They Spoke and Millions Disappeared
Holocaust Remembrance Day and the Weight of Words
Today, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, we pause to honor the millions of lives lost – and we reflect on the dark forces that orchestrated that tragedy. It’s a day of mourning and memory. We light candles, say prayers, and vow “Never Again.” But what does “Never Again” truly mean? To really understand it, we must confront not only the images of emaciated survivors and liberated camps, but also the words that made such horrors possible. Sometimes history’s most chilling lessons hide in plain sight, in speeches and documents left behind by the perpetrators themselves. So, allow me to take you back to one such moment. Picture a grand hall in the city of Posen in October 1943. In this very ordinary setting – no fanfare, no press – one of the most sinister figures of the Third Reich is clearing his throat to speak. What he’s about to say is something he insists must never be spoken of publicly, yet he says it anyway. Why? And what can we, decades later, learn from it on this day of remembrance?
The city is Posen – a place with a split identity, known today by its Polish name, Poznań. Posen had long been a city on the fault line of empires. For centuries it seesawed between Polish and German rule, its very cobblestones by the stamp of different regimes. Prussia annexed Posen in 1793 during the partitions of Poland. Later it became part of the German Empire, only to be handed back to the reborn Polish Republic after World War I. Then came Hitler. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Posen was seized once more and dubbed the capital of the Warthegau – a new German colonial province under the brutal thumb of Gauleiter Arthur Greiser. One might say the streets of Posen were scarred by history, a fitting backdrop for what was to come. Is it any wonder, then, that Heinrich Himmler chose this contested, blood-soaked city to reveal the Nazi regime’s most ghastly secret to his inner circle?
Now, consider the timing. It’s early October 1943. World War II has entered its fifth year, and the tide is beginning to turn against Hitler. In the East, the German army is in slow retreat. Just a month earlier, facing Soviet advances in Ukraine, Himmler had given a scorched-earth order: the Red Army, he demanded, “must truly find a totally burned and destroyed landscape” as it reclaims Ukrainian territory. This is a leader steeling himself – and his followers – for a fight to the bitter end. Meanwhile, whispers of resistance and the unmistakable stench of genocide are in the air. Two months before, prisoners at Treblinka extermination camp had staged an uprising, with dozens of Jews managing a daring escape on August 2, 1943. In the face of these events – military setbacks abroad, unrest at the sites of massacre – one might expect Nazi leaders to reconsider their bloody course. Did they? Not one bit. In fact, on October 4, 1943, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler gathered a group of about 90 SS Gruppenführer (the SS’s senior officers) in a Posen hotel and doubled down on the Nazis’ murderous mission. He spoke behind closed doors, with an urgency spiced by the knowledge that the war’s outcome was uncertain.
Himmler was not known as a charismatic or rousing orator – certainly no match for Hitler’s frenzied theatrics or Goebbels’s propaganda flair. So imagine the scene: a somewhat bland-looking man with pince-nez glasses, standing before rows of stiff-backed SS generals in gray uniforms. Not exactly a Churchillian tableau of wartime oratory. And yet, the significance of Himmler’s words that day would reverberate through history. This was not a speech meant for radio or newsreels. There was no intention to rally the German public. Instead, it was a frank, unvarnished briefing for the Nazi elite – an admission and a justification of mass murder, delivered in the clinical tone of a man who saw genocide as just another difficult duty.
Behind Closed Doors: Himmler Addresses the SS (October 4, 1943)
Himmler begins unassumingly, almost like a lecturer ticking off key points for an exam. He reminds his audience of the core “values” expected of an SS man. Honesty. Decency. Loyalty. Comradeship. Sounds admirable, until you hear the catch. An SS man must be all these things “to members of our own blood and to nobody else,” Himmler stresses. In other words: morality stops at the edge of the master race. In Himmler’s worldview, normal rules of ethics apply only among “our own.” And for all others? There is only ruthless exploitation.
With that twisted moral code established, Himmler’s speech wanders through a landscape of grotesque racism. He casts his gaze eastward, toward the vast lands of the Soviet Union. On the surface, he acknowledges, Russians might show some praiseworthy qualities – piety, hard work, technological skill. Might being the key word. Just as quickly, he flips the coin to reveal his deeply ingrained prejudices. Russia, he proclaims, is a land of endemic laziness and brutality. The implication is clear: Slavic peoples are inherently inferior. He even certifies (that’s the word he essentially uses) that such racial stereotyping is not only acceptable but is to be the basis of action for the SS. Think about that for a moment: the head of the SS is telling his officers that their handbook of conduct is blatant racism.
