virtual wasteland.
The richest most industrialised, parts of the Soviet Union were in ruins 
He wanted a cordon sanitaire. With friendly governments. Poland most of all. It was through Poland that both Napoleon and Hitler had invaded 
It's still a matter of fierce controversy but I think it's certainly a possibility that Stalin and Roosevelt could have worked together, probably under the aegis of the United Nations.
The Cold War as we know it was created by hawkish elements in Truman's cabinet, allied with militarists and big business.
The birth of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex.
Keenans long telegram. Nitzes memorandum, the Greek Civil War.. Churchill's Iron Curtain speech in Fulton Missouri ( Churchill didn't coin the phrase. That particular honour went to Goebbels. In a diary entry frightening in both it's cynical tone and its prescience)
The zombie corpse of the Cold War was conjured to life by Washington powerbrokers using the bones of Old Europe.
Using fear , institutional paranoia and other psy ops techniques it cemented the East West divide into the consciousness of at least 3 maybe 4 generations.
When the wall came crumbling down they took the bricks and moved on, refining the process, safe in the knowledge that internal walls are infinitely more durable.
The tin foil fantasies of Rothschild puppeteers crouched on top of the Capitol building and the Kremlin is all just bullshit
Could the Cold War have been avoided?
Possibly.
Despite the very real tensions that emerged in 44 and 45 it certainly wasn't inevitable.

Thanks Vinny.
But I wouldn't sell yourself or certain of our fellow members short.
IMHO there's a few genuinely talented historians here. 
Before I continue with the timeline I thought I'd better deal with one of the most insidious revisionist myths. One of the most destructive  lies of the Post War Era.
Like all great lies it has its roots deep in the past, feeding on the ever fertile soil of hate. That thrives under the thin crust of civilization  Feeding on those ancient lies so it can appear relevant. Just as the greatest truths are timeless,  so then the greatest lies are outside time.   Lies created anew then passed from father to son. Made new by each generation. For each generation remakes the past and it's myths in its very own image. If you want to understand how a generation sees itself, study how it views the past.
This myth is woven together from the fabric of pure hatred ,using the thread of ignorance. A fabric that's as old as it is new, as worn as it is shiny with a thread that runs like liquid cancer through the history of the last 2000 years 
The needle that binds both together is still as sharp as ever. And just as deadly too. And the hands that weave them together, as dexterously as the crusaders in 1097, as righteously as those who built the pyres for the Inquisition, as joyously as the printers who ensured Luther's words would be read, as proudly as those who pulled the hoods over their heads are the hands some of our tin foil hatted brethren want us to hold.
The myth of course is holocaust denial.
And make no mistake it is a myth.
Quite simply the Holocaust is one of the most thoroughly documented events in history.
Those who try to deny it do so out of ignorance, out of hatred, out of anti semitism.
Saying that there's valid questions still to be definitely answered.
Functionalism v Intentionalism for example.
Was the holocaust always Hitler's intention? Was the attempted destruction of European ( and World) Jewry and inevitability from the morning of January 30th 1933? When helped by the backroom intrigues of the arch conservative palace camarilla that surrounded the ageing President Von Hindenburg( already in his mid 80s and slipping into senility. An apocryphal tale has him later that very night, standing at the window of his Palace , stamping his cane in time to the martial airs of the Old Reich that blared triumphantly as the torchlight procession of SA men snaked by towards the Unter Der Linden , he turned to the old general tottering by his side and grunted " I didn't know we'd taken so many Russian prisoners") Hitler was ushered into the Chancellorship, like a newly hired valet. The conservative administrations of Von Papen, Von Schliecher ( a devious " desk general" who would be murdered by the Nazis on the Night of the Long Knifes) and Bruening having failed, and fearing the rise of communism the German establishment turned to the ex Austrian tramp, as a guarantee of the Old Order. 
As limited as the scope of his mind was, littered with the crude anti semitism of his vagabond years in Vienna( the Hitler who left Vienna in 1911 was essentially the same Hitler who died under the ruins of Berlin 34 years later. His politics and " weltanaschuung" " worldview" remaining fundamentally unchanged. Along with Wagner, whose towering apocalyptic musical visions evoked a simpler Germanised past untainted by the Christianity and Capitalism, the muddled psuedo Darwinism of Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain( who lived to 1922, acclaiming the then unknown rabble rouser as the Saviour of Germany) the greatest influence on the young would be artist was Karl Lueger, the anti Semetic mayor of Vienna. It was from Lueger
Hitler claimed to have learned his most important lesson. The formation of a nationalist party with genuine mass support. It wasn't for nothing Gefreiter Hitler, who visited the grimy backroom of an even broker Munich bierkeller on the orders of his army superiors  ( Hitler was a Verbungdienstmann ( an intelligence man) sent to spy on the countless political parties that had exploded into being in restless chaotic post war Munich) changed the name of the Deutsche Arbeiter Partei , founded by locksmith Anton Drexler and drunken playwright Dieter Eckhart, later a mentor of Hitler, to the National Socialist German Worker's Party. ) Hitler undoubtedly possessed( pre 1940 at least until megalomania set in) an uncanny genius . The ability to size up men and situations.
Like in Italy before the old guard were quickly disabused of their fantastical delusions.
The Reichstag fire and the subsequent Enabling Act in March 1933 followed by the Hindenburgs death the next year cemented the dictatorship that would end in the flames and ruins of Berlin and most of Europe.
Intentionalists point to passages in Mein Kampf and certain speeches of Hitler( the Kroll Opera House speech of September 1939 that threatened World Jewry with destruction if it succeeded in starting another war is the most famous example)
The Functionalists prefer the more nuanced approach.
The Holocaust developed in small incremental steps. Driven primarily from below. From within the sprawling bureaucracy. " Working towards the Fuhrer" in Nazi jargon. The Nazi government was utter chaotic in structure. Hitler famously despising the day to day business of governing. To keep his underlings at each others throats often 2 people were given roughly the same job . In the quasi Darwinian jungle of Nazi politics the strongest would supposedly prevail. For example no less than 5 departments dealt with the crucial matter of access to the Fuhrer himself. Bormann, a relatively lowly Party Secretary won that particular battle( a veteran of bareknuckle Nazi intrigue Bormann had spent time in prison in the 1920s with future Auschwitz commandant Hoess. They were involved with the murder of a French informer in the Ruhr)
It was known Hitler favoured the radical approach to a problem.
The development of the Nazi Jewish policy is easy to trace,. From the boycotts of 33, Kristalnacht, the Nuremberg laws, the forced emigration, the Nisko reservation scheme, the Madagascar plan( the Jews of Europe being shipped en masses to Madagascar), the star of David armband legislation, the eventual ghettoisation, the Einsatzgruppen, the forced labour camps, the hunger plan, extermination through labour finally arriving at the Final Solution of the Jewish Question" Probably in July 1941, driven by the euphoria of the first victories in the Soviet Union. Each step small but logical, moving towards a goal that would be finalised at the Wannsee Conference of January 1942.
The impetus came from above, Hitler giving the verbal authorisation to Goering who gave the order in writing to Heydrich in July 1941
" The Fuhrer has authorised me to order you to commence the Final Solution of the Jewish Question"
The actual methods, the technical aspects of genocide came from below 
It as very much a  question of trial and error. 
The mass shootings of the Einsatzgruppen giving way to the gas vans giving way to Zyklon B ( at Auschwitz only. Zyklon B, an industrial pesticide was first used by Hossler and Palitzch ( SS Untersturmfuhrer and blockfuhrer described by Hoess as the most unpleasant and quarrelsome individual. A man who would climb over dead bodies to succeed) as an experiment on some Russian prisoners in the basement of Block 11) apart from Hoess who perfected the procedure, gassing up to 15000 a day by the mass Hungarian gassings of autumn 44, the other Nazi Vernichstunglager ( extermination camps) the Reinhardt camps Treblinka ( 800 000-1million dead) Belzec( 3/400000) Sobibor ( 3/200000) Chelmno (175/200000) and Madjanek ( 78000) used exhaust gas. Pumped in from an engine. The gas chamber at Treblinka was named the Hackenholt Foundation, after the gasmann Lorenz Hackenholt who operated the gassing mechanism, with an Ukrainian assistant. Not the infamous Ivan Marchenko, Ivan the Terrible, his notoriety was earned by attacking the naked victims in the " sclauch" " tube" with a sword.
The Functionalists and the Intentionalists are then probably both right 
The process , if encouraged from above, was driven from below.
This post is already way too long. With your permission I'll finish it tomorrow.
Tracing first the roots of Nazism and anti semitism before debunking each myth individually.

