I | INTRODUCTION |
Holocaust, the almost complete destruction of Jews in
Europe by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II (1939-1945).
The leadership of Germany’s Nazi Party ordered the extermination of 5.6 million
to 5.9 million Jews (see National Socialism). Jews often refer to the
Holocaust as Shoah (from the Hebrew word for “catastrophe” or “total
destruction”). The word holocaust derives from the Greek holo
(whole) and caustos (burned) and originally referred to a burnt
offering, or a religious sacrifice that is totally consumed by fire.
The Holocaust was the worst genocide in
history. Those who carried it out methodically created the means to efficiently
round up and kill millions of people. The Holocaust led to the establishment of
international laws against human rights violations.
Jews were not the only victims of the Nazis
during World War II. The Nazis also imprisoned and killed people who opposed
their regime on grounds of ideology; Roma (Gypsies); Germans who were mentally
impaired or physically disabled; homosexuals; and captured Soviet soldiers.
II | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND |
For many centuries Christians in Europe
discriminated against Jews. Many harbored a prejudice against Jews that is known
as anti-Semitism. Some scholars view anti-Semitism as a religious prejudice.
Others regard it as an anti-Jewish variety of a general hatred directed against
ethnic minorities.
In the minds of anti-Semites, Jews represent
mysterious, mythical, and evil forces; are all-powerful; and play a sinister
role in world history. In the Middle Ages, Christian anti-Jewish preaching
sought to prevent contacts with Jews, and many Christians believed that Jews
were in league with the Devil. Christians blamed the Jews for the crucifixion of
Jesus Christ. Many believed that Jews were not human and that they used magic to
appear like other people. All these beliefs merged with popular superstitions
about the magical power of human blood, sorcery, and perversity, giving rise to
the blood libel—the false accusation that Jews used the blood of Christian
children in their rituals. Such stereotypes of the Jews interacted in the minds
of many Europeans with fear of foreigners and combined with economic and social
frictions. As a result, anti-Jewish violence frequently erupted. The Christian
church and various governments enacted laws that prohibited Jews from engaging
in certain occupations, forced them to live in certain areas, kept them from
attending universities, or even expelled them from various countries.
For many centuries the Roman Catholic Church
taught anti-Jewish beliefs and attitudes. The anti-Jewish teachings of the
Catholic Church did not advocate the killing of Jews. However, the propagation
of hatred, insults, degradation, and often demonization of Jews induced many
Catholics to accept anti-Semitic measures when the Nazis and their collaborators
introduced them in the 20th century.
The same was true of Protestant churches. The
pamphlet “On the Jews and their Lies,” written by German religious reformer
Martin Luther in 1542, used extremely violent language. It called on Christians
to set synagogues on fire, to destroy Jewish houses, and to put Jews in stables,
and it advised rulers to banish Jews from their countries. Luther’s writings had
a significant influence on German Protestant theologians and also contributed to
a climate of opinion that condoned or approved persecution of Jews.
In the 19th century, Jews in most European
countries were emancipated—that is, they were granted rights equal to those of
the Christian citizens or subjects of those countries. The Industrial Revolution
was under way, and Jews began playing a significant role as entrepreneurs in the
newly developing industries and businesses. The rapid social and economic
mobility and cultural advancement of European Jews during this period made them
one of the most visible symbols of modernization. Individuals who opposed
19th-century modernization—ranging from aristocrats to peasants—perceived the
Jews as a destructive force. Traditional attitudes that persisted after Jewish
emancipation and new images of the Jews both merged with contemporary
frustrations and angers resulting from the social changes brought on by
capitalism.
In the second half of the 19th century,
modern anti-Semitism penetrated Catholic political circles and parties. The
Jesuit journal Civilta Cattolica, published in Rome, continuously spread
anti-Semitic prejudices whose influence ranged far beyond Italy. In Austria the
Christian Social Party, which enjoyed the backing of the Catholic Church, had
strong anti-Semitic elements and revived the blood libel. In France the Catholic
press propagated anti-Jewish sentiments, especially at the time of the Dreyfus
affair, a controversy involving a Jewish officer in the French army who was
wrongly convicted of treason in 1894.
By the mid-19th century a new social theory
had emerged in Europe: the theory of race. According to this theory, humanity
was divided into “higher” and “lower” races. In the view of those who believed
in this theory, the Jews were a mongrel race—and a mortal threat to the “purity”
of the “higher” races.
