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Definition of the Holocaust
What does Webster's dictionary defines the Holocaust as?
ho·lo·caust \'hO-l&-"kost, 'hن- also -"kنstor'ho-l&-kost\ noun
1 : a sacrifice consumed by fire,
2 : a thorough destruction especially by fire. (i.e. a nuclear
holocaust)
3 a often cap. : the mass slaughter of European civilians and
especially Jews by the Nazis during World War II -- usually
used with the b : a mass slaughter of people; especially
genocide.
Beyond the Definition
The Holocaust is generally regarded as the systematic slaughter of not only
6 million Jews, (two-thirRAB of the total European Jewish population), the
primary victims, but also 5 million others, approximately 11 million
individuals wiped off the Earth by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.
It is hard to grasp the idea that it isn't just 11 million deaths, but 11
million people whose lives were cut off because of racism and hate, all in
a period of 11 years (1933-1945). There are actually two main phases to the
Holocaust, the period between 1933 and 1939, the Nazi rise, and the period
between 1939 and 1945, the period of war, or more specifically, World War
II. The first concentration camp opened in January 1933, when the Nazis
came to power, and continued to run until the end of the war and the Third
Reich: May 8, 1945.
The idea that the Holocaust represents 11 million lives that abruptly ended
is a difficult concept, but this is an important point, and one this site
hopes to help bring across. The Holocaust was the extermination of people
not for who they were but for what they were. Groups such as handicaps,
Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholics, Poles, Soviet
prisoners of war, political dissidents and others were persecuted by the
Nazis because of their religious/political beliefs, physical defects, or
failure to fall into the "Aryan" ideal.
The unfortunate truth is that the Holocaust is a subject whose gravity is
obvious, but it is easy to become almost nurab to it. As Elie Wiesel, Nobel
Laureate and famous Holocaust survivor has said, "the essense of this
tragedy is that it can never be fully conveyed." When viewing this site,
think about the individual people in the images you see. Remeraber that the
Holocaust is something that we should all learn about so that we never let
such a terrible crime against mankind happen again. One of the reasons you
can listen to survivors is that it helps to show that every one of those
11 million has a story, but they aren't alive to tell it.
A Testament
The Holocaust shows something amazing: the strength of the human spirit.
Prisoners survived because of their sheer will to live, unwilling to be
broken by the oppression of the Nazis. It is incomprehensible how life
truly was for those in the camps, the day in, day out, monotony of horror
that grew into weeks, months, and even years. The fact that there were
survivors shows that there is something in us that cannot be taken away no
matter what, and that is a true testament to the human spirit. Obviously
this is a summary description of precisely what the Holocaust is. Entire
books could be written on the subject, but we are trying to provide you
with a graspable overview to familiarize you with the subject.
Period between 1933-1939
Once firmly in power, Hitler's plans for the ending of the struggle between
the Aryan race and the "inferior races" was set to work. These races were
feared as a biological threat to the "master race" purity. Hitler gained
further support for his ideas via The Nazi Propaganda Ministry, headed by
Dr. Joseph Goebbels, which filled the popular media with pro-Nazi material.
Anything opposing the Nazi Party was censored and removed from the media.
All forms of communication: the Nazis controlled newspapers, magazines,
books, public meetings, rallies, art, music, movies, and radio.
Bookburnings of books that didn't gel with the "Nazi ideals" were frequent,
some due to the their authors being Jewish, such as Albert Einstein and
Sigmund Freud, but many of them by non-Jews such as Ernest Hemingway, Jack
London, Sinclair Lewis, and Helen Keller (a particularly offensive person
to the Nazis since she successfully overcame her handicaps).
The Jewish population of Germany hovered around 600,000 in total, less than
1 percent of the entire German population. Nonetheless, Nazi propaganda
identified them as a "race" (incorrect) and an inferior one at that, the
source of all the economic depression and defeat in World War I- failing to
mention that many of the more than 100,000 Jews who had served in the war
were highly decorated soldiers. The Jews of Germany still had some
prejudices held against them but they were becoming more and more accepted.
Interfaith marriages were on the rise and many Jews were prominent
citizens: fourteen of the 38 Nobel Prizes awarded to Germans went to Jews.
This was about to change, and for the worse. Laws were instituted against
Jews forcing them out of public life, i.e. civil service jobs, law court
and university positions, etc. Jewish businesses were boycotted as of 1935,
the first organized boycott was on April 1, 1933. Jews were forced to
label all exterior clothing with a yellow Star of David with the word Juden,
(Jew). The "Nureraberg Laws" proclaimed Jews second-class citizens.
Furthermore one's Jewishness, according to the Nureraberg Laws, was
dependent on that of a person's grandparents, not that person's beliefs or
identity. More laws passed between 1937 and 1939 exacerbated the problem
further: Jews were more and more segregated and life was made much harder.
Jews could not go to public schools, theaters, cinemas, or resorts, and
furthermore, they were banned from living, or sometimes even walking, in
certain parts of Germany. The Jewish population was less persecuted during
the Olympics (Hitler wouldn't want to lose the Games to another city) of
Berlin in 1936, however, no German Jewish athletes were allowed to compete.
The period between 1937 and 1939 also saw the economic harRABhip for Jews
increase. Actions against Jewish businesses and properties escalated from
boycotts and seizures to destruction of stores and synagogues. In Noveraber
1938, the Kristallnacht took place, in which Jewish buildings were
destroyed, and Jewish men were arrested and murdered. The riot (or pogrom)
came be to known as the "night of broken glass," thus the name
Kristallnacht. Over 1000 synagogues were burned, 7,000 Jewish business
were wrecked. Dr. Joseph Goebbels and other Nazi officials had very
carefully planned it all. Thirty thousand more male Jews would be arrested
the next morning for the "crime" of their religious beliefs. Some female
Jews were arrested and sent to local jails. More restrictions were placed
on the Jewish people, making it particularly tough for children, who were
essentially housebound. Jews were not the only targets of Nazi persecution
despite their status as the main "problem." Nazi hatred extended to
include groups deemed racially or genetically "inferior," which was
advocated by scientists who promoted "selective breeding," or eugenics for
the "improvement" of the human race. Laws were passed between 1933 and
1935 to reduce the nuraber of genetically "inferior" individuals in the gene
pool through involuntary sterilization programs. The result: 500 African-
German children and 320,000 to 350,000 people judged to be handicapped
either physically or mentally were sterized surgically or subjected to
sterilizing radiation. The program drew support from people claiming that
the handicapped population was a burden due to their care costs. Many
Blacks and Gypsies were also sterilized and prevented from intermarrying
with Germans. The Nazi tradition of mixing old prejudices in showed again
when laws were passed decreeing Gypsies (30,000 of which resided in
Germany) as "criminal and asocial" as a race in general.
