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.

NOTES

The scandal surrounding the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, which has ground on for two years, is coming to a head.

From the moment the scandal erupted in late October 2024, three interlinked elements have been visible: Khan was accused of sexually attacking a female underling multiple times over nearly a year, of using his power within the ICC to try to suppress her complaint via inducements and intimidation, and of applying for the ICC arrest warrants against Israel’s leaders in May 2024 as part of the cover-up.

To say the case is heavily politicised is merely to reiterate that it involves an “international law” institution, and so far from trying to disentangle the issues, Khan used the tangle as his main line of defence. Khan and his surrogates have whispered to the media from the earliest days that the whole thing is an Israeli smear campaign and the accuser is a MOSSAD agent. This conspiratorial defence has not gone well.

The victim turned out to be a Malaysian Muslim woman who shares Khan’s politics, which Khan tried to exploit. Khan initially tried to prevent the victim raising the complaint by rushing to issue the warrants, in blatant violation of the ICC’s own rules of procedure and against the advice even of most ICC staff, then telling her she must keep quiet or it would derail the anti-Israel lawfare campaign they both favoured. Once the warrants were issued and the complaint was officially lodged, Khan continued with the same emotional blackmail to pressure her into withdrawing the allegations, among other things approaching “her several times in the office crying” and at least once saying, “Think about the Palestinian arrest warrants”.

When Qatar hired private investigators to find a Jewish or Israeli connection to the victim that could be used to discredit her, they not only failed to find such a connection: their activities were leaked to the media, disclosing that the Qatari hired guns believed their paymaster had “arms around” Khan and that Khan had made a “deal” with Doha to issue warrants, in exchange for which the Qataris would “look after” him.

Further evidence has also come to light that suggest sexual predation and misuse of power are patterns in Khan’s behaviour. A second female subordinate has come forward to allege she was sexually abused by Khan in a remarkably similar manner to the first accuser. And Khan publicly collaborating with the political warfare against Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, as preparation for issuing an arrest warrant against him, was too much for even the ICC to stomach.

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Khan was suspended on 8 June by the ICC’s Bureau of the Assembly of States Parties (ASP), the executive committee of the ICC’s oversight body, and ten days later he was suspended from the Bar Standards Board, the British regulator for court lawyers. While the ASP committee stressed that its decision was “not an indication of the final outcome”, there are reasons to doubt this. Apart from being an unprecedented step, it comes after the ICC has tried everything it can to protect Khan.

When the initial complaint was made, the ICC buried it for six months, only beginning a serious disciplinary proceeding in October 2024 after a Twitter account started publishing details of the case and the media took it up. A damning investigation of Khan by the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), documenting his “nonconsensual sexual contact” with the female aide, was countered by a panel of three ICC judges, who submitted a brief to the ASP committee in March of this year claiming the U.N. report findings “do not establish any misconduct or breach of duty”.

The ASP committee has decided to overrule the ICC judges and recommend the ASP fire Khan after completing their own investigation, which draws on the U.N. report, “the underlying evidence”, and “written submissions”. The New York Times has obtained the report of the ASP committee synthesising the evidence, which concludes:

• Khan “committed sexual harassment when he engaged in sexual activity with a junior member of his staff”;

• Khan “later sought to dissuade his accuser from pursuing her allegations of misconduct against him”;

• Khan at first refused to “clearly” deny sexual contact “with his subordinate, though he was given 30 opportunities to do so, telling an investigating U.N. team that ‘the main issue’ for him was the possibility that his accuser might have made recordings implicating him”;

• Only once no recordings surfaced did Khan begin to plainly denying the sexual assault allegations, denials the ASP judged to be “devoid of credibility”.

The actual conclusion of the ASP Bureau report is strange, though. It says Khan’s behaviour was “extremely harmful” to the proper functioning of the ICC, but that behaviour is described as engaging in “a consensual sexual relationship rendered inappropriate by a power imbalance”. (The corollary is the report sidestepping the question of whether Khan retaliated against other ICC staff who provided evidence he had raped his subordinate.)

Khan’s lawyer understandably protested the recommendation of dismissal on the basis of a charge so different from the one originally brought. Khan must also be perplexed at the ASP’s premise that “inappropriate” behaviour is grounds for dismissal because the Prosecutor’s office is supposed to be occupied by “a person of high moral character”; it never has been yet.

The full ASP will vote on whether to remove Khan from office on 24 July. A finding of misconduct requires a two-thirds majority, and that is hardly foreordained.

Working against Khan, most Western governments are resolved to remove him, and his standing in the global antizionist movement, which includes a significant number of the governments voting on his fate, recently took a hit. Khan’s concern about his declining status within the antizionist movement after HAMAS’s 7 October 2023 pogrom was another factor motivating him to rush the warrants in 2024.1 In May, however, Khan made the mistake of admitting in a public interview that the evidence does not sustain the central antizionist axiom, that Israel has committed “genocide” in Gaza.

In Khan’s favour, the African States, in particular,2 and most of what we once called “the Third World”, which has an overwhelming majority in the ASP, have staunchly defended him all along, regarding the investigation against him as the work of sinister forces and repeatedly trying to terminate it. It is unclear if the ASP Bureau’s findings or even Khan’s faux pas on antizionist orthodoxy will have much impact on this bloc.

Whichever way the vote goes at the end of the month, it will do serious damage to the prestige and legitimacy of the ICC. Either the ICC will affirm to one and all it is happy to have a sex predator as its Prosecutor, or Khan will be removed and every decision he has made since 2021 will be called into question. It is the perfect opportunity for the Trump administration to take the next step in its campaign against the ICC by sanctioning the whole institution.

NOTES

In the historiography for the first few decades after the Second World War, the 20 January 1942 Wannsee Conference was often portrayed as the moment when the Nazis took the decision to implement the “Final Solution”, that is the extermination of European Jewry. In fact, that decision had been taken and implementation had begun between July and December 1941.

The exterminatory phase of the Shoah began with the Einsatzgruppen that followed the German army into the Soviet Union rounding up and shooting Jews in the occupied areas. This was the so-called Holocaust by Bullets, the most infamous incident of which was the massacre at Babi Yar. By September 1941, the Nazi killer brigades in the occupied East were systematically slaughtering Jews in the villages and towns of Ukraine, and experiments had begun, principally organised by Schutzstaffel (SS) official Walther Rauff, with using carbon monoxide to murder Jews in mobile gas vans. On 8 December 1941, the first death camp, Chelmno, became operational.

The Wannsee Conference was a coordination meeting to bring the ministries of the fractious Nazi State into harmony as the Holocaust was expanded into a Continent-wide, industrialised genocide, aimed at creating a Jew-free Europe, hence the meeting discussed murdering Jews in countries not conquered by the Nazis, including Britain. It was in the months after Wannsee that Zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide), which had been experimented with from late August 1941, came into use at the stationary death camps, and by mid-1942 it was being used in the large-scale extermination of Jews in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The Wannsee meeting was called by the SS, the ascendant element of the Nazi government. It was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, the deputy of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and Director of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA). The organiser of the conference—the man who prepared the paperwork, arranged the food and drink, etc.—was Adolf Eichmann, at the time a relatively junior SS officer working under Heydrich.

The Wannsee Conference lasted no more than two hours, and probably more like ninety minutes, but we cannot be sure because it was wilfully organised as a secret gathering, knowledge of it kept from all but the most senior Nazi officials, limiting the number of witnesses, and very little was committed to paper about Wannsee, so historians have few sources to work with.

Some details of the meeting were extracted from Eichmann during his trial in Israel in 1961, but caution has to be exercised regarding these for two obvious reasons: (1) Eichmann was speaking from memory nearly two decades after the event; and (2) Eichmann was speaking in a context where he had major incentives to be misleading if not outright untruthful, because he was trying (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to minimise his guilt and avoid the death penalty.

By Eichmann’s account, stenographic notes were taken at Wannsee, but he then edited them to remove “vulgarisms” and make the text reflect (the more euphemistic) National Socialist “official language”, notably “evacuated” and “treated accordingly” to mean extermination of Jews. The original notes were destroyed and Heydrich then reviewed Eichmann’s amended text, ordering further changes. Thirty copies of the final cleaned-up version of the minutes were made and distributed within the Nazi State to a very tight circle of officials.

This Wannsee Protocol (Das Wannsee-Protokoll) produced by Eichmann is the only contemporary official record of the Wannsee Conference produced by the Nazi regime, and the sole surviving copy is Number 16, the one belonging to Martin Luther, the Undersecretary (Unterstaatssekretär) in the German Foreign Office. The probable reason Luther’s papers survived is because he was in no position to burn them as the Allies closed in and in the panic nobody else thought to do it. Luther was arrested in February 1943 and imprisoned at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he died on 13 May 1945, it seems genuinely of natural causes, after plotting an internal coup to replace Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.

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The Wannsee Protocol was discovered in late 1946 by Kenneth Duke, a member of the American staff for the International Military Tribunal (IMT) or Nuremberg Trials, who was responsible for microfilming documents that could serve in evidence, and who went on to a career focused on the Nazi Foreign Office archives, among other things. In March 1947, Duke handed the Protocol on to Dr. Robert Kempner, a German-born Jewish refugee, the deputy of the American chief prosecutor at the IMT, Robert H. Jackson, and himself the U.S. prosecutor in the Ministries Trial, the eleventh of twelve “Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings” or “Subsequent Nuremberg Trials”, held before U.S. military courts in 1947-48. It was at this moment that the only other primary evidence about the Wannsee Conference was gathered. Kempner interrogated several of the attendees who were in Allied custody and at the Ministries Trial he grilled several others about Wannsee.

Kempner most extensively questioned Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger, who had been State Secretary in the Reich Chancellery and died before the trial. The Reich Chancellery was the central administrative office of the German State, as distinct from the Nazi Party machinery (the two were never fully integrated), coordinating the work of the ministries and handling communication between the ministries and Hitler. As such, Kritzinger occupied a position immediately below one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany, Chief of the Reich Chancellery Hans Lammers, the effective head of the pre-Nazi civilian State bureaucracy and the bridge between it and the Führer, which also made him one of the gatekeepers to Hitler.

Others Kempner questioned in one way or another were:

• Otto Hofmann, an SS-Gruppenführer, head of the Race and Settlement Main Office (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt or RuSHA).

• Josef Bühler, State Secretary for the General Government (Generalgouvernement), i.e., the part of conquered Poland perhaps most associated with the Holocaust, and Deputy to Governor-General Hans Frank. Bühler tried to deny he had understood that Wannsee was about organising the physical annihilation of the Jewish people, but the demonstration of his guilt, not least by the Protocol where he is recorded asking that wholesale extermination be carried out in his district first, was quite important in showing that all parts of the Nazi apparatus—the Party, civilian administrative State, and the military—were active participants in a genocide that became a national project for the Germans. Bühler was subsequently extradited to Poland, by then under Soviet Communist rule, where he was executed in August 1948.

• Wilhelm Stuckart, State Secretary of the Interior Ministry. Stuckart, a lawyer who co-authored the Nuremberg Race Laws that deprived Kempner of his German citizenship in 1935.

A translation of the Wannsee Protocol is given below.

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— — PAGE 1 — —

30 Copies [Made]

16th Copy

Discussion Protocol [or “Minutes of the Meeting” (Besprechungsprotokoll)]

I.

