A few days ago, I published a long article about what Azerbaijan calls “the Khojaly genocide” as an exemplar of a false genocide claim that is generated for political reasons. The genocide claim, made in the immediate context of Azerbaijan’s war with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh amid the Soviet Empire’s collapse, became a crucial pillar of Azeri nationalism, binding the population of the new State in a collective sense of victimhood and hostility towards a foreign neighbour that plots their destruction—and always has. For in Baku’s telling, Khojaly is only the most-recent of multiple genocides perpetrated by the Armenians against Azeris stretching back to the first decade of the twentieth century.

The Armenian response is that it is they who have suffered an interminable campaign of genocides by Turkic enemies, from the terrible massacres during the deportations in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 through to the pogroms against the Armenian minority in Azerbaijan, at Sumgait and Baku, in 1988 and 1990. This competitive victimhood has entrenched “divergent national narratives”, each denying the suffering of the other, which sustains the conflict by preventing the two sides finding even the minimal common ground that would be needed to begin working towards peace and reconciliation.

As discussed in the article, part of what makes the Khojaly case interesting is that, despite a general trend in academia since the 1980s—reflected in the media and popular understanding—to dissociate the word “genocide” from the Holocaust and apply it ever-more widely, the academic consensus rejects the Khojaly genocide claim. An important reason for this is the recognition that Khojaly is part of a broader phenomenon in the post-Soviet space, where “genocide” is widely used in official political discourse “with barely any reference to the international legal understanding of the term”.

An example of this tendency was furnished yesterday by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who tweeted: “Bucha. It was a genocide, recognized by everyone.”1 Bucha refers to a small town, less than twenty miles from Kyiv, which the Russian army entered on 27 February 2022, during the first days of the full-scale invasion meant to destroy the Ukrainian State and incorporate the country into Russia. Bucha’s liberation a month later, as the invaders were driven back from the Ukrainian capital, disclosed a hideous scene. The occupiers, including some of Russia’s elite troops, had raped, tortured, and massacred the civilian population, leaving bodies in the streets.2

In the regional context, Zelensky is doing nothing unusual in choosing to call the Bucha slaughter, or indeed the entire Russian war, genocide. The Azeris frame Khojaly as one episode in an Armenian war in the Karabakh that was genocidal tout court. Even before that, right at the beginning of the post-Soviet world in 1989, Romania’s revolutionaries had put Nicolae Ceaușescu and his grisly wife, Elena, to death after a show trial that declared them guilty of genocide.3 Russia, meanwhile, claimed it invaded Georgia in 2008 to stop a genocide in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and Tbilisi counter-claimed that Russian and its separatists were the perpetrators of genocide.

Alongside contemporary genocide claims, numerous post-Soviet States have raised such claims about the past. This often happened in the early phase of independence and was geared towards reinforcing the dual processes of nation-building, namely anathematising the Communist period as an alien imposition and forging a new national history, whether remembered, recovered, or invented. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania all commemorate Soviet genocides against them. Poland has Katyn. Mutatis mutandis, Russia claims it, as successor State to the Soviet Union, embodies the victims of the Nazi “genocide of the Soviet people”.

At a sub-State level, the Crimean Tatars and Chechens have appealed for their deportations by Stalin to be recognised as genocide, and the Circassians have made the same appeal about their deportation by Imperial Russia in the 1860s.

What does make the Bucha genocide claim slightly unusual is that it comes from Ukraine. Ukrainian émigrés first seriously mobilised to campaign for recognition of the terror-famine during Soviet collectivisation in 1983, on the fiftieth anniversary, and the Holodomor was legislatively enshrined by independent Ukraine as the national genocide in the 2000s. Ukraine thereafter avoided making supplementary genocide claims for itself, even under the extreme provocation of Russia’s initial invasion in 2014, which (one may detect a pattern here) was justified by Moscow as protecting people in the Donbas from a “genocide” by “the Kiev junta”. The Ukrainians understood—as the Azeris and Armenians seem not to—that proliferation erodes, rather than enhances, the legitimacy of genocide claims.

There is an irony in the attempt to use politicised genocide claims as a mechanism to escape the Soviet legacy because there can be no surer testament to it. In 1946, before the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring genocide a crime under “international law”, the Soviets had already used the Nuremberg “trials” as a stage to blame the Germans for Katyn. The 1948 Genocide Convention had barely entered into force in 1951 when the Soviets started accusing the United States of genocide for its treatment of the Native Indians and African Americans at home, and for repelling Soviet aggression in Korea. It was in this era that the Armenian genocide-recognition campaign originated as a Soviet active measure to prevent and then punish Turkey for joining NATO. And the Soviet capture of the U.N. General Assembly in the 1960s, creating an in-built anti-Western majority via the amusingly named Non-Aligned Movement, made the U.N. the key theatre for launching an endless series of KGB global influencing campaigns based on fabricated genocide charges.4 The most intense and enduring such campaign was against Israel.5

I got a bit of blowback for saying Zelensky was not quite correct that “everyone” agreed Bucha was a genocide. The basic objection was that this was in some way downplaying the seriousness of the atrocity. In a strict sense, this is unfair: to argue that an event does not meet the technical definition set out in the Genocide Convention is to say no more than that. It does not necessarily involve contesting the facts of the case nor their criminality; the issue is why the crime happened, and whether the perpetrators had the “special intent” for genocide. Emotionally, of course, the objection lands because those making a genocide claim do so precisely because genocide is viewed as the top of a hierarchy of atrocity—“the crime of crimes”—and events so recognised thereby enter the same category as the Holocaust; to refuse this will incur resentment. The only way through is to reiterate that the Convention definition is what it is; “genocide” is not a synonym for “a bad thing”. And a crime does not have to be genocide to deserve attention, condemnation, and retribution.

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FOOTNOTES

One cannot make a direct crossing from Azerbaijan to Armenia, so when making the trip at the end of August I had to go via Georgia. Driving to the Azeri land border with Georgia, the “Red Bridge”, I passed the Khojaly Genocide Memorial, commemorating an event from February 1992.

To say that something is genocide is implicitly—and usually explicitly—to claim it can withstand a comparison with the Holocaust, the Nazi attempt to exterminate all Jews everywhere solely for their identity. Such is the case with Khojaly, declared genocide by Azerbaijan’s parliament a month after it happened.1 “The Khojaly genocide”, says Baku, “is the gravest crime”, one “against humanity” as a whole, and “does not differ from other horrifying tragedies [such as] Katyn, Lidice, Oradour-sur-Glane, Holocaust, Songmy, Rwanda, and Srebrenica”.

It is either a shocking indictment of man’s inhumanity that this world-historical crime is so little known, or something else is going on here.

The Karabakh Conflict

Azerbaijan says the Khojaly atrocity was perpetrated “in the course of Armenia’s aggressive war against Azerbaijan”, meaning the First Karabakh War (1988-94). The origins of the Karabakh conflict go back to the Soviet Union creating Azerbaijan and Armenia in 1920. The Soviets drew the borders based on the territorial holdings of the Armenian Christians and Turkic-speaking Muslims in the Caucasus, who had used their freedom from Imperial oversight after the 1917 Bolshevik coup to fight a brutal ethno-irredentist war. Fatefully, the Soviets left the Armenian-majority Karabakh in Azerbaijan. Armenians never accepted this and in February 1988, capitalising on Mikhail Gorbachev scaling back the Cheka Terror, they initiated a campaign to revise the borders.

Armenian protests erupted in Yerevan and the Karabakh, and on 22 February 1988 two Karabakh-Azeris were killed at a counter-demonstration. Less than a week later, there was a gruesome Azeri pogrom against Armenians in Sumgait, north of Baku, which killed about thirty people. It was the beginning of four years of escalating inter-communal violence. Armenia began to terrorise and deport its Azeri minority, and Azerbaijan responded in kind, culminating in another anti-Armenian pogrom in Baku in January 1990. Ninety Armenians were killed and the survivors expelled, completing the mutual ethnic cleansing.

In the Karabakh through 1988-89, the Armenian minority was expelled from the main Azeri town of Shusha, and the Azeri minority was expelled from the main Armenian town (and provincial capital) of Stepanakert/Khankendi.2 The Armenian nationalists in power in Yerevan after the summer of 1990 “deniably” infiltrated fedayeen guerrillas into the Karabakh. The Soviets responded with a “pacification” operation in mid-1991, the main effect of which was to further militarise the Karabakh conflict and normalise ethnic cleansing as a method.

Azerbaijan and Armenia declared independence after the KGB’s failed putsch in August 1991 and the Soviet Union dissolved four months later, creating the enduring legal-political situation where the Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan’s sovereign territory,3 and the conflict is thus formally defined as a domestic rebellion, not an inter-State war. Armenia worked to sustain this fiction by officially disclaiming any involvement in the Karabakh and continuing to operate there (until early 1993) mostly through the fedayeen and other “volunteer” irregulars. Azerbaijan, inheriting even less of a military from the U.S.S.R. than Armenia and being racked by internal political divisions that inhibited the creation of organised armed forces, relied in the Karabakh on its “special police” or OMON and various mafiosos-turned-nationalist warlords.

The demographic mosaic in the Karabakh was seen as a problem by both sides, and both opted for ethnic cleansing to resolve it. The less numerous Karabakh-Azeris (under-25% of the population) were in many small “traps”, their villages surrounded by Armenian settlements from which the fedayeen invaded and forced the Azeris to flee. The Armenians were in one big “trap”, with Stepanakert/Khankendi hemmed in by the major Azeri strongholds.4 Stepanakert/Khankendi was effectively besieged by October 1991. The shelling from the surrounding Azeri positions rendered the town dependent on supplies helicoptered in from Armenia. The immediate context for the Khojaly event was the Armenian attempt to break the siege of Stepanakert/Khankendi.

The Khojaly Event

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The Origins of the Karabakh Conflict

Imperial Russia, under its policy of “defensive expansionism”, conquered a series of Muslim-ruled khanates in the Caucasus from the Qajar Persians in the 1810s and 1820s. The mixed population of Armenian Christians and Turkic-speaking Muslims in the area would be afflicted by nationalism through the nineteenth century, and the First World War created opportunities for the nationalist elites to put their theories into practice.

The hopes of Tsarist Russia to use Armenian revolutionary nationalism to defeat and dismember the Ottoman Empire led the Armenians into the great catastrophe of 1915 when “Western Armenia” was lost forever amid the deportations. But the collapse of Russia itself into the civil war engendered by the Bolshevik coup gave the Armenians a second chance and they seized it, as did the Caucasian Muslim leaders who identified as Azerbaijanis or Azeris. Apart from the opportune circumstances as their former master disintegrated, the States of Azerbaijan and Armenia proclaimed in mid-1918 had reason to think history was on their side, given U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric, particularly focused on Russia, about self-determination for nations heretofore supposedly oppressed by the multiethnic Empires.

The experience of trying to translate the concepts of Armenia and Azerbaijan as nation-states from the minds of intellectuals into actually existing entities, however, was a war of all against all. There being no agreed boundaries in the wreckage of the Russian Empire, the Armenians and Azeris used their freedom to try to create some, resulting in an internecine ethno-irredentist on-off war against one another, wherein they variously manipulated and were manipulated by the Bolsheviks, the Ottomans, and the British. The conventional invasions and stirring up of compatriot minorities behind the lines resulted in a bitter conflict marked by omni-directional massacres and expulsions, though both sides would enshrine memories where they were “suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer”.1

Wilson’s debilitating stroke in October 1919 and the shattering of the anti-Bolshevik forces around the same time weakened the moral and practical climate for self-determination,2 and a year later it was all over in the Caucasus. The moment the Bolshevik regime had any sense of security, it set about expanding the Revolution, starting by restoring the old Imperial frontiers. The Miracle on the Vistula spared Poland and the Baltics, and shored-up Finland’s freedom, but that was the exception. From Ukraine to Mongolia, Lenin’s Revolution crushed those who had been so foolish as to believe his promises on the “Nationalities Question”. The Azeris and Armenians, having exhausted each other, folded quickly when the Red Army came for them.

It was the Soviets who first created Armenia and Azerbaijan as polities with defined frontiers in 1920, essentially on the basis of control on the ground. Both sides requested boundary adjustments and the Soviets, as Imperial overlord, had to decide. A particular area of dispute was the Nagorno-Karabakh region, an Armenian-majority enclave that had seen intense Armenian-Azeri fighting and was mostly occupied by the Azeris when the Red Army arrived. The Armenian argument for the Karabakh as part of their natural territory was heard and the Soviets—inevitably after much discussion in a committee—decided on 4 July 1921 to redraw the internal borders so the Karabakh was in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. For reasons still unclear, the Kavbiuro reversed itself the next day, deciding to leave the Karabakh in the Azerbaijani SSR, and made it an autonomous oblast in 1923.3 Such was the Karabakh’s status for more than half-a-century.

The Resumption of the Karabakh Conflict

Under the “New Thinking” of Mikhail Gorbachev after he became General-Secretary in 1985, the Terror that held the Soviet Empire together was scaled back, opening the space for the Karabakh conflict to be resumed.

Gorbachev’s key aim was to rein-in the KGB and erode its anti-reformist allies in the bureaucracy. It was within this framework Gorbachev purged Heydar Aliyev, an old Chekist, from the Politburo in October 1987. Aliyev had been ruler of Soviet Azerbaijan (1969-82) and he retained influence there after being elevated to the capital. Aliyev was inter alia patron of the Karabakh soviet, ensuring it was dominated by Baku-loyal Armenians. Aliyev’s fall furnished Armenians in the nomenklatura, in the Karabakh and in the Armenian SSR, with a chance for “bureaucratic insurgency”. The insurgents’ hope was to acquire Gorbachev’s patronage so they could displace Aliyev’s people, and have the Karabakh handed to the Armenian SSR by staging demonstrations to convince Gorbachev this was the popular will of the oblast.4 Which it probably was: over-75% of the Karabakh population was Armenian,5 and every time there had been a political thaw letters and petitions from Armenians asking for the Karabakh to be made part of the Armenian SSR had flooded into Moscow.6

Armenian insurgent bureaucrats diverted “administrative resources to sponsoring popular rallies” in the Karabakh and Yerevan calling for “reunifying” the Karabakh and Armenia, which began in February 1988. Even at this early stage, however, it was apparent that the bureaucratic insurgents’ “carefully planned” campaign was “provincially naïve”: they were unleashing forces they could not control.7 The bureaucrats believed the crowds were a means to an administrative end—having the Karabakh transferred to Soviet Armenian jurisdiction—but the crowds had ideas of their own, which for some included expelling the Karabakh Azeris.8 This miscalculation was compounded by the Armenian nomenklatura being divided among themselves. Some believed the system was eternal and they had to achieve their goals through Moscow Centre. Others were envisioning a radically different future, and they had more than imagination to work with.9

Over the previous two decades, an Armenian “internal diaspora” had been created in the Soviet Union, with many Karabakhi members, which would emerge in 1988-89 as the Pan-Armenian National Movement (HHSh). The HHSh network stretched from Yerevan to Tashkent, and was able to reach into the Karabakh. HHSh tested its capacity with the Karabakh Armenian protests. When the KGB did not crush them immediately, the HHSh was emboldened.10 HHSh, with the advantage of its strategic depth outside the Karabakh, was swiftly able to compete for popularity and power with the remnants of Aliyev’s Armenians and those looking to the Centre, and to coordinate and sustain activities in the Karabakh on an unprecedented scale.11

The speed and organisational skill with which the Armenian nationalists acted convinced many Azeris that the Armenians had Moscow’s sanction.12 In truth, the Soviet leadership, which looked on Armenian nationalism with as much distaste as it had for any other, however willing Moscow had been to instrumentalise it, was taken off-guard, hence its improvised responses—intended to restore calm—often backfired.13

After about a week of protests by Armenians, in the Armenian SSR and in the Karabakh—in the enclave’s capital, Stepanakert or Khankendi,14 and in Askeran in the Khojaly District—the Karabakh Regional Soviet voted for the oblast to be administered by the Armenian SSR on 20 February 1988.15 Moscow rejected the resolution out of hand, but news was already spreading of two Azeri women raped in Stepanakert/Khankendi, and two days later the atmosphere was inflamed further when an Azeri protest march was attacked in Askeran. Two Azeris were killed, one by a policeman in murky circumstances, and the other by an Armenian villager with a hunting rifle—“the first victim of intercommunal violence”, as Thomas de Waal puts it in Black Garden, his classic study of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.16

Less than a week later, on 28 February, another milestone in the Soviet Union’s demise took place with the first explosion of peacetime ethnic violence in Sumgait/Sumqayit, a grim Communist-built town twenty miles north of Baku. Two days of incitement at rallies boiled over into a horrifying Azeri pogrom against Armenians in Sumgait that lasted until 29 February. The official tally about thirty Armenians murdered, but the mutilation and burning alive of victims made counting the dead difficult, and nobody ever comprehensively documented the rapes.17

The Armenians continued lobbying Moscow to transfer the Karabakh to them until July 1988 when the Supreme Soviet definitively ruled the Karabakh was staying in the Azerbaijani SSR. Switching tactics, a campaign of popular terror with official backing unfolded against the Azeri minority in the Armenian SSR. By the late summer, this evolved into the wholesale deportation of the Azeris to the Azerbaijani SSR, though it did not stop the terror. In November 1988, for instance, twelve Azeris in Vartan, a village in north-east Armenia, were burned alive.18

Around the same time, Armenians in the Azerbaijani SSR were massacred at Kirovabad/Ganja: nobody knows from that day to this how many were killed, but the Armenians claimed 130 fatalities and it was enough for the “human rights” groups to start raising the spectre of “genocide”, a word central to the political warfare and identity of both sides. The Karabakh was already following in microcosm the broader dynamics, with the Armenians expelled from the main Azeri town of Shusha and the Azeris expelled from the main Armenian town of Stepanakert/Khankendi.19 The tit-for-tat massacres and expulsions lasted another half-decade, each side convinced from beginning to end—and long afterwards—that they were the real and sole victim.

The Soviet “special regime” for the Karabakh—effectively direct rule from Moscow—put in place in late 1988 became official in January 1989 and brought down levels of overt violence. But political fragmentation and the proliferation of (relatively) organised armed units was overtaking the Karabakh. In late November 1989, amid the shock to the Soviet system of Gorbachev failing to send the Red Army to thwart the Captive Nations’ bids for freedom, a calamitous decision was taken to transfer the new Karabakh “Organisational Committee” to the Azerbaijani SSR, i.e., to put the Karabakh under direct rule from Baku. In retaliation, the Armenian SSR declared full “reunification” with the Karabakh on 1 December 1989.20

Armenians were euphoric; Azeris were enraged. Intercommunal village clashes in the Karabakh escalated. As a by-product, the Azeri nationalist opposition, the Popular Front, was empowered—and Moscow’s alarm turned to panic as the nationalists usurped power on the streets from the Communist authorities in Azerbaijan. These two trends met fatefully in Baku in January 1990.

The Armenians in Baku—a terrified remnant of what had once been a community of 200,000 (10% of the city’s population)—were set upon in a ferocious pogrom on 12 January 1990. Violence raged in various ways for a week and at the conclusion of it perhaps ninety Armenians were dead. The survivors were packed onto boats across the Caspian to Turkmenistan, and from there flown to Yerevan. “With this terrible flourish”, writes De Waal, “Armenia and Azerbaijan completed their ethnic cleansing of each other’s populations.”21

Barely had the pogromshchiki gone home when there was another massacre in Baku on 20 January 1990, this time of Azeris—perhaps 130 of them—by the Soviet army as it repressed the nationalists and installed a “healthy” Communist regime led by Ayaz Mutalibov.22 It was within the formal boundaries of the Soviet Union what had happened multiple times in the contiguous Soviet Empire—in East Germany in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, in Afghanistan in 1979—and for a time it seemed similarly successful. But time was running out.

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Militarising the Karabakh Conflict in the Soviet Context

As Gorbachev plotted a new Union Treaty to save the U.S.S.R., he now had a reliable ally in Azerbaijan—if he met the quid pro quo of Moscow taking a hard line on the Karabakh and the Armenians in general. This was not a difficult sell. The Karabakh situation had nearly spiralled out of control after the “Black January”, and the façade of order brought by the deployment of Soviet state of emergency forces and the new Azeri “special police” or OMON was breaking down. The Armenian Nationalist Movement led by Levon Ter-Petrosyan (LTP) completed its capture of Yerevan in the summer of 1990, one of the first non-Communist governments to take power in a Soviet republic, and began infiltrating fedayi into the Karabakh, reviving the name used by the Armenian guerrillas or terrorists (as you prefer) in the early part of the twentieth century. The Armenian fedayi blew up bridges, invaded Azeri villages, took hostages, assassinated local officials, and caused general mayhem.23

The mingling of Moscow and Azeri politics in approaching the Karabakh in 1990-91, and the fact those two elements were mingled, while the Armenians were on a different trajectory, laying the foundations for independence by constructing their own domestic military-security capability—and a paramilitary apparatus in the Karabakh—was to crucially determine the course of the First Karabakh War.24

After Baku delivered its vote in mid-March 1991 for Gorbachev’s referendum on a reformed Soviet federation—and the Armenians (with five other SSRs25) boycotted it entirely—Moscow delivered Operation RING at the end of April, sending Soviet troops to support the Azerbaijani SSR in securing the Karabakh. “Operation RING marked the beginning of the open, armed phase of the Karabakh conflict”, writes De Waal. Its public objective was eliminating the Armenian paramilitaries. Its undeclared objective was altering the demographics to clear the Armenian populations surrounding the Karabakh and replace them with a “ring” of loyal Azeris. Militarily, the RING operation proceeded smoothly if brutally, and by mid-June 1991 the Armenians, in Yerevan and the Karabakh, were putting out feelers asking for a compromise.26

However, there was a problem inherent to Operation RING: it was, as De Waal argues, “the first and last ‘Soviet civil war’,” with uniformed elements of the Soviet State fighting each other, which did not augur well for the Soviet Union’s durability.27 And in terms of the dynamics of revolutionary warfare—where military victories come and go but political victories endure—RING heavily redounded to the Armenians’ advantage.

