SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 227
3 to 5 May 1984 under the general heading “The Murder of the European
Jews in the Second World War. Genesis and Implementation.”
The respective proceedings were published a year later under the same
title. 655
Eberhard Kolb formulated with great clarity the two fundamental
questions which the meeting faced: 656
“1. Was the ‘Final Solution’ the realization of a project which
had been on the books for a long time and which aimed – in the last
instance – at the physical annihilation of the European Jewry?
2. Was there a specific order – at least an oral one if not a written
one – by Hitler to kill not only the Jews living in Eastern Europe
but all Jews within the German sway, and when was this order given?”
From there, Kolb goes on to set out the replies furnished by the Holocaust
historiography up to the date of the meeting: 657
“If I am not mistaken, the majority of the researchers today tend
to put a big question mark on the idea of a National Socialist policy
towards the Jews based on a plan which unfolded and moved along
on a straight line – from the anti-Semitic slogans of the ‘Kampfzeit,’
via the anti-Jewish measures of the 1933-1939 period towards the
organized mass murder from 1941 on. The real question today is
whether (and when) Hitler gave a specific extermination order. Into
the 1970s there was almost unanimous agreement on this point. Certainly:
a written extermination order emanating from Hitler had not
come down to us and we could assume that there never was such a
written order. However, an express ‘Führerbefehl’ in the form of an
oral instruction given by Hitler to Himmler was regarded as the indispensable
condition for the assassinations which were begun in
1941.
On the other hand, there was no general agreement on the moment
at which this order had been given: Raul Hilberg (1961) believes
that the general extermination order was issued by Hitler in
‘early summer’ of 1941, Helmut Krausnick (1965) dates such an order
to ‘March of 1941 at the latest,’ Uwe Dietrich Adam has a span
‘between September and November of 1941’; if we follow Andreas
655 Eberhard Jäckel, Jürgen Rohwer (eds.), Der Mord an den Juden im Zweiten Weltkrieg.
Entschlußbildung und Verwirklichung, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1985.
656 Ibid., p. 61.
657 Ibid., pp. 61-63.