The following took part in the discussion held on 20 January 1942 in Berlin, at Am Grossen Wannsee No. 56/58, concerning the Final Solution of the Jewish Question [die Endlösung der Judenfrage]:

• Gauleiter Dr. [Alfred] Meyer and Reichsamtsleiter Dr. [Georg] Leibbrandt: Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories

• State Secretary [Staatssekretär] Dr. Stuckart: Reich Ministry of the Interior

• State Secretary [Erich] Neumann: Plenipotentiary [or “Commissioner”] for the Four-Year Plan [Beauftragter für den Vierjahresplan]

• State Secretary Dr. [Roland] Freisler: Reich Ministry of Justice

• State Secretary Dr. [Josef] Bühler: Office of the Governor-General

• Undersecretary [Martin] Luther: Foreign Office

• SS-Oberführer [Gerhard] Klopfer: Party Chancellery [Partei-Kanzlei]

• Ministerial Director [Friedrich Wilhelm] Kritzinger: Reich Chancellery

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• SS-Gruppenführer [Otto] Hofmann: Race and Settlement Main Office

• SS-Gruppenführer [and head of the Gestapo, Heinrich] Müller: Reich Main Security Office [Reichssicherheitshauptamt]

• SS-Obersturmbannführer [Adolf] Eichmann

• SS-Oberführer Dr. [Karl Eberhard] Schöngarth, Commander of the Security Police and the SD in the General Government: Security Police [Sicherheitspolizei] and SD [Sicherheitsdienst]

• SS-Sturmbannführer Dr. [Rudolf] Lange, Commander of the Security Police and the SD for the General District [Generalbezirk] of Latvia, as representative of the Commander of the Security Police and the SD for the Reich Commissariat Ostland [“Eastern Land” (Baltics and Belarus)]: Security Police and SD

II.

The Chief of the Security Police and of the SD, SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich, communicated at the outset his appointment by the Reich Marshal [Hermann Göring] as Plenipotentiary for the Preparation of the Final Solution of the European Jewish Question [referring to a letter Göring wrote to Heydrich on 31 July 1941] and pointed out that this meeting had been convened in order to create clarity on fundamental questions. The wish of the Reich Marshal to have transmitted to him a draft concerning the organisational, substantive, and material matters with regard to the Final Solution of the European Jewish Question requires the prior coordination of all central agencies directly involved in these questions with a view to the harmonising their actions.

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Lead responsibility for conducting the process of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question lay, without regard to geographical boundaries, centrally with the Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police [i.e., Heinrich Himmler].

The Chief of the Security Police and the SD then gave a brief retrospective account of the struggle conducted thus far against this opponent. The most essential elements were:

a) the pushing back [zurückdrängung] of the Jews from the individual spheres of life of the German people,

b) the pushing back of the Jews from the living space [lebensraum] of the German people.

In the execution of these efforts, the acceleration of the emigration of the Jews from the territory of the Reich was, as the only possible provisional solution, undertaken in an intensified and systematic manner.

By order of the Reich Marshal, a Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration was established in January 1939, the direction of which was entrusted to the Chief of the Security Police and the SD. It had, in particular, these tasks:

a) to take all measures for the preparation of an increased emigration of the Jews,

b) to direct the stream of emigration,

c) to accelerate the carrying out of emigration in individual cases.

The objective of the task was to cleanse [säubern] the German living space of Jews by legal means.

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All authorities were clear about the disadvantages that such a forcing of emigration brought with it. However, in view of the absence of other possible solutions, it had to be accepted for the time being.

The emigration work was, in the period that followed, not only a German problem, but also a problem with which the authorities of the destination countries had to concern themselves. The financial difficulties, such as increases in the vorzeigegelder [“presentation fees”, money Jews fleeing Germany had to demonstrate possessing before countries would take them in] and landing fees on the part of the various foreign governments, lack of ship space, continually tightened immigration restrictions or prohibitions, extraordinarily hindered the emigration efforts. Despite these difficulties, since the Machtübernahme [(Nazi) Seizure of Power] up to the cut-off date of 31 October 1941, a total of approximately 537,000 Jews were caused to emigrate. Of these:

• from 30 January 1933 from the Altreich [“Old Reich”, Germany proper]: approx. 360,000

• from 15 March 1938 from the Ostmark [“Eastern March”, Austria]: approx. 147,000

• from 15 March 1939 from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia: approx. 30,000

The financing of emigration was carried out by the Jews themselves or by Jewish-political organisations. In order to avoid the verproletarisierten Juden [“proletarianised Jews”, those stripped of property, reduced to poverty] remaining behind, the principle was followed that the wealthy Jews had to finance the emigration of the propertyless Jews; for this purpose, an appropriate levy or emigration tax was prescribed, graduated according to wealth, which was used to meet the financial obligations arising in the course of the emigration of propertyless Jews.

— — PAGE 5 — —

In addition to the Reichsmark revenues, foreign currency had been required for presentation and landing fees. In order to preserve the German foreign-currency reserve, the Jewish financial institutions abroad were induced by the Jewish organisations within the country to take care of the procurement of corresponding foreign-currency funds. In this way, by means of gifts from these foreign Jews, a total of approximately 9,500,000 dollars had been made available up to 30 October 1941.

In the meantime, the Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police [Himmler], in view of the dangers of emigration during wartime and in view of the possibilities of the East, has prohibited the emigration of Jews.

III.

In place of emigration, there has now emerged as a further possible solution, following the appropriate prior approval by the Führer, the evacuation of the Jews to the East.

However, these actions are to be spoken of merely as provisional possibilities [or “makeshift expedients” (ausweichmöglichkeiten)]; nevertheless, practical experience is already being gathered here which is of significant importance with regard to the coming Final Solution of the Jewish Question.

In the course of this Final Solution of the European Jewish Question, approximately 11 million Jews come under consideration, who are distributed among the individual countries as follows:

— — PAGE 6 — —

A

• Altreich [Germany proper]: 131,800

• Ostmark [Austria]: 43,700

• Ostgebiete [Eastern Territories]: 420,000

• General Government: 2,284,000

• Bialystok [Nazi District in Poland]: 400,000

• Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia: 74,200

• Estonia: Jew-free [judenfrei]

• Latvia: 3,500

• Lithuania: 34,000

• Belgium: 43,000

• Denmark: 5,600

• France / Occupied Territory: 165,000

  • Unoccupied Territory: 700,000

• Greece: 69,600

• Netherlands: 160,800

• Norway: 1,300

B

• Bulgaria: 48,000

• England: 330,000

• Finland: 2,300

• Ireland: 4,000

• Italy including Sardinia: 58,000

  • Albania: 200

• Croatia: 40,000

• Portugal: 3,000

• Romania including Bessarabia: 342,000

• Sweden: 8,000

• Switzerland: 18,000

• Serbia: 10,000

• Slovakia: 88,000

• Spain: 6,000

• Turkey (European part): 55,500

• Hungary: 742,800

• USSR: 5,000,000

  • Ukraine: 2,994,684

  • White Russia excluding Bialystok: 446,484

Total: More than 11,000,000

— — PAGE 7 — —

In the case of the stated numbers of Jews in the various foreign States, however, these concern only Glaubensjuden [Jews by religion/faith], since the definitions of Jews according to racial principles are still lacking there in part. The treatment of the problem in the individual countries will, in view of the general attitude and conception, encounter certain difficulties, especially in Hungary and Romania. Thus, for example, even today in Romania a Jew can obtain, in exchange for money, appropriate documents which officially certify him as having a foreign nationality.

The influence of the Jews upon all spheres in the USSR is known. In the European territory there [i.e., European Russia] live approximately 5 million Jews; in the Asian region, [there are] scarcely a quarter of a million Jews.

The occupational classification of the Jews residing in the European territory of the USSR was approximately as follows:

• In agriculture: 9.1 %

• as urban workers: 14.8 %

• In trade: 20.0 %

• employed as State workers: 23.4 %

• in the private professions – medicine, press, theatre, etc.: 32.7 %

Under appropriate direction, the Jews are now, in the course of the Final Solution, to be brought in a suitable manner to labour deployment in the East. In large labour columns [arbeitskolonnen], with separation of the sexes, the Jews fit for work will be led into these territories while building roads, whereby without doubt a large part will fall away through natural diminution [or “natural reduction” (natürliche Verminderung)].

— — PAGE 8 — —

The eventual final remaining stock [of Jews] will, since this will undoubtedly concern the most resistant part, have to be treated accordingly, because this element, representing a natural selection [natürliche Auslese], would, if released, become the nucleus [lit. “germ cell” (Keimzelle)] of a new Jewish revival. (See the experience of history.)

In the course of the practical implementation of the Final Solution, Europe is to be combed through from west to east. The territory of the Reich, including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, will have to be dealt with first, if only due to the housing question and other socio-political necessities.

The evacuated Jews will first be brought, train by train, into so-called transit ghettos [Durchgangsghettos], in order from there to be transported further to the East.

An important prerequisite, SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich further explained, for carrying out the evacuation at all, is the precise determination of the circle of persons under consideration.

The intention is not to evacuate Jews over the age of 65, but rather to transfer them to an old-age ghetto [Altersghetto]—for which Theresienstadt is envisaged.

In addition to these age groups—of the approximately 280,000 Jews present in the Old Reich and the Ostmark [Austria] on 31 October 1941, about 30 per cent are over 65 years of age—the Jewish old-age ghettos will furthermore receive severely war-damaged [i.e., disabled] Jews and Jews with war decorations (Iron Cross, First Class). With this

— — PAGE 9 — —

expedient solution, many interventions will be eliminated at a stroke.

The beginning of the individual larger evacuation operations [Evakuierungsaktionen] will depend to a great extent upon military developments. With regard to the handling of the Final Solution in the European territories occupied and influenced by us, it was proposed that the relevant officials of the Foreign Office should confer with the competent officials of the Security Police and the SD.

In Slovakia and Croatia the matter is no longer all too difficult, since the most essential core questions in this respect have already there been brought toward a solution. In Romania, the government has in the meantime likewise appointed a Plenipotentiary for Jewish Affairs [Judenbeauftragten]. For the regulation of the question in Hungary, it is necessary, in the near future, to impose upon the Hungarian Government an adviser for Jewish affairs.

With regard to the initiation of preparations for the regulation of the problem in Italy, SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich considers a connection with the Chief of Police in these matters to be appropriate.

In occupied and unoccupied [i.e., Vichy] France, the registration of the Jews for evacuation will in all probability be able to proceed without great difficulties.

Undersecretary Luther stated in this connection that, in the event of an in-depth treatment of this problem in certain countries, such as the Nordic States, difficulties would arise, and that it is therefore advisable for the time being to postpone these countries.

— — PAGE 10 — —

In view of the small numbers of Jews involved here, this postponement does not in any case constitute a significant restriction.

The Foreign Office foresees no great difficulties for southeastern and western Europe.

SS-Gruppenführer Hofmann intends to send along to Hungary, for general orientation, an official of the Race and Settlement Main Office when the matter is taken in hand there by the Chief of the Security Police and the SD. It was determined that this official of the Race and Settlement Main Office, who is not to become actively involved, should temporarily be assigned officially as an assistant to the Police Attaché.

In the course of the Final Solution measures, the Nuremberg Laws are, so to speak, to form the basis, whereby a prerequisite for the complete clearing up of the problem is also the solution to the questions of mixed marriages and persons of mixed ancestry.

The Chief of the Security Police and the SD, with reference to a letter from the Chief of the Reich Chancellery [i.e., Hans Lammers], discusses first, in theoretical terms, the following points:

1) Treatment of first-degree Mischlinge [lit. “mixling” or “hybrids”].