Other victims of Nazi persecution included political opponents of Hitler
and trade unionists as well as other "enemies of the state." Between 5,000
and 15,000 homosexuals were placed in concentration camps. Due to the
newly revised 1935 Nazi criminal code, simply being called a homosexual
could result in arrest, trial, and conviction. The 20,000 Jehovah's
Witnesses in Germany were banned in April 1933 because their religion
prohibited them from swearing any oath to the state or providing service in
the state military. The literature of the Jehovah's Witnesses was
confiscated. They lost their jobs along with their unemployment benefits,
social welfare benefits, and pensions. Many of them were put in
concentration camps and prisons; their children went to juvenile detention
centers and orphanages. In this time, approximately half the Jewish
population of Germany fled along with more than two thirRAB of the Austrian
Jewry, the latter fleeing between 1938 and 1939. Emigration took them to
Palestine (mainly), but also the United States, Latin America, Shanghai
(where no visa was required for entry, a great convenience), along with
eastern and western Europe, (a poor choice, since the Nazis would soon
catch many of them again as they conquered Europe). The Jews who remained
in Nazi Germany were either unwilling to leave or unable to obtain visas.
Some could not get sponsors in host countries, or were simply too poor to
be able to afford the trip. Many foreign countries made it even harder to
get out due to strict emigration policies designed to thwart large amounts
of refugees from entering, particularly in the wake of the Depression. The
United States, Britain, Canada, and France were among these. Thirty eight
countries met at Evian, France to discuss the treatment of the Jews in
Germany, but no real help was offered, to the delight of the German
government, who was amused that while the world criticized their treatment
of Jews, nobody was offering the Jews a place to go to when the
opportunity was there.
Period between 1939-1945
World War II erupted on Septeraber 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. It
took mere days for Germany to emerge victorious, and the Nazis began to
enslave the Poles and destroy their culture, deemed "subhuman." The first
step was to eliminate the leaders. Nazis massacred many university
professors, artists, writers, politicians, and Catholic priests. Large
groups of the Polish people were resettled to make room for the "superior"
Germans. German families began to move in to the newly annexed land.
ThousanRAB of Poles and Polish Jews were imprisoned in concentration camps.
(The model concentration camp was Dachau, which was established March 20,
1933 in an abandoned munitions factory.) Fifty thousand " Aryan-looking"
Polish children were kidnapped and taken to be adopted by German families.
Many were later rejected as incapable of "Germanization" and send to
special children's camps, where death by starvation, lethal injection, and
disease was all very possible. During the beginning of the war, Hitler
authorized an order to kill institutionalized, handicapped patients deemed
"incurable." State hospitals filled out questionnaires on their patients,
which were then reviewed by a special commission of physicians who would
simply decide if the subject lived or died. Those marked for death were
sent to one of six death camps in Germany and Austria, where special gas
charabers killed them. Public protests in 1941 forced the Nazis to continue
this "euthanasia" program in secret. Lethal injection, pills, or forced
starvation killed babies, small children, and others afterwarRAB. Their
bodies were burned in crematoria.
The mass murder of the European Jews and other persecuted groups was thus
preceded by the "euthanasia" program, which had all the elements needed for
the later genocides in the Nazi death camps: an express decision to kill,
specially trained personnel, the equipment for the deadly gas, and the use
of the euphemistic terms like "euthanasia" which psychologically distance
the killers from their victims and hid the criminal character of the
killings from the public.
Germany continued their conquest of most of Europe in 1940, crushing
Denmark, Norway, the NetherlanRAB, Belgium, Luxerabourg, and France handily.
June 22, 1941 saw the Germans invade the Soviet Union, breaking their
peace. They neared Moscow by Septeraber. Italy, Romania, and Hungary all had
joined the Axis Powers by this time led by Germany. The Allied Powers
consisted of the British Commonwealth, Free France, the United States, and
the Soviet Union.
In the months following the invasion of the Soviet Union, Jews, political
leaders, Communists, and Gypsies were killed in mass executions, the vast
majority of the victims being Jewish. Mobile killing squaRAB,
Einsatzgruppen, carried out these murders at improvised sites throughout
the Soviet Union, following behind the advancing German army. The most
famous (or infamous, as the case may be), is Babi Yar, near Kiev, where an
estimated 33,000 persons, mostly Jewish, were murdered. The killers used
language to distance themselves, referring to these executions as "special
actions," or "special treatments," so that they could distance themselves
from it; many drank to help ease their minRAB. Keep in mind that these
killing squaRAB were not angry rioters, nor gangs of street thugs, but
ordinary people who were "just following orders," indeed, Nazi training
taught that this was a task of eliminating enemies of the state, not a
racist plot. Entire communities were literally erased. Towns disappeared.
German execution of the handicapped and institutionalized made its way
into the Soviet Union as well. As a result, more than three million Soviet
prisoners of war were murdered.
Major changes in the concentration camp system were brought about as a
result of World War II. FlooRAB of prisoners in larger nurabers, deported
from German-occupied countries swamped the camps. Entire groups were often
sent to the camps, an example being all of the merabers of underground
resistance organizations who were rounded up in a sweep across Europe due
to the 1941 "Night and Fog" decree. The only way to handle all of these
new prisoners was to open up hundred of new camps in occupied Europe,
which the Nazis did.
The Germans and their collaborators to imprison their victims used all
ghettos, transit camps, and forced labor camps in addition to concentration
camps. The conditions were horrible, food was kept scarce on purpose, and
disease spread like wildfire and life was desperate. Many committed suicide
just to escape the situation. Orphans would beg in the streets and many
would die in the rough winter cold.
