French army officers openly called for the extermination of all Jews

Evidence

The most important of the contemporary documents in this respect is the “Henry Memorial” and the various solutions it proposed to the Jewish question: Jews were to be torn to pieces like Marsyas in the Greek myth; Reinach ought to be boiled alive; Jews should be stewed in oil or pierced to death with needles; they should be “circumcised up to the neck.” One group of officers expressed great impatience to try out a new type of gun on the 100,000 Jews in the country. Among the subscribers were more than 1,000 officers, including four generals in active service, and the minister of war, Mercier. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 309

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete instance of the state-military nexus that prefigures the totalitarian apparatus later chapters theorize; pairs with the mob’s relation to elite power.
• SEED: The Henry Memorial as a document showing that genocidal rhetoric was not marginal but signed by a thousand serving officers — angle: the bureaucratic normalization of eliminationist language.