The appearance of anti-Jewish parties and
organizations, whether they were based on economic, religious, or racist
principles, or a combination of all of these, constitutes the most important
distinguishing feature of modern political anti-Semitism. Such parties came to
the fore especially in Germany in the 1880s. In the Russian Empire anti-Semitism
became an official policy of the government, which in 1881 and 1882 encouraged
anti-Jewish mob attacks, or pogroms. The first international congress of
anti-Semites convened in 1882 in the German city of Dresden. By the start of the
20th century there were many committed anti-Semites throughout Europe,
particularly in France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Romania. Although
anti-Semitic parties did not receive many votes, anti-Semitism was not only
widespread but also socially acceptable.
The emergence of nation-states in eastern
Europe following the collapse of the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian
empires after World War I (1914-1918) brought an unprecedented wave of
anti-Semitism. Both individuals and governments carried out acts of hostility
against Jews. Many of the leaders of Russia’s Communist-led Bolshevik Revolution
of 1917 were Jewish, supplying anti-Communist conservatives in many countries
with new anti-Semitic ammunition. In the period between the end of World War I
and the start of World War II, anti-Semitic measures became official state
policy in some countries. In countries such as Poland, Romania, and the Baltic
states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, traditional anti-Judaism merged with
new views of Jews as carriers of Communism.
III | ATTITUDES TOWARD JEWS IN GERMANY AFTER WORLD WAR I |
Many Germans blamed the Jews for Germany’s
defeat in World War I, some even claiming that German Jews had betrayed the
nation during the war. In addition, at the end of the war a Communist group
attempted to carry out a Bolshevik-type revolution in the German state of
Bavaria. Most of the leaders of that failed attempt were Jews. As a result, some
Germans associated Jews with Bolsheviks and regarded both groups as dangerous
enemies of Germany. After the war, a republic known as the Weimar Republic was
set up in Germany. Jewish politicians and intellectuals played an important role
in German life during the Weimar Republic, and many non-Jews resented their
influence.
On the basis of his anti-Semitic views, Nazi
leader Adolf Hitler attacked the impressive role Jews played in German society
during the Weimar Republic, especially in the intellectual world and in
left-wing politics. He referred to them as a plague and a cancer. In his book
Mein Kampf (My Struggle, translated 1939), which was published in
1926, Hitler blamed the plight of Germany at the end of World War I on an
international Jewish conspiracy and used terms such as extirpation and
extermination in relation to the Jews. He claimed that the Jews had
achieved economic dominance and the ability to control and manipulate the mass
media to their own advantage. He wrote of the need to eradicate their powerful
economic position, if necessary by means of their physical removal.
IV | UNIQUENESS OF NAZI ANTI-SEMITISM |
The linking of anti-Semitic accusations to
race struggle is what made Nazism so genocidal. The Nazis believed the Jews were
responsible for what they regarded as the degeneracy of modern society. Hitler
viewed modern ideologies that stressed equality and emancipation as a revolt of
inferior classes and peoples led by the Jews. The Nazis viewed Bolshevism as the
most radical recent form of the ancient Jewish conspiracy that would lead to
national dissolution and disintegration. For Hitler, Nazism was thus a doctrine
of world salvation to redeem humanity from the Jewish-Bolshevik doctrine. He
believed that the German race had to acquire and maintain total supremacy
through total war against the Jews. Such a war would be a fight in which the
only alternatives, for either side, were victory or extinction.
V | RISE OF THE NAZIS TO POWER |
Until 1929 the National Socialist German
Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or
NSDAP), as the Nazi Party was officially called, was a small political party.
Then, in the parliamentary elections of 1930, the party received more than 18
percent of the total votes cast, compared to about 2.5 percent in 1928. The bulk
of the votes for the Nazis came from the middle classes and the well-to-do
rather than from workers and unemployed people. The major factors in the Nazis’
electoral success were lingering anger at Germany’s military collapse toward the
end of World War I; resentment toward the Versailles treaty, which had ended the
war and imposed harsh conditions on Germany; the worldwide economic depression
of the 1930s; fear of the spread of Communism; and Hitler’s charismatic
personality.
By 1930 German society was unable to forge a
political consensus. The fact that no party was able to establish a majority
government created a vacuum of power and a political stalemate in the Reichstag,
Germany’s parliament. Most Germans wanted to replace the republic and its
multitude of competing parties with an authoritarian system that promised
stability and employment. Hence the Nazis gained in popularity in the 1930
elections. In the parliamentary elections of September 1932, the Nazis did even
better, receiving about 38 percent of the votes. They did not win a majority of
the seats in the Reichstag, but the support Hitler received from the
Conservative Party provided the necessary basis for a coalition government. And
so on January 30, 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler
chancellor (prime minister).
