24.3 The Holocaust

In January 1933 Hitler came to power as Chancellor of Germany. As we have seen, his Nazi Movement would consolidate its power and eliminate its enemies all in the name of the restoration of Germany’s honor as a great power. Hitler’s ambitions would ultimately lead to an aggressive foreign policy that would take Europe to war in 1939. While building Germany as a great power, Hitler was also waging war against another perceived enemy, Germany’s Jews. Hitler’s anti-Semitism would be fabricated into state policy and lead to what has come to be called the Holocaust, a systematic policy of genocide intended to rid Europe of Judaism.

The Holocaust can be dated from 1933 to 1945. During that period some ten million European Jews and others deemed by the Nazis as Untermenschen (“sub-humans”) would be systematically destroyed. This reading is intended to introduce the reader to the Holocaust. It is at best a survey and cannot effectively convey the perversity and tragedy that were the Holocaust. It cannot convey the physical and psychological impact of the Holocaust on its victims and its survivors. The statistics are staggering, but statistics reduce the human element to clinical abstractions. The story of the Holocaust is best told by those who experienced its terror and horror. Such works include The Diary of Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel’s Night, and Gerda Klein’s All But My Life. Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s List, while a novel, is based on an actual person, a Nazi opportunist whose life and purpose were transformed by his role in the Holocaust. If one cannot read the book, one must see the movie. It is an unforgettable testimony to all that is good and evil in humanity.

In 1933 the Jewish population of Germany numbered some 600,000 – only one percent of the total population of some 60 million Germans. While seemingly insignificant in number, Germany’s Jews were significant in the overall economic and social life of the country as educators, doctors, scientists, businessmen, financiers, lawyers, writers, and artists.

It is a mistaken assumption that in their vehement anti-Semitism, the Nazis were an anomaly in an otherwise tolerant Germany. While Hitler vilified Jews in Mein Kampf, anti-Semitism was not an emphasis in the Nazi political appeal to the German electorate in the years before Hitler’s coming to power. Some of the most influential figures of the Nazi leadership, among them Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and Adolf Eichmann, were not anti-Semitic before joining the Nazi movement. Statistical records of Nazi Party membership from the 1930s reveal that only 13 % joined the party because they hated Jews. Almost half (48%) of the early Nazis were not anti-Semitic at all (Pauley 162).

Anti-Semitism had been evident in German life before the Nazis came to power. Upper middle class professionals resented the prevalence of Jews among journalists, doctors, university professors, and jurists (lawyers and judges). Among these Germans were those who called for quotas on the numbers of Jews admitted to the professions or even for the expulsion of Jews from the country. While there was some degree of anti-Semitism among the lower middle class, it was the Nazis’ political message that attracted their support. Anti-Semitism would, however, be made state policy once the Nazis came to power.

In the spring of 1933 Hitler authorized a nation-wide boycott of Jewish businesses and shops. This policy proved unwise as consumer consumption of goods and services was essential to the Nazi promise to end the Depression. While not officially rescinded, the call for boycott was not enforced. Nonetheless, anti-Jewish publications such as Der Stürmer urged continued boycott and Jewish merchants suffered from threats and sporadic attacks by SA men. Otherwise, Jewish owned businesses remained relatively untouched by the Nazis until 1937. Further laws, however, were more far-reaching. Jewish teachers and professors were dismissed from public schools and universities. They could continue to teach in Jewish schools. Jewish students were still permitted to attend public schools but had to sit in seats separated from other students. Jewish students who wanted to go on to higher education were restricted by university quotas limiting their numbers. Jews were ordered removed from the civil service (all positions of public service in the local, regional, and national bureaucracies) and the law courts. There were, however, categories of exceptions that allowed many Jewish civil servants and judges to keep their positions – for the time being. Jewish artists, musicians, filmmakers, writers were expelled from cultural guilds. Jewish editors and journalists were dismissed from German newspapers and other publications. Beyond these policies, it was not evident that Hitler had a plan for the “Jewish Question” other than creating circumstances whereby Jews would want to leave Germany. In 1933 some 53,000 Jews emigrated. Of those who left the country, 16,000 would return. In their new countries they experienced continued anti-Semitism or were homesick for Germany.

