An Introductory History
The Holocaust (also called Ha-Shoah in Hebrew) refers to the period from January 30, 1933 -
when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany - to May 8, 1945, when the war in Europe officially ended. During this time, Jews in Europe
were subjected to progressively harsher persecution that ultimately led
to the murder of 6,000,000 Jews (1.5 million of these being children)
and the destruction of 5,000 Jewish communities. These deaths represented
two-thirds of European Jewry and one-third of all world Jewry.
The Jews who died were not casualties of the fighting that ravaged Europe during World War II. Rather, they
were the victims of Germany's deliberate and systematic attempt to annihilate
the entire Jewish population of Europe, a plan Hitler called the “Final Solution” (Endlosung).
Background
After its defeat in World War I, Germany was humiliated
by the Versailles Treaty, which reduced its prewar territory, drastically
reduced its armed forces, demanded the recognition of its guilt for the
war, and stipulated it pay reparations to the allied powers. With the German
Empire destroyed, a new parliamentary government called the Weimar Republic
was formed. The republic suffered from economic instability, which grew
worse during the worldwide depression after the New York stock market crash
in 1929. Massive inflation followed by very high unemployment heightened
existing class and political differences and began to undermine the
government.
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler, leader of the National
Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party, was named chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg after the Nazi party won a significant percentage
of the vote in the elections of 1932. The Nazi Party had taken advantage
of the political unrest in Germany to gain an electoral foothold. The
Nazis incited clashes with the communists and conducted a vicious propaganda
campaign against its political opponents - the weak Weimar government
and the Jews whom the Nazis blamed for Germany's ills.
Propaganda: “The Jews Are Our Misfortune”
A major tool of the Nazis' propaganda assault was the weekly
Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer (The Attacker). At the bottom of the front page of each issue, in bold
letters, the paper proclaimed, "The Jews are our misfortune!" Der Stürmer also regularly featured cartoons of Jews in which
they were caricatured as hooked-nosed and apelike. The influence of
the newspaper was far-reaching: by 1938 about a half million copies
were distributed weekly.
Soon after he became chancellor, Hitler called for new elections in
an effort to get full control of the Reichstag, the German parliament,
for the Nazis. The Nazis used the government apparatus to terrorize
the other parties. They arrested their leaders and banned their political
meetings. Then, in the midst of the election campaign, on February 27, 1933, the Reichstag
building burned. A Dutchman named Marinus van der Lubbe was arrested
for the crime, and he swore he had acted alone. Although many suspected
the Nazis were ultimately responsible for the act, the Nazis managed
to blame the Communists, thus turning more votes their way.
The fire signaled the demise of German democracy. On the
next day, the government, under the pretense of controlling the Communists,
abolished individual rights and protections: freedom of the press,
assembly, and expression were nullified, as well as the right to privacy.
When the elections were held on March 5, the Nazis received nearly 44
percent of the vote, and with 8 percent offered by the Conservatives, won a
majority in the government.
The Nazis moved swiftly to consolidate their power into
a dictatorship. On March 23, the Enabling Act was passed. It sanctioned Hitler’s dictatorial efforts
and legally enabled him to pursue them further. The Nazis marshaled their
formidable propaganda machine to silence their critics. They also developed
a sophisticated police and military force.
The Sturmabteilung (S.A., Storm Troopers), a
grassroots organization, helped Hitler undermine the German democracy. The Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei, Secret State Police), a force recruited
from professional police officers, was given complete freedom to arrest
anyone after February 28. The Schutzstaffel (SS, Protection Squad) served as Hitler’s personal bodyguard
and eventually controlled the concentration
camps and the Gestapo.
The Sicherheitsdienst des ReichsführersSS (S.D., Security Service of the SS) functioned as the Nazis' intelligence
service, uncovering enemies and keeping them under surveillance.
With this police infrastructure in place, opponents of the
Nazis were terrorized, beaten, or sent to one of the concentration
camps the Germans built to incarcerate them. Dachau, just outside of Munich, was
the first such camp built for political prisoners. Dachau's purpose
changed over time and eventually became another brutal concentration
camp for Jews.
By the end of 1934 Hitler was in absolute control of
Germany, and his campaign against the Jews in full swing. The Nazis
claimed the Jews corrupted pure German culture with their "foreign"
and "mongrel" influence. They portrayed the Jews as evil and
cowardly, and Germans as hardworking, courageous, and honest. The Jews,
the Nazis claimed, who were heavily represented in finance, commerce,
the press, literature, theater, and the arts, had weakened Germany's
economy and culture. The massive government-supported propaganda machine
created a racial anti-Semitism, which
was different from the longstanding anti-Semitic tradition of the Christian
churches.
The superior race was the "Aryans," the
Germans. The word Aryan, "derived from the study of linguistics, which
started in the eighteenth century and at some point determined that the
Indo-Germanic (also known as Aryan) languages were superior in their
structures, variety, and vocabulary to the Semitic languages that had
evolved in the Near East. This judgment led to a certain conjecture about
the character of the peoples who spoke these languages; the conclusion was
that the 'Aryan' peoples were likewise superior to the 'Semitic' ones"
(Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 36).