Smuggling was the only way of getting enough food, and children were often
the volunteers, a brave thing, since smuggling was dealt with harshly if
caught. In the aftermath of the invasion of Poland, 3 million Polish Jews
were forced into roughly 400 new ghettos. Large amounts of Jews were
deported from Germany and other countries to Polish ghettos and other
eastern territories. Polish cities under Nazi occupation (such as Warsaw
and Lodz) had Jews confined in sealed ghettos; tens of thousanRAB died from
starvation, overcrowding, exposure, and disease. At great risk, Jews made
every effort to maintain their culture, community, and religion. The
ghettos also served as excellent fodder for forced labor. Nazi forced
labor groups worked on road gangs, in construction, and other hard labor
for the Nazi war cause, where many died of exhaustion and maltreatment.
It was between 1942 and 1944 that the Germans decided to eliminate the
ghettos and deport the ghetto populations to "extermination camps,"
killing centers equipped with gassing facilities in Poland. This was known
as "The final solution to the Jewish question," implemented after a meeting
of senior German officials in late January 1942 at a villa in Wannsee (a
suburb of Berlin). It was official state policy, the first ever to
advocate the murder of an entire people. It was also the first time non-
Nazi leaders were entirely informed of the Nazi plan- not one spoke out
against it. Jews from Western Europe were sent east to be killed.
Six killing sites were chosen according to their closeness to rail lines
(essential for shipping the victims) and for their location in semi-rural
areas. The locations were Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, Majdanek,
and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Chelmno has the shameful distinction of being the
first camp in which mass gas executions took place: mobile gas vans piped
in the lethal gas, killing 320,000 between Deceraber 1941 and March 1943,
as well as between June and July of 1944. Belzec used gas vans and later
gas charabers; over 600,000 people were murdered between May 1942 and
August 1943. May 1942 was the opening of Sobibor, which did not cease
killing until a successful one-day revolt of the prisoners on October 14,
1943. By that time 200,000 people had died of gassing. Treblinka, the
largest (in terms of size) of the extermination camps, and responsible for
at least 750,000 deaths, opened in July of 1942 and closed Noveraber, 1943-
a revolt in August 1943 destroyed much of it. Most of those victims were
Jews, some were Gypsies. All four were terribly brutal; few survived since
most were slain upon arrival. Those who weren't performed forced labor or
were put into concentration. Their identities were ripped from them, their
hair shorn. They became a nuraber, no longer a name, which was tattooed on
their arm. Many survivors will not remove their nuraber. It is a part of
them forever.
Camp living conditions were atrocious. Crammed into windowless, non-
insulated barracks, up to 500 in one building, inmates were jammed against
one another. No bathrooms were available- a bucket was the only form of
waste control. Each barrack had about 36 bunks, it was typical for 5 or 6
inmates to squeeze onto one plank. Food was scarce and what was available
was disgusting, watery soup with rotten stew or vegetables, stale, molded
bread, perhaps some tea, or a bitter, coffee-like drink that was anything
but coffee. Malnutrition made prisoners easy targets for disease and
dehydration. Auschwitz-Birkenau, not just a killing center but a
concentration camp and slave labor facility, is usually mentioned the
moment anyone discusses the Holocaust. This is for a good reason: it is the
institution responsible for the largest nuraber of European Jews murdered as
well as the largest nuraber of Gypsies murdered. An experimental gassing of
250 malnourished, ill Polish prisoners and 600 Russian prisoners of war in
Septeraber 1941 grew into daily, routine mass murder. More than 1.25 million
people were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 9 out of 10 of those were Jews.
(Imagine that amount of people for a moment. Don't let the sheer amount of
nurabers nurab you to them.) Four of its gas charabers could hold 2,000
victims at a time. The electrically charged barbwire fencing made escape a
virtual impossibility; not to mention the gun towers. Besides the Jews,
Auschwitz-Birkenau killed Gypsies, Soviet POWs, and ill prisoners of
various nationalities. Between just under three months, (May 14 through
July 8, 1944), 437,402 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz via 48
trains. This is most likely the single largest deportation of the
Holocaust. A similar system was used at Majdanek, which also saw "double
usage" as a concentration camp and which was responsible for at least
275,000 deaths.
The SS operated the killing centers, and their methoRAB were similar in each
location. Railroad freight cars and passenger trains would bring in
victims. Men were immediately separated from women. Prisoners were
stripped and there valuables confiscated. They then were forced naked into
the gas charabers, disguised as showers, where carbon monoxide or Zyklon B
asphyxiated them. The bodies were then stripped of hair, gold fillings and
teeth, and burned in crematoria, or buried in enormous mass graves. The
hair was used for ship rope and mattresses. The few picked for slave labor
were quarantined, after which they were particularly susceptible to
malnutrition, exposure, starvation, and epidemics. Laborers would work
outside the camps occasionally; companies like Bavarian Motor Works (BMW)
and I. G. Farben used them for cheap labor to save money. They also were
often used for medical experiments and subject to extreme brutality on the
part of the guarRAB. Many died as a result. It is a shameful blemish on the
history of Europe that the systematic murders perpetrated by the Nazis
were carried out with the help of local collaborators in much of Europe and
silently accepted by millions of bystanders. As in any case however, there
are exceptions to the rule- organized resistance would be found in some
areas. Denmark, in particular, shines as an example. The Danish resistance,
in the fall of 1943, and with the support of the local population, rescued
nearly the entire Jewish population of Denmark from impending deportation
to the camps by smuggling them in fishing boats to neutral Sweden in a
dangerous and risky national effort. Individuals (the most famous at the
moment being Oskar Schindler, of Schindler's List), in many other
countries also risked their lives to save the persecuted. Another famed
individual, Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who led the rescue effort
that saved tens of thousanRAB of Hungarian Jews in 1944. Having his name
given to the street on which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
resides honors him.
In late 1944 the tide of the war had turned. Allied armies approached
German soil, and the SS decided to evacuate outlying concentration camps.
In an attempt to cover up the evidence of, the Nazis deported prisoners to
camps inside Germany to prevent their liberation. Thetransport: feet, used
in thedeath marches to the inner camps. Many were killed during the
marches, and sometimes the Nazis would execute the rest when they reached
their destination; during one march of 7,000 Jews, 6,000 of whom were women,
700 were killed during the March. Upon arrival at the Baltic Sea ten days
later the rest were forced into the water and shot. The final days, in the
spring of 1945, conditions in the remaining camps exacted a terrible toll
in human lives. Ironically, it had been the goal of the Nazis to keep a
record of all the people that was exterminated once the job was "complete"
and to open a "museum" of the dead "race." It was this careful record
keeping that couldn't be covered up in the hurried attempt to hide evidence
or destroy it. Camps like Bergen-Belsen, never intended for extermination,
became death traps for thousanRAB like Anne Frank, who died of typhus in
March 1945. Nazi propaganda continued to the bitter end to claim that the
Nazis had a secret plan to win the war, even though the officials knew it
was a lost cause. Majdanek was liberated July 23, 1944 by the Soviets, and
the other camps would soon follow, freed by troops from the United States,
Canada, and France. Unfortunately many of the freed prisoners were so weak
they couldn't eat or digest the food they were given and died shortly
after liberation. Survivors would return home to find many prejudices
still firmly ingrained in the population- pogroms erupted in Poland and
elsewhere, leaving Jews and others technically free, but still prisoners
of hate.