In 1935 the Nuremberg Laws officially classified Jews as a “race.” One was identified as a Jew if one had at least one grandparent who was Jewish.[1] All Jews were stripped of their German citizenship. They would henceforth be “subjects” of the state no longer holding legal or civil rights (such as the right to vote). All intermarriage between Jews and “Aryans” was prohibited. Jews were forbidden from hiring “Aryan” servants. Most Germans, including Jews, thought that the Nuremberg Laws would be the end of any further persecutions. Still, by 1938 some 129,000 Jews had left Germany.

With the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936, Nazi Germany put its best face forward for the world to see. The Germans proved gracious and welcoming hosts. Foreign visitors saw and were impressed by the accomplishments of the Nazi regime. By then Germany had recovered from the Depression and had asserted its independence from the military restrictions of the Versailles Treaty. Germany was regimented, to be sure, but to most Germans its prosperity and growing international respect seemed well worth the inconvenience of dictatorship.

The next step toward the Holocaust would come in 1937 when Hitler’s government allowed local and regional Nazi officials to persecute Jewish business owners. Jewish businessmen were threatened or attacked and consequently “persuaded” to sell their businesses at prices far below their value. The businesses were thus “Aryanized.”

In March 1938 Hitler’s foreign policy successfully brought Austria into the Third Reich. With the Anschluss (annexation of Austria), came a population of 200,000 Austrian Jews. Suddenly, Germany’s Jewish population was larger than it had been in 1933. With Austria also came a non-Jewish population that had a long and virulent tradition of anti-Semitism. Now free to express their hatred, Austrian Nazis began harsh persecutions of their former countrymen. Austrian Jews were attacked and arrested for being in violation of the Nuremberg Laws. German Nazis traveled to Austria to study their Austrian colleagues’ “Aryanization” techniques. The annexation of Austria, consequently, would prove disastrous for Germany’s Jews.

In the summer and fall of 1938 persecutions of German Jews were accelerated. In June 1500 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps simply because they were Jews. Decrees were issued requiring that all Jewish men had to add “Israel” to their names and all Jewish women “Sarah.”

Efforts by Jews to leave Germany were intensified, but many were hesitant to leave as Nazi conditions for emigration meant sacrificing one’s business assets, home and property, and most of one’s personal fortune. Basically Jews were allowed to leave with only what they could carry and then at a very high price in payment for exit visas. Emigration was also hampered by restrictive immigration laws in countries to which many Jews sought to relocate.

Kristallnacht and the November Pogrom

In November 1938 a German diplomat was assassinated in Paris by a young German Jew of Polish extraction. The assassination resulted in mass rioting. Thousands of angry Germans took to the streets across both Germany and Austria and systematically attacked, looted, and destroyed synagogues and Jewish businesses. Jews were dragged from their homes and beaten, and some 91 were killed. Over 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and taken to concentration camps. Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels labeled the event Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass.” The rioting appeared to be the spontaneous reaction of an outraged population to the Paris assassination, but was in reality a systematic and well-organized event. Units of the SS, SA, and Hitler Youth, all ordered not to wear their uniforms, were the initial rioters who stoned store and synagogue windows and set the fires that destroyed them. They were joined in the streets by others who became caught up in the frenzy of destruction. Blaming the Jews for the loss of valuable property, the German government then levied a fine of one billion marks ($2.5 billion) on the Jewish population to compensate for the damages.

Kristallnacht proved very controversial. Most Germans recognized what had happened and many expressed shame and embarrassment that their government had sanctioned such devastation. Even some Nazis saw the destruction as the work of hard-line anti-Semites who by their actions had disgraced their country. Germany came under intense international criticism as foreign governments expressed their condemnation. Kristallnacht had not been ordered by Hitler (most evidence points to Goebbels as the brain behind the event) but he did not condemn it. The Nazis did, however, learn that public demonstrations of open persecution such as Kristallnacht were detrimental to their public image. From then on persecution would be conducted through “legal” means. Thus began the “November Pogrom.”

The “November Pogrom” was a series of laws that prohibited Jews from any form of private business practice, including medicine and law (except for Jewish patients and clients). Jews were forbidden the use of public parks and public telephones, and to own automobiles. All Jewish students were expelled from public schools and universities. All Jews were also ordered removed without compensation from any management-level occupations.

