The Holocaust is the name given to the genocide (mass murder of a people) of approximately 6 million Jews during World War 2 – two thirds of the 9 million Jews living in Europe at the time. It was state-sponsored murder orchestrated by Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Party within Nazi Germany and its occupied territories. The Holocaust is perhaps the most shameful act humans have ever committed against other humans, and it all happened within the last century.
So how could this have happened? To even begin to understand, we need to look at the atmosphere in which Hitler’s Nazi Party formed, flourished and rose to power.
German nationalism had been on the rise since the end of World War 1. This nationalism combined with bubbling, long-held feelings of Anti-Semitism (distrust or hatred of Jewish people) within Europe which became aggressively re-energised by an idea in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries – propagated by the populist German Volkisch Movement – that Jews and Aryans (the alleged modern descendants of a mythical master race) were ‘competing’ in an ethnic struggle for world domination. Jewishness became categorised as a race – not just a religion – that should be ‘defeated’ and such abhorrent views became mainstream, even within Germany’s educated professional classes. The new evolutionary theory of Darwinism was still in its relative infancy as well and the Volkisch Movement seized on the idea of ‘Social Darwinism’ to justify its racial beliefs.
The German nationalist Adolph Hitler wrote the book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in 1925. Hitler’s intent to drive Jews out of German political, intellectual and cultural life was well-known by the time his Nazi Party came to power in the country in 1933. When the Nazis came to power, Anti-Semitic laws were introduced immediately, preventing Jewish people from working in the German civil service, as physicians, farm-owners, lawyers or judges. Jews were expelled from schools, universities and newspapers. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws prohibited Jews from marrying or having sex with Aryans and stripped them of their German citizenship. Hitler stated that if these laws could not ‘solve’ the Jewish problem, then the problem should be handed over to the Nazi Party for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. The 1938 Weapons Act made it illegal for Jews to own guns. On a night known as Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), large-scale orchestrated violence saw almost every Jewish synagogue in Germany damaged or destroyed. 30,000 Jews were rounded up and placed in concentration camps. Public life for Jews in Germany had effectively ceased to exist.
Other countries followed. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939 (starting World War 2), most of Poland’s 3 million Jews were rounded up into ghettos to work for the German war effort. Thousands died from maltreatment, disease, starvation and exhaustion, although there was not yet a program of systemic killing in place. Germany then invaded Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium and France in 1940, with Anti-Jewish policies being put in place in those countries. German allies such as Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Finland and Croatia did the same. There were around 4 million Jews in western Russia – many had fled there to escape – when Germany invaded in 1941 and then the mass murders began in earnest: 33,771 Jews were murdered in one day alone at the Babi Yar ravine in the Ukraine. 80% of the Lithuanian Jews had been killed by the end of 1941.
Jews in all German occupied territories were rounded up into ghettos to contain them. By 1942 six large concentration camps had been set up in which inmates were subjected to slave labour until they died of exhaustion or disease. Horrendous experiments were conducted at Auschwitz, Dachau and other camps such as injecting chemicals into children’s eyes to see whether eye colour could be changed. If they were unfit to work, adults were murdered in gas chambers disguised as shower blocks – the first time in human history that establishments were constructed for the express purpose of mass murder.
The Nazis tried to carry out these mass killings in secret but the stench of burning bodies could be detected for miles around. One of the most bewildering aspects of The Holocaust to the outside observer looking back is the almost complete lack of resistance from the Jews to the genocide being perpetrated against them. After suffering centuries of oppression and prejudice, many Jews tried to appeal to and reason with their oppressors – the realisation that this time it was different came much, much too late. By the time of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, most of the Jews in Poland were already dead. Attempted uprisings at the Treblinka extermination camp in 1943 and at Auschwitz in 1944 were brutally suppressed. Additionally, many Jews believed passivity to be a form of resistance: it was to die with dignity, showing no panic or despair. Many families also preferred to die together rather than separate and fight. Others still brought suitcases to the death camps, believing they were merely being resettled, not sent to their deaths.
There is fierce debate to this day about the complicity of German civilians in the Holocaust – many claim they too thought the Jews were simply being rounded up to be resettled. Others claim the public knew exactly what was happening and remained silent. The rest of Europe too has been criticised for being slow to react, or even of willfully ignoring what was happening. The western ‘Allies’ of World War 2 (the UK and US) had been told of the Jewish death camps as early as 1942 by resistance fighters in Poland, but felt these stories must have been exaggerated and did little more than release statements condemning racial extermination until more and more reports of what was happening began to leak out.
As the tide of World War 2 began to turn against the Germans, the genocide accelerated. By spring 1944, up to 8,000 Jews were being gassed each day at Auschwitz. However, as 1944 progressed the US and UK began advancing on Germany from the west and the Russians from the east. Concentration camps were shut down – with great efforts made to conceal the evidence of what had happened. Gas chambers were dismantled, mass graves were dug up and corpses cremated, with crops hastily planted on the sites to give the impression they had never existed. Despite such efforts, throughout 1944 and 1945 the advancing Russian, British and American armies discovered and liberated remaining death camps en route to the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany and end of World War 2. U.S Army Colonel William Quinn said of Dachau after liberating it in April 1945: “There our troops found sights, sounds and stenches horrible beyond belief, cruelties so enormous as to be incomprehensible to the human mind.”
To learn more about Anti-Semitism – the hatred of Jews – jump to Chapter 35: Anti-Semitism
To learn more about the crime of Genocide, jump to Chapter 36: Genocide
To learn more about the Nazi Party and how they rose to power, turn to Chapter 37: Nazi Party – content to follow
Post-script – Amidst all this darkness, perhaps, a small shimmer of light – the only country occupied by Nazi Germany to have a higher Jewish population at the end of World War 2 than at the start was Albania, which provided Jews with false documents, hid them when necessary and generally treated them as honoured guests; a country whose population was 60% Muslim.
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