Then comes the chilling elaboration. Russians, Czechs, Poles – all Slavs, in Himmler’s eyes – are Untermenschen, sub-humans. They have, he says, “no inherent value as human beings.” In fact, he calls them “human animals,” whose only worth is in serving as slave labor for the German master race. To drive home the point, Himmler offers a jarring example: if 10,000 Russian women collapse and die digging an anti-tank trench for Germany, it matters to him only so far as the trench gets finished. Ten thousand women dead – and it’s of no consequence, just a means to an end. He does not flinch as he says this. You can almost hear a collective, cold shudder run through the room. But Himmler isn’t done. He goes further, talking about cherry-picking any “good blood” that might be hiding in these Slavic populations. “Whatever good blood of our kind exists in these people, we should take by stealing the children, if necessary, and raising them ourselves,” he declares. This is not hypothetical – at that very moment, SS officers were indeed kidnapping Polish children with “Aryan” features to be Germanized. It’s as if Himmler is saying: we will work some of them to death, and the few we deem racially salvageable, we will literally steal. The audience of SS officers, steeped in Nazi ideology, nods along. This is all part of the grand vision.
Now, we might pause here. As modern readers, it’s almost unbearable to absorb these statements. The casual talk of mass death, the dehumanization, the kidnapping of children – it’s beyond monstrous. And yet, notice how matter-of-fact it all is. Himmler’s tone isn’t fiery or bloodthirsty in a theatrical way; it’s bureaucratic, even pedagogical. In Bob Brier’s line of work (Egyptology), I might compare it to explaining the steps of mummification – except instead of preserving life for eternity, Himmler is describing how to snuff it out on an industrial scale. There’s a term we often use for this kind of dispassionate cruelty: the banality of evil. But as Himmler continues, we see there is nothing “banal” to him about the grand project underway – on the contrary, he views it as something epic.
After expounding on the subjugation of Slavs, Himmler signals that he is turning to what he calls “a very difficult topic.” His voice lowers; one imagines the room falling absolutely silent, if it wasn’t already. “Among ourselves,” he says – emphasizing that what comes next is for insiders only – “it should be expressed once very candidly, even though we will never speak publicly about it”. The SS leaders lean in. What secret is their chief about to share? They could probably guess, because by this point, late in 1943, the gruesome reality of what the SS had been doing in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union was known to everyone present. But to hear it spoken aloud – that was another matter.
Himmler does not keep them in suspense for long. In a single breath, he drops the euphemisms and says it plainly: “I mean now the Jewish evacuation… the extermination of the Jewish people.” There it is. The code word “evacuation (Evakuierung)” – which had been the Nazi euphemism for deporting Jews to ghettos and death camps – is immediately clarified by the word “extermination (Ausrottung).” No polite fiction, no ambiguity. Heinrich Himmler has bluntly informed his top lieutenants that the Final Solution is outright genocide. He even acknowledges the parallel with an earlier secret massacre: he frames the mass killing of Jews as an order, akin to the infamous “Night of the Long Knives” purge of 1934, which demanded the utmost obedience from the SS. In essence, he’s saying: We were ordered to slaughter an entire people, and we’ve done it out of loyalty and duty.
It’s hard to overstate how shocking this moment is – not only to us, but even within the context of Nazi secrecy. This was a regime that was extremely careful never to discuss the mass murder of Jews in plain terms in public. The word “genocide” didn’t even exist yet (Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin would coin it in 1944). And yet here, behind closed doors, Himmler just speaks the unspeakable. Why? Perhaps to ensure that his SS generals are all on the same page, bound together by the knowledge of this colossal crime. It’s a perverse form of esprit de corps: we’ve all done this terrible thing together, we all share responsibility, and we will take this secret to our graves. He even explicitly says this is something that “we will never speak of publicly.” One can imagine a few gulps in that room, maybe some uneasy shifting in seats. The SS officers knew of the mass killings, of course – some had overseen shootings or managed camps – but hearing their commander validate it so directly might have felt jarring, even to them. It was as if Himmler were conducting a dark communion, sanctifying the blood on their hands.