To continue my post from yesterday , I'll very briefly catalogue the ideological routes of Nazi anti semitism. 
If you study the history of the German states post Westphalia, it becomes clear that Hitler wasn't some abhorrent anachronism, his rise to power was a perfectly logical development.  Germany's history was, in European terms, uniquely troubled.  A patchwork of tiny states ruled by  savage despots. In this fertile if poorly tended soil anti semitism and an almost mindless compliance to temporal rulers blossomed .Germany was thus cut off from the mainstream of European thought. A rustic backward  looking backwater at the very heart of Europe. Once you understand this paradox Germany's tragic history post Unification makes perfect sense.  
Westphalia was the  1648(?)  Treaty that finally ended the Thirty years war ,beginning in the Bohemian provinces of the Holy Roman Empire what started as a clear religious conflict between the Protestant states, supported by Sweden , England and Scotland ( pre 1707 still seperate kingdoms ruled by the same Stuart kings) and the Imperial Habsburg forces supported by their Spanish cousins, eventually it denigrated into a confused dynastic struggle between Catholic France, supported by the Northern Protestant states and the Habsburg controlled Holy Roman Empire.
In real terms it was probably the most destructive war in Europe's history.
Both sides employing huge mercenary armies that would devastate the countryside, foraging etc. It's estimated over 1/3 of Europe's pre war population died due to famine and disease as well as in battle.
The victory of the French and the resultant treaty ensured the German states( over 1000 of them. Ranging from mid sized regional powers like Bavaria to archaic Prince- Bishoprics and petty lordships.) remained ossified in the middle ages, becoming a virtual backwater as the rest of Europe moved towards the Enlightenment and the strengthening of centralised nation states.
The " cuius regio cuius religio" " his state, his religion" that legalised Lutherans ensured these lords were absolute masters in their domains.
Instilling an almost slavish devotion to secular rulers in the German mindset.
The currents of new thought that were electrifying Europe, the concepts of freedom of conscience, rule by parliament that culminated in the first of the revolutions that would first challenge before ultimately sweeping away the ancien regime in Europe and its New World colonies, passed Germany by . Until late in the 18th century certain states remained frozen in time, like the Russian Empire ( that only abolished serfdom in 1861) the various German statelets remained reactionary almost feudal enclaves . Only the Papal States, until the Risorgimento, were anything like as backward in Western Europe
The English Civil War (Wars of the Three Kingdoms) was a forerunner and precursor to the French and American Revolutionary Wars over a century later.
Indeed many historians view the American Revolution as a logical culmination of the English.
The Patriots inheriting the mantle of the Parliamentarians( both wars being triggered by disputes over taxation and representation) and Ol' King George playing the part of his I ill fated Stuart predecessor.
Prussia of course was a factor too. Eventually the defining factor 
The German Empire declared in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles 1871 after the triumph of the Franco Prussian War was thoroughly Prussianised.
Prussia, created out the old fiefdoms of the Teutonic Knights and led by the Hohenzollerns, was accurately described as a army with a state rather than a state with an army. 
Prussia with its ferociously well drilled army and with it's duplicitous foreign policy ( expertly manipulating the fragile European Alliance system . In the Seven Years War of the mid 18th century Frederick the Great doubled Prussian size by forming an alliance with Great Britain, ) pulled itself up by its bootstraps to become a Great Power 
Nationalism as we understand it today was a product of the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848. After the defeat of Napoleon and the subsequent Congress of Vienna, reaction set it. The Holy Roman Empire abolished by Bonaparte in 1808 was replaced by the Austrian Empire 
After the Hungarian revolutions( crushed with the help of Nicholas I of Russia's Cossacks, just as almost exactly 100 years later the another revolution was crushed by Soviet tanks) the Compromise was reached in @867 and the dual monarchy of Austria Hungary was born 
Another product of the revolutions of 1848 was the German Confederation. Led intially by Emperor Franz Josef of Austria , this was an another uneasy compromise to placate the revolutionaries of 1848.
After its humiliating defeats by Bonaparte and it's eventual triumph Prussia, led by Trietsche, Fichte, Hegel and latterly Nietschze and Wagner went through a period of reappraisal.
The glorification of State and War. Swaggering nationalism.
The baccilus of anti semitism, dormant but never utterly eradicated now stirred in the hearts of earnest young students and army officers.
From the days of Luther, whose pamphlet ' On the Jews and their Lies" could almost have been written by Goebbels himself, a very particular type of anti semitism developed in Germany, and in Central Europe in general.
Indeed the Nazi bureaucracies followed a long established precedent when they began enacting their anti Semetic legislation.
The Catholic church had long favoured ghettos( indeed the Rome ghetto, abolished y Bonaparte was quickly re-established) There had been many expulsions, starting with Edward Longshanks in 1271, culminating in the mass expulsions after the Reconquestia of Christian Spain. Initially the dreaded Spanish Inquisition was not set up to hunt heretics but Jews, and Muslims. The so called conversos the religious authorities feared were still secret Jews 
In the Holy Roman Empire ( incidentally Prussia had an uniquely anomalous position in the Empire. The stem Brandenburg duchy's were considered Imperial territory, indeed the Dukes were elevated to the status of Electors with the Golden Bull and eventually Frederick William was crowned King IN Prussia, But in practical terms Prussia was outside the Imperial structure, which 
s was little more than a antiquated ceremonial structure with little real power. Or as Voltaire famously put it " it was not Roman, Holy, nor indeed 
was it an Empire) anti semitism flourished. There were many ghettos, with News forced to wear the yellow hat and follow certain trades 
Money lending, banned by New Testament strictures regarding usury became associated with the Jews( Even though the greatest banking houses, like the Fuggers and the great Florentine houses of previous centuries, the Frescobaldi who were bankrupted when Edward Longshanks defaulted on a huge loan and of course the Medici were all Christian)
In the Holy Roman Empire a curious position evolved, the Hofjuden, the court Jew who dealt with his lord's financial matters 
The Rothschild's started as Court Jews, in Wurttemberg I think.
The Jews also became associated with the plague in Christian minds . The myth of the Wandering Jew became entwined in the popular mind with great masses of dispossessed people.
The Jews as always served as scapegoats. 
Other equally odious beliefs permeated early modern Europe . The myth of the Jews as Deicides.. literally God killers, responsible for the death of Christ. Conveniently ignoring the fact Iudea was then a Roman province, under direct Roman rule. Pilate was a prefect answering to the legate in Syria who answered to the Emperor.
The Austro Hungarian Empire, weak, crumbling, a vast polyglot empire ruled by a creaking outmoded central structure ( the labyrinthine bureaucracy depicted so deftly by Kafka) was particularly fertile soil for anti semitism.
The Austro German ruling class began seeing themselves as a master race. After the publication of the Origins of the Species they began seeing the Slavs and particularly the Jews in crude pseudo Darwinian terms.
They sought to unify Germany.
So to did the Prussians 
Now with Bismarck at the helm and the pliant Wilhelm I as king.
Bismarck despised the bourgeoisie revolutionaries of 1848 with their romantic dreams of Germania 
He was a fiercely practical man( the apogee of the Junker class) he set out to unify Germany by " Blood and Iron"
Winning three quick victories over Denmark in 1864, then Austria in 1866( the defeat was the catalyst for the Compromise, bringing an end to over 15 years of bitter wrangling) then finally the Franco Prussian War of 1870-71.
Thanks to the Ems dispatch and his cynical manipulation of French public opinion Bismarck was able to manoeuvre Napoleon III into declaring war on the Prussian dominated North German Confederation ( the post Austro Prussian War successor to the original Confederation)
The Second Reich ( the first being the Holy Roman Empire) that survived from 1871 to 1918 shared many of the same fundamental contradictions as the Third 
In many ways with its social , health and pension reform it was the most advanced state in the world.
A dynamic rapidly industrialising powerhouse opposed to the creaky worm eaten obsolescence of its Habsburg Ally.
Despite its parliament, political parties, and free press Prussia was in fact a militarist autocracy. The Kaiser appointed the ministers, the ministers answered to him 
The parliament was virtually powerless while the political parties haggled ( kuhlhandle, cattle trading ) for benefits for whatever class they represented.
I apologise for the length of the post but I think itsi important, when dealing with such an important subject to deal with all angles.
The history of Germany, and to a lesser extent Austria is crucial if you want to fully understand the rise of Hitler 
Hitlers ideology had deep routes in the German past. In many ways he represented a logical culmination of the post Westphalian development, or lack of.
Germans, and indeed Austro Germans had an almost religious devotion to their secular rulers. 
Anti semitism was an integral part of the German experience. As the rest of Europe passed through the Enlightenment, science over superstition ( although it seems some are trying to reverse the process) rule of law as opposed to the divine right of Kings, anti semitism was relegated to the fringes of society 
Not so in the German states, the Holy Roman Empire, Brandenburg- Prussia and their successors.
Anti semitism was considered perfectly respectable. Martin Luther was, and still is , a towering figure . His influence on German thought, character etc is impossible to fully estimate.
Try to imagine an America where George Washington had written " on the Jews and their lies"
Anti semitism also flourished of course in another relatively backward autocracy- the Empire of the Tsars with the pogroms and the Black Hundreds.
Look to the past for the keys to the present and the road to the future.
At the Nuremberg rallies a postcard was sold. It had the faces of Frederick the Great, Bismarck, Von Hindenburg and Hitler with the legend
" What the king won, the prince United , the field marshal defended and the soldier saved"
Hitler and the anti semitism of the Nazis was a perfectly logical progression.
They were in no way innovators, relying on precedent.
Dispossession, loss of citizenship, expulsion, ghettoisation...they only became inventors by necessity.
By the need to construct the mechanics of extermination.
Even then there were some precedents .
" Who remembers the Armenians?" Hitler is recorded as saying in Goebbels diaries 
Ive read some revisionist work. Including one, I'm ashamed to admit, written by a fellow Scotsman. A member of the OIC who tries to claim WW1 was caused by the Jews.. Rothschild bankers blah blah blah...
The usual myopic one dimensional garbage
Fundamentally I think holocaust denial was created ( and it was a creation. In all the trials, Nuremberg, Doctor's trial, Einsatzgruppen trial, the Polish tribunals, the West German trials of the 60s not one of the perpetrators, not one, try to deny the holocaust happened. Relying on the " I was only following orders" Watch Dr Grassler, 2nd in command of the Warsaw Ghetto trying to evade responsibility for example) to maintain the myth of a secret Jewish cabal behind the scenes controlling everything.
The holocaust destroys that fantasy utterly.
The Western Allies knew very well what was going on but they didn't lift a finger.
The extermination process was halted by one thing.
The advance of the Red Army. 
I apologise again for the length of this post. I wanted to try to include most of the important details tracing the troubled growth of Germany. It's uniqueness and how that uniqueness contributed to the growth of anti semitism as a relatively mainstream phenomenon.
Tomorrow illI list briefly then debunk the major holocaust deniers arguments.
Then illI resume the post WW2 timeline.
Thanks for your patience!