VI | GERMAN JEWS UNDER THE NAZI REGIME |
As soon as the Nazis assumed power, they made
racism and anti-Semitism central components of their regime. During its first
months in power the Nazi Party instigated anti-Semitic riots and campaigns of
terror that climaxed on April 1, 1933, in a countrywide boycott of Jewish-owned
shops and Jewish professionals, such as physicians and lawyers. In addition, the
new government issued regulations and ordinances to deprive Jews of their civil
rights and economic means of survival. On April 7, 1933, the Reichstag enacted a
law that allowed the government to dismiss Jews from the German civil service.
Later, quotas were adopted to limit the numbers of Jewish students. However,
Hitler and the other Nazi leaders viewed these piecemeal regulations as
insufficient, and so they decided to implement a comprehensive legal framework
for their anti-Semitic policies.
One early decree was a definition of the term
Jew. Crucial in that determination was the religion of one's
grandparents. Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was automatically a
Jew, regardless of whether that individual was a member of the Jewish community.
Those with two Jewish grandparents, known as half-Jews, were considered Jewish
only if they themselves belonged to the Jewish religion or were married to a
Jewish person. All other half-Jews, and persons who had one Jewish grandparent,
were classified as Mischlinge (half-breeds). Jews and Mischlinge were
“non-Aryans,” in contrast to “pure” Germans, who were “Aryans.” In Nazi
doctrine, such emphasis on descent was regarded as an affirmation of race, but
the principal purpose of these categorizations was the clear delimitation of a
target for discriminatory laws and directives.
On September 15, 1935, the Reichstag met in
Nürnberg and passed two laws, known as the Nürnberg Laws. The first, the Reich
Citizenship Law, declared that only individuals of “German blood” could be
citizens of the German Reich (state), thus depriving German Jews of their
citizenship. The second, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German
Honor, formalized barriers between Jews and Germans, forbidding marriage and
sexual relations between Jews and “Aryans.” Thus, the Nazis deprived German Jews
of all civil rights and effectively excluded them from social and cultural life.
Their policy was then aimed at expropriating Jewish property with a view to
compelling Jews to emigrate from Germany.
In 1938 Jews were barred from the medical and
legal professions and were forced to register their property as a preliminary
measure for its confiscation and “aryanization,” or forcible sale to Germans. As
a practical matter, the government compelled Jews to accept payments
representing only a fraction of the property’s true value from “Aryan”
buyers.
When the Nazis took power in Germany, the
German Catholic bishops believed that Hitler would protect Europe’s Christian
civilization from Bolshevism. As a result, they accommodated the Nazi regime,
supporting its nationalistic foreign policy. Despite their opposition to
Hitler’s racial doctrine, Catholic and other Christian church leaders failed to
take a public stand against his anti-Semitic policies. The major Christian
churches gave pastoral care to Jewish converts to Christianity who were
persecuted by the Nazis, but they failed to react when the Nazis introduced
racial legislation, instigated physical attacks on Jews, or began the
deportation and extermination of Jews.
The attitude of the top leadership of the
Roman Catholic Church under Pope Pius XII largely paralleled that of the German
Catholic bishops. The pope never criticized the persecution of the Jews in an
encyclical, nor did he ever threaten to excommunicate Hitler, nominally a
Catholic, or other Catholics involved in the Holocaust. Moreover, although the
pope and his advisers were fully informed about the extermination of the Jews
during World War II, they refused to condemn it on the grounds that Vatican
City, the tiny independent state under the authority of the pope, had to
maintain strict neutrality in international affairs.
After Germany annexed Austria in March 1938,
all the same anti-Semitic measures were implemented there. A year later, these
measures were implemented in Bohemia and Moravia, which the Germans occupied
following their dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.
By 1938 two-thirds of German Jews had left
the country, and 60 percent of those who stayed had lost their livelihood. The
anti-Semitic actions of the Nazis culminated in the Kristallnacht (“night
of broken glass”) pogrom, which occurred all over Germany and Austria on the
night of November 9, 1938. During that night, Nazi mobs murdered more than 90
Jews, beat hundreds more, demolished 76 synagogues and set fire to 191 more, and
destroyed and looted thousands of shops and businesses owned by Jews. The
authorities arrested 30,000 Jews and sent them to concentration camps, where
they were severely mistreated. The Kristallnacht pogrom marked a crucial
milestone in the Nazis’ actions against the Jews, for it was the first occasion
in the modern era in which widespread violence was directed against Jews in a
western European country. At a meeting held two days after the pogrom, top Nazi
leaders decided that the Jews of Germany should bear the cost of the destruction
regardless of insurance coverage.
