Approximately 800 new digital recordings and transcripts of Nazi criminals from after World War II were revealed Saturday, including dramatic and disturbing testimonies that shed light both on Nazi methods during the war and Holocaust and on their escape routes.
Among the recordings, published on the Hoover Institution website, is one from SS officer Bruno Streckenbach in which he admits that Adolf Hitler indeed gave explicit instructions for implementing the Final Solution and the mass murder of Jews – a significant revelation, as until now there has been limited concrete evidence of this direct order.
Streckenbach was responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the Third Reich – from managing SS death squads that slaughtered thousands across Poland in 1939 to deploying the "Einsatzgruppen," which murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews. Prosecutors attempted to charge him with responsibility for the murder of at least one million people, but Streckenbach evaded all attempts to bring him to trial and didn't spend a single day in a German prison after the war.
For almost 80 years, historians have debated whether the Holocaust stemmed directly from Hitler's explicit orders or evolved through initiatives taken by German subordinates and field commanders implementing broader directives.
According to Streckenbach's account, the first time he heard about the plan was when he received a hint from an old friend named Erwin Schulz, a volunteer officer in the "Einsatzgruppen" who until that point had supervised executions of up to a hundred people in western Ukraine, but apparently felt uncomfortable witnessing the mass murders of Jews.
Streckenbach admitted, "Schulz trembled, trembled like I'm trembling now. He said, 'What are we doing?' and I said, 'We can't do anything, we can't leave everything. There was an order.'"
Streckenbach went directly to his immediate commander, Reinhard Heydrich, one of the main architects of the Holocaust. "Heydrich was very quiet, very businesslike. He sat at the edge of his large conference table and said, 'Be quiet now, Streckenbach. Now listen to me. Shut your mouth, don't interfere. We can't do anything about it. This is the order from the Führer. He chose the SS to carry out this order. Neither the Reichsführer [Heinrich Himmler, SS leader] nor I can do anything about it,'" Streckenbach recounted.
Thomas Weber, Professor of History at the University of Aberdeen, who discovered the recordings, said Streckenbach's claim that the first order came directly from Hitler is of historical significance.
