The Holocaust refers to Nazi Germany's systematic genocide of various ethnic, religious, national, and secular groups during World War II starting in 1941 through to 1945.
The Jewish people of Europe were the main targets of the Holocaust, in what the Nazis called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question". Other groups deemed "undesirable", especially gay men, were also persecuted and murdered. The death toll is estimated at between 12 and 26 million. Around six million of the victims were Jews.
Etymology and usage of the term
The word Holocaust comes from the Greek word holokauston (Greek for "a completely (holos) burnt (kaustos) sacrificial offering"), the word meant "a burnt sacrifice offered to God", referring to a sacrifice Jews were required to make by the Torah, and later to large scale catastrophes or massacres. Shoa (השואה), also spelled Shoah and Sho'ah, Hebrew for "Calamity", is the Hebrew term for the Holocaust; Churban Europa Hebrew for "European Destruction" (as opposed to simply Churban, the destruction of the Second Temple), is also used. Shoa is preferred by many Jews and a growing number of Christians due to theological discomfort with the literal meaning of the word Holocaust. These groups believe it is theologically offensive to imply that the European Jews were a sacrifice to God. There is also concern that the term has become too generic, with mass killings such as the Rwandan Genocide and the actions of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia increasingly popularly referred to as "holocausts." Many Roma (Gypsy) people use the word Porajmos, meaning "Devouring".
Features of the Nazi Holocaust
There is a set of features unique to the Nazi Holocaust that distinguishes it from other mass murders:
Deliberateness
It was a deliberate, systematic attempt to wipe out an entire race of people. It is estimated that die Endlösung der Judenfrage (the Final Solution of the Jewish Question), as the Nazis called it during the Wannsee conference of January 1942, saw the murder of 60 per cent of all the Jews in Europe, and 35 per cent of the world's Jewish population. In a speech in October 1943, Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), told a group of senior SS men and Nazi party leaders: "What about the women and children? I decided to find an absolutely clear solution here too. I regard myself as having no right to exterminate (ausrotten) the men—in other words, to kill them or have them killed—and to let the avengers in the form of the children grow up for our sons and grandsons to deal with. The difficult decision had to be taken to make these people disappear from the earth."
Efficiency
It was characterized by the efficient and systematic method by which the mass killings were conducted. Detailed lists of potential victims were made and maintained using Dehomag statistical machinery, and meticulous records of the killings have been found. As prisoners entered the death camps, they had to surrender all personal property to the Nazis - which was precisely catalogued and tagged, and for which receipts were issued. In addition, considerable effort was expended over the course of the Holocaust to find increasingly efficient means of killing more people; for example, by switching from carbon monoxide poisoning in the Aktion Reinhard death camps of Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka to the use of Zyklon B at Majdanek and Auschwitz.
Scale
The scale of the mass murder was international and widespread. Unlike mass killings carried out in a specific area or country, the Holocaust was methodically executed in virtually every inch of Nazi-occupied territory, with Jews and other victims targeted in what are now 35 separate European nations, being sent to labor camps in some nations, and extermination camps in others. Documented evidence suggests that the Nazis even had plans to spread the Holocaust into Britain, North America, and Palestine if these regions were to be conquered. The murders continued until the end of World War II, the Holocaust ending only when the Allies charged into Germany itself, forcing the Nazis to surrender in May 1945.
Cruelty
Nazis carried out cruel and deadly medical experiments on prisoners, including children. Dr. Josef Mengele, medical officer at Auschwitz and chief medical officer at Birkenau, was known as the "Angel of Death" for his sadistic and bizarre medical experiments. Many of these experiments were intended to produce 'racially pure' babies and as research into weapons and techniques of war.
Victims
The victims of the Holocaust were primarily Jews, who were the targets of the Final Solution. However, other groups regarded as undesirable were also persecuted and murdered, including Communists, Censored page, Roma and Sinti (also known as gypsies), the mentally ill and the physically disabled, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish, Russian, and other Slavic intelligentsia, political activists, Jehovah's Witnesses, some Catholic and Protestant clergy, trade unionists, psychiatric patients, common criminals and people labeled as "enemies of the state". These victims all perished alongside one another in the camps, according to the extensive documentation left behind by the Nazis themselves (written and photographed), eye-witness testimony (by survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders), and the statistical records of the various countries under occupation.