First of all thanks to Greg for creating this new topic and for moving my posts here ..
Not even the Great Conspiracists himself, Stevie Gaal, in all his colourful multi fonted munificence could have dreamt up a conspiracy to link Stripling High, Frank Wisner, the fake Marguerite with the Treaty of Westphalia!!
Edit: Maybe I spoke too soon!! I've got vague recollections of Fezzo posting on the Treaty, although I suspect our little fez wearing chum thought the Treaty of Westphalia was an agreement between President Eisenhower, MJ12 and the three anused shape shifting Reptilians from Westphalia Minor.

In this post I thought I'd outline a brief history of the Holocaust itself, before describing and debunking the major holocaust deniers myths.
To me Holocaust denial is one of the most pernicious phenomena of the past half century.
It celebrates the negationist view of history beloved by so many conspiracists.
The negation of facts and the distortion of the past, if our true history counts for nothing then the future can mean anything.
When truth becomes the choice between two seperate lies. 1984 is increasingly resembling a quaint fairy story, as are the goosestepping phalanxes of jackbooted fascists.
The reality that is sneaking up on us, a wolf clothed in a pigs body, is infinitely more terrible.
A cuddly media friendly fascism that no one recognises, thanks to the compliant drones who've been busy labelling everyone and everything they disagree with as fascism 
It's all just bullshit. Fascism has become a daydream, to stop us recognising the nightmare that's occuring outside.

