Contextual Essay

The Holocaust was the attempt made by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during the Second World War to murder the Jews of Europe. Of a prewar population of about 10 million, around 6 million Jews were killed in mass executions, forced labor, “death marches,” and by disease and starvation. As an instance of genocide, the Holocaust remains unique in history and, along with the founding of Israel in 1948, is the central event of the modern Jewish experience. The term “Holocaust” (from the Greek holokauston, or “burnt whole”) did not come into widespread usage until the 1960s. Increasingly, scholars use the more general term “genocide,” whereas in Israel the Hebrew term “Shoah” is most common. The Holocaust remains one of the most researched subjects in modern history, with scholars focusing on topics as varied as its origins, the decisions by the Nazi regime to implement a “final solution” to the “Jewish question,” the identities and motivations of the perpetrators and collaborators, Jewish responses and resistance, rescue and allied intervention, and postwar justice.The Holocaust was the attempt made by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during the Second World War to murder the Jews of Europe. Of a prewar population of about 10 million, around 6 million Jews were killed in mass executions, forced labor, “death marches,” and by disease and starvation. As an instance of genocide, the Holocaust remains unique in history and, along with the founding of Israel in 1948, is the central event of the modern Jewish experience. The term “Holocaust” (from the Greek holokauston, or “burnt whole”) did not come into widespread usage until the 1960s. Increasingly, scholars use the more general term “genocide,” whereas in Israel the Hebrew term “Shoah” is most common.

The Origins of the Holocaust

The origins of the Holocaust lie in the “racialization” of anti-Semitism, the ideology and policies of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, the willingness of thousands of Germans and other Europeans to implement a program of persecution and genocide, and the course of the war in Europe. With the emergence of modern nationalism and “scientific” racism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European anti-Semitism became “racialized;” many people believed that the Jews were a distinct (and inferior) “race” of people and hence did not belong to the “national community.” Both this racialized anti-Semitism and the aggressive nationalism inflamed by the First World War pervaded much of German and Austrian society and informed Adolf Hitler’s ideas about the Jews. Hitler considered Jews to be subhuman and often referred to them as “vermin” to be “exterminated.” He also believed that the Jews were behind both communism and American and British capitalism. In the 1920s, Hitler and Nazi Party figures spoke openly of ridding Germany of Jews and “Jewish influences” in political, economic, and cultural life. Systematic persecution by the Nazi Party thus began almost immediately after Hitler came to power in 1933 and intensified in stages. Jews were assaulted, driven from public life, stripped of their citizenship and property, and were encouraged to emigrate. In November 1938, the regime engineered a nationwide pogrom that resulted in the destruction of nearly every synagogue in Germany and the arrests of thousands of Jewish men.

None of this, however, amounted to genocide. The catalyst for the “final solution” was the Second World War. Until recently, historians have interpreted the emergence of a genocidal program in two ways. One interpretation – the “intentionalist” school – holds Hitler primarily responsible for initiating the genocide, seeing in his writings, speeches, and policies a clear and consistent intention to kill Jews. Another school – the “functionalist” – proposed that the “final solution” resulted largely from the contingencies of the war, German plans to resettle Eastern Europe, and competition between powerful Nazi Party figures. Recent research has combined these two interpretations. Hitler both set the broad parameters of policy toward the Jews and made the crucial decisions. Yet the nature of his rule encouraged subordinates to act according to his “will” and perceived wishes. And above all, Hitler was obsessed with the Jews, “Jewish communism,” and the threat he imagined they posed to the “German race.”

The “Final Solution”

The decisions to carry out a program of mass murder were taken by Hitler and influential Nazi Party and “Schutzstaffel” (or “SS”) leaders (particularly Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, and Reinhard Heydrich) from September 1939 to October 1941. Shortly after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Heinrich Himmler proposed, and Hitler approved, plans for the “demographic transformation of Eastern Europe.” The Germans planned to annex large swaths of Eastern Europe (mainly Poland and parts of the Soviet Union) in order to provide “living space” for the “German race.” Jews were to be removed, though their ultimate destination was initially undecided (at one point, evacuation to the island of Madagascar was considered). Thousands of Jews were forced into “ghettos” in Poland to await an uncertain fate. In late June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union and a quick victory seemed assured. A month later, Reinhard Heydrich was authorized to prepare a “final solution” to the “Jewish question.” Hence, there seems to be a connection between the euphoria of the initial military victories on the eastern front and the decision to exterminate the Jews.

Most of the victims of the Holocaust were killed by special mobile execution squads (the “Einsatzgruppen” and Order Police battalions) or in the concentration and death-camp systems. Many also died in forced labor, in “death marches,” or by disease and starvation. The Einsatzgruppen and Order Police battalions followed the regular German army in the invasion of the Soviet Union. They were charged with killing Jews, Roma and Sinti peoples (“Gypsies”), Communist Party officials, and other alleged “hostile elements.” Operating mainly between 1941 and 1942, Einsatzgruppen and Order Police killed hundreds of thousands of people by firing squad and by gassing in mobile vans designed for that purpose.