The purpose of the November Pogrom was to make conditions so intolerable for Jews that they would emigrate from Germany. Such emigration was made difficult as it was expensive, and Jews were limited in how much money and personal belongings they could take from Germany. Between 1933 and 1939 those German and Austrian Jews who were able to get out (about 400,000 total) emigrated to eastern and western Europe, Palestine, Latin America, China, and the United States. Among those who did successfully emigrate were the noted physicist Albert Einstein, the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and numerous other noted scientists, artists, musicians, and writers, including eight Nobel Prize-winners. Those who immigrated to western and eastern Europe would be again subject to Nazi rule when those regions were conquered and occupied by the Germans during World War II.

The Euthanasia Program

In September 1939 the Nazis initiated a secret euthanasia program directed against those mentally and physically disabled. Surveys were made of psychiatric institutions, hospitals, and homes for the chronically ill to identify those defined by law as unfit to live. This included men, women, and children who had been institutionalized. Those slated for death were transported to six extermination centers. Death was first by starvation, but gassing became the preferred means of execution. The “patients” were escorted to a gas chamber disguised as a shower. Once they were in the room gas was pumped through the “shower” heads. All this was done under the supervision of a doctor. The bodies were then disposed of by burning in a crematorium. Victims’ families were informed that the patients had been taken to new and modern treatment facilities. They were not told where nor would family members be allowed to visit. Families were later informed that their loved ones had died. They were sent condolence letters, falsified death certificates signed by a physician, and an urn with the victim’s ashes. Between 1939 and 1941 some 72,000 had been executed before Hitler ordered the program ended. The Nazi euthanasia program provided the “dress rehearsal” and infrastructure for mass murder that would become the Holocaust.

The Ghettos

On September 1, 1939, Hitler launched the German invasion of Poland, beginning the Second World War. By the summer of 1941 Germany had invaded and defeated Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Hungary, Slovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Finland became German satellites under direction from Berlin. The German invasion of the Soviet Union began in June 1941. By the onset of winter, German armies had conquered and occupied western Russia and Ukraine. With the exception of Britain and a few neutral states, Germany now dominated all of Europe west of a line extending across Russia from the Baltic to the Black Sea. In those territories were millions of Jews and others the Nazis identified as Untermenschen upon whom the Nazi terror had descended. The Holocaust was about to begin.

There were Jewish populations in all of the states under Nazi occupation, most of them in Poland and Russia. In Poland the German military and SS occupation authorities, working with Polish collaborators, forcibly relocated the country’s Jewish populations into ghettos. Ghettos were specified areas of the major cities – Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz, Lublin – that would be restricted to Jewish populations. The Germans usually sealed the ghetto areas behind walls and barbed wire. SS guards controlled the gates. Basically, the ghettos were prison cities. Evicted from their homes, and bringing only what they could carry, hundreds of thousands of people were jammed into overcrowded apartment blocks where they suffered the hardships of food rationing and unsanitary conditions. Disease was rampant. What semblance of civil government that existed in the ghettos was provided by the Judenrat (German for “Jewish Council”), Jewish officials responsible to the German authorities for keeping order. Ghetto Jews were conscripted by the Germans to work in Polish factories (all now under German control) or to do other forms of hard manual labor. Ghettos were established in other areas of occupied Eastern Europe. They were, however, to be only temporary. Following the invasion of Russia in 1941, the Germans would begin the liquidation of the ghettos and deportation to the camps.

The Death Squads

The conquest and occupation of western Russia and Ukraine created a massive logistical problem for the German authorities. These were the regions Hitler had identified as Germany’s future Lebensraum (“living space”). As such, the native Untermenschen, meaning the Slavic populations of Russians and Ukrainians, had to be subdued and enslaved. Among the Slavs, however, were additional millions of Jews. Orders to the SS called for the immediate extermination of all Jews – men, women and children – in areas taken by the German army. To this end mobile death squads were authorized.