Jews
Nazis in uniform in Vienna, Austria 1938 mock Jewish men scrubbing streets
Anti-Semitism was common in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s (though its history extends far back throughout many centuries during the course of Judaism). Adolf Hitler's fanatical anti-Semitism was laid out in his 1925 book Mein Kampf, largely ignored when it was first printed, but which later became popular in Germany once Hitler acquired political power.
On April 1, 1933 the recently elected Nazis, under Julius Streicher, organized a one-day boycott of all Jewish-owned businesses in Germany. This policy helped to usher-in a series of anti-Semitic acts that would eventually culminate in the Holocaust. The last remaining Jewish enterprises in Germany were closed on July 6, 1939. In many cities throughout Europe, Jews had been living in concentrated areas. During the first years of World War II, the Nazis formalized the borders of these areas and restricted movement, creating modern ghettos to which Jews were confined. The ghettos were, in effect, prisons in which many Jews died from hunger and disease; others were executed by the Nazis and their collaborators. Concentration camps for Jews existed in Germany itself. During the invasion of the Soviet Union, over 3,000 special killing units (Einsatzgruppen) followed the Wehrmacht and conducted mass killings of Communist officials and of the Jewish population that lived on Soviet territory. Entire communities were wiped out by being rounded up, robbed of their possessions and clothing, and shot at the edges of ditches.
In December 1941, Hitler finally decided to exterminate European Jews. In January 1942, during the Wannsee conference, several Nazi leaders discussed the details of the "Final Solution of the Jewish question" (Endlösung der Judenfrage). Dr. Josef Buhler urged Reinhard Heydrich to proceed with the Final Solution in the General Government. They began to systematically deport Jewish populations from the ghettos and all occupied territories to the seven camps designated as Vernichtungslager, or extermination camps: Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Maly Trostenets, Sobibór and Treblinka II.
Slavs
Poles were one of the first targets of extermination by Hitler, as outlined in the speech he gave the Wehrmacht commanders before the invasion of Poland in 1939. The intelligentsia and socially prominent or powerful people were primarily targeted, although there were some mass murders and instances of genocide (notoriously, the Croatian Ustashe).
During Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Red Army POWs were arbitrarily executed in the field by the invading German armies (in particular by the notorious Waffen SS), or were shipped to extermination camps for execution simply because they were of Slavic extraction. Thousands of Soviet peasant villages were annihilated by German troops for more or less the same reason.
Gypsies
Main article: Porajmos
Hitler's campaign of genocide against the Roma people of Europe was seen by many as a particularly bizarre application of Nazi racial science. German anthropologists were forced to contend with the fact that Gypsies were descendants of the original Aryan invaders of India, who made their way back to Europe. Ironically, this made them no less Aryan than the German people itself, in practice if not in theory. This dilemma was resolved by Professor Hans Gunther, a leading racial scientist, who wrote:
- "The Gypsies have indeed retained some elements from their Nordic home, but they are descended from the lowest classes of the population in that region. In the course of their migration, they absorbed the blood of the surrounding peoples, thus becoming an Oriental, West-Asiatic racial mixture with an addition of Indian, mid-Asiatic, and European strains."
As a result, however, and despite discriminatory measures, some groups of Roma, including the Sinti and Lalleri tribes of Germany, were spared deportation and death. Remaining Gypsy groups suffered much like the Jews (and in some instances, were degraded even more than Jews). In Eastern Europe, Gypsies were deported to the Jewish ghettoes, shot by SS Einsatzgruppen in their villages, and deported and gassed in Auschwitz and Treblinka.
Gay Men
Censored page were another of the groups targeted during the time of the Holocaust. Some leaders clearly wanted gays exterminated; while others wanted laws against gay sex enforced. More than one million gay German men were targeted, whom at least 100,000 were arrested and 50,000 serving prison terms as convited gay men. An additional unknown number were institutionalized in state-run mental hospitals. Hundereds of European gay men living under Nazi occupation were castrated under court order.
At least an estimated 15,000 gay men were sent to concentration camps and their death that we officially know about through historical documents. Larger numbers include those who were Jewish and gay, or even Jewish, gay and Communist. In addition, records as to the specific reasons for internment are non-existent in many areas making it hard to put an exact number on just how many gay men perished in death camps. See Censored page for more information. Conditions for gay men in the camps was especially rough, they faced not only persecution from German soldiers but also other prisoners, many gay men were reported to die of beatings. German soldiers were also known to use the pink triangles gay men were forced to wear as target practice with their weapons.
