The Holocaust

1941–1945 CE — Europe, Nazi Germany

Today: Europe (Auschwitz, in modern Poland)

Nazi Germany murdered approximately six million Jews — two thirds of Europe's Jewish population — along with Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners, gay men, and political prisoners, in a program organized with railway timetables, corporate contracts, and civil-service paperwork. It was not carried out by a mob but administered by an educated, bureaucratic, technologically advanced state. That is the fact that has resisted every attempt to explain it away: the machinery of modern government, turned to the industrial killing of civilians.

Worth knowing: The Wannsee Conference, where officials coordinated the logistics of the killing, lasted about ninety minutes and was followed by lunch. The surviving minutes read like the record of any government meeting about a difficult administrative problem.

Pattern: Ideological movement — A belief system rises, spreads, institutionalizes, and then schisms — changing the rules people accept as legitimate.

Entry 216 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.