Hitler's reference to the Armenian genocide

At the conclusion of his Obersalzberg Speech on 22 August 1939, a week before the German invasion of Poland, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler reportedly said "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

I have issued the command – and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy.

Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness – for the present only in the East – with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language.

[9]However, the version of the speech with the Armenian reference was included in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, a collection of documentary evidence prepared by the American and British prosecuting staffs for presentation before the Nuremberg trials.

[14] Kevork B. Bardakjian, an expert in Armenian studies, also argues that the L-3 document originated in the notes secretly taken by Canaris during the meeting of 22 August 1939 and that it is "as sound as the other evidence submitted at Nuremberg".

[17] In his 1987 survey of the historiography of the Holocaust, Canadian historian Michael Marrus wrote that recent research pointed to the authenticity of the L-3 document.

[19] German historian Tobias Jersak [de] cites the statement as evidence that Hitler believed that crimes committed during wartime would be overlooked.

[20]: 575 Margaret L. Anderson, a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, said in 2010 that "we have no reason to doubt the remark is genuine" and that, regardless of whether it is, the Armenian genocide had achieved "iconic status... as the apex of horrors imaginable in 1939" and that Hitler used it to persuade the German military that committing genocide might provoke condemnation but would lead to no serious consequences for the perpetrator nation.