First-degree Mischlinge [i.e., half-Jews] are, with regard to the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, placed on an equal footing with Jews.

— — PAGE 11 — —

The following are exempted from this treatment:

a) First-degree Mischlinge who are married to persons of German blood, from whose marriage children (second-degree Mischlinge) have resulted. These second-degree Mischlinge are, in essence, placed on an equal footing with Germans.

b) First-degree Mischlinge for whom exemption permits have hitherto been granted by the highest authorities of the Party and the State in any sphere of life whatsoever. Each individual case must be reviewed, whereby it is not excluded that the decision may once again be rendered to the disadvantage of the Mischling.

The prerequisites for an exemption permit must always be fundamental merits of the Mischling in question himself. (Not merits of the parent or spouse of German blood.)

The first-degree Mischling who is to be exempted from evacuation will be sterilised—in order to prevent offspring and to clear up the Mischling problem definitively. The sterilisation takes place voluntarily. However, it is a prerequisite for remaining in the Reich. The sterilised “Mischling” is thereafter freed from all restrictive regulations to which he has hitherto been subject.

2) Treatment of second-degree Mischlinge.

As a matter of principle, second-degree Mischlinge are assigned to the persons of German blood, with the exception of the following cases, in which second-degree Mischlinge are placed on an equal footing with Jews:

— — PAGE 12 — —

a) Origin of the second-degree Mischling from a bastard marriage [Bastardehe, i.e., where both partners are Mischlinge].

b) Particularly unfavourable racial appearance of the second-degree Mischling, which already outwardly marks him as among the Jews.

c) Particularly poor police and political assessment of the second-degree Mischling, which permits recognition that he feels and behaves like a Jew.

However, even in these cases exceptions are not to be made if the second-degree Mischling is married to a person of German blood.

3) Marriages between full Jews and persons of German blood.

Here it must be decided from individual case to individual case whether the Jewish party is to be evacuated, or whether, taking into consideration the effects of such a measure upon the German relatives of this mixed marriage, he is to be transferred to an old-age ghetto.

4) Marriages between first-degree Mischlinge and persons of German blood.

a) Without children.

If no children have resulted from the marriage, the first-degree Mischling is to be evacuated or transferred to an old-age ghetto. (The same treatment as in marriages between full Jews and persons of German blood, point 3.)

— — PAGE 13 — —

b) With children.

If children have resulted from the marriage (second-degree Mischlinge), they are, if they are placed on an equal footing with Jews, to be evacuated together with the first-degree Mischling or transferred to a ghetto. Insofar as these children are placed on an equal footing with Germans (the normal cases), they are to be exempted from evacuation, and thereby the first-degree Mischling as well.

5) Marriages between first-degree Mischlinge and first-degree Mischlinge or Jews.

In these marriages (including the children), all parties are treated as Jews and therefore evacuated or transferred to an old-age ghetto.

6) Marriages between first-degree Mischlinge and second-degree Mischlinge.

Both parties to the marriage are, without regard to whether children are present or not, to be evacuated or transferred to an old-age ghetto, since any children would, in racial terms, as a rule exhibit a stronger Jewish blood admixture [Bluteinschlag] than second-degree Jewish Mischlinge.

SS-Gruppenführer Hofmann takes the position that extensive use must be made of sterilisation, especially since the Mischling

— — PAGE 14 — —

placed before the choice of whether he is to be evacuated or sterilised, would prefer to undergo sterilisation.

State Secretary Dr. Stuckart stated that the practical implications of carrying out the solution possibilities just communicated for the clearing up of the mixed-marriage and Mischling questions in this form would be an endless amount of administrative work. In order, on the other hand, to take account of the biological facts in all cases as well, State Secretary Dr. Stuckart proposed proceeding to compulsory sterilisation.

For the simplification of the mixed-marriage problem, furthermore, possibilities would have to be considered with the aim that the legislator might, for example, say: “These marriages are dissolved.”

With regard to the question of the effect of the evacuation of the Jews upon economic life, State Secretary Neumann declared that the Jews presently employed in labour deployment in war-essential enterprises could not at present be evacuated so long as no replacement labour was available.

SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich pointed out that these Jews would in any case not be evacuated under the guidelines approved by him for carrying out the evacuation actions currently in progress.

State Secretary Dr. Bühler stated that the General Government would welcome it if the Final Solution of this question were begun in the General Government, because, for one thing, the transport problem does not play a predominant role here

— — PAGE 15 — —

and reasons relating to labour deployment would not hinder the course of this action. Jews would have to be removed from the territory of the General Government as quickly as possible, because it is precisely here that the Jew represents an eminent danger as a carrier of disease, and because, on the other hand, through continued illicit trade, he permanently brings the economic structure of the country into disorder. Of the approximately two and a half million Jews under consideration, moreover, the majority of cases are unfit for work [arbeitsunfähig].

State Secretary Dr. Bühler further stated that responsibility for the conduct of the solution of the Jewish Question in the General Government lies with the Chief of the Security Police and the SD, and that his work would be supported by the authorities of the General Government. He had only one request: to solve the Jewish Question in this territory as quickly as possible.

In conclusion, the various kinds of possible solutions were discussed, whereby both Gauleiter Dr. Meyer and State Secretary Dr. Bühler took the position that certain preparatory work in the course of the Final Solution should be carried out immediately in the territories concerning themselves, though disturbance of the population would have to be avoided.

With the request of the Chief of the Security Police and the SD to the participants in the meeting that they provide him with appropriate support in carrying out the solution work, the meeting was closed.

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Almost twenty years ago, on 30 June 2006, Usama bin Laden released a eulogy for Ahmad al-Khalayleh, the Jordanian jihadist universally known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of the Islamic State movement. A translation of the eulogy is given below.

Zarqawi had established the nucleus of IS with Bin Laden’s seed funding in Taliban Afghanistan in late 1999 and moved to Iraq with his cadres in early 2002, linking up with the well-developed and increasingly emboldened jihadist underground, a year before the Anglo-American invasion that felled Saddam Husayn. In October 2004, after eighteen months of combat with the Coalition where it was quite clear the Zarqawists had some connection to Al-Qaeda, Zarqawi resolved all doubt by publicly swearing an oath of allegiance to Bin Laden and renaming his organisation Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (AQM). It was as emir of AQM that Zarqawi perished on 7 June 2006 and as such that Bin Laden eulogised him three weeks later.

The alliance forged by Bin Laden and Zarqawi between their jihadist currents would, a lot of murk and ambiguity notwithstanding, outlast both of them, but ultimately the theological and strategic tensions that had been visible at their first meeting just before the turn of the millennium proved too much of a strain. The relationship collapsed in 2014 and in many ways the story of the jihadist movement since then has been the struggle for supremacy between two poles that have steadily widened as they defined themselves against one another.

Eulogy for the Martyr of the Umma and the Emir of the Martyrdom-Seekers: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi1

Praise be to God, then praise be to God, praise be to God who said: “Think not that those killed in the path of God [sabil Allah] are dead. Rather, they live with their Lord, being provided for, rejoicing in what God has given them from His bounty, and receiving glad tidings about those who have not yet joined them but have been left behind: no fear shall be upon them, nor shall they grieve” [Qur’an 3:169-170].

Prayers and peace be upon our Prophet Muhammad, who said: “By the One in whose hand is the soul of Muhammad, I would love to raid in the path of God and be killed, then raid and be killed, then raid and be killed” [hadith, Sahih al-Bukhari].

As for what follows:

Our Islamic umma [community] has been struck with crushing grief by the loss of its fearless knight [or “bold horseman” (farisuha al-miqdam)], the lion of jihad, and the man of resolve and sound judgement: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Ahmad al-Khalayleh, following his killing in a sinful [or “wicked” (atheema)] American airstrike. To God we belong and to Him we return. We ask God to honour him with what he wished for, thus accepting him among the martyrs, granting him abundant reward and recompense, and beautifying consolation for his family and relatives.

O Muslims, indeed the grief is immense, and the situation is grave. We urge you toward what is beautiful, namely patience, and we encourage you toward what is abundant, namely reward [al-ajr].

[Arabic poetry, indicated henceforth by italics]

Thus let the calamity be immense and the matter grievous [/] for there is no excuse for an eye whose tears have not flowed

A youth who died amid striking and stabbing [/] a death that stands in place of victory since victory escaped him

Our precious Islamic umma: although the separation from the beloved ones, Abu Musab and his companions, has saddened us, it has gladdened us that their souls were poured out in these tremendous epics [al-malahim] while they were defending the shari’a of Islam. And although we have been afflicted by the loss of a knight [fursan] from among our greatest knights and an emir from among our greatest emirs, it has gladdened us that we have found in him a symbol and everlasting example for the generations of our glorious umma [to come]. The mujahideen shall remember him, supplicate for him, and praise him in poetry and prose, secretly and openly. We shall praise him according to what we knew.

For he was easy in companionship so long as he was not wronged [/] and if he sensed fear among the people, he charged forth without reproach

Abu Musab departed with his head held high, mighty of soul, free and proud, noble and loyal. He would never accept humiliation in his deen [lifeway, i.e., Islam], nor would he ever sleep upon oppression, nor would he flatter anyone or compromise regarding the truth. Stern against the disbelievers [or “infidels” (kafireen)], merciful toward the believers, inciting toward fighting, and waging jihad in the path of the deen.

Among his statements, may God have mercy on him, was: “There is no good in a life where our honour is violated, the dignity of our sisters is trampled, and the slaves of the Cross rule over us.”

Another of his statements: “We fight in Iraq and our eyes are upon Jerusalem, which shall not be regained except through a Qur’an that guides and a sword that grants victory.”2

He, may God have mercy on him, was the focus [or “object” (mahall)] of the love of his friends and the esteem of his enemies, the fair-minded among them, who testified for him and praised him, and there is no wonder in that.

He departed pure of garments; there did not remain a garden [/] on the morning he was laid to rest that did not wish to be his grave

Upon you be the peace of God always, for indeed I [/] have seen that the noble, free man has no lifespan [i.e., limit to his legacy]

Abu Musab followed the example of our Prophet Muhammad, and took as his example others who passed before him from among our leaders: Musab [ibn Umayr], Umar [ibn al-Khattab], Ali [ibn Abi Talib or Imam Ali], and Ja’far [ibn Abi Talib], may God be pleased with them all. Thus he plunged into the depths of war with a smile, so God raised his rank, elevated his remembrance, and he became an example for those after him.

The coward’s love of self led him survival [/] and the brave man’s love of war led him to war

And what difference is there between mankind [i.e., other men] and him [/] when he feared what is fearful and regards what is difficult as difficult?

