Raul Hilberg

“He was an intensely stubborn and contrary person,”

The First Zundel Holocaust Trial in 1985
from Spike EP on Vimeo.

" It is hard now to remember that the Nazi holocaust was once a taboo subject. During the early years of the Cold War, mention of the Nazi holocaust was seen as undermining the critical U.S.-West German alliance. It was airing the dirty laundry of the barely de-Nazified West German elites and thereby playing into the hands of the Soviet Union, which didn't tire of remembering the crimes of the West German "revanchists." "

- Finkelstein

"As the Nazi regime developed over the years, the whole structure of decision-making was changed. 

At first there were laws. 

Then there were decrees implementing laws. 

Then a law was made saying, "There shall be no laws." 

Then there were orders and directives that were written down, but still published in ministerial gazettes. 

Then there was government by announcement; orders appeared in newspapers. 

Then there were the quiet orders, the orders that were not published, that were within the bureaucracy, that were oral. 

Finally, there were no orders at all. 

Everybody knew what he had to do." 

- Raul Hillberg's explanation for the absence of documentation ordering or authorising the physical Destruction of the European Jews.