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.”

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”