VII | NAZI ANTI-SEMITIC POLICY, 1939-1940 |
On January 30, 1939, Hitler delivered
a chilling threat in an address to the Reichstag: “In my life I have often been
a prophet and … today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish
financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once
more into a world war, then the result will be not the Bolshevization of the
world and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in
Europe.”
After the outbreak of World War II in
September 1939, the Nazis searched for what they termed a “final solution to the
Jewish question.” The top leaders contemplated a “territorial solution” for
European Jews. Leaders of the SS, an elite section of the Nazi Party, were put
in charge of solving the “Jewish question.” They proposed two options. The first
option was the establishment in southeastern Poland of a reservation to which
Jews would be deported. The second option, which was proposed as the Germans
anticipated an imminent victory over Britain following their defeat of France in
July 1940, was the deportation to the island of Madagascar of all 4 million Jews
in the countries then occupied or controlled by Germany. At that time,
Madagascar, off the southeastern coast of Africa, was a colony of France.
Neither of these proposals was adopted. In
late 1940 the Nazis began planning an invasion and conquest of the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). That planning led them to abandon the idea of
a reservation in Poland, because such a reservation would be in the center
rather than on the periphery of an enlarged German empire. The Nazis abandoned
their Madagascar plan because Britain did not surrender, and continued British
control of the Suez Canal closed the route to Madagascar to German ships.
Before these plans were dropped, however,
the Germans carried out a preliminary step to future deportations to
concentration camps or to the planned Jewish reservation. Jews in Poland were
forced to move into ghettos, where they were ordered to set up Jewish councils
that would carry out German orders. They were also forced to wear a yellow
Jewish star on their clothing and to perform forced labor. Atrocious living
conditions, such as overcrowding, lack of proper sanitation and health services,
and meager food rations, resulted in a high mortality rate among the inhabitants
of the ghettos. In the Warsaw ghetto, for example, 20 percent of the population
died in 1941.
While Polish Jews were sealed in ghettos,
Jews in western European countries occupied or controlled by the Nazis faced
ruthless anti-Semitic measures. From Norway to North Africa all Jews lost their
rights and property. They were forced to live in designated neighborhoods or
were imprisoned in closed camps.
VIII | BEGINNINGS OF THE EXTERMINATION |
In the spring of 1941, as preparations
were under way for the invasion of the USSR, Hitler proclaimed that a war of
destruction was about to start. He called for the annihilation of the Bolshevik
leadership, thus laying the foundation for the extermination of what Hitler
considered to be the biological source of Bolshevism: the Jews of the USSR. The
killings were to be conducted by four mobile SS units called Einsatzgruppen
(action squads), each consisting of some 1,000 men. In addition to the
Einsatzgruppen, there were other SS and police units commissioned to shoot Jews
who were to be assembled in front of mass graves dug by the Jews themselves. On
many occasions after the military campaign started in June 1941, the German army
was called on to provide support to the SS and police units. Thus, the total
number of Germans involved in the mass shootings of Jews was around 30,000.
On July 2, 1941, Reinhard Heydrich, head
of Germany’s Sicherheitsdienst (SD; Security Service) and an instrumental
figure in organizing the extermination of the Jews, issued his Commissars’
Order, according to which all Jews in official positions in the Soviet
administration were to be executed. However, the Einsatzgruppen commanders
broadly interpreted this order to mean all adult male Jews. Large numbers of
them were immediately shot regardless of whether they held official Soviet
positions. In August 1941 the killings were expanded to include Jewish women and
children. For example, on August 1, 1941, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS,
issued an order to SS units preparing to comb the Pripet Marshes in Belarus:
“All male Jews must be shot. Drive the female Jews into the swamp.” The SS
officer in charge of the operation advised his superiors that “Driving women and
children into the swamps did not have the intended success because the swamps
were not deep enough for the Jews to drown.” Beginning in late September 1941
German forces carried out large-scale actions in which whole Jewish communities
were wiped out. For instance, 33,000 Jews of Kiev, in Ukraine, were killed on
September 29 and 30, 1941, in a ravine outside Kiev called Babi Yar.
In the autumn of 1941 a new phase began.
Until then the targets had been Soviet Jews, but now the killing was extended to
Jews in parts of Poland and Serbia. For these killings the Germans also
used gas vans, specially sealed vans in which the exhaust fumes from the engine
were piped into a storage compartment filled with victims to asphyxiate them.
During the winter of 1941 to 1942 there was a pause in the shootings because, in
part, the frozen ground prevented the digging of pits for burying the murdered
Jews. In addition, the Germans had to send many Jews to Germany to serve as
slave labor for the war effort. However, in the spring of 1942 the intensive
campaign of killing resumed. This time even Jewish slave laborers were murdered.
