the war made a difference in two essential ways. First, it changed the emphasis of the moral justification for persecuting Jews which Hitler produced. This moral reasoning, crude though it might be, was an important element in the Holocaust because it was used publicly by Goebbels to secure the acquiescence or indifference of the German people, and by Himmler to promote the enthusiasm of those who manned the repressive machine itself. Until the outbreak of war, the argument ran that, since the Jews had been engaged for generations in defrauding the
