It is hoped that memoirs due to be published following the death at the weekend of a former SS aide to Adolf Hitler will disclose just how much the Nazi leader knew about the Holocaust and was personally responsible for ordering its implementation.
Fritz Darges died at the weekend aged 96, leaving instructions for the publication of his memoirs, that contain details of the time he spent at the side of Adolf Hitler during World War Two.
Every day for four years Fritz Darges, a man the
Telegraph says trained as an export clerk before joining the SS in the spring of 1933, was present wherever the leader of Nazi Germany went. Darges attended all the major war conferences, as well as social engagements and policy announcements.
And now it is hoped that the memoirs he ordered could only be published after his death will settle once and for all the arguments over how much Hitler really knew about the Final Solution, as the extermination of the Jewish population of Europe was known.
Diaries kept by Hitler's armaments minister Albert Speer and his chief propagandist Josef Goebbels were published after the war and neither refer to hearing Hitler order the Final Solution.
Indeed over the years there have been many claims made by right-wing revisionist historians that it was SS chief Heinrich Himmler, and not Hitler, who issued the orders that resulted in the deaths of six million Jews. A number of the revisionist historians have denied that the Holocaust happened at all, some of them acknowledging that many Jews died but refusing to believe that millions of deaths occurred. The British writer
David Irving is one individual who has either denied the Holocaust or played down its significance.
However mainstream historians cannot accept that Hitler knew nothing about the fate of the Jewish people and are adamant that the German leader gave verbal orders relating to the extermination of Europe's Jews whilst his adjutant was present.
Therefore the memoirs written by Darges, a man who described Hitler as a genius and, according to the
Daily Mail, 'the greatest man who ever lived', are being eagerly anticipated as they may provide the answers to many questions that have been asked and have remained unanswered since Hitler took his own life in Berlin in 1945.
Darges joined Hitler's personal staff in 1940 and as adjutant oversaw the Fuhrer's finances and his day-to-day program. Much of his time with Hitler was spent at either the
Wolf's Lair at Rastenburg, East Prussia, the German leader's eastern headquarters, or the
Berghof, a holiday home Hitler kept at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps.
A car salesman in latter life, Darges had, prior to joining Hitler's staff, been senior adjutant to Martin Bormann, the private secretary to Hitler, and he also served with an SS panzer division in France and Russia.
Despite holding the highest gallantry award for bravery in battle, and the close relationship he had seemingly established with Hitler, Darges found himself back in the field again in 1944 after the Fuhrer took exception to a remark he had meant as a joke.
Still Darges, who told a German newspaper shortly before he died in Celle in Lower Saxony, Germany, that he first met Hitler at a rally in Nuremberg in 1934 and found him warm-hearted and with a sympathetic look, held no grudge against the man who was
Chancellor of the German nation for 12 years and
Fuhrer for more than 10 years.
Because, as Darges explained:
We all dreamed of a greater German empire. That is why I served him and would do it all again now