The entanglement of Operation RING with Moscow politics made it an issue for the Russian SSR, led by Boris Yeltsin, which wanted to rein-in the Soviet security establishment even further—a common objective with the Armenian SSR. Yeltsin sent representatives down to the Caucasus and they returned declaring themselves appalled by the killings and deportations of Armenians. While the Soviet Union lasted, it was effective political warfare to destabilise the KGB faction and Azerbaijan. Beyond that, the campaign revived the Russian-Armenian political relationship that had been such an important factor in the previous Armenian independence struggle and would influence the next one, to Baku’s detriment. In parallel, the Armenians had been radicalised and unified. The ranks of the fedayeen swelled, and Armenian moderates were sidelined. These dynamics came into sharp focus soon after Valery Grigorian—the Karabakhi Armenian leader who tried for a compromise of restoring the enclave’s autonomy within Azerbaijan—was branded a “collaborator” by his own and shot down in the street in Stepanakert/Khankendi on 10 August 1991.28

Soviet citizens awoke on 19 August 1991 to find Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake playing on a loop on State television, the first they knew of the coup d’état led by KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov. The KGB, having triumphed over the Dissidents in the late 1970s, was out of patience with Gorbachev, who had constrained the Chekists’ war against “ideological subversion”, and refused to change course even as deviationism of all kinds tore the U.S.S.R. apart.29 So far as the gekachepisty were concerned,30 the coup was a rescue operation “to prevent society from sliding into a nationwide catastrophe”. For Azerbaijan, this was vindication: Mutalibov had bet on the Communist security sector and now Baku’s loyalty would be rewarded with an even harsher crackdown on the Armenians.31

Except, as everybody knows, the putsch was a shambles; it collapsed on 21 August and hastened the fragmentation of the Soviet Union it was designed to forestall. Yeltsin emerged as the undisputed victor, after rallying Moscow for a counter-coup, and, in the disarray as Gorbachev cleaned house at the KGB, a vacuum opened up in the Karabakh, into which the Armenians—understanding that their bet on independence had been vindicated—started re-inserting guerrillas, occupying villages cleared during Operation RING.32

The End of the Soviet Union

Changing lanes rapidly, Azerbaijan declared independence on 30 August 1991. Mutalibov had himself elected president in an absurdly rigged plebiscite nine days later, but the internal trouble that would rack Azerbaijan in the coming war was already visible. Heydar Aliyev, who had gained popularity by publicly opposing the “Black January” events that installed Mutalibov, got himself elected speaker of parliament in Nakhichevan and swiftly built up an independent powerbase in the exclave.33 Still, Mutalibov’s manoeuvre strengthened significantly Baku’s position over the Karabakh. Under the universally recognised, if regularly abused, principle of uti possidetis juris (“as you possess under law”), States emerging from decolonisation inherit their pre-existing administrative boundaries as international frontiers, meaning the Karabakh was—and remains—part of Azerbaijan’s sovereign territory.

When Armenia declared independence on 23 September, it had already orchestrated “a sleight of hand that allowed Armenia to say that it was only an interested observer [in the Karabakh], not a party to the conflict”, as De Waal explains. To avoid the political opprobrium that attaches to expansionist designs on neighbouring countries—this being six months after Saddam Husayn’s annexation of Kuwait had been reversed in a United Nations-blessed, U.S.-led operation—Yerevan had prodded the Karabakh Armenians to declare an independent “Nagorno-Karabakh Republic” on 2 September 1991. The argument was that autonomous oblasts, no less than SSRs, had a legal right to independence. Armenia initially had some internal tension, too, namely between the HHSh in Yerevan and the Dashnak leadership under Artur Mkrtchian in Stepanakert. But Yerevan, unlike Baku, resolved this quickly by eliminating Mkrtchian.34

There was a moment at the last when it seemed the descent into all-out war would be avoided. Yeltsin, using his newfound prestige, mediated the Zheleznovodsk Accords, which both sides signed. Announced the same day as Armenia’s independence, the accords were blown apart with the helicopter shot down by the Karabakh Armenians on 20 November 1991. All twenty-two on board were killed, including thirteen Azeri government officials, and Russian and Kazakh representatives coming to implement the peace deal. There was then a brief “war of laws”. Azerbaijan abolished the Karabakh’s autonomous status on 26 November, making it officially a province like any other with no special rights—a response of sorts to Armenia’s claim autonomous zones were entitled to independence. This was the point where Stepanakert was formally renamed Khankendi. Yerevan retaliated with a referendum on independence in the Karabakh on 10 December: the Armenians voted “yes” nearly unanimously and the Azeris boycotted.35

There would be no de jure declarations of war in the Karabakh, not least because Armenia pretended throughout it was not a party to the conflict. Nor is a de facto beginning of armed conflict easy to detect; the nearest to a candidate is the Soviet-Azeri Operation RING in April 1991, but, of course, that was initiated in response to the Armenian guerrilla warfare. Most historians date the outbreak of the First Karabakh War to February 1988, i.e., the Armenian vote to transfer the Karabakh to Armenia, and, in the sense that the cliché “war is politics by other means” contains an implicit vice versa, one would have to say this is reasonable. The militarisation of the conflict thereafter—amid massacre and counter-massacre, expulsion and counter-expulsion, and Soviet measures aimed at pacification—was incremental and uneven, but nevertheless inexorable. As the flag of the Soviet Union was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time on 25 December 1991, all political avenues to a settlement in the Karabakh were closed and the military struggle was already underway.

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The Post-Independence Nagorno-Karabakh War

While neither Armenia nor Azerbaijan had a conventional army as 1992 dawned, Armenia had far more access to resources and instruments that could be used for making war in the near-term.

There were thousands of Armenian veterans of the Red Army, many infantry with frontline training and experience, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, plus senior officers with the prestige and administrative skills to organise and lead these men. The new Armenian Chief of the General Staff Norat Ter-Grigoriants, for example, had been the deputy head of the Soviet General Staff. There were also Russians who had been high-ranking Soviet officers that joined the Armenian cause as “advisers”, like retired Lieutenant General Anatoly Zenevich.36 Still, it took time to construct a cohesive Armenian army, and longer still for Yerevan to all-but openly deploy the army to the Karabakh, tacitly dropping the pretence it was not a combatant.

Until then, the Armenians in the Karabakh had the great advantage of the 366th Motorized Regiment. Based in Stepanakert/Khankendi since August 1988, about fifty of the 350 men in the 366th were Armenians, including one battalion commander. The 366th had been selling weapons to the Armenian guerrillas and using their own weapons against the Azeris for a price—usually vodka—even before the August 1991 putsch. By January 1992, the Armenians in the 366th had functionally defected and the Regiment “borrowed” its ten tanks—the only such heavy armour in the Karabakh—to the Armenians many times.37

For all that, until early 1993, the most important Armenian armed force was the fedayeen: the battle-hardened guerrillas already in the Karabakh hills were joined by “a new flood of … volunteers” from Armenia proper in late 1991 and early 1992, writes De Waal. “The situation was chaotic. Weapons were being handed out to men who had displayed nothing more than a willingness to go and kill.”38

“Azerbaijan was in a much weaker position”, as De Waal explains, in two interlinked ways. First, militarily. The militant godless distrusted Muslims, so Azeris in the Red Army had more often been cooks or builders than professional soldiers. The main basis for an Azeri army was OMON, which on its best day was, by structure and culture, more a police force than a military unit. OMON had played only a supporting role to the Soviets in the Karabakh,39 and was mostly known for its abusive behaviour at the Khojaly Airport it took over, shaking down passengers and sexually abusing women.40

Second, politically. Mutalibov had created a Defence Ministry in October 1991, but for the aforementioned reasons there were few officers to staff it. Worse, when Azeri armed factions began to appear, they were spawned by the Popular Front and other opposition elements. Mutalibov inclined to annex these forces by having them brought under the Defence Ministry,41 then realised this was unworkable and tried to impede their creation altogether, fearing, correctly, that these militias would be used inside Azerbaijan against him. “For many [Azeri] politicians, the war effort was less important than the domestic power struggle”, as De Waal bluntly puts it.42

The upshot was that the Azeri cause in the Karabakh in the opening phase was outsourced to criminals over whom Baku had varying levels of control, and these Azeri gangsters fought each other nearly as much as the Armenians.43

The mosaic of Armenian and Azeri villages in the Karabakh at the end of 1991 was regarded by both sides as a problem. “The less numerous Karabakh Azerbaijani villages found themselves in dozens of small traps, at the mercy of Armenian fedayin”, writes De Waal, while “the Armenians found themselves in one large trap”, namely Stepanakert/Khankendi, which was “surrounded by Azerbaijani settlements”: “Aghdam and the plain of Azerbaijan” to the east; Khojaly to the north with the Karabakh’s only airport; and to the south, on higher ground, was Shusha. “Stepanakert’s only link to the outside world was by helicopter across the mountains to Armenia.”44

The solution the warring parties in the Karabakh adopted to deal with the strategic dilemma of the mottled demography was “ethnic cleansing”, a term coming into common use at the time in association with Bosnia’s nasty civil war. The Armenians made the first organised move to “reduce the line of the front”, as one fedayi euphemistically put it, intimidating the Karabakh Azeris to flee their villages. The Azeris soon responded in kind, trying to redraw the demographic map to their advantage.45

“Most of the [Karabakh] conflict was irregular, improvised, even intimate”, De Waal concludes. “The lack of any rules of engagement made it more brutal. Both sides revived the practice of the early 1900s employed by the Armenian guerrilla commander Andranik: chopping off the ears of enemy dead as war trophies. … [O]ften this was, literally, a neighbors’ war.”46

Aftermath

The Armenian move to break the siege of Stepanakert/Khankendi took them first to Khojaly, which was captured, with assistance from the Soviet 366th Regiment, in late February 1992 in circumstances the Azeris call “genocide”, a claim that will be examined in the next post. Though the fallout destabilised Azerbaijan’s politics, toppling the ruler, Ayaz Mutalibov, and Shusha fell to the Armenians in May 1992, events seemed to break Baku’s way. Russia withdrew the 366th and over the summer of 1992 a major Azeri offensive captured most of the northern Karabakh. But the 366th had left their equipment and the Armenians staunched the Azeri tide by September 1992. In February 1993, the Armenians launched a counter-offensive spearheaded by Yerevan’s army.

The fact of an inter-State war now barely concealed, the Armenians took Kelbacar in April 1993 and soon recaptured the northern Karabakh. Azerbaijan’s stressed politics snapped this time: a military rebellion in June 1993 created months of turmoil that ended with Heydar Aliyev in power. Armenia took full advantage of Azerbaijan’s internal chaos, rolling through the Azeris’ Karabakh headquarters at Agdam, and on to Fuzuli and Jabrail. A costly Azeri push in the southern Karabakh from December 1993 to February 1994 recovered Horadiz, but not much else. The Armenians were back on the offensive when a Russian-mediated ceasefire went into effect on 12 May 1994.

Each ethno-religious group in the Karabakh had fled or been expelled when the other side captured their area during the war. Since the conflict froze with Armenia holding the Karabakh—and a significant surrounding zone—the Azeris emptied out entirely. For a quarter-century this was the status quo, but it was always fragile because Armenia lacked legitimacy. The fig-leaf of Karabakh autonomy under the “Republic of Artsakh” notwithstanding, the “international law” situation was that Armenia occupied 13.5% of Azerbaijan’s territory.47

Aliyev’s son, Ilham, who succeeded to the throne in 2003, set about using Azerbaijan’s oil money to cultivate a favourable political environment in the West for reconquest, the (in)famous “caviar diplomacy”, and to build an army, with Turkey’s help, capable of pulling it off. The Armenians continued relying on Russia for protection, and only at the end realised it was a mirage. Backed by Turkish (and Israeli) drones, and Turkish advisers, Azerbaijan shattered Armenia’s hold on the Karabakh in a six-week campaign in September-November 2020, but left in place the shell of Armenian administration. A two-day demonstrative Azeri offensive in September 2023 forced the total Armenian capitulation and withdrawal. Within a week, the entire Karabakh Armenian population of more than 100,000 had emptied out. Of the Azeris settled in the Karabakh since then as Azerbaijan seeks to integrate the province, 40,000 are reportedly returnees from the 1990s.

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FOOTNOTES

As regular readers of this newsletter will know, the numbers game over historical wars and atrocities, never mind ongoing conflicts, is a highly dubious business, where the usual pattern is figures established by political actors, based on little or no reliable underlying evidence, becoming totemic through repetition. The case of the Armenian deportations and massacres in 1915-16 holds to the pattern.

The Black Book

Probably the most authoritative source on the Armenian numbers is the so-called Black Book of Talat Pasha, found among the possessions of the former Ottoman Interior Minister and Grand Vizier after he was assassinated by an Armenian terrorist in Berlin in 1921.1 The documents have been claimed as proof, from the architect of the genocide himself, that a million Armenians were subject to “race extermination” by the Ottoman government.2 In fact, the 77-page black-cover notebook or journal, which does not seem to have been written in Talat’s hand, says nothing whatsoever about his intentions with the deportations.3

What the Black Book records is that about 1.1 million Armenians, out of a pre-war population given as 1.5 million, were “missing” from the Ottoman registry in 1917,4 with no indication of whether they had been deported, killed, migrated to Russia, or defected to join the Russian or French volunteer units, and “significant numbers of Armenians [listed as ‘missing’ in the Black Book] turned up later”.5

The Black Book’s provincial breakdown shows a wide variance in the application of deportation. While the Eastern Six Provinces were almost entirely cleared of Armenians,6 the proportion of Armenians remaining in the fifteen Central and Western Provinces ranged from 98% to 15%. The overall average of Armenians remaining in the Centre and West of Anatolia was about 45%, and seven of those provinces retained half or more of their Armenians.7 To the extent this bears on the genocide debate, it lends weight to the non-exterminatory interpretation of Ottoman conduct.

There being no evidence in the Ottoman archives of a decision to annihilate the Armenians, the genocide case is built by inference.8 An oft-made argument is that the deportations, instead of being a response to the Armenian rebellion in alliance with invading Russians in the east, were “neither a military necessity nor a contingency of war”,9 and this is demonstrated by deportations far from the warzone in Anatolia. Such an indiscriminate policy, the argument goes, indicates that the deportations were cover for a premeditated attack on the Armenians “as such”, in the language of the Genocide Convention. The thesis is troubled on its face by the simultaneous landing of the British and French—who had their own connections with the Armenian committees—at Gallipoli, extending the warzone from east to west, plus the wholesale exemption from deportation of Armenians in Constantinople, Smyrna (Izmir), and Aleppo.10 And the Black Book, assuming its authenticity,11 adds further evidence against the thesis.

Armenian Deportees and Deaths

The Black Book suggests 250,000 to 280,000 Armenians were never deported or were relocated within Anatolia.12 Walter Rössler, the German Consul in Aleppo, reported in December 1915 that 500,000 Armenians had been “spared from being deported”. Rössler’s evidence is problematic. An eyewitness he might have been, Rössler’s bias for the Armenian cause was well-known, a possible incentive to minimise the figure. More importantly, Rössler obviously did not gather this data personally, and he did not claim otherwise. Rössler said his un-deported number was “estimated”, and the only sources cited in his cable are “circles which must be taken seriously, as they are usually better informed than others”.13 Still, there are contemporary scholars who consider 500,000 a plausible total for Armenians not deported out of Anatolia.14

As to the numbers who were deported, Arnold Toynbee, a British intelligence operative responsible for wartime propaganda against the Ottomans, estimated in a 1917 product that there were 1.2 million deportees.15 Boghos Nubar, the Armenian representative in Europe, said the total was 600,000 to 700,000 in 1918.16 Turkey has also given the 700,000 figure.17 And Johannes Lepsius, the famous German Protestant missionary advocate for the Armenians, estimated 1.4 million in 1919.18 At the present time, Donald Bloxham is an outlier in implying there were 1.5 million deportees.19 Taner Akçam, relying on the Black Book, writes, “one can confidently say that the number of deported Armenians was around 1.2 million”,20 and this is generally considered the high-end figure. On the low end, Fuat Dündar, using the same Black Book, has estimated 800,000,21 and Raymond Kévorkian estimates 850,000.22 All of these are specialist scholars on the genocide-recognition side of the debate. Most non-specialists either give the 800,000 to 1.2 million range,23 or pick a number from within it; around 900,000 seems to be popular of late.24

A reason to suspect that this range for the deportees is too high is that there was a mass-movement of Armenians out of the Six Provinces—especially Van, Bitlis, and Erzurum—before the deportations were ordered and several more waves of refugees up to 1918 as the Ottomans and Russians fought bitterly on a shifting front-line, a significant cause of the “missing” tally in the Black Book.25 Toynbee and Lepsius do try to take some account of the refugees, though their estimates hover around 200,000, and the lower estimates in modern scholarship just for the Armenians who departed into the Russian Caucasus—without factoring in those who emigrated to Western Europe or the United States—range from 250,000 to 400,000.26 Some demographers put the figure at half-a-million.27

When it comes to the fatalities, Toynbee’s 1916 “Blue Book”, his most enduring messaging product, said an estimate of 600,000 Armenians killed in 1915 would “not be far wrong”.28 Lepsius claimed that German diplomats estimated “between 800,000 and one million” in October 1916. A commission in 1919 created by Mustafa Arif Deymer, the Interior Minister of the post-war Turkish government, which was set on vilifying its predecessor and operated under Allied occupation, estimated that 800,000 Armenians were killed during the deportations.29 The Armenian leadership in 1919 claimed: “One million Armenians have perished during this War”.30 It is possible to see the approximate convergence of these numbers as supporting evidence for their validity. It is also possible to see the convergence as evidence of cross-contamination among actors in the same milieu.

The same consideration would apply in noting that Talat made an official announcement in May 1916 that there had been 300,000 Armenian “losses”,31 and the Turkish government has said that on the available evidence “it can be concluded that the number of the Armenian losses was around 300,000”.32

Armenian Population Statistics

What would provide some solidity is reliable denominators—that is, numbers for the total Ottoman-Armenian population before the First World War and after its end. But alas, there are only competing claims on this issue, too.

The Ottoman census department recorded 1.3 million Armenians in 1914, and some sceptical demographers have gone as high as 1.7 million.33 The Armenian Patriarchate recorded 2.1 million Ottoman-Armenians in 1913, and some Armenian historians have gone as low as 1.9 million.

In 1919, the Armenian National Council of Constantinople estimated there were 1.25 million Ottoman-Armenian survivors, and George Montgomery, an American official at the Paris Peace Conference, presented an apparently detailed study showing 594,000 Armenians remaining in the rump Ottoman realm, with 450,000 in Russia and 60,000 in Iran, a total of 1.1 million.34 The same year, Lepsius estimated 845,000.35

The Turkish government has suggested a survivors’ figure of 980,000,36 and Armenian activists tend to favour a figure around 600,000.37 Demographers on both sides of the debate have produced surprisingly consistent estimates of 836,00038 and 881,00039 Armenian survivors.

What To Make of It All

From these numbers, it would be possible to calculate an Armenian death toll anywhere from 50,000 to 1.5 million.

It can be pointed out that the Armenians in 1919 were trying to maximise their survivor tally to argue to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson that they were a nation of sufficient size to qualify for his promised self-determination. But excluding numbers because they were politically generated is not going to leave much data. Decisions on inclusion and exclusion are intrinsic to data analysis, of course, but it makes nonsense of the idea that turning to the numbers eliminates subjectivity.

Take Dr. Montgomery’s overall figure, which is so close to the Armenian Council estimate and would allow a similar hyper-low-end fatality estimate. Is that going to be excluded, too? Or used in a weighted average? Or will Montgomery’s number for Armenians within Ottoman territory be used instead? Any one of these decisions could be justified, and then the process repeats for the next datapoint and the one after that. Dozens of decisions—large and small, conscious and unconscious—taking every analyst on a different route through the garden of forking paths. It is interpretation all the way down, and the demographers cannot rescue us from this because they are working with the same uncertain datapoints and making their own decisions on whether and how to use them.

Overall, then, in the Armenian case we see the usual pattern of incredibly spongy figures, with the underlying numbers marred by hearsay and agenda, and conclusions that depend on layers of assumption and interpretation, none of which can be taken for granted. These numbers might be all we have, but it does not make them any better. Attempting to work with these statistics provides so many researcher degrees of freedom in selecting a way through that it amounts to choosing your own adventure. The honest answer to the empirical numbers questions surrounding the Armenian catastrophe is that we do not know and probably never will.

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FOOTNOTES

On Sunday morning, an apparent terrorist attack against the Royal Air Force Fairford base was narrowly averted after the arrest of five men in three vans in the village of Whelford. While the police investigation is in its early stages, the activities of the security services at the scene suggest that the alleged terrorists planned to use the vans as car bombs.

In off-the-cuff remarks, US President Donald Trump said that “we had them under view for a long time” and America “worked with a lot of [British agencies]” to stop the attack. According to Whitehall sources, however, the Government’s response was not an “intelligence-led operation”.

This is alarming because the visible scale of what was planned would make this one of the most serious terrorist plots in some time. While it is not as potentially lethal as Al-Qaeda’s 2006 airlines plot, it is still a significant escalation from the low-tech operations in the Islamic State’s terrorism wave in the 2010s. There is still much that is unknown about the RAF Fairford incident; a possible explanation for the difference is that this attack was state-sponsored.

Read the rest over at UnHerd.

The above chart, created by the Israel Policy Forum’s Gabriel Epstein, is a summary of the latest Gaza death toll list put out by HAMAS’s “health ministry”.1 The list contains 72,835 names, each a purported fatality incurred between 7 October 2023 and 7 May 2026, and gives a breakdown of the fatalities by age and sex.

The top-line numbers are striking:

• 70% (almost exactly) or nearly 51,000 of the total fatalities are male;2

• 49.5% or about 36,000 of the total fatalities are adult males (aged 18-64);

• 30% or nearly 22,000 of the total fatalities are female;

• 28% or about 20,500 of the total fatalities are children (under-18), and about 60% (just over 12,000) of the under-18 fatalities are male;

• 4.7% or about 3,400 of the total fatalities are elderly (aged 65 and over).