This constituted the main killing operation before the extermination camps were created. Yet Nazi officials soon realized that large-scale killing could not be carried out using such methods. Though German military advances were halted in October 1941, victory was still assumed and plans for the “final solution” were not delayed. In January 1942, Heydrich presided over a meeting of high-level Nazi Party officials in Wannsee, outside Berlin, to coordinate the efforts of various government ministries. In March, the first deportations from occupied Poland to the Belzec death camp took place, and systematic extermination at the other death camps (Chelmno, Sobibor, Maidanek, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau) began. Upon arrival, inmates were either selected for immediate execution, forced labor, or medical experimentation.

The operational model for gassing large numbers of people in the death camps was provided by another Nazi program. In 1939, Hitler had authorized the killing of mentally ill Germans. Many of the victims were taken by train to special killing centers, where they were gassed in shower rooms. This program (known as “Operation T-4”) provided the model and even some of the personnel for gassing in the main camps, which operated between 1942 and 1944. By October 1941, deportations from the “ghettos” began and the Germany forbade any further Jewish emigration from Europe. From June to November 1942, Jews in occupied Western Europe were deported to the camps. In October 1943, Himmler ordered Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibor shut down, but Auschwitz-Birkenau remained in operation. By early 1945, over 3.5 million Jews had been murdered in the death camps. In January 1945, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz; Nazi Germany surrendered four months later.

The extent of the extermination Europe’s Jewish populations varied with the extent of German control and a variety of diplomatic, strategic, and military considerations. In areas under direct German control (including those incorporated into Germany itself – Austria and portions of Poland and Czechoslovakia) the destruction of the Jewish population was near total. Hungary’s Jewish communities were decimated only after the Germans occupied that country in the spring of 1944, but the Germans received assistance nonetheless from Hungarian fascists and many ordinary Hungarians. Many Romanian Jews were saved only because the Germans were reluctant to occupy the entire country for fear of generating anti-German sentiment in a nation that provided crucial supplies of oil. Organized efforts to save Jews were most effective in Denmark, where the anti-Nazi underground managed to save nearly every Danish Jew (about 7,500 out of an estimated pre-war population of 8,000).

Perpetrators and Collaborators

The SS was the element of the Nazi regime directly responsible for planning and carrying out the “final solution.” Originally created to be Hitler’s personal bodyguard, it was led by Heinrich Himmler, who forged it into an elite corps that oversaw the camp system. Recent research has also revealed the extensive involvement of the regular Germany army (Wehrmacht) and the German medical establishment in the Holocaust and other crimes against civilians. Scholars continue to debate the extent of the German public’s knowledge of and participation in the Holocaust. Thousands of “ordinary” Germans, motivated by anti-Semitism, opportunism, or peer pressure, committed acts of brutality while many thousands more remained passive or indifferent. Further, the genocide could not have taken place without the collaboration of thousands of non-Germans. In France, the collaborationist Vichy regime enacted anti-Semitic laws on its own initiative and willingly aided the Germans in identifying and rounding up Jews for forced labor and deportation to the death camps. Historians have only recently begun to explore the extent of collaboration in Eastern Europe. The Catholic Church has also come under intense scrutiny in recent years, and some historians have criticized it, along with the Protestant Churches, for not speaking out against the genocide and doing more to assist the Jews.

Jewish responses and resistance

The responses by Europe’s Jews to persecution, deportation, and ghettoization were varied, but it is not true that the Jews did not offer any resistance, as some claimed after the war. After Hitler came to power, many German Jews attempted to leave Germany, but were hindered above all by widespread foreign immigration restrictions. Still, around 300,000 (out of a pre-Holocaust population of about 500,000) managed to emigrate. German Jews also negotiated collectively with the Nazi regime, which for a time encouraged emigration. During the war and the Holocaust itself, “resistance” took many forms. There were several armed uprisings in the camps, most notably in Treblinka and Sobibor, and in 1943 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto shocked the Germans by launching an armed revolt that lasted nearly a month. Jews also figured prominently in various underground resistance movements. Resistance could also take the form of individual or collective religious observance in the ghettos or the camps themselves.

A number of Jewish organizations based in allied nations, notably the World Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, and the Jewish Antifascist Committee, attempted to help Jews emigrate and pressured allied governments to take steps to rescue Jews, as did the Jewish community in Palestine (Yishuv). A few attempts at outright rescue were made. In 1942, Jewish leaders in Slovakia devised a scheme (the “Europa Plan”) to bribe Nazi officials to halt deportations. The efforts of a single Swedish diplomat in Hungary, Raoul Wallenberg, saved thousands of Hungarian Jews.

What did the Allies know, and when did they know it?

