Hitler’s Prophecy: The Key to the Holocaust

Most historians, after a long and involved dispute, now accept that Hitler’s threats to annihilate the Jewish population on the European continent were an important element in the Nazi regime’s escalating wartime policy of expulsion and extermination. The general consensus, however, is that the ‘Final Solution’ was not ordered at a particular moment so much as gradually adopted. In a compact, readable, and cogently argued text, Hitler’s Prophecy draws on the rapidly expanding provision of online archival materials to set out some significant new findings, proposing a fresh answer to the abiding question of exactly when and why the Holocaust was put into practical effect. It examines the circumstances in which the prophecy was initially formulated and subsequently, at critical points, menacingly repeated, and links the prophecy to the eventual evacuation of Jewry ‘to the east’ in an ultimately homicidal form, identifying the order—in fact orders—that were issued. Covering the period from January 1939 to the spring of 1942, it describes in detail the exact sequence of events, establishing Hitler’s direct responsibility as well as depicting the role played by the main collaborato