Until quite recently, it was standard for the United Nations and its associated “humanitarian” NGOs to report that 70% of the Palestinians killed in Gaza were women and children. It was bad enough that these institutions were laundering the HAMAS death toll statistics—the central element of the terrorists’ political warfare—but in this specific case it was even worse. The HAMAS numbers have not shown that percentage for some time. What the NGOs and the U.N. were laundering was HAMAS’s press releases, which misrepresented their own data. Nor has the game entirely been given up: as recently as April, the U.N. claimed 38,000 women and girls had been killed in Gaza, a figure 75% higher than what HAMAS’s data claims.

Taking the numbers on their own terms, and with the obvious caveat that not all the males killed—not even all of the military-age males—were combatants, there is an immediate prima facie difficulty for the “Israeli genocide” narrative. The pre-war Gazan population was roughly 47% children (under-18), 25% each adult male and female (18-65), and 3% elderly (over-65), with a total female population of 49%. The sex ratio and the number of children in HAMAS’s death toll list, therefore, do not testify to an indiscriminate Israeli attack on Gaza’s population intended to destroy Palestinians “as such”, which would be necessary to meet the definition in the Genocide Convention.

Now we come to the first of the problems with the data: the use of child soldiers by HAMAS and the other Islamic Revolution units. The scale of the “martyrdom” notices makes clear that the terrorist groups routinely recruited older teens, aged 15 to 17,3 but the ages of the publicly celebrated child “martyrs” go down as far as 12-years-old. As HAMAS, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and the others are still in the process of releasing official obituaries for their fighters, these numbers will rise.

The jihadists’ use of child soldiers is reflected even in HAMAS’s data, where roughly equal numbers of males and females aged 0-11 are listed as fatalities,4 while twice as many males as females aged 12-17 are listed as fatalities,5 and if the bracket is restricted to 15-17 it is edging towards three males listed for every one female.6

To try to take account of this, and with the same caveat as before, we can calculate the males aged 15-65 in the HAMAS list: about 39,400 or 54% of the total fatalities, which is 77% of the total male fatalities.

This issue with the child soldiers is part of the broader problem with the HAMAS data, namely it does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. HAMAS treats everyone on the list as a martyr in the struggle against the Zionist Entity and heavily implies they are all civilians, a piece of disinformation often made explicit by HAMAS’s surrogates (witting and unwitting) in the global ecosystem of U.N. officials, NGOs, journalists, academics, “human rights” activists, “international law” custodians, and even some Western governments.

There is then the systemic problem that HAMAS attributes all deaths in its total to Israel, while the list in fact includes:

• Palestinians killed by misfired HAMAS and PIJ rockets;

• Palestinians killed in intra-Palestinian fighting between HAMAS and the clans;

• Palestinians killed in common crimes (domestic abuse, banditry, etc.);

• Palestinians killed in accidents;

• Palestinians who die natural deaths.

It is also an open question whether the HAMAS death toll includes people who are not dead. The explosion at the Ahli Hospital on 17 October 2023 was widely reported as an Israeli airstrike that had killed nearly 500 people, and HAMAS’s running tally incorporated that explanation and number long after it became clear Al-Ahli had been struck by a misfired PIJ missile and perhaps fifty people had been killed. Whether those imaginary victims remain on the HAMAS list, and how many more have been added, is unknown.

HAMAS’s list does not include the dates of deaths, nor any indication of its data collection methodology, an understandable decision from its perspective, since its prior explanations—giving it the benefit of assuming the explanations were true—lowered the credibility of its data. This time around, HAMAS has at least provided complete data for each entry—date of birth, age, sex, identification number—but there is absolutely no way of knowing if this data is correct.

About 4,000 deaths were added to the HAMAS list between November 2025 and May 2026. This is, however, a net total, because HAMAS simultaneously removed 450 names. How HAMAS accomplishes these feats of resurrection at such regular intervals nobody knows—and nobody seems to care enough to ask, certainly not the United Nations, which simply and diligently updates its figures to match whatever HAMAS is currently claiming.

To round out where HAMAS’s claims stand, it said back in April that there are 8,000 bodies under the rubble, which would bring the total HAMAS-given death toll in Gaza to 81,000, far below the estimates of activist “studies” that have tried to generate fatality totals over 100,000 by relying on the “missing” and other statistical shenanigans.

There are three conclusions to be drawn from this. First, the problems with the HAMAS data are so grave—just the concrete, identifiable problems sketched above, not even factoring in the likelihood of outright fabrication—that the data is unusable to say what is true about the fatalities in Gaza. Second, precisely because the HAMAS data is subject to such extensive manipulation, it draws some lines around what can be true. It is most improbable HAMAS is undercounting the aggregate total, so that can be used as a rough ceiling. On the same evidence-against-interest basis, it is reasonable to treat HAMAS’s women and children figures as maximums, and its military-age male tally as a minimum. Third, the directional signal from HAMAS’s own claims about the death toll in Gaza points to Israel having waged a conventional war against a terrorist organisation embedded in an urban environment, and cuts strongly against the claim that Israeli conduct amounts to “genocide”.

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FOOTNOTES

Over the weekend, I visited Lincoln Cathedral and nearly missed a small tomb on the way out. Circling back, I saw it was that of Little Saint Hugh. The name is forgotten now but this eight-year-old boy’s death in 1255 became the basis of a nation-wide anti-Jewish hysteria. The scale of the popular mobilisation and the drawing in of the State, indeed of the King himself, led to the arrest of nearly 100 Jews and the judicial murder of more than a dozen people. It was a momentous event in English history,1 a signal that Jewish life was becoming untenable in the country. It was also an ominous harbinger for the whole of Christendom, solidifying and disseminating themes and ideas that colour European perceptions of Jews to this day.

LITTLE SAINT HUGH

Essentially nothing is known of Hugh’s life except that he was born around 1247, went missing in late June 1255, and his body was discovered down a well about two months later, on 29 August.2 While many legends would arise to satisfy the popular curiosity about Hugh’s brief life after he became famous, the most consequential legend was the one about what had happened to him between his disappearance and death, which made him famous in the first place.

A contemporary chronicler, Matthew Paris, a Benedictine monk based at Saint Albans, recorded in his Chronica Majora:

This year, about the feast of the apostles Peter and Paul [29 June], the Jews of Lincoln stole a boy called Hugh, who was about 8 years old. After shutting him up in a secret chamber where they fed him on milk and other childish food, they sent [messages] to almost all the cities of England in which there were Jews, and summoned some of their sect from each city to be present at a sacrifice to take place at Lincoln, in contempt and insult of Jesus Christ. For, as they said, they had a boy concealed for the purpose of being crucified; so a great number of them assembled at Lincoln, and then they appointed a Jew of Lincoln judge, to take the place of Pilate, by whose sentence and with the concurrence of all the boy was subjected to various tortures. They scourged him till the blood flowed, they crowned him with thorns, mocked him, and spat upon him; each of them also pierced him with a knife, and they made him drink gall, and scoffed at him with blasphemous insults, and kept gnashing their teeth and calling him Jesus, the false prophet. And after tormenting him in divers ways they crucified him, and pierced him to the heart with a spear.

When the boy was dead, they took the body down from the cross, and for some reason disembowelled it; it is said for the purpose of their magic arts. The boy’s mother, when her son had been missing several days, sought for him diligently, and the neighbours told her that they had last seen him playing with some Jewish boys of his own age, and going into the house of a Jew. So the mother entered the house suddenly and saw the boy’s body lying in a well; the bailiffs of the city were then cautiously summoned, the body was found and drawn up. It was a remarkable sight which then presented itself to the people; the mother’s cries and lamentations provoked all the citizens assembled there to tears.

There was present John of Lexington, a man of learning, wise and prudent, who said, “We have heard sometimes that Jews have dared to attempt such a thing in insult of our crucified Lord Jesus Christ;” and then addressing the Jew whose house the boy had entered whilst at play, and who, as being for that reason a greater object of suspicion, had been arrested, “Wretched man, dost thou not know that a speedy end awaits thee? All the gold in England would not suffice to ransom or save thee. Yet unworthy though thou art, I will tell thee how thou canst save thy life and limb from destruction. Both of these will I save thee, if without fear or falsehood, thou wilt expose unto me all that has been done in this matter.”

Then the Jew, whose name was Copin, thinking that he had found a way of escape, answered: “My lord John, if thou wilt pray my words with deeds, I will show wondrous things unto thee.” Then when John zealously urged and encouraged him, the Jew continued: “What the Christians say is true. Almost every year the Jews crucify a boy in injury and insult to Jesus. But one is not found every year, for they do this privately, and in remote and secret places. This boy whom they call Hugh, our Jews crucified without mercy, and after he was dead, and they wished to hide his corpse, they could not bury or conceal it. (This they wished to do, as the body of an innocent boy was considered useless for augury, which was the reason for disembowelling it.) In the morning when they thought it was hidden away, the earth vomited and cast it forth, and there it lay unburied on the ground to the horror of the Jews. At length they threw it into a well, but still they could not hide it, for the mother never wearied in her search, and finding the body informed the bailiffs.”

The Jew was kept in chains, and the body given to the canons of Lincoln, who had asked for it, and who, after displaying it to an immense number of people, buried it honourably in the church of Lincoln, as if it had been that of a precious martyr. …

Then the guilty man said, “… I will tell the truth to you all. Nearly all the Jews in England agreed to the death of this boy, and from nearly every English city where Jews live, some were chosen to be present at this sacrifice as at a Paschal [Passover] offering.”3

Remarking on the punishment meted out to Jews afterwards, Paris wrote that “if any Christians pitied them, they were only dry tears which their rivals the Caursines shed.” Caursines were also known as Cahorsins, the name originally derived from Cahors in southern France, before becoming a general term for foreign—mostly French and Italian—Christian merchants, bankers, and money-lenders. Paris disliked these “Transalpine usurers”, and his mocking suggestion here is that the Caursines might affect sorrow for the Jews, with whom they had some relations as part of what we might call the finance sector, but secretly the Caursines would be happy at the destruction of their Jewish competitors. The association of Jews with banking and money—a predicament significantly imposed upon them in medieval Europe—has, of course, been an enduring stereotype.

The other elements of the narrative likewise remain alarmingly familiar: Jews targeting children for murder; the extraction of blood and organs; Jews being collectively guilty; and a Jewish defector giving moral confidence to the accusers by providing “insider” proof of the Jews’ malevolent beliefs and designs. The only element that has gone is the specifically religious one, of the Jews’ child-killing being a re-enactment of Christ’s Passion, with mockery of Christian doctrine and torture preceding an excruciating death, usually on an ersatz Cross.

THE ENGLISH ORIGINS OF THE BLOOD LIBEL

These elements of anti-Jewish conspiracy theory did not come together spontaneously at the time of Hugh’s death—and death is all we know for sure: there is no certainty that it was murder. The template for “ritual murder” accusations, what would evolve into “the blood libel”,4 was already more than a century old in 1255 and had begun in England.

Around the time of Passover and Easter in 1144, a 12-year-old boy, William of Norwich, was found either hanging from or under a tree in the woods on the outskirts of the city. The imprecision over how William is found is part of a larger ambiguity, namely, once again, whether he was murdered at all: it is possible it was a suicide. Regardless, it was soon declared that “the Jews dwelling in the city enticed the boy to enter their houses”, whereupon he was seized, tormented by having his head shaved and wounded with a crown of thorns among other things, strung up as if on a Cross, and his flank pierced deeply, producing torrents of blood.5 Such details were “known” because a Jew who defected from his people attested to them, and revealed that Jewish scripture demanded an annual Christian child sacrifice.6 The attempts to hide William’s body after he had endured “all the tortures wherewith our Lord was tortured” were thwarted by God revealing the location of the “holy martyr”, and his body was given to monks, who buried it at Norwich Cathedral where the status of Saint William was proved by a steady flow of miracles.7

The remarkable narrative continuity across the 111 years separating William and Hugh is explained to some extent by the ritual murder script becoming formulaic through repetition. That being said, the number of ritual murder accusations remained relatively small into the mid-thirteenth century. There were a half-dozen or so cases in England between 1144 and 1255,8 and about the same number on the Continent after it arrived there in 1171. The frequency of ritual murder accusations against Jews increased in the second half of the thirteenth century and continued to rise thereafter into the Early Modern period. Correlation might not be causation, but it is difficult to conclude that the Little Hugh case, which was unprecedented in a number of respects, had no influence on this.

A KINGLY INTERVENTION

What is notable about the pre-1255 ritual murder accusations in England, other than their relatively small number, is their relatively contained impact. With one exception, the pre-Hugh ritual murder panics had never resulted in legal prosecutions, and it is striking that the one exception, in Winchester in 1225, saw four of the accused acquitted outright, while the two Jews convicted of murdering a child were not convicted of ritual murder.9 The pre-Hugh cases were also highly localised: the “boy martyrs” became folk Saints in their towns, and their shrines might draw pilgrims from the surrounding countryside, but never from much further afield.10

The contemporary evidence shows that early on after Hugh’s body was discovered, there was an unusual popular potency to the case and it was already breaking out of the usual kind of containment. This might have been because there was such a “cooperative” Jewish witness, Copin, who was eagerly ratifying the most lurid fantasies in the Christian anti-Jewish imagination and casting the affair as the work of English Jewry in toto. Whatever the cause, there was a climate of popular anger—most immediately focused on Copin, whose life being spared was considered an outrage, and more broadly against the Jews whom he had implicated—and it was spreading beyond Lincoln, reaching as far as Matthew Paris, a hundred miles to the south, in the environs of London.

This trendline suggests it is improbable the government would not ultimately have been forced to do something more to appease the mob. But luck played the decisive role—as it so often does in history—in deciding the nature of events.

King Henry III (r. 1216-1272) had been in the north of England—the proper north, as Geordies would say, near the Scottish border—organising a coup against the Regent of Scotland.11 On 23 September 1255, Henry set out for home, departing from Alnwick, thirty miles north of Newcastle.12 Exactly how, when, and where Henry heard of the furore in Lincoln is uncertain. By one account, Hugh’s mother accosted Henry with the news as he was on the road south, though even there it is not clear if she diverted the King or merely went out to meet him as he approached a city he always planned to pass through.13 What is clear is that Henry III arrived in Lincoln on 3 October 1255,14 took direct control of the Hugh ritual murder case, and in so doing brought it before the whole of England—and to peoples beyond.15

The official stamp of approval for a ritual murder accusation from an anointed Monarch was a unique development. Until this point, the most important secular powers (and the clerical ones, as we shall see) had rejected these accusations against Jews as devoid of truth.16 Just a few years earlier, the Holy Roman Emperor had denounced the blood libel as a malicious hoax, declaring the Jews “completely absolved of this imputed crime” and specifying they were under Royal protection, i.e., that attacking Jews was equivalent to rebellion.

Though Henry III’s reasons for departing from this consensus cannot be known for sure, his unusually intense piety has to be considered an important factor.17 Such piety was reflected in the very landscape of the Kingdom, with the construction of hospitals and upkeep of religious sites, even the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey because Henry had taken the penultimate Anglo-Saxon King, Edward the Confessor (r. 1042-1066), as his patron saint. There were other benign effects from the rule of this “Most Christian King” (rex Christianissimus), as his contemporaries called him, including vast government expenditure on charity to feed the poor, orphans, and other vulnerable people. But there was a dark side, the one most ingrained in Christianity: a very negative attitude towards Jews, whom Henry ordered formally segregated in 1253, and he developed a fixation with trying to convert them to Christianity. With such a predisposition, it is less surprising Henry took the ritual murder accusation at face value.

That Henry had sold the right to tax his Jewish subjects to his brother, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, and could only get at Jewish wealth if they were convicted of crimes and thus forfeited their property to the Crown, is regarded as important by some historians.18 The balance of probability is that this materialist consideration is given outsize consideration by modern materialist historians who struggle to give ideology its due weight.

Henry immediately upbraided the local baron in Lincoln, John of Lexington, for promising Copin his life. The King had Copin hanged without further ado, and his body tied to a horse’s tail and dragged through the streets.19 On the King’s orders, there was then a round-up of Jews. 91 or 92 Jews (sources conflict) were arrested and—crucially—transported with Henry to the capital, being imprisoned in the Tower of London. The salience and legitimacy of the ritual murder charge, already high because of the King’s personal involvement, was accentuated by the geographic movement of the Jewish prisoners to centre-stage in England.

The Jewish prisoners were in the Tower by 22 October 1255, and on 22 November, Feast Day of Saint Cecilia, they were indicted before the King (coram Rege) on felony charges of having “crucified and put to death” Hugh “in contempt of the Christian faith”. Eighteen of the Jews refused to submit to an all-Christian jury and asked that some Jews be included, as was their right. In the atmosphere of the moment, this was popularly viewed as an admission of guilt, and Henry III circumvented any further process on the issue by having all eighteen Jews summarily hanged. The remaining 70-odd prisoners went on trial in February 1256; were found guilty; and condemned to death.

In the event, the death sentences were never carried out. By the end of 1256, all the convicted Jews had been released. It is interesting that even in this most sensational case, those executed were not convicted of ritual murder, and those so convicted were freed in short order.

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THE CHURCH, THE JEWS, AND THE BLOOD LIBEL

The release of the Jews convicted in the Little Hugh case was secured by the protests of Richard, the King’s brother, and above all the Catholic order of Franciscans.20 This may seem surprising, since the conventional image now is of the medieval Catholic Church as a bastion of antisemitism. In reality, while the inflammation of Jew-hatred in medieval Europe can certainly be traced to developments in Church doctrine, the Church per se advocated the protection of Jewish life and property, and consistently worked to suppress the blood libel.

The backdrop against which the ritual murder accusations arose was the Papal Revolution, a process of radical transformation begun in the mid-eleventh century that intended to cleanse and purify Christendom. An immediate concern was divesting secular rulers of their role in the Church,21 but alongside administrative and social reform there was an inherent militancy that manifested quickly and intensified over time. The Norman conquest of England in 1066 was an early example; the “armed pilgrimage” to recover Jerusalem in the 1090s a more instructive one, beginning as it did with the “People’s Crusade” massacring Jews on the Rhine. It showed that the logic of sending Christian warriors to cleanse Muslims from the Holy Land was not easily distinguished in popular perception from the need to cleanse Europe of Jews, who were sociologically the only minority inhibiting the uniformity of Christendom and theologically occupied the special place of having killed God.

The Church as an institution offered no support to this conduct. On the contrary, Christian clergy condemned it vociferously at the time and bishops helped Jews escape the pogromshchiki where they could. The disgust with what was done is evident even in the later chronicles, which are otherwise euphoric about the success of the First Crusade. One chronicler went so far as saying the disaster that befell the People’s Crusade was divine retribution for their atrocities against the Jews. Around 1120, a Papal Bull was issued, Sicut Judaeis, in no small part as a reaction to the Rhine massacres and the bloodbath after Jerusalem fell, which condemned violence against Jews, forbade stealing or desecrating Jewish property (specifically cemeteries), ruled coerced conversions an affront to God, and demanded that Jewish holy festivals and practice be protected. The serial reissuing of the Bull as a reminder to Christians is encouraging about Church intent, and less so about its efficacy.22

In 1247, eight years before the Hugh of Lincoln case, the Papacy issued Lachrymabilem judaeorum, which explicitly condemned the blood libel as just that: a scandalous lie that had led to even more scandalous behaviour towards Jews. A specific reference was made to Fulda, Germany, where in 1235 the blood libel “proper” had emerged, with accusations of Jews extracting the blood of a Christian child for ritual purposes and eating the child’s heart on Passover, which sparked a pogrom. It did not take long for this to become the charge of using blood in Passover matzah. The Pope ordered “faithful Christians” to desist from such falsehoods and the related falsehood that using human blood in religious rites was prescribed by the Tanakh, “since in the Old Testament [Jews] are instructed not to use blood of any kind, let alone human blood”. Christians were warned they would be excommunicated if they persisted with the blood libel.

In 1272, there was another explicit Papal condemnation of the blood libel. It reiterated a lot of the key points in the 1247 Bull, while adding in blunt terms that sometimes people just lose their children and accusing Jews of responsibility without evidence was abominable; that it was obvious in some cases “the parents of these very children, or some other Christian enemies of these Jews, secretly hide these very children in order that they may be able to injure these Jews” or “extort” them; “[a]nd most falsely do these Christians claim that … the Jews offer sacrifices from the heart and the blood of these children”. The Pope decreed that Christians making these claims were to be ignored by the courts, adding: “we order that Jews seized under such a silly pretext be freed from imprisonment, and that they shall not be arrested henceforth on such a miserable pretext”. Anti-Jewish incitement was forbidden and it was ordered that Jews be “maintained in that status and position” they have had since antiquity. The threat of excommunication for Christians who defied the Pope was renewed.

It may seem paradoxical that the Catholic Church ordered Jews protected even as it promulgated the hostile theology that endangered them and mandated restrictions on Jewish life all across Latin Christendom—indeed, escalatingly so. As the Church’s revolution proceeded and the concept of “heresy” reached maturity in the thirteenth century, the restrictions became ever-more onerous, notably the 1215 ruling that Jews wear distinctive clothing—implemented in England eventually as making Jews wear a yellow badge—and in 1267 Christians were banned from having sexual relations with Jews.23 But this was tolerance in the old sense, which as the late Bernard Lewis put it, “is by modern standards an essentially intolerant idea”, where a dominant group permits a subordinate group security and “some though not all of the rights and privileges” the dominant group enjoys, provided the subordinate group recognise their subordination and behave according to rules the dominant group lay down and enforce.

It is a testament to the limitations of the Roman Church even at the height of its powers in Latin Christendom that it could not ensure this bare minimum was upheld in many places and the blood libel craze rumbled on for centuries, the last lethal outbreak taking place after the Holocaust in Catholic Poland.