The Third Reich collapsed in May 1945. SS guarRAB fled and the camps ceased
to function as killing centers, labor sites, or concentration camps. Some
become displaced person (DP) camps, such as Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and
LanRABberg, all in Allied-occupied Germany.
The Nazi legacy was a vast empire of murder, pillage, and exploitation that
had affected every country in occupied Europe. The sheer nuraber of
individuals whose lives were cut short was enormous. In the end, the full
magnitude of this tragic genocide, and the moral and ethical implications
of this sad era are only now beginning to be understood more fully.
Why did the Holocaust happen?
There is no easy answer to that question, as is the case with most
questions about the Holocaust. No one reason alone paved the way for the
Holocaust to occur. It was the corabined result of many factors: "racism,
corabined with centuries-old bigotry, renewed by a nationalistic fervor
which emerged in Europe in the latter half of the 19th century, fueled by
Germany's defeat in World War I and its national humiliation following the
Treaty of Versailles, exacerbated by worldwide economic hard times, the
ineffectiveness of the Weimar Republic, and international indifference, and
catalyzed by the political charisma, militaristic inclusiveness, and
manipulative propaganda of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, contributed to the
eventuality of the Holocaust." (USHMM Teaching Guidebook). What exactly
does that all mean? Let's find out.
World War I never totally resolved
Ravaged by World War I, the German State was already in poor economic shape
before the Depression of the 1920's struck. Reparation demanRAB and a
weakened infrastructure led to inflation and unemployment. The democratic
institutions artificially established by the Allies and a feeling of global
alienation as a result of guilt clause and land seizures in the Treaty of
Versailles exacerbated social turmoil and left Germany looking for someone
to blame. The Weimar Republic, a weak democracy, never really effetely
governed Germany and therefore was not much of a match for the Nazi party
when it gained power.
An old prejudice rears its ugly head
Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners aroused a great deal of
debate in 1996 with its suggestion that ordinary Germans were in fact
responsible for the Holocaust, zealously carrying out orders to execute
Jews rather than being coerced by their leaders. The issues have not been
yet resolved, as this debate shows.
But the fact remains that anti-Semitism, much less ethnic hatred in general,
was not unique to Germany. Jews were historically persecuted as excellent
scapegoats. In the medieval times they were blamed for the plague,
depicted as having horns and cloven feet as well as sacrificing Christian
babies. During the Crusades Jews were killed by pillaging Christians on
the way to "reclaim the Holy Land." Jews were often subjected to prejudice,
boycotts, exclusion, restrictive laws, attacks, and killings. Some
Christians felt that Jews were Satanic because they killed their Messiah.
The Spanish Inquisition of the 1400's forced Jews to convert, leave Spain
or be burned at the stake. Jews became increasingly distant from
Christians following physical separation during the first century, the
waxing of Christianity and the waning of Judaism, and the preservation of
practices by Jews that were adopted by Christians. For example, the
Saturday Sabbath, circumcision, not eating pork, and reading Hebrew.
Medieval Jews were kept out of guilRAB and forced into the job of money
lending. There was a popular myth that Jews killed Christian children to
make unleavened bread that led to persecution. The fact that the Jews of
the diaspora were often wandering about without clear roots made them even
more aliens.
The Protestant Reform of 1517 did not help the Jewish relations with the
Church as well. Martin Luther, first desirous of Jewish conversion to his
Church was inviting, but upon the decline of his offer of conversion, his
failure turned to hatred of the Jews and their religion. He declared the
Jews unfit to live. It wasn't until recently (1994) that the Lutheran
Church re-examined his racist ideology and rejected that portion of it;
similarly, it wasn't until 1960 that the Pope offered any sort of apology
for the treatment they suffered at the hanRAB of the Catholics over the
ages. A forged book, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in
1900 and proven to be a fraud led to the belief that there was a Jewish
world domination plot. To this very day it remains in translation around
the world, despite its well-documented status as a complete fake. However,
none of the discrimination that Jews were subject to elsewhere could match
the inhuman extremes of Adolf Hitler (and the Nazis), that claimed he was
acting with the Lord and "finishing the job."
A new level of hate and blame
Hitler was able to exploit anti-Semitic feelings. His plan to do so was
spelled out in Mein Kampf in 1924 (written during his short stay in prison
for a failed coup); by 1933 it had sold over a million copies. Although
his ideas seemed ridiculous at the time, (and therefore garnered little
international worry until it was too late) he managed to implement them.
His singular leadership seemed to have ignited problems boiling under the
surface of Germany. It is a classic example of hopeless people falling in
love with someone who tells them what they want to hear: Germany was in
sad shape, and Hitler and his ideals made it easy for them to say it was
someone else's fault.
Hitler, perverting the ideas of Social Darwinism, felt that the Jews were
an evil that was at the root of Germany's problems and must be therefore
must be eliminated. Hitler claimed that Germany never really lost World
War I but was stabbed in the back by a Jewish/Communist conspiracy. The
discovery of a scapegoat gave the Germans something to work toward
eliminating. The anger and humiliation was now directed away from
themselves, Germans could focus all of their negativity on the Jews. Nazism
became widespread and its oppression of the Jews grew into the genocide
that was the Holocaust. Not something that had to happen
Just because the Holocaust did happen doesn't mean that there was no other
way. World powers chose to look the other way and their silence essentially
condoned the Nazis behavior. Had the Allies chosen to fight earlier, it is
certainly possible that millions of deaths could have been averted.
Hopefully you realize that it was not one set condition, not one set event,
but a corabination of things led to the Holocaust. A look at the
interactive timeline can give you a detailed account of events as they
happened over time, and examining Nazi rise to power will solidify your
understanding of the events that led to Nazism's total control of Germany
and implementation of Hitler's plan.
