Hitler's extermination orders

Note: The fact file series is intended to present facts of history, free
from the polemics and misinformation so often presented in this medium.
Hopefully the facts contained herein will serve the cause of truth in
history.

Note to educators and students: The essence of this Fact File is that no
order for the extermination of the Jews written or authorized by Adolf
Hitler has ever been discovered. The result of this situation is that many
historians presume that the order was transmitted orally. For this, there
is also no proof. The syllogism utilized is:

Major premise: The extermination of the Jews occured.

Minor premise: Within the Nazi form of government, the extermination of the
Jews could not have occurred without Hitler's authorization.

Conclusion: Hitler ordered the extermination of the Jews.

Since Historians and researchers have yet to unearth such an order, the
'oral order' has become a necessary part of the story. It should be
unnecessary to stress that the conclusion of this logical form is invalid
if either the major or minor premise is untrue. Don Van Handel
(DonVH@aol.com)

The Führer Order on the Final Solution apparently was never committed to
paperÑat least no copy of it has yet been unearthed in the captured Nazi
documents. William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

For the want of hard evidence and in 1977 I offered, around the world, a
thousand pounds to any person who could produce even one wartime document
showing explicitly that Hitler knew, for example, of Auschwitz. My critics
... postulated the existence of Führer orders without the slightest written
evidence of their existence ... Of explicit, written, wartime evidence, the
kind of evidence that could hang a man, they have produced not one line.
David Irving, Hitler's War

To the present day a written order by Hitler regarding the destruction of
the Europúean Jewish community has not been found, and, in all probability,
this order was never given. Walter Laqueur, Was niemand wissen wollte: Die
Unterdruckung der Nachrichten uber Hitlers Endlösung

For in the table talk, the speeches, the documents or the recollections of
participants from all those years not a single concrete reference of
[Hitler's] to the practice of annihilation has come down to us. When we
consider that he ordinarily transformed everything that preoccupied him
into rampant speechmaking, that he never concealed his radicalism, his
vulgarity, his readiness to go to extremes, this silence about the central
concern of his life involving, as it did in his mind, the salvation of the
world seems all the stranger. Joachim C. Fest, Hitler

... The New York Times' ... editorial (December 2, 1942) claimed that 'Of
Germany's 200,000 Jews in 1939 all but 40,000 have been deported or have
perished,' while going on to assert that 'according to evidence in the
hands of the [U.S.] State Department, an order of Adolf Hitler demanding
the extermination of all Jews in all territories controlled by Germany' was
known to exist. Researchers nearly 40 years later were still searching for
that order, or information leading to anyone who might have ever seen it at
any time. James J. Martin, The Man who invented 'Genocide': The Public
Career and Consequences of Raphael Lemkin

No written document containing or reporting an explicit command to
exterminate the Jews has come to light thus far. Arno J. Mayer, Why did the
Heavens not Darken?: The 'Final Solution' in History

In the new edition [of Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews], all
references in the text to a Hitler decision or Hitler order for the Final
Solution have been systematically excised. Christopher Browning, The
Revised Hilberg