THE LEGACY OF LITTLE SAINT HUGH

Since 1220, there had been a Saint Hugh from Lincoln, the city’s bishop from 1186 until his death in 1200. It was to differentiate the “boy martyr” that he was hailed as Little Saint Hugh, and there was another difference: “the papacy pointedly refused to confirm this canonisation”.24 It made little difference to the popularity and vibrancy of the cult of Little Saint Hugh. England’s King had confirmed the ritual murder accusation and executed, as far as anyone was concerned, nineteen of the perpetrators: that was more than enough for the English people, who marked the boy Saint’s Feast Day every year.25 As the plaque at Lincoln Cathedral says, “the boy was venerated as a saint [anyway]. Legends and ballads blaming the Jews circulated widely. His tomb in Lincoln Cathedral was a place of pilgrimage for the rest of the 13th century”.

None of the other “ritual murder Saints” acquired such a large cult in their own time, and none were so long-lasting as Little Saint Hugh’s. Indeed, Little Hugh gradually eclipsed William of Norwich and the others. It is telling that when Geoffrey Chaucer, writing The Canterbury Tales a century and more on, at the end of the fourteenth century, wished to invoke a notorious crime against children by the “cursed Jews”, it was for “yonge Hugh of Lincoln” that he reached.

Little Hugh’s cult seems to have been fading by the second quarter of the fifteenth century, and the Reformation in all practical senses brought it to an end. There is no sign of resistance when the Protestant iconoclasts “ravaged and desecrated” Hugh’s shrine and tomb. (The tomb was damaged further in 1644 when the Puritan rebels sacked and looted Lincoln Cathedral during the First English Civil War. What remains now is part of the original.) The ebbing of the Little Saint Hugh cult might suggest declining popular antisemitism in England, but that would rather miss the point.

The ritual murder craze over Hugh in 1255 was a sign that the Jews’ time in England was drawing to a close. Jewish communities had only been planted in England after 1066 and within a century the ritual murder accusation had emerged. In September 1189, at the coronation of King Richard I (“the Lionheart”), there had been an outbreak of lethal antisemitism that escalated into 1190, most gruesomely at York. Church restrictions and Royal “taxations” (confiscations) increased over the next few decades. English Jews were visibly marked, segregated, and intermittently attacked during civil disturbances under Henry III, and in the shadow of the Little Saint Hugh case, especially under Henry’s son Edward I (r. 1272-1307), all of this got worse. Just in the 1270s, Edward introduced new harshly discriminatory legislation and staged a judicial massacre of over 250 Jews, having partly prepared the ground by getting involved in one of the two blood libel cases that decade. On every front the space for Jews was being shrunk and in 1290 Edward I took the final step by ordering the expulsion of all Jews from England. France followed his example in 1306.

The only official refuge for Jews in England after this was the “House of Converts” (Domus Conversorum), set up by Henry III in 1232, where entry relied on a renunciation of Jewishness; there were never more than 100 residents. It would be 350 years before Jewish life recommenced in England.

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FOOTNOTES

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The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have captured many documents during the war with HAMAS and the other elements of the Islamic Revolution in Gaza. Releasing batches of these documents has made concrete evidence available to the public about a number of aspects of the HAMAS-led invasion and massacre in Israel on 7 October 2023, and has been an important part of how the Jewish State has tried to combat the massive information war waged against it. The latest documents released show how the jihadists planned the information war itself.

PRIOR DOCUMENT RELEASES

An early set of captured documents was the most gruesome, relating to the one component of the 7 October pogrom that Islamists and their Leftist allies have found embarrassing enough to seek to deny: the mass-rape and sexual torture of Israeli civilians. The denialism has taken basically two forms: outright, and what we might call the David Irving school—that is, admitting it happened, while minimising the scale and exculpating the leadership, arguing that such crimes as occurred were lapses by underlings acting outside the intentions and instructions of their superiors. The captured documents tore these lies to shreds.

The clearest evidence that there was nothing spontaneous about HAMAS’s savage sexual violence on 7 October was the language guide issued by HAMAS commanders to their jihadists before they were sent into Israel. The guide contained various Hebrew phrases, given phonetically in Arabic so the terrorists would know how to pronounce them, which included phrases to be used during the rapes: “Lie down”, “Take off your pants”, “Take off your clothes”, and “Raise your hands and spread your legs”.1 The mass-rape of Israelis—women, men, and children—was integral to HAMAS’s 7 October plan, intended to terrorise and humiliate—to “dirty them”, as one terrorist captive later put it.

The same phrasebook confirmed the rest of what happened that Saturday was by the design of HAMAS’s central leadership. There were phrases to assist the foot-soldiers in the taking of hostages—“I will kill you”, “Get in”, “Where are your friends?”, “Don’t move”, “You are a captive”—and the utilisation of hostages to deter any attempts by Israeli civilians to fight back and to impede the IDF response, such as: “We have hostages”, “We will kill the captives”, and “Throw down the weapon”. Other jihadists on 7 October had a note inciting them to exterminate Jews—“a disease that has no cure other than cutting off heads and cutting out hearts and livers”—which was signed off, “In the name of the God of Khaybar”, an oasis apparently north of Medina where the Prophet Muhammad is said to have slaughtered Jews.

Other documents found on the HAMAS jihadists and released quickly disclosed that the terrorists had alarmingly good intelligence about the areas of Israel they invaded. The intelligence was used to produce detailed maps and lists of targets, in particular primary schools and Jewish youth centres, where HAMAS operatives were ordered to “kills as many as possible” and “capture hostages”.

Subsequent batches of documents showed how intimately the Iranian leaders of the Islamic Revolution had been involved in planning for what became the Simchat Torah Pogrom, intended as the opening shot of a decisive campaign to destroy Israel and her people. HAMAS leader Yahya Sinwar indicated his plans to the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani shortly after the May 2021 war with Israel. They approved, and Mohammad Said Izadi, the head of the IRGC’s “Palestinian Office” that manages HAMAS and the other IRGC units in former Mandate Palestine, was clued-in a month later. Sinwar kept Tehran updated on his “big project” and Qaani supplied money, training, and strategic direction on lulling Israel into a false sense of security to lower its defences, while setting up a Joint Operations Chamber (JOC) to coordinate HAMAS’s actions with the IRGC’s “external armies”, notably Hizballah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. Some of this coordination was facilitated by HAMAS’s “political wing” in Qatar. The Iranians eventually picked the 7 October 2023 date after several times ordering Sinwar to delay “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”.

Captured documents have disclosed the extent of the terrorists’ control over the NGOs in Gaza, able to manoeuvre their operatives in this sympathetic milieu into leadership positions, and use the “humanitarian” organisations as fronts to order equipment for military purposes (above all the tunnels) and raise money.

The documents recording Sinwar’s thinking about how to wage the war removed all doubt that HAMAS’s human sacrifice strategy with the captive Palestinian population was a conscious decision taken in the belief it was central to how HAMAS would prevail, not something arrived at contingently. Palestinian deaths “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honour”,2 Sinwar told the HAMAS “political” officials in Doha a few months after 7 October. In another missive, Sinwar celebrated the deaths of Palestinian civilians as the “necessary sacrifices” to achieve victory.

Perhaps the most interesting find was a memo written by Sinwar in August 2022, discovered in 2025 after his brother and successor was killed in a tunnel under a hospital in Gaza. The memo was released with a package of intercepted HAMAS communications from 7 October. Sinwar was fixated on ensuring his planned attack on Israel had a dimension of literal holocaust, ordering that his troops be supplied with “gasoline or diesel” when they invaded Israel so they could burn “entire” kibbutzim. HAMAS commanders on the day of the pogrom relayed these instructions. “I want the whole kibbutz to be in flames”, one said. “Set fire to anything”, said another. Sinwar conceived a surprise attack, the use of bulldozers to break down the border fence, and staggered waves of invaders: all this would be done.

More than a year in advance, Sinwar was also keenly aware of “Al-Aqsa Flood” as a media event. Sinwar insisted HAMAS murder Israelis in as shocking a manner as possible and film what they did so it could be broadcast, with the intention of frightening Israelis and drawing global support to HAMAS from the large constituency excited by the spectacle of Jews being slaughtered. “It needs to be affirmed to the unit commanders to undertake these actions intentionally, film them and broadcast images of them as fast as possible”, Sinwar wrote. His deputies delivered on 7 October, telling obedient HAMAS killer brigades, “Slit their throats. Slit them as you are trained”, and, “Document the scenes of horror, now, and broadcast them on TV channels to the whole world.”

THE NEW DOCUMENT RELEASE

The world largely reacted to the 7 October massacre as Sinwar desired. The official condemnations of HAMAS by Western governments notwithstanding, the immediate reaction was popular enthusiasm on the streets all across the West, where the only violence condemned was the impending Israeli response to HAMAS,3 and elite institutions supplied the more polished justifications for the carnage as an act of “liberation” and “decolonisation”. The journalists, academics, and public intellectuals who spoke this way—and the “human rights” groups and the United Nations accusing Israel of breaking “international law” before the bodies had even been counted—could have been reading from the script Sinwar had prepared.

On the same day Sinwar wrote the above memo, 24 August 2022, he wrote a second tactical document, an important part of which focused on how to present the HAMAS rampage in Israel to a global audience. The Islamic and exterminatory motives of “Al-Aqsa Flood” were to be concealed, and HAMAS propaganda would instead emphasise the “civilian, humanitarian, [and] national” nature of the operation. (This dovetailed with the instructions discovered in other documents to avoid displaying HAMAS insignia in atrocity videos the terrorists disseminated, which allowed HAMAS to play the double game of claiming credit for 7 October before sympathetic audiences while “officially” denying responsibility for the crimes of its Einsatzgruppen when convenient, casting the blame onto the Gazan civilians who followed the invaders into Israel. As the war unfolded, this standard IRGC warfare tactic of preventing visuals of its troops being broadcast assisted in fostering the “genocide” narrative: since nobody ever saw the combatants against whom Israel was engaged, it made it easier to claim Israel was waging war against civilians.)

Sinwar instructed HAMAS’s Media Department to describe the purpose of 7 October as achieving Palestinian “rights”, specifically “the right of return”, i.e., the movement of the Arab refugees from the 1948 war in Mandate Palestine and all of their descendants—nearly six million people—into Israel. This call for Israel’s destruction by other means was to be disguised through the presentation of the false Palestinian nationalist version of history that has come to be associated with the word nakba (“catastrophe”), wherein “the Zionists” intentionally and systematically ethnically cleansed Arabs to recreate Israel in 1948. Thus would aggression be transformed into anti-colonial liberation. Added to this polemical history, Sinwar said there should be an emphasis on the “human dimension”, using pictures and videos from Palestinian villages of people delighted by the prospect of “Returning Home”, a slogan to be promoted in multiple languages. Sinwar even wrote the slogan in English to underline the point.

All Israelis were referred to as “settlers” by Sinwar, reinforcing this “return” paradigm and legitimating their “expulsion” in decolonial terms. In the instructions for HAMAS’s internal use, Sinwar was more specific that those Israelis not murdered should be expelled “toward the sea”, an echo of the Arab propaganda about throwing the Jews into the sea in the build-up to the Six-Day War, the disastrous (for Arabs) conflict in 1967 that concluded with Israel occupying Gaza (until then occupied by Egypt) and the West Bank (until then occupied—formally annexed—by Jordan).

Sinwar went on to instruct the Political Department that in their propaganda they should “rely on international law”, a concept that has served HAMAS well. “The objective of the plan”—what became 7 October—should be described as trying “to implement the [international] law which is not being implemented”, Sinwar explained.

The rest of the pages Sinwar wrote contained tactical minutiae on achieving surprise, the numbers of HAMAS terrorists to be sent into Israel, how they were to be divided up to seize junctions and kibbutzim, and the methods to encircle and “neutralise” military bases. There was one illuminating section, though, where Sinwar wrote: “The enemy will not hesitate to use all the means and weapons at its disposal … It may even use a nuclear bomb.” Sinwar, unsurprisingly given his view of Palestinian civilian deaths as necessary to achieve victory, was not overly concerned about this: “This campaign is a battle of life or death, and there will be life, with Allah’s help.”

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FOOTNOTES

I can still remember exactly where I was when I heard about 9/11. I was on my way home from a school that no longer exists, in front of a building that is likewise gone, but even now, twenty-five years on, I can point out the spot, virtually down the paving stone,1 where I was standing when my mum said: “America’s been attacked.” Because of the time difference, this would have been barely an hour after the second plane hit the towers and confirmed what was happening.2 A few minutes later I was home, and the television channels had cleared their schedules to show rolling news.

A little over a decade later, most of my time and thoughts on any given day would in some way relate to the Middle East and jihadism. This was pursued briefly in an academic setting, then became my day job, and still is. I was asked so many times—as an ice-breaker at a conference or social event, and with more interest by colleagues and friends—why I got interested in this area, and it always stumped me. There was no obvious biographical explanation, for instance. I have no familial, ethnic, or religious connection to the region; nobody I knew was from there or worked there; and Middle East history and politics is not exactly part of the zeitgeist in Birkenhead.

It probably should not have taken so long to realise the answer, in however winding a way, went back to those images of death and destruction. There was, it turned out, no expiry date to the shock and horror of seeing people jump a thousand feet to their deaths since the only alternative was to be burned alive,3 and the Twin Towers being reduced in a few seconds to a heap of burning rubble and human remains. The release soon afterwards of the last telephone calls from those in the towers and on the planes added to our knowledge of the agony of that day.

Surveying an event as operatically horrific as 9/11, where the mass-murder of civilians was the means and ends, the moral calculus might seem relatively straightforward. But clarity was in shorter supply than one might imagine even in the immediate aftermath, and it was not just from the conspiracy theorists on the rapidly-expanding Internet. A standard theme in academic commentary, the Left-wing press, and among public intellectuals was that America had brought the attacks upon herself. Mary Beard, as herbivorous a specimen as one could hope to find, wrote a few weeks after the 9/11 massacre that “the United States had it coming”, and she was surely correct that “many people” in her circles “openly or privately” thought the same.

Blaming the victim was accomplished with many abstract nouns, prominently “imperialism” and “capitalism”, and the “foreign policy” explanations were a gallery of pet causes. American support for Israel in the dispute in former Mandate Palestine was a favourite (plus ça change).4 Others—determined to create a mystery where none existed and decrying the simplisme of President Bush, who spoke of men motivated by an “evil” ideology, a “radical and perverted vision of Islam”—set out in search of “root causes”, with poverty being to this day the most enduring candidate.

It was a shame that so few were prepared to take Beard’s advice to “listen to what the ‘terrorists’ have to say” because they were entirely plain that the root cause of Islamist terrorism is Islamist ideology.

By the end of September 2001, we knew what the death pilots’ state of mind was because their “spiritual manual” for their last night was in the public domain. Mohamed Atta and the other conspirators were “heading for a deed that God loves” with a sense of “optimism” for the “victory, control, and conquest” it would bring. They were dwelling on “all of the things God has promised for the martyrs”, above all “eternal bliss”.5 Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, the architect of what he called “Holy Tuesday”, told a journalist in April 2002 that the attack was part of a “jihad against the infidels” and was “designed to cause as many deaths as possible”. Usama bin Laden himself explained in public the way Al-Qaeda’s leadership “calculated in advance the number of casualties”, aiming to maximise them by hitting the towers with planes full of fuel at a point most likely to cause a collapse. The carnage was “all that we had hoped for”, Bin Laden said.

At this juncture, a quarter-century later, all of this seems quite remote. 9/11 has faded from public memory and discourse. Part of the reason is no doubt simply the life cycle of humanity. There are many adults alive now—indeed, everyone under-25—who not only did not watch 3,000 civilians murdered on live television, but could not have, since they were not even born on 11 September 2001, and basically nobody under-30 has memories of that day. That is to say, the bulk of our most vital and ambitious people, those who either hold the political and economic commanding heights or advise those who do, only know of 9/11. That is not the only reason, though.

Public memory construction is a deliberate process. The State and cultural-intellectual power centres decide what to remember—and what to forget. That “9/11 changed everything” became a laugh line as early as 2007 is not just a symptom of this ironised age. It reflects an elite consensus, formed at that time and reinforced ever since, that the U.S. and broader West overreacted to 9/11, and that the Global War on Terror was a conceptual error compounded by a series of moral and tactical mistakes. On this view, GWOT made the problem worse, but jihadism was never that much of a threat to begin with, so handing Afghanistan back to the Taliban-Qaeda forces in 2021—however “messy” in the short-term—was a necessary step to finally course-correct and consign GWOT to history. The West did not need to be engaged out in the world. The answers were at home, in better security and intelligence methods.

The difficulty with this view is that it relies on there having been no repeat of 9/11, and on the belief that President Bush’s explicit strategy to prevent the next attack is incidental to this fact. Another view of current conditions—where Al-Qaeda is out of the global terrorism business and even the Islamic State is receding from the headlines—is that they result from sustained military action abroad. The internal evidence suggests the policy of global engagement continued by Bush’s successor both degraded Al-Qaeda’s capacity and pushed it into a strategic-theological reassessment that deprioritised anti-Western terrorism. And IS’s high-tempo foreign attacks campaign of the mid-2010s was terminated when the U.S.-led coalition demolished its “caliphate”. The recent resumption of IS “external operations” is on a much lower scale.

Perhaps it will be said this could have been accomplished some other way, and maybe it could have. Acknowledging uncertainty and avoiding “presentist” impositions on history is the point.

This applies retrospectively. There are two structural factors that debilitate the assessment of any security policy. First, we can never see what was down the road not taken: we can see all that went wrong with the options chosen; we never see the consequences of not choosing them. Second, when security policy works—when the threats and disasters are prevented—the experience is of nothing happening, and in that secure environment, where the benefit is invisible and the costs only too apparent, it becomes easy to contend that the measures in place are excessive, were probably never necessary, and should be removed.

It also applies when looking to the future. At the present time, with jihadism apparently on the wane, 9/11 seems on course to become in the public mind a much less salient Second World War, an episode from long ago that everybody knows something about, a source of “lessons” that become folk wisdom, and a symbol to be reacted against by younger generations, whether in the generic sense of the children of the Sixties who were fed up of hearing about “the war” from their parents or in the more provocative sense of kids on TikTok who think Bin Laden had a point.

But as 9/11 itself demonstrated, nothing is inevitable.6 Contingency is the human condition. The 1990s had been a decade of peace and prosperity, the holiday from history after the end of the long Cold War, where the only question seemed to be how much time it would take before the spread of democracy and the Internet completed the creation of a borderless world. Then one Tuesday morning it was all over amid fire and debris. The trendlines of vast impersonal forces had been overwhelmed by the determination of one man and the end of history was cancelled.

Fixing 9/11’s place in history is even more fraught because the war with jihadism is not over, however much it is wished otherwise. The enemy’s sleepless quest to visit upon us atrocities equivalent to the “Planes Operation” or worse continues, and the world is now awash in cyber capabilities, drones, and other deadly technologies unimaginable in 2001. All it would take is for them to succeed once for 9/11 to be remembered as the unheeded wake-up call, and the self-flagellation about our response would give way to bitter questions about why more was not done.

FOOTNOTES

The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute is within a memorial complex at Tsitsernakaberd (lit. “Swallow’s Fortress”) in Yerevan, which also contains the Sanctuary of Eternity monument and the 140-foot Stele that date back to 1967 when Armenia was part of the Soviet Union and Moscow had just begun to back in earnest the Armenian genocide-recognition movement, within the “Socialist Republic” and in the Armenian diaspora. The museum was opened after the liberation from Communism, in 1995.

I was recently in Armenia and visited the museum. There are forty main text panels: I photographed all except one (I do not know how I missed it) and have transcribed the whole presentation below. Some of the photographs are incorporated, too.

So far as I can tell, the entire text from the museum is not available anywhere else on the web, which is a shame. The museum was created as a project of the Armenian State. It remains overwhelmingly State-funded, while accepting donations, and though it is nominally overseen by a Board of Trustees—consisting of historians and other scholars, State officials, and political figures, including Members of Parliament and community representatives—the Board is subordinate to the government, as was recently demonstrated. In short, the museum’s presentation is the nearest we have to the official Armenian version of the contested history of the terrible events of 1915.

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I recently went on ’s podcast to discuss the various historical questions that surround the origins of Islam. The podcast can be found here.

The trigger for the discussion was a recent article I wrote about the journey of a Frankish bishop, Arculf, to Jerusalem c. 680 AD, nearly half-a-century after the Arab conquests, and how his observations fit with the broader evidence that Islam as we know it comes into being as a result of a process of evolution after the creation of the Arab Empire. Among other things, we also touch on the argument of “revisionist” Islamic Studies scholars since the 1970s that Muhammad and his original community of believers did not emerge in a pagan Mecca, deep in the Hijaz, but in the sectarian circles of Biblical monotheists in the Levant.

I find this subject endlessly fascinating and for those interested I have written several other articles on aspects of this: the extent of Roman-Arab contact and consequent spread of monotheism among the Arabs on the eve of the conquests; the Jewish dimension to the early creed of the Arab conquerors; the historical difficulties with the Tradition story of the first Caliph; dating the Qur’an; and what it looks like when “revisionist” interpretations go wildly wrong.

Read the article over at UnHerd.

A previous article documented the crucial role Palestinians played in the 1978-79 Islamic Revolution, training and otherwise assisting the Islamist and Communist terrorists warring against the Shah within the country, and tying together the external coalition that sustained the year-long struggle that concluded with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini being swept to power. The Palestinian role went beyond this, however. Palestinians were directly involved in the Revolution inside Iran, including in the most politically consequential event leading up to the fall of the Shah.

