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Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and his closest subordinate, Reinhard Heydrich. As early as 1939, a so-called euthanasia program, directly responsible to Hitler and the Führer Chancellery, had been initiated to eliminate nearly ninety thousand ethnic Germans who were deemed “unfit to live” because they were physically or mentally “defective.” This program, halted temporarily in 1941, proved to be a training ground for the “Final Solution.” In late 1941, its personnel, apparatus, and experience in killing by poison gas was transferred to death camps in Poland to be used against the Jews.
    The Holocaust required more than an apocalyptic ideology of anti-Semitism in order to be implemented. It was equally the product of the most modern and technically developed society in Europe—one with a highly organized bureaucracy. The streamlined, industrialized mass killings carried out in death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka were of a form unknown in European and world history. But millions of Jews were also killed by the Germans and their helpers via more primitive, “archaic” methods in Russia, eastern Europe, and the Balkans. The Einsatzgruppen and police battalions hunted down Jews and executed them in gruesome pit killings, in forests, ravines, and trenches. Russians, Poles, Serbs, and Ukrainians, although not earmarked for systematic mass murder, were also decimated in large numbers. Three million Soviet prisoners of war died in German captivity.
    Some, such as Daniel Goldhagen, have argued that the Germans carried out these murders because they wereGermans; their political culture and mind-set, grounded in a nationalist pride in their Volk , had been preprogrammed by an “eliminationist anti-Semitism” that had existed since at least the mid-nineteenth century. But before Hitler, völkisch racist anti-Semitism had not made great inroads in Germany, though it was far from negligible. Anti-Semitism had been much stronger and more influential in Tsarist Russia, Romania, or in the Habsburg Monarchy and its successor states, especially Poland, Slovakia, and Austria. Germany before 1933 was still a state based on the rule of law, where despite long-standing prejudice Jews achieved remarkable economic success, were well integrated into society, enjoyed equal rights, and decisively shaped its modernist culture.
    Hitler’s rise to power would not have been possible without the carnage of the First World War, the traumatic impact of German military defeat, the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, the economic crises of the Weimar Republic, and the fear of Communist revolution. Anti-Semitism, while central to Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Himmler, Jules Streicher, and other Nazi leaders, was not the main vote-getter of the movement. But once racist anti-Semitism became the official state ideology of the Third Reich, reinforced by an extraordinarily powerful propaganda apparatus and a barrage of anti-Jewish laws, its impact was devastating.
    It is, however, important to realize that the receptiveness of Germans (and other Europeans) to the demonization of the Jews owed a great deal to the much older tradition of Christian anti-Judaism. The Nazis did not need to invent the images of “the Jew” as a usurer, blasphemer, traitor, ritual murderer, dangerous conspirator against Christendom, or a deadly threat to the foundations of morality. Both secular rulers and Christian churches had ensured that (until the French Revolution) Jews were pariahs in European society, condemned to positions of inferiority and subordination. Racism had been used in Catholic Spain in the fifteenth century, for example, to justify the removal of even convertedJews from public functions and positions of economic influence.
    The Protestant Reformation, especially in Germany, brought little improvement in the status of the Jews. Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish diatribes would moreover become a contributing factor in the complicity of so