The Jews Are Isolated from Society
The Nazis then combined their racial theories with
the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin to justify their treatment
of the Jews. The Germans, as the strongest and fittest, were destined
to rule, while the weak and racially adulterated Jews were doomed to
extinction. Hitler began to restrict the Jews with legislation and terror, which entailed burning books written by Jews, removing Jews from their professions and public schools, confiscating
their businesses and property and excluding them from public events.
The most infamous of the anti-Jewish legislation were the Nuremberg Laws, enacted on September
15, 1935. They
formed the legal basis for the Jews' exclusion from German society and
the progressively restrictive Jewish policies of the Germans.
Many Jews attempted to flee Germany, and thousands
succeeded by immigrating to such countries as Belgium,
Czechoslovakia, England, France and Holland.
It was much more difficult to get out of Europe. Jews encountered stiff
immigration quotas in most of the world's countries. Even if they obtained
the necessary documents, they often had to wait months or years before
leaving. Many families out of desperation sent their children first.
In July 1938,
representatives of 32 countries met in the French town of Evian to discuss the refugee and immigration problems created by the Nazis
in Germany. Nothing substantial was done or decided at the Evian Conference,
and it became apparent to Hitler that no one wanted the Jews and that he would not meet resistance in
instituting his Jewish policies. By the autumn of 1941, Europe was in
effect sealed to most legal emigration. The Jews were trapped.
On November 9-10, 1938,
the attacks on the Jews became violent. Hershel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old
Jewish boy distraught at the deportation of his family, shot Ernst vom
Rath, the third secretary in the German Embassy in Paris, who died on
November 9. Nazi hooligans used this assassination as the pretext for
instigating a night of destruction that is now known as Kristallnacht (the night of broken glass). They looted and destroyed Jewish homes
and businesses and burned synagogues. Many Jews were beaten and killed;
30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
The Jews Are Confined to Ghettos
Germany invaded Poland in September 1939,
beginning World War II.
Soon after, in 1940,
the Nazis began establishing ghettos for the Jews of Poland. More than 10 percent
of the Polish population was Jewish, numbering about three million. Jews were forcibly deported from their homes to live in crowded ghettos,
isolated from the rest of society.
This concentration of the Jewish
population later aided the Nazis in their deportation of the Jews to
the death camps. The ghettos lacked the necessary food, water, space,
and sanitary facilities required by so many people living within their
constricted boundaries. Many died of deprivation and starvation.
The “Final Solution”
In June 1941 Germany attacked the Soviet Union and began the "Final
Solution." Four mobile killing groups were formed called Einsatzgruppen A, B, C and D. Each group contained several commando units. The Einsatzgruppen gathered Jews town by town, marched them to huge pits dug earlier, stripped them,
lined them up, and shot them with automatic weapons. The dead and dying
would fall into the pits to be buried in mass graves. In the infamous Babi Yar massacre, near Kiev, 30,000-35,000 Jews were
killed in two days. In addition to their operations in the Soviet Union,
the Einsatzgruppen conducted
mass murder in eastern Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. It is
estimated that by the end of 1942,
the Einsatzgruppen had murdered
more than 1.3 million Jews.
On January 20, 1942,
several top officials of the German government met to officially coordinate
the military and civilian administrative branches of the Nazi system
to organize a system of mass murder of the Jews. This meeting, called
the Wannsee Conference, "marked
the beinning of the full-scale, comprehensive extermination operation
[of the Jews] and laid the foundations for its organization, which started
immediately after the conference ended" (Yahil, The Holocaust,
p. 318).
While the Nazis murdered other national and ethnic
groups, such as a number of Soviet prisoners of war, Polish intellectuals,
and gypsies, only the Jews were marked for systematic and total
annihilation. Jews were singled out for "Special Treatment" (Sonderbehandlung),
which meant that Jewish men, women and children were to be methodically
killed with poisonous gas. In the exacting records kept at the Auschwitz death camp, the cause of
death of Jews who had been gassed was indicated by "SB," the
first letters of the two words that form the German term for "Special
Treatment."
By the spring of 1942, the Nazis had established six killing centers (death camps) in
Poland: Chelmno (Kulmhof), Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Maidanek and Auschwitz. All were located near
railway lines so that Jews could be easily transported daily. A vast system
of camps (called Lagersystem) supported the death camps. The purpose
of these camps varied: some were slave labor camps, some transit camps,
others concentration camps and their subcamps, and still others the
notorious death camps. Some camps combined all of these functions or a few
of them. All the camps were intolerably brutal.
The major concentration camps were Ravensbruck,
Neuengamme, Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen,
Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, Flossenburg,
Natzweiler-Struthof, Dachau, Mauthausen, Stutthof, and Dora/Nordhausen.