The Einsatzgruppen provided Hitler with
reports on the numbers of Jews and others who had been killed. These documents
represent the primary source of knowledge about the mass shootings in eastern
Europe up to the spring of 1942. It is estimated that from the summer of 1941 to
the summer of 1942, the Nazis shot more than a million Jews in front of mass
graves.
On December 12, 1941, Joseph Goebbels,
Hitler’s minister for propaganda and national enlightenment, noted in his diary,
“As concerns the Jewish question, [Hitler] is determined to make a clean sweep.
He had prophesied to the Jews that if they once again brought about a world war
they would experience their own extermination. This was not just an empty
phrase. The World War is there, the extermination of Jewry must be the necessary
consequence.”
IX | THE “FINAL SOLUTION” |
In the fall of 1941 the Nazis began
deporting all the Jews of occupied Europe to the east (Poland and the western
USSR) in order to exterminate them. In the meantime, in Germany they had already
carried out their program of exterminating people who were mentally impaired or
severely disabled.
In the so-called euthanasia program, which
had begun in the fall of 1939, Nazi doctors killed Germans with mental or
physical disabilities. Tens of thousands were murdered, mostly by the
administration of carbon monoxide gas supplied in large metal bottles. In
addition, many were killed in gas vans. Hitler ordered the euthanasia program
discontinued in August 1941 because it was causing public disquiet. However, the
experience acquired was used in the “final solution,” as the program of killing
all the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe came to be known. The gas vans and their
personnel from the euthanasia program were moved to eastern Europe and placed at
the disposal of Odilo Globocnik, the SS officer in charge of the Lublin area in
occupied Poland.
When the euthanasia teams arrived in the
east in late 1941, they began planning the construction of killing facilities.
From September through December 1941 they tested different types of poison gas.
In September 1941 they carried out gassing experiments at Auschwitz, killing 600
Soviet prisoners of war with cyanide gas produced from Zyklon-B, the commercial
name of a pesticide based on hydrocyanic acid. In November 1941, 30 prisoners
were killed in a gas van at the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, north of
Berlin. At the concentration camp of Chelmno, not far from Łódź, the site of a
large Jewish ghetto in western Poland, gassing began on December 8, 1941.
As the Nazis improved their gassing
techniques, they decided to deport all Jews from occupied Europe to their deaths
in the east. The countries from which Jews were deported included countries
under German occupation—such as Norway, France, The Netherlands, Belgium,
Luxembourg, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Greece—as well as countries
allied with Germany—such as Italy and Hungary. On January 20, 1942, a meeting of
high-ranking officials chaired by Heydrich was convened in an SS-owned mansion
in the Berlin neighborhood of Wannsee. This meeting came to be known as the
Wannsee Conference. Attached to the summonses to attend the Wannsee Conference
was a directive from Nazi leader Hermann Göring to Heydrich to prepare a
European-wide “final solution” to the Jewish question. Heydrich told the
conference participants that Jews unfit for work were to be killed and
that any Jews who survived forced labor, having thereby shown their physical
stamina, were for that very reason to be killed as well. The Wannsee Conference
was an important signpost in the evolution of the policy of extermination
because it was there that the participants were instructed to coordinate efforts
for the extermination of the Jews.
Shortly after the Wannsee Conference the
extermination of the European Jews intensified. First in line were the 3 million
Polish Jews. In July 1942 Himmler laid down a schedule for their elimination in
death camps. For this operation, code-named Operation Reinhard, three main
gassing centers were built: Bełżec and Sobibór, in southeastern Poland not far
from Lublin, and Treblinka, northeast of Warsaw. Gassing commenced at those
three camps in the period from March through July 1942. From 750,000 to 950,000
Jews were gassed at Treblinka; from 500,000 to 600,000 at Bełżec; and about
200,000 at Sobibór.
Other camps were built that combined forced
labor and extermination facilities. Two camps were built near Auschwitz
(Oświęcim in Polish), a small town in the region of Upper Silesia. The smaller
camp was known as Auschwitz I. The larger camp was called Auschwitz II and was
also known as Birkenau. Most of the extermination occurred at the larger camp:
About 1 million Jews died there as a result of gassing, starvation, or
disease.
