An objection to having been 'taken out of context' is the first resort of any politician of no matter what persuasion the moment he or she is challenged for being inaccurate, stupid, outrageous, indelicate or some other variation on these adjectives or their synonyms. It's not usual to ask what precisely is the context the speaker in question has been 'taken out of'; it's enough that this desperate, semi-literate plea is its own condemnation.
The latest resort to absent contextual sensitivity, however — that of Senator Fraser Anning in order to duck the implications of the phrase 'final solution' in his barbarous maiden speech — perhaps deserves a modicum of contextualising.
Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich, also known as Der Henker (The Hangman), the Blond Beast (by his colleagues), the Butcher of Prague (by the Czechs) and 'the man with the iron heart' (admiringly by Hitler) rose rapidly through pre-war Nazi ranks to survive Heinrich Himmler's displeasure and attract Hitler's praise as 'a highly gifted but also very dangerous man, whose gifts the movement had to retain ... for he would eternally be grateful to us that we had kept him and not expelled him and would obey blindly'.
Obey blindly he did: slavishly interpreting Hitler's dictum, 'All means ... are legal if they subserve the will of the Führer', and under Himmler's direction, Heydrich formed the Special Action Einsatz groups to assassinate Poland's leading professional, political, religious and aristocratic figures. Turning his attention to Poland's more than two million Jews, he forced those he didn't have executed into Ghettos in Cracow, Warsaw and Lodz where, by half way through 1941, half a million of them had died from starvation, disease or summary execution. And that was only the beginning.
In 1939 Heydrich had announced that an ambitious young SS-Obersturmführer named Adolph Eichmann was his 'special expert' in the management of the deportation of Jews into the region known as General Government — the area of Poland not yet part of the Reich. Eichmann supervised this process during which thousands of Jews died in unspeakable conditions on the trains and thousands more in the transit camps. During 1941 the policy of deportation became one of extermination, and Heydrich and Eichmann devoted their energies to achieving the Fuhrer's target of 'the physical extermination of the Jews'.
Himmler, who had never experienced combat and indeed never would, was unable to cope with the sight of kneeling Jews being