The mobile death squads were identified by the German word Einsatzgruppen (“Special Action Groups”). The Einsatzgruppen would enter a town or village, round up all Jews, Communists, and intelligentsia (teachers, scholars, writers), assemble them in an assigned area, and gun them down. The bodies would then be buried in a mass grave (excavated by prisoners of war or sometimes beforehand by the victims themselves). Fearing for their lives, local villagers or townspeople did nothing to interfere. In fact, the SS wanted others to see what was happening in order to “educate” them that a similar fate awaited anyone who resisted or expressed dissent to German control. The most notorious of these mass killings took place at a site called Babi Yar near Kiev. On September 29, 1941, in retaliation for a Russian insurgent attack on a German military facility in the city, the entire Jewish population of Kiev was assembled and forced marched to a ravine called Babi Yar. There they were to take off all their clothing, rings, and other jewelry and forced to lie down in rows at the bottom of the ravine. Each was then systematically shot in the back of the neck. When one row filled the ditch, other victims were ordered to lie down on top of the dead to wait their turn to be shot. Thus, the victims were layered on top of each other. The executioners strode along the layers of bodies systematically killing the next victims. The slaughter went on into the next day. When it was over, 33,000 people had been killed (Berenbaum 100). Conscripted Ukrainian policemen and Russian prisoners of war were ordered to cover the bodies with dirt.

The Einsatzgruppen, it is estimated, killed 1.2 million Jews between 1939 and 1943, but the Nazi leadership found the program systematically slow and psychologically demoralizing for the men who did the shooting. A faster, more efficient means of extermination was necessary. At the concentration camp set up at Chelmno in Poland, gas vans (based on the euthanasia program) had been in operation since December 1941. Gas vans were enclosed trucks hooked up to their own engine exhaust. This, too, proved limited in effect. The trucks could hold only 60 to 70 people at a time, death came slowly, and it was difficult to remove the bodies. Gassing, however, was seen as the most effective means to the end. What was the end? The Nazis called it the “Final Solution.”

The Final Solution

In January 1942 the 15 top Nazi security chiefs met in Wannsee (a suburb of Berlin) wherein they formulated the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Question.” Their decision? To systematically kill off the entire Jewish population of Europe. The Wannsee Conference was called and presided over by Reinhard Heydrich, Head of the Reich Security Department. Instrumental in drafting the meeting’s protocols (means whereby the Final Solution would be implemented) was Adolph Eichmann, Head of the Gestapo’s “Jewish Affairs” Department. Absent from Wannsee were Hitler and SS and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, who, while not there, clearly approved of the meeting’s outcome. It is interesting to note that in all of the programs that were implemented to destroy the Jews, none came directly from Hitler himself. None, however, would have happened had he disapproved.

The Final Solution called for the liquidation of the ghettos and transport of the Jews to specially-constructed transit camps. From the transit camps, prisoners would be sent by train to the extermination camps. There were six extermination camps, all in Poland – Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. To move millions of people through the extermination process required extensive organization and manpower. Thousands of SS troops and other clerical officials would be responsible for processing the prisoners, overseeing their transport, and operating the camps. These forces would, consequently, have to be reassigned from active military duty at the front. Between 1941 and early 1943, the German advance in Russia was being strongly resisted by the Soviet Red Army and removing troops for use in the Final Solution pulled vital manpower away from the German war effort. Likewise the use of railroad trains for the transport of prisoners meant that those trains could not be used to supply the armies fighting in the east. The war against the Jews was given priority over the war against Germany’s foreign enemies.

The future of the war against Germany’s enemies was decided in the winter of 1943 at the Battle of Stalingrad. The Germans took the city in the summer of 1942, but the Russians launched a major counteroffensive that surrounded the city and cut the Germans off from their lines of supply. Hitler ordered his commanders to hold the city "to the last man." The advancing Russians forced the battle into the city where it was savagely fought street to street and house to house. Finally, in February 1943 with annihilation inevitable, the Germans surrendered. Stalingrad marked the end of the German offensive in the east. From then on the Russians would take the offensive, pushing the Germans back to the west. In June of 1944 the Western Allies, the US and Britain, successfully landed on the beaches of Normandy in France. The Germans now had to fight massive Allied land armies both in Russia and France.

But the turn of the war in the Allies’ favor did nothing to alleviate the plight of Europe’s Jews. Millions were being systematically destroyed in the death camps. The liquidation of the ghettos was carried out with brutal efficiency. Ghetto residents were ordered to assemble. Each person could bring one suitcase. They were not told where they were going. In some cases the Nazis provided pre-written postcards with cheery messages to be sent to the victims’ relatives. SS troops searched every building for those who might be hiding. Those who tried to hide or escape were shot and killed. At the transit camps and other centers, the suitcases were confiscated, their owners being told the baggage would be delivered later. (All baggage was looted and destroyed.) Those being transported were jammed into railroad cattle or freight cars. The cars were so crowded that there was no room to sit or lie down. There were no sanitation facilities nor were food and water provided. Thousands died in transit.

