See For The Record Read­ing List for more about The Splen­did Blond Beast.

Hitler was well aware of Turkey’s geno­cide of Arme­ni­ans and of the fail­ure of the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity to respond ade­quately to it. As early as June 1931, Hitler com­mented in an inter­view that the “exter­mi­na­tion of the Arme­ni­ans” had led him to “the con­clu­sion that masses of men are mere bio­log­i­cal plas­ticine” over which Aryans would even­tu­ally triumph.5 He returned to this theme in a for­mal talk to his com­mand­ing gen­er­als on the eve of their inva­sion of Poland in 1939: “Our strength is in our quick­ness and our bru­tal­ity,” he exclaimed. “Genghis Khan had mil­lions of women and chil­dren killed by his own will and with a gay heart. His­tory sees only in him a great state builder. . . . Thus for the time being I have sent to the East . . . my Death’s Head Units with the order to kill with­out pity or mercy all men, women, and chil­dren of the Pol­ish race or lan­guage. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowa­days of the exter­mi­na­tion of the Armenian?“6 On at least three other occa­sions, Hitler pointed to the bru­tal­ity of Turkey’s regime and its will­ing­ness to strike with­out mercy as a wor­thy model for his own government.7

A new and more ter­ri­ble wave of slaugh­ter began when the Ger­mans invaded the USSR dur­ing June of 1941. Spe­cial SS troops ded­i­cated to mass mur­der now fol­lowed close behind the advanc­ing Ger­man army. Within thirty-six months, these Ein­satz­grup­pen and their sub­units, the Ein­satzkom­man­dos and Son­derkom­man­dos, shot about two mil­lion peo­ple, accord­ing to the Nurem­berg Mil­i­tary Tri­bunal. The large major­ity of the dead were Jews, although the Ein­satz­grup­pen’s net also caught hun­dreds of thou­sands of Com­mu­nists, Slavs, Roma­nis, Poles, homo­sex­u­als, hos­pi­tal patients, unarmed pris­on­ers of war, and even orphan chil­dren. These two mil­lion mur­ders, more­over, do not include the gassings at Auschwitz, Tre­blinka, and other death fac­to­ries that began in the wake of the invasion.8

A 1942 report on the fate of Jews in east­ern Poland smug­gled out of War­saw by the Jew­ish Labor Bund pro­vided remark­ably detailed and accu­rate early doc­u­men­ta­tion of the work of the Ein­satzkom­man­dos.

From the day the Russo-German war broke out, the Ger­mans embarked on the phys­i­cal exter­mi­na­tion of the Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion on Pol­ish soil, using the Ukraini­ans and Lithuan­ian fas­cists for this job. It began in East­ern Gali­cia in the sum­mer months of 1941. The fol­low­ing sys­tem was applied every­where: men, four­teen to sixty years old, were dri­ven to a sin­gle place—a square or a ceme­tery, where they were slaugh­tered, or shot by machine-guns, or killed by hand grenades. They had to dig their own graves. Chil­dren in orphan­ages, inmates in old-age homes, sick in hos­pi­tals were shot, women were killed on the streets. In many towns Jews were car­ried off to an “unknown des­ti­na­tion” and killed in the adja­cent woods. Thirty thou­sand Jews were killed in L’wow [Lvov], 15,000 in Stanis­la­wow, 5,000 in Tarnopol, 2,000 in Zloc­zow, 4,000 in Brzezany (there were 18,000 Jews in this town, now only 1,700 are left). The same has hap­pened in Zborow, Kolomyja, Sam­bor, Stryj , Dro­hobycz, Zbaraz, Prze­mys­lany, Kuty, Sni­atyn, Zaleszczyki, Brody, Prze­mysl, Rawa Ruska, and other places. . . . The num­ber of the Jews mur­dered in a beastly fash­ion in the Wilno [Vilna] area and in Lithua­nia is put at 300,000.9

The exter­mi­na­tion cam­paign gath­ered momen­tum by inte­grat­ing itself with the day-to-day activ­i­ties of Hitler’s gov­ern­ment and Ger­man soci­ety. In Jan­u­ary 1942, four­teen senior Ger­man gov­ern­ment bureau­crats met at SS offices at Lake Wannsee, in the sub­urbs of Berlin, to coor­di­nate efforts to exter­mi­nate the Jews of Europe. Up to that point, the var­i­ous Ger­man min­istries had often worked at cross-purposes in their approach to the “Jew­ish Ques­tion.” Offi­cials in charge of the eco­nomic exploita­tion of the Nazi-occupied ter­ri­to­ries in the East had some­times advo­cated reten­tion of able-bodied Jews as slave labor­ers, while Rein­hard Hey­drich of the SS had pushed for mass exe­cu­tion by the Ein­satz­grup­pen. Still other min­istries had favored a vari­ety of depor­ta­tion and reset­tle­ment schemes, though they were unable to agree on exactly where to relo­cate the refugees and the extent of ter­ror to wreak upon them.