Lesbians were not treated as harshly as gay men. They were labeled as "anti-social" but not sent to camps.
Others
Around 2000 Jehovah's Witnesses perished in concentration camps, where they were held for political and ideological reasons. They refused involvement in politics, would not say "Heil Hitler", and did not serve in the German army. See Jehovah's Witnesses and the Holocaust.
Several hundred thousand mentally and physically disabled people were exterminated. The Nazis believed that the disabled were a burden to society because they needed to be cared for by others. Around 400,000 individuals were sterilized against their will for having mental deficiencies or illnesses deemed as hereditary in nature.
The T-4 Euthanasia Program was established in 1939 in order to maintain the supposed purity of the so-called Aryan race by systematically killing children and adults born with physical deformities or suffering from mental illness.
On August 18, 1941, Hitler ordered a temporary halt to T-4. Graduates of the Aktion T4 program were then transferred to the concentration camps, where they continued in their trade.
Euthanasia did not end in 1941, however; it still took place in hospitals around Germany and Austria, and crept East into a few of the occupied territories.
Death toll
General (later US President)
Dwight Eisenhower inspecting prisoners' corpses at a liberated concentration camp, 1945
The exact number of people killed by the Nazi regime is still subject to further research. Recently declassified British and Soviet documents have indicated the total may be somewhat higher than previously believed [1] http://www.jpost.com/com/Archive/20.May.1997/News/Article-2.html (this is now in the Paid Archives. To access this article go Here http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/jpost/abstract/64152996.html?did=64152996&FMT=ABS&FM
TS=FT&date=May+20%2C+1997&author=DOUGLAS+DAVIS&desc=7+million+died+in+Holocaust ). However, the following estimates are considered to be highly reliable.
The Nazis persecuted many groups of people deemed inferior to the Nazi Aryan ideal. The following estimates refer to groups that were actively singled out in Nazi ideology as being 'unfit for life' and were part of the Nazi's planned and systematic genocide.
- 5 – 6 million Jews, including 3.0 – 3.5 million Polish Jews [2] http://www.yad-vashem.org.il/about_holocaust/faqs/answers/faq_3.html
- 200 000 – 800 000 Roma & Sinti
- 200 000 – 300 000 handicapped
- 10 000 – 25 000 gay men
- 2 000 Jehovah's Witnesses
Lucy Davidowicz used prewar census figures to estimate that 5.85 million Jews died. Using official census counts may cause an underestimate since many births and deaths were not recorded in small towns and villages. Another reason some consider her estimate too low is that many records were destroyed during the war. (Her book, The War Against the Jews has detailed listings by country of the number of Jews killed.)
The following groups of people were also killed by the Nazi regime but there is little evidence that the Nazis planned to systematically target them for genocide as was the case for the groups above.
- 2.5 – 3.5 million non-Jewish Poles
- 3.5 – 6 million other Slavic civilians
- 2.5 – 4 million Soviet POWs
- 1 – 1.5 million political dissidents
Resistance
Due to the careful organization and overwhelming military might of the Nazi German military and their supporters, not many Jews and other Holocaust victims were able to resist the killings. There are though many documented eye witness reports and published books with documented cases of passive and active resistance, which even led to local partisan groups joining together with former Ghetto fighters. The most famous instance of organized resistance took place in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Some non-Jews took drastic and dangerous steps to rescue Jews and other potential victims from the Nazi occupiers. Since 1963, a commission headed by an Israeli Supreme Court justice has been charged with the duty of awarding such people the honorary title Righteous Among the Nations.
Searching for records of victims
Initially after WWII, of course, there were millions of members of families broken up by the war or the Holocaust searching for some record of the fate and/or whereabouts of their missing friends and relatives, which became much less intense as the years went by. More recently, however, there has a been a resurgence of interest by descendants of Holocaust survivors in researching the fates of their lost relatives. Yad Vashem provides a searchable database of three million names, about half of the known direct Jewish victims. Yad Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victims Names is searchable over the Internet at [3] http://www.yadvashem.org/ or in person at the Yad Vashem complex in Israel.
Other databases and lists of victims' names, some searchable over the Web, are listed in Holocaust (resources)#External links.
Concentration and extermination camps
Main articles: Concentration camp, Extermination camp.
