Despite the immense amount of research which has taken place into the mass murder of European Jews during the Second World War, there are still areas of controversy surrounding the subject, particularly so far as the motivation of the murderers is concerned. Leaving aside the preposterous notion that Hitler himself was ignorant of the ‘final solution’, there has been serious debate as to the exact timing of the decision to commence genocidal operations, and the reasons which lay behind such measures. In particular, it has been argued by those who tend towards an institutional rather than an ideologically-based explanation that it was Hitler's first setback against the Red Army which scotched any hope of ‘resettling’ Jews in the Russian steppes and therefore left the Nazis with only one possibility-mass extermination. To be fair to the authors of this interpretation they have not advanced it as an excuse for genocide, but usually as an antidote to simplistic versions of Third Reich history in which Nazi crimes are blamed on a small number of hate-crazed fanatics whilst everybody else obeyed orders without really knowing what was going on.

Christopher Browning is certainly not likely to fall into that error. As he himself puts it: ‘ … one fact is undisputable: Hitler alone did not murder the European Jews’.

He does, however, argue very persuasively that the crucial decision to establish mass extermination camps must have been taken in the summer of 1941 - that is at a time when Hitler expected rapid victory in the East.

Painstakingly surveying the evidence available, Browning points out that already in the autumn of 1941 Nazi ‘experts’ were looking around in Poland for suitable sites in which to erect death camps. These men were specialists in mass killing who had gained experience in the euthanasia programme designed to murder mentally handicapped Germans, a programme directly controlled from Hitler's Chancellery. From the chronology convincingly built up by Browning it appears that Hitler must have given orders to Himmler and Heydrich in late July 1941 and that they passed these on to Eichmann and Hoss the following month. By October the ‘experts’ were already at work preparing the Chłmno and Bełżec camps for their nefarious activities. Hence the notorious Wannsee Conference in January 1942 was as much a bureaucratic tidying-up operation as a meeting to initiate policy.