A newly released archive of 800 digital recordings and transcripts interviews with Nazi criminals has apparently confirmed that the Holocaust was the result of a direct order from Adolf Hitler.
Among the recordings, published on the Hoover Institution website, is one from SS officer Bruno Streckenbach, head of the Administration and Personnel Department of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), in which he admits that the Nazi leader gave explicit instructions for implementing the Final Solution and the mass murder of Jews.
Streckenbach was responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the Third Reich, from managing SS squads that slaughtered thousands across Poland in 1939 to deploying the Einsatzgruppen, which murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews.
Prosecutors attempted to charge him with responsibility with the murder of at least one million people, but Streckenbach evaded all attempts to bring him to trial and didn't spend a single day in a German prison after the war.
According to Streckenbach's account, the first time he heard about the plan was when he received a hint from Erwin Schulz, a volunteer officer in the Einsatzgruppen who had supervised the executions of up to a hundred people in western Ukraine but apparently felt uncomfortable witnessing the mass murders of Jews.
Streckenbach said: "Schulz trembled, trembled like I'm trembling now. He said: 'What are we doing?' and I said: 'We can't do anything, we can't leave everything. There was an order.'"
Following the exchange Streckenbach claimed went directly to his immediate commander, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the RSHA and one of the main architects of the Holocaust.
It was Heydrich who chaired the January 1942 Wannsee Conference that formalised plans for the Final Solution.
"Heydrich was very quiet, very businesslike. He sat at the edge of his large conference table and said 'Be quiet now, Streckenbach. Now listen to me. Shut your mouth, don't interfere. We can't do anything about it. This is the order from the Führer. He chose the SS to carry out this order. Neither the Reichsführer [SS leader Heinrich Himmler] nor I can do anything about it'," Streckenbach recounted.
For almost 80 years, historians have debated whether the Holocaust stemmed directly from Hitler's explicit orders or evolved through initiatives taken by German subordinates and field commanders implementing broader directives.
In the most extreme cases, Holocaust deniers like David Irving have sought to completely exculpate Hitler, claiming in a 2009 interview that mass murders of Jews were hidden from the dictator as he was “the best friend the Jews had in the Third Reich”. Indeed, the repetition of this claims in Irving’s book – Hitler’s War – partly formed the basis of the high profile libel suit he lost against American historian Deborah Lipstadt in 2000, which effectively established the existence of the Shoah as a matter of legal record in the UK.
Thomas Weber, professor of history at the University of Aberdeen, who discovered the recordings, said Streckenbach's claim that the first order came directly from Hitler is of major historical significance.
Weber emphasised that this recording directly addresses a decades-long historical debate about the development of the "Holocaust by bullets" in Soviet territories and the chain of command behind these mass killings.
He noted that while historians have long suspected Nazi defendants misrepresented their personal responsibility during post-war trials, Streckenbach's recording provides unprecedented first-person evidence confirming these deliberate misrepresentations of authority and responsibility.
