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The term Holocaust is used to describe the event when the Nazis killed 6 million Jews. The term is formed by a combination of the Greek words “halo” (whole) and “caustos” (burned). There were about 11 million victims of the Nazis, but the Jews were the only group that the Nazis wanted to completely destroy. Other groups, including gay people, Slavs, Gypsies, and people with birth defects, were eliminated from German society or were forced into slave labor camps. While the Germans were not the only country to engage in violent anti-Semitism (prejudice against Jews), the Holocaust stands out because of the organized way that the Nazis killed the Jews. The Nazis used the technology of an industrialized country, like trains and gas chambers, to murder millions of people.
The goal of the Nazis was to make a racially pure Germany. In order to understand why the Nazis targeted the Jews, it
is important to know that the Nazis saw the Jews as a nationality or “people” who were separate from the Germans. Historically, Jews were seen as having their own religion, culture, and language. This led to the Jews being considered a separate national group, making them a target. In fact, Jews had been persecuted in Europe since 250 A.D. They had been expelled from their villages, attacked by mobs, and murdered for thousands of years. Though the persecution of the Jews was not a new idea, the Germans took their prejudice to an extreme. The Nazis saw the Jews as people they wanted to exterminate from Germany, so they targeted the entire Jewish population of Germany, and eventually expanded to all of the Jews in the territory that the conquered, which meant most of Europe. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, its anti-Jewish policies became more brutal. While the Jews in Germany were only about 1 percent of the population, Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe. Nearly 10 percent of the Polish population was Jewish, which was about 3 million people. As the Germans captured more countries, especially in Eastern Europe, the population of Jews under Nazi control grew larger. Countries like the Soviet Union, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia all had large Jewish populations.
Once the Holocaust began, Jews were forced to move into ghettos, or walled off sections of cities. They were not allowed to have jobs outside of the ghettos, and they had no way of getting food or supplies besides those given to them by the Nazis. The people in these ghettos were used as slave labor for German businesses and many German companies got huge profits from this slave labor force. Jews living and working in ghettos were fed a diet of about 1200 calories a day, while the average adult needs 2000 calories per day. This meant that they suffered a slow starvation. In addition, the Germans confiscated Jewish property and wealth and gave it to loyal Nazis.
Once the Jews were separated from everyone else, the German populations were resettled to Jewish property into Poland and Ukraine to give them more “living space”.
Because Nazi philosophy was based on the idea of racial purity and the Nazis were planning to turn Eastern Europe into “living space” for the German people, the Nazis began to look for a way to eliminate the Jewish populations from these conquered territories. The Nazis realized that they could not just force the Jews to move to other countries because no other countries would accept them. Instead, the Nazis changed their policy to genocide, or killing, of the Jews. The Nazis tried to hide their policy and often used euphemisms (a nice way of saying something harsh) in official documents and communications about the Holocaust. For example, Nazis used the term “the Jewish Question” to refer to their plans to kill all of the Jews of Eastern Europe. Even though they tried to hide their actions from the world, the Nazis kept detailed records of the people killed in the Holocaust.The beginning of the Holocaust was marked by Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, one of the first events ofgovernment-sanctioned violence against the Jews. On November 9th, 1938, a wave of anti-Jewish violence spread through Germany. Members of the German military and the Hitler Youth attacked Jewish homes and businesses. They shattered the windows of the businesses, leaving the streets littered with broken glass. Jews were dragged from their homes and attacked in the streets, and many were arrested by the police. The government tried to make it look like random attacks on the Jews, but the attacks were actually ordered by the Nazis.
Outside of the cities, the Nazis were still looking for ways to kill the Jews, so they organized mobile killing squads, called Einsatzgruppen. These death squads were made up of ordinary people, sometimes reserve policemen, who followed behind the German Army, rounding up and killing Jews. They often worked with the local populations to find the Jews and execute them. The Einsatzgruppen kept detailed records, both written and photographic, of these killings. The massacre of 33,771 Jews in Babi Yar in the Ukraine is the most famous of the Einsatzgruppen actions. Over the course of the war about 150,000 Ukrainians and were executed at Babi Yar. According to the Einsatzgruppen records, the mobile killing squads murdered approximately 1.5 million people. However, the Nazis found that the Einsatzgruppen men could not stand the psychological stress of massacring people, and began to look for another way to carry on their genocidal program.The Nazis also created concentration camps where Jews and other “undesirables” were kept on starvation diets and forced to perform hard labor.
