The protocols from the Wannsee Conference is used as evidence of Hitler’s alleged final solution to exterminate European Jews. Here is what Wikipedia has to say:
And here’s what the Holocaust Encyclopedia claims:
Interestingly enough Holocaust Encyclopedia fails to provide the means in which their readers can view the document for themselves.
There is much debate about whether the document is genuine or not, but that is not what I will be addressing today. Instead I will examine this claim at its face value and for the sake of argument assume that the document is legitimate and that we are being given a accurate translation.
On the Jewish Virtual Library website I was able to find a translation of the protocols with the following disclaimer; “This English text of the original German Wannsee Protocol is based on the official U.S. government translation prepared for evidence in the Nuremberg Trials. Revisions to the Nuremberg text were made for clarification and correction. The revisions were made by Dan Rogers of the University of South Alabama. This document is in the public domain and may be freely reproduced.” You can follow this link to read the protocols. I’ll wait.
The interpretation of this document will depend on what the reader believes the term’ final solution’ to mean. If you have an American education, such as myself, you have learned by rote that the ‘final solution’ means the murdering of Jews. However, this document does not define the final solution. In fact there is no German document that defines a ‘final solution’. If one were to define this term through the context of the document, however, it’s clear that the final solution is a program of deportation.
Part III includes this passage:
“Another possible solution of the problem has now taken the place of emigration, i.e. the evacuation of the Jews to the East, provided that the Führer gives the appropriate approval in advance. (…) These actions are, however, only to be considered provisional, but practical experience is already being collected which is of the greatest importance in relation to the future final solution of the Jewish question.”
I says right there that the ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ is emigration. Secondly, since when is mass extermination considered a provisional action?
There is nothing in the document about Jews being ’rounded up and sent to extermination camps’ as Wikipedia suggests. There is nothing in this document mentioning the two main aspects of the Holocaust. Those being a plan to exterminate European Jews and homicidal gas chambers. This renders the protocols of the Wannsee Conference inadmissible as evidence of the Holocaust.
So when the orthodox Holocaust historians claim that the Holocaust is the best documented case of genocide you must remember that their standards of documental evidence are quite low.
see The Origins of the Final Solution by Christopher Browning which provides a day by day coverage of this whole development.
The Wannsee conference was originally to have taken place December 9, 1941 when gassings at Chelmno began and was pushed back to January 20, 1942. The allowance for the expulsioning of Jews ended October 18, 1941. Formal orders to exterminate Jews exist in the Criminal orders issued mid 1941 before Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.
I don’t need Christopher Browning’s book to read the minutes from the Wannsee conference for myself and determine that they were talking about a territorial solution and not a mass extermination. Unless Browning’s book has an argument with evidence against a territorial solution I’m not interested.
Even orthodox Holocaust historians have to admit that there were no formal orders to exterminate Jews.These so-called ‘criminal orders’ that you have brought up before are refer to wartime enemies, not a genocide.
>Formal orders to exterminate Jews exist in the Criminal orders issued mid 1941
This comment is typical of the casual belief that Hitler ordered the extermination of the Jews, although if challenged to produce the ‘formal order’ specifically about that, he couldn’t do it.
He might be thinking about the (in)famous Kommissarbefehl — that’s the only ‘formal order’ I know about that specifically mentions killing — it was issued on 06 June 1941, a little more than two weeks before the start of Barbarossa:
https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Kommissarbefehl
It says: ‘Sie sind daher, wenn im Kampf oder Widerstand ergriffen, grundsätzlich sofort mit der Waffe zu erledigen.’
This is usually interpreted to mean they were not, under any circumstances, to be taken prisoner — they should be shot (‘mit der Waffe zu erledigen’) — some of them were — it’s not clear how many.
This was about executing officers operating as political functionaries and attached to the Red Army, henchman employed by the Stalin regime to politically control Red Army troops — it doesn’t specifically say anything about Jews — what fraction of the political Kommissars were Jews isn’t known, nor is it known how many Jewish Kommissars were shot.
In this context it seems fair to mention that German soldiers, whether members of the NSDAP or not, swore a personal oath to obey Adolf Hitler (Führereid):
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrereid
Hitler viewed the war against the Soviet Union as a life-and-death struggle against Jüdischer Bolschewismus (Jewish Bolshevism), and this was stated in German propaganda at that time:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCdischer_Bolschewismus
So the Kommissarbefehl fits with that, and this could be an often unstated reason that exterminationists like to see it as targeting Jews and therefore part of the ‘Holocaust’.