The Holocaust Historiography Project

New documents provide Holocaust proof

Sunday, January 31, 2016

Archive materials recently discovered by French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet shed further light on the planning of the Holocaust.

Historians have long believed that fifteen high-ranking leaders of the Nazi party and German government convened on January 20, 1942, to plan the destruction of the Jews, but only now has a remarkable find of transcripts of this meeting (now referred to as the Wannsee Conference) revealed what has remained hidden for so many years.

In order to systematize the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” the members of the conference developed plans to round up all European Jews, transport them to killing centers, and then murder them. This process is now known as the Holocaust.

Among the transcripts discovered by Vidal-Naquet is a portion of the opening remarks by SS General Reinhard Heydrich, which set the tone and direction for the meeting:

“It is not necessary to ask how, technically, such a mass murder will be accomplished. It will be technically achievable because we wish it so. That is the necessary point of departure for any logistical planning on this subject. It is our function simply to decree the goal: There is not, there cannot be, any debate about whether or not it is even possible.”

According to Vidal-Naquet, this transcript provides at long last proof of the Holocaust. Said Vidal-Naquet, “Holocaust deniers have for years attempted to misdirect scholarly efforts at studying the Holocaust by pointing out the German need for slave labor, the huge cost in precious resources that would have been needed in already constrained wartime Germany to effect mass murder, and the fact that to date we have not been able to produce a Nazi gas chamber. This transcript shows that Nazi leaders were aware that the ‘Final Solution’ was only barely feasible, if at all, and still were determined to go forward at any cost.”