At the same time that the Polish Jews were
being put to death in these camps, the program of deporting Jews from other
parts of occupied Europe to the east was put in motion. In various European
countries, teams of SS men were sent to direct the roundups and deportation of
Jews by train to the killing centers and concentration camps in Poland. These
operations were supervised by Adolf Eichmann, who worked under Heydrich and was
entrusted with responsibility for carrying out and coordinating the “final
solution.” Their task was done in stages: First the poorer members of a Jewish
community were rounded up, then foreign Jews and Jewish refugees, and finally
the rest of the Jewish community. Some western European Jews were initially
transported to ghettos in the east and later to the concentration camps. Others
were sent directly to the extermination centers.
X | JEWISH RESISTANCE AGAINST THE NAZIS |
Jewish resistance to the Nazis was not
widespread, but it did occur. Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were completely
disarmed, and the Nazis went to great lengths to convince people that they were
merely being deported to work camps. Resistance by Jews was made more difficult
because the local population, out of anti-Semitism, fear of Nazi retribution, or
callous indifference, did not support or help them. Throughout occupied Europe,
people who opposed the Nazis and the occupation of their countries organized
resistance movements. These movements received instructions from governments in
exile in Britain or other Allied countries, as well as supplies from the Allies,
the coalition of nations that was fighting against Germany. However, the Jews
had no government in exile, and the Allies did nothing to support them.
Despite the overwhelming odds against the
Jews, there were many examples of Jewish armed resistance. In the ghettos of
eastern Europe, Jewish fighting groups were formed. Jews who managed to escape
from the ghettos joined the partisans (the anti-Nazi resistance movement) in the
forests. About 30,000 Jews from eastern Europe fought in the ranks of Soviet
partisans. Armed uprisings broke out in several ghettos, the most noteworthy
being in Warsaw in April 1943. The majority of the combatants in the Warsaw
ghetto uprising died fighting. Even in the death camps of Sobibór, Treblinka,
and Auschwitz revolts broke out. In the occupied countries of western Europe,
Jews joined all the national resistance organizations. They concentrated their
efforts on hiding Jewish children and smuggling Jews across borders to find
refuge in neutral countries such as Switzerland and Spain.
XI | RESPONSES OF OTHER NATIONS |
In the parts of Europe that were occupied by
Germany, Jews were sent to the death camps regardless of the attitudes of the
local population. In some occupied countries, such as Belgium, and even in some
countries that were allied with Germany, such as unoccupied France under the
Vichy government, a few church dignitaries protested when Jews were rounded up.
In Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, on the other hand, thousands of people joined
the Nazi killers voluntarily, as did many Croats, Ukrainians, and Slovaks. Jews
were sometimes protected for economic reasons, as in Hungary until 1944, when
Eichmann arrived to supervise the destruction of the Hungarian Jews. Bulgarians
protested against the cooperation of their government officials with the Nazis.
The Vichy government in unoccupied France sent about 70,000 foreign Jews and
Jewish refugees to the concentration camps, but only a few of its own Jewish
citizens.
Italy had a fascist government and was
allied with Hitler. However, anti-Semitism was rare among Italians, and they did
not turn over many Jews to the Nazis. The Italians surrendered to invading
Allied troops in 1943, but German forces occupied the northern half of the
country. This occupation made it possible for the Germans to round up many
Italian Jews. In The Netherlands and Belgium, most citizens were anti-Nazi, and
many helped hide Jews. In Norway there was a Nazi puppet government, but the
Norwegian resistance helped many Jews escape to neutral Sweden. In Denmark, in
spite of the German occupation, Jews were protected by the government. When the
Nazis tried to round them up, the Danish people smuggled most of them to safety
in Sweden.
A relatively small number of men and women
risked their lives to help persecuted Jews. Some 18,000 of them have been
honored by the state of Israel with the title of Righteous Among the Nations.
They include Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who issued 4,500 protection
passports to save Jews in Hungary, and German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who
protected Jews working for him in Poland.
Historical documents have shown that the
Allied governments were informed of the Nazi extermination policy. As early as
November 1941 coded reports sent to Berlin on the mass murders by the
Einsatzgruppen in the USSR were intercepted and decoded by British intelligence.
In August 1942 reports on the deportation and extermination of Jews in countries
occupied by the Nazis were sent from Jewish organizations in Switzerland to top
government officials in Britain and the United States. In mid-1944 two Slovak
Jews who had escaped from Auschwitz gave accounts of the systematic
extermination of Jews at Auschwitz. However, the Allied governments were
reluctant to rescue Jews. After the war British government officials said they
had not wanted to reveal that their agents were successfully decoding German
communications. Allied military leaders said they did not believe that rescue
missions so far to the east would succeed. As part of their strategic campaign
to destroy Germany’s ability to wage war, the Allies bombed factories at
Auschwitz, but they failed to target the gas chambers.
