The greatest crime in history

BRIGADIER Peter Vaux was a stickler for the rules of war, but he once confessed to me that he nearly shot a German POW. He'd been an intelligence officer in 7 Armoured Division in North Africa — one of the 'Desert Rats' — and the prisoner was just an ordinary infantryman but in his pocket were some photographs.

- By Phil Craig

They included a street somewhere in Europe, with naked women running along it. One of them, obviously frightened, was holding her hands between her legs. “Who are these women?” Vaux asked, struggling to contain the anger in his voice. The man was quite startled. “Who? Them? Only Jews.”

The snapshot that almost caused Vaux to use his revolver was a small part of something unprecedented in scale and cruelty — a systematic attempt to exterminate an entire race. Across Poland, the Baltic States and thousands of miles into the Soviet Union, Hitler's armies were followed by Einsatzgruppen - 'cleansing squads' with orders to clear designated areas of the race-enemy.

Jews were rounded up and either shipped to the nearest ghetto to await employment as slave labour, or taken into quarries and forests and killed. At Babyn Yar, just outside Kyiv, 30,000 people were ordered to strip so their clothes could be re-purposed and then made to line up until it was their turn to be shot into a mass grave.

In some town squares, locals came to watch or even join in the carnage. A famous photograph of a half-dressed Jewish woman, fleeing from a gleeful gang of teenage boys, bleeding from her mouth, reveals what was called “the holocaust of bullets”.

The first experiments with gas began in autumn 1941, using vans with exhaust fumes directed into a sealed passenger section. Drivers were told to keep going until the screaming stopped. The first purpose-built gas chamber opened at Chelmno in Poland shortly before Christmas. And by now the Nazis had found something more deadly than engine exhaust: Zyklon B.

The architects of the Holocaust set themselves a logistical challenge: the murder of between eight and ten million people. That included Roma, homosexuals and other minorities, but the overwhelming majority would be Jews. Simply transporting the victims would require a substantial proportion of the available transport in the east.