Abu Musab, may the mercy of God be upon him, departed after God had granted fath [opening, conquest]. He established a base for defending the deen and for recovering Palestine, by God’s permission, and exacted revenge there on behalf of the oppressed [mustad’afeen], inflicting heavy losses upon the Americans, the allies of the Jews. He confounded them, killed their men, shattered their edifice [lit. “structure” (bunyanahum)], exhausted their wealth, disrupted their unity, and humiliated their arrogance, until those both near and far, the obedient and the disobedient, dared to challenge them. So it was that he entered history through its widest gates and ennobled it, and took the world by the hand toward the path of honour and made it known to it, through determination, decisiveness, and a proud refusal [to submit]. As a result, his biography was immortalised alongside the biographies of the eminent nobles.3

Do not weep except for a lion who has departed [/] bravely in the raging wars

Leave me in the wars that I may die honourably [/] for an honourable death is better than my life

Abu Musab taught humanity practical lessons in how freedom is seized. For freedom is not granted to the submissive beneath the domes of democracy. He taught humanity rebellion against idolatrous rulers [tamarud ala al-tughat], in an age in which the greatest taghut, the Pharaoh of the age, Bush and his companions, hold sway, trampling upon all values and covenants. In the invasion of Iraq and the prison of Guantanamo, you have a lesson. They terrorised the people, humiliated them with fire and iron, and treated presidents as though they were slaves.4

The Pharaoh of the age came to Iraq not caring about the objections and demonstrations of mankind, who said to him: “No to the shedding of red blood for the sake of black oil”. But he was contemptuous of the entire world and advanced into Iraq arrogantly, swaggering on account of his troops and equipment, imagining that the lions of the wilds [asad al-shara] had been transformed [into something weak], and that the men of Islam had receded after the Arab rulers, the kings and presidents, had given him every sign of obedience and loyalty, humiliation and submission. Each one of them was placing his hand upon his head, wondering when his turn would come to be placed in his grave.

The enemy attacked Iraq, then began oppressing the people mercilessly and demolishing villages utterly. The roar of aircraft filled the horizons and deafened the ears, while the explosions of gunpowder spread death and offended the nostrils. The mountains were shaking and swaying from the intensity of the bombardment, until hearts were in throats. Those possessing courage and understanding sought refuge in their homes; they were not stirred by words, and their feet would not carry them because of the severity of the terror. Falsehood raised its head high, the munafiqeen [hypocrites] broke their covenants and stood in the trench of the Christians and Jews. The Muslims became like scattered sheep on a rainy night in a land filled with predators.

It was under the shadow of that gloomy atmosphere—where you saw the semblances of leaders but no leaders, the semblances of ulema but no ulema, and the semblances of men but no men, except those upon whom God had mercy—in those difficult, earth-shaking circumstances, that there appeared the knight of Islam, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Like a lion stretching out upon its forelegs [/] bold-hearted, a lion of great stature and power

He appeared with a small band of believers. They were seventeen men, not seventeen armies.5 They bound themselves together, pledged themselves to one another, and made a covenant with God Most High that they would support His deen or perish in its defence, [as] men, and [real] men are few.

The people are a thousand, of whom [only] one is like a man [/] while one man may equal a thousand when a matter becomes serious

Whom were they going to fight? Those equal to them in number, or twice their number?! Never [or “by no means” (kalla)]. Or even ten times their number?! Never. Rather, they [the enemy] were waves like the sea, waves of equipment and soldiers of evil. But whoever magnifies God’s right in his heart and is granted tawhid [monotheism], the firm mountains will sway while he does not sway. So our knight dismounted, carrying the banner [or “standard” or “flag” (al-raya)], and resolved upon fighting until the end: either he would taste what Ja’far tasted, or he would taste victory.6

He planted his foot firmly in the swamp of death [/] and said to it: “Beneath your sole is al-hashr [“the gathering” (of mankind on Judgment Day)].”

So they plunged into the depths of war and began striking, with a small number of Kalashnikovs, a small number of anti-tank mines, and a small number of bazooka launchers. Abu Musab had previously come with some of his brothers to the jihad against the Russians [i.e., Soviets, in Afghanistan in the 1980s7], so he competed with his brothers [in racing to the battlefield] until he overtook those who had gone before him, and when he spoke he excelled over the other speakers. Through his coming, and that of his brothers, to the land of Afghanistan, they gained experience [lit. “inoculation” (ta’tim)] in battling a superpower, and the myth of the [invincibility of] great powers vanished from their minds. They transferred the great, surging boldness and the immense morale from Afghanistan to Baghdad, igniting the fuse of jihad. The energies of the youth erupted in every place, from the Upper Euphrates to its lower reaches, and to God belongs all praise and favour.

This is our knight about whom we are speaking. He accomplished all of that, after God granted him success, with his own modest means alone. There was not behind him an international alliance, nor a regional coalition, nor a global organisation. That is the bounty of God; He gives it to whom He wills, and God is All-Encompassing, All-Knowing.

The soul of Isam made Isam a leader [/] and taught him to charge into battle and boldly advance

Yes, this is the knight of Islam about whom we speak, who stood in the face of the Pharaoh of the age, in the face of American imperialism [al-imbiriyaliyya al-amrikiyya], after the international organisations failed, after the regional groupings failed, after the entire world failed to stop that brutal, exceedingly unjust aggression.8

A striker of heads, striking heads in the heat of battle [/] agile when the heavily-armoured horse becomes burdened

Perceptive in obtaining praise from every place [/] even if the lions concealed it between their fangs

Here we ask God to grant the best reward to our bold knight, and to bestow the best reward upon everyone who offered us condolences and comfort regarding our great knight, may God have mercy on him. We mention specifically al-Emir al-Mu’mineen [“the Commander of the Faithful” or “the Prince of the Believers”], [Taliban leader] Mullah Muhammad Umar, and we ask God Most High to grant him and his mujahid brothers victory over the infidels.9

Then I say to whoever accuses the knight of our umma of killing some segments of the Iraqi population: if someone comes to you claiming that a man gouged out his eye, wait until you see the accused, for perhaps the claimant himself gouged out his own eye!

In recent weeks, there has been increased clarity on this matter. The [Iraqi Sunni Arab parliamentary] deputy Mohammed al-Dayni has spoken about the scale of the oppression and torture being practised against the Muslims in Iraqi prisons. Likewise, leaders of the Association of Muslim Scholars [Hay’at Ulema al-Muslimeen] has previously spoken about the war of extermination to which the sons of Islam in Iraq are being subjected.

Abu Musab, may the mercy of God be upon him, had clear instructions: that he should concentrate his fighting upon the invading occupiers, primarily the Americans, and that he should leave alone anyone who desired neutrality. As for whoever insisted on standing and fighting in the trench of the Crusaders against the Muslims, he was to kill them, whoever they may be, regardless of their madhhab [school of Islamic jurisprudence] or tribe, because supporting infidels against Muslims is a nullifier from among the Ten Nullifiers of Islam [Nawaqid al-Islam], as is established among the people of knowledge [ahl al-ilm, i.e., the consensus of the ulema].

Next, I say to Bush: you must hand over the body of the hero to his family. Do not be excessive in your rejoicing, for the banner has not fallen, praise be to God. Rather, it has passed from one lion to another lion from among the lions of Islam, and we shall continue, by God’s permission, fighting you and your allies in every place—in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Somalia and Sudan—until we drain your wealth, kill your men, and you return defeated to your own lands, just as we defeated you before, by God’s grace, in Somalia.10

Likewise, I say to your proxy [or “agent” (wakil)] in Jordan: enough of your despotism [or “arbitrary rule” (istibdad)]. You prevented Abu Musab from entering his homeland alive, so do not now stand between him and that. The one most deserving of leaving Jordan is you, to the Hijaz, for that is your land and the land of your forefathers before Britain installed your grandfather, Abdullah the First, as its agent [amila] over Jordan. What frightens you about Al-Zarqawi, may God have mercy upon him, even from beyond the grave, is that you know that if the Muslims are left to their own devices concerning his funeral, then, by God’s permission, it will be a great funeral, a demonstration of the extent of the Muslims’ sympathy with their mujahideen sons.11

In conclusion, I say: Abu Musab, may God have mercy upon him, brings honour not only to his tribe, his homeland, and his umma, but humanity as a whole, because he embodied for it the meanings of honour and proud refusal [of surrender], sacrifice and self-ransom [al-tadhiya wal-fed’a12]. Indeed, his life story is valuable material for [use as] a contemporary model. If the world were to study his fragrant biography, its sons would learn how faith in God [iman bi Allah] makes men, so that they resist the people of injustice and misguidance [or “oppression and error” (al-zulm wal-dalal)].

It is incumbent on every educator, writer, and novelist worthy of the name to draw from his biography that which may give sustenance to the rising generation and the next generations. Similarly, it is incumbent on every free poet to compose poetry regarding this falcon. If I were among the knights of poetry, I would greatly multiply the rhymes in lamenting him, and thereby compete with Tamadur [bint Amr, a.k.a. Al-Khansa] in lamenting Sakhr. But there is no harm in my borrowing verses from the poetry of the poet of the contemporary Islamic da’wa [proselytism], [the Islamist propagandist on Al-Jazeera satellite channel] Shaykh Yusuf Abu Hilala:

The earth choked with the blood of the sacrifices, and the fields of struggle blazed,

And from the barren desolate wastelands there springs forth the source of pure water,

Shining proudly with the banners of al-aqeeda [the creed] and true acts of heroism,

Declaring: if giving becomes scarce, then we are the sacrifices for the deen.

***

Victory belongs to those dyeing their bodies with the blood of wounds,

Who refuse to sell away their lands in willing surrender,

And those who disdain the life of humiliation and violation.

***

A few moments whose terror would overwhelm the raging winds,

Hamdan plunges down through them like a falcon with clipped wings,

After he had stormed into death while bombardment had engulfed the surrounding regions.

***

I bent over kissing his bleeding wound, and my own wounds reopened,

Tears flowed upon my cheek, so I said: “O my soul and my comfort,

Would that you had mercy upon our hearts and turned away from this departing.”

***

Then the shrouded hero answered me, mocking my suggestion:

“Wipe away your tears; there is no comfort for me in your noble tears.

This is the path if your love is sincere, so carry my weapon.”

May God have mercy on Abu Musab, and may God have mercy on everyone who carried weapons for jihad in the path of God. The last of our supplications is that all praise belongs to Allah, Lord of the worlds, and prayers and peace be upon our Prophet Muhammad and upon his family and all his companions.

Shaykh Usama bin Muhammad bin Laden

4 Jumada al-Thani 1427 AH

30 June/Haziran 2006 AD

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FOOTNOTES

Read the article over at UnHerd.

A translation is given below of the main editorial in the 548th edition of Islamic State’s Al-Naba newsletter, published on 21 May 2026. The article, entitled, “Our Throats Before Islam”,1 i.e., that the jihadists will sacrifice their lives to defend the faith, is an interesting example of a recurring motif in IS propaganda, namely using Islamic history to justify atrocities and incite Muslims to violence against non-jihadist Muslims and non-Muslims.

The Naba article draws on the Islamic Tradition—the early biographies of the Prophet Muhammad, the hadith that record the sayings and actions of the Prophet and the lives of the Companions (Sahaba), select legal rulings—and a smattering of Qur’an verses to build an argument that presents IS’s ideology as the only legitimate interpretation of Islam, one which places jihad and the killing of Jews, Christians, and hypocritical Muslims above all other obligations.

This has always been IS’s method, to arrange the sacred history accepted by the mainstream of Islam to buttress radical conclusions. IS are not alone among Islamists in doing this. There is much less discussion of ideological warfare in the West these days when it comes to countering jihadism, and this is perhaps for the best given how badly those efforts have gone. But should interest revive, challenging the certainty about history that underlies the jihadist project would be an area to focus on.