“The Most Difficult Task We’ve Ever Had”
Having unmasked the euphemism and uttered the word “extermination,” Himmler then doubles down to justify these heinous deeds. Not only was it necessary, he argues, but it was a heroic burden that the SS had shouldered. “Most of you know what it means when 100 corpses lie together, when 500 lie there or when 1,000 lie there,” he reminds them bluntly. Pause on that image: piles of a hundred, five hundred, a thousand bodies. He assumes – correctly – that many in his audience have personally witnessed mass graves and killing fields. There is no euphemism here, no gentle wording. And then, in one of the most grotesque flips of morality imaginable, Himmler frames this mass murder as a source of pride. “This is a never written and never to be written page of glory in our history,” he proclaims. Think about that – a “page of glory” that is never to be written. The genocide of Europe’s Jews is, to Himmler, a secret triumph, something that will not be celebrated openly in history books or songs, but which, in the furtive lore of the SS, will shine as their finest hour. Why never to be written? Because even the Nazi leadership knew how utterly reprehensible and criminal this was, should the outside world find out. So it must remain unspoken – yet he wants his men to know in their hearts that they’ve done something grand for the fatherland. If your stomach is turning, you’re not alone. How the SS officers in that room reacted internally, we can only imagine – but outwardly, we can guess there were solemn nods of agreement, perhaps even a murmur of approval. In this twisted circle, murdering millions of defenseless people – men, women, children – was an accomplishment to be proud of.
Himmler’s rhetoric then casts the SS as almost martyrs or unsung heroes of a dirty job. He laments that ordinary Germans have no idea what sacrifices the SS have made for them. In his words, the SS had “implemented what they were told to do and still remained decent, that has made us hard”. There’s a jarring irony here: Himmler uses the word “decent” – as if one could participate in genocide and still call oneself a decent human being. But to him, decency means something entirely different: it means sticking to the cause, not faltering, not stealing jewels from the victims (he actually criticizes those who sought personal gain from killings elsewhere in the speech). Decency, in his warped moral universe, means being able to shoot hundreds of people and then have a nice dinner without losing your nerve or your dedication to the Nazi ideal. And hardness – that was a compliment. To be “hard” enough to kill innocents and feel it was all morally right – that was the SS way.
He proceeds to justify the genocide with one more nauseating argument: security. If any Jews had survived, he insists, they would have surely grown up to “act as partisans, sabotaging Germany’s war effort”. Thus, by this logic, even the Jewish children had to be killed – to preempt some future threat they might pose. He infamously compares Jews to deadly germs or bacteria that had to be eliminated for the health of the body politic. And on he goes, praising the SS for carrying out “this hardest task out of love to our people”. Love! In this upside-down morality, mass murder is an act of love – tough love, you might say – toward the German people, to secure their future. The monstrosity of these ideas, as one historian later put it, “tests the limits of comprehensibility”. Indeed, it’s hard for any sane person to wrap their head around the fact that educated men could applaud themselves for systematically murdering children and call it love and duty. Yet here we are, listening to it straight from Himmler’s mouth.
Himmler ended that October 4th speech, fittingly, with fulsome praise of Adolf Hitler – a “slavish paean,” as it’s been described. He lauded Hitler as the man who “created the Germanic Reich” and who would “lead us into the Germanic future”. With that sycophantic tribute, the meeting concluded. The SS generals filed out, carrying with them the heavy knowledge that their leader had entrusted them with: explicit confirmation that the Final Solution – the annihilation of the Jews – was happening under their watch and was considered their ultimate duty and honor. One might imagine them later that evening, clinking glasses of cognac (or perhaps swigs of schnapps) and reassuring each other that history would thank them – even if in secret – for what they had done. It was a grim brotherhood of guilt.
No Innocents, No Mercy: Two Days Later at Posen City Hall
Remarkably, Himmler wasn’t finished. Two days later, on October 6, 1943, he addressed another gathering in Posen – this time of Nazi Party officials, the Gauleiter (regional party leaders) and Reichsleiter. The venue shifted to the ornate Posen City Hall, but the message remained just as infernal. If October 4 had been about bringing the SS on board with the candid truth, October 6 was about doing the same with the Nazi Party hierarchy. Once again, Himmler spoke about the mass murder of Jews with striking frankness. He framed it in almost personal terms, as if sharing an inner struggle. “The Jewish question has been the most difficult question I’ve had to face in my life,” he confessed. Difficult not because he wrestled with the morality of it – but because, in his view, it required steeling himself to do what he thought had to be done. In this second speech, Himmler explicitly discussed the murder of women and children, and he defended it without a hint of remorse. Mercy, he argued, would be misplaced.
