Adolf Hitler

He came to power in Germany lawfully, in January 1933. He is the author of the Holocaust: six million Jews murdered, 5700–5705 AM. The machinery was not spontaneous but governmental and staged: the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which stripped Jews of citizenship and forbade marriages; Kristallnacht in 1938; the ghettos from 1939; the shootings by the Einsatzgruppen from 1941; the Wannsee conference of January 1942, where twelve officials in ninety minutes divided up the duties of the "final solution"; the extermination camps—Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Auschwitz.

And one thing worth saying outright, because it is constantly confused: no written order by him for the extermination has been found. This is no argument in anyone's favour—orders of that kind were given orally, and documents invoking "the Führer's will" are numerous; he himself publicly promised the Jews "annihilation" in the speech of 30 January 1939 and invoked that promise more than once afterwards. The absence of the paper is a property of how it was done, not a doubt about who decided it.