On arrival at some camps, the trains were sometimes welcomed with band music. The gate at Auschwitz was lettered Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work Makes one Free”). With the exception of the killings, what happened at the death camps also happened at the other concentration camps. At all the camps prisoners went through a several stage “selection” process. Those immediately identified by camp doctors as too weak to work were immediately condemned to death, either by shooting or gassing. In all camps prisoners were separated by sex and age. Husbands were separated from wives. In some camps children were separated from their parents and likewise separated by sex. A second selection identified those who would be consigned to hard labor which meant a delayed death by physical exhaustion. With the intent to dehumanize them, prisoners condemned to labor were tattooed with a number. All clothing was replaced with prison uniforms. All eyeglasses, shoes, and any personal items being carried were confiscated.

Mass executions were through gassing. Gas chambers capable of holding several hundred persons were constructed at the six death camps. Prisoners were deceived into believing they were going to shower rooms for cleaning and disinfectant. Once they were in the gas chamber (shower room), the room was sealed and poisonous Zyklon B (a hydrogen-cyanide gas used for rodent extermination) was forced through the shower spouts. It took from 20 to 30 minutes for the gas to have its full effect. At Auschwitz it was possible to kill 6000 people a day. The dead were removed from the chambers by other prisoners. As human hair had value as a textile, the heads of the dead were sheared, and any teeth with fillings were extracted for their gold content. The bodies were then incinerated in crematorium ovens. At Auschwitz the oven capacity was such that some 1000 bodies could be cremated daily. Not all of the Final Solution’s victims were cremated. Hundreds of thousands died across Europe wherever the Nazis had camps. The bodies of those disposed of by shooting or those who died of illness or exhaustion were buried in mass graves.

Life in the camps was one of continual fear, hunger, and exhaustion. The Nazis intended to demoralize, dehumanize, and destroy. Prisoners could arbitrarily be beaten or killed for the most minimal of offenses or for no reason whatsoever. The caloric value of daily rations was intended only to keep a prisoner alive for one more day. Sanitation and toilet facilities were primitive and limited. Thousands died daily through malnutrition, starvation, and disease as well as through physical abuse. In some camps select prisoners, both adults and children, were subjected to horrific medical experiments.

The Holocaust went far beyond the death camps in Poland. By the end of 1941 the Germans had occupied and dominated Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, and significant portions of the Soviet Union (The Baltic States, western Russia and Ukraine). Pro-Nazi satellite governments looking to Berlin for direction were in place in Finland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. In Italy Mussolini’s government was by then dependent upon German protection and was, therefore, subject to German direction. Over all of these states and regions the Germans imposed their will through terror and repression.

Jews in the occupied and satellite states were subject to the same policies as had been Jews in Germany. Such measures included categorizing those within the population to be identified as Jewish (much like the Nuremberg Laws); denial of human liberties; confiscation of property; dismissal from professional and civil service occupations; expulsion from schools and universities; and the seizure of businesses. Jews were required to wear the identifying Star of David when in public. Eventually Jews were assembled in the cities and transit camps and, from 1942 on, transported to the death camps in Poland. The mechanisms of state power (police and bureaucracy) were required to cooperate with the Germans. And, in all the occupied areas there were persons willing to collaborate with the Germans, motivated by their own anti-Semitism, fear, or intent to be “in good” with their German masters. It was forbidden to give refuge or support to Jews. Those who did and were discovered were severely punished, sometimes with death but often with transport to concentration camps. Yet many defied the German edicts and risked their lives to protect or save their Jewish countrymen.

Rescue and Resistance

In all the occupied regions there were those whose humanity and/or patriotism overcame their fears and took direct action to save Jews and others being persecuted by the Nazis. In all major cities under German control there were “rescuers,” basically average persons who were willing to provide shelter, money, clothing, and food to Jewish refugees. Yet there were also large-scale rescue efforts. In October 1943, 90% of the Jewish population of Denmark was successfully smuggled out of the country to neutral Sweden. A concentrated and well-organized rescue effort involving the Lutheran Church, Danish Jewish organizations, government officials, and the willingness of the Danish people to provide shelter and money, resulted in the secret overnight evacuation of over 7000 Jews aboard fishing boats. In France the Huguenot village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon defied the collaborationist authorities and became a place of refuge for 5000 Jews, mostly children. When Bulgarian Jews were ordered to wear yellow armbands with the Star of David, the great mass of the Bulgarian people showed their support for their Jewish compatriots by putting on yellow armbands. In Hungary, a Swedish diplomat named Raoul Wallenberg conducted an active campaign to prevent the deportation of the Jews of Budapest.