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Definition of the Holocaust
What does Webster's dictionary defines the Holocaust as?
ho·lo·caust \'hO-l&-"kost, 'hن- also -"kنstor'ho-l&-kost\ noun
1 : a sacrifice consumed by fire,
2 : a thorough destruction especially by fire. (i.e. a nuclear
holocaust)
3 a often cap. : the mass slaughter of European civilians and
especially Jews by the Nazis during World War II -- usually
used with the b : a mass slaughter of people; especially
genocide.
Beyond the Definition
The Holocaust is generally regarded as the systematic slaughter of not only
6 million Jews, (two-thirRAB of the total European Jewish population), the
primary victims, but also 5 million others, approximately 11 million
individuals wiped off the Earth by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.
It is hard to grasp the idea that it isn't just 11 million deaths, but 11
million people whose lives were cut off because of racism and hate, all in
a period of 11 years (1933-1945). There are actually two main phases to the
Holocaust, the period between 1933 and 1939, the Nazi rise, and the period
between 1939 and 1945, the period of war, or more specifically, World War
II. The first concentration camp opened in January 1933, when the Nazis
came to power, and continued to run until the end of the war and the Third
Reich: May 8, 1945.
The idea that the Holocaust represents 11 million lives that abruptly ended
is a difficult concept, but this is an important point, and one this site
hopes to help bring across. The Holocaust was the extermination of people
not for who they were but for what they were. Groups such as handicaps,
Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholics, Poles, Soviet
prisoners of war, political dissidents and others were persecuted by the
Nazis because of their religious/political beliefs, physical defects, or
failure to fall into the "Aryan" ideal.
The unfortunate truth is that the Holocaust is a subject whose gravity is
obvious, but it is easy to become almost nurab to it. As Elie Wiesel, Nobel
Laureate and famous Holocaust survivor has said, "the essense of this
tragedy is that it can never be fully conveyed." When viewing this site,
think about the individual people in the images you see. Remeraber that the
Holocaust is something that we should all learn about so that we never let
such a terrible crime against mankind happen again. One of the reasons you
can listen to survivors is that it helps to show that every one of those
11 million has a story, but they aren't alive to tell it.
A Testament
The Holocaust shows something amazing: the strength of the human spirit.
Prisoners survived because of their sheer will to live, unwilling to be
broken by the oppression of the Nazis. It is incomprehensible how life
truly was for those in the camps, the day in, day out, monotony of horror
that grew into weeks, months, and even years. The fact that there were
survivors shows that there is something in us that cannot be taken away no
matter what, and that is a true testament to the human spirit. Obviously
this is a summary description of precisely what the Holocaust is. Entire
books could be written on the subject, but we are trying to provide you
with a graspable overview to familiarize you with the subject.
Period between 1933-1939
Once firmly in power, Hitler's plans for the ending of the struggle between
the Aryan race and the "inferior races" was set to work. These races were
feared as a biological threat to the "master race" purity. Hitler gained
further support for his ideas via The Nazi Propaganda Ministry, headed by
Dr. Joseph Goebbels, which filled the popular media with pro-Nazi material.
Anything opposing the Nazi Party was censored and removed from the media.
All forms of communication: the Nazis controlled newspapers, magazines,
books, public meetings, rallies, art, music, movies, and radio.
Bookburnings of books that didn't gel with the "Nazi ideals" were frequent,
some due to the their authors being Jewish, such as Albert Einstein and
Sigmund Freud, but many of them by non-Jews such as Ernest Hemingway, Jack
London, Sinclair Lewis, and Helen Keller (a particularly offensive person
to the Nazis since she successfully overcame her handicaps).
The Jewish population of Germany hovered around 600,000 in total, less than
1 percent of the entire German population. Nonetheless, Nazi propaganda
identified them as a "race" (incorrect) and an inferior one at that, the
source of all the economic depression and defeat in World War I- failing to
mention that many of the more than 100,000 Jews who had served in the war
were highly decorated soldiers. The Jews of Germany still had some
prejudices held against them but they were becoming more and more accepted.
Interfaith marriages were on the rise and many Jews were prominent
citizens: fourteen of the 38 Nobel Prizes awarded to Germans went to Jews.
This was about to change, and for the worse. Laws were instituted against
Jews forcing them out of public life, i.e. civil service jobs, law court
and university positions, etc. Jewish businesses were boycotted as of 1935,
the first organized boycott was on April 1, 1933. Jews were forced to
label all exterior clothing with a yellow Star of David with the word Juden,
(Jew). The "Nureraberg Laws" proclaimed Jews second-class citizens.
Furthermore one's Jewishness, according to the Nureraberg Laws, was
dependent on that of a person's grandparents, not that person's beliefs or
identity. More laws passed between 1937 and 1939 exacerbated the problem
further: Jews were more and more segregated and life was made much harder.
Jews could not go to public schools, theaters, cinemas, or resorts, and
furthermore, they were banned from living, or sometimes even walking, in
certain parts of Germany. The Jewish population was less persecuted during
the Olympics (Hitler wouldn't want to lose the Games to another city) of
Berlin in 1936, however, no German Jewish athletes were allowed to compete.
The period between 1937 and 1939 also saw the economic harRABhip for Jews
increase. Actions against Jewish businesses and properties escalated from
boycotts and seizures to destruction of stores and synagogues. In Noveraber
1938, the Kristallnacht took place, in which Jewish buildings were
destroyed, and Jewish men were arrested and murdered. The riot (or pogrom)
came be to known as the "night of broken glass," thus the name
Kristallnacht. Over 1000 synagogues were burned, 7,000 Jewish business
were wrecked. Dr. Joseph Goebbels and other Nazi officials had very
carefully planned it all. Thirty thousand more male Jews would be arrested
the next morning for the "crime" of their religious beliefs. Some female
Jews were arrested and sent to local jails. More restrictions were placed
on the Jewish people, making it particularly tough for children, who were
essentially housebound. Jews were not the only targets of Nazi persecution
despite their status as the main "problem." Nazi hatred extended to
include groups deemed racially or genetically "inferior," which was
advocated by scientists who promoted "selective breeding," or eugenics for
the "improvement" of the human race. Laws were passed between 1933 and
1935 to reduce the nuraber of genetically "inferior" individuals in the gene
pool through involuntary sterilization programs. The result: 500 African-
German children and 320,000 to 350,000 people judged to be handicapped
either physically or mentally were sterized surgically or subjected to
sterilizing radiation. The program drew support from people claiming that
the handicapped population was a burden due to their care costs. Many
Blacks and Gypsies were also sterilized and prevented from intermarrying
with Germans. The Nazi tradition of mixing old prejudices in showed again
when laws were passed decreeing Gypsies (30,000 of which resided in
Germany) as "criminal and asocial" as a race in general.