XII | OTHER VICTIMS OF THE NAZIS |
Jews were not the only victims of the Nazis
during World War II. Many Germans and people in German-occupied countries who
opposed the Nazi regime on grounds of ideology were arrested and sent to
concentration camps. Among them were political opponents, particularly
Communists and Socialists; dissenting clergy; and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Nazis
also singled out Roma, commonly called Gypsies; people with mental retardation,
mental illness, and severe disabilities; and German male homosexuals.
Of the non-Jewish victims, two groups were
sent to extermination centers: the Roma and the mentally impaired and severely
disabled. The Nazis did not appear as determined to wipe out the Roma and the
mentally impaired and severely disabled as they were to annihilate the Jews.
Nevertheless, their actions against the Roma undoubtedly represented genocide
according to the definition of the United Nations’ International Convention on
the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The Nazis defined the life experienced by
the mentally impaired and severely disabled as “life unworthy of living.” In the
fall of 1939 they started their euthanasia program, in which Nazi doctors
murdered more than 70,000 mentally and physically disabled persons in six
extermination centers. Public disquiet forced Hitler to order a halt to the
program in August 1941, but many tens of thousands more were murdered in
hospitals after that date despite the official end of the program. The Nazis
viewed the bulk of the Roma as racially inferior, a threat to the “purity” of
the German race, and a problem to be solved by selective mass murder. Within
Germany itself there were some 40,000 Roma at the start of World War II. A few
thousand were sterilized, and many thousands were deported to extermination
centers in Poland. In various countries of eastern Europe, Roma were rounded up
and shot. At the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp there was a special
compound for Roma that held 20,000 inmates. In the course of the persecution,
the Nazis and their collaborators murdered as many as 200,000 Roma.
Beginning in 1941, the Nazis murdered some
3.5 million captured Soviet soldiers, mainly by starvation but also by shooting
and gassing, in prisoner-of-war camps, slave labor facilities, and concentration
camps. Poles, who were considered both subhuman and an obstacle to Germany’s
expansion, were also killed. To enslave the Polish population, the Nazis killed
thousands of Polish intellectuals, political leaders, and clergy. Thousands of
Polish children who were considered of Germanic origin were kidnapped and sent
to Germany to be raised by German foster parents. About 1.5 million Polish
civilians died during World War II as a result of the Nazi invasion and
occupation of Poland.
XIII | AFTERMATH AND LEGACY OF THE HOLOCAUST |
When World War II ended in 1945, the
entire Jewish secular and religious culture in Europe had been obliterated, and
from 5.6 million to 5.9 million Jews had been exterminated. Some 1.5 million of
the victims were children.
After the war the Allies established an
International Military Tribunal at Nürnberg, Germany, to prosecute the surviving
Nazi leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity. At the most important
of the war crimes trials, held in 1945 and 1946, 22 top leaders of Nazi Germany
were found guilty, and of these 12 were sentenced to death. In addition,
military and civilian tribunals in many countries conducted hundreds of trials.
The occupation governments set up by the Allies in Germany removed tens of
thousands of Nazis from official positions throughout Germany. In Germany alone,
close to 90,000 war crimes cases were opened. Later, in 1948, a United Nations
(UN) resolution established crimes against humanity as a crime under
international law with no limitation period for the prosecution of those accused
of such crimes. Based on this resolution, France has convicted a number of
former Nazis and the United States has revoked the citizenship of several Nazi
collaborators who had immigrated there.
A | Holocaust Survivors and Israel |
After the war some 250,000 Jewish
survivors made their way to camps for displaced persons that were operated by
the Allies in Germany, Austria, and Italy. They pressed the U.S. Army and
government to let them immigrate to Palestine, then under British rule, and the
U.S. government in turn pressed the British to accept these refugees. The
British refused, and thousands of Jewish survivors boarded ships to emigrate
illegally to Palestine. The suffering of the survivors, who had nowhere else to
go, and the British policy of stopping these ships and sending the survivors to
detention camps in Cyprus caused an outcry in world public opinion. Jews in the
United States soon mobilized in favor of solving the refugees’ problem by
creating a Jewish state in Palestine. Under pressure from Jewish refugees and
public opinion, the British were eventually forced to ask the UN to resolve the
competing Jewish and Arab claims to Palestine. In 1947 the UN voted to partition
Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The Jewish state, Israel, was established
in May 1948.
B | Compensation and Reparations for the Holocaust |
In the years following World War II,
some Jewish property, cash, and other assets seized by the Nazis were returned
to Holocaust survivors or their heirs or, when there where no survivors or
heirs, to Jewish charitable organizations. Many Jews claimed that the amount
returned in no way equaled the actual losses, for there was no way to calculate
the measure, economic or otherwise, for the suffering and loss of life. Many
observers noted that no restitution could ever be made for the ordeal of the
Jews of Europe in the Holocaust.
