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As head of the SS, chief of police, 'Reichskommissar for the Consolidation of Germanness', and Reich Interior Minister, Heinrich Himmler enjoyed a position of almost unparalleled power and responsibility in Nazi Germany. Perhaps more than any other single Nazi leader aside from Hitler, his name has become a byword for the terror, persecution, and destruction that characterized the Third Reich.

Peter Longerich is Professor of Modern German History at Royal Holloway University of London and founder of the College’s Holocaust Research Centre.  His book, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, shows the steps taken by the Nazis that would ultimately lead to the Final Solution.  He argues that anti-Semitism was not a mere by-product of Nazi political mobilization or an attempt to deflect the attention of the masses.  Rather, from 1933 onwards, anti-Jewish policy was a central tenet of the Nazi movement’s attempts to implement, disseminate, and secure National Socialist rule.  In the excerpt below Longerich analyzes the state of Jewish citizens of Germany right before the start of the war.

Once the third anti-Semitic wave had reached its peak, the National Socialist policy of total segregation of the German Jews had now been realized by extensive measures in all spheres of life. The Jews, excluded from economic life, led a wretched existence in complete social isolation: they lived on savings deposited in blocked accounts, from which sums for their immediate needs could be withdrawn only with permission from the Gestapo, Jewish welfare aid, or the minimal wages from Jewish work deployment. Jews could only be economically active for others Jews, for example as Rechtskonsulenten (legal advisers)…

According to the results of the May 1939 census, there were still 213,930 ‘faith Jews’ (i.e. members of synagogues) living in the Old Reich Territory. The concentration of Jews in cities had intensified. There was a disproportionately high level of old people among the Jews living in Germany: 53.6 percent were over 50, 21.6 per cent over 65…As a result of emigration there was a considerable surplus of women (57.5 percent). Only 15.6 percent of the Jews counted in May were in work, almost 71 percent of all Jews over 14 came under the category of the ‘unemployed self-employed’. There were also 19,716 people who did not belong to the Jewish religious community (more than half were Protestants), but who were graded as ‘racial Jews’, as well as 52,005 ‘half-breeds grade I’ and 32,669 ‘half-breeds grade II’.

At the instigation of the NS state the compulsory ’self-administration’ of the Jewish minority had been rendered uniform: the religious associations became branches of the Reich Association…which also took over the whole of Jewish care, health, and schooling, as well as all still existing Jewish organizations. The Reich Association…thus became the organization that controlled the isolated Jewish sector. Apart from this, the only remaining autonomous Jewish organization was the Jewish Cultural Association.

If the Reich Deputation of the Jews in Germany, now dissolved, had been a holding organization of independent Jewish organizations and communities, in the new, hierarchical organization autonomy was as good as excluded…On the social level their task now no longer consisted of supporting needy Jews alongside state care; falling back entirely on their own resources, they now also had to undertake the care of the Jews who were completely excluded from the state social system. In this way the regime had not only discharged responsibility and expenses; it has also ensured that the Jewish minority was almost completely isolated from the rest of the population and it had at its disposal a compulsory organization that it made responsible for the execution of official orders.

This set-up, using a Jewish organization to control an isolated Jewish sector and making it responsible for the implementation of the regime’s anti-Jewish policies, marked the birth of a new and perfidious form of organization of Judenpolitik: the<