In January 1942, at the Wanssee Conference outside Berlin, the Nazis decided to begin the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Question”. The Final Solution was the systematic genocide of the Jews. Prior to this time, they had kept Jews in ghettos and sent them to work camps, but the goal was primarily to use them for slave labor, rather than kill them. Under the Final Solution, the concentration camps and ghettos were “liquidated” and their populations of Jews were sent to death camps equipped with gas chambers and crematoriums to destroy the bodies of the Jews. In addition, other groups of
“undesirables” were also sent to the extermination camps. There were six death camps built, all in Poland. The vast majority of the people sent to these camps died within hours of their arrival. In addition, the Nazis stole everything from their victims, taking their clothes, jewelry, artificial limbs, teeth fillings, and even hair, to support the German war effort. The Nazis also used the concentration camp populations for “scientific” experiments to support their own theories of racial purity, such as whether Jews could be made into Aryans. In Poland, more than 300,000 people were removed from the Warsaw ghetto and sent to Auschwitz. However, in April 1943, before the entire Warsaw ghetto could be liquidated, the 65,000 remaining Jews rose in armed resistance to the Germans. For three weeks, the Jews battled the Germans, in an event known as the Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising. During the fighting, roughly 20,000 Jews were able to escape the ghetto before the uprising was eventually put down by a large and brutal police force. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was not the only case of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust. In August 1943, the prisoners at the Treblinka death camp rose up in rebellion and burned large parts of the camp. Some 1500 were killed in the rebellion, but roughly seventy escaped to freedom. The rebellion also stopped the gas chambers at Treblinka for a month, slowing down the killing. In October 1943, the prisoners of Sobibor, another death camp, carried out a successful rebellion and escape. They killed 11 SS guards and roughly half of the 600 prisoners escaped. Both of these camps were closed by the Nazis soon after.
The Final Solution continued all the way to the final days of the war when soldiers from the Allied powers liberated, or freed, the camps. Many American, British and Soviet soldiers simply stumbled across the camps as they marched toward Germany, and were stunned by what they found. In fact, in the final year of the war, the Nazis sped up the killings, often diverting necessary resources from the war effort to support the killing of the Jews. Even when the war was lost the Nazis held on to their idea of racial purity for Germany. As they liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, British soldiers found SS soldiers shooting Jews. By 1945, almost three out of every four Jews in Nazi occupied Europe had been killed.
Many individuals helped to save Jews during the Holocaust, but very few countries did much to intervene on their behalf. In fact, at the beginning of World War II, the Nazis only wanted to deport the Jews out of Germany. However, other countries would not allow the Jews to immigrate to their countries. Throughout the Holocaust, Jewish immigration out of Europe was limited. During World War II, rescuing the Jews was not a priority for countries. They were dealing with fighting against Nazi Germany, so many turned a blind eye to the Holocaust. The United States, for example, received news of the Holocaust, but did not publish the information until it could be confirmed. Many believed that such widespread violence was impossible, and so they assumed that reports out of Europe were exaggerated. Though newspapers eventually published news about the Holocaust, it was not as widely covered as the war itself, and many did not believe the reports. As the war drew to a close, the true horrors of the Holocaust were exposed. American soldiers discovered concentration camps as they liberated Europe, and men who were trained as soldiers to fight and kill became nurses and protectors of the Jews.
Individuals in Europe took on great personal risk to protect the Jews. Individuals hid Jews in their homes, on their farms, or in the woods, and supported them with food and supplies. Others adopted Jewish children, falsifying documents to make it appear as though the children were Christian. Still others risked their jobs as diplomats to help Jews emigrate, or chose to employ Jews in their factories so that they could offer them protection. These people, faced great personal risk for helping the Jews. If caught, they faced death or deportation to the concentration camps. For their bravery and self-sacrifice, many have been awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations.
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