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Two days later, before dawn on X-Day, 8 December, Japanese planes took off for Pearl Harbor, Singapore and Guam while the army invaded British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. ‘Throughout the day, the emperor wore his naval uniform and seemed in a splendid mood’ as the first reports came in from the War of Greater Asia. At dawn, 353 Japanese planes hit Pearl Harbor, aiming to destroy four battleships and, especially, the three aircraft carriers. The battleships were sunk and 2,467 men were killed, but the carriers were at sea. The planes returned without finding them. Hirohito celebrated, but Yamamoto realized that Japan had not done enough.

Shaken and ashen, Roosevelt addressed Congress on this ‘date which will live in infamy’, but he was still not at war with Hitler. On 11 December, in the Reichstag, Hitler declared war on America, accusing Roosevelt of leading ‘the Jews in all their satanic treachery’. He looked triumphant, but that moment was the beginning of the American Century. Outside Moscow, Zhukov pushed the Germans back. Their generals panicked. Hitler ordered them ‘not to retreat a single step’. The generals begged him to permit retreat. ‘Do you think Frederick the Great’s grenadiers died gladly? They’d have liked to stay alive but the king had every right to demand the sacrifice.’ Hitler claimed that if he had ‘shown weakness even for a moment, a catastrophe that would have far overshadowed Napoleon’s would have been at hand’. But as he told the Danish foreign minister in November, ‘If the German people prove not strong or willing enough to make sacrifices and shed their blood for the sake of their existence, they deserve to die out and be destroyed by another stronger force.’

In January 1942, the other overconfident, autodidactic supremo, Stalin, insisted on a multifront offensive that, overstretching his armies, allowed the Germans to recover. And the failure of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg accelerated the tragedy of the Jews.

I SEE ONLY ONE OPTION – TOTAL EXTERMINATION: HITLER AND THE HOLOCAUST

Returning to his ‘prophecy’, Hitler declared that ‘The result of this war will be the destruction of Jewry.’ The murder had started not with Jews but with Germans.

In spring 1939, Hitler had ordered the liquidation of the elderly, the mentally ill and the deformed to ensure ‘survival of the fittest’. Hitler had often talked at dinners of his plan ‘to eradicate the incurably ill and not just the mentally ill’. He commissioned his personal doctor Karl Brandt and a Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Major Genetic Disease and Suffering, made up of radicalized doctors, to create a secret system denoted T4 (Tiergartenstrasse 4, Berlin – headquarters of the euthanasia programme). In September 1939 Hitler ordered ‘mercy killings of ill people deemed incurable’, using Luminal, or Phenobarbital, then, at the suggestion of the SD, carbon monoxide. Over 65,000 were killed.

Although there were only 200,000 terrified and impoverished Jews left in Germany, there were 1.5 million in Hitler’s Poland. He planned to deport them to French Madagascar, where many would presumably perish, but in the meantime, in 1940, the Germans started to wall up ghettos in Polish cities, entrapping over 400,000 Jews. But the Russian war provided the fatal arena for slaughter. At a conference in December 1940, Himmler announced that Eichmann had calculated there would soon be 5.8 million Jews in Nazi hands, offering the chance for a Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. In early 1941, Hitler asked Heydrich to produce ‘a proposal for a final solution’. In May just before Barbarossa, with Hitler’s agreement, Himmler created four Einsatzgruppen that were to follow the Army Groups, each led by trusted RSHA officers. Göring ordered Heydrich to make ‘all preparations’ for ‘a total solution to the Jewish question’. So far ‘Jews who occupy Party and state positions’ were the victims, but the Einsatzgruppen immediately started to kill all Jews, including women and children, in the Baltics and Ukraine, assisted by Lithuanian, Latvian and Ukrainian fascists^* – and enthusiastically joined by the Romanians.

In June 1941, Antonescu ordered, ‘Cleanse Ias¸i of its Jewish population: 13,000 Jews were butchered. When Odessa, the great cosmopolitan Black Sea city, entrepôt of Russian grain, fell in October after a siege that exposed Romanian ineptitude, the Romanians killed 30,000 Jews in the streets, while the surviving 200,000 were concentrated at Bogdanovka and murdered so chaotically that Himmler and Eichmann became vexed. Cooperating with German Einsatzkommandos (Einsatzgruppen units) and Ukrainian Germans, the Romanians killed over 300,000 Jews and were responsible for more Jewish murders than anyone except the Germans.