In the case of this Al-Naba article, the immediate problem is that the Tradition, which largely interprets the Qur’an, since the text of the Qur’an is far from self-evident in its meaning (as the Qur’an itself acknowledges2), dates from about two-hundred years after Muhammad’s death (albeit we do not know exactly when Muhammad died) and was generated in the context of consolidating an Imperial creed to explain a world transformed by the Arab conquests. In Christian terms, this would be like constructing the life of Jesus by relying on the Gnostic Gospels that were written to make theological arguments around two centuries after Christ’s death, thus have little historical grounding in the realities of first-century Judea. Making it better known simply that there is a question mark over this history, even without the detail, might introduce just enough doubt to halt a potential jihadist recruit.

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If the question is the first (known) shark attack on a human being, archaeology has the answer: a man in Japan, whose 3,000-year-old skeleton has nearly 800 wounds.1 If the question is the first human representation of a shark attack, the current answer is a Greek vase dating to c. 725 BC, discovered in Ischia, Italy, which shows a man being assailed by a large fish that is probably a shark. The scope of this article is narrower, focusing on the earliest written accounts of shark attacks. However, this does allow a somewhat broader inquiry into how people have perceived sharks over time, albeit not all people, since the literary sources come entirely from Europe.2

It is possible—even likely—that the first written record of a shark attack appears in the work of the Father of History himself, Herodotus, two-and-a-half millennia ago.3 In 492 BC, Mardonius, the son-in-law of the Persian King Darius I, led an expedition to Greece, nominally to punish Athens and Eretria for supporting the Ionian Revolt, but “the Persians were really aiming at the conquest of as many Greek States as they could manage”, Herodotus tells us. The Persian fleet “was approaching the headland” of Mount Athos, Herodotus goes on, when “a violent northerly gale swept down”, and “the damage suffered by their ships was terrible”. “It is said” 300 ships were destroyed and 20,000 men killed, “dashed onto the rocks or drowned because they did not know how to swim, or else [they] perished of hypothermia”. Herodotus then reports: “Some of these casualties were due to the presence in the waters off Athos of an immense number of savage beasts which devoured the Persians”.4 It is overwhelmingly probable this refers to sharks, but we cannot be absolutely sure.

There is no serious doubt that when naturalists in the Classical period, such as Aristotle and as Pliny the Elder, wrote of “dogfish” or similar they were referring to sharks.5 The Greeks were a maritime people and the Mediterranean became a Roman lake: they saw sharks regularly. The tumult of the Roman Empire’s fragmentation reduced Europeans’ ocean-going capacity and the advent of Islam restricted their access: to even live on the coastline of Italy, let alone venture onto the Mediterranean Sea, was to be at high risk of being carried off by slave-seeking Arab pirates. Thus, in the Medieval era, confined basically to the Continent and fishing mostly in rivers, Europeans largely did not encounter sharks.

An exception to this rule was recorded around 1350. At that time, Europe had significantly recovered from the Roman collapse,6 and the brief period of counter-attack we call the Crusades,7 though it had failed in its objective of restoring Jerusalem and the Holy Land to Christendom, had succeeded in creating some more room to move in the Mediterranean. In this environment,8 Ludolf von Sudheim, a German Roman Catholic priest and a historian of the then-recently lost Crusader States, had been able to tour the Islamic-ruled eastern Mediterranean—the Land of Israel, the broader Levant, and Egypt—between 1336 and 1341.9 Ludolf’s chronicle of his travels discussed, inter alia, the various dangers of maritime journeys in small vessels: the sea itself; “pirates or corsairs”, especially around “Barbary” (the Muslim polities of North Africa); the “rocks and shoals”. Ludolf then mentions the “perils from great fish”:

About these you should know that there is in the sea a certain fish which the Greeks call Troya marina, which means sea-swine, which is greatly to be feared by small ships, for this same fish seldom or never does any mischief to great ships unless pressed by hunger. Indeed, if the sailors give it bread, it departs, and is satisfied; but if it will not depart, then it may be terrified and put to flight by the sight of a man’s angry and terrible face. However, the man must exceedingly careful when he is thus looking at the fish not to be afraid of it, but to stare at it with a bold and terrible countenance; for if the fish sees that the man is afraid it will not depart, but bites and tears the ship as much as it can. …

An exceedingly notable sailor has told me that when he was a youth he fell into peril with this in a small ship. There was with him in the ship a youth who thought himself exceeding brave and fierce, so that when the fish met him he … lowered himself down by a rope from the ship to the water to look at the fish with an angry face, as is the custom. But when he saw the fish he was straightway affrighted and shouted to his comrades to pull him up by the rope, and the fish, seeing the man’s fright, leaped out of the water as he was being drawn up, and with one bite took off half the man from his belly downwards[.]

The story is second-hand, and about events many years earlier. The tall tales of seamen are also notorious, particularly when it comes to the size of fish they encounter. Still, it could be true, and if it is, it is difficult to think what the creature could be other than a shark. But considerable ambiguity remains.

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As the Ludolf case shows, even the vocabulary for sharks faded in Europe through the Middle Ages. The change came with the Age of Discovery, specifically the conquest of the Americas.10

In 1561, Bartolomé de las Casas, the Dominican friar whose campaign to defend Native Americans and indict the conduct of the Spanish Conquistadors provides a lot of the raw material for the Black Legend that endures to this day, completed a book that describes a scene where a Spanish overlord uses an Indian to dive for pearls.11 The danger to the Indians, Las Casas says, came from three types of animal: lagartos or crocodiles; tiburones that could “tear to pieces” even horses, seemingly meaning smaller sharks, such as tiger sharks and bull sharks; and marrajos that could “swallow [a man whole] on the first gulp”, i.e., larger sharks, the description matching closely the great white shark and probably the mako shark, too.12 From Las Casas:

On one occasion, it happened that an Indian, upon diving, saw a marrajo close to him, and came up fleeing up out of the water [onto the canoe]; the Spanish executioner argued with him asking why he came up so quickly without bringing anything; the Indian said that there was a great fish and that he feared it would kill him; the Spaniard forced him to return to diving and … beat the Indian with a stick. The sad Indian dove, and the marrajo, that was waiting for him, charged him and swallowed him.

It seems that at the beginning the Indian fought with the fish, and there was a swirl in the water for a while; the Spaniard understood that the fish had attacked the Indian, and seeing that the Indian was not returning, he killed a small dog that they had in the boat, and put it on a hook with a heavy chain, which they commonly carry for these fishes, and threw it in the water; and later the marrajo took it, for it was not satisfied, and the hook set in such way that it could not escape; the Spaniard feeling that the fish was hooked, gave it enough line, and slowly returned towards the beach in his canoe or boat.

Jumping to the land, he called for people to help him, they landed the beast, giving blows with axes and rocks or whatever they had, and killed it, opening its belly they found the unfortunate Indian and took him out, the Indian gave two or three gasps and he died there

There is no reason to doubt that pearl divers in the New World were menaced by sharks, but this story has the feel of myth about it, and the fact it appears without any rooted detail—names, time, place—in a work with a propagandistic purpose should increase the suspicion about its veracity.

Two decades on, in 1580, an officer sailing between Portugal and India wrote of seeing one of his crewmen fall overboard. The Early Modern equivalent of a lifebuoy, a wooden block tied to a rope, was thrown to the man:

Our crew began to bring in the man, who had managed to catch the block, but, when he was no more than half the range of a musket away, there appeared from beneath the surface a big monster known as tiburon; it rushed at the man and cut him to pieces right before our eyes. It was certainly a terrible death.

This is often said to be the first account of a shark attack in English, and it may be. There is, however, a problem in determining whether it was written in English, or translated into English. The word tiburón, borrowed by the Spanish from the Carib Indians or Kalinago of northern South America and used, as explained above, to designate the smaller man-eating sharks,13 was also used by the English for about a century, until the late sixteenth century, i.e., the time when this was written. The English would switch to the word xoc from the Mayans in Mexico, which ultimately evolved into “shark”.14 As such, either case—originally English or a translation—is plausible, and this uncertainty is merely one complication with this source, which is of very murky provenance: there is no precise date, the author is anonymous, and nobody knows where the text first appeared.

Regardless, something like the modern view of sharks, the mingled fascination and dread, seems to have been in place by the end of the sixteenth century. For example, in 1593, the English privateer—an entirely different thing to a pirate—Admiral Sir Richard Hawkins wrote:

The Sharke or Tiberune, is a fish like unto those which wee call dog-fishes, but that hee is far greater, I have seene of them eight or nine foot long; his head is flat and broad, and his mouth in the middle … [H]is skinne is rough, like to the fish which we call a rough hound, and russet, with reddish spots, saving that under the belly hee is all white: hee is much hated of sea-faring men, who have a certaine foolish superstition with them, and say that the ship hath seldome good successe, that is much accompanied with them. It is the most ravenous fishe knowne in the sea; for he swallowth all that hee findeth.15

An intermittently-famous shark attack in the United States dates from 1642 in what was then-New Amsterdam, a settlement on Manhattan Island that would become New York City:

It was a dark and stormy night when good Antony Van Corlaer arrived at the creek [Harlem River] which separates the island of Manna-hata from the mainland. The wind was high, the elements in an uproar, and no Charon could be found to ferry the adventurous sounder of brass [Van Corlaer was a trumpeter] across the water. For a short time, he vapored like an impatient ghost upon the brink and then, bethinking himself of the urgency of his errand, took a hearty embrace of his stone bottle, swore most valorously that he would swim across in spite of the devil, and daringly plunged into the stream. Scarce had he buffeted halfway over when he was observed to struggle violently battling with the spirit of the waters. Instinctively, he put his trumpet in his mouth and, giving a vehement blast, sank forever to the bottom.16

An “old Dutch burgher,” renowned for his honesty, witnessed Van Corlaer’s demise and told of how he had seen the “dvyvel” (devil) in the shape of a huge fish “seize the sturdy Antony by the leg and drag him beneath the waves”.17

The episode is listed in databases of shark attacks and appears in history books on the same subject, referred to as one of, if not the, earliest such incidents in the Colonial Americas. But it is a legend, originating in an 1809 book, A History of New York: From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, published under the name of Diedrich Knickerbocker, a pseudonym for Washington Irving. Irving, one of the most famous writers of his day, admired by contemporaries like Lord Byron and Charles Dickens, was an author of fiction: his History was satire and Van Corlaer never existed.18 Irving is remembered now, if at all, for the “Rip Van Winkle” short stories.

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A genuine report from two years earlier was written by Father Thomas Copley, a Jesuit missionary in Maryland, or “the Colony of Saint Mary”, as he referred to it. The representatives of the Society of Jesus wrote litterae annuae (annual letters) to Rome, explaining the progress of their ministries, and in 1640 Copley incorporated in his letter the story of a man who had been inclining to faith, then backed away from conversion and resumed a life of sin, even blasphemy. “[H]e was accustomed to smoke [the prayer-beads he had obtained] in his pipe with tobacco, after grinding them to powder, often boasting that he was eating up his ‘Ave Marias’,” wrote Copley:

But the divine vengeance did not let the wicked crime go long unpunished; for scarcely a year having passed, on the returning vigil of the day on which he had abandoned his purpose of embracing the Catholic faith, a more sacrilegious playfulness possessed him … [I]n the afternoon, when he had betaken himself to the river for the purpose of swimming, scarcely had he touched the water when a huge fish having suddenly seized the wicked man, before he could retreat to the bank, tore away, at a bite, a large portion of his thigh, by the pain of which most merited laceration, the unhappy wretch was in a short time hurried away from the living—the divine justice bringing it about that he, who a little while before boasted that he had eaten up his “Ave Maria beads,” should see his own flesh devoured, even while he was yet living.19

Modern researchers have argued that the evidence points to the attack taking place in August 1640 and the perpetrator being a bull shark, based partly on that species being a seasonal summer visitor to the Chesapeake Bay down to the present. The inference is reasonable, but not conclusive.

