21.6: The Holocaust

After the war, as a whole, Europe was in shambles, with whole cities destroyed, and even the victorious Allied nations were economically crippled. In addition, details of what became known as the Holocaust were discovered by the liberating armies. Simultaneously, the world was forced to grapple with the fact that human beings had the ability to extinguish all life on earth through atomic weapons. These two traumas - the Holocaust and The Bomb - forced "Western Civilization" as a whole to rethink its own identity.

Before the Holocaust

In 1935, the Nazis implemented anti-Jewish racial laws, known as the Nuremberg Laws. Jews were deprived of their citizenship and banned from various professions based upon their classification of being either “full” Jews (three or four practicing Jews as grandparents) or 'mixed" Jews. For the next four years leading up to the war, the Nazi government sought to force Jews to emigrate from the Reich, while extracting as much wealth from them as possible. The state imposed a “Reich Flight Tax”. Then, in 1938, they forced all Jews to register their property, which was then expropriated in a campaign dubbed “Aryanization.”

In November 1938, the Nazis initiated a nationwide pogrom known as the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht) in which some 90 Jews were killed and 177 synagogues burned to the ground. Afterwards, 20,000 Jewish men were arrested for “disrupting the peace” and incarcerated in prison camps. Nazi leader Hermann Göring demanded one billion Marks from the German Jewish population for the damage caused by the riots. After Kristallnacht, many of the remaining German Jews desperately sought asylum outside of Germany, but were all too often rebuffed by countries which, in the midst of the Great Depression, allowed in only a trickle of immigrants each year (Jewish or otherwise). Approximately half of the 500,000 German Jews did manage to flee before the war.

Figure 21.1.1: The aftermath of Kristallnacht in Munich: the gutted remains of the Ohel-Jakob Synagogue.

Simultaneously, high-ranking Nazi officials in the SS were exploring permanent options for ridding the Reich of Jews. Beginning in 1941, many Nazis wanted to render the entire face of Europe, and possibly the world, Judenrein: "Jew-Free." In the end, the “final solution to the Jewish question” - the Nazi’s euphemism for the Holocaust - was decided to consist not of deportation, but of systematic murder.

The bulk of Europe's Jewish population was in the east, concentrated in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. Unlike the Jews of Central and Western Europe, most of the Jews of Eastern Europe were largely unassimilated, living in separate communities, speaking Yiddish as their vernacular language instead of Polish or Russian, and often facing harsh anti-Semitism from their non-Jewish neighbors (which was somewhat muted in the nominally unprejudiced Soviet Union). Thus, the Jews of the east had almost nowhere to run and few who would help them once the German war machine arrived.

When the war began, Polish Jews were beaten, humiliated, and sometimes murdered outright, but there was not a campaign of focused, organized murder against them. Instead, the initial task of Nazi murder squads was the elimination of the Polish “leadership class,” which came to mean intellectuals, politicians, communists, and Catholic priests. At least 50,000 Polish social, political, and intellectual elites were murdered by SS death squads or regular German soldiers in a campaign codenamed “Operation Tannenberg.”

On encountering the enormous numbers of Jews in Poland, the Nazis opted to drive them into hastily-constructed ghettos, neighborhoods that were usually fenced-off, and surrounded with barbed wire. The largest ones were in the large Polish cities of Warsaw and Lodz; the Warsaw Ghetto alone housed over 400,000 Jews at its height in late 1941. Conditions were atrocious. The official food ration “paid” to Jewish workers who worked as slave laborers for the Nazi war effort consisted of about 600 - 800 calories a day. (An adult should consume about 2,000 a day to remain healthy.) Approximately 500,000 people died from starvation and disease in the ghettos.

The Holocaust Begins

The Holocaust began with the invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. As German armies advanced into Soviet territory, they were followed by four teams of Einsatzgruppen - mobile killing squads - charged with killing “Jews, Gypsies, and the disabled.” At some point over the next few months, the top Nazi leadership decided to abandon earlier experiments with forced deportations and search for more efficient methods. The head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, ordered experiments with better means of mass murder, which resulted in Nazi technicians devising “gas vans” that killed their victims through carbon monoxide poisoning. By the late fall of 1941, killing facilities were being built in the concentration camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz. There, the first experiments with the infamous pesticide Zyklon B were carried out on Russian POWs.

Based on the experiments with gas vans and temporary gas chambers at Auschwitz, SS leaders concluded that stationary killing centers would be the most efficient. In early 1942, the Nazis embarked on the creation of the extermination camps. Extermination camps were not the same thing as concentration camps. Concentration camps were prison camps, Extermination camps were designed for one purpose: to kill people. There were only six of them in total, and most were very small - often about a quarter of a square mile in size. All were located in occupied Poland, near rail lines and hidden in forests away from major population centers. New arrivals were typically dead within two hours. They were, in short, "death factories," production facilities of murder that ran on industrial timetables.

The most well-known camp was Auschwitz. Built to be permanent, its gas chambers were large and made of concrete and steel (unlike the wood sheds used to murder in the other extermination camps). It was intended to be the final destination for every Jew captured by the Nazis. Thus most Jews from the western European countries occupied by Germany were sent to die in Auschwitz. The Nazis continued to prioritize the "final solution" even as the war turned against them, shipping hundreds of thousands to Auschwitz as the Allies steadily pressed against them in the east and south.

Aftermath

The liberation of the camps was horrifying to the Allied soldiers who discovered them in the closing months of the war. Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander of the forces that had carried out the D-Day invasion, ordered that British and American troops alike document what they discovered - the huge mounds of corpses, the open graves, the emaciated survivors, and the gas chambers. Likewise, Soviet forces preserved the evidence discovered in the eastern camps, including Auschwitz itself.

At the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi leaders were charged with Crimes Against Humanity, a completely new category of crime designed by the victorious Allies to try to deal with the enormity of what they still called “Nazi atrocities.” Based on the German SS's documentation, the Allies calculated that the death toll of Jews murdered by the Third Reich to roughly six million individuals, and the basic mechanisms of deportation, slavery, and gassing were also clear. Today, global community members can visit a number of museums dedicated to the remembrance of the Holocaust, such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

Editor's Note: This textbook is used at Mizzou Academy, a private school located in the state of Missouri. Pursuit to Revised Statutes of Missouri, RSMo Section 161.700, the term "Holocaust" shall be defined as the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies and collaborators during the period from 1933 through 1945.