Holocaust Evidence

Did any high-ranking Nazi ever acknowledge a plan to exterminate the Jewish people? Did the "evacuation" of Jews from their homes and towns have anything to do with their "extermination?"

Heinrich Himmler, in charge of implementing the Nazi's "Final Solution to the Jewish Question," gave an infamous speech to one hundred SS men on October 4, 1943. As direct as anyone could possibly be on the issue, Himmler defined "evacuation" as "Ausrottung." That word, in English, means "extermination." Himmler told his men:

I shall speak to you here with all frankness of a very serious subject. We shall now discuss it absolutely openly among ourselves, nevertheless we shall never speak of it in public. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race.

Himmler, while discussing the Jewish extermination with his troops, observed that his men remained decent people:

Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet - apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness - to have remained decent fellows, this is what has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and shall never be written.

Himmler was wrong on that last point, thanks to the many documents Nazis left behind.