       The Holocaust
The Final Solution of the Jewish Question was the culmination of 8 years of increasingly severe official persecution. Utilising long established techniques, loss of citizenship, civil rights, humiliation, exclusion, forced emigration, ghettoisation; it was the invasion of the Soviet Union, and the realisation that the newly established Reichkommisariats ( Ostland/ Ukraine) would soon have millions of Soviet Jews to deal with, that prompted the leadership to take the final radical step.
Making official state policy out of what ,had been until then, a relatively disorganised process.
For example the Einsatzgruppen that followed the Wehrmacht into Poland in September 1939 did not have a set policy of extermination. The massacres that did occur( Erntefest, IntelligenceAktion etc) were fundamentally local initiatives carried out by particularly brutal local commanders( Von Avensleben)
The Einsatzgruppen that followed the three Army Groups into the Soviet Union went with the sole purpose of extermination.
A protocol having been worked out between Heydrich and General Wagner of the Quartermasters Corps. The Einsatzgruppen ( and indeed the SS in general were given Carte Blanche in rear areas to carry out " Special Tasks") receiving full co operation and logistical support from the Wehrmacht. Indeed some eager personnelactually volunteered to take part in the massacres. Many more flocked to the execution sites with their cameras, photographing " souvenirs" to send home.
This of course makes a further nonsense of the Clean Wehrmacht myth
The Einsatzgruppen comprised of personnel from the Allgeimene ( general) SS , Waffen SS, Orpo, Kripo SD and Replacement Police battalions. Augmented by local " volunteers"( in Latvia for example the Arajas Commando took part in the Riga and the Rumbula Massacres. A notorious film shows a Jew being beaten to death as an accordionist cheerfully entertains the watching crowd with the National Anthem) Official policy was to encourage, strictly behind the scenes, local outbreaks of Anti semitism, pogroms etc. Relying on the well worn canard of Jewish Bolshevik commissar 
The Einsatzgruppen actions were  mass shootings. Following what would become known as the " Jeckeln Method"( after SS Obergruppenfuhrer Freidrich Jeckeln) The Jews were rounded up by the Orpo/local collaborators, led to a secluded destination ( forest clearing, sand dunes etc) where vast pits, dug by the Jews themselves, awaited them.
Guarded by armed SS men they would be forced to undress before being led, in batches of 10-15 to the pit where they were forced to sit on the edge/ lie down on the corpses before being shot in the neck by an SS man. Usually with a Soviet machine pistol.
The best description of such an operation is from Hermann Graebe, a civilian construction expert who witnessed Einsatzgruppen D in action in the Ukraine.
These operations simply stagger the mind. The banality of evil personified.
These were not monsters, raving anti Semetic maniacs. They were frighteningly banal characters. Bookkeepers, milk men, career policemen, clerks etc . Who discussed their wife's ailments or their teenage daughters rebellious behaviour as they sat on the edge of a pit, smoking a cigarette, cradling the gun, wiping the sweat from their forehead with the hankerchief their wife embroidered for them. Dangling their legs over the edge, the toe of their boot brushing the back of the teenage girls head he'd just blown out, dreaming of a cool glass of beer only for the crack of his comrades whip and his gutteral cries of "Schnell Juden" to wake him from his reverie
The commanders of the four Einsatzgruppen, Stahlecker, Raschh, Nebe and Ohlendorf were all educated men.
Three held doctorates. Ohlendorf being one of the brightest political economists of his generation.cRasch actually held two doctorates, thus was known as Dr Dr Raschh.
The Einsatzgruppen operations were halted on humanitarian grounds.
Because of the psychological damage the executions caused. For the perpetrators I hasten to add. Years of indocrination, dehumanising the jews" vermin" "trash" "subhuman" had been frighteningly effective.
Never underestimate the power of the state, over the weak minded. The well trained citizen. 
A certain SS major by the name of Rauff ( who commanded the short lived Einsatzgruppen Afrika and who ended up in Syria after the war. A friend of Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl) had a flash of inspiration, improving apon the gassing mechanisms employed by the T4 Euthanasia programme.
The murder of the disabled, both physically and mentally, the remit was later expanded to include " asocial elements" The Lebens unswerte leben in Nazi neologisms " Life unworthy of life"
Thus the gas vans were employed. Other methods were tried, Josef Oberhauser (?) driver and adjutant of Odilio Globocnik, key administrator of what soon would become Operation Reinhard talks in his post war interrogation of dynamiting bunkers and other methods of mass slaughter.
We'll never know what prompted Goering to authorise Heydrich in a letter dated 31st July 1941 to commence the Final Solution of the Jewish Question.
Goering probably received verbal authorisation from Hitler 
The Einsatzgruppen operations continued throughout the remainder of 1941, with the gasvans and the first primitive gas chamber at Belzec being employed. These were improvisations.. " Working towards the Fuhrer" the policy of mass extermination, the process of the extermination camps was not yet enshrined in official policy.
Another improvisation took place in a camp in Upper Silesia. At this time( late autumn 1941) Auschwitz was still mainly a POW camp for Red Army prisoners and Polish political prisoners.
The custom built extermination facility at Birkenau ( Auschwitz II) with it's 6 crematoria, it's camp orchestra that serenaded the doomed down the steps towards their fate was yet to be constructed.
Karl Fritisch, the SS officer in command of the cynically titled " protective custody" after discussions with his comrades, Hossler and Palitzch, both veterans of the Death's Head Units, passing through Eickes brutal indoctrination at Dachau, decided to experiment with Zyklon B, a commercially manufacturer pesticide. Forcing 100 or so Soviet POWs into the basement of the dreaded Block 11 they put on their gasmasks and emptied in some of the blue crystals through a vent in the door from the tin that resembled in Hoesss words" a tin of Bulgarian jam"
They watched with interest as the prisoners choked to death, noting the bleeding from the noses and anuses of the prisoners, the distinctive blueish tinge of the skin and the agonising death agonies that took up to 30 minutes.
Hoess was excited by the report writing to his superior Glucks at the Concentration Camp Directorate of the " far reaching vistas" the experiment opened up.
The Final Solution of the Jewish Question became state policy at a conference held in a neo Classical mansion in the leafy Berlin suburb of Wannsee on a cold foggy January morning in 1942. The building in one of those chilling twists of irony was the HQ of Interpol
The conference, postponed twice, was chaired by Heydrich ( an avid pilot and major in the Luftwaffe he had , despite the fog, piloted himself from Prague in his personal Me109) who, along with his other roles as chief of the RSHA, head of the SD, Himmler's unofficial deputy, newly appointed deputy protector of Bohemia Moravia was also chairman of Interpol.
The attendees- Eichmann, Muller, Langer, Schongarth, Klopfer, Neumann, LutherMeyer, Freisler, Leibbrandt, Buhler, Stuckert, Krislinger and Hofmann represented the main departments- SS, party, foreign officer, race and resettlement, reich chancellery, Goerings four year plan and the gaulieter from the Eastern territories.
The conference lasted barely 90 minutes, with cognac and a break for a buffet was called to implement the Final Solution. To plan the most practical, cost effective way to exterminate the Jewish race in Europe ( all 11 million of them, including the territories still at war with Germany)
Only one copy of the minutes( drawn up by Eichmann, head of Amt IV B IV of the RSHA, the Gestapo's Jewish expert who would facilitate the process of genocide from his spacious Berlin office. After nearly fainting at an execution he was careful to remain in the background, until it came to the early summer of 44. He travelled to Budapest with his deputy Dieter Wisceleny to plan the evacuation of HungarysH Jews) survived in the files of Martin Luther of the Foreign Office.
The minutes are a clumsy mixture of Nazi jargon, neologisms and the familiar euphemisms.
Special Treatment ( sonderbehandlung), evacuation to the East etc.
The very blandness of the language was designed to conceal the true purpose.
None of the death train itineraries for example are classified any higher than " for internal use only" the lowest classification.
Incredible when you think one single document could record anything up to 50000 deaths.
These documents from GEDOB, the Reichsbahn and the Central currency exchange to the SS  are the most chillingly mundane perhaps of all the vast library of Holocaust related documents.
Talking in drab bureaucratic language about pfennigs per kilometre. The SS paid standard group rate. The Jews themselves really paid out of their confiscated property, although children under 10 travelled for half fare and children under 4 travelled free.
The documents trace each train, the ones I've seen trace the trains involved with the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka, starting on 22nd July 1942. Each train( no fewer than 50 goods wagons long) travelling through 8 stations to Malkinia, the Treblinka station. They returned empty ( marked with a (l) lehr) On one document I counted 14 seperate journeys 
One itinerary out of hundreds, maybe thousands. One document out of tens of thousands.
14 journeys, 50+ goods wagons full of people. 95%+ would be dead within 3 hours of reaching Treblinka.
After Wannsee  the process accelerated. Although several concentration camps ( 22 main ones with 100s of subcamps) had gas chambers , there were only 6 Vernichstunglager ( extermination camps)..7 if you count Klooga,
These were camps specifically designed for murder on an industrial scale.
Auschwitz I was an arbeitslager ( workcamp, a standard Concentration Camp) it was Auschwitz II Birkenau that was the custom built extermination facility.
Likewise Treblinka. Treblinka I was a concentration camp, while Treblinka II was the extermination camp.
The others, Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmo were extermination camps. Madjanek operated as an extermination facility during Reinhard , before reverting to a concentration camp.
The 4 main Reinhard camps ( Treblinka, Belzec Sobibor and Chelmo) began operations in late spring 42.
Auschwitz was a seperate operation.
As SS Unterscharfuhrer Suchomel, a guard at Treblinka puts it " We ( Treblinka) were a cottage industry, Auschwitz was a factory of death"
Perhaps.
Treblinka ( a tiny cramped facility, run by 15-20 SS and 150 so Ukrainian or Latvian Trawniki guards) still managed to murder between 800000-1 million Jews in a relatively short period of time April 42- Dec 42, Jan 43 sporadically through to Oct 1943.
In contrast Auschwitz accounted for upwards of 1.1 million.
From roughly Jan 42 through to Oct/ Nov 44.
How did a Reinhard camp operate?
The operations at Treblinka are best recorded.
Thanks to the testimony of 2 of the 3 commandants Stangl and Kurt Franz ( known as Laike- Baby-face by the Jews he was the infamous owner of Barry the dog .A hugeSt Bernhard hedh trained to bite the genitals of prisoners on the command " man bite dog" or forcing prisoners to box with a glove before shooting them) and numerous other camp personnel including Suchomel.
Filmed secretly by Claude Lanzmann for his 8 hour masterpiece Shown, he describes the process in detail. Even singing the Kurt Franz authored camp song.
The prisoners would be quickly seperated on arrival. Perhaps a dozen or so chosen out of each transport to serve as Arbeitjuden, work Jews, who pretty much kept the camp running.
The men were always taken first to the undressing room. Always running, always accompanied by violence and shouting, to keep them off balance psychologically.
From the undressing room they were driven naked up the tube( known as the Road to Heaven) into the gas chamber. The tube was barbed wire hidden with branches. It led to the gas chamber itself at the top of the camp.
The gas chamber known as the Hackenholt Foundation after the German gas operator Lorenz Hackenholt ( last seen reeling drunkenly out a brothel in Belgrade in early 45) was relatively crude. The engine of a Soviet T 34 tank.
There was also the Infirmary, with a Red Cross flag fluttering and white coated personnel.
The old, the sick, unaccompanied children were taken there directly.
To be shot.
The infirmary was, in true Nazi cynical fashion, a massive execution pit.
Operated by August Miete aka Frankenstein or his deputy Hirtreiter.
They personally dispatched 1000s. With a genickshoss, neck shot.
Using a Soviet Nagant pistol.
Sometimes to amuse himself Miete would fling living people into the burning pit.." To watch them dance"
A transport of 1000-2000 could be dispatched in 2-3 hours 
At its height Treblinka could account for 13000 victims a day.
Working in shifts 
With your permission ladies and gentlemen I'll finish this post and begin the one debunking denier myths on Tuesday.

Apologies to everyone for not posting anything today 
I'm not at home so I don't have access to my books, research materials.
IvI' been posting from memory and I want to check a few facts before I debunk the major denier myths.
Oh, theyre easy enough to debunk, I just want to get all my facts right.
The topic's far too important.
There's at least one denier who checks this forum on a regular basis, so I don't  want to make even the smallest mistake.
Mistakes are what those scumbags thrive upon

Excellent account, Alex.

Lanzmann's Shoah is available on DVD and Blu-Ray. If everyone watched it, the world would be a better place.