Mass grave at Bergen Belsen concentration camp 1945
Concentration camps for "undesirables" were spread throughout Europe, with new camps being created near centers of dense "undesirable" populations, often focusing on heavily Jewish, Polish intelligentsia, communists, or Roma groups. Most of the camps were located in the area of General Government. The transportion of prisoners was often carried out under horrifying conditions using rail freight cars, in which many died before their destination.
Concentration camps for Jews and other, "undesirables," also existed in Germany itself, and while not specifically designed for systematic extermination, many concentration camp prisoners died because of harsh conditions or were executed.
Some camps, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, combined slave labour with systematic extermination. Upon arrival in these camps, prisoners were divided into two groups: those too weak for work were immediately executed in gas chambers (which were sometimes disguised as showers) and their bodies burned, while others were first used for slave labor in factories or industrial enterprises located in the camp or nearby. The Nazis also forced some prisoners to work in the collection and disposal of corpses, and to mutilate them when required. Gold teeth were extracted from the corpses, and women's hair (shaved from the heads of victims before they entered the gas chambers) was recycled for use in products such as rugs and socks.
Four camps — Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibór, and Treblinka II — were used exclusively for extermination. Only a small number of prisoners were kept alive to work at the task of disposing of the bodies of people murdered in the gas chambers.
The triangles
Main article: Inverted triangle
To identify prisoners in the camps according to their "offense", they were required to wear colored triangles on their clothing. Although the colors used differed from camp to camp, the colors most commonly used were:
-
Yellow: Jews -- two overlaid to form a Star of David, with the word "Jude" (Jew) inscribed; mischlings, (half-breeds) i.e., those who were deemed to be only part Jewish, often wore a single yellow triangle
-
Red: Political dissidents, including Communists
-
Green: Common criminals. Criminals of Aryan descent were frequently given special privileges at the camps, and power over other prisoners.
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Purple: Religious fundamentalists (defined as persons belonging to Christian sects whose teachings forbid fighting in wars), most notably Jehovah's Witnesses
- Blue: Immigrants.
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Brown: Roma and Sinti (Gypsies)
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Black: Lesbians and "anti-socials" (alcoholics and the "work-shy")
- Pink: Gay men
Historical interpretations
As with any historical event, scholars continue to argue over what exactly happened, and why.
Who was directly involved in the killings?
Who authorized the killings?
While no specific order from Hitler authorizing the mass killing of the Jews has surfaced, a mass of evidence suggests that sometime in the fall of 1941, Himmler and he agreed in principle on mass murder by gassing. To make for smoother intra-governmental cooperation in the implementation of this "Final Solution," to the "Jewish Question," the Wannsee conference was held near Berlin on January 20 1942 with the participation of fifteen senior officials, led by Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann, the records of which provide the best evidence of the central planning of the Holocaust. Just five weeks later, on February 22 Hitler was recorded saying "We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jews" to his closest associates.
There is no known document in which Hitler explicitly ordered the Holocaust, although there is documentation that he approved of the Einsatzgruppen, where Jews throughout Russia were shot naked in front of ditches. Most historians believe he not only knew of the Holocaust and the gas chambers but ordered Himmler to carry it out — certainly it was entirely consistent with his lifelong beliefs.
Who knew about the killings?
The full extent of what was happening in German-controlled areas was not known until after the war. However, numerous rumors and eye-witness accounts from escapees and others did give some indication that Jews were being killed in large numbers. Some protests were held. For example, on October 29/30, 1942, in the United Kingdom, leading clergymen and political figures held a public meeting to register outrage over Germany's persecution of Jews.
Why did people participate in, authorize, or tacitly accept the killing?
Functionalism versus intentionalism
A major issue in contemporary Holocaust studies is the question of functionalism versus intentionalism. Intentionalists like Lucy Davidowicz argue that the Holocaust was planned by Hitler from the very beginning. More moderate recent intentionalist historians like Eberhard Jäckel continue to emphasize the relative earliness of the decision to murder the Jews, although they are not willing to claim that Hitler planned the Holocaust from the beginning. Functionalists like Hans Mommsen hold that the Holocaust was started in 1942 as a result of the failure of the Nazi deportation policy and the impending military losses in Russia. They claim that extermination fantasies outlined in Hitler's Mein Kampf and other Nazi literature were mere propaganda and did not constitute concrete plans.