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Roughly between 679 and 682 AD, Arculf, a Frankish bishop,1 undertook a journey in the Near East, through Egypt, the Land of Israel, and Syria—the ancient Christian territories conquered by the Arabs a few decades earlier. The most intriguing aspect of Arculf’s testimony relates to the nine months he spent in Jerusalem at the beginning of his trip.2

Christian pilgrimage to the Holy City went back to the fourth century, after the Emperor Constantine and his mother Helena “discovered” the sites related to Jesus’s life and ministry, but the practice had been disrupted by the Arab conquests of the 630s and the relentless subsequent expansion. In 678-679, however, there had been a thaw between the Romans/Byzantines and the Arabs that permitted freer movement.3 That Arculf’s journey was possible, and the fact he saw “a huge concourse of people from various nations … come together in Jerusalem”,4 helps date his journey to after this Byzantine-Arab treaty.5

Islamic Tradition tells of the Muslim conquerors, soon after their occupation of Jerusalem in 637-638, beginning to refashion the architecture of the city. Arculf records little evidence of this. Arculf also found little evidence of the claims in earlier Frankish chronicles that it was the “habit” of the “Saracens” to “lay waste the provinces of the Empire that had fallen to them”.6 The churches and Christian sites were as his ancestors would have known them, and their upkeep was remarkable. Arculf’s travel documents were in Greek and the coinage he used was not only weighted according to metrics set in Constantinople; many of the coins had Christian crosses on them.7

A specific claim in the Tradition is that Umar, allegedly the second Rashidun (Rightly-Guided) Caliph, began to put Islam’s stamp on the site where Solomon’s Temple and the Second Jewish Temple had stood until the Romans demolished it in 70 AD. What Arculf found was:

In that famous place, where once stood the magnificently constructed Temple, near the eastern wall, the Saracens now frequent a quadrangular house of prayer, which they have built in a crude manner, constructing it from raised planks and large beams over some remains of ruins. This house can, it is said, accommodate three thousand people at once.8

It seems unlikely that such an improvised “place of prostration” or masjid (mosque) would still be in place if construction had begun three decades earlier. On the other hand, there is a claim in a ninth-century Byzantine chronicle that the Umar-era houses of worship “kept falling down”,9 which may explain its condition when Arculf saw it, and in either case such a large structure on the Temple Mount attests to the Arab rulers’ viewing the site and thus the city as significant.

Finally, Arculf relates a story, “which all the people of Jerusalem assert to be true”, of a dispute between Jews and Christians over the shroud placed over Christ’s head in the tomb:

The rivalry … divided the people of Jerusalem into two factions, the faithful believers, that is, against the infidel unbelievers. Upon this the King of the Saracens, Mavias [i.e., Muawiya] by name, when invoked by both sides, in judgment between them said to the infidel Jews (who stubbornly held on to the Lord’s shroud) in presence of the Christian Jews [i.e., Christian converts]: “Give into my hand the sacred cloth that you have.” …

The King took it with great reverence, and bade a pyre be prepared in the court before all the people. When it was burning with great intensity, he got up, went right up to the pyre, and said in a loud voice to the dissident parties: “Now let Christ the saviour of the world, who suffered for the human race, who had this shroud (which I now hold in my arms) placed on his head in the sepulchre, judge by the flame of the fire between you who contend for this cloth, that we may know on which of these two contending bands he will deign to bestow such a gift.” And so saying he cast the Lord’s sacred shroud into the flames.

But the fire was completely unable to touch it. Whole and unimpaired it arose from the pyre, and began to flutter on high … then gradually coming down it swerved by God’s guidance towards the Christian party, who meantime kept beseeching Christ the judge, and it settled in their midst.10

The story, obviously, has a mythic quality, but the core of it—that Muawiya was concerned with arbitrating Jewish-Christian disputes, and they both regarded him as the proper authority in such matters—is something to keep in mind.

Arculf transmitted his account in 683 or 684 to Adomnan, the abbot on Iona,11 an island off western Scotland, and Adomnan recorded it in De Locis Sanctis (“Concerning the Sacred Places”), which was completed around 686 AD.12

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Arculf’s testimony is important because it provides a precious point of light in what is otherwise a dark age in the Near East. The term “dark age” is often used morally-polemically,13 but there are legitimate technical-descriptive uses for it in history. One such case is the Near East from the 630s to about 800 AD, the period of the Arab conquests and the advent of the Arab Empire. (Another famous case is Britain, where from 410 to 597 AD—between the collapse of Imperial Roman administration and the arrival of the Papal Roman mission—the sources are so threadbare that all attempts at reconstruction are necessarily probabilistic and provisional. There is an interesting parallel in both beginning with the collapse of part of the Roman Empire and lasting about two centuries.)

The only narrative account of how the Arabs captured and colonised the Roman and Persian zones is contained in the Islamic Tradition: the biographies of the Prophet Muhammad (Sira) and accounts of the military campaigns (Maghazi) especially, as well as in the Hadith, the legal literature of the shari’a, and Qur’anic exegesis. For a long time, this source deficiency led to a deference towards Islam’s sacred history, even in Western critical scholarship. The enormous problem is that the Islamic Tradition postdates 800 AD almost in its entirety and, as is well-known in general, “Tradition does not merely transmit the past: it creates it”.14

A proper reckoning with this situation began in the 1970s with the emergence of a “Revisionist” trend in Islamic Studies, exemplified by John Wansbrough and Patricia Crone. Half-a-century later, the Revisionists have not prevailed, exactly, and almost definitionally could not—there is no single Revisionist view.15 However, the collective evidence and arguments of the Revisionists have significantly eroded the Tradition-reliant consensus, and the methodology that underwrote it. The primary approach of recent decades has been to situate the Arab conquests in their Late Antique context and that has produced some convergence, if not quite consensus.

An area where the debate in Islamic Studies has been substantially rewritten is that many secular academic specialists now, even former stern critics of the Revisionists, accept that Islam is a product of the Arab Empire, not a cause of its creation. The obvious corollary question is: What was the nature of the Arab creed before that?

The Revisionist answer—taking together the totality of the available evidence, including from the Qur’an, which unlike the Tradition is (probably) authentically Late Antique—is an indeterminate Biblical monotheism, a blending of Jewish and Christian elements, some of them already ancient “heresies” by the seventh century. This doctrine, which the Qur’an calls Millat Ibrahim (the Way of Abraham), was not a new revelation but a primordial call for Jews and Christians to “return” to the “proper” faith. The non-Arabs who encountered it at the time knew its followers “Hagarenes” or “Ishmaelites”, the reference being to Hagar, the concubine of Abraham, and their son, Ishmael, from whom the Arabs descend, according to Biblical exegetes on all sides.

This kind of creed is very recognisable from the Late Antique “sectarian milieu” in and around the Roman Levant, where renegades from the orthodoxy of Constantinople and the rabbis gathered and mingled—and where Arabs had been employed as foederati and settled in ever-expanding numbers in the centuries before the 630s. The implication from this, reinforced by multiple lines of evidence, is that when the Arab armies very pointedly made the Jerusalemite Holy Land the first target of their conquests, they did not arrive from the Hijaz a thousand miles away, but took advantage of a situation on their doorstep, with Roman power in the Near East hollowed out after a generation-long war with the Persians.

All indications are that the Ishmaelites emerged from the more Jewish end of the spectrum in the sectarian milieu, adhering to a revivalist doctrine focused on the Promised Land to which they had a blood right, and were quite possibly assisted by Jews during the take-over of the Syro-Palaestina provinces, partly in reaction to the then-recent severe Byzantine antisemitic persecution and partly due to the stimulation of eschatological hopes that the Temple would be rebuilt. Which it might have been if the Arabs had stopped there, and the spectacle of a restored Temple combined with the weight of the Jewish inheritance might have absorbed the inchoate Ishmaelism. But with the devastation of Rome and Persia, a dominion more vast than they could ever have dreamed of fell into Ishmaelite hands. The creed adapted to the new horizons, taking on a more Christian universalist character, though the particularism was never wholly set aside.

There is no reason to doubt that Muhammad existed—contemporary evidence suggests he led the invasion of the Jerusalemite zone16—but he died soon afterwards and then disappears from the records for about sixty years. It is the Arab Empire beginning to officially invoke Muhammad in the 690s that marks the turn towards a more exclusivist creed, with the Prophet and the Qur’an as its pillars, and the evolution of an identity where, so to speak, muslim (“submitter to God”) becomes a proper noun, separate from the Jews and Christians, particularly in its explicit hostility to the Trinity.17 Ultimately, once the Tradition stabilises in the ninth century AD, Islam will cast the two prior monotheisms as corrupted and superseded revelations.18

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The importance of Arculf is that he is an eyewitness and an outsider, free of the pressures that shaped the Tradition. What Arculf provides to historians is a piece of concrete evidence—an immovable data point in a landscape where inference and probability do so much work in constructing the historical picture.19 In other words, while the substantive weight of Arculf’s testimony is relatively slight—a few brush strokes on the canvas—it is an important controlling element because Revisionist interpretations that are contradicted by Arculf must be discounted.

On the core Revisionist argument of Islam emerging from the Empire, rather than before it, Arculf’s account offers no contradiction. There is no hint of “final-form” Islam: the word is absent; there is no mention of Muhammad or the Qur’an, neither by Arculf’s interlocuters or on inscriptions; “Muslim” does not appear as an identity category; and there is no Islamic architecture. On the visual evidence of the unmolested churches and shrines, and what we might call the logistical evidence provided by Arculf (his travel papers and money), it might easily be concluded the Christian Byzantines had never left Jerusalem.20 This is what would be expected if the Arab Imperial ideology had not detached itself from its Judeo-Christian seedbed at this stage.

The makeshift “house of prayer” (orationis domus) Arculf sees offers more substantive evidence for the Judeo-Christian creedal fluidity of the Arab rulers in Jerusalem around 680 AD, though it is more in the nature of a tantalising clue than a definitive answer. It shows that the Temple Mount had a sacral significance to the Ishmaelites, implying that the Jewish dimension within Ishmaelism remained alive. From other sources, it is believed that relations between the Ishmaelites and the Israelites themselves had cooled by this time, and Arculf’s story of Muawiya siding with the Christians over Jesus’s shroud hints at this. Arculf’s testimony is also consistent with the explanation the earlier evidence gives for the tension in Jewish-Ishmaelite relations, namely the Ishmaelites’ moves to appropriate the Temple site into their dispensation, not merely the Jews’ disappointment at their perceived allies and new overlords preventing them rebuilding the Temple.21 The construction c. 692 of the Dome of the Rock might be regarded as the completion of this process of appropriation, but it is difficult to be sure what this curious structure originally was: it is certainly not a mosque—the Aqsa Mosque was created more than a decade later—and the rites it hosted in the first phase of its existence call into question the appellation of “the first great Islamic building”.22

In a similar vein, Arculf does not contradict the thesis that Muawiya was not a Muslim in the modern sense, and to an extent contributes directional evidence for this, but once again Arculf gives a sense of something in outline that remains out of reach in the specifics.

What we know of Muawiya is that he came to power in 661 AD, displacing the Rashidun with the Umayyad dynasty, and this reignited Jewish hopes, which had first arisen a quarter-century earlier in the immediate aftermath of the Arab occupation of Jerusalem, that the Ishmaelites would be the vehicle for restoring the Temple.23 One can understand why. Muawiya was crowned on the Temple Mount, declaring that the spot was “dearer to God than the rest of the earth” and the surrounding land would be the place “of ingathering and resurrection on Judgement Day”.24 Muawiya even ostentatiously considered making Jerusalem his capital, before settling in Damascus.25 However, from the beginning it was not only Jews who detected a Redeemer.

After Muawiya was crowned, he prayed at Gethsemane, Golgotha, and the tomb of the Virgin Mary. Subsequently, contemporary chroniclers would tell of Jacobites (Syriac Orthodox) and Maronites calling in Muawiya to settle their differences.26 This adds to the credibility of Arculf’s account that Ahl al-Kitab (People of the Book) looked to Muawiya as an arbitrator and that Christians in Jerusalem in 680 believed the Arab ruler capable of invoking “Christ the saviour of the world”. What connection this has to the real Muawiya is, of course, distinctly opaque, but the Christians can be forgiven for thinking their favourable view of Muawiya was requited, and struggling at times—as Arculf did—to understand he was not one of them.27 After the pro-Christian display at Muawiya’s coronation ceremony, he had married a Christian and married his son to a Christian Princess, the daughter of the last King of the Ghassanids, the devoutly Christian Arab shield of Byzantium for two centuries and more. Throughout his reign, the gestures continued, such as repairing the church of Hagia Sophia in Edessa when it was damaged in an earthquake,28 in-keeping with the maintenance of the churches in Jerusalem that Arculf witnessed.

The ambiguity surrounding Muawiya starts with the very title of his office. The Qur’anic term “Caliph” (Khalifa),29 “Deputy (of God)” or “Successor (to His Prophet)”, would not be used by Arab rulers until the 690s. Muawiya was “Commander of the Believers” (Emir al-Mu’mineen), a non-Qur’anic and seemingly wilfully more equivocal title.30 None of Muawiya’s surviving inscriptions, coins, or documents mention the Prophet Muhammad, nor are there any extant Qur’ans securely datable to Muawiya’s reign, if it comes to that.31 But there is an inscription at Hamat Gader, near the Sea of Galilee, which is preceded by a Cross and reads, in Greek, “Muawiya, the Commander of the Believers”.32 Which believers remains an open question.

As intriguing is what is not in Arculf’s account: Mecca. Arculf records no sign that those at prayer face it. On its own, this is an argument from silence that does not amount to much. But it becomes more important in combination with the writings from a couple of years later of Jacob of Edessa, a Syriac bishop, who precisely locates the Arab qibla (direction of prayer): “the Jews and the muhajirun” pray “toward Jerusalem and toward the ka’ba, these ancestral places of their peoples”.33 Modern archaeology tells the same story of the qibla in this period being in the vicinity of Jerusalem, not the Hijaz.34 Arculf is, therefore, consistent with the evidence that the qibla reorientation from around Jerusalem to the Hijazi Mecca was a byproduct of the reforms by Abd al-Malik (r. 685-705) in the 690s, and the Tradition placing this change before the conquests is a theologically-inspired back-projection.

One might perhaps see it as an effect of the creedal changes that Willibald, an English monk and later bishop in Bavaria who tried to follow in Arculf’s footsteps in the 720s, found a much less hospitable environment for Christian pilgrims in the Jerusalemite zone.35 But the ramifications only became fully apparent after the Umayyads had been overthrown in 750 AD.

The new Arab rulers, the Abbasids, moved the Imperial capital to Baghdad, away from the former Roman Levant and into Persianate Mesopotamia. It was in this environment that the great exegetical project took place that codified the Tradition, forging Islam as we know it.36 As so often in the ancient world, this revolution was presented as a return to a forgotten authentic past. The Abbasids, naturally, blamed their Umayyad predecessors for this recovery being necessary, embedding an anti-Umayyad bias in Islamic historiography, which presents the Umayyads as impious, presiding over a worldly Caesarist system rather than upholding the Holy Law of God, and spiritually marginalises the geographic heartland of the Umayyads.37 The Abbasid-era Tradition that underlies classical Islam “aggressively seeks to conceal” the “special sanctity of Jerusalem and Palestine … [to] the early Believers”—damning the belief that Jerusalem is a Holy City as a superstition of superseded creeds, while locating the Muslim Holy Land firmly in the Hijaz—and attributes any confusion on the point to the Umayyads’ “un-Islamic” deviance.38

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FOOTNOTES

The Soviet Union’s triumph in the Second World War—enslaving the eastern half of Europe conquered from its former Nazi allies—finally awakened the West to the Cold War waged against it since global Communism acquired Moscow as its headquarters in 1917. The simultaneous realisation was how far behind the West already was. Soviet aggression was ongoing internationally—from Greece and Iran to China and Korea and soon as far afield as Guatemala—and there was massive subversion within the Free Bloc. The Red Army had been halted in Berlin, but Moscow-run “fraternal” Communist Parties had ministers in four Western European governments into the late 1940s and the Anglosphere States had to reckon with their folly in believing until so recently that the Soviets were an ally.

American and British resources rescued the Soviets from Stalin’s nearly fatal miscalculation in jointly starting a world war with Hitler—and enabled the Soviet conquest of the East. But this generosity at no point changed the Soviet approach to the United States and the British Empire. On the contrary, the Soviets exploited the new trust and openness of these capitalist powers to escalate subversive activities intended to destroy them. Soviet spies had infiltrated America and Britain, including the Dominions,1 on a vast scale.

The severity was such in the U.S. that had President Franklin D. Roosevelt not replaced the fellow-travelling Henry Wallace with Harry Truman as his Vice President in July 1944, when FDR died months later the Soviets would have had two agents in the American Cabinet.2 The American reaction was stern and far-reaching, as it had been to the original outbreak of domestic Communist revolutionary contagion after the First World War and to the internal menace from the Axis. For all the yelps about “McCarthyism”, the combination of bureaucratic-security measures, legal repression, and the public ideological assault on Communism crippled the Soviet apparat in the U.S. by the early 1950s, making the U.S. enduring more resistant to Communism for the duration of the long struggle against its bid for world domination.

In Britain, by contrast, there was a much less serious effort to comb spies out of the State and a much weaker effort to correct public opinion in Britain about the Soviets. The failure to undo—or even understand—the scope of the damage in the late 1940s had a long-lasting impact in making Britain more vulnerable to Soviet subversion. An important part of the explanation is that the British intelligence system had already been captured by the Soviets. Kim Philby—the most infamous of “the Magnificent Five”, as the Soviets called the Cambridge spies—had been appointed head of counter-intelligence at the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) in 1944, able to protect Soviet assets within the British system, betray British assets in the Soviet system, and sabotage anti-Soviet measures domestically and abroad. Another factor was political.

A Labour government came to power in Britain in mid-1945 with a conciliatory belief “Left can speak to Left”. To the great credit of Prime Minister Clement Attlee, he quickly realised this was false and fully integrated Britain into the effort to stem the Communist onslaught, but he was not comfortable rhetorically treating Communism as he had Nazism, partly because he had to manage a party with an openly pro-Soviet wing—Labour MPs like Konni Zilliacus and John Platts-Mills—who moved in a much wider milieu of Soviet sympathisers and anti-Americans. The Soviets rapidly understood the potential of this dynamic.

Before the war, the Soviets had instructed their most valuable agents—like the Magnificent Five—to distance themselves from the Communist Party and its fronts; to play the part of Establishment gentlemen. With the Five’s demise in 1951, and Labour entrenching as the second British party—tied to trades unions and student movements where Communism flourished—the Soviets turned their focus to this more natural route to influence, where its agents could be their radical selves without arousing suspicion or sanction.

Writing a little while ago about Tom Driberg, a Labour MP from the 1940s and senior party official into the 1960s who was a Soviet spy for most of that time—among other things, he participated in Soviet active measures to exculpate Guy Burgess, one of the Five and by then a defector—I pointed out:

Driberg is a representative case study of the constant influence the Soviets exerted over the Left-wing of the Labour Party … The fundamental problem is that a large part of the Western Left has always suffered from the “popular front” delusion summarised in the phrase “pas d’ennemis à gauche” ([there are] no [true] enemies to the Left). … The inability within the mainstream Left to ever quite draw a line beyond which it was impermissible to stray—to always imagine that the “excesses” of the comrades, tactically misguided as they might be, came from a good place—made the formation of a stable anti-Communist Left difficult. … Operating in this broader environment of confusion and naiveté, Driberg did not really stand out and certainly never came close to running over any tripwires that would have him ostracised.

This continued all the way to the end. There are some notorious cases. Jeremy Corbyn is one: he was able to become a Labour MP while being a public supporter of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and other terrorists in the Soviet orbit. The subsequent revelation Corbyn had been a Communist spy in the 1980s, regularly passing political intelligence to Moscow through the Czechoslovak extension of the KGB, the State Security (StB), did not prevent him becoming Labour leader from 2015 to 2020.

There is, however, a much less well-known and far more scandalous Soviet espionage case in Labour’s history. Indeed, it is one of the worst compromises in British history and in the West during the Cold War. Worse than the Profumo affair or the spy in the office of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, and worse than Soviet agents nearly being brought into the American Cabinet, for in Britain a traitor actually made it into the Cabinet of a Labour government.

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In a recent essay on the nature of the Nazi regime, the key underlying dynamic I examined was the way its “polycratic” structure sustained a cumulative radicalisation in ideology and behaviour. The genocide of six million Jews in Europe was the escalation point reached before the Third Reich was demolished, and I went into some detail about how the Nazi system produced this horror.

HOLOCAUST HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE FÜHRER ORDER

To summarise briefly: why the Holocaust happened is straightforward—because Adolf Hitler wished it to—but how and when the decision was taken is debated. The debate turns largely on whether there was a Führer Order for the Holocaust. While no such document has ever been found, this is not surprising. There was extensive destruction of Nazi documentation, and Hitler routinely conveyed orders verbally anyway, so, if there was a Führer Order, it was almost certainly never written down in the first place. Accentuating the difficulties, the surviving records are written according to a euphemistic official Nazi discourse that leaves room for interpretation, and Hitler—like Lenin—deliberately cultivated uncertainty within the regime about his role in the worst crimes.1

Historians are broadly divided into two camps, those who argue for a moment between July and December 1941 when a Führer Order was issued, and those who argue there was no “moment”, but rather an iterative process between Hitler at the centre and various lower officials in the occupied territories, where the Führer endorsed, rather than originated, the escalatory steps of the Shoah.

In assessing the evidence historians are working with in coming to these divergent conclusions, one aspect I highlighted was:

SS operatives involved in implementing the Final Solution … have uniformly testified that their orders came directly from Hitler. There is no reason to doubt the SS men were substantially correct, that Hitler stood behind the fundamental decision for the Holocaust and every decision of significance as it escalated. But it does not settle the question of a Führer Order because none of the SS officials heard Hitler’s verbal instruction(s) personally; they all heard of Hitler’s will through [Heinrich] Himmler. And Himmler did not specify to his subordinates whether, during his increasingly frequent face-to-face meetings with Hitler from the summer of 1941 onwards, the Führer had approved or initiated genocidal measures.

This article, taking account of some new evidence, can be regarded as an extended footnote on this point.

MYSTERY SOLVED?

Last year, the London Times reported on the existence of tapes from 1977 recording the deathbed testimony of Bruno Streckenbach, and contended they were of “historical significance” in resolving the Führer Order question.

Who was Bruno Streckenbach?

In the crucial period, Streckenbach was a senior member of Himmler’s SS-police complex, one of the two most radical elements of the power cartel (the other was the Party organisation proper, out of which the SS emerged), and by the summer of 1941 the SS was the most individually powerful regime sector, the one leading in conceiving and implementing the Holocaust.

