Holocaust

Overview - The term Holocaust is used to describe the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis. While there were about 11 million victims of the Nazis, the Jews were the only group that the Nazis sought to annihilate. The Holocaust stands out in history because of the systematic way in which the Nazis killed the Jews. The Nazis applied the technology of a modern industrial state to commit genocide. Genocide is the term used to describe when a group tries to killed an entire group of other people because of reasons of race, ethnicity or religion.

In order to understand why the Nazis targeted the Jews, it is important to recognize that the Nazis saw the Jews as a nationality or “people” separate from the Germans. The Nazis did not consider Jewish people born in Germany to be “German”. The goal of the Nazis was to make a racially pure Germany. The Jewish population of Germany was a very small proportion of the German population, less than 2 %. Before World War Two, the Nazi policy had been to force Jewish people in Germany to leave the country.

The Nazi policy of killing the Jewish people began with the German invasion of Poland in World War Two. Poland had the largest population of Jews in Europe. The German occupation of Poland placed an additional two million Jews under German control. As the Germans captured more countries, especially in Eastern Europe, the population of Jews under Nazi control grew larger. The Nazi wanted to make the lands of Eastern Europe into “living space” for the German people. The SS (Nazi Party Guard) were put in charge of the genocide of the Jews and others groups that the Nazis claimed to be “sub-human” and “undesirable”, such as Gypsies, people with birth defects, and homosexuals. In addition, Nazi policy was that Slavic people were to be rounded up and used as slave labor in German industry.

The SS began to force Jewish people to move into ghettos, walled off sections of cities, and concentration camps where they were kept on starvation diets. The Jewish people in these ghettos and concentration camps were used as slave labor in German industry and many German companies reaped huge profits from this slave labor force. In addition, the Nazis stole Jewish property and wealth.

In Eastern Europe, the SS formed Einsatzgruppen or “actions squads”. These were mobile death squads that followed behind the German Army killing Jews. These groups often worked with the local populations to round up and execute Jews. The Einsatzgruppen kept detailed records, both written and photographic, of these killings. According to the Einsatzgruppen records, they killed 1.5 million people. However, the SS 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.

In January 1942, at the Wanssee Conference the SS decided to begin the “Final Solution” or the systematic genocide of the Jews. The SS decided to send the Jewish people living in concentration camps and ghettos specially built extermination camps equipped with gas chambers. There were six extermination “death camps” built in Poland: Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The vast majority of the Jewish people sent to these camps died within hours of their arrival. After killing the Jewish people, the SS took their their clothes, jewelry, artificial limbs, teeth fillings, and even hair, and sent these things back to German war effort. The Nazis also used the concentration camp populations for bogus scientific experiments to support their own theories of racial purity, such as whether Jews could be made into Aryans.

Many Jewish people fought back against the Nazis. In April 1943, when the SS was rounding up and sending the population of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, to Treblinka, the Jewish people fought back in an armed uprising. The Jew population battled the Germans for three weeks - resulting the complete destruction of the areas of the Warsaw Ghetto. It is estimate that between several hundred to several thousand Jews were able to escape the ghetto during this fighting. In August 1943, the Jewish 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 stopped the gas chambers at Treblinka for a month. In October 1943, the prisoners of the Sobibor 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 rebellions.

The Nazi Holocaust of the Jewish people continued all the way to the final days of the war, until the Allies liberated the death camps. In fact, in the final year of the war, the Nazis sped up the killing of the Jews people. For example, British soldiers found SS soldiers shooting Jewish people while they liberated the Bergan-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945. By the end of the war in 1945, almost three out of every four Jews in Nazi occupied Europe had been killed.

In 1948, after World War Two and the Holocaust, the United Nations enacted a Genocide Convention in which the countries of the world pledged to prevent genocides from happening and punish any country that engages in genocide.

Source # 1 - Video on World War Two and the Holocaust - click here

Source # 2 - Statistics on Jewish Deaths in the Holocaust (click for larger image)