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existence,” he said, “thus it will be a racial struggle of pitiless severity, in the course of which 20 to 30 million Slavs and Jews will perish through military actions and crises of food supply.” In Himmler’s vision, the Nazi plan for Lebensraum meant clearing the Soviet Union of its indigenous population all the way to the Urals through war, murder, enslavement and deliberate starvation.
    Heydrich inspected his troops immediately before they moved out. “On that day of inspection,” Erwin Schulz recalled, the Einsatzgruppen commandos “were gathered together on the marching field . . . and lined up in the open square.” Heydrich hurried his walk through the ranks; a rainstorm was coming that might ground his plane and he needed to return to Berlin. “And then the inspection took place by Heydrich,” Schulz concludes, “and after the inspection they marched out of this place down the road.” No more sinister phalanx was ever loosed on the world.

TWO
    Vicious Circles
    The Third Reich was built on violence. It governed with violence, dominated Europe with violence and provoked a violent response that finally destroyed it. The scale of its use of violence, not only its anti-Semitism, distinguishes it from other contemporary governments and regimes. Anti-Semitism had a long history in the West and pervaded European society. The Jews of the Diaspora had migrated to Poland and western Russia in the first place because Christian anti-Semitism had driven them out of western Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Millions of copies of the widely translated, bogus Protocols of the Elders of Zion, supposedly a transcription of a secret Jewish council’s plans to subvert legitimate governments and take over the world, were sold internationally in the 1920s and 1930s; Henry Ford took the forgery as literally as Adolf Hitler did. Hitler cherished a fanatic hatred of the Jews, whom he believed to be his regime’s most dangerous enemies, and he put the highest priority on their elimination, but he intended to enslave and destroy with privation the far more numerous Slavic peoples as well, as Himmler’s words at Wewelsburg confirm.
    The control of violence is a fundamental responsibility of government. Governments control violence by monopolizing it. They authorize military and police forces to use violence but deem criminal any other individual or institutional use. From this basic division, which evolved across five centuries in the West as governments enlarged and centralized, the common belief has emerged that government violence is rational (or at least deliberate and intentional), while private violence is irrational, aberrant, the product of psychopathology rather than deliberate intention. In fact, violence is violence, whether public or private, official or unofficial, legal or illegal, good or bad. Violence is an instrumentality, not a psychopathology or a character disorder. Violence is a means to an end—domination and control—one of many possible means. Since its essence is injury, its efficacy in the long term is marginal, but its short-term advantages are obvious.
    To say that governments monopolize violence is to imply that violence is a commodity that can be collected and stored. Violence is a behavior. As such, it resides in individuals, people who have experienced it and out of that experience learned to produce it more or less on demand. Weapons enter the picture as tools violent people may or may not use to amplify their violence production. Governments monopolize violence by authorizing some of their citizens to use violence in circumstances deemed legal and official. These citizens may have come to their official duties already experienced with violence, or they may gain their violent experience through official training. However they learn to use violence, even these violent officials are authorized to do so only under specific circumstances, and if they use violence under