Holocaust

The Holocaust or Shoah was the systematic killing of the Jews of Europe by the Nazis.

Origins

The ideological underpinnings of the annihilation of the handicapped, Jews and Gypsies as well as the mass killings of Slavic populations in German-occupied eastern Europe were based on widely accepted theories of the inequality of races. Ideas of racial purity and purification had already existed long before the Nazis came to power.

The Nazis violently hated all the Jews and everything they stood for. They worked relentlessly toward the goal of removing all possible Jewish influences. Starting in the 1920s (when they were a small party) with a violently anti-Semitic rhetoric that blamed Jews for all the problems of Germany and the modern world, the Nazis defined Jews as a permanent “race” that would never change and could never be improved. The Nazis also strongly disliked Christianity as being too Jewish. Their goal was to return to a pre-Christian, all-Aryan (imaginary) world.

The second stage of Nazi policy concerning Jews, from 1933 to–1938, when Hitler was dictator in a peacetime Germany, involved the removal of Jews from all public office. The Nazis encouraged the Jews to leave and half of the Jewish population in Germany did so (including famous scientist Albert Einstein and the teenaged Henry Kissinger). The Nazis opened Dachau and other “concentration camps” to punish thousands of their political enemies—including many Jews. About 1,000 Jews were murdered in concentration camps inside Germany before 1939; these were distinct from the killing camps that were opened in 1942 in Poland.

Stage three, from 1938– for 1941, involved increasingly severe and humiliating restrictions for Jews. “Kristallnacht” in November 1938 was a systematic violent attack on all synagogues. World public opinion grew hostile to the Nazi actions, who ; they responded by supporting pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic political movements in France and other countries, including the “German-American Bund.” After invading Poland in 1939, the Nazis forced two million Jews into a few ghettoes with below-starvation food allotments.

Stage 4 began when the Germans invaded Russia in June 1941. Special units of the SS, the Security Police, and the Security Service (Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, Einsatz- and Sonderkommandos) not only massacred large numbers of Jews, but routinely included handicapped persons in open-air mass shootings. Seven of the “Einsatzgruppen” rounded up and shot Polish Catholic priests, intellectuals, and political leaders. Another five units (with 3,000 men) followed the Red Army and executed Communist commissars and partisans, and about 600,000 Russian Jews.

Stage 5 began at The Wannsee Conference in January 1942 began stage five of Nazi power; it was then that when top Nazis decided on a “Final Solution” —to round up and secretly execute all the Jews of Europe. Killing centers were opened in Poland, and thousands of trainloads of Jews were transported there. and Jews were gassed immediately upon arrival.cmc3 Over three million Jews (and numbers of gypsies and other hated groups) were murdered, mostly in 1942–43.

Stage 6 arrived when the Soviet armies overran the Polish camps in 1944–45 and, liberated the survivors. In all, six million Jews were murdered; most of the 300,000 survivors emigrated to the United States or Israel.

Analytically, the people involved in the Holocaust can be divided into the following groups follows.

Victims

Millions were victimized by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. The Jews were always the principal targets; however, the Nazis also systematically hunted down and murdered the Roma people (“Gypsies”). They also targeted special enemies, including Communist activists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and people with disabilities. The last group was the target of euthanasia programs carried out in German hospitals in 1939–1941., and These programs were stopped when German Christian leaders mobilized public opinion against them.

Perpetrators

Under the guidance of an all-powerful führer (Hitler), the Nazis believed fervently in force, violence, and terror as their best weapons. The most fanatical Nazis joined the SS, which carried out most of the executions. The Final Solution was directed by Heinrich Himmler, commander of the SS and Minister of the Interior. He was captured in 1945 and committed suicide before his war crimes trial began. His top aide was Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo and, after 1939, of all the secret police agencies grouped into the RSHA; he was assassinated by Czech commandos with British help in 1942. Adolf Eichmann was the senior SS bureaucrat in charge of handling deportation and transportation. However, regular German army police units also systematically killed large numbers of civilians and POWs on the Eastern Front. After the war, West Germany recognized its guilt and made large financial payments to Israel., but However Communist East Germany refused to do the same.

Bystanders

In recent years much controversy has arisen over when President Franklin D. Roosevelt learned what about the Nazis, and what he did or did not do. Switzerland was neutral and accepted in some refugees, but it also made large profits by trading and banking with Germany;, and was in the 1990s the Swiss were forced in the 1990s to make reparation payments.

Collaborators

In rounding up Jews the Nazis sometimes had the enthusiastic cooperation of pro-Nazi governments (as in France and Slovakia). A few countries, including Italy and Hungary, tried to stall the Nazis, but the Germans took power directly and seized the Jews. Only Bulgaria and Denmark were largely successful in protecting their Jews.

Resisters

Resistance took many forms, from individual acts to hundreds of examples of organized, armed resistance. The most famous episode was the month-long uprising of 60,000 remaining Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943. At the Sobibor death camp, an uprising in October 1943 allowed 600 prisoners to escape.

Rescuers

Rescuers hid potential victims as best they could; the tragic story of Anne Frank is the most famous. The Danish people managed to ferry their entire Jewish population to neutral Sweden in one night, under the noses of the Nazis. The pope helped protect some Italian Jews; it is still being debated whether or not he could have done much more. The most famous rescuer was Oskar Schindler; —“Schindler’s List” the movie is a tells the true story about of how he saved 1,100 Jews from the Nazis by setting up factories that produced defective munitions..

Liberators

The Allies liberated the concentration camps in 1945, —but could they have the question remains whether they could have bombed the camps or otherwise stopped the Final Solution.? The main war criminals were tried at the International War Crimes Tribunals at Nuremberg in 1945–1947, and at smaller trials throughout Europe. The Holocaust was mentioned at the trials, but the major allegation against defendants was the systematic planning of an unjust war. The Far East War Crimes Trials were held from 1946 to 1948, and resulted in the conviction of 25 Japanese generals and high officials accused of crimes against peace. Over 2,000 local and regional trials convicted 4,000 Japanese officers accused of mistreating prisoners and civilians.

Survivors

The survivors of the Final Solution were very quiet about their experiences until about 1961, when Adolf Eichmann was captured in South America by Israel, tried in Jerusalem, and executed. Since then the Holocaust has become recognized as the most horrible episode of the twentieth20th century, and it has been analyzed in numerous with many books, courses, museums, and movies. The most important museums are the Holocaust Museum in Washington, and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.