Another controversy was started by the historian Daniel Goldhagen, who argues that ordinary Germans were knowing and willing participants in the Holocaust, which he claims had its roots in a deep eliminationist German anti-Semitism. Most other historians have disagreed with Goldhagen's thesis, arguing that while anti-Semitism undeniably existed in Germany, Goldhagen's idea of a uniquely German "eliminationist" anti-Semitism is untenable, and that the extermination was unknown to many and had to be enforced by the dictatorial Nazi apparatus.
Revisionists and deniers
Holocaust denial, also called Holocaust revisionism, is the belief that far fewer than the 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis (numbers below 1 million, most often around 300,000 are typically cited). Adherents of this position claim that there never was a Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews, and that many other minorities were persecuted as severely or worse than the Jews, particularly Ukranians under Stalin (the latter persecutions are often attributed to Jews). Many people who hold this position further claim that Jews and/or Zionists know that the Holocaust never occurred, yet that they nonetheless disingenuously use the Holocaust to further their political agenda. These views are not accepted as credible by mainstream historians.
Holocaust deniers almost always prefer to be called Holocaust revisionists. However, many people contend that the latter term is misleading. Historical revisionism is a well-accepted and mainstream part of the study of history; it is the reexamination of accepted history, with an eye towards updating it with newly discovered, more accurate, and/or less biased information, or viewing known information from a new perspective.
Holocaust deniers maintain that they apply proper revisionist principles to Holocaust history, and therefore the term Holocaust revisionism is appropriate for their point of view. However, mainstream historians strongly disagree. Gordon McFee writes in his essay "Why Revisionism isn't" that:
- "Revisionists" depart from the conclusion that the Holocaust did not occur and work backwards through the facts to adapt them to that preordained conclusion. Put another way, they reverse the proper methodology [...], thus turning the proper historical method of investigation and analysis on its head." [4] http://www.holocaust-history.org/revisionism-isnt/
New historical studies of the Holocaust may in theory be referred to as Holocaust revisionism. However, because the latter term has become associated with Holocaust deniers, mainstream historians today now avoid using it to describe such work.
Holocaust denial, aka Holocaust revisionism, is most commonly associated with neo-Nazis or anti-Semites, and has become popular among many Islamic fundamentalists.
Holocaust theology
On account of the magnitude of the Holocaust, many people have re-examined the classical theological views on God's goodness and actions in the world. Some believers and apostates question whether people can still have any faith after the Holocaust, and some of the theological responses to these questions are explored in Holocaust theology. Others, particularly Open Theists, argue that horrors such as the holocaust are the result of too little faith and obedience to God, rather than too much. They conclude that it is non-sequitur to blame or doubt God for humanity's steadfast refusal to "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," because we have no one but ourselves to blame.
Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, writer and spokesman on Holocaust issues, addressing the US Congress
Political ramifications
The Holocaust has had a number of political and social ramifications which reach to the present.
State of Israel
The Holocaust and its aftermath left millions of refugees, including many Jews who had lost most or all of their family members and posessions, and often faced persistent anti-Semitism in their home countries. The need to find a homeland for the Jewish refugees led to many of them fervently joining the Zionist movement. Many Zionists, pointing to the fact that Jewish refugees from Germany and Nazi-occupied lands had been turned away by other countries, argued that if a Jewish state had existed at the time, the Holocaust could not have occurred on the scale it did. The sudden rapid growth of Zionism and the post-Holocaust displacement resulted in the emigration of a great many Jews to Palestine, much of which became the modern State of Israel soon after. This immigration had a direct effect on the regional Arabs, many of whom firmly opposed a Jewish state in the Middle East. The ongoing unrest between Jews and Arabs is perhaps the most tragic legacy of the Holocaust, further discussed in the articles on the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in other related articles linked to them.
While the Holocaust stands as a reminder that modern, "civilized" nations can engage in the most horrific of organized group behavior, it is also important to remember that during the Holocaust, many non-Jews risked (and often lost) their lives attempting to aid Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution, for no conceivable gain other than to satisfy their own consciences. In order to recognize these examples of the most noble of human behaviors among the most debased, the Israeli government through the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial set up a Righteous gentiles program to honor and memorialize as many of these heroic individuals as can be found.
See also
References
- Martin Gilbert . The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War (New York, 1985) ISBN 0805003487
- Nazi Persecution of Gays 1933-1945 http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/hsx/
Resources
Resources are listed in Holocaust (resources).
Last updated: 02-06-2005 11:38:33
Last updated: 05-03-2005 17:50:55
