The Nazis did not inaugurate the systematic killing of Jews until 1941, but from the beginning they were building concentration camps and sending Jews to them—and sometimes murdering them. The first such murder, Kim Wünschmann relates in Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps, occurred as early as 1933 in Dachau. James Rosen writes in his review:

[W]hen the prisoners had been assembled for the purpose of receiving their mail—an amenity still observed at that early stage of things—an SS officer named Hans Steinbrenner, known for his brutality, interrupted the proceedings to demand that [four of the prisoners] report for more work in the gravel pit. A contingent of SS men marched the four outside the camp’s walls, to the woods nearby, and shot them. . . . The next morning, Dachau’s remaining prisoners, alarmed by the sound of the shots and fearful of what they portended, were informed that the four had been killed while trying to escape. . . .

The circumstances surrounding these murders—the unprecedented appearance of the SS guards in the prisoners’ barracks before dawn, the singling out of the eventual victims for punitive work and their removal from the grounds immediately prior to their deaths—strongly suggest that the killings were premeditated. Thus did Dachau become, in the words of German historian Jürgen Matthäus, “the first institution in which the Nazi slogan ‘Jews, perish!’ was officially put into action.”

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.