Historical Summary
The Holocaust was the
state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry
by Nazi collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims-six
million were murdered; Gypsies, the handicapped, and Poles were also targeted
for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic, or national reasons.
Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah's
Witnesses, Soviet
prisoners of war, and political dissidents, also suffered grievous oppression
and death under Nazi tyranny.
The concentration
camp is most closely associated with the Holocaust and remains an enduring
symbol of the Nazi regime. The first camps opened soon after the Nazis
took power in January 1933; they continued as a basic part of Nazi rule
until May 8, 1945 when the war, and the Nazi regime, ended.
The events of the
Holocaust occurred in two main phases: 1933-1939 and 1939-1945.
I. 1933-1939
On January 30, 1933,
Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor, the most powerful position in the German
government, by the aged President Hindenburg who hoped Hitler could lead
the nation out of its grave political and economic crisis. Hitler was the
leader of the right-wing National Social German Workers Party; it was,
by 1933, one of the strongest parties in Germany, even though-reflecting
the country's
multiparty system-the Nazis
had only won a plurality of 33 percent of the votes in the 1932 elections
to the German parliament (Reichstag).
Once in power, Hitler
moved quickly to end German democracy. He convinced his cabinet to invoke
emergency clauses of the Constitution that permitted the suspension of
individual freedoms of press, speech, and assembly. Special security forces-the
Special State Police (Gestapo), the Storm Troopers (SA), and the Security
Policy (SS), murdered or arrested leaders of opposition political parties
(Communists, Socialists, and Liberals). The Enabling Act of March 23, 1933,
forced through a Reichstag already purged of many political opponents,
gave dictatorial powers to Hitler.
| Also
in 1933, the Nazis began to put into practice their racial ideology. Echoing
ideas popular in Germany
as well as most other western nations well before the 1930s, the Nazis
believed that the Germans were "racially superior" and that there was a
struggle for survival between them and "inferior races." They saw Jews,
Roma (Gypsies), and the handicapped as a serious biological threat to the
purity of the "German (Aryan) Race," what they called the "master race."Jews,
who numbered nearly 600,000 in Germany
(less than one percent of the total population in 1933), were the principal
target of Nazi hatred. The Nazis mistakenly identified Jews as a race and
defined this race as "inferior." They also spewed hate-mongering propaganda
that unfairly blamed Jews for Germany's
economic depression and the country's
defeat in
World War I (1914-1918). |
|
In 1933, new German
laws forced Jews to quit their civil service jobs, university and law court
positions, and other areas of public life. In April 1933, a boycott of
Jewish businesses was instituted. In 1935, laws proclaimed at Nuremberg
made Jews second-class citizens. These "Nuremberg Laws" defined Jews, not
by their religion or by how they wanted to identify themselves but by the
religious affiliation of their grandparents. Between 1937 and 1939, new
anti-Jewish regulations segregated Jews further and made daily life very
difficult for them: Jews could not attend public schools, go to theaters,
cinemas, or vacation resorts, or reside, or even walk, in certain sections
of German cities.
| Also
between 1937 and 1939, Jews were forced from Germany's
economic life: the Nazis either seized Jewish businesses and properties
outright or forced Jews to sell them at bargain prices. In November 1938,
this economic attack against German and Austrian Jews changed into the
physical destruction of synagogues and Jewish-owned stores, the arrest
of Jewish men, the destruction of homes, and the murder of individuals.
This centrally organized riot (pogrom) became knows as Kristallnacht (the
"Night of Broken Glass"). |
|
Although Jews were
the main target of Nazi hatred, the Nazis persecuted other groups they
viewed
as racially or genetically "inferior." Nazi racial ideology was buttressed
by scientists who advocated "selective breeding" (eugenics) to "improve"
the human race. Laws passed between 1933 and 1935 aimed to reduce the future
number of genetic "inferiors" through involuntary sterilization programs:
about 500 children of mixed (African-German) racial backgrounds and 320,000
to 350,000 individuals judged physically or mentally handicapped were subjected
to surgical or radiation procedures so they could not have children. Supporters
of sterilization also argued that the handicapped burdened the community
with the costs of their care. Many of Germany's
30,000 Gypsies were
also eventually sterilized and prohibited, along with Blacks, from intermarrying
with Germans. Reflecting traditional prejudices, new laws combined traditional
prejudices with the new racism of the Nazis which defined Gypsies, by "race,"
as "criminal and asocial."
