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 shot by the hundreds and abandoned in an open grave into which they fell as they were cut down. His order that a more efficient procedure be adopted led eventually to the gas chambers and the use of Zyklon B in the concentration camps. Heydrich's efficient, merciless execution of these orders assisted his continued ascent through the Nazi hierarchy and when, on 31 July 1941, Hitler ordered Reich Marshal Hermann Göring to prepare 'a general plan of the ... measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution (Endlösung) of the Jewish question', it was to Heydrich that Göring turned.
Heydrich accordingly convened the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942 to coordinate the 'Final Solution', the aim of which was to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe and the Soviet Union — about 11 million people in all. Heydrich vowed that 'Europe would be combed of Jews from east to west'.
"The Final Solution remained a pre-eminent aim: Himmler instituted Aktion Reinhard — named in Reinhard's honour — and increased the rate and efficiency of exterminations."
His willingness and efficiency in the business of Jewish extermination earned Heydrich another promotion: he became Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in former Czechoslovakia and set up headquarters in Prague where he immediately established one of the most notoriously evil of the ghettos, Theresienstadt, and began vigorously earning his reputation as the Butcher of Prague and the most feared instrument of the Final Solution.
But Heydrich, always viciously narcissistic, and by now regarded as Hitler's possible successor, had become brazenly arrogant, imperious and murderously ambitious.
Spurning protection, he habitually travelled in an open car and was killed by a British trained Czech and Slovak duo, Josef Gabcik and Jan Kubis, in 'Operation Anthropoid'. In Hitler's revenge, all the men of the nearby villages of Lidice and Lezaky, falsely said to be implicated, were murdered, while the women were sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp and 81 of the 95 children taken prisoner in Lidice were gassed in Chelmno camp. Lidice was razed and obliterated.
Gabcik and Kubis hid in the crypt of the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius but were betrayed by colleague Karel Curda for one million Reichsmarks. They were not caught alive. Curda confirmed their identities after their suicide. Two hundred and ninety-four members of the extended families of Jan Kubis and others active in Operation Anthropoid were executed at Mauthausen concentration camp.
On 4 September 1942, the bishop, priests, senior lay leaders and some of the flock of the Church were shot by Nazi firing squads at Prague's Kobylisy Shooting Range. The Final Solution, however, remained a pre-eminent aim: Himmler instituted Aktion Reinhard — named in Reinhard's honour — and increased the rate and efficiency of exterminations.
There you are Senator (and those parliamentarians who shook your hand in congratulation): will that do for context?
Brian Matthews is honorary professor of English at Flinders University and an award winning columnist and biographer.