Streckenbach’s rise owed a lot to his status as an “Old Fighter” (Alter Kämpfer), meaning he had been loyal to Hitler before the Nazis took power 1933, in the “Period of Struggle” (Kampfzeit) when the cause seemed hopeless. Streckenbach became involved with extreme nationalist politics soon after the Great War. He participated in the Kapp Putsch in March 1920, the only Rightist coup attempt against the Weimar Republic other than Hitler’s 1923 “Beer Hall Putsch”. Streckenbach joined the Nazi Party and the Stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung or SA) in late 1930. In late 1931, Streckenbach signed up with the Schutzstaffel (SS), a rather marginal element of the Nazi Movement at that time.

In 1933, the 31-year-old Streckenbach was made chief of the State political police (what became the Gestapo) in Hamburg, his hometown, and moved to conquered Poland in October 1939 to serve as head of the Security Police (the combined State criminal and political police) and Sicherheitsdienst or SD (the SS’s Party intelligence agency). While the incomplete integration of Party and State was a fundamental driver of Nazi regime fragmentation in general, Himmler ameliorated this factor in the security realm by personally taking over both elements in 1936 and institutionalising the merger of police and SD within the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in September 1939.

The operational chief of the RSHA was Reinhard Heydrich, a Himmler protégé and the man most directly responsible for organising the Holocaust. After a power struggle of the kind that was so common in the Nazi regime, Heydrich removed the leader of one of the RSHA’s seven principal Departments (Amt) in January 1941, and Streckenbach was called to Berlin to fill the role.

It was in this position, as head of RSHA Amt I (Administration and Personnel), that Streckenbach played his part in the Final Solution. Streckenbach left the post in February 1943. Declining the request to take a police role in Austria, Streckenbach transferred to the front as part of the Waffen-SS.

At the time of the Nuremberg Trials, Streckenbach was believed dead, but in fact he had been captured by the Red Army on 10 May 1945 at the conclusion of the Soviet reconquest of Latvia. The Germans in the besieged “Courland Pocket” did not hear of Berlin’s capitulation until that point, making them some of the last troops fighting. Streckenbach was taken to the Soviet Union and held in a prisoner-of-war (POW) camp until 1955, when he was returned to West Germany.2 There were some desultory efforts by Bonn to bring legal charges against Streckenbach, but by the time there was any seriousness to the project, in the early 1970s, he was too ill to stand trial. Streckenbach died in Hamburg on 28 October 1977, aged 75.

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The New Evidence

A caveat here is that I am relying on the Times report of Streckenbach’s testimony. The tapes were discovered by Thomas Weber, a professor of history at the University of Aberdeen, and the testimony was given, over four hours, to Gerd Heidemann, who was, like so many self-described “investigative journalists”, a political oddball and lurid character in his own right.3

Streckenbach claimed he first heard about the extermination of Jews in the summer of 1941 from “an old friend called Erwin Schulz, a volunteer officer in an Einsatzgruppe”, the Times explains.

The Einsatzgruppen were mobile SS units that followed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union when Operation BARBAROSSA began on 22 June 1941, ostensibly as security-intelligence forces to lock down occupied territory by working with collaborators to comb out resistant (or potentially resistant) anti-Nazi elements, including race enemies, Communists, and NKVD spies. In practice, the four Einsatzgruppen immediately acted as death squads focused on murdering Jews. The Einsatzgruppen’s anti-Jewish massacres were initially relatively small-scale and targeted mostly men, before escalating into wholesale extermination of Jewish villages and towns. By mid-August 1941, genocide was definitively underway. The atrocities were sometimes carried out by inciting local pogroms and more usually in organised mass-shootings. The most infamous single atrocity in this phase—known as the Holocaust by Bullets—was the slaughter of 34,000 Jews over two days at Babi Yar, then-a ravine on the northern outskirts of Kiev.

From Streckenbach’s reported comments in the Times on his meeting with Schulz, where Schulz said he “had by that point overseen the executions of up to a hundred people in western Ukraine”,4 it can be assumed that this was early on, i.e., not later than July 1941. Schulz “was purportedly uncomfortable with the mass killings of Jews that he had witnessed”, the Times goes on:

Streckenbach said: “[Schulz] was trembling, trembling like I am now, and he says: ‘What do we do?’ And I say: ‘We can’t do anything at all. I can’t leave. You know—it was an order’.”

Streckenbach said he had then gone straight to his immediate superior: Reinhard Heydrich …

“Heydrich was very quiet, very matter-of-fact,” Streckenbach said. “He sat on this large conference table that he had, he sat on the edge, and said: ‘Be quiet now, Streckenbach. Now you listen to me very carefully. Keep your mouth shut. Don’t get involved. We can’t do anything about it. It’s the order from the Führer, for us of all people. He’s chosen the SS to carry out this order. Neither the Reichsführer [Himmler] nor I could do anything about it’.”

There are fairly glaring problems with this. Streckenbach was the spokesman for Himmler and Heydrich to lower officials from the spring of 1941, and in that role conveyed the Commissar Order to the Einsatzgruppen at Pretzsch before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, explaining that it meant they should liquidate “Jews and Soviet political commissars” on sight.5 In other words, the idea Streckenbach learned of the Einsatzgruppen atrocities through a chance encounter is ridiculous, as is the notion that Himmler and Heydrich were reluctantly obeying a Führer Order to exterminate Jews. The same view must be taken of Streckenbach’s claim “that he had only heard about the full preparations for the Holocaust at the end of the war”, given that, as the Times notes, “Streckenbach effectively [became] Himmler’s No 2 in the RHSA from [June] 1942”, after Heydrich’s assassination.

It is fair to point out that assessing the exact ranking of Nazi officials is treacherous because there was no systematic relationship between the institutional titles people held and the actual power they had conferred upon them by Hitler personally or one of the barons at Hitler’s Court—like Himmler. But the Times summary is a reasonable one for the situation at RSHA for the six months after Heydrich’s demise, when Himmler ran the RSHA directly with Streckenbach as his principal subordinate. Streckenbach himself said in 1977 he was the day-to-day administrator of the RSHA in this period, and the evidence suggests that if he exaggerates, it is not by much.6 There is simply no way someone in this position at RSHA when the mass-murder of Jews in gas chambers was at its height was unaware of what the SS was doing.7

At one point in his testimony, Streckenbach essentially concedes this point, recalling an instance where he lambasted his SS colleagues for their supposed ineptitude and half-heartedness in annihilating Jews: “You either have to do it systematically—all 15 or 16 million Jews [in the world]—or not at all, but you can’t [just] do a few hundred thousand. That was how we figured at the time. That was the order of magnitude.”

Streckenbach as a narrator of details is self-evidently to be treated with scepticism, but this does not discredit the core of his story: being told by Heydrich that the order for the Holocaust came from Hitler directly. Weber remarks to the Times that “[w]hile Streckenbach had clearly sought to portray himself in a good light, … there had been no incentive for him to lie about the issue [of a Führer Order] at the end of his life, when there was no prospect of him being prosecuted”, and this seems correct.

With that in mind, here is what Streckenbach said when asked directly about Hitler’s involvement: “This is something that interests every one of us: was Hitler the initiator, did he know, did he give the order? Personally, I have to tell you: I simply can’t imagine that any man apart from or below Hitler would have started these things on his own initiative” [emphasis added].

How it Fits With the Prior Evidence

Adolf Eichmann, the primary logistical coordinator of the Holocaust, and one of his deputies, Dieter Wisliceny, as well as Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz, “all asserted after the war that the orders passed on to them to implement the ‘Final Solution’ derived from Hitler himself.” Of note, too, all of them, like Streckenbach, gave “testimony [that] is inaccurate in a number of ways and cannot be trusted with regard to detail”. Similarly, “Second- and third-tier SS leaders directly implicated in the ‘Final Solution’ were in no doubt … they were fulfilling ‘the wish of the Führer’.”8 The Einsatzgruppen officers said the same thing.

Otto Ohlendorf, commander of Einsatzgruppe D, assigned to the German 11th Army under Army Group South—which advanced through Bessarabia, southern Ukraine, and the Crimea—said under cross-examination at Nuremberg: “The order for the liquidation [of Jews] came from the Führer of the Reich, and it was to be carried out by the Reichsführer-SS Himmler.” Ohlendorf said Streckenbach “transmitted” this order at the training camps in Pretzsch in May 1941, and many others at the Einsatzgruppen Trial confirmed this. Walter Blume of Einsatzgruppe B—attached to Army Group Centre, moving through what had been eastern Poland, Belarus, and western Russia, heading for Moscow—was emphatic that at a 17 June 1941 meeting, at the Prince Albrecht Palace in Berlin, Heydrich had openly discussed a “Führer Order” to murder “all Jews”. Numerous Einsatzgruppen officers present testified that Heydrich had said: “Eastern Jewry was the intellectual reservoir of Bolshevism” and in the “Führer’s opinion” must be “exterminated”.9

Dr. Walther Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A, responsible for the worst crimes in the early phase of the Eastern Blitzkrieg as it went through the Baltics towards Saint Petersburg behind Army Group North, noted in a report to the RSHA in October 1941 that his troops had operated “from the beginning” under “basic, general orders for cleansing operations aimed at a maximum elimination of the Jews”. This was a written report about the Holocaust, so the language is inflected with official Nazi euphemisms and explicit mentions of the Führer are scrupulously avoided, but it makes clear that the Einsatzgruppen officers at Nuremberg were not retrospectively inventing a “just following orders” defence: their real-time understanding had been that mass-murder was an order right from the top.

The Times headline said Streckenbach “reveals” that “Hitler gave [the] first order for Holocaust”. The headline of a derivative report said Streckenbach “confirms” that “Hitler ordered [the] Holocaust”. But, as can be seen, the truth is Streckenbach simply joins the list of SS officials involved in the Final Solution to testify that they were told by Himmler and/or Heydrich—and, therefore, believed—the initiating Holocaust Order came from Hitler. Which leaves us where we began: the SS officials are unquestionably correct that “Hitler’s authority … stood behind every decision of magnitude and significance” as the Holocaust escalated, but whether there was an originating Führer Order guiding this or it was a more ad hoc process where Hitler gave “verbal consent to propositions usually put to him by Himmler” remains debateable.10

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FOOTNOTES

I recently went on Sibylline’s “What Just Happened?” podcast hosted by Marco Giannangeli to discuss the proposals of Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi to disarm the Shi’a militias that answer to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which is supposed to take place by 30 September 2026, the same date the United States is set to withdraw the last of its troops from Iraq.

The discussion covers the politics in Baghdad that led up to this, whether disarmament can work, whether it would impact the Iranian hold over Iraq if it did, and the role of the United States, since President Donald Trump has very publicly bet on Al-Zaidi as a partner.

The podcast is available here.

Fifteen senior Nazis gathered in Berlin on 20 January 1942, at a villa in Wannsee, to discuss the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”. Some early post-war historiography presented the Wannsee Conference as the decision-point for the Holocaust, but in reality it was a coordination meeting about a decision already taken. While the structure and conduct of the Nazi regime is unimaginable without Adolf Hitler, the regime was not the orderly totalitarian system of popular imagination, and Wannsee was necessary to bring together its fragmented and overlapping power centres to implement a single policy. Examining the participants at Wannsee provides a window onto the structure of the Nazi regime, the process of perpetually escalating radicalism this structure sustained, and how the Holocaust decision was produced from these dynamics.

THE NATURE OF THE NAZI REGIME

The Third Reich was, above all else, a Führer cult: the premise of power in Nazi Germany was the Führerprinzip, that what the Leader wanted took precedence over all else, including written law and the bureaucratic procedure of formal State institutions. The Nazi system, however, never approached the kind of unitary, totalitarian rule seen in the Soviet Union. This was for three interlinked reasons.

First, where Communism imposed itself on Russia via a violent coup and apocalyptic destruction, giving Vladimir Lenin tabula rasa, the Nazi Revolution was democratic, and Hitler’s “charismatic authority” was grafted onto the sophisticated modern bureaucracy of the German State, creating an inherent duality in power from which further splits cascaded.1

Second, Hitler, unlike Lenin or Joseph Stalin, was a highly non-interventionist ruler, who had no interest in grand designs to “rationalise” the State structure and did not involve himself in disputes among underlings until the Darwinian wrangling had produced a clear winner. This was not just about Hitler’s personality—waking near midday, watching movies late into the night, being uninterested in complex detail, averse to dealing with paperwork, detesting chairing meetings—let alone a conscious divide-and-rule strategy. It was an inescapable and indispensable element of Hitler’s charismatic authority: the Führer post having been deified, Hitler needed to maintain the personal prestige, specifically the reputation of infallibility, to match it. He could not be lowering himself into grubby faction fights and he certainly could not be getting onto the losing side of one.2

Third, ideologically, the Nazis, unlike the Communists, were very sensitive to the charge their rule was lawless—and, in practice, Nazi Germany, even its army at the height of the savage war in the East, could be bizarrely legalistic.3 The crux was the interpretation of law. The Nazis despised strict adherence to detailed written law, but only because, apart from seeing it as a deadening rabbinic innovation, they saw it as a dangerous impediment to true law. That is to say the primordial law of nature, felt as a living essence in the blood and soul: ensuring the survival of the race and serving the Führer, the two things synonymous in the Nazi mind.4

The upshot was a system where power was both institutional-legal and personal, and the latter was always decisive. The fundamental fact of the landscape was the incomplete integration of Party and State, meaning the two retained separate and often competing interests. There were then factions within the Party and the growth of an autonomous SS-police complex as a subdivision of the “Nazi bloc” in the ruling coalition, while each of the State ministries had their own priorities. Added to that, the various regime entities had formally overlapping lines of authority and there were special Führer projects—the Four Year Plan is a classic case—that cut across Party-State lines and created yet further power-bases. It was a chaotic milieu of venomous rivalries where the only semblance of order was imposed by Hitler, or more precisely the image of Hitler, whose will these Party offices, State agencies, and hybrid institutions all claimed to be carrying out.5

As even senior ministers struggled to actually meet or communicate with Hitler, the handful of people who did—and those who controlled access to the Führer—became immensely powerful, effectively the barons at Hitler’s court. It was these baronial networks, especially as the war went on, with the growing institutional decay and collapse of any coherent policy-making process, that defined the power centres in the Reich.6 The day-to-day experience of most people in the Nazi regime was acting on their own initiative, in conformity with their own racialist beliefs and emphases, to realise the broad vision and goals Hitler embodied and propagated, such as “remove the Jews”. The combination of the fractured governmental landscape (“polycratic” is the technical term) and Hitler issuing only infrequent, “delphic” orders,7 fostered a mentality of “working towards the Führer”, where the networks and individuals within them continually fought for Hitler’s approval by trying to out-bid each other in providing the most extreme solutions, correctly judging these were the solutions Hitler wanted to the problems he had defined.8

The result was a restless dynamism wherein the most radical element of the “power cartel”, the Nazi bloc (the Party organisation proper and the SS), gained increasing influence, and its growing influence drove the system into ever greater extremism, locking in a cycle of cumulative radicalisation in regime behaviour.9 Wannsee was on the one hand a reflection of this trendline, and on the other a unique exception to the general pattern of Nazi governance, since its primary purpose—which succeeded—was to unite the entire regime coalition around one policy under the agreed leadership of one faction.

THE WANNSEE CONSPIRATORS

Those present at Wannsee were:

1. Reinhard Heydrich: Chief of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) and Deputy of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

2. Dr. Gerhard Klopfer: Ministerial Director in the Party Chancellery.

3. Erich Neumann: State Secretary in the Office of the Four Year Plan.

4. Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger: Ministerial Director in the Reich Chancellery.

5. Heinrich Müller: Chief of the Gestapo.

6. Dr. Josef Bühler: State Secretary and Deputy Governor-General in the General Government.

7. Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: State Secretary in the Interior Ministry.

8. Otto Hofmann: Chief of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office.

9. Martin Luther: Undersecretary of State in the Foreign Ministry and principal liaison with the Party and SS.

10. Dr. Alfred Meyer: State Secretary and Deputy Reich Minister in the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories.

11. Dr. Roland Freisler: State Secretary in the Justice Ministry.

12. Dr. Georg Leibbrandt: Head of the Political Department in the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories.

13. Dr. Karl Eberhard Schöngarth: Commander of the Security Police (SiPo) and the Security Service (SD) in the General Government.

14. Dr. Rudolf Lange: Commander of the SiPo and SD in Latvia.

15. Adolf Eichmann: Head of the Jewish Affairs and Evacuation Section of the RSHA.

Some of these participants were individually prestigious and/or powerful, most obviously Heydrich, one of the most senior SS officials, who had convened and chaired the Wannsee meeting. The purpose of the conference did not require the presence of top officials, though. Most of the invitees were second-level officials, deputies to Party barons or State Secretaries at the principal ministries, and Heydrich’s aim was to have them, as representatives of their institutions, assent to participation in implementing the Final Solution and accept their roles in it as directed by the SS. Wannsee was a coordination meeting to identify and resolve legal and administrative problems, particularly conflicting bureaucratic jurisdictions, which, bluntly, meant the representatives surrendering any prerogatives that would impede the SS’s program. As such, it makes most sense to examine the participants in the context of the five broad sectors of the Nazi regime represented at Wannsee.

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THE SS-POLICE COMPLEX

The baron of the SS sector was Heinrich Himmler. The Wannsee Protocol bloodlessly records Heydrich, in his opening statement at the Conference, invoking Himmler’s authority as Reichsführer-SS with “lead responsibility for conducting the process of the Final Solution”. It gives little sense of the burning ideological commitment that propelled Himmler to that point, or the scale of his demonic achievement in knitting together a bureaucratic empire—containing the Nazis’ ideological vanguard, the race policy administrators, police, intelligence services, kommissars of the occupied territories, and concentration camps—that was already putting the other regime sectors in its shadow and made Himmler effectively the third man in the Third Reich.

Himmler, a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) since its re-founding in 1925, was an intellectual and impatient revolutionary. Himmler was determined to “re-awaken” Germans to the worldview of their pagan ancestors, where humans understood they were separate races in an eternal struggle and the strong unsentimentally trampled down the weak.10 To get there, to secure a thousand-year Reich, a Nordic racial elite, such as the Romans had (in the Nazi imagination), would have to be forged to guide the restoration of “the Germanic familial order” in a reordered Europe,11 and the greatest obstacle to this new world, Christianity, would have to be torn up by the roots,12 meaning the Jews who had incubated one Saint Paul—with his “Bolshevik” doctrine that laid the Roman Empire low by inciting racially inferior masses to rebel against their natural masters—would have to be destroyed, lest they produce another.13

Himmler’s January 1929 appointment as head of the Schutzstaffel (SS, “Protection Squad”), the personal bodyguard for the leader of a fringe (if growing) political party, hardly seemed the ideal starting point for turning his dreamworld into a reality. But Himmler trusted in history—and the German people—to deliver power to the Nazis, and he was an exceptional player in the bureaucratic-political game. Industrious, meticulous, and ruthless, Himmler combined ideological utopianism with a cold understanding of power politics, above all the need for unfailing loyalty to Hitler, whose favour time and again removed obstacles in Himmler’s way.14 It was this personality and political skill that enabled Himmler to transform control of a squad of 280 bouncers into the first step on the road to, within a decade, embedding his ideological mission in the most powerful European State and taking into his hands an apparatus of terror that would impose it on nearly the whole Continent.15

Himmler began by remaking the SS internally into a disciplined Nazi intellectual elite, the nucleus of his new racial aristocracy. Fostering an elitist ethos was abetted by defining the SS against the Party militia, the Stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung or SA), to which the SS was officially subordinate. The SA was a chaotic mass movement, having 60,000 members at the end of 1929,16 focused on spectacle and “action” (political street fighting), and its internal culture was marked by proletarianism and populism,17 especially after coming under the leadership of Ernst Röhm, from the socialist wing of the Party, in November 1930.18 The educated idealists drawn to the Nazi Movement as Hitler’s political fortunes rose in 1929-30—university professors, scientists, doctors, civil servants, military professionals, and elements of the lower nobility—were attracted to the SS, where Himmler made racialism a matter of academic seminars and scientific inquiry, casting the violence inherent to Nazism as reasonable and defensive in a world of racial “struggle”. Wannsee was in effect one of these seminars, heavy in SS discourse defining “Jew” and framed around the necessity of “struggle … against this opponent” to protect the German people.

Back in 1931, with Röhm constraining the SS to 10% the size of the SA and the seizure of power (Machtergreifung) two years away, Himmler organising a “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” seemed a remote possibility, but he was already laying the foundations. That year, what became the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA) was established, simultaneous with Himmler’s Marriage Order. Initially a genealogical race vetting mechanism for SS recruits—guiding the selective breeding of this prospective elite of the German volk—the RuSHA got seriously involved in settlement, i.e., Germanising conquered zones, in Austria in 1938.19 At Wannsee, RuSHA chief Otto Hofmann reinforced the ideological framework of the meeting and promised to press the point on unconquered countries like Hungary by sending racial “orientation” officials to prepare the ground for the Final Solution. By then, the RuSHA had already coordinated with other elements of the SS to design the racial screening programs underpinning the expulsions and colonisation of Poland,20 and contributed to the General Plan East (Generalplan Ost), the Nazi blueprint for restructuring Eastern Europe after the Soviet Revolution and the Jews were gone, which entailed destroying tens of millions of Slavs.21

Also in 1931, Himmler created an SS intelligence service, the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst or SD), appointing as leader a recently-cashiered Naval intelligence officer, Reinhard Heydrich, a protégé, ideologically and administratively, obsessed with the purity of German blood and so hostile to Christianity that in 1941 he would even oppose “hearts and minds” propaganda showing the invading Germans re-opening churches closed by the militant godless in the Soviet Union.22 In the summer of 1932, in an important harbinger of what was coming, the SS outmanoeuvred its rivals to secure for the SD monopoly powers over Party intelligence activities—internal security, intelligence, and surveillance.