In nearly every country overrun by the Nazis, the Jews were forced to wear badges marking them as Jews, they were rounded up into
ghettos or concentration camps and then gradually transported to the
killing centers. The death camps were essentially factories for murdering Jews. The Germans shipped thousands of Jews to them each day. Within a few
hours of their arrival, the Jews had been stripped of their possessions and
valuables, gassed to death, and their bodies burned in specially designed
crematoriums. Approximately 3.5 million Jews were murdered in these death
camps.
Many healthy, young strong Jews were not killed
immediately. The Germans' war effort and the “Final Solution” required a
great deal of manpower, so the Germans reserved large pools of Jews for
slave labor. These people, imprisoned in concentration and labor camps,
were forced to work in German munitions and other factories, such as I.G.
Farben and Krupps, and wherever the Nazis needed laborers. They were worked
from dawn until dark without adequate food and shelter. Thousands perished,
literally worked to death by the Germans and their collaborators.
In the last months of Hitler’s Reich, as the
German armies retreated, the Nazis began marching the prisoners still alive
in the concentration camps to the territory they still controlled. The
Germans forced the starving and sick Jews to walk hundreds of miles. Most
died or were shot along the way. About a quarter of a million Jews died on
the death marches.
Jewish Resistance
The Germans' overwhelming repression and the presence of
many collaborators in the various local populations severely limited the
ability of the Jews to resist. Jewish resistance did occur, however,
in several forms. Staying alive, clean, and observing Jewish religious
traditions constituted resistance under the dehumanizing conditions imposed
by the Nazis. Other forms of resistance involved escape attempts from the
ghettos and camps. Many who succeeded in escaping the ghettos lived in the
forests and mountains in family camps and in fighting partisan units. Once
free, though, the Jews had to contend with local residents and partisan
groups who were often openly hostile. Jews also staged armed revolts in the ghettos of Vilna, Bialystok, Bedzin-Sosnowiec,
Cracow, and Warsaw.
The Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising was the largest ghetto revolt. Massive deportations (or Aktions) had been held in the ghetto from July to September 1942,
emptying the ghetto of the majority of Jews imprisoned there. When the
Germans entered the ghetto again in January 1943 to remove several thousand
more, small unorganized groups of Jews attacked them. After four days, the
Germans withdrew from the ghetto, having deported far fewer people than
they had intended. The Nazis reentered the ghetto on April 19, 1943, the
eve of Passover, to evacuate the
remaining Jews and close the ghetto. The Jews, using homemade bombs and
stolen or bartered weapons, resisted and withstood the Germans for 27 days.
They fought from bunkers and sewers and evaded capture until the Germans
burned the ghetto building by building. By May 16 the ghetto was in ruins
and the uprising crushed.
Jews also revolted in the death camps of Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz.
All of these acts of resistance were largely unsuccessful in the face of the superior German forces, but
they were very important spiritually, giving the Jews hope that one day the
Nazis would be defeated.
Liberation and the End of War
The camps were liberated gradually, as the Allies advanced on the German army. For example, Maidanek (near Lublin, Poland) was
liberated by Soviet forces in July 1944, Auschwitz in January 1945 by the Soviets, Bergen-Belsen (near
Hanover, Germany) by the British in April 1945, and Dachau by the Americans in April 1945.
At the end of the war, between 50,000 and 100,000 Jewish
survivors were living in three zones of occupation: American, British and
Soviet. Within a year, that figure grew to about 200,000. The American zone
of occupation contained more than 90 percent of the Jewish displaced persons (DPs). The
Jewish DPs would not and could not return to their homes, which brought
back such horrible memories and still held the threat of danger from anti-Semitic
neighbors. Thus, they languished in DP camps until emigration could be
arranged to Palestine, and later Israel, the United States, South America
and other countries. The last DP camp closed in 1957 (David S. Wyman,
"The United States," in David S. Wyman, ed., The World Reacts
to the Holocaust, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996,
pp. 70710).
Below are figures for the number of Jews murdered in
each country that came under German domination. They are estimates,
as are all figures relating to Holocaust victims. The numbers given here for Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania are based on
their territorial borders before the 1938 Munich agreement. The total
number of six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust,
which emerged from the Nuremberg
trials, is also an estimate. Numbers have ranged between five and
seven million killed.
COUNTRY |
Jews Killed |
Country |
Jews Killed |
Africa |
526 |
Hungary |
305,000 |
Albania |
200 |
Italy |
8,000 |
Austria |
65,000 |
Latvia |
85,000 |
Belgium |
24,387 |
Lithuania |
135,000 |
Czechoslovakia |
277,000 |
Luxembourg |
700 |
Denmark |
77 |
Netherlands |
106,000 |
Estonia |
4,000 |
Norway |
728 |
France |
83,000 |
Poland |
3,001,000 |
Germany |
160,000 |
Romania |
364,632 |
Greece |
71,301 |
Soviet Union |
1,500,000 |
Yugoslavia |
67,122 |
TOTAL: 6,258,673 |
Sources: Holocaust Memorial Center
6602 West Maple Road
West Bloomfield, MI 48322
Tel. (248)6610840 Fax. (248)6614204
[email protected]; http://www.holocaustcenter.org |