Absolutely Jeremy 
Lanzmanns film was not only a monumental achievement in artistic terms but its arguably the most chillingly insightful glimpse into the frailties of human nature.
The Suchomels, Oberhausers, Grasslers and that grey faced bureaucrat who controlled the railway network, (Chief of GEDOB) were not monsters. Red eyed crazed anti semites with swastikas tattooed on their foreheads. Nor were the vast majority of the camp personnel, the SS technocrats ,even the Einsatzgruppen men who did the actual shooting ( the only exceptions were Wirth, Palitzch, Globocnik, Miete, Clauberg, Moll, Kurt Franz, Hirtreiter and Mengele) They were ordinary men and women, whod been instructed by their superiors to exterminate the Jewish people for the sake of the Greater German Reich.
For their children's sake.
For the sake of humanity.
Their very ordinariness forces us to confront ourselves. Ordinariness after all can be used to disguise many sicknesses.
Have you read Grossman's Life and Fate? An incredible book. An unathletic Moscow intellectual Grossman got himself in shape and travelled with the Red Army ( as a war correspondent) all the way from Stalingrad to Berlin.
He was one of the very first into Treblinka.
As a Jew who lost his mother his writing has an added pathos.
He dissects the holocaust with the unflinching gaze of the true artist and confronts us( and himself) with many uncomfortable observations.
In on particularly powerful passage he writes about the nature of human good.
How if youd asked Himmler and Hitler himself hedh have told you he was acting in the name of Good.
For Grossman history is not a battle of Good versus Evil, the multilayed complexity ( and sometimes conflicting motivations) of the human soul makes a nonsense of such a simplistic equation.
To Grossman history tells of a tiny kernel of human goodness( simple kindness ) a succession of great evils has been unable to crush.
For evils most effective tactic has been to suborn the forces of so called good.
I've read pretty much all of the official reports. The blandness of the language, the seemingly innocuous jargon and euphemisms while disguising one truth reveal an even darker one.
As the holocaust recedes even further into history, soon passing out of living memory, it becomes even more relevant. 
Stop making monsters out of the perpetrators, they were anything but. Denying the humanity of the perpetrators is like denying the humanity of the victims.
Both were human. We are all human.
If Franz Suchomel had been born 20 years later he would have probably led an anonymous, uneventful life.
Look at the world today. We are more divided than ever. In the name of unity.
The same old language, vilifying "enemies" in barely human terms.
Hating those who have the Jews just as the Jews were once hated themselves is not progress.
Education and honesty are the keys.
Not creating a false dichotomy, tribalising understanding.
The troofers are just one half of the Janus headed monster.
Dividing people, keeping them mired in pointless debate.
I despise the Don Jeffries of this world. They are dangerous. Really fucking dangerous.
Useful idiots who can be used to divert people's doubts and fears.
Turning them into a garish tabloid sideshow.
Hopefully we'll be back home next week,I don't want to continue posting on this subject until I've rechecked my facts.
The subject is way too important.

I've heard good things about Grossman's Life and Fate. It is currently on my list of Very Long Novels I Really Ought to Get Around to Reading One Day.

To lighten the tone a little, it reminds me of a line in a Woody Allen film: "I did a speed-reading course once. I read War and Peace in two hours. It was about some Russians."

I strongly recommend it Jeremy.
Sometimes it's by using the lightest of touches we can tell the darkest of tales. I strongly recommend Grossman's " the Hell of Treblinka" as well. He was one of the first correspondents to set foot inside what remained of the camp. In late autumn 44, he was travelling with elements of the 8th Guards Army( Chuikovs old 62nd Army of Stalingrad fame)
If you can believe it after the brenners and bone crushers of Blobels Sonderaktion 1005 had done their "work" , exhuming then burning all the corpses in the vicinity of the old Extermination facility, Treblinka was ploughed over and turned into a farm.
Along with Primo Levi . he's one of the most unflinchingly literate of all the writer's who tackled the subject of the Holocaust.
He wasn't a survivor, but he was there. In a very real sense. In fact his perspective may well be unique ( I exclude Simonov, who was one of those literary hacks who flourished under Stalinism) he saw the Eastern Front through the eyes of the generals AND through the eyes of the embattled front line Ivan's.
His luminous narrative gifts allowed him to write authentically and without affectation from both sides.
His literary celebrity ( he was without doubt THE leading Soviet war correspondent) gave him almost unfettered access to the highest echelons of the Soviet politico- military machine
His fearlessly honest descriptions of Stalingrad  remain some of the the most realistic. The bloody drunken chaos, the vodka soaked ineptitude of much of the higher command, the ruthless squandering of life's, the childlike gleam in the eye of hardened snipers, killers like the famous Zaitsev, the terror of initiative, the unbelievable carelessness with life, the ever present threat of the " special section" at a time when the Soviet Union was quite literally fighting for it's survival, balancing on the banks of the Volga and the edge of European Russia, a time when divisions were barely the size of regiments and some battalions were barely platoon strength , the OO( special section) of the NKVD still managed to execute over 13000 soldiers ( a full pre war strength division) between Sept 42 and Jan 43.
If he recorded the dark side of the undoubtedly brutal Soviet system, the blocking detachments and punishment battalions, the terrified 19 year old fresh out his village , shot by firing squad for stepping out of his column without permission to take a piss; he also recorded, with a disarming unsentimentality the " real mass bravery" of the common Red Army man. It's too easy to dismiss the Red Army as brainwashed terrorised automatons, along with the brutality, the drunken massacres and the phenomenon of mass rape( along with mass collaboration this remains one of the great Taboos in Russian society. ) There  were countless acts of  real heroism. Just to dismiss Stalin's victory as the victory of the more brutal tyrant is to grossly misunderstand the nature of the Soviet victory.
Draconian punishment , mass waves of cannon fodder flung at the Germans , until even the insatiable appetite of their guns was sated and the huge barracks like factories, deep in the frozen Urals turning out tanks on an unimaginable scale can't fully explain the victory. The statistics and the clichéd Western narrative misses the real drama, the human drama, without precedent in history.
Between 22nd June 41 and 7th Dec 41 it's estimated the Red Army lost upwards of 450% of itsi prewar strength.
In other words the pre war Red Army was wiped out 4 and a half times over 
In two of the vast kesselschacts ( cauldron battles) the Wehrmacht gloried in; Bryansk/ Smolensk and Kiev , the Soviets lost over 1 million men.
As they lost over a million at Stalingrad.
Profligacy without parallel, unless you go back to the days of Genghis Khan..
Time and time again it's the front line troops who hold on. Refusing to surrender, refusing to yield another yard of the Motherland..
Time and time again too, in diaries, official dispatched, post war memoirs the Germans speak with a certain disbelief, and no little admiration of the resilience of the Red Army soldier. 
It's not me just being over romantic, seeking to idolise the vanquished of the Nazis, it's a very real phenomenon.
" The real mass heroism" of the Red Army man, ironically the glutinous Stalinist propaganda if anything underplayed the heroism of the troops, was a crucial factor in the victory.
Hopefully we should be back home next week and I'll be able to recheck the figures and some of the technical aspects, especially regarding the so called Leuchter Report the deniers always wheel out.
I've argued with deniers before and I know their tactics.
Anomaly hunting, what iffery mixed with zealotry.
ImI not a scientist and rather than adopting Professor Larsen of the Armstrong Bible College's favourite technique, namely talking out his amply upholstered rear end, I'd prefer to be sure of my facts 
Outside the hallowed portals of Father Armstrongs campus arguments such as " Duh! they lost it" don't carry much weight.
Maybe if I have time tomorrow I'll post a brief synopsis of the Eastern Front. Tracing the campaign's from Barbarossa through to the Fall of Berlin

alex wrote:For Grossman history is not a battle of Good versus Evil, the multilayed complexity ( and sometimes conflicting motivations) of the human soul makes a nonsense of such a simplistic equation.

In Beautiful Losers, Lenny Cohen uses the metaphor of Hollywood Westerns where you knew the good guys from the bad guys by their black or white hats - that is until the birth of psychological Westerns where things got a bit more complex. 

alex wrote:Stop making monsters out of the perpetrators, they were anything but. Denying the humanity of the perpetrators is like denying the humanity of the victims.

Both were human. We are all human.

If Franz Suchomel had been born 20 years later he would have probably led an anonymous, uneventful life.

In the same book, Cohen observes that some people are never content with what is, and then states that Hitler was such a man, adding that if Hitler had been born into Nazi Germany, he would have been just as ill-at-ease with that status quo.

Greatly appreciated Alex. Please keep it coming.

Thanks Jake for your kind words and for your encouragement.
Both are much appreciated.
To pick up on Gregs point I think one of the reasons why the Third Reich still fascinates and repels us; one of the reasons too why Hitler has become an almost mythical figure on the fringes of society is because he and his motley gang represent the triumph of the perennial outsiders.
Up until the Depression Hitler and the Nazis were viewed as comic figures. An assortment of the most bizarre, grotesque caricatures, led by an ex tramp with a Chaplin moustache and a guttaral lower Bavarian accent ranting about the blonde haired blue eyed Aryan supermensch.
But within a decade this ex vagrant and would be artist was Fuhrer of one of the most modern potentially powerful states in Europe, if not the world. 
He had abolished the power of the individual states, institutionalised a centralised dictatorship.
More powerful than any Bismarck or Hohenzollern prince.
It's one of the most improbable stories in history

"It's one of the most improbable stories in history"....begs the question, "So what was different about the that time in history that such an improbable scenario was able to play out?" Many say it was Goebbels and his innovative use of the relatively new technologies of radio and film as used to influence the public. Mass media amplified that small signal emanating from street thugs and boomed it across the whole of German society, and the rest of the world. Certainly mass media remains the most powerful force in the world today. Plus now we have the "relatively new" (sound familiar?) social media, or "the new media" and with it once again we see the amplification of anti-Semitic views as voiced by street thugs. It would appear that there are those who are ready, willing, and able to go straight down the same path again.