After the Machtergreifung in January 1933, Hitler moved rapidly to refashion Germany as a centralised Führer State by Nazifying or eliminating every public and private institution (the process known as Gleichschaltung, lit. “Coordination”). Dismantling Germany’s federal structure (Länder) was an immediate necessity, and key to that was gaining control of the police. It was by no means obvious that Himmler, merely head of the Criminal Police (Kriminalpolizei or Kripo) in the single city of Munich as of 9 March 1933, would be the man to do it. But within days, Himmler was on the move, assuming command of the Bavarian political police, which was swiftly SS-ified and used to sideline the Kripo in the rest of Bavaria by the end of the month, giving Himmler free rein to repress anti-Nazi forces in the State.

March 1933 was also the fateful moment when Himmler was vested with authority over the Weimar-era “protective custody” (Schutzhaft) system, which was used as legal cover for his capacity to arbitrarily imprison and administer the Nazi concentration camps, the first opened in Dachau in Upper Bavaria on 22 March 1933,23 by which time the murders in SS custody had already begun.24 Himmler spent the next year capturing the State political police forces seriatim and increasingly synchronised them, laying the foundations of a centralised national police force such as Germany had never had. Most momentously to this end, Prussia, containing two-thirds of Germany’s 65 million people, transferred its political police, the Secret State Police (Die Geheime Staatspolizei or Gestapo), to Himmler in April 1934.25

The SS had vastly expanded,26 and Himmler freed himself from SA oversight by proving his loyalty once and for all to Hitler on the Night of the Long Knives, providing the muscle to eliminate Röhm and neutralise the SA.27 The SS was declared an independent organisation answering to Hitler alone, and the SD was made the sole Party intelligence service, its rivals absorbed or dissolved. Himmler, now supreme over Party security and entrenched in the State police, was able to significantly shift policing in practice to preventive repression of political dissent, especially the Jewish “wire-pullers”, and policing in concept towards protecting the “Aryan” race from biological defects.28 But Himmler’s vision of the Party subsuming the State was now impeded by the police remaining part of the Interior Ministry.

Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, an ardent Nazi but a lawyer and career civil servant, envisioned a system not of State over Party, exactly, but an integration of the two where the institutional scaffolding of the State was reinforced and the Party exercised power through the State, rather than alongside it or above it.29 Frick held his ground for two years before he was defeated in the way so many others would be in the Nazi regime: Hitler bestowing personal favour on one of his underlings. In June 1936, Himmler was made “Chief of the German Police in the Reich Ministry of the Interior”, i.e., de jure still under Frick, controlling a unified national Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei or SiPo)—containing the Kripo and political police—which nominally remained a State institution. However, Himmler had de facto detached the police from the Interior Ministry and merged the police into the SS.

From now on, Himmler was at baronial level, answering solely and directly to the Führer. There were some efforts to demarcate the State-Party division in Himmler’s empire, notably between the Gestapo—a name now applied to the entirety of the State political police—and the Party’s intelligence service, Heydrich’s SD. They failed. For example, Heydrich set up an SD Jewish department in 1937 run by a coterie of young intellectuals, among them Adolf Eichmann, to develop a comprehensive Jewish policy, but the department soon became involved in persecution, a Gestapo function.30 Heydrich’s role at Wannsee, acting at Himmler’s behest and with Eichmann at his side, was an extension of the process that centralised Jewish policy in Heydrich’s office through the 1930s.

The announcement of the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) in late September 1939, formally bringing the SiPo and SD under one roof, exemplified another feature of the Nazi system: the awarding of formal titles after Hitler’s personal favour had already created a power centre in practice. (In August 1943, the bureaucratic tangle was fully resolved by Himmler overtly supplanting Frick as Interior Minister.31) In accordance with the Führerprinzip that ran through the regime, Himmler set the “visionary” guidelines for the RSHA, while Heydrich, whose rise and protection within the Nazi system relied significantly on his personal relationship with Himmler, was its operational leader, albeit Himmler—like Hitler—intervened in the details when he wished.32 Similarly, Heinrich Müller, a professional policeman with an anti-Nazi record before the Machtergreifung, was appointed Chief of the Gestapo upon the RSHA’s foundation because he had Heydrich’s patronage.

There was nobody else who would have, and probably nobody else who could have, “brought together the police, the camp system, racial selection, settlement policy, [and] forced-labour programmes” in the way Himmler did, as Peter Longerich writes. Himmler’s ideology gave him the ambition to accumulate so many powers and provided the controlling principle to organise them into a coherent bureaucratic empire that restlessly pursued Nazi goals.33 The war in the East brought Himmler new power and prestige—it was his SS officers like Karl Schöngarth and Rudolf Lange who dominated in the occupied territories—and all it did was inspire him to press for more, sensing that the Nazi Utopia was within reach.34

To us, the Wannsee Conference represents the culminating horror of the Nazi regime, the systematisation of the program to destroy the Jewish people. For Himmler, however, it was conceived of as merely the beginning. Himmler’s dream of a Europe reordered as a Greater Germanic Reich necessitated the extermination of many other peoples, and seizing the opportunity opened up in the East required more power than the SS had at Wannsee to direct other regime sectors.35 In the event, the SS-police complex would continue to be empowered. SS control of slave labour, for instance, at the factories and elsewhere, became a lever for gaining influence over the economy. Albert Speer’s “armaments miracle” in 1944 relied directly on SS terror.36 Through the war economy, the SS spread into the connected policy areas, i.e., nearly of them, and Himmler steadily reaped official duties from others.37 But even as Reichsführer-SS’s power grew, his dream was being consumed in fire and ruin.

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THE PARTY

A case in point of the ambiguities of status in Nazi Germany is Gerhard Klopfer, who was a member of the SS (an Oberführer) yet represented the Party—a rival power centre to Himmler’s, however often they ideologically agreed—and who was personally in no sense a top-tier figure, but who represented Martin Bormann, the most shadowy of the barons.

Bormann’s involvement in violent antisemitic politics went back to 1919, and he briefly joined the SA in 1925, before joining the NSDAP in 1927 and transitioning from a street fighter to a bureaucratic warrior.38 Serving at first in propaganda and finance roles, Bormann became chief of staff to Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess a few months after the Machtergreifung. Getting involved in as much of the business of Hess’s office as he could, mediating Party factionalism and Party-State issues, and using the Party apparatus to drive escalating cycles of antisemitic “action”,39 Bormann was soon in Hitler’s orbit, becoming a regular at the Führer’s dining table,40 in many ways the centre of gravity in Nazi policy-making. Bormann, immensely loyal and capable, became an all-purpose fixer for Hitler, and had a status far beyond his official rank by 1935 when he started handling the Führer’s personal finances,41 and organised the construction of Hitler’s Berghof residence on the Obersalzberg. Bormann built a home for himself within the same compound in the Bavarian Alps, a physical manifestation of his proximity to power.42

In 1938, Bormann ceased to be a “guest” at Hitler’s table: he now “belonged to the inner group of courtiers”,43 and those present recognised “Bormann’s dominant position in the Court”.44 When Hess flew to Britain in May 1941, Hitler immediately abolished Hess’s post, renamed his office the Party Chancellery, and put Bormann in charge of it. Thereafter, Bormann swiftly acquired more power than Hess ever had.45 The Party Chancellery gave Bormann institutional power, overseeing the NSDAP—by then one of the two most dominant elements of the regime—and specifically directing the Party regional offices with their SS-provided apparatuses of surveillance and repression. But it was the simultaneous appointment as Secretary of the Führer, a position formalised in April 1943, which truly distinguished Bormann.

Bormann spent more time with Hitler than anybody else after 1941. A near-constant presence at the Führer’s side, including in the bunker at the last, Bormann gained Hitler’s trust in a way few others did,46 while controlling the flow of paper information and in-person access of others to Hitler, ensuring the Führer rarely heard views Bormann opposed.47 Since Hitler did not operate a decision-making process in any conventional sense, but had a “tendency to seize impulsively upon random strands of information or half-baked judgements from cronies and court favourites” that were then issued as Führer Orders,48 Bormann had the opportunity to exert enormous sway over policy, such as it was. And Bormann took the opportunity to invariably advocate the most extreme course to Hitler, often exceeding the suggestions of the Party radicals that dominated the regime at the local level.49

Bormann’s concentration of power allowed him to uncompromisingly enforce his version of Nazi orthodoxy through the Party apparatus. Fear of incurring Bormann’s disapproval for insufficient radicalism spread throughout the bureaucracy and afflicted even a figure so close to Hitler as Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.50 Right down to the end, Bormann was devising anti-Jewish measures,51 and trying to eradicate Christianity.52 Bormann was certainly ultimately working towards the Führer with this latter fixation,53 though there was a tactical ambiguity. Hitler initially favoured having “the showdown” with Christianity after the war,54 but as the war went on Hitler moved closer to Bormann’s position, increasingly blaming Christian morality for Germany’s declining fortunes and seeing even short-term accommodation as dangerous.55

Bormann’s relentless persecution of the churches was a source of common ground with Himmler,56 and in general the two, being from the same ultra-radical wing of the Party, saw eye to eye.57 This was crucially true in the conquered zones, which were under Party jurisdiction and practical SS control. Bormann fought all efforts for a more “moderate”—and militarily sensible—policy towards populations in the East, backing Himmler’s insistence on sticking to the letter of Nazi ideology in dealing with “subhumans” (Untermenschen), and providing the SS with logistical and administrative muscle in places to enable the campaign of enslavement and extermination.58 Klopfer, therefore, attended Wannsee as active supporter of Heydrich’s.

THE FOUR YEAR PLAN

Erich Neumann was similar to Klopfer in not having much personal prestige, but he represented Hermann Göring, an individual for whom the word “baron” might have been invented, the avaricious and flamboyant designated successor to Hitler. This status was instantiated in a law of 30 August 1939 that also made Göring head of the six-man Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich (MCDR).59 When the war began days later, “Hitler basically ceased to be Reich Chancellor”: Nazi interaction with the State apparatus was largely delegated to the MCDR, and Hitler became physically distant from the Reich government, regularly leaving Berlin and permanently departing in 1941.60 Göring, President of the Reichstag from before the Machtergreifung and Minister-President of the all-important State of Prussia from soon afterwards, was made head of the Air Force (Luftwaffe) in 1935 and would become Reichsmarschall, the highest-ranking military officer, in July 1940.

Unsurprisingly, these formal positions derived from Göring’s personal relationship with Hitler, which went beyond the usual brotherhood of the Front Generation. Göring, often remembered justifiably as a ludicrous figure, bulging out of an all-white suit and surrounded by stolen art, had not always been so. When Göring joined the Nazi Party in 1922, he was the most famous living flying ace of the Great War, having led “the Flying Circus” after the death of “the Red Baron” Manfred von Richthofen. Göring’s membership single-handedly elevated the NSDAP’s national visibility and credibility. In 1923, after bringing some discipline to the Stormtroopers,61 Göring was a (wounded) participant in the Beer Hall Putsch, an accolade among the Nazis to rank alongside fighting in the First World War. Göring held to the NSDAP when the cause seemed hopeless in the wilderness years, then helped guide the Nazi Machtergreifung, founded the Gestapo, and was a pivotal actor on the Night of the Long Knives. The bond held to the end—Hitler would not formally dismiss Göring from anything and sentimentally insisted on his “indispensable” leadership, despite his manifest incompetence—and, indeed, it held beyond the end. At Nuremberg, Göring refused to utter a word of criticism against the Führer and as far as possible he prevented others doing so.62

It was against this background Göring was appointed Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan by Hitler in August-September 1936, tasked with accelerating rearmament and autarky. That this was to prepare for aggressive war by 1940 was the most open of secrets and the German public reacted with rapturous enthusiasm.63 It is at this moment in 1936 when the Marxist idea of the Nazi regime serving the interests of “big business” becomes untenably absurd: the “primacy of politics” was asserted, State planning prevailed, and the autonomy of the “economic establishment” as an influence on policy was sharply curtailed and ultimately terminated. The creation of the Four Year Plan complex was in essence Gleichschaltung for industry, erasing another line between State and society by bringing vital corporations into conformity with the ideological-strategic vision of National Socialism.64

Göring’s Four Year Plan Office (Vierjahresplanbehörde) spread its tendrils through the State, annexing vast swathes. Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht—one of three men acquitted at Nuremberg—had been a powerful figure steering the Nazi economy in line with international financial markets, and he was now removed. Göring briefly headed the Economics Ministry himself, before formally handing it over to the journalist Walther Funk, while Göring—following Hitler’s example and foreshadowing his own fate—ran the Ministry through favourites among Funk’s subordinates. Similarly, Göring colonised the Agriculture, Labour, and Transport Ministries from the inside out by recruiting the State Secretaries to the Four Year Plan Office. In the private sector, the pattern repeated, most prominently with Carl Krauch, a board member at the chemical giant I.G. Farben, who provided “informal” employees to Göring’s empire: their expertise and efficiency assisted Göring and Krauch’s association with Göring made him the strongman of the company.65

Göring’s operational deputy at the Four Year Plan Office was Paul Körner and Neumann was Körner’s deputy from mid-1938. Hitler, obviously, did not wait four years to begin the war, but the Office, name and all, remained as the coordinating authority for the war economy—and, as the war was the primary “policy” Hitler took an interest in, this was a very powerful institution. By the time of Wannsee, however, Göring’s prestige was seriously slipping. Hitler had been reasonably forgiving when Göring’s extravagant promises for his Luftwaffe’s offensive and defensive capabilities were falsified against Britain in late 1940. But a line was drawn when Göring overpromised and underdelivered again in late 1941 for Operation BARBAROSSA.66

Göring’s diminished status with Hitler crippled him in the unfolding power-struggle as Himmler capitalised on the SS’s new military and economic functions in the occupied East to encroach on Göring’s territory. Göring recognised the centrality of controlling slave labour to his position, both as an indicator of his standing against Himmler, and as the mechanism for recovering favour with Hitler by using it to increase military-industrial output and construct the wonder weapons Hitler placed his hopes in until nearly the end.67 Neumann’s primary intervention at Wannsee reflected Göring’s resistance in this area. Neumann insisted that Jews “presently employed in … war-essential enterprises” could not be “evacuated”—the Wannsee euphemism for annihilation—“so long as no replacement labour was available”. Heydrich granted the exemption, but it did little to alter the trajectory of events.

By the spring of 1942, the Göring-led MCDR had been sidelined, many of its responsibilities syphoned off by Bormann, and Albert Speer, another permanent fixture at Hitler’s dining table, had been appointed Armaments Minister.68 Speer was ostensibly within the Four Year Plan network under Göring’s authority, but the shift in Hitler’s favour precipitately reduced Göring’s war economy prerogatives immediately, and most of the rest drained away over the next eighteen months.69 Göring was never completely disempowered—and officially, as mentioned, not at all—but there was a steady downward spiral. Hitler’s disfavour incentivised factional attacks, and Göring increasingly spent his time fending off these attacks, which prevented him accomplishing the tasks that would restore Hitler’s favour. Demoralised by this, and by realising relatively early the cause was lost, Göring retreated into self-indulgence and reminiscences with his remaining loyalists.70

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THE STATE

Friedrich Kritzinger represented the Chief of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Lammers, at Wannsee.71 Lammers was different to the other barons because his proximity to Hitler was more a consequence than a cause of his institutional weight, and his scope for independent action and dispensing patronage was far more restricted.

The Reich Chancellery was the central administrative office of the German State, coordinating the work of the ministries, and handling communication between the ministries and Hitler. Lammers’ power at its height should not be underestimated. Sitting at the nexus of the pre-existing civilian State bureaucracy and the Führer, and acting as the bridge between the two, Lammers enjoyed unusually frequent access to Hitler, regulated the access of others, and was instrumental in the most high-functioning State in Europe serving Nazi goals. Without the capacity of the German State, and its ingrained ethos of apolitical State service as an end in itself,72 the Holocaust could not have taken place on the scale it did in so short a time. That being said, Lammers’ role was procedural, facilitating and administering for others, thus it was always narrower and more passive than the bureaucratic entrepreneurialism of the other barons. Lammers’ levers were managing the flow of business to Hitler, a margin for interpretation in translating Hitler’s will into policy, enabling or obstructing the implementation of administrative decisions, and influencing appointments in the Reich Chancellery. And over time, Lammers would lose even these.

Lammers came from within the civil service—he was a lawyer in the Interior Ministry in the interwar years—but he also had the prestige of being a veteran of the Great War (he lost his left eye on the Western Front) and joining the NSDAP (just about) before the Machtergreifung.73 Lammers was recommended to head the Reich Chancellery by Interior Minister Frick, and served in the post from the first day to the last of the Third Reich.74 Lammers’ promotion to Reichsminister in November 1937 symbolised his overtaking of Frick, whose authority had been radically diminished a year earlier when Himmler removed the police from his ministry.

As of 1938, Lammers was in a category with maybe half-a-dozen others in terms of his power, but by January 1942 this had changed. The Party was overshadowing the State: the SS had made inroads in many of the ministries Lammers coordinated and there was no individual from whom Bormann would usurp more power than Lammers. Lammers understood that Bormann’s rise—intentionally on Bormann’s part—would render him “superfluous”,75 a dynamic visible by the time of Wannsee, well-advanced by mid-1943 when Bormann formally became Hitler’s private secretary (as usual, the title following the practicality of the Führer’s favour), and completed by mid-1944. By then, Lammers’ office was “little more than a postbox and distribution agency for orders laid down by Bormann”.76

Still, at Wannsee, Lammers remained around the top tier, the primary conduit of Hitler’s orders—almost invariably given verbally—to the civilian government,77 and Kritzinger sat at the table as primus inter pares among the ministry representatives. Kritzinger later said he thought the “Jewish policy” set at Wannsee was shameful; he gave no contemporary indication of this view.78

Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, a lawyer at the Interior Ministry, represented Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick at Wannsee. Frick, a member of the Front Generation imprisoned after the Munich Putsch, was key to the Nazi consolidation of power, one of the principal architects of the legislation that dismantled the Weimar Constitution and, his own misgivings notwithstanding, the lead administrator in superimposing the Party upon the State.79 Though Frick’s ministry lost power to Himmler’s SS after 1936, it did not become irrelevant. As already mentioned, the Nazis—individually and collectively—were genuinely concerned to act legally. This gave Stuckart, not only as the embodiment of his ministry but having the personal prestige of co-authoring of the foundational 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws,80 something of a special role at Wannsee: his approval tacitly reassured the other participants that genocide was legitimate within the Nazi legal order.

It is, therefore, strange that Stuckart is sometimes presented as a dissenter at Wannsee. The basis of this is the Protocol recording Stuckart’s objections during a key section of the discussion, over what to do about “mixed” (Jewish and “Aryan”) marriages, and their Mischling (“hybrid”) offspring, a category Stuckart led in creating.81 What the Protocol actually says, though, is that Stuckart was concerned about the “practical implications” for the bureaucracy, specifically the “endless … administrative work” if the “Mischling” were to be assessed for “evacuation” according to Heydrich’s exemptions, which included some subjective considerations like “racial appearance”. Stuckart raised no objection to the principle of murdering “Mischling”—and no objection whatever to murdering “full Jews”. Stuckart merely “proposed proceeding to compulsory sterilisation” as a blanket measure for part-Jews, thus simplifying the administration and annihilating all of their bloodlines within a generation.

Martin Luther represented the Foreign Ministry of Joachim von Ribbentrop, a former star player within the regime and its international face, who was by the time of Wannsee a victim of his own success. Ribbentrop had steered the Nazi State into war, right up to personally signing the Pact with the Soviets in 1939 that ignited it. But war diminished the need for diplomacy, and the Foreign Ministry lost a lot of ground to the SS. Wannsee was an example of that, with the Foreign Ministry being given a task within an SS operation, namely to coordinate the cooperation of other States under varying degrees of German influence—Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Vichy France, Croatia, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria—in the Final Solution. It was an important task in enabling the Holocaust, and it makes nonsense of the Foreign Ministry’s post-war claims of institutional innocence. Luther’s actual input at Wannsee, though, amounted to voicing a prudential concern, namely that the pace of the Final Solution be tailored to local levels of antisemitism. Ribbentrop’s once mighty ministry counted for less than the administrators of the conquered zones where the killing took place.

Roland Freisler was one of the best-known legal theorists of the Third Reich (and went on to infamy as head the People’s Court82). The Justice Minister that Freisler represented at Wannsee, Dr. Franz Schlegelberger, by contrast, was not a long-standing Nazi revolutionary, but a highly distinguished academic and practicing jurist of the old world, who only joined the Nazi Party in 1938 and had been in his job merely a year (technically as acting Minister). The Justice Ministry was responsible for applying the racial laws devised by the Interior Ministry, meaning at Wannsee there was a certain overlap of institutional interests between Freisler and Stuckart, notably on the implications of the Final Solution for “mixed” marriages. But, in contrast to Stuckart, Freisler was a passive participant at Wannsee. This was less to do with the Justice Ministry being much less powerful than even the emasculated Interior Ministry, or Freisler lacking the personal prestige of Stuckart, and more to do with Freisler being a Party radical whose eagerness to assist the SS extermination program outweighed any concern for bureaucratic turf or administrative difficulties.

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OCCUPATION ADMINISTRATIONS

The final category of officials present at Wannsee were those administering the conquered areas in the East where the killing had begun and the Final Solution under discussion would be implemented.

Dr. Joseph Bühler, a lawyer, joined the German Academy of Law run by Dr. Hans Frank in 1933.83 Bühler remained in Frank’s orbit ever-afterwards. Frank, a Front Generation Nazi and putschist in 1923, was Hitler’s personal lawyer and the Party lawyer, before becoming the chief legal ideologist of the Nazis in power. In the early phase, Frank held senior official posts and was a trusted Hitler intimate, but by 1936 it was clear his theorised vision of the Nazi regime had been defeated, and legal theory was much less relevant as the Führer prepared for war.84 Once the war began, Frank was sent to govern part of obliterated Poland, the General Government (Generalgouvernement). For Frank, becoming Governor-General was an ambivalent appointment, being both a promotion and removing Frank from proximity to Hitler, the fundamental source of Nazi power. Bühler went with Frank to Warsaw, and in 1940 he became State Secretary for the General Government and Deputy Governor-General.

