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232 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
that Jersak “probably exaggerates the impact of the Atlantic Charter on
Hitler,” so that this interpretation, too, is unsustainable. 664
Kershaw then goes on to examine Christian Gerlach’s interpretation
of 1997, according to which “by the time the meeting [of Wannsee]
eventually took place, on January 20, 1942, Hitler’s basic decision to
kill all the Jews of Europe had been taken,” but Kershaw judges that
such a perspective is difficult to imagine, hence, once again, unsustainable.
Going on to a study by Florent Brayard published in 2004, Kershaw
continues: 665
“A recent, meticulous examination of the complex evidence of
decision-making on anti-Jewish policy between 1939 and 1942 offers
yet another variant. Florent Brayard places the date of Hitler’s
order to commence the Final Solution as a comprehensive program
later than any other historian had done, to June 1942, immediately
following the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague.”
But to Kershaw it is “perhaps a little more plausible” to see in this
event the last and greatest phase of an expanding process which resulted
in the extermination program being extended to all European Jews. 666
In a “magisterial study of the ‘politics of annihilation’” that appeared
in 1998, Peter Longerich had in fact established that “a comprehensive
program of extermination of European Jewry developed as an incremental
process, with a number of acceleratory spurts, between summer
1941 and summer 1942,” 666 but in order to reach this somewhat trivial
conclusion in respect of the Holocaust, a “magisterial study” was not
really needed.
In the end, Kershaw strikes the balance of the studies concerning the
Führerbefehl: 667
“It seems certain, given the fragmentary and unsatisfactory evidence,
that all attempts to establish a precise moment when Hitler
decided to launch the Final Solution will meet with objections. And,
of course, much depends upon what is envisaged as a Führer order.
Was it a precise and clear directive, or merely a green light or nod
of the head? Interpretation rests additionally upon whether decisionmaking
on the Final Solution is regarded as a continuum, with adjustments
and acceleratory phases over the period of a year or so, or
664
665
666
667
Ibid., p. 22.
Ibid., p. 23.
Ibid., p. 24.
Ibid., p. 25f.