Thanks again for posting all this, that we might learn something or another from history.

Many say it was Goebbels and his innovative use of the relatively new technologies of radio and film as used to influence the public. Mass media amplified that small signal emanating from street thugs and boomed it across the whole of German society, and the rest of the world. Certainly mass media remains the most powerful force in the world today. Plus now we have the "relatively new" (sound familiar?) social media, or "the new media" and with it once again we see the amplification of anti-Semitic views as voiced by street thugs.

As a general rule, the extreme right is able to communicate more effectively with the masses than those on the other end of the spectrum because they keep the messaging simple and talk in the language of the target audience. They are not trying to sell some (usually flawed) complex social and economic theory to peasants and workers with little education. They are identifying the "causes" of social and economic woes and offering "solutions" at the same time as instilling nationalistic pride.

greg_parker wrote:

Many say it was Goebbels and his innovative use of the relatively new technologies of radio and film as used to influence the public. Mass media amplified that small signal emanating from street thugs and boomed it across the whole of German society, and the rest of the world. Certainly mass media remains the most powerful force in the world today. Plus now we have the "relatively new" (sound familiar?) social media, or "the new media" and with it once again we see the amplification of anti-Semitic views as voiced by street thugs.

As a general rule, the extreme right is able to communicate more effectively with the masses than those on the other end of the spectrum because they keep the messaging simple and talk in the language of the target audience. They are not trying to sell some (usually flawed) complex social and economic theory to peasants and workers with little education. They are identifying the "causes" of social and economic woes and offering "solutions" at the same time as instilling nationalistic pride.

Their rendering of those messages as simple and in the language of the target audience also conditions, or teaches that audience that the messaging should be simple and that those simple messages should be spoken in their language. Media such as radio and film are able to transmit the simplified messages themselves and at the same time induce the perception that it is the proper way of doing things. That is because audio and pictorial media integrate both together infinitely more effectively than printed words, or intellectual dissertations ever could before the new technology came along. Yet, the problems are not simple, the answers are not simple, and not everyone speaks the same way. Nevertheless, this new way of perceiving things becomes the basis for discourse. All the arguments on all sides become much too simple and far too self centered. This is how the media shapes the way minds work, or as Marshall McLuhan put it "the medium is the message". Whenever new media come along, the medium within which people's minds work is changed as a result.

Jake_Sykes wrote:

greg_parker wrote:

Many say it was Goebbels and his innovative use of the relatively new technologies of radio and film as used to influence the public. Mass media amplified that small signal emanating from street thugs and boomed it across the whole of German society, and the rest of the world. Certainly mass media remains the most powerful force in the world today. Plus now we have the "relatively new" (sound familiar?) social media, or "the new media" and with it once again we see the amplification of anti-Semitic views as voiced by street thugs.

As a general rule, the extreme right is able to communicate more effectively with the masses than those on the other end of the spectrum because they keep the messaging simple and talk in the language of the target audience. They are not trying to sell some (usually flawed) complex social and economic theory to peasants and workers with little education. They are identifying the "causes" of social and economic woes and offering "solutions" at the same time as instilling nationalistic pride.

Their rendering of those messages as simple and in the language of the target audience also conditions, or teaches that audience that the messaging should be simple and that those simple messages should be spoken in their language. Media such as radio and film are able to transmit the simplified messages themselves and at the same time induce the perception that it is the proper way of doing things. That is because audio and pictorial media integrate both together infinitely more effectively than printed words, or intellectual dissertations ever could before the new technology came along. Yet, the problems are not simple, the answers are not simple, and not everyone speaks the same way. Nevertheless, this new way of perceiving things becomes the basis for discourse. All the arguments on all sides become much too simple and far too self centered. This is how the media shapes the way minds work, or as Marshall McLuhan put it "the medium is the message". Whenever new media come along, the medium within which people's minds work is changed as a result.

Thanks Jake. That's seems pretty perceptive to me.

We'll be home by tomorrow night, so as soon as I check the facts and the scientific data I'll be able to post a serious debunking of the most heinously resilient holocaust denier myths.
As a prologue, and to provide the proper context I thought I'd post a brief synopsis of the Great Patriotic War.
Splitting this truly monumental subject up into 2 seperate posts.
Today I'll begin by describing the ideological roots/ the run up to the invasion before I attempt to recount the opening months of Operation Barbarossa.