After the joint Nazi-Soviet attack on Poland that initiated the Second World War, the Soviets annexed the eastern half. The Nazi half was roughly halved again,85 with the westernmost sector annexed and the eastern portion turned into a colony, the General Government, which was inevitably closely tied into the Reich proper.86 The Nazi-annexed sector was divided into four. Three of the pieces were added to pre-existing German provinces,87 and one wholly new province was created, the Warthegau.88 All the annexed territories were subject to vicious “Germanising” policies, but the Warthegau became exceptional, with more to do and subject to a particularly cruel Gauleiter (regional Party leader) and Reich Governor (a State office), Arthur Greiser, who planned to physically “cleanse” the four million Poles and 400,000 Jews in the Warthegau to make space for German settlement. The General Government was the designated dumping ground for “undesirables”.89 In pursuing this mission, the Warthegau emerged as an epicentre of radical innovations in racial policy that helped pave the way to the Holocaust, but it was ultimately in the General Government, which was unable to play the receptacle role envisioned for it, where the Holocaust itself mostly took place.90

The Nazi-conquered districts of former Poland were placed under Party rule. Radicals hand-picked by Hitler operated out of sight of the constraint of public opinion and free of any modulating influence from the State ministries. Not that the resolution of the Party-State conflict in the incorporated and occupied territories reduced governmental anarchy. The Gauleiters had an institutional rival, the SS; the Gauleiters vied with each other to fulfil the broad “Germanising” mandate Hitler had given them; and the provinces were racked internally by the customary clashes of personality and personal power—with the overall effect of contributing to the escalating radicalism as they all competed for Hitler’s favour. In addition, the Nazis in Poland were dealing with “Eastern Jews” (Ostjuden), the most supremely dehumanised population in Nazi theology and propaganda.91

Levels of antisemitic barbarity hitherto unseen swiftly took hold in Nazi-ruled former Poland. Jews were forced, including via pogroms, into ghettos, the first in Łódź (Warthegau) in December 1939,92 and compulsory labour for Jews was introduced a month later. These two measures raised the ideological baseline of radicalism to new heights and crossed a line in moving genocide from the realm of abstract ideal to concrete policy.93 The large-scale Jewish mortality intrinsic to the ghettos and helotage was consciously understood and welcomed by the Nazis.94 In parallel, an infrastructure of registration and confinement was being constructed to make all-out genocide possible. Perhaps most fatefully, the measures, from the perspective of their envisaged outcome, created “problems”—of “unproductive” Jews who could not work, housing shortages and overcrowding, disease outbreaks, and perennial difficulties providing food—for which mass-murder became a “solution”.95

Nazi policy towards Jews at this time “officially” remained “emigration” (expulsion). That policy had been set in place by Göring, who was formally tasked with coordinating a “resolution” to the Jewish Question after Kristallnacht, and he deputised Heydrich, on 24 January 1939, to lead the new Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration, where Eichmann would become a prominent official.96 While the office would fail in its stated mission of “emigration”, it was important in solidifying Heydrich’s administrative hold over Jewish policy. The office becoming a nerve-centre of the Holocaust was downstream of the commission Heydrich now had through lines of authority from Himmler and Göring, as Heydrich emphasised at Wannsee.

The bureaucracy did continue exploring “emigration” options into 1941.97 But the war in the West had largely foreclosed external migration, and the “internal” deportation plans—to empty the Warthegau into the General Government—collapsed in March 1940 when Frank said he could not handle any more and Göring backed him. Step by step, in the Nazi perception, policy was being driven into a cul-de-sac where options other than outright genocide were dwindling.98 War in the East, the planning for which began in December 1940, seemed, briefly, to offer an alternative.99 The vastness of Russia, expected to soon be in Nazi hands,100 could provide the “territorial solution” Heydrich had been advocating since June 1940.101 In itself, this was a marked change: the transfer of Jews to the arctic wastes of Russia was an implicitly genocidal scheme to neglect and work the Jews to death.102 And in the event, the invasion of the Soviet Union would prove to be a “quantum jump” on the road to anti-Jewish genocide.103

Why the Holocaust happened is not in question: because Adolf Hitler wished it to. As his biographer, Sir Ian Kershaw has put it, “No Hitler, no Holocaust”.104 How and when the decision to exterminate Europe’s Jews was made remains debated. One view is that Hitler had formulated the Holocaust plan by the time he published Mein Kampf in 1925-26, if not before, and implemented it as soon as he could.105 While Hitler’s remarkably consistent worldview was always latently genocidal, and a strong link clearly formed early in his mind between another war and murdering the Jews,106 few historians, even in the “intentionalist” camp, any longer believe there was a straight line from Mein Kampf to Auschwitz.107

Even if one does believe Hitler came to power with a developed plan for anti-Jewish genocide, however, the Holocaust did not begin in 1933, so there must have been a later moment when the order was given, and no written Führer Order for the Shoah has been discovered. It was either destroyed by the Nazis in the final months of the war, along with so much of the Third Reich’s documentation, or, more likely, there never was one to begin with in a system where high-level orders were routinely conveyed verbally. Reconstructing the circumstances and timing of a Führer Order for the Holocaust, therefore, relies on interpreting the surviving records, which is made more difficult by the euphemistic terminology used in the Nazi documents,108 and Hitler’s strenuous efforts—following in the footsteps of Lenin, the originator of the one-party State model Hitler emulated—to avoid personal association with his regime’s most heinous crimes.109

Some argue Hitler gave the Holocaust Order in July-August, in the period of German “euphoria” at the apparently-imminent Soviet collapse, as the apotheosis of his dream of “removing” the Jews. Others contend the order was given in or after September 1941, once the difficulties with the Nazis’ Eastern Blitzkrieg were visible, as a sort of vengeful consolation prize,110 and because of an increasingly firm ideological conviction that the war could not be won unless the Final Solution was completed first, reversing the original plan for victory in the war to create the conditions for the Final Solution.111

Still others doubt Hitler gave an order, verbal or otherwise.112 Requests and rationalisations for genocide had been sent to Berlin over the summer of 1941 by officials in destroyed Poland whose administrations were foundering, ravaged by disease and beset with shortages. The requests were early and unusually candid from the Warthegau.113 The General Government was more circumspect, with the Frank-Bühler administration initially pressing to deport Jews “further East”—to zones everyone knew were killing fields—until, in October 1941, accepting they would be responsible for murdering the Jews in place and initiating mass-shootings.114 The implication from the “structuralists” or “functionalists”, who locate the crystallisation of the Holocaust in the iterative interaction between Hitler at the centre and local initiatives from the periphery, is that there was no “moment” of decision.

The structuralist analysis is not necessarily contradicted by the research showing—after peeling back the layers of Nazi public propaganda and internal regime messaging “leading away from the Führer” on the Jewish Question—how intimately Hitler was involved in the details of anti-Jewish “action” up to the outbreak of war.115 But it does lead some historians to consider it inherently implausible that Hitler played an endorsing, rather than originating, role at the culmination point.

Similarly, it is noteworthy that SS operatives involved in implementing the Final Solution—including Eichmann, its primary logistical coordinator—have uniformly testified that their orders came directly from Hitler. There is no reason to doubt the SS men were substantially correct, that Hitler stood behind the fundamental decision for the Holocaust and every decision of significance as it escalated. But it does not settle the question of a Führer Order because none of the SS officials heard Hitler’s verbal instruction(s) personally; they all heard of Hitler’s will through Himmler. And Himmler did not specify to his subordinates whether, during his increasingly frequent face-to-face meetings with Hitler from the summer of 1941 onwards, the Führer had approved or initiated genocidal measures.116

It is uncontested that the decisive phase of the process leading to Europe-wide extermination of Jews in gas chambers began no later than 31 July 1941, with Göring’s letter to Heydrich giving him official powers over the ministries to devise a “complete solution” to the Jewish Question.117 What is contested is whether this was the written expression of a verbal Führer Order for genocide. Heydrich opening the Wannsee Conference with an invocation of the authorities bestowed by this letter, and saying the meeting was “to create clarity on fundamental questions” raised therein, can be argued to point in that direction. However, it is possible the meaning evolved over time, not unlike the way Heydrich’s Jewish emigration office morphed into part of the administrative apparatus for Jewish annihilation. Suggestive in this regard is that the letter was prepared in Heydrich’s office (probably written by Eichmann). All Göring did was sign it. It is at least possible that Göring saw this merely as confirming de facto authorities Heydrich had had since January 1939 and their extension into the soon-to-be created “reservation” for Jews beyond the Urals. Likewise, it is plausible Heydrich’s purpose was simply locking down bureaucratic turf for the still-envisioned “Russian General Government”.118

This does not, however, rule out the possibility of a Führer Order for the Holocaust at some point after July 1941: Heydrich also said at Wannsee that Jewish policy had switched from “emigration” to “evacuation” “following the appropriate prior approval by the Führer” [emphasis added], which appears to mean the change originated with Hitler, though “approval” leaves open the possibility Hitler consented to a proposal brought to him by Himmler.

By the time of Göring’s letter, the SS Einsatzgruppen units that accompanied the regular army (Wehrmacht) into the Soviet Union had been massacring Jews for six weeks under “general orders” from Berlin. In mid-August 1941, the relatively small-scale Einsatzgruppen killing operations against mostly male Jews escalated into wholesale slaughter: genocide was definitively underway, the so-called Holocaust by Bullets, and it was only possible with the Führer’s approval.119 Simultaneously in mid-August, Goebbels secured Hitler’s assent to make Jews wear the “Yellow Star”, a policy long desired by Party radicals. At that meeting, Hitler referred to the “prophecy” in his 30 January 1939 Reichstag speech—that another world war would result in “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”—and said it was coming true “with an almost uncanny certainty”.120 The “prophecy” and its message that Jews would pay the price for forcing war upon Germany, a Führer theme before BARBAROSSA,121 now became a total fixation for Hitler, repeated constantly to Nazi leaders in private, as well as in the Führer’s public speeches and official Nazi propaganda.122 For example:123

In September 1941, Hitler ordered the deportation of Jews in Germany proper, Austria, and the Czech Protectorate to the East. Hitler had heretofore resisted this policy, another idée fixe of Party activists, arguing the Jews were useful as “hostages” against the Allies, especially if the U.S. should enter the war. Hitler’s abrupt reversal signalled that Hitler was no longer willing to wait until the war was over for the final confrontation with the Jews. It was a momentous conceptual shift and by October 1941 it had effected a policy shift, whether as a result of a Führer Order or a Führer signal spurring radical initiatives from below. The deportations began on 15 October and in all of the destinations—Lodz, Riga, and Minsk—either the Jewish deportees were massacred on arrival or Jews in local ghettos were massacred to make space for the new arrivals.124

In parallel, the General Government, while being spared a new influx of German and Czech Jews, had it made plain by the centre that “their” Jews were never going to be sent “further East”,125 and began implementing their own “solution”. Genocide-scale shootings of Jews commenced in the east of the General Government,126 and authorisation was received from Himmler on 13 October to build an extermination camp, what became Belzec, in the adjacent Lublin District.127 Construction of Belzec was underway as of early November 1941, utilising equipment from Germany proper and officials (notably Christian Wirth) reassigned from the paused euthanasia program.128 The same month, gas vans began to be used to murder Jews—experimentally in the Warthegau, on a large scale in Ukraine, and on a lesser scale in Latvia.129 Chelmno death camp, purpose-built to liquidate the Jews in the Lodz ghetto using carbon monoxide and like Belzec relying on technology and personnel assigned to it from the centre,130 became operational in the Warthegau in December 1941, three days before Germany declared war on the United States.131

For our purposes, there are two takeaways from all this. First, the threads within the Nazi matrix—ideology, i.e., the guiding antisemitic obsession of the Führer cult, the self-created logistical problems in Poland, and the new opportunities opened up, psychologically and practically, by the invasion of the Soviet Union—had very likely coalesced into a decision to annihilate European Jewry before the Wannsee Conference,132 probably by the time Heydrich sent out the first invitations to Wannsee on 29 November 1941.133 Frank certainly seemed to be under the impression a decision had already been made after visiting Berlin two weeks later.134 Which leads to the second point: Bühler was not “coming in blind” to Wannsee. Bühler not only knew the agenda; the Nazi entity he served had helped condition it and was already implementing it. Wannsee was about the mechanics of generalising the Final Solution and Bühler’s personal contribution at the Conference itself, forcefully advocating this course and that the SS’s new “efficient” methods be deployed in his province first, makes him a more consequential participant than some others, including those below, who outrank him on various metrics.

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Dr. Alfred Meyer, academically trained in law and political science, joined the NSDAP in 1928 as it was expanding into the Protestant north. Meyer became Gauleiter for Westphalia-North in 1931, answering directly to Hitler, and the High President (Oberpräsident) of the Prussian Province of Westphalia from 1938. Meyer was not in Hitler’s inner-circle, but he was not actively marginalised. For example, Meyer was one of the Gauleiters consulted by Goebbels in the summer of 1941 when the Roman Catholic Church ignited the massive anti-Nazi protest movement that halted the euthanasia program.135 A month after Operation BARBAROSSA began, Meyer was appointed Deputy and operational leader of the new Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Ostministerium), the body (nominally) responsible for the civilian administration of the Nazi-occupied areas of the Soviet Union, which was headed by Alfred Rosenberg, whom Meyer represented at Wannsee.

Meyer was undoubtedly a significant second-tier Nazi official—one of the crucial “middle managers” that keep so many organisations going—but he was not quite as important as he might appear given the foregoing for three reasons. First and most obviously, Bormann’s tightening of the reins over the Party made Gauleiters much less independent figures as time went by.

Second, Rosenberg was not at the baronial level, his self-perception and reputation as a Nazi ideologist second only to Hitler notwithstanding. Rosenberg had the prestige of being an early Nazi Party member even by the standards of the Front Generation. An ethnic German born in Tsarist Estonia, Rosenberg was part of that cadre of ethno-separatist “Russian” collaborators pulled out with the German army in 1918 who played such an outsize role in the early phase of the post-war Völkisch movement in Germany. Where most faded away after 1923, Rosenberg joined the first incarnation of the NSDAP in 1919 and saw it through to the gallows at Nuremberg. This gave him the standing to be persuasive to Hitler on occasion, including possibly about the deportation of Germany proper’s Jews in late 1941.136 But Rosenberg was never entrusted with serious power. Even in the propaganda realm where Rosenberg ostensibly had authority,137 Hitler imposed rather stringent limits on Rosenberg’s hobbyhorses, finding his flamboyant assaults on Christianity tactically irksome and his paganism substantively contemptible.138 It is notable that Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), a tract often ranked with Mein Kampf as encapsulating Nazi ideology, had to be published as a private work and never received official blessing from the NSDAP.139

Third, the Ostministerium, based in Berlin, had little practical reach into the East. This was a problem internally, with Rosenberg and Meyer struggling to get the Ostministerium’s own officials to obey orders. Notoriously, the Ostministerium’s Reichskommissar for Ukraine, Erich Koch, appointed by Hitler on Göring’s recommendation, openly defied Rosenberg’s instructions to try to win over Ukrainians, brutally exploiting a population he regarded as subhuman and challenging Rosenberg’s ideological bona fides into the bargain. It was even more of a problem in dealing with the SS, which had an officially overlapping competency for Eastern policy, especially towards Soviet Jews, and held power on the ground. Inflaming the institutional rivalry, Himmler found dealing with Rosenberg personally exasperating, and unlike the Wehrmacht that Himmler also found vexing, Rosenberg had no legions to compel an accommodation.140 Meanwhile, the Ostministerium had to compete with Göring’s Four Year Office on economic “policy”—the cataloguing and distribution of material, agricultural, and human plunder—and in time Rosenberg’s network was eclipsed by Speer’s apparatus on this front.

All that said, the Ostministerium was an actor in the East and Rosenberg had access to Hitler. In the drive for unity at Wannsee, it would have been senseless to exclude the Ostministerium.

What is slightly mysterious is why the Ostministerium had two representatives present at Wannsee. The probable answer is that Dr. Georg Leibbrandt, like Meyer an academic, but unlike Meyer a specialist in Soviet nationalities, had expertise directly relevant to the Conference, and had met Heydrich (with Meyer) in early October 1941.141 Leibbrandt had studied and fostered relations with German populations in the Soviet Union, which he visited three times in the 1920s, and his work drew international recognition.142 The other potential factor, from the other side, was that Leibbrandt was closer to Rosenberg than Meyer, despite being formally subordinate. Sharing Rosenberg’s basic biography—Leibbrandt was an ethnic German born in Tsarist Ukraine and German collaborator during the First World War—Leibbrandt had quickly become Rosenberg’s political adviser after joining the NSDAP in late 1933,143 and was promoted from within to lead the Political Department at the Ostministerium, one of its three main sections (economics and administration-legal were the others). Meyer, by contrast, had only worked with Rosenberg for six months before Wannsee.

As a last example of the overlapping structure of the Nazi system, two members of the SS faction at Wannsee also held positions in the occupation administrations, namely the SD-police chiefs in the General Government (Schöngarth) and Latvia (Lange).

FINAL NOTE

It may be wondered why the Wehrmacht—often considered the third pillar, alongside Party and State, in the regime, and one certainly deeply involved in the Holocaust—was not present at Wannsee. Part of the answer is that the status of the German Army as a separate power centre was radically eroded by the late 1930s after the catastrophic miscalculation of the General Staff in 1935, inaugurating a Führer Oath designed to tether Hitler to the designs of the military leadership and accomplishing the reverse.144 The direct answer over Wannsee is simply that it was a coordination meeting among the SS and civilian agencies with responsibilities for Jewish policy.

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FOOTNOTES

Eden is based on what is called “the Galapagos Affair” in Germany, a strange episode in the early 1930s when eight idealistic Germans gathered on one of the idyllic Ecuadorian islands made famous by Charles Darwin and descended into a slightly mysterious abyss.

The film introduces us to Friedrich Ritter (played by Jude Law), a doctor turned philosopher, who went out to the Galapagos Islands, specifically Floreana Island, in 1931, intending to isolate himself from the influence of the modern world, which he sees as on the brink of collapse, to write a manifesto that will allow humanity’s renewal. Ritter blends this apocalypticism with Nietzscheanism, vegetarianism, and a commitment to “true democracy”. He is, in short, a dreadful man. He has, however, acquired a devotee, Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby), who is certainly not his wife—marriage, like all other bourgeois values and institutions, having been declared repressive by Ritter’s philosophy—though she fulfils many of the same functions. Between urging Ritter to finish the manifesto she views as cosmically significant, Strauch tries to cure her multiple sclerosis via meditation.

Ritter’s antics have, unknown to him, become a media sensation in Germany, where the impact of the Great Depression, and the growing popularity of and street violence between the Nazis and Communists, have made his apocalyptic ravings seem less absurd. Heinz Wittmer (played by Daniel Brühl), a 41-year-old Great War veteran,1 is among those inspired by reading about Ritter in the newspapers, and resolves to move to the island with his new wife, Margret (Sydney Sweeney), who is a bit younger than him (28), and his 12-year-old son, Harry (Jonathan Tittel), from a previous marriage. Heinz shares in Ritter’s sense that modernity is to be escaped and admires what Ritter has done, in making a new beginning and becoming (apparently) self-sufficient. But Heinz does not share Ritter’s ideology: the Wittmers remain devoutly Christian and deeply practical people. Heinz, for instance, believes the Galapagos environment will be healthier for Harry, who suffers with several chronic conditions.

Ritter is displeased at having his solitude interrupted by the Wittmers, but believes they will soon succumb to the hardships of island life and leave. Unfortunately for him, the Wittmers prove to be unexpectedly capable settlers—and then things get much worse. Two months after the Wittmers’ arrival, a ship anchors off the beach, a record player is set up on the sand blaring stirring music, and a woman is carried ashore on the shoulders of two men. After this theatrical entrance, the woman, announcing herself as “Baroness” Eloise Wehrborn de Wagner-Bosquet (Ana de Armas), declares she will soon build a massive hotel called “Hacienda Paradiso”, and proceeds to have sex in the sea with the two men who had carried her, Robert Philippson (Toby Wallace) and Rudolf or “Rudy” Lorenz (Felix Kammerer).

The Baroness is in some ways more ideologically aligned with Ritter, being a libertine individualist who rejects bourgeois morality (she has a dog named “Marquis de Sade”) and seeing the island as a place of real freedom. But she resembles Heinz Wittmer in having been drawn to the island by Ritter’s “celebrity”, while having rather different ideals. The Baroness’s hope is to exploit the island’s fame to enhance her own status and leverage that to transform the island into a lucrative tourist trap. Whatever irritation Ritter felt at the Wittmers’ conventionalism is soon eclipsed by the carry-on from the new trio, the ostentatious polyamory being the least of it.

Carnage begins immediately as the Baroness clashes directly with the other settlers and tries to set them against each other. The Baroness, a complete sociopath, rather than taking any care for her own survival, intrudes on the others, bathing in their drinking water and stealing from their scarce food supplies. She then produces a document she says is from the Governor of the Galapagos Islands, giving her ownership of thousands of acres on the island, and starts acting as if she is the ruler.2 The Baroness’s party have brought firearms, which are used to enforce her writ, and the introduction of violence starts to spiral. The overarching narrative is the escalating war between the three “families”, but the Baroness sows chaos within them, too. In her own camp, Lorenz is increasingly bullied and marginalised, and Ritter’s choices in responding to the Baroness’s encroachments trespass his own ideals and lead to Strauch becoming disillusioned with him. The denouement in 1934 brings these trendlines together with lethal consequences.

Unlike Colonia Dignidad in Chile, where the fascination is the lurid details of how badly a group of German colonists in Latin America behaved, the fascination surrounding the Floreana imbroglio is precisely that all this time later the exact details of what happened are elusive. This is necessarily so because there were few witnesses at the key moments and those who survived had every incentive to shade their testimony to avoid murder charges. The Ecuadorian police records and journalistic investigations are shaped by this factor, as are the most important sources, the competing memoirs, which sold well over subsequent decades and embedded the Galapagos Affair in Germany’s popular culture. The scriptwriters for Eden have clearly immersed themselves in this material and produced a narrative that, as well as being very entertaining—part gritty survival drama, part psychological thriller—is, with one notable exception, a highly plausible rendering of the real-life evidence.

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