The difficulty with the sources examined so far is that we cannot be totally sure they refer to sharks and/or the reliability of the sources themselves is in doubt, with the contents being dubious or the authenticity being in question or both. The first unambiguously recorded shark attack on a human dates to 1749. The victim was Brook Watson, a British boy born in Plymouth in 1735.

Watson was orphaned when he was 6-years-old, in 1741, and sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the American colonies—Boston, Massachusetts, to be precise. Watson, inspired by his uncle, a trader in the West Indies, decided on a life at sea, and at the age of 14, he was given the job of cabin boy aboard a merchant ship. It was during downtime from this commission, while swimming in Havana Harbour off Cuba, that Watson was attacked by a shark.

As Watson later recounted, while his shipmates noticed the attack by his “voracious assailant” quickly, their rescue efforts were wrong-footed because he was pulled under the water and surfaced “at about 100 yards distance”. Then he was attacked and dragged under again. Watson was finally saved from the water as the shark closed in for a third attack, but the chances of saving his life were very low: “all the flesh was stripped off the calf from the bone downwards” on one leg and the “foot … divided from the [other] leg”, Watson wrote.20 Yet, despite such injuries, and the medical technology of the mid-eighteenth century, Watson survived. A surgeon managed to stop the bleeding, and Watson made it through the subsequent gauntlet of amputation and infections.21 Fitted with a wooden leg, Watson was back at work within three months, and went on to have a colourful life as a founder of Lloyd’s of London, a Loyalist during the American rebellion, and a politician in Britain. He died ennobled as Sir Brook Watson at the ripe old age of 72 in 1807.

The sourcing is not perfect. Watson’s account was written in April 1778 for a newspaper to promote the painting (see above), Watson and the Shark, by Anglo-American artist John Singleton Copley, which shows the moment of Watson’s rescue just before the shark closed in for its third and probably fatal attack. Twenty-nine years is time enough for memory to be unreliable about the details, and the promotional purpose of the account leaves open the possibility of elaboration. Nonetheless, the basics of the story are confirmed beyond question. Watson and his contemporaries had the concept and lexicography of a shark pinned down specifically,22 all were agreed a shark is what had attacked Watson, and there is the impressive physical evidence of Watson’s missing leg.23

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FOOTNOTES

The Supreme Leader (Rahbar-e Mo’azzam) of the Islamic Revolution, Ali Khamenei, was killed on 28 February, the first day of the U.S.-Israeli military campaign in Iran. On 8 March, his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, was hastily upgraded to “ayatollah” in regime messaging and appointed as replacement Rahbar. Almost immediately, stories began to circulate that Mojtaba, who has not been seen in public since his elevation, was seriously injured and not in command of the regime. This has been the dominant media narrative for the last two months, but there are reasons to doubt its veracity.

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In December 2025, Netflix put out a documentary directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, Cover-Up, about the life and work of Seymour Hersh, the famous or notorious American investigative journalist.

No effort is made to conceal that the makers of Cover-Up are consecrated, long-term fans of Hersh. Indeed, part of the “story” of the documentary is that these devotees—Poitras, who has wanted to make a film about Hersh since 2005, and Obenhaus, who has been a collaborator with Hersh on three “investigative documentaries”—are finally being granted access to the great man and his archives, and he regrets agreeing to it. Hersh’s prickly demeanour is on display the first time we see him in the present day. Agitated about Poitras and Obenhaus seeing his files and exposing the names of his sources, Hersh says: “I barely trust you guys”. By later in the film, Hersh is having a meltdown and declaring: “I’d like to quit”.

This subplot aside, the film is structured as a series of case studies, shown to us using archive footage and present-day interviews, wherein Hersh, through guile and tenacity, exposes the truth about American wrongdoing, leading to a global media coverage and punishment of the villains.

To Poitras’s credit, Cover-Up is not the complete hagiography she produced in Citizenfour (2014), about Edward Snowden, the systems administrator at the National Security Agency (NSA) who enabled the most sustained assault on Western intelligence and defected to Russia in 2013. But the basic formula remains the same: the United States is presented—using genuine misdeeds, half-truths, and pure imagination—as a murderous rogue State, against which Poitras’s subject is a lone voice of truth and resistance, omitting where possible and spinning where not awkward elements in their biography to sustain this illusion.

An important element of this is bookending Cover-Up with stories Hersh reported on in 1968 and 2004. The first story, Vietnam, is self-evident, the natural starting-point since it is what made Hersh’s name. The second, Iraq, is potentially explicable in narrative flow and audience terms: it was objectively the biggest moment in Hersh’s career since Vietnam and it is probably the story he is best-known for among the younger Netflix-viewing segment of his largely liberal and Left-wing fan base, so it is a way of finishing on a high note. It is, however, somewhat jarring in a documentary that is otherwise essentially chronological—we get up to Hersh’s activities in the 2020s, and then it suddenly cuts back two decades. But the effect on the flow of the narrative is the least of it. What is most striking is what this arrangement conceals from the narrative.

The very brief section on the 2010s and 2020s alludes to the disquiet Hersh’s writings in this period have caused even among his admirers without getting into details. One such admirer wrote fifteen years ago of “Hersh’s recent turn away from the investigative reporting that made him famous into unsubstantiated conspiracy theories”, and this is now a widespread view of Hersh on the Left. Hastily changing the subject to Iraq, where Hersh is on the “right” side according to the politics of his supporters, prevents the issue of Hersh’s missteps narratively metastasising into questions that could complicate the image of Hersh the rest of the documentary has cultivated, and avoids concluding on downbeat note of Hersh “in decline”. Most importantly, since the film stresses Hersh’s consistency, it prevents the emergence of the dangerous question that would have torpedoed the entire enterprise: What if there was no “recent turn” and Hersh was like this all along?

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From Cover-Up’s opening moments, in the vignettes it uses to set the scene for Vietnam, we get a sense of its approach.

Footage is played from a press conference with President Lyndon Johnson in November 1967, where he says the U.S. is making incremental progress in Indochina. The intent is clearly to show LBJ and the American government as delusional at best, and probably dishonest. But LBJ was correct. The U.S. prevailed militarily in Vietnam, then for political reasons abandoned what it had secured under the cover of a fake “peace” agreement, a recurring tendency in American policy.

A document is then shown, with the section reading, “Pentagon acknowledges that civilian areas in N[orth] Vietnam have been damaged during [bombing] raids”, highlighted. In combination with the clip of Hersh lamenting the “open murder in Vietnam”, it is meant to convey that the U.S. intentionally killed civilians in Vietnam, but that is not what it says. There are civilian casualties in war; even the invention of precision weapons has not changed that fact of life. But there were fewer civilians killed in the Vietnam War—which was spread over three countries (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) and nearly twenty years—than in Korea over three years. The two conflicts were strategically identical, with the U.S. defending an imperfect Southern republic from conquest by a Soviet colony to the North; it is objectively strange that the one waged more scrupulously is the one commonly regarded as inherently criminal. The kind of decontextualised propaganda Cover-Up engages in is a large part of the answer for why this is so.

The story Hersh reported on that made him famous was the My Lai massacre, a gruesome atrocity by a U.S. Army unit in a Vietnamese village on 16 March 1968. Perhaps 400 civilians were murdered, most of them women and children and old people. During the three-hour rampage, many other crimes, including rape and mutilation, were committed.

As Hersh tells it, he had just quit his job at the Associated Press—after a fight with the editor, of course—and received a telephone call from a friend with a source in the military, giving him a tip that there was an “atrocity in Vietnam that they’re covering up”. Discovering that the leader of the offending platoon, Lieutenant William Calley, was under house arrest on a barracks in Utah, Hersh went down there. While speaking to the commanding officer, Hersh could see Calley’s charge sheet on the desk and copied it down. Hersh then spoke to Calley, who claimed he had done nothing wrong: he had acted under orders and civilians had been killed incidentally in a fire-fight. Calley said his Captain, Ernest Medina, could vouch for him, and called him on the telephone, intending to get him to speak to Hersh. Instead, Medina said he did not know what Calley was talking about and slammed the receiver down, by Hersh’s account. Calley was ultimately convicted and imprisoned.

What surely leaps out from this story is that the U.S. military was already in the process of punishing the perpetrators at My Lai. Indeed, Hersh’s article in November 1969 in the Dispatch News Service, the one that changed his life, was made possible by the leaking of documents from this judicial procedure and by the testimony of officials involved in the investigation, which had been underway since March 1969 and Calley was charged in September 1969. So when Hersh says in the film, “After my story came out, the Army did an investigation” [emphasis added], he restates the fundamental lie on which his career has been built. Hersh did not alter the course of justice. What Hersh did was make the massacre public knowledge, transforming it into a global story the Soviet Union could utilise in political warfare to reinforce its onslaught against South Vietnam and the American troops trying to protect it.1

Hersh sees no problem with this: he advocates in Cover-Up for total press immunity from secrecy laws so it can publish anything it wants and boasts that while the Pentagon wanted to handle My Lai internally, “I broke that game up”. Fine. Most journalists would say Hersh was simply describing the job here. But Hersh’s “right” to do this, and whatever supposed benefits there were to the U.S. public knowing about My Lai, are clean different things to the claim that Hersh’s reporting was the only reason justice was done. Moreover, the gravamen of the My Lai saga is not the disclosure. It is what happened next, Hersh’s attempt to impose a larger meaning on it, which gets to the heart of the Hershian method—and which is most journalistically questionable.

There is “always another level”, Hersh says early in Cover-Up. “There had to be more”, he says of My Lai. This kind of thinking manifestly lends itself to poor journalism—to starting with a story and back-filling the evidence by credulously citing sources who say what you want to hear—and it is intrinsically vulnerable to degenerating into conspiracy theories, if every story must be bigger than it appears and sources saying it is will be believed.

Despite saying that Calley told him a tissue of lies in their meeting, Hersh decided to believe Calley’s claim he obeyed superior orders in My Lai, saying on a contemporary television program: “It raises the very real question: Were there really orders to shoot everything in the village? And if so, is this being done all the time?” Hersh moved swiftly from “just asking questions” to grand assertions that the Pentagon was lying when it said My Lai was an aberrational incident that said nothing at all about the U.S. Army. Hersh justifies this by saying he “kept on finding people” who told him a tale of an American “descent into madness” in Vietnam. In practice, what Hersh meant is he spoke to several of the My Lai killers who were keen to make the blame institutional, not personal.

One of these people was Michael Terry, whose hysterical comment to Hersh for his My Lai article—it was a “Nazi-type thing”—is highlighted in Cover-Up. What is omitted is that Hersh described Terry as a “witness”; only later was Terry forced, under the weight of evidence, to confess he was one of the killers. Another was Paul Meadlo, whose mother provided the quote that gave Hersh his headline: “I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer.” Mrs. Meadlo had an obvious incentive to blame the Army, rather than accept she raised a bad man, and it was ideologically convenient for Hersh, so he acted as stenographer for this dubious assessment of the situation.

Two weeks after the article, Hersh coaxed Meadlo himself into an interview with Mike Wallace on CBS Radio, where he disclaimed any real responsibility by insisting Calley had forced him to shoot civilians. Cover-Up eschews the context that would have helped here. Calley’s orders, if we assume they were real, also applied to helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr., who stopped the My Lai atrocity by threatening to shoot his own colleagues. Thompson played the part that was in his character, and Meadlo played the part in his.