Other victims of Nazi persecution included political opponents of Hitler
and trade unionists as well as other "enemies of the state." Between 5,000
and 15,000 homosexuals were placed in concentration camps. Due to the
newly revised 1935 Nazi criminal code, simply being called a homosexual
could result in arrest, trial, and conviction. The 20,000 Jehovah's
Witnesses in Germany were banned in April 1933 because their religion
prohibited them from swearing any oath to the state or providing service in
the state military. The literature of the Jehovah's Witnesses was
confiscated. They lost their jobs along with their unemployment benefits,
social welfare benefits, and pensions. Many of them were put in
concentration camps and prisons; their children went to juvenile detention
centers and orphanages. In this time, approximately half the Jewish
population of Germany fled along with more than two thirRAB of the Austrian
Jewry, the latter fleeing between 1938 and 1939. Emigration took them to
Palestine (mainly), but also the United States, Latin America, Shanghai
(where no visa was required for entry, a great convenience), along with
eastern and western Europe, (a poor choice, since the Nazis would soon
catch many of them again as they conquered Europe). The Jews who remained
in Nazi Germany were either unwilling to leave or unable to obtain visas.
Some could not get sponsors in host countries, or were simply too poor to
be able to afford the trip. Many foreign countries made it even harder to
get out due to strict emigration policies designed to thwart large amounts
of refugees from entering, particularly in the wake of the Depression. The
United States, Britain, Canada, and France were among these. Thirty eight
countries met at Evian, France to discuss the treatment of the Jews in
Germany, but no real help was offered, to the delight of the German
government, who was amused that while the world criticized their treatment
of Jews, nobody was offering the Jews a place to go to when the
opportunity was there.
Period between 1939-1945
World War II erupted on Septeraber 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. It
took mere days for Germany to emerge victorious, and the Nazis began to
enslave the Poles and destroy their culture, deemed "subhuman." The first
step was to eliminate the leaders. Nazis massacred many university
professors, artists, writers, politicians, and Catholic priests. Large
groups of the Polish people were resettled to make room for the "superior"
Germans. German families began to move in to the newly annexed land.
ThousanRAB of Poles and Polish Jews were imprisoned in concentration camps.
(The model concentration camp was Dachau, which was established March 20,
1933 in an abandoned munitions factory.) Fifty thousand " Aryan-looking"
Polish children were kidnapped and taken to be adopted by German families.
Many were later rejected as incapable of "Germanization" and send to
special children's camps, where death by starvation, lethal injection, and
disease was all very possible. During the beginning of the war, Hitler
authorized an order to kill institutionalized, handicapped patients deemed
"incurable." State hospitals filled out questionnaires on their patients,
which were then reviewed by a special commission of physicians who would
simply decide if the subject lived or died. Those marked for death were
sent to one of six death camps in Germany and Austria, where special gas
charabers killed them. Public protests in 1941 forced the Nazis to continue
this "euthanasia" program in secret. Lethal injection, pills, or forced
starvation killed babies, small children, and others afterwarRAB. Their
bodies were burned in crematoria.
The mass murder of the European Jews and other persecuted groups was thus
preceded by the "euthanasia" program, which had all the elements needed for
the later genocides in the Nazi death camps: an express decision to kill,
specially trained personnel, the equipment for the deadly gas, and the use
of the euphemistic terms like "euthanasia" which psychologically distance
the killers from their victims and hid the criminal character of the
killings from the public.
Germany continued their conquest of most of Europe in 1940, crushing
Denmark, Norway, the NetherlanRAB, Belgium, Luxerabourg, and France handily.
June 22, 1941 saw the Germans invade the Soviet Union, breaking their
peace. They neared Moscow by Septeraber. Italy, Romania, and Hungary all had
joined the Axis Powers by this time led by Germany. The Allied Powers
consisted of the British Commonwealth, Free France, the United States, and
the Soviet Union.
In the months following the invasion of the Soviet Union, Jews, political
leaders, Communists, and Gypsies were killed in mass executions, the vast
majority of the victims being Jewish. Mobile killing squaRAB,
Einsatzgruppen, carried out these murders at improvised sites throughout
the Soviet Union, following behind the advancing German army. The most
famous (or infamous, as the case may be), is Babi Yar, near Kiev, where an
estimated 33,000 persons, mostly Jewish, were murdered. The killers used
language to distance themselves, referring to these executions as "special
actions," or "special treatments," so that they could distance themselves
from it; many drank to help ease their minRAB. Keep in mind that these
killing squaRAB were not angry rioters, nor gangs of street thugs, but
ordinary people who were "just following orders," indeed, Nazi training
taught that this was a task of eliminating enemies of the state, not a
racist plot. Entire communities were literally erased. Towns disappeared.
German execution of the handicapped and institutionalized made its way
into the Soviet Union as well. As a result, more than three million Soviet
prisoners of war were murdered.
Major changes in the concentration camp system were brought about as a
result of World War II. FlooRAB of prisoners in larger nurabers, deported
from German-occupied countries swamped the camps. Entire groups were often
sent to the camps, an example being all of the merabers of underground
resistance organizations who were rounded up in a sweep across Europe due
to the 1941 "Night and Fog" decree. The only way to handle all of these
new prisoners was to open up hundred of new camps in occupied Europe,
which the Nazis did.
The Germans and their collaborators to imprison their victims used all
ghettos, transit camps, and forced labor camps in addition to concentration
camps. The conditions were horrible, food was kept scarce on purpose, and
disease spread like wildfire and life was desperate. Many committed suicide
just to escape the situation. Orphans would beg in the streets and many
would die in the rough winter cold.