Throughout the war, news of the ghettos, deportations, and camps leaked out to the allies and were widely reported in presses of the allied nations. Recent research has indicated that in the fall of 1941, British intelligence picked up German radio transmissions indicating that mass executions were being carried out. The extent to which Soviet intelligence knew of systematic killings remains unclear. In December 1942, the allies jointly and publicly denounced the Nazis genocidal policies. Many people have been harshly critical of the American and British governments in particular for not acting to rescue more Jews from persecution and then certain death. Others have argued that the allies did everything in their power to end the war in Europe as quickly as possible. It is worth noting that the Holocaust took place over a relatively short period of time and in areas that were controlled by the Germans and their allies. In terms of military capabilities, only the Soviet Union was in a position to hinder the “final solution” in any significant way, but its leader, Josef Stalin, chose not to act.

Postwar Justice and the Memory of the Holocaust

Immediately after the war, the surviving leadership of the Nazi Party was tried in the German city of Nuremberg. The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials focused on the war itself and not the “final solution.” Simultaneously, thousands of former SS officers were arrested, tried in military tribunals, and executed. Many others, however, managed to conceal their identities and escaped Europe. A still unknown number of perpetrators were also recruited by the military and intelligence establishments of the wartime allies. In the 1950s, there was little public or scholarly discussion of Nazi crimes in either West or East Germany. Konrad Adenauer, the first West German chancellor, understood that the German public’s support for Hitler and National Socialism had been very strong. He believed that that the construction of a stable democracy meant that the allies’ unpopular “denazification” policy (removing former Nazi Party members from their jobs) and war crimes trials would have to end, with convicted war criminals amnestied. Hence, thousands of perpetrators went free and entered mainstream West German society. Yet Adenauer also engineered -- against significant domestic political opposition -- restitution payments to Holocaust victims and strong financial and diplomatic support for Israel. In East Germany, the Communist dictatorship subordinated any public recognition of Nazi crimes against the Jews to an “official history” that emphasized the persecution of Communists and Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union. This process was encouraged by Stalin’s own anti-Semitism and a series of political “show trials” in Communist-ruled Eastern Europe, in which Jews were prominent victims.

It was not until the 1960s that the extent of the Nazi assault on the Jews became widely understood in Europe, Israel, and the United States. In 1953, the Israeli government established the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority (Yad Vashem), near Jerusalem, which became the most important memorial and museum devoted to the genocide. In 1960, Adolf Eichmann, a principal architect of the “final solution,” was captured by Israeli agents in Argentina; he was tried, convicted, and executed in Israel. The widely publicized trial called attention to the details of the “final solution,” particularly the systematic nature of the German attempt to eradicate European Jewry. Trials against former death camp commanders resumed in West Germany in the 1960s, and a central body for prosecuting war criminals was established in that country. Yet it was not until the broadcast in 1979 of an American-produced television series (“The Holocaust”) that millions of West Germans became aware for the first time that the Nazis had attempted to murder the Jews of Europe. Largely as a result of these developments, therefore, interest in the Holocaust exploded and remains a topic of intense scholarly and popular attention.

Bibliography

Books

Breitman, Richard, Official Secrets What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999). Now the best study available on what the British and Americans knew about the Holocaust while it was taking place.

Browning, Christopher, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). A case study of what motivated men in a Reserve Police Battalion to kill thousands of Jews.

Browning, Christopher and Matthäus, Jürgen, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). The most comprehensive explanation of how the Nazis decided upon genocide of the Jews.

Friedlander, Henry, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Examines the Nazi “euthanasia” program and its relationship to the “final solution.”

Gross, Jan, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (New York: Penguin, 2002). Explores the role of Poles in the massacre of Jews in Jedwabne, a small town in eastern Poland, which had long been attributed to German occupiers.

Hilberg, Raul, The Destruction of the European Jews (London: W.H. Allen, 1961). Still a valuable and reliable comprehensive history of the Holocaust.

Kaplan, Marion, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Moving study of German Jewish life under the Nazis, with particular attention paid to Jewish women and family life.

Kershaw, Ian,Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris & Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis. Not only the best biography of Hitler now available, but one of the best explanations of how Hitler exercised power in Germany.

Klee, Ernst, Dressen, Willi, and Riess, Volker, eds., The Good Old Days: the Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders (New York: Free Press, 1991). Official and unofficial first-hand accounts of the Holocaust written by perpetrators.

Laqueur, Walter, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). The most comprehensive and up-to-date encyclopedia of the Holocaust.

Levi, Primo, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York: Touchstone, 1996). Written by a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp and among the most perceptive and widely-read Holocaust memoirs.

Marrus, Michael, and Paxton, Robert, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981). Explains the complicity of the Vichy regime in the Holocaust.

Documentaries

Night and Fog (1955, 31 min., dir. Alain Resnais). Footage of concentration and death camps filmed less than ten years after the war’s end, juxtaposed with interviews.

Shoah (1985, 563 min., dir. Claude Lanzmann). Revealing interviews with survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders.

The Sorrow and the Pity (1972, 260 min., dir. Marcel Ophuls). Portrait of a French town under Nazi occupation, with interviews, newsreel and propaganda footage. Banned for years in France.

The Last Days (1998, 87 min., dir. James Moll). Interviews with five Hungarian survivors of the Holocaust.

Web Sites

Yad Vashem’s website, http://www.yad-vashem.org.il

United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum website, http://www.ushmm.org