The annihilation of the Soviet Union( in Nazi ideology Communism and Judaism were inseparable. SS Obergruppenfuhrer Erich Von Dem Bach Zeleswki, a particularly imaginative and callous mass murderer in charge of combatting the Soviet partisans summed it up with typically pithy, barbaric simplicity " the partisan is the jew and the jew is the partisan." Indeed in an entry in Himmlers daily diary, sometime in autumn 1941, after a meeting with Hitler , the Reichsfuhrer SS records the instructions Hitler gave him to deal with the millions of Soviet Jews that had fallen into their hands in the opening months of Barbarossa. " Exterminate them as partisans"
Probably the closest we'll ever get to a direct order from Hitler regarding the holocaust) was a fantasy deeply ingrained in the mind of Hitler and his followers.
The fantasy included a vast slave empire in the East, The concept of " Lebensraum" living space, for the Germanic herrenvolk ( master race)
A genocidal dystopian reimagining of British India, with millions of Slavic untermensch ( subhumans) toiling at the behest of their German overlords.
Hitler's fantasy was as detailed as it was demented. With vast networks of autobahns snaking like an iron coil round the neck of European Russia. Leningrad , the holy city of Soviet Communism reduced to ashes,  in a grand guignol of historical symmetry; destroyed by slaves, just as it was built by slaves. Swedish POWs from the Great Northern War Peter the Great had ordered to built his mighty city, Russia's gateway to Europe out of the marshes and forests that crowded round the banks of the River Neva.
As it's creation was the product of megalomania so too would be it's intended destruction.
Moscow was slated for annihilation too, Hitler wanted it turned into an artificial lake.
Crimea was to be annexed outright. The rest of European Russia turned into a vast agrarian concentration camp. The breadbasket of the Greater German Reich. Ruled by a lordly caste of viceroys and administered by the SS and by specimens of true Aryan supermensch...farmer/ warriors, ex NCOs given absolute jurisdiction over their vast granaries.
A nightmarish vision... perhaps the dark apotheosis of European Colonialism filtered through the mind of power crazed genocidal despot.
In Mein Kampf Hitler lays out his plan for the East. In great detail. He scorned the Hohenzollerns for their disastrous choice of allies and equally disastrous foreign policy.
Hitler viewed Great Britain and Italy as Nazi Germanys natural allies.
His plan was first to settle accounts with France before turning East 
The initial planning ( codenamed Operation Otto) began soon after the defeat of France in the summer of 1940.
By December of that year, at a conference at the Berghof, Generaloberst Joel ( chief of staff OKW) presented the outline of the plan.
Three huge army groups ( 2 above the Pripyat marshes, 1 below) heading for Leningrad, Moscow and the Ukraine. The plan called for the destruction of the Red Army, the geographical aim was the so called A-A Line, from Archangel to Astrakan in the Caucasus. The furthest extent of European Russia.
The provisional date was set for May 1941
Throughout the early months of 41 the plan was refined, by late spring the renamed Operation Barbarossa ( in honour of the medieval German emperor) was pretty much completed
Three Army Groups, about 170 front line divisions , approximately 3.5 million men, 3000 tanks, 2000 aircraft, split into three airfleets.
The panzers too were to be split into four autonomous panzergruppen. As always these were to be the tip of the spear. The schwerpunkt in tactical terms.
Blitzkrieg was not an official term. Schwerpunkt was. The massed panzers, supported by self propelled artillery and dive bombers would attack the weakest point of the enemy line, breaking through they would then surround the enemy troops, there's was a mobile war, probing, attacking, wreaking havoc in the enemy rear, before moving on, leaving the vast infantry armies slogging along behind them to exploit the initial breakthroughs and close the traps .
These were the kesselschacts, cauldron battles, an utterly devastating tactic.
In the early months of Barbarossa the accompanying war reporters waxed lyrical about the Mot Pulks ( irresistible mastodons) as the panzertruppen themselves characterised their columns.
Moving in a V shape, with the heavy tanks at front, the lighter tanks, the self propelled artillery, panzergrenadiers in their lorries and APCs etc spread out behind them...it's a truly apocalyptic image to imagine one of those huge formations; half lumbering and half gliding, with the Stuka soaring overhead, watchful, predatory like some steampunk pterodactyls, churning up the soil of Mother Russia, the dust and the haze hanging like a shroud in the clear summer evenings.
However Operation Barbarossa broke one of THE cardinal rules of the "blitzkrieg" tactics.
Instead of coming together and uniting the disperate parts( the army's, corps and even the divisions) would be even further apart.
Consumed by the sheer scale of Russia.
Briefly Army Group North( Von Leeb) with Hoepners 1st Panzer Army and 2 infantry armies was to head through the Baltic States/ Byelorussia towards Leningrad, where they were to rendevous with the Finn's( hoping to regain the territory lost to the Soviet Union in the Winter War)
Army Group Centre ( the largest group, led by the fearsome Generalfeldmarschall Von Bock. Nicknamed the Holy Fire of Kustrin for his fire and brimstone style, Hitler commented" he was the man to teach young soldiers how to die) led by 2nd and 3rd Panzer armies, Hoth and the redoubtable Heinz Guderian, the father of Germany's post WW1 armoured force and along withManstein and Rommel it's ablest tactician.
AGC boasted three infantry armies. It's job was to follow Bonaparte's old route into the heart of Russia. Along the Smolensk highway towards Moscow.
Tempting fate even further the date of the invasion 22nd June 1941 was the 129th anniversary, to the day, of Napoleon's ill fated invasion.
The third army group, Army Group South( Von Rundstedt, senior Wehrmacht officer) comprised of Von Kleists 1st Panzer Army, 2 infantry armies. A seperate German Army( 17th, commanded by Von Schobert) was to support the Romanian attack. Army Group South being further augmented by approx 250000 Romanian soldiers 
The start date was delayed by the coup in Yugoslavia in May 1941, pro Allied army officers overthrowing the old pro Nazi king and replacing him with his son and regent Petr, also staunchly pro Allied.
Enraged by this Hitler hurled his army at the small enfeebled Balkan state.
Bombing undefended Belgrade and indulging in their trademark atrocities the Wehrmacht took all of 14 days to rout the small well trained Yugoslav army.
The delay would prove crucial.
Having signed the Molotov Ribbentrop pact in autumn 1939( perhaps the most cynical of all treaties) and joining with Hitler on the destruction and dismemberment of Poland( he also forced his new ally, desperate to secure his Eastern flank before turning West, to agree to Stalin's seizure of the Baltic States ( sending Vishinsky, Dekanozov ( deputy ambassador to Germany on 2#nd June, it was later discovered that he operated a private torture chamber in the embassy basement and Zhdanov to oversee the " elections" as well as parts of Bessarabia, stealing it from the Romanians who had previously stolen it from the crumbling Tsarist Empire) Stalin tried his best to maintain the uneasy peace.
As an aside Hitler is often derided for opening a second front. This is a mistake, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union the Eastern Front was the only front. And would remain so for nearly 3 years until D Day. The smaller theatres( North Africa, Sicily, Greece, Italy )barely tied down two dozen divisions out of the 600 plus the Germans would eventually activate.
Displaying an almost unbelievable myopia/ wilful blindness Stalin refused to listen to the 150 plus warnings.
Believing them to be part of some grand British provocation.
He knew war with Germany was inevitable, he just wanted time to strengthen his forces
" You only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down" was Hitler's appraisal of the Eastern colossus.
The complete underestimation of Red y numbers/ capabilities ( for which Gehlen as chief of Fremde HeerOst must take the most responsibility) was one of the key blunders of the war.
So complacent were the Germans that they didn't even bother to issue their soldiers with winter uniforms

I'll continue with Part 2 tomorrow

Part Two

As the dawn rose on the morning of the 22nd of June 1941, the deep azure  skies above the River Bug tinged a fiery red , echoes of the sun , rising far to the East ,over 2000 guns of all calibres suddenly burst into life.
Then, at exactly 3 30 am( local time) after the codeword " Dortmund" had been dispatched, with the air full of the high pitched shrieking of the nebelwerfers, the dull slap of the 88s , the deep throaty bass of the huge Krupp howitzers the greatest invasion force ever assembled rumbled into action. All along the 1500 mile long front ..the panzers lurched into action, coming lumbering out of the beech forests, the silhouettes of their guns  casting an eerie shadow. The smaller, nimbler STUGs and Panzer I and IIs trundling obediently along behind the larger heavier Mk IIIs and IVs .the drivers hearts filled with conflicting emotions, trying to him a few bars of the Horst Wessel lied perhaps, trying not to remember the bloodcurdling tales their SA truppfuhrers had told them about this terrible primitive land.
Overhead, the infantry below ,crouching in their lorries or marching warily can just about make out the distinctive gull shaped profile of the Stukas and the sleek contours of the Messerschmitts...tiny shapes held aloft by the shoulders of the blurry dawn..
In the distance the crump of artillery, tongues of fire lapping the grey Russian skies...Russia .. the Empire of the Tsars now the domain of bloody Stalin and his jewish clique..
As morning approached and the sky lightened , a veil of dust hung over the ruins of towns, villages and border posts. Taken completely by surprise ( one famous radio exchange has a frantic operator calling his base for instructions " We are being fired upon".." You must be crazy" came the irascible reply" and why is your message not in code?") the Panzer spearheads had smashed through the disorganised border forces, a combination of Red Army men and NKVD Border Guards. Mansteins LVIIth Mechanised Corps had made a frantic 100km dash, deep into enemy territory. Both and Guderians Panzer groups had poured over the Bug, fanning out across the fields and rolling meadows.
At least 20 full Soviet divisions had been destroyed, through the shimmering haze of that hellish afternoon from a distance it was often hard to tell the ragged columns of frantic refugees from the triumphant invading hordes..
The Luftwaffe had been even more successful, practically wiping out the entire VVS( Soviet airforce) on the first day. Bombing their home based, the planes lined up in neat rows.
The few Soviet aircraft that made it into the sky were reduced to attempting to ram the much faster and more manoeuvrable Messerschmitts and Heinkels..
It was an unbelievable rout, the German commanders congratulating each other , marvelling at how the operation was unfolding seamlessly and " planmaessing" according to plan ...
But even then, in those first few heady days when victory and the cataclysmic New Order( a nightmarish psuedo Darwinist vision of masters and slaves, useless eaters and Aryan Ubermensch, beyond all laws and morality) seemed all but assured, there were a few troubling signs 
A hitherto unknown heavy tank( the T 34) far superior to the Panzer IVs, acts of suicidal defiance ( the fortress of Brest Litovsk) and most of all the stubborn refusal of the average Red Army man to acceed meekly to his subhuman status, lay down his arms and surrender .
Right from the start of Barbarossa the Wehrmacht were, if not equal partners, then at the very least enablers , of the genocidal excesses of the Einsatzgruppen.
Despite their later denials and clumsy attempts at revisionism all the senior commanders( from field grade all the way up to Army Group) followed the criminal orders of the regime. In some cases, like Von Reichenaus " Severity Order", even attempting to surpass their brutality.
The most notorious of these orders was the " Commissar Order" . In terse bureaucratic language, interspersed with homicidal fatuity, this order instructed army officers to hand  all suspected communist functionaries and jews, over to the SS for " special treatment"
The invasion was predicated upon  a genocidal notion; the Ostplan aka the Hunger Plan, a premeditated scheme to st condemn upwards of 30 million " useless eaters"to a slow death by starvation.
There's an infamous photo of the top SS leaders, including Himmler and Heydrich, standing in a semi circle  round Dr Konrad Morgen( a 
brilliant young scientist turned pioneer of industrialised genocide, who formulated the original plan) Their expressions  a mixture of  intense concentration  and rapt adoration as the prophet unveils his vision.
To men who considered themselves visionaries. Pioneers. Expanding the  scope and reach of anti semitism far beyond the tired old boundaries.
TTheirs wouldbe a new world. THE new world. They would be  Columbus and Hernan Cortez, the grave pits dug in the desolate Latvian forests and the ramps of Auschwitz and Treblinka would be the shore of Hispaniola and the towering majesty of  Tenochticalan.
The first few months saw all three Army groups push deep into the vast Russian hinterlands.
The barren steppes proving ideal tank country.
By September Von Leeb was at the gates of Leningrad, even earlier Guderian and Von Bock were urging the OKW to allow them to push into Moscow .only in the South, assisted by the Pripyat marshes and by the fierce resistance of Timoshenkos armies did the Panzer spearheads encounter any significant difficulties.
AAt the ill fated conference at  Lutzen Von Bock was instructed to turn both his Panzer groups south( as a sop to sate Guderians ego his army was renamed PanzerArmee Guderian) to help Von Kleist take Kiev ..
Kiev was taken only for Hitler to decide he wanted Moscow too. Before the Russian winter arrived...
I've got some work to do today so I'll finish this part tomorrow .