In the spring of 1944 Germany, in order to prevent its withdrawal from the war, occupied its satellite ally Hungary. Under the direct orders of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi authorities ordered the arrest of Hungary’s Jewish population and their transportation to the camps. In response to an appeal from the American War Refugee Board for neutral assistance, the government of Sweden acted to intervene in Hungary and dispatched Raoul Wallenberg to Budapest. Of a wealthy Swedish banking family and educated in the United States, Wallenberg arrived in Budapest in July 1944. By that time some 400, 000 of Hungary’s 700, 000 Jews had been transported. Using whatever means he could and in bold defiance of the Nazi authorities, Wallenberg vigorously pursued his mission. He issued Swedish passports and safe passes to thousands of Jews. For the displaced he set up medical and shelter relief services called “Swedish houses.” Moving incessantly throughout the city he tirelessly begged, bribed, and badgered arresting authorities to release Jews being held in custody. He interfered with efforts to remove Jews from the city, personally stopping and boarding trains to secure the release of those with Swedish papers. An angry Eichmann warned that “accidents do happen, even to a neutral diplomat” (Berenbaum 166). Wallenberg was not injured when his car was rammed in circumstances that seemed less than accidental. In mid-January 1945 Soviet armies entered Budapest, and for Hungary’s surviving Jews the nightmare was over. It is estimated that through his efforts, Wallenberg saved some 100,000 Jews. Wallenberg now intended to work with the Soviets to rehabilitate Jews back into Hungarian life. The day after the Soviets entered Budapest, he left the Swedish legation to meet with Soviet authorities. He never returned. His disappearance and subsequent death remained a mystery for decades. [2]

The End

By the end of 1944 it was increasingly clear that Germany would lose the war. The Soviet offensive in the East had the Germans retreating westward back across Poland. In the West, the Americans and British had liberated France and were pushing eastward towards the Rhine. In both East and West the Allied advance was slowed as the Germans stubbornly fought to prevent invasion of the homeland.

In the East orders had gone out to evacuate the camps. It was inevitable that the Soviets would discover the camps in Poland and all evidence of the slaughter had to be destroyed. Where time permitted, the Nazis tried to destroy the “evidence” of the genocide by digging up the mass graves and burning the bodies. As slave labor was still needed in Germany’s war industries, the surviving prisoners were to be evacuated and returned to Germany. The winter of 1944 - 1945 witnessed the horror of the death marches.

There were some 59 death marches across Eastern Europe. Prisoners were allowed to take whatever they could carry. Food and water were minimal, if at all. Thousands starved or froze to death. Especially vulnerable were children, the aged, and those who were sick. Those who fell ill or collapsed from exhaustion along the way were shot. Those who survived were assigned to labor and concentration camps only to suffer further hardships. Allied bombing had so disrupted German rail transport that the logistical needs of the camps became increasingly difficult to provide. Especially scarce were food and medical supplies, and waves of typhus swept through the camps.

In the East the Soviets easily discovered what remained of the death camps. In some camps the work of destruction was incomplete or so hastily done that the evidence was easily unearthed. While most prisoners might be gone, the partially destroyed buildings, crematoria, and piles of human hair, clothing, shoes, eyeglasses, and other personal effects remained mute testimony of what had happened.

By April 1945 the Americans and British had crossed the Rhine and were advancing across Germany. The Soviets had reached the outskirts of Berlin and were shelling the city. Hitler and other members of his high command had taken refuge in the bunker deep under the chancellery building. All across Germany Allied armies were liberating the concentration camps and discovering the extent of the Nazi brutality.

No one among the Allies expected what they found. When British troops entered the Bergen-Belsen camp, disease was so rampant that thousands of bodies lay unburied. Despite efforts of British doctors to provide relief, 28,000 more would die within two weeks of liberation. What was found at Bergen-Belsen was also found at Buchenwald, Dachau, and most of the other German concentration camps. The survivors, virtually walking skeletons, stared in vacant-eyed disbelief at the well-clothed and well-fed young men who had come to save them. One woman prisoner recalled that on seeing the energy of the British soldiers who had liberated her camp, she thought “These men seemed not to know that one could live in slow motion, that energy was something you saved” (Berenbaum 190).