In the early 1950s negotiators for the
government of West Germany and the state of Israel, as well as representatives
of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany (an umbrella group
of 22 Jewish organizations), agreed that material losses would be the sole basis
for compensation. These material losses were estimated at $14 billion. As a
result of agreements with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims and the state
of Israel, the government of West Germany enacted the German Federal
Indemnification Law in 1952. According to this law, West Germany consented to
deliver goods valued at some $720 million to Israel over a 12-year period and to
pay a sum of $100 million for the reconstruction of Jewish communities in
Europe. Additional payments were made to Jewish slave laborers. After the
reunification of West Germany and East Germany in 1990, the claims conference
and the World Jewish Restitution Organization began negotiating with the German
government and other European governments, as well as with Swiss banks,
insurance agencies, and German industries, for the establishment of an
additional compensation program for Holocaust survivors. The negotiations
concerned the return of Jewish real estate and other property that had been
confiscated or forcibly sold during the years of the Nazi regime. The
negotiations also dealt with the enactment of restitution legislation in
European countries concerning looted bank accounts, thefts in the camps, and
looted artwork. In addition, in August 1998 a $1.25-billion settlement with
Swiss banks was reached. It established a fund for Holocaust survivors to
compensate those whose looted assets had been traced to Swiss banks or who had
performed slave labor for Swiss-owned firms or for companies that had deposited
assets in Switzerland.
C | Church Actions |
In the 1960s, as a result of the
initiatives of Pope John XXIII, the Second Vatican Council issued the
declaration Nostra Aetate (In Our Age), in which it “deplored the hatred,
persecutions and display of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews.” In the
1990s conferences of Catholic bishops in Hungary, Germany, Poland, and France
adopted resolutions that censured anti-Semitic teaching and the silence of the
Catholic Church during the Holocaust. In March 1998, under Pope John Paul II,
the Vatican issued the statement “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” which
openly asked forgiveness for crimes and errors committed in the name of the
church. In March 2000 John Paul II visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in
Jerusalem, to pay homage to the millions of Jews who were murdered in the
Holocaust.
Statements made by the Catholic Church
in the 1990s show that the church rejects the charges of historical
responsibility for the role anti-Semitic persecution played during World War II.
However, by denouncing anti-Semitism, expressing regret over the Holocaust, and
apologizing for the silence of Christians who witnessed the mass murder,
statements made by the church in the late 20th century broke new ground in
improving relations and in the fight against prejudice. Beginning in the 1970s a
similar change took place in the German Protestant churches. Many German
theologians denounced the anti-Jewish tradition of the Protestant churches and
recognized their failure to act during the Holocaust.
XIV | HOLOCAUST MEMORIALS |
Memorials and museums concerning the
Holocaust have been established all over the world. In Germany and the European
countries that were under Nazi occupation, remnants of many concentration camps
and killing centers have been converted into museums and memorials. In countries
not involved with the events of the Holocaust, governments and survivors’
organizations have established memorials and museums. Among them are Yad Vashem,
the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, which was established
in 1953 in Jerusalem by an act of the Israeli parliament to commemorate the Jews
murdered by the Nazis. In the United States two museums opened in 1993: the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which is dedicated
to presenting the history of the Holocaust, and the Museum of Tolerance in Los
Angeles, California, which is dedicated to opposing prejudice, intolerance,
violations of human rights, and genocide.
XV | HOLOCAUST SCHOLARSHIP |
Scholars began the systematic investigation
of the Holocaust in the 1960s. Studies of the role of anti-Semitism in Nazi
ideology, the Nazi rise to power, and the structure of the Nazi regime were
published in the 1960s and 1970s. Holocaust scholarship in the 1980s was
characterized by a debate between so-called intentionalists, who maintain that
the “final solution” was the result of a Nazi plan to kill the Jews, and
so-called functionalists, who argue that there was no such plan and that the
Nazis came to the “final solution” by trial and error. In the 1990s the focus
shifted toward the motivations of the perpetrators and the victims’ memory and
representation of the Holocaust. The question of the uniqueness and universality
of the Holocaust and the politics of genocide were the major focus of research
by scholars at the start of the 21st century. These scholars were probing issues
such as whether there is a difference between genocide in general and the
Holocaust, whether the other victims of the Nazis were also Holocaust victims,
and whether there were differences between the Nazi policy toward the Jews and
their policies toward their other victims.
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