Thanks Alex. Excellent research.

My pleasure Vinny.
Hopefully I'll have the time tomorrow to finish part 2 and post a thorough debunking of the most offensive denier myths.

alex_wilson wrote:My pleasure Vinny.
Hopefully I'll have the time tomorrow to finish part 2 and post a thorough debunking of the most offensive denier myths.

Thank-you Alex. Thanks for coming here to the Forum and sharing your vast knowledge of History.
This is a fantastic insight, I enjoy reading your work very much.
Great stuff mate!

It's my absolute pleasure Mick

PART TWO ( continued)

Up until relatively recently ( late 90s) the conventional narrative of the Great Patriotic War focused on Stalingrad as THE definitive turning point. While it's certainly true that after Stalingrad the initiative would pass to the Soviets, despite some tactical victories( Von Mansteins " backhand" counter offensive in the Don region that allowed Army Group A* to escape from being trapped in the Caucasus in spring 43, a potential disaster that would have dwarfed Stalingrad, the much celebrated recapture of Kiev by the 1st SS PanzerKorps later that same year.) Not to mention the last major German offensive of the war, Operation Citadel, that culminated in the ferocious armoured duel at Kursk, from Spring 43 the Red Army ( now with the pre Revolutionary ranks and shoulderboards restored, not to mention the awards named after Kutuzov and Suvorov, once derided as reactionary buffoons) was in the ascendancy. It's now accepted by most historians that the real turning point came a year earlier.
Outside Moscow in the winter of 41/42,when the temperatures dropped to minus 40.
The Germans had gambled on a quick victory. Barbarossa in hindsight was do or die.
The manpower shortages and the logistical nightmare of supplying a 3 million plus army 2000 miles away from their home bases over primitive roads, a different rail guage and hostile territory already full of well armed and organised partisan bands, doomed the Wehrmacht in the medium to long term.
Like at Dunkirk, when the defeated British and Commonwealth forces escaped to fight another day, the defeat before Moscow left the Germans agonisingly short of complete victory. Despite all the stunning successes, the brilliant tactics, the audacious generalship, the 3.5 million prisoners, the vast territorial gains the Red Army although battered and severely depleted was still a potent fighting force 
At the Lutzen conference Hitler had decided to concentrate his available forces on capturing the Ukraine. The breadbasket of the Soviet Union. Also the Donets basin , home to huge coalfields and giant factories, was the most industrialised part of the country.
Railing at his generals for their outmoded bourgeoisie view of war and their obsession with the golden onion domes of Moscow, Guderian claims to have heard Hitler say for the first time:" my generals know nothing about the economic aspects of war"
Over the next 3 and a half years it would become a familiar complaint.
Reinforced by both Hoth and Guderians Panzer armies the German's duly captured the wheatfields and the industrial heartlands of the Ukraine. Capturing nearly 700000 Soviet prisoners in the iron jaws of a huge double pincer east of Kiev, a battle Hitler declared was "the greatest of all time"
Convinced of his military genius and his almost god like infallibility the Fuhrer now declared, in September 41, only a month before the autumn rainfalls ( the rasputitsa) and less than 2 months away from the start of the dreaded Russian winter,  that he wanted Moscow captured too. ( Perhaps to offset the disappointment of failing to capture Leningrad, now entering the first month's of the notorious siege . Maddened by the stubborn refusal of the subhumans to admit defeat and surrender Hitler had ordered the huge Krupp railway howitzers ( the Big Bertha's , that lobbed 1 ton shells) to pulverise the city)
Operation Typhoon was hurriedly planned, a gigantic undertaking, with 3 full Panzer armies and 4 infantry armies ( backed up with Von Richthofen's, cousin of the famous Red Baron, luftflotte 4)
  attacking from 3 directions.
Hoepner through the forests north of the Moscow Volga canal, Hoth, supported by Von Kluges party motorised 4th army, along the main highway and Guderian from the south, coming up through Orel ( Guderian would make Tolstoy's Yasna Polyana country house his HQ)
" Tell me honestly as a communist Georgi Konstantinovich can we hold Moscow?" a nervous Stalin had asked the newly recalled Zhukov in October 41, with the Panzer spearheads barely 100 miles away.( Zhukov, who as deputy commander would come to know Stalin as well as anyone, could tell by the unlit pipe he figeted with that Stalin was unusually tense)
" Yes we can" Zhukov answered calmly.
And they did.
By carefully preparing four defensive rings, recalling Marshal Rokossovski from the gulag he presently languished in. Convicted thanks to the testimony of a man who died in 1920. He was flown from the camp directly to the Kremlin in a Douglas for an interview with Stalin.." Haven't they been feeding you Konstantin Konstantinovich?" He asked without a hint of irony. From the Kremlin he was flown to his new command, the 10th Army, on what would prove to be a vital sector of the front.
Perhaps most importantly of all, thanks to his spy in Tokyo Richard Sorge, Stalin knew that the Japanese would honour the non aggression pact signed after Zhukov's victory at Khalkin Gol in 1940. Instead of attacking the Pacific Maritime provinces as the Germans were imploring them to do, the Japanese had cast their avaricious gaze southwards, to the British, Dutch and French colonies. And the American colonies of Guam and the Philippines...not to mention Hawaii and Pearl harbor, where the US Pacific Fleet lay at anchor.
Thus Stalin was able to withdraw the 17 well trained well armed Siberian divisions. In their felt boots and fur caps. 
It would be these divisions the Stavka would unleash on the battered uncomprehending Germans on the morning of the 7th of December.
Gliding out of the icy foggy murk on their skis, with a prehensile almost balletic grace with the. T34s churning impassively behind them, their wide tracks creating a snowy mist...with their low profile and with the fur coat Siberians clinging to their sides to the weary frostbitten half starved Germans, shivering in their summer uniforms and with newspapers stuffed in their helmets they must have seemed like a terrible vision . ghosts of the Mongol hordes perhaps riding on their fearsome war elephants..
The fighting on the 7th of December was so severe that Franz Halder, Army Chief of Staff didn't even mention Pearl harbor in his diary entry that night 
Ending a brief laconic couple of paragraphs with " wild fighting round Mayoslavarets" ( where out of the frozen night Dovators cavalry corps had appeared, all but annihilating an entire infantry Division in a couple of hours of Napoleonic carnage)
In the one genuinely heroic episode of his life Stalin, with his private train packed and waiting at the Byelorussian Station, refused to evacuate Moscow and join the mass official exodus to Kuibyshev.
Preferring instead to doss down in a specially modified Metro car, in words of Isaac Deutscher, " like some omnipotent tramp"
* At the start of Operation Blue Army Group South was split into two separate commands:
Army Group A, commanded by Generalfeldmarschall Von List( including the 1st, and 17th Armies and the 1st Panzer Army) headed for the Caucasus and the oilfields of Maikop and Grozny
Army Group B commanded by Generalfeldmarschall Baron Von Weichs ( including the ill fated 6th army commanded by the newly appointed Friedrich Paulus, in his first independent field command. A talented staff officer, Paulus had been the long time chief of staff to 6th army commander Von Reichenau ( described as a bullnecked unrepentant Nazi he was of course the author of the Severity Order) Hoths 4th Panzer Army , refitted and transferred south after Operation Typhoon, 8th Italian army , 2nd Hungarian and 2nd Romanian armies, both to play such fateful roles in the campaign to come. Losing close to 750000 killed, missing and wounded since June 41 the Wehrmacht was increasingly forced to rely upon poorly armed and motivated " allied" troops from their Axis partners. The 2nd Romanian Army was supplied with out dated horsedrawn PAK anti tank guns, christened " the door knocker" by contemptuous Red Army tankists because their shells bounced harmlessly off the thickly armoured hulls of the T34s and the KV1s) heading for Stalingrad and the Volga River.

With your permission I'll continue this post tomorrow and over the weekend

Can't wait Alex. Riveting material. Love it!

Mick_Purdy wrote:Can't wait Alex. Riveting material. Love it!

It is great background material for better understanding the decades that followed. 

When Alex says he has been writing from memory, you can believe it. Encyclopedic memory doesn't do justice to describing his recall.