On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered. Hitler had committed suicide in his bunker a week before. In his last testament he wrote, “Above all, I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the laws of race and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry” (Berenbaum 191). Even in death Hitler’s delusional hatred prevailed.

With the end of the war in Europe came the end of the Holocaust. Who was to blame and how would they be punished? The surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust were arrested, imprisoned, and brought before an international tribunal that the Allies had established at the German city of Nuremberg. They included Herman Göring, Rudolph Hess, and other top Nazi leaders. Those most instrumental in directing the implementation of the Final Solution were missing. Reinhard Heydrich had been assassinated in 1942. Heinrich Himmler had committed suicide upon his capture. Adolf Eichmann had escaped the country and had fled to South America.[3]

The Nuremberg Trials began in October 1945. Indictments were based on three sets of crimes: crimes against the peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. In late September 1946, following some eleven months of investigation and testimony, the tribunal handed down its verdicts for the 24 former Nazi leaders accused of crimes against humanity. Twelve of the defendants were sentenced to death by hanging; three to life imprisonment, four to lesser prison terms, and three were acquitted. Göring committed suicide the day before the October 15 executions. Lower tiers of Holocaust perpetrators were also bought before the tribunal over the next year. These included those officers who commanded the camps, army generals who permitted atrocities in occupied areas controlled by their troops, judges who made German law a means to mass murder, doctors who participated in the selection process and medical experiments, and industrialists who profited from slave labor and manufactured the poison gas used in the mass executions. As the oncoming Cold War necessitated their participation in the reconstruction of Germany, many of these received light sentences or were later granted clemency.

Legacies

What was the legacy of the Holocaust? The immediate legacy was several million displaced persons. Survivors of the camps were now faced with an uncertain future. Their families were gone. They were now strangers in lands far from their home countries. They could not go home and most did not want to return to their homelands. Without money and livelihoods, they were dependent upon relief provided by the Allied governments. This meant relocation to refugee camps. The Allies were ill-prepared to assume the burden of providing shelter, food, and medical services for millions of refugees. The camps were crowded and unhealthy. Relief was slowed by the cumbersome efforts to set up a bureaucratic system capable of meeting the need. The camps became an embarrassment. Gradually, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration assumed greater responsibility for the camps, but the most effective relief came from overseas Jewish organizations. Not wanting to stay in Europe, many Jews hoped to go to the United States. American immigration quotas, however, were strictly enforced, making that dream impossible. Others sought to go to Palestine.

Palestine (today Israel) was a British Mandate with a small but prosperous Jewish population. In the 1917 Balfour Declaration Britain officially stated that a Jewish national homeland should be established in Palestine. In the years before the war Britain allowed Jewish immigration to Palestine. The increasing Jewish presence in Palestine, however, was disturbing to the Arab population of the region. Arab opposition to Jewish settlement in the late 1930s caused the British to restrict Jewish immigration just at the time the Nazis began active persecution of German Jews. Palestine as a refuge for escaping Jews was closed off.

Now that the war was over and the scope of the Holocaust so evident, there was great pressure on Britain to open Palestine to Jewish immigration. Britain, however, refused. Jews on their way to Palestine were intercepted and interned under armed guard in British camps on Cyprus. The Jewish Agency (the Palestinian Jewish leadership) and the Haganah (Jewish defense force) defied the British and began an active campaign of smuggling Jews into Palestine. With funds provided by Jewish organizations abroad, the Jewish Agency sent its representatives to Europe where it established schools and farms where refugees were taught Hebrew and vocational skills and recruited in the cause of an independent Jewish state. In late 1945 Palestinian Jewish political and military organizations began a campaign of armed resistance to the British presence in Palestine. Many of those joining the Haganah and other Jewish resistance movements (such as the terrorist organization called the Irgun), were young Jewish men recruited from the camps in Europe. Britain now found itself facing a guerrilla war in Palestine that it did not have the resources or resolve to win.