All this gave Hersh what he needed to transform My Lai into an indictment of America tout court: “We’ve been sort of committed to a program of almost at random murder, rape, et cetera [in Vietnam]”, said Hersh in a contemporary television interview shown by Cover-Up. “I think everybody just looked the other way, including the reporters who obviously must have heard about it, some of them.”

To build the argument that My Lai was not an isolated incident, Hersh ignores the hard evidence that acquitted Captain Medina and thus the U.S. Army command of any responsibility for the massacre, and foregrounds the fashionable speculation that the “body count” metric was not being used as a rough guide to who was winning the war, but as an encouragement to U.S. Army units to go around murdering civilians to meet quotas.2 More tangibly, Hersh drew attention to a second massacre on the same day, in the same area, which at least has the benefit of being true. U.S. forces killed about ninety civilians in My Khe, a couple of miles from My Lai. But again Cover-Up lives up to its name and we are denied context.

The impression is allowed to stand that two anti-civilian massacres in one day by the Americans in Vietnam was the norm. So, do we find a systematic pattern of atrocities by U.S. troops in 1968 and 1969? We do not. There is one murky incident on the U.S. side that killed a dozen civilians but probably was not a war crime, and two massacres by the U.S.-allied South Koreans, where the worst that can be said of the U.S. is that it did not pressure its ally sufficiently to punish these crimes.3

What further distorts the picture is that the enemy in Vietnam is virtually omitted from Cover-Up. It would be unfair to expect a biographical documentary to give a comprehensive history of the Vietnam War, but it could have given some sense of the nature of the conflict. As it is, those relying on Cover-Up could be forgiven for thinking there were no opposing combatants in Vietnam and the U.S. had waged a senseless genocidal war on civilians.4 Even if the documentary was to omit the generally atrocious campaign of the Communists,5 it might have given a modicum of perspective by referencing the slaughter of 5,000 or more people by the Communists at Huế a month before My Lai, an exterminatory operation carried out as a matter of policy, centrally planned and ordered from Hanoi.

Speaking of Hanoi, at the end of this section it is noted that Hersh went to the city for several weeks in 1972, but this is used merely a segue, since it was after this trip that Hersh was hired by the New York Times. It seems a shame this was not delved into. An interesting episode in itself, it could have been a mechanism to examine the enemy in Vietnam and Hersh’s views of same.

There is a short section giving a potted family history. Hersh’s parents are Jews from Poland and Lithuania, who got to the U.S. in the 1920s. Almost all their relatives who remained in the Old World were wiped out in the Nazi Holocaust. Then it is on to Watergate, his first Times story.

We begin with a recording of President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, which the makers of Cover-Up obviously think makes Hersh look good because Nixon says Hersh is “probably a Communist agent” and Kissinger grovellingly assents (“Exactly. Exactly.”), when Hersh self-evidently was not. What caught my attention in the clip is that Nixon’s anger was because he believed Hersh was inventing a story out of “whole cloth”, and my prior is to assume Nixon was correct—or as good as. It could be that Hersh was being manipulated by “sources” using him in the venerable Washington way to wage bureaucratic-political warfare via fabricated “leaks” in the press. As Hersh himself said in a clip shown from the 1970s, “I give service to leaks”. The thought that followed was, “Like Woodward and Bernstein”, and, amusingly, within seconds Bob Woodward, the slave to his sources par excellence, was on screen giving the mythologised version of his Watergate reportage.

Hersh’s main contribution was a January 1973 report in the New York Times that four of the five Watergate burglars were still being paid. It does not seem to have moved the needle on the legal process investigating Watergate and it would be a stretch to connect it to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. Nonetheless, it was genuinely impactful in reigniting the press clamour for stories about Watergate after a couple of quiet months since Nixon’s landslide re-election in November 1972.

There is a digression on Hersh’s methodology, and he candidly describes it as: “Amazing people talking to me”. How this investigative journalism differs from access journalism one might wonder, and one will continue to wonder because the question is not even posed. “Amazing” is an apt enough description for many of Hersh’s sources, though. “Incredible” would work, too, and this aspect looms larger and larger in the Hersh canon, as we shall see.

In late 1974, Hersh had two “scoops”. The first was a yarn contributing to the rich mythology that Kissinger was behind the military coup in Chile in 1973, a point of doctrine for Leftists who cannot accept that Salvador Allende undid himself by destroying the economy and democracy. Hersh is still a believer in the ‘American economic imperialism’ fantasy of General Augusto Pinochet’s rise, saying Allende was overthrown because he “nationalised copper mines that were owned by people who were big supporters of Nixon financially”. The second was a report on Operation CHAOS, a CIA operation that in Hersh’s outraged telling involved “spying on American kids!” What the Agency had been doing was investigating Soviet infiltration of the student and activist movements, a counterpart to the FBI’s much-maligned COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program).

The ostensible crime in the CHAOS operation is that the CIA is only supposed to gather “foreign” intelligence. The difficulty was that Communists recognised no borders and served an apparatus headquartered in Moscow, which is not exactly a “domestic” issue. Regardless, in the post-Nixon witch-hunt atmosphere about really all authority, but especially the intelligence services, the critics got their way. Hersh is given a lot of credit for these developments in the film. Cover-Up suggests, if not quite says, Hersh’s reporting caused the creation of the Rockefeller Commission into CIA “abuses” that led on to the even more politicised and vindictive Church Committee in the Senate. The 1970s Congressional reforms neutered the CIA under various forms of “oversight” and established “the wall” between the CIA and FBI, with 9/11 as the result. It goes without saying that Cover-Up has no comment on the lack of a public inquest into the KGB.6

When Hersh enumerates the anti-constitutional actions the CIA apparently engaged in, he lists “foreign assassinations, domestic spying, [and] mind control”. One of these things is obviously not like the others, and it was not a passing slip from Hersh. The “mind control” reference is to Project MKULTRA and Cover-Up expands on this considerably in a segment that doubles as a critique of James Angleton, the controversial CIA counter-intelligence chief, with whom Hersh clashed. Hersh says MKULTRA was about “trying to make a Manchurian candidate” and “reprogram somebody to be an assassin”. The reality of MKULTRA is rather more mundane, but it was exposed with the most sensationalist slant by the Congressional Committees, along with many other CIA programs: some “red team” exercises, some exploratory, some operationalised, and all of them fodder for the conspiracy theorists ever since.

There is a moment during this part of the film where Hersh drops in an extraordinary claim about the death in 1953 of Frank Olson, a CIA officer involved in MKULTRA in its early days: “I have every reason to believe that was an organised CIA hit”. This is just left hanging; he is not asked why he thinks this or how he knows. Perhaps the evidence of suicide is too banal to countenance when there is “always another level”.

The take-home message Cover-Up wants from this section is that Hersh fearlessly confronting the rogue spies was the cause of the removal from office of Angleton, Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger, and CIA Director William Colby. It is usually the Duke of Wellington who is credited with the line, “If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.” As Hersh reveals in his memoir, Colby was the source for the reporting on the “Family Jewels” document that compiled CIA operations judged retrospectively untoward. In other words, the story was, once again, of the American State self-correcting, and Hersh using the documentation of this self-correction to misrepresent America as a republic where systemic criminality goes unpunished.

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Hersh rounded out his stint at the New York Times by working with Jeff Gerth to write about corporations, a subject he cheerfully admits he “knew nothing about it”. This curtain-raises a section where some criticism of Hersh gets an airing.

In 1997, four years after signing the contract, Hersh published a book on John F. Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot, which as the title suggests was not an admiring look at the 35th President. Hersh portrayed JFK as distracted from his duties by an uncontainable sex life, with this moral corruption entangling him in financial corruption with the mafia and the private recklessness leading to public policy recklessness, particularly foreign policy disasters like the Bay of Pigs. Even those who believe Hersh discovered real new material acknowledge that it was a “bad book”, filled with hearsay nonsense from people who could not know the things they claimed to know. Cover-Up does not focus on the book, though, but how it was put together, which brought Hersh as close as he has been to career destruction.

In the summer of 1995, Hersh signed an agreement with a source, Lawrence X. Cusack, for a tranche of Kennedy documents, among them letters testifying that Kennedy had had an affair with Marilyn Monroe, and a year later, to generate hype and publicity ahead of the book’s publication, Hersh (and Obenhaus7) made a deal with NBC News to produce a documentary based on the documents and interviews with some of the Kennedy-era Secret Service men Hersh had tracked down for the book. Filming started—then abruptly stopped. The documents were fake, as NBC (and ABC, which had been given some of them) realised almost immediately upon viewing them. This is elided in Cover-Up, but the documents were blatantly forged. One letter dated 1961 had a ZIP code, when ZIP codes were introduced in 1963. Another letter from Kennedy was written on a typewriter invented eight years after Kennedy was murdered.

In Cover-Up, Max Friedman, a research assistant of Hersh’s, offers the defence that, while Hersh had “maybe talked to too many people about these [forged] papers” and started including material from them into his manuscript, he took the fake stuff out before he published the book. Small mercies. Hersh himself at the time said in an interview that he felt like a “dupe”, yet he was also “relieved because it cleared up a whole number of impossible to reconcile issues”. Hersh does not seem to realise the gravity of this confession: he had discovered glaring contradictions in his sources, but he did not have an acute enough sense of the historical method—and did have too much of a story he wanted to tell—to see what these contradictions meant. In the present day, Hersh says: “The fact that they [the documents] weren’t true, that’s just part of the process”. But it was not part of his process, the key point Cover-Up obfuscates. It was NBC and ABC who detected the forgery Hersh was desperate to believe.

For all the deficiencies of Cover-Up’s handling of Hersh’s “Marilyn papers” fiasco, it is the section containing my favourite moment of the whole film. Amy Davidson Sorkin, a fact-checker at the New Yorker, where some of Hersh’s best-known work has been published,8 is brought in and wonderfully remarks: “It was definitely a cautionary tale for journalism, but also for Sy and his strengths, and his things that maybe are not necessarily strengths”. I don’t think she was trying to be laugh-out-loud funny, but she accomplishes it all the same.

In February 2023, Hersh published his first article on Substack, which asserted, on the word of an “unnamed source”, that the U.S. Navy sabotaged the Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022, and that the administration of President Joe Biden began planning the operation in December 2021, three months before Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine. Moscow was initially suspected; evidence pointing to a Kyiv false-flag emerged as early as March 2023 and has grown since then. What there has never been any evidence for is U.S. responsibility, the accusations of the Russian government and Hersh’s source notwithstanding.9 Asked about this in Cover-Up, Hersh looks and sounds confused, and gets very defensive. “Even if there’s nine sources, sometimes it’s much better just to make it one”, Hersh says, giving some half-baked “security” reason. A clearly flabbergasted Poitras asks Hersh how he can say this: What if the single source is wrong? “Then”, says Hersh, “I’ve got twenty years of working with the guy that I’ve been wrong on.” Hold that thought. (It is just after this Hersh says he wants to quit.)

