the holocaust

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The Holocaust

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Shoah, the Hebrew term used to describe the genocide of six million European Jews during WWII A program of systematic state-sponsored extermination by Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler, its allies and collaborators. Some maintain that the definition of the Holocaust should also include the Nazis' systematic murder of millions of people in other groups, ethnic Poles, the Romani, Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities, gay men, and political and religious opponents. By this definition, the total number of Holocaust victims is between 11 million and 17 million people

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Persecution was carried out in stages. Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society was enacted years before WWII. Concentration camps were established in which inmates were used as slave labour until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where the Third Reich conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings. Jews and Romani were crammed into ghettos before being transported by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them were killed in gas chambers. Every arm of Nazi Germany’s bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of this mass murder, turning the country into what one Holocaust scholar has called "a genocida state

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‘the National Socialist killing of the Jews was unique in that never before had a state with the authority of its responsible leader decided and announced that a specific human group, including its aged, its women and its children and infants, would be killed as quickly as possible, and then carried through this resolution using every possible means of state power’ Ernst Nolte

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Medical Experiments Another distinctive feature of the Holocaust was the extensive use of human subjects in medical experiments. German physicians carried out such experiments at Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen,and Natzweiler concentration camps

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Origins It has been argued that from the Middle Ages onward, German society and culture were suffused with anti-Semitism and there was a direct link from medieval pogroms to the Nazi death camps of the 1940s.

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Legal repression and emigration Throughout the 1930s, the legal, economic, and social rights of Jews were steadily restricted. In legally defining "who is Jew", the Nazis considered anyone of Jewish descent, even the descendents of converts who converted from Judaism after January 18, 1871 were still considered Jews, ‘for the Nazis, Germany drew its strength for its "purity of blood" and its "rootedness in the sacred German earth.’ In 1933, a series of laws were passed which contained "Aryan paragraphs" to exclude Jews from key areas: the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service; the physicians' law; and the farm law, forbidding Jews from owning farms or taking part in agriculture. Jewish lawyers were disbarred. Jews were excluded from schools and universities, (Law to prevent overcrowding in schools) and from belonging to the Journalists' Association, or from being owners or editors of newspapers

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Kristallnacht On 7 November 1938, Jewish minor Herschel Grünspan assassinated Nazi German diplomat Ernst von Rath in Paris. This incident was used by the Nazis to initiate the transition from legal repression to large-scale outright violence against Jewish Germans. What the Nazis claimed to be spontaneous "public outrage", was a concerted action by the Nazi’s to openly persecute Jews - the (Reich’s-) Kristallnacht or November pogroms. Jews were attacked and Jewish property was vandalized, over 7,000 Jewish shops and 1,668 synagogues, almost every synagogue in Germany was damaged or destroyed. The death toll is assumed to be much higher than the official number of 91 dead. 30,000 were sent to concentration camps, including Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Oranienburg concentration camp, where they were kept, and released only when they could either prove that they were about to emigrate or after their property had been transfersed to the Nazis.

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Resettlement and deportation to colonies and reservations Before the war, the Nazis had thought of mass resettlements of the German and European Jewry to areas outside Europe. Because Germany had lost her colonies in World War I, diplomatic efforts were undertaken to negotiate arrangements with the colonial powers, primarily the United Kingdom and France. These efforts included plans to resettle Jews to British Palestine, Italian Abyssinia, British Guinea, British Rhodesia, French Madagascar, and British Australia. The Madagascar plan

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Concentration and labour camps 1933–1945 Leading up to the 1933 elections, the Nazis began intensifying acts of violence to wreak havoc among the opposition. With the co-operation of local authorities they set up camps as concentration centres within Germany. One of the first was Dachau, which opened in March 1933. These early camps were meant to hold, torture, or kill only political prisoners, such as Communists and Social Democrats. These early prisons – usually basements and storehouses – were eventually consolidated into full-blown, centrally run camps outside the cities. By 1942, six large extermination camps had been established in Nazi-occupied Poland.

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Ghettos 1940–1945 After the invasion of Poland the German Nazis established ghettos in which Jews and some Romani were confined until they were eventually shipped to death camps to be murdered. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest, with 380,000 people, and the Łódź Ghetto the second largest, holding 160,000. They were, in effect, immensely crowded prisons, described by Michael Berenbaum as instruments of "slow, passive murder. From 1940 through 1942, starvation and disease, especially typhoid killed hundreds of thousands. Over 43,000 residents of the Warsaw ghetto died there during 1941 from disease, that’s more than one in ten.

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Death Squads Einsatzgruppen , a "special-ops unit“ were paramilitary groups formed under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, deputy to Heinrich Himmler, and operated by the Schutzstaffel before and during World War II. Their principal task, according to SS General Erich von Bach, at the Nuremberg Trials: “was the annihilation of the Jews, Gypsies, and Soviet political commissars.” They were a key component in the implementation of the final solution.

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Wannsee Conference The Wannsee Conference was convened on January 20, 1942 at a villa, Am Großen Wannsee No. 56-58, in the suburbs of Berlin to finalize a plan for the extermination of the Jews. The plan became known Aktion Reinhard.

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Extermination Camps During 1942, in addition to Auschwitz, five other camps were designated as extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) for the carrying out of the Reinhard plan.

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Death Marches By mid 1944, the Final Solution had largely run its course. Those Jewish communities within easy reach of the Nazi regime had been largely exterminated, in proportions ranging from more than 90 percent in Poland to about 25 percent in France. In May, Himmler claimed in a speech that “The Jewish question in Germany and the occupied countries has been solved.”During 1944, in any case, the task became steadily more difficult. German armies were evicted from the Soviet Union, the Balkans and Italy, and German allies were either defeated or were switching sides to the Allies. In June, the western Allies landed in France. Allied air attacks and the operations of partisans made rail transport increasingly difficult, and the objections of the military to the diversion of rail transport for carrying Jews to Poland more urgent and harder to ignore.

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Non-Jewish victims Slavs Soviet Civilians Soviet POW’s Ethnic-Poles Romani Freemasons Jehovah's Witnesses Homosexuals Political activists