In early 1947 Britain announced that it would end its mandate and refer the Palestinian problem to the United Nations. The UN Special Committee on Palestine recommended partition of Palestine between the lands predominantly Jewish and Arab. Following intensive debate the UN General Assembly voted for partition in late 1947. Britain announced its intent to end the mandate by May 14, 1948. Neither the Jews nor the Arabs wanted partition except on their terms. Arabs and Jews now found themselves fighting each other to expand their respective territorial control before the British withdrew. On May 14, 1948, the leaders of the Jewish Agency proclaimed the independence of the State of Israel.

The new Israeli government proclaimed the open immigration of Jews. The camps on Cyprus were opened and the refugee camps in Europe began to empty. In 1950 Israel passed the Law of Return whereby Jews, no matter where they were from, were granted Israeli citizenship upon arrival. Israel’s origins and continued existence was not without hardship. Immediately on declaring its independence Israel was attacked by its Arab neighbors. It would defeat its enemies, but its right to exist within a hostile environment has been a continuing challenge for its entire history as a sovereign state.

But Israel is not in itself the legacy of the Holocaust. The legacy of the Holocaust must be its permanent place in humanity’s historical consciousness. The systematic slaughter of some ten million human beings because of their religious or ethnic identity must never be forgotten.

The Holocaust did not happen in a primitive barbaric society. It happened in a modern civilized state with a long and illustrious history of contribution to human cultural, intellectual, and technical achievement. That alone should serve to remind one that the rational constraints and conventions of civilization are but a thin and vulnerable veneer under which exists the irrationality of human passions: fear, fanaticism, and self-preservation - the very stuff upon which the demagogues of hate depend. Crippled by economic depression, the hopeless despair of livelihoods lost, and government paralysis, German society broke down under fear of an unknown future. So desperate were the Germans that they willingly gave up both their human rights and their humanity in favor of the dictator who promised them the world. They enabled Hitler to deliver. His regime thrived on and cultivated their fear which he then redirected as hatred. They were the “Master Race” who would rid the world of those who were the cause of their misfortunes: communists, democrats, liberals, Untermenschen, and Jews.

Can it happen again? Rational minds say no. But rational minds need to be reminded that on backgrounds of instability and uncertainty, rational minds can allow irrational minds to rise to heights of power. It is much easier to fix blame on someone else than to fix the problem that creates the blame. One need only look at the ethnic slaughters in Bosnia in 1993, Rwanda in 1994, Darfur in the early 2000s, and, perhaps, at the statements of the government of Iran today to realize how easy it is to slip into a mindset that sanctions mass murder. Or, how easy it is to pretend not to see.

Sources for the Holocaust

Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know. Boston: Little Brown, 1993.

Goldston, Robert. The Life and Death of Nazi Germany. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1967.

Klein, Gerda Weissmann. All But My Life: A Memoir. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.

Merriman, John. A History of Modern Europe. New York: Norton, 1996.

Palmer, Robert R. et al. A History of the Modern World. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002.

Pauley, Bruce. Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini: Totalitarianism in the Twentieth Century. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2003.

Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960.

[1] Under the Nuremberg Laws there were different classifications of Jews. Full Jews were those with three Jewish grandparents. First- and second-class Meschinge were those who had one or two Jewish grandparents. One is reminded of the Mississippi racial law upheld by the US Supreme Court in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Decision. That law maintained that one was legally black if one had one great-grandparent who was black. The Plessy v. Ferguson Decision was the basis of the “separate but equal” doctrine upon which several southern states segregated their black populations. That doctrine remained law in the US until 1954.

[2] It has since been learned that Wallenberg was arrested by the Soviets as an American spy and taken to the Soviet Union and imprisoned. Appeals from the Swedish government about his fate went unanswered from the Soviet regime for over ten years. In 1957 the Soviets revealed that a Wallenberg died in a Russian prison in 1947. It was not until 2001, some ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that a combined Swedish-Russian commission reported that Wallenberg had been wrongfully arrested and died in prison in 1947. Russian authorities denied allegations that he had been executed. Today he is honored by Israel as among the “Righteous,” those who risked their lives to save the victims of the Holocaust.

[3] In 1960 Israeli agents in Argentina captured Adolf Eichmann and secretly smuggled him to Israel. In Jerusalem he was put on trial for crimes against humanity. The trial was conducted in public and, despite the Israeli efforts to achieve impartial justice, was highly controversial. In 1961 Eichmann was convicted and hanged. His body was then cremated and his ashes were scattered at sea.