If the Ukraine section contains the sole moment where Hersh is challenged in the film, it should also be noted that it is yet another instance where context is removed. Cover-Up chose the Hersh story on Ukraine where genuine uncertainty remains. It omitted the flagrantly false Hersh story two months later, citing “one knowledgeable American intelligence official”, to accuse Kyiv of buying fuel from Russia and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of stealing “untold millions” of American dollars in a complex corruption scheme

Ninety-odd minutes in, we get to Syria. Hersh pronounces himself “shocked” at how quickly Bashar al-Asad fell (weren’t we all). Hersh says, obliquely, “I wrote stories for the London Review [of Books]. There were reports that Asad nerve gassed his own people. I saw him two or three or four times, and I didn’t think he was capable of doing what he did, period. And let’s call that wrong. Let’s call that very much wrong.” Asked if this was “an example of getting too close to power”, Hersh says: “Of course”. Hersh goes on: “The human rights people were all over him. I never thought he was Mother Teresa, but I thought he was okay. But if I have made a claim in prior interviews to be perfect, I would now withdraw it. That’s all. I wasn’t perfect.” And with that, after just about one minute, the Syria file closes, and we move on to Iraq in 2004.

When Hersh spoke about the LRB pieces, the magazine cover image of one—“Whose Sarin?”, from December 2013—flashes up on-screen (see above), but it would be easy to miss the headline at the very top of the page, and even if viewers do see it, unless they already have the background knowledge, it is going to be meaningless. For those who do not know: Hersh heavily implied, channelling his “sources”, four months after chemical weapons of mass destruction were used to kill hundreds of people in Damascus, that the Syrian insurgency had gassed itself and its supportive population. In April 2014, the LRB published another Hersh article, this one more forthright in claiming that Syria’s insurgents—with the connivance of Turkey—had carried out the poison gas attack to provoke Western intervention against Asad, and President Barack Obama had faltered on his “red line” in August 2013 because he knew the intelligence picture was more complex than he let on in public.

This was not a one-off mistake. This was two five-thousand-plus-word articles over four months. How did this happen? Who were the sources (in outline, obviously; not their names)? Why did he believe these sources over the public U.S. intelligence assessment and the copious open-source evidence—photographs, videos, testimony—from the “first YouTube war”? Did he vet the sources in a way that differs from what he usually does? We do not even discover what he thinks now in any serious sense. Does he at this point accept his sources were wrong? If so, does he think they lied or were mistaken? And does he wish for the LRB articles to be retracted?

These questions are never asked, and this whole “critical” section—which lasts about fourteen minutes—is like this. We get no genuine answers from Hersh or insight into what has led him astray, which seems to be the point: to go through the motions of self-criticism for the sake of form, but not to actually leave any black marks against Hersh’s name. The Syria segment is only the most egregious, and likely the most effective. It would be staggering if even half the viewers of this documentary have any idea what is going on during that minute.

The Iraq story is Abu Ghraib, and it is almost precisely My Lai redo. In early May 2004, Hersh reported for the New Yorker on the revolting torments inflicted by a group of U.S. Military Police (MPs) on detainees at a prison in Iraq. The story was based on the documents produced by the U.S. military investigation that had begun in January 2004, specifically the Pentagon’s Taguba Report,10 reports from the Army Criminal Investigation Division, and the sworn statements of witnesses. The U.S. was already in the process of delivering justice. All Hersh did was make this public so the enemy could make use of it—the enemy in this case being the Islamic State movement. Within the month, Hersh was trying to work up these gruesome individual acts, the kind of thing that happens in every war, into a charge of institutional and systematic criminality against the United States.

Cover-Up relates how the dissident Hersh pressured the Establishment CBS 60 Minutes show into running their story on the Abu Ghraib crimes on 28 April 2004. CBS had initially acceded to a Pentagon request to delay publication and Hersh threatened to scoop them. The attempt to present Abu Ghraib as resulting from intentional U.S. policy—by linking it to the “torture” techniques authorised against Al-Qaeda captives after 9/11—is oddly elliptical and weak. The reason is presumably that if Cover-Up had zoomed in on the details, it would have been quite plain that what happened at Abu Ghraib was recreational cruelty led by a couple of determined sadists, unconnected to any effort to elicit information. The film managed to get Antonio Taguba himself on for an interview, where all he says is how “angry” he was about what happened and that there was some suspicion he had leaked his report.

The most time in this ten-minute section on Iraq goes to Camille Lo Sapio, the “anonymous source” who responded to Hersh’s radio appeal—he literally gave out his mobile telephone number—and provided him with the photographs the criminal MPs had taken of their handiwork. Hersh claims there would have been “no story” without the photographs, which is implausible, though doubtless in a decreasingly literate age such as ours pictures helped spread and sustain the story. Hersh’s claim, apparently sourced from an officer in the Iraqi Army, that people were rounded up at random and sent to be tortured at Abu Ghraib is simply false, as his claim that “children were being [sexually] assaulted” at the prison. There is no evidence of this in the thousands of photographs, and none of the reports, official or journalistic, contain even rumours of such a thing.

Throughout the Iraq portion of Cover-Up, there were clips played of Americans on radio and television phone-in shows being angry at Hersh for his Abu Ghraib reporting. The message is how brave Hersh is to stand for truth against the tide of jingoism, and this is the theme of the last few minutes, harking back to the My Lai days, an apparent nod to the near-perfect symmetry between the two stories.11 We see radio stations playing “The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley”, a country song from 1971 suggesting that Calley had been betrayed while fighting for his country. Hersh expresses some displeasure at the length of Calley’s prison sentence. And then Poitras asks why, in the face of all this opposition, he carries on. Hersh says: “You just can’t have a country that does it and looks the other way. If there’s any mantra to what I did, that’s it.” We close out with a message on-screen reading: “Dedicated to all those killed and denied justice, and those who resist, past and future.”

I mentioned several times above in the various case studies that what was most wrong with the presentation was not anything said, but the stripping of context, and one can apply that as a meta-criticism. Of all of the defects in Cover-Up—the slant and distortion, the half-truths and untruths—the most serious problem with it is what is not present. One can argue it is disreputable to do a film about Hersh’s life and work that all-but avoids the last fifteen years, when even some of the old comrades have questioned in public whether Hersh still has both oars in the water. It is straightforward malpractice to make space (barely) for the Syria and Ukraine cases in a survey of this period, and leave out Hersh’s May 2015 article in the London Review of Books questioning the “official narrative” of the U.S. raid that killed Usama bin Laden four years earlier.

With “a retired senior [U.S.] intelligence official” as his “major” source, some “information from inside Pakistan”, and two “longtime consultants to the Special Operations Command” providing splashes of colour, Hersh contended that Bin Laden’s demise was an act of theatre disguising the “premeditated murder” of “an unarmed elderly civilian”, as his primary source puts it. The raid was not the result of a decade of U.S. intelligence work and the Navy SEALs on the night did not have to dodge Pakistani defences, wrote Hersh. Rather, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)—the controllers of the jihadist insurgency in Afghanistan—had sold out Al-Qaeda’s leader, who was living on the dime of the Saudi Kingdom he had affected to war against for a quarter-century. Usually, when the ISI wants to trade in one of its jihadist assets for American favour, it simply arrests them and hands them over. For reasons Hersh felt need not concern us, the ISI decided in 2011 that its interests would be best-served by enabling an American raid that made it look incompetent, on a location a stone’s throw from its premier military academy so the whole world would know Aabpara harboured Bin Laden.

The Bin Laden piece was undoubtedly Hersh’s most impactful story in this most recent phase of his career. It was all over the American networks, made it to the BBC in Britain, and as far away as the ABC in Australia. But the mainstream press that usually receives Hersh missives with reverence reacted harshly to this one. It was at this time former doting disciples started writing of Hersh going “off the rails”. The outraged confusion of Hersh’s die-hard supporters among the radical “anti-imperialists” to this press treatment of their hero was wholly justified, because Hersh had done nothing out of the ordinary in using cranky “sources” to concoct a deranged anti-American fable. What had changed was the political consensus of Hersh’s target audience. With Obama as President, not Nixon or George W. Bush, dubious and conspiratorial accusations of criminality against the U.S. government were much less welcome on the American Left.12 This was the cause of such pushback as there was on the Syria stories, and Biden was in office over Ukraine, a cause in any case ubiquitously popular beyond the fringes.

Had Cover-Up included the Bin Laden raid imbroglio, one could easily see it presenting just such a defence, of Hersh holding to his principles while all around him surrendered to partisan exigency, and pointing concretely to the New Yorker, which took a pass on the Bin Laden piece,13 despite repeatedly publishing Hersh in the mid-2000s when he used exactly the same methods and standards to foretell an imminent American war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. The magazine’s vaunted fact-checkers waived through claims no more outlandish and no more sourced than those in the 2015 article, including that Vice President Dick Cheney and the dreaded “neoconservatives” were planning to initiate the Iran war with a false-flag and that the Bush administration was considering using “tactical nuclear weapons” on Iran. Tellingly, as late as 2012, Hersh was publishing unsubstantiated claims in the New Yorker about shady U.S. policies towards Iran—that dated back to the Bush administration.

One can just as easily see why Cover-Up drew a veil over the entire business. It is greatly to the credit of Poitras and Obenhaus that they avoid this narrative of a Hersh “decline”, which is basically a mechanism for those who like his work on Vietnam and Iraq especially, and Watergate, Kissinger, and the CIA, to keep all of that, and firewall it off from the later work they do not like. The Iran stories of the 2000s, written in the same period and venue as the Abu Ghraib pieces, make nonsense of this idea. But the premise of total Hershian continuity in method and motives needs very careful curation if the resultant picture is to be a positive one. Syria and Ukraine as two isolated missteps ten years apart is bearable. The preposterous Abbottabad raid story is not. It could contaminate Hersh’s oeuvre on its own, and defending it on business-as-usual grounds would almost certainly create more scepticism about all of Hersh’s other work than it would converts to his Bin Laden tale.

Equally unbearable would be giving any sense of the true range of Hersh’s reporting disasters. In 2008, Hersh claimed (in the New Yorker) that Israel’s Operation ORCHARD had not demolished a nuclear-weapons site in Syria months earlier (he was hazy on what was hit and speculative on why). Hersh’s 1991 book said inter alia that Israel targeted Soviet cities with nuclear weapons and passed U.S. intelligence to Moscow, these contradictory claims sourced to Ari Ben-Menashe, a con man who “lies like people breathe”, according to none other than Hersh. Hersh’s 1986 book claimed the poor Soviets had been viciously smeared for massacring the 270 civilians aboard Korean Air Lines Flight 007. Hersh’s false accusation in 1983 that Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai was a CIA agent ended up in court. Hersh was author of “the longest correction ever published” in 1981 for the New York Times, confessing his error in claiming former U.S. Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry had been involved in coup-plotting against Allende. It is not simply that the more errors Cover-Up had shown, the less reliable Hersh would seem. It is that when the errors are stacked together, it discloses something more than ineptitude: the errors all go in one direction.

At the present time, criticism of the use of “anonymous sources” tends to either insinuate or explicitly claim that those sources do not exist, and the journalist in question is a fabricator, telling a story they want to tell and pretending it was told to them by others. The problem with Hersh is narrowly distinct. Arthur Schlesinger’s remark during the public debate about the Kennedy book, that Hersh is “the most gullible investigative reporter perhaps in American history”, is often quoted by critics, and rightly so. But it is important to give the second half of that quote: “He will believe anything so long as it discredits John Kennedy.”14 Mutatis mutandis, this is the Hersh method distilled. Hersh’s is a willed gullibility. Hersh’s sources do the fabricating and he believes them, or affects to, if what they tell him supports the ideological narrative he is constructing. Any connections to reality in the articles generated by this methodology are accidental.

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FOOTNOTES