He spelled it out with an awful clarity that still shocks us today: I did not feel justified, he said, in exterminating the men only to let their children grow up and seek revenge against our children and grandchildren. Therefore, “the difficult decision had to be taken to make these people disappear from the face of the earth,” Himmler explained. All of them. Men, women, children – an entire people wiped out, “disappeared” from the face of the earth. He acknowledged it was “the most difficult” task they had ever had to undertake, but implied that history (and Hitler) would judge them kindly for their resolve. This was as close as one gets to hearing a Nazi official articulate the rationale for genocide in plain German. It’s almost as if Himmler, in these Posen speeches, wanted to create an oral record for the future – a justification that could be cited if anyone ever questioned how such atrocities were possible. We had no choice, the reasoning goes. We had to do it for the safety of our future. We even had to kill the children. This horrendous logic of absolute enmity – that an entire ethnicity, down to its last infant, must be obliterated – is what we confront when we talk about the Holocaust. It’s vital to remember: this was not a spontaneous frenzy of violence. It was a calculated policy, discussed behind gilded doors by men who then went home to dinner. Hearing Himmler’s words, one cannot escape that reality.
Aftermath: Harveset of Death and the Legacy of Remembrance
What happened after those sinister speeches in Posen? Did the killing stop? Far from it – in fact, it escalated. A mere week later, on October 14, 1943, prisoners at the Sobibór death camp in Poland rose in revolt, managing to kill several guards and break out to freedom (roughly 60 of them made it out). This act of Jewish resistance, coming on the heels of Himmler’s speeches, was met with swift and merciless retaliation. Himmler ordered “Operation Harvest Festival” (Erntefest) in early November 1943 – an ironically code-named bloodbath. During this operation, SS and police units massacred tens of thousands of remaining Jewish prisoners in the Lublin district of Poland. In just a couple of days, at places like Majdanek, Trawniki, and Poniatowa, mass graves were filled with bodies in one of the single largest killing actions of the war. It was the gruesome final act of Himmler’s effort to wipe out Polish Jewry. At the same time, the Nazis hurried to cover their tracks: the Operation Reinhard death camps (Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec) were dismantled, their grounds plowed over and replanted to hide the evidence of genocide.
Yet, as frantic as these efforts were, they were not signs of a regime repenting or relenting – they were the last convulsions of a genocidal machine determined to complete its mission. Mass extermination did not slow down as Germany’s military fortunes waned; perversely, it ramped up. Even with the Allies advancing on all fronts in 1944, the trains to Auschwitz kept running on time. The dying continued until the very final days of the war. Why? Because, as Himmler’s Posen speeches laid bare, the Nazi leadership was committed to the exterminationist mindset to the bitter end. They had convinced themselves – in a chilling mix of ideological fervor and self-pitying “toughness” – that annihilating the Jews was not only necessary but noble.
And so, we come back to Holocaust Remembrance Day – to now. Why dredge up these abhorrent words of Himmler today? Because we must. Because in the ashes of the crematoria and the silence of mass graves, there are lessons that only the perpetrators’ own admissions can teach. Himmler’s Posen speeches are a stark reminder that the Holocaust was not an accident of history; it was a deliberate choice, articulated and defended by those in power. When we say “Never Again,” it’s not just a hope – it’s a call to vigilance. We study these speeches, as nauseating as they are, to understand how prejudice can slide into policy, how ordinary men can become architects of atrocity, and how crucial it is to stop such hatred before it reaches the point of no return.
Professor Bob Brier once said in a different context that to truly appreciate ancient Egyptian history, you have to listen to the voices of the past – read their hieroglyphs, hear their stories. The same holds true for this darkest chapter of modern history. We have to listen to Himmler’s words (through the safety of time and scholarship) to grasp the full depravity of what the Nazis envisioned. It’s painful, it’s disturbing, but it’s necessary. On this day of remembrance, as we light candles against the darkness, we recount not only the stories of victims but also the confessions of the villains – so that we remember exactly what “Never Again” forbids.
Holocaust Remembrance Day is a day of hope as much as sorrow: hope that by remembering, we inoculate ourselves against evil. The Posen speeches of October 1943 are among the vilest sermons ever delivered in the temple of death that was the Third Reich. But we retell this horrific tale with a kind of curiosity and candor because understanding how and why it happened is one of the best defenses we have against it happening again. So let us remember, let us never forget, and let us never cease asking the question: how do we prevent the next Himmler from ever taking center stage?