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In this letter dated March 4, 1942, the Reichsarzt SS Ernst-Robert Grawitz describes the medical condition and recovery process of the Higher SS and Police Leader for the central zone in Russia Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, whose role in leading executions in the East left mental scars. Grawitz notes that von dem Bach suffered from “severe nervous exhaustion…from thoughts related to the executions of Jews that he himself oversaw”.
On February 13, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich’s adjutant, SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans-Achim Ploetz, forwarded a report from Einsatzgruppe A to the staff of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler on the “defeatist” remarks made by SS-Sturmbannführer and Oberstleutnant Arno von Kriegsheim. Among other statements, Kriegsheim expressed that “executing Jews is unworthy of a German.” The report also noted that “similar statements, albeit in less severe forms, were made by almost all the officers of the Commander of the Rear Army Area North during the first months of the Eastern campaign.”
Paul Wurm, the Foreign Editor of the Nazi propaganda newspaper Der Stürmer and head of the so-called “Anti-Jewish World League,” wrote a letter on October 23, 1941, to Franz Rademacher, the Foreign Office’s expert on Jewish affairs. In this letter, Wurm mentioned a recent encounter with “an old party comrade” who was actively involved in implementing the “resolution of the Jewish Question” in the East. According to Wurm, this old party comrade disclosed that “much will be destroyed of the Jewish vermin through special measures”.
On August 1, 1941, Reich Minister Alfred Rosenberg led a high-level meeting to discuss the governance of Nazi-occupied territories in Eastern Europe. Hinrich Lohse, the Reichskommissar for Ostland and Gauleiter of Schleswig-Holstein, reported that “approximately 10,000 Jews had been liquidated by the Lithuanian population”. Lohse emphasized that, following Hitler’s directive, “the Jews should be completely removed from this area”.
Between 20 and 29 September 1942, an Italian delegation led by Fascist Party secretary Aldo Vidussoni traveled from Milan through Litzmannstadt, Brest-Litowsk, Minsk, and Kharkov, reaching Millerovo near Rostov. Vidussoni’s account, recorded in Mussolini’s Secretariat documents, notes that “in Minsk, at the Opera Theater, we saw the belongings of thousands and thousands of murdered Jews piled up” and that “what struck the Italians the most was the method of killing”. In mid-May 1943, the German Foreign Office learnt about the incident from a report that Wilhelm Kube, the Generalkommissar for Belarus, had shown the Italian fascist delegation in Minsk “a gas chamber where the killing of Jews was supposedly carried out.” At the time, in September 1942, homicidal gas vans were actively operating near Minsk.
On December 29, 1942, SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler delivered a report to Adolf Hitler, mentioning the execution of 363,211 Jews within only four months, between August and November of that year. Himmler’s report, known as report no. 51 to the Führer on Bandit Fighting, provides one of the clearest examples of high-level documentation of the Holocaust.