Andy Pearce

Eighty-five years ago today, one of the most important directives in world history was issued. On 31 July 1941, Hermann Göring – a powerful senior member of the Nazi regime – wrote a letter to SS Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the security police and security service. In it, Göring directed Heydrich with ‘making all necessary preparations’ and ‘promptly’ submitting a plan ‘for the execution of the intended final solution of the Jewish question.’   We found a third of students still believe Hitler was solely responsible for the Holocaust – while 39.9 per cent of pupils believed mass killings began with Hitler coming to power.   Today, these words have a distinctly obsidian complexion.

On this day, 85 years ago a seismic event in world history took place. At 4am on the 22 June 1941 a massive land force of 3.5 million men, supported by thousands of tanks and aircraft, invaded Soviet territory. Led by Nazi Germany and codenamed ‘Operation Barbarossa’, the significance of the incursion was not lost on contemporaries. ‘We have reached one of the climacterics of the war,’ Prime Minister Winston Churchill told the nation in a radio address delivered that night. Not for the first time, Churchill would be proved right.

Ninety years ago this week, the acting chief of the Munich Police Department held a press conference. The new man had been busy. On assuming office a few days earlier, the chief had tried to get to grips with what he saw as acute political unrest in the city by authorising a wave of mass arrests. The primary targets were leading figures in the Communist Party and paramilitary groups made up of trade unionists, liberals, and social democrats. According to the chief, it was no longer possible to guarantee the security of such people, and so scores of them were unceremoniously taken into so-called ‘protective custody’. However, a new problem had emerged. The round-ups were performed with such zeal that the city’s prison cells were now bursting at their seams.