The ones who walk away

And who seem to know where they are going

I want to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for.

—Ivan Karamazov

On 4 October 1943, Heinrich Himmler stood before 92 SS officers in a room within the Posen Townhall (Rathaus)—Posen being a Nazi-occupied town in central-west Poland—and committed the logic of the Final Solution, of which he was Hitler’s primary overseer, to the official record more clearly and unambiguously than in any surviving document we have of that time.¹

This meeting, and a subsequent one two days later on the same topic, addressed to Reichsleiters, Gauleiters, and other Nazi government representatives, was top secret, and it is something of a fluke that we know anything about these speeches.²

You can sense an almost wistful, more-in-sorrow-than-anger tone to Himmler’s hideous words.³ He explains to his underlings the absolute necessity for the extermination of the Jews of Europe while acknowledging that some of those listening to him may have had nagging qualms about the scale and nature o…