Holocaust

The Holocaust was the systematic killing of the Jews, and others deemed subhuman under the Nazi race and biological ideology of Europe by the Nazis. Shoah refers specifically to the killing of Jews, but the killing machinery was used extensively against Soviet prisoners of war, political opposition, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc.

Origins

See also: Nazi race and biological ideology

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.

Eugenics, incorporating prescientific 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.

Stage two: Emigration and sterilization

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: Forced relocation

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: Active killing

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: the Final Solution

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: Endgame

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.

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

Hitler was at the heart of the Holocaust. While there is no confirmation, it is widely accepted that he gave the orders for the Final Solution verbally to Himmler and Hermann Goering, Goering then being his deputy and economic chief. Himmler then gave orders to Reinhard Heydrich, who conducted the Wannsee Conference.

There were two major factions in the SS, with different goals. The WVHA economic administration, under Oswald Pohl, sought to maximize the gain from the camps, as with slave labor. Its Inspector of Concentration Camps actually ran them.

The other faction was the RSHA security administration, first under Reinhard Heydrich and the Ernst Kaltenbrunner. RSHA offices included the Gestapo, whose Amt IVB, under Adolf Eichmann was the senior SS bureaucrat in charge of handling deportation and transportation to the camps. The RuSHA, however, developed the racial policies and criteria for arrest.

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 Concentration 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.?

Trials

The main war criminals were tried at the International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg) (IMT) in 1945–1947, and at smaller trials throughout Europe, especially the U.S. Nuremberg Military Tribunals.

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.