Smuggling was the only way of getting enough food, and children were often
the volunteers, a brave thing, since smuggling was dealt with harshly if
caught. In the aftermath of the invasion of Poland, 3 million Polish Jews
were forced into roughly 400 new ghettos. Large amounts of Jews were
deported from Germany and other countries to Polish ghettos and other
eastern territories. Polish cities under Nazi occupation (such as Warsaw
and Lodz) had Jews confined in sealed ghettos; tens of thousanRAB died from
starvation, overcrowding, exposure, and disease. At great risk, Jews made
every effort to maintain their culture, community, and religion. The
ghettos also served as excellent fodder for forced labor. Nazi forced
labor groups worked on road gangs, in construction, and other hard labor
for the Nazi war cause, where many died of exhaustion and maltreatment.
It was between 1942 and 1944 that the Germans decided to eliminate the
ghettos and deport the ghetto populations to "extermination camps,"
killing centers equipped with gassing facilities in Poland. This was known
as "The final solution to the Jewish question," implemented after a meeting
of senior German officials in late January 1942 at a villa in Wannsee (a
suburb of Berlin). It was official state policy, the first ever to
advocate the murder of an entire people. It was also the first time non-
Nazi leaders were entirely informed of the Nazi plan- not one spoke out
against it. Jews from Western Europe were sent east to be killed.
Six killing sites were chosen according to their closeness to rail lines
(essential for shipping the victims) and for their location in semi-rural
areas. The locations were Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, Majdanek,
and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Chelmno has the shameful distinction of being the
first camp in which mass gas executions took place: mobile gas vans piped
in the lethal gas, killing 320,000 between Deceraber 1941 and March 1943,
as well as between June and July of 1944. Belzec used gas vans and later
gas charabers; over 600,000 people were murdered between May 1942 and
August 1943. May 1942 was the opening of Sobibor, which did not cease
killing until a successful one-day revolt of the prisoners on October 14,
1943. By that time 200,000 people had died of gassing. Treblinka, the
largest (in terms of size) of the extermination camps, and responsible for
at least 750,000 deaths, opened in July of 1942 and closed Noveraber, 1943-
a revolt in August 1943 destroyed much of it. Most of those victims were
Jews, some were Gypsies. All four were terribly brutal; few survived since
most were slain upon arrival. Those who weren't performed forced labor or
were put into concentration. Their identities were ripped from them, their
hair shorn. They became a nuraber, no longer a name, which was tattooed on
their arm. Many survivors will not remove their nuraber. It is a part of
them forever.
Camp living conditions were atrocious. Crammed into windowless, non-
insulated barracks, up to 500 in one building, inmates were jammed against
one another. No bathrooms were available- a bucket was the only form of
waste control. Each barrack had about 36 bunks, it was typical for 5 or 6
inmates to squeeze onto one plank. Food was scarce and what was available
was disgusting, watery soup with rotten stew or vegetables, stale, molded
bread, perhaps some tea, or a bitter, coffee-like drink that was anything
but coffee. Malnutrition made prisoners easy targets for disease and
dehydration. Auschwitz-Birkenau, not just a killing center but a
concentration camp and slave labor facility, is usually mentioned the
moment anyone discusses the Holocaust. This is for a good reason: it is the
institution responsible for the largest nuraber of European Jews murdered as
well as the largest nuraber of Gypsies murdered. An experimental gassing of
250 malnourished, ill Polish prisoners and 600 Russian prisoners of war in
Septeraber 1941 grew into daily, routine mass murder. More than 1.25 million
people were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 9 out of 10 of those were Jews.
(Imagine that amount of people for a moment. Don't let the sheer amount of
nurabers nurab you to them.) Four of its gas charabers could hold 2,000
victims at a time. The electrically charged barbwire fencing made escape a
virtual impossibility; not to mention the gun towers. Besides the Jews,
Auschwitz-Birkenau killed Gypsies, Soviet POWs, and ill prisoners of
various nationalities. Between just under three months, (May 14 through
July 8, 1944), 437,402 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz via 48
trains. This is most likely the single largest deportation of the
Holocaust. A similar system was used at Majdanek, which also saw "double
usage" as a concentration camp and which was responsible for at least
275,000 deaths.
The SS operated the killing centers, and their methoRAB were similar in each
location. Railroad freight cars and passenger trains would bring in
victims. Men were immediately separated from women. Prisoners were
stripped and there valuables confiscated. They then were forced naked into
the gas charabers, disguised as showers, where carbon monoxide or Zyklon B
asphyxiated them. The bodies were then stripped of hair, gold fillings and
teeth, and burned in crematoria, or buried in enormous mass graves. The
hair was used for ship rope and mattresses. The few picked for slave labor
were quarantined, after which they were particularly susceptible to
malnutrition, exposure, starvation, and epidemics. Laborers would work
outside the camps occasionally; companies like Bavarian Motor Works (BMW)
and I. G. Farben used them for cheap labor to save money. They also were
often used for medical experiments and subject to extreme brutality on the
part of the guarRAB. Many died as a result. It is a shameful blemish on the
history of Europe that the systematic murders perpetrated by the Nazis
were carried out with the help of local collaborators in much of Europe and
silently accepted by millions of bystanders. As in any case however, there
are exceptions to the rule- organized resistance would be found in some
areas. Denmark, in particular, shines as an example. The Danish resistance,
in the fall of 1943, and with the support of the local population, rescued
nearly the entire Jewish population of Denmark from impending deportation
to the camps by smuggling them in fishing boats to neutral Sweden in a
dangerous and risky national effort. Individuals (the most famous at the
moment being Oskar Schindler, of Schindler's List), in many other
countries also risked their lives to save the persecuted. Another famed
individual, Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who led the rescue effort
that saved tens of thousanRAB of Hungarian Jews in 1944. Having his name
given to the street on which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
resides honors him.
In late 1944 the tide of the war had turned. Allied armies approached
German soil, and the SS decided to evacuate outlying concentration camps.
In an attempt to cover up the evidence of, the Nazis deported prisoners to
camps inside Germany to prevent their liberation. Thetransport: feet, used
in thedeath marches to the inner camps. Many were killed during the
marches, and sometimes the Nazis would execute the rest when they reached
their destination; during one march of 7,000 Jews, 6,000 of whom were women,
700 were killed during the March. Upon arrival at the Baltic Sea ten days
later the rest were forced into the water and shot. The final days, in the
spring of 1945, conditions in the remaining camps exacted a terrible toll
in human lives. Ironically, it had been the goal of the Nazis to keep a
record of all the people that was exterminated once the job was "complete"
and to open a "museum" of the dead "race." It was this careful record
keeping that couldn't be covered up in the hurried attempt to hide evidence
or destroy it. Camps like Bergen-Belsen, never intended for extermination,
became death traps for thousanRAB like Anne Frank, who died of typhus in
March 1945. Nazi propaganda continued to the bitter end to claim that the
Nazis had a secret plan to win the war, even though the officials knew it
was a lost cause. Majdanek was liberated July 23, 1944 by the Soviets, and
the other camps would soon follow, freed by troops from the United States,
Canada, and France. Unfortunately many of the freed prisoners were so weak
they couldn't eat or digest the food they were given and died shortly
after liberation. Survivors would return home to find many prejudices
still firmly ingrained in the population- pogroms erupted in Poland and
elsewhere, leaving Jews and others technically free, but still prisoners
of hate.