Another consequence
of Hitler's
ruthless dictatorship in the 1930s
was the arrest of political opponents and trade unionists and others the
Nazis labeled "undesirables" and "enemies of the state." Some five- to
fifteen thousand homosexuals were imprisoned in concentration camps; under
the 1935 Nazi-revised criminal code, the mere denunciation of a man as
"homosexual" could result in arrest, trial, and conviction. Jehovah's
Witnesses, who numbered 20,000
in Germany,
were banned as an organization as early as April 1933, since the beliefs
of this religious group prohibited them from swearing any oath to the state
or serving in the German military. Their literature was confiscated, and
they lost jobs, unemployment benefits, pensions, and all social welfare
benefits. Many witnesses were sent to prisons and concentrations camps
in Nazi Germany, and their children were sent to juvenile detention homes
and orphanages.
| Between
1933 and 1936, thousands of people, mostly political prisoners and Jehovah's
Witnesses, were imprisoned
in concentration camps, while several thousand German Gypsies were confined
in special municipal camps. The first systematic round-ups of German and
Austrian Jews occurred after Kristallnacht, when approximately 30,000 Jewish
men were deported to Dachau
and other concentration camps, and several hundred Jewish women were sent
to local jails. At the end of 1938, the waves of arrests also included
several thousand German and Austrian Gypsies. |
|
Between 1933 and
1939, about half the German Jewish population and more than two-thirds
of Austrian Jews (1938-39) fled Nazi persecution. They emigrated mainly
to Palestine, the United
States, Latin America, Shanghai
(which required no visa entry), and eastern and western Europe
(where many would be caught again in the Nazi net during the war). Jews
who remained under Nazi rule were either unwilling to uproot themselves
or unable to obtain visas, sponsors in host countries, or funds for emigration.
Most foreign countries, including the United
States, Canada, Britain,
and France,
were unwilling to admit very large numbers of refugees.
Back
to top
II. 1939-1945
On September 1, 1939, Germany
invaded Poland
and World War II began. Within days, the Polish army was defeated, and
the Nazis began their campaign to destroy Polish culture and enslave the
Polish people whom they viewed as "subhuman." Killing Polish leaders was
the first step: German soldiers carried out massacres of university professors,
artists, writers, politicians, and many Catholic priests. To create new
living space for the "superior Germanic race," large segments of the Polish
population was resettled, and German families moved into the emptied lands.
Thousands of other Poles, including Jews, were imprisoned in concentration
camps. The Nazis also "kidnapped" as many as 50,000 "Aryan-looking" Polish
children from their parents and took them to Germany
as not capable of Germanization. They were sent to special children's
camps, where some died of starvation, lethal injection,
and disease.
As the war began
in 1939, Hitler initiated an order to kill institutionalized, handicapped
patients deemed "incurable." Special commissions of physicians reviewed
questionnaires filled out by all state hospitals and then decided if a
patient should be killed. The doomed were then transferred to six institutions
in Germany and Austria,
where specially constructed gas chambers were used to kill them. After
public protests in 1941, the Nazi leadership continued this euphemistically
termed "euthanasia" program in secret. Babies, small children, and other
victims were thereafter killed by lethal injection, pills and forced starvation.
The "euthanasia"
program contained all the elements later required for mass murder of European
Jews and Gypsies in Nazi death camps: an articulated decision to kill,
specially trained personnel, the apparatus for killing by gas, and the
use of euphemistic language like "euthanasia" that psychologically distanced
the murderers from their victims and hid the criminal character of the
killings from the public.
In 1940, German forces
continued their conquest of much of Europe, easily defeating Denmark, Norway,
the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg,
and France.
On June 22, 1941, the German army invaded the Soviet Union, and by September
was approaching Moscow.
In the meantime, Italy, Romania,
and Hungary had
joined the Axis powers led by Germany
and opposed by the Allied Powers (British Commonwealth, Free France, the United
States, and the Soviet Union).
In the months following
Germany's
invasion of the Soviet Union,
Jews, political leaders, Communists, and many Gypsies were killed in mass
executions. The overwhelming majority of those killed were Jews. These
murders were carried out at improvised sites throughout the Soviet
Union by members of special mobile killing squads (Einsatzgruppen)
who followed in the wake of the invading German army. The most famous of
these sites was Babi Yar, near Kiev,
where an estimated 33,000 persons, mostly Jews, were murdered. German terror
extended to institutionalized handicapped and psychiatric patients in the Soviet
Union; it also resulted in the mass murder of more than three
million Soviet prisoners of war.
| During
the war, ghettos, transit camps, and forced labor camps, in addition to
the concentration camps, were created by the Germans and their collaborators
to imprison Jews, Gypsies, and other victims of racial and ethnic hatred
as well as political opponents and resistance fighters. Following the invasion
of Poland,
three million Polish Jews were forced into approximately 400 newly established
ghettos, where they were segregated from the rest of the population. Large
numbers of Jews were also deported from other cities and countries, including Germany,
to ghettos in Poland
and German-occupied territories further east. |
 |
| In
Polish cities under Nazi occupation, like Warsaw
and Lodes, Jews were confined in sealed ghettos where starvation, overcrowding,
exposure to cold, and contagious diseases killed tens of thousands of people.
In Warsaw
and elsewhere, ghettoized Jews made every effort, often at great risk,
to maintain their cultural, communal, and religious lives. The ghettos
also provided a forced labor pool for the Germans, and many forced laborers
(who worked on road gangs, in construction, or other hard labor related
to the German war effort) died from exhaustion or maltreatment. |
|
|
Between 1942 and
1944, the Germans moved to eliminate the ghettos In occupied Poland
and elsewhere, deporting ghetto residents to "extermination camps"-killing
centers equipped with gassing facilities-located in Poland.
