Holocaust-deniers claim that they wish to "revise" history to point out that there is no known _written_ order from Hitler to exterminate Jews. This is of course nothing new. Consider this passage from _The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich_, by William Shirer, from 1960. Pages 964-965: As it worked out, the "final solution" was what Adolf Hitler had long had in mind and what he had publicly proclaimed even before the war started. In his speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, he had said: If the international Jewish financiers ... should against succeed in plunging the nations into a world war the result will be ... the annihilation of the Jewish race throughout Europe. This was a prophecy, he said, and he repeated it five times, verbatim, in subsequent public utterances. It made no difference that not the "international Jewish financiers" but he himself plunged the world into armed conflict. What mattered to Hitler was that there was now a world war and that it afforded him, after he had conquered vast regions in the East where most of Europe's Jews lived, the opportunity to carry out their "annihilation." By the time the invasion of Russia began, he had given the necessary orders. What became known in high Nazi circles as the "Fuehrer Order on the Final Solution" apparently was never committed to paper -- at least no copy of it has yet been unearthed in the captured Nazi documents. All the evidence shows that it was most probably given verbally to Goering, Himmler and Heydrich, who passed it down during the summer and fall of 1941. A number of witnesses testified at Nuremberg that they had "heard" of it but none admitted ever seeing it.
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