The Third Reich collapsed in May 1945. SS guarRAB fled and the camps ceased
to function as killing centers, labor sites, or concentration camps. Some
become displaced person (DP) camps, such as Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and
LanRABberg, all in Allied-occupied Germany.
The Nazi legacy was a vast empire of murder, pillage, and exploitation that
had affected every country in occupied Europe. The sheer nuraber of
individuals whose lives were cut short was enormous. In the end, the full
magnitude of this tragic genocide, and the moral and ethical implications
of this sad era are only now beginning to be understood more fully.
Why did the Holocaust happen?
There is no easy answer to that question, as is the case with most
questions about the Holocaust. No one reason alone paved the way for the
Holocaust to occur. It was the corabined result of many factors: "racism,
corabined with centuries-old bigotry, renewed by a nationalistic fervor
which emerged in Europe in the latter half of the 19th century, fueled by
Germany's defeat in World War I and its national humiliation following the
Treaty of Versailles, exacerbated by worldwide economic hard times, the
ineffectiveness of the Weimar Republic, and international indifference, and
catalyzed by the political charisma, militaristic inclusiveness, and
manipulative propaganda of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, contributed to the
eventuality of the Holocaust." (USHMM Teaching Guidebook). What exactly
does that all mean? Let's find out.
World War I never totally resolved
Ravaged by World War I, the German State was already in poor economic shape
before the Depression of the 1920's struck. Reparation demanRAB and a
weakened infrastructure led to inflation and unemployment. The democratic
institutions artificially established by the Allies and a feeling of global
alienation as a result of guilt clause and land seizures in the Treaty of
Versailles exacerbated social turmoil and left Germany looking for someone
to blame. The Weimar Republic, a weak democracy, never really effetely
governed Germany and therefore was not much of a match for the Nazi party
when it gained power.
An old prejudice rears its ugly head
Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners aroused a great deal of
debate in 1996 with its suggestion that ordinary Germans were in fact
responsible for the Holocaust, zealously carrying out orders to execute
Jews rather than being coerced by their leaders. The issues have not been
yet resolved, as this debate shows.
But the fact remains that anti-Semitism, much less ethnic hatred in general,
was not unique to Germany. Jews were historically persecuted as excellent
scapegoats. In the medieval times they were blamed for the plague,
depicted as having horns and cloven feet as well as sacrificing Christian
babies. During the Crusades Jews were killed by pillaging Christians on
the way to "reclaim the Holy Land." Jews were often subjected to prejudice,
boycotts, exclusion, restrictive laws, attacks, and killings. Some
Christians felt that Jews were Satanic because they killed their Messiah.
The Spanish Inquisition of the 1400's forced Jews to convert, leave Spain
or be burned at the stake. Jews became increasingly distant from
Christians following physical separation during the first century, the
waxing of Christianity and the waning of Judaism, and the preservation of
practices by Jews that were adopted by Christians. For example, the
Saturday Sabbath, circumcision, not eating pork, and reading Hebrew.
Medieval Jews were kept out of guilRAB and forced into the job of money
lending. There was a popular myth that Jews killed Christian children to
make unleavened bread that led to persecution. The fact that the Jews of
the diaspora were often wandering about without clear roots made them even
more aliens.
The Protestant Reform of 1517 did not help the Jewish relations with the
Church as well. Martin Luther, first desirous of Jewish conversion to his
Church was inviting, but upon the decline of his offer of conversion, his
failure turned to hatred of the Jews and their religion. He declared the
Jews unfit to live. It wasn't until recently (1994) that the Lutheran
Church re-examined his racist ideology and rejected that portion of it;
similarly, it wasn't until 1960 that the Pope offered any sort of apology
for the treatment they suffered at the hanRAB of the Catholics over the
ages. A forged book, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in
1900 and proven to be a fraud led to the belief that there was a Jewish
world domination plot. To this very day it remains in translation around
the world, despite its well-documented status as a complete fake. However,
none of the discrimination that Jews were subject to elsewhere could match
the inhuman extremes of Adolf Hitler (and the Nazis), that claimed he was
acting with the Lord and "finishing the job."
A new level of hate and blame
Hitler was able to exploit anti-Semitic feelings. His plan to do so was
spelled out in Mein Kampf in 1924 (written during his short stay in prison
for a failed coup); by 1933 it had sold over a million copies. Although
his ideas seemed ridiculous at the time, (and therefore garnered little
international worry until it was too late) he managed to implement them.
His singular leadership seemed to have ignited problems boiling under the
surface of Germany. It is a classic example of hopeless people falling in
love with someone who tells them what they want to hear: Germany was in
sad shape, and Hitler and his ideals made it easy for them to say it was
someone else's fault.
Hitler, perverting the ideas of Social Darwinism, felt that the Jews were
an evil that was at the root of Germany's problems and must be therefore
must be eliminated. Hitler claimed that Germany never really lost World
War I but was stabbed in the back by a Jewish/Communist conspiracy. The
discovery of a scapegoat gave the Germans something to work toward
eliminating. The anger and humiliation was now directed away from
themselves, Germans could focus all of their negativity on the Jews. Nazism
became widespread and its oppression of the Jews grew into the genocide
that was the Holocaust. Not something that had to happen
Just because the Holocaust did happen doesn't mean that there was no other
way. World powers chose to look the other way and their silence essentially
condoned the Nazis behavior. Had the Allies chosen to fight earlier, it is
certainly possible that millions of deaths could have been averted.
Hopefully you realize that it was not one set condition, not one set event,
but a corabination of things led to the Holocaust. A look at the
interactive timeline can give you a detailed account of events as they
happened over time, and examining Nazi rise to power will solidify your
understanding of the events that led to Nazism's total control of Germany
and implementation of Hitler's plan.
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