After the meeting of senior German government officials in late January
1942 at a villa in the Berlin
suburb of Wannsee, the decision to implement "the final solution of the
Jewish question" became formal state policy, and Jews from western Europe
were also sent to killing centers in the East.
The six killing sites,
chosen because of their closeness to rail lines and their location in semi-rural
areas, were at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Chelmno was the first camp in which mass executions were carried out by
gas, piped into mobile gas vans; 320,000 persons were killed there between
December 1941 and March 1943 and between June to July 1944. A killing center
using gas vans, and later chambers operated at Belzec, where more than
600,000 persons were
killed between May 1942 and August 1943. Sobibor opened in May 1942 and
closed one day after a rebellion of the prisoners on October 14, 1943;
up to 200,000 persons were killed by gassing. Treblinka opened in July
1942 and closed in November 1943; a revolt by the prisoners in early August
1943 destroyed much of the facility. At least 750,000 persons were killed
at Treblinka, physically the largest of the killing centers. Almost all
of the victims at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were Jews; a
few were Gypsies. Very few individuals survived these four killing centers,
where most victims were murdered immediately after arrival.
Auschwitz-Birkenau,
which also served as a concentration camp and slave labor camp, became
the killing center where the largest numbers of European Jews and Gypsies
were killed. After an experimental gassing there in September 1941 of 250
malnourished and ill Polish prisoners and 600 Russian POWs, mass murder
became a daily routine; more than 1.25 million people were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau,
9 out of 10 of them Jews. In addition, Gypsies, Soviet POWs, and ill prisoners
of all nationalities died in the gas chambers. Between May 14 and July
8, 1944, 437,402 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz
in 48 trains. This was probably the largest single mass deportation during
the Holocaust. A similar system was implemented at Majdanek, which also
doubled as a concentration camp and where at least 275,000 persons were
killed in the gas chambers or died from malnutrition, brutality, and disease.
The methods of murder
were the same in all the killing centers, which were operated by the SS.
The victims arrived in railroad freight cars and passenger trains, mostly
from ghettos and camps in occupied Poland,
but also from almost every other eastern and western country. On arrival,
men were separated from women and children. Prisoners were forced to undress
and hand over all valuables. They were then driven naked into the gas chambers
which were disguised as shower rooms, and either carbon monoxide or Zyklon
B (a form of crystalline prussic acid, also used as an insecticide in some
camps) was used to asphyxiate them. The minority selected for forced labor
were, after initial quarantine, vulnerable to malnutrition, exposure, epidemics,
medical experiments, and brutality; many perished as a result.
The Germans carried
out their systematic murderous activities with the active help of local
collaborators in many countries and the acquiescence or indifference of
millions of bystanders. However, there were instances of organized resistance.
For example, in the fall of 1943, the Danish resistance, with the support
of the local population, rescued nearly the entire Jewish community in Denmark
from the threat of deportation to the east by smuggling them via a dramatic
boat lift to safety in neutral Sweden.
Individuals in many other countries also risked their lives to save Jews
and other individuals subject to Nazi persecution. One of the most famous
was Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who led the rescue effort that
saved the lives of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews in 1944.
| Resistance
movements existed in almost every concentration camp and ghetto of Europe.
In addition to the armed revolts in Sobibor and Treblinka, Jewish resistance
in the Warsaw
ghetto led to a courageous uprising in April-May 1943, despite a predictable
doomed outcome because of superior German force. In general, rescue or
aid to the Holocaust victims was not a priority of resistance organizations
whose principal goal was to fight the war against the Germans. Nonetheless,
such groups and Jewish partisans (resistance fighters) sometimes cooperated
with each other to save |
 |
Jews. On April 19,
1943, for instance, members of the National Committee for the Defense of
Jews, in cooperation with Christian railroad workers and the general underground
in Belgium, attacked a train leaving the Belgian transit camp of Malines
headed for Auschwitz and succeeded in assisting several hundred Jewish
deportees to escape.
After the war turned
against Germany
and the Allied armies approached German soil in late 1944, the SS decided
to evacuate outlying concentration camps. The Germans tried to cover up
the evidence of genocide and deported prisoners to camps inside Germany
to prevent their liberation. Many inmates died during the long journeys
on foot known as "death marches." During the final days, in the spring
of 1945, conditions in the remaining concentration camps exacted a terrible
toll in human lives. Even concentration camps never intended for extermination,
such as Bergen-Belsen, became death traps for thousands, including Anne
Frank, who died there of typhus in March 1945.
In May 1945, Nazi
Germany collapsed, the SS guards fled, and the camps ceased to exist as
extermination, forced labor, or concentration camps. Some of the concentration
camps, including Bergen-Belsen, Dachau,
and Landsberg, all in Allied-occupied Germany,
were turned into camps for displaced persons (DPs), which included former
Holocaust victims unable to be repatriated.
The Nazi legacy was
a vast empire of murder, pillage, and exploitation that had affected every
country of occupied Europe. The toll
in lives was enormous. The full magnitude, and the moral and ethical implications,
of this tragic era are only now beginning to be understood more fully
|
