Sonderaktion 1005 in the context of "Ordnungspolizei"

The governments of the German Empire and Nazi Germany (under Adolf Hitler) ordered, organized, and condoned a substantial number of war crimes, first in the Herero and Nama genocide and then in the First and Second World Wars. The most notable of these is the Holocaust, in which millions of European Jews were systematically abused, deported, and murdered, along with Romani in the Romani Holocaust and non-Jewish Poles. Millions of civilians and prisoners of war also died as a result of German abuses, mistreatment, and deliberate starvation policies in those two conflicts. Much of the evidence was deliberately destroyed by the perpetrators, such as in Sonderaktion 1005, in an attempt to conceal their crimes.

Pseudohistory is a form of pseudoscholarship that attempts to distort or misrepresent the historical record, often by employing methods resembling those used in scholarly historical research. The related term cryptohistory is applied to pseudohistory derived from the superstitions intrinsic to occultism. Pseudohistory is related to pseudoscience and pseudoarchaeology, and usage of the terms may occasionally overlap.

Although pseudohistory comes in many forms, scholars have identified common features in pseudohistorical works. Pseudohistory is almost always motivated by a contemporary political, religious, or personal agenda. It frequently presents sensational claims or a big lie about historical facts which would require unwarranted revision of the historical record. Another hallmark is an underlying premise that powerful groups have a furtive agenda to suppress the promoter's thesis—a premise commonly corroborated by elaborate conspiracy theories. Works of pseudohistory often point exclusively to unreliable sources—including myths and legends, often treated as literal historical truth—to support the thesis being promoted while ignoring valid sources that contradict it. Some works adopt a position of historical relativism, insisting that there is no such thing as historical truth and that any hypothesis is equal to any other. Many works conflate mere possibility with actuality, assuming that if something could have happened, then it did.