Holocaust investigation

DATE: Began in 1945

THE EVENT:The Holocaust is the name given to the programmed genocide of some six million Jews by the German government during World War II. Instruments of the Holocaust included forced marches, ghettoization, deliberate starvation, beatings, concentration camps, and random and systematic murder.

SIGNIFICANCE: The Holocaust is a watershed in human history, marking a time when a civilized nation deliberately and systematically undertook the destruction of a specific people. The ultimate goal of the Nazis was to eliminate Jews from all of Europe, or at least all the territory occupied by the Nazis during World War II. It has been estimated that six million Jews, along with hundreds of thousands of other “undesirables,” were murdered during this period of genocide; some estimates place the death toll as high as eleven million. Following the war, forensic scientists were involved in efforts to bring the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice and to identify as many of their victims as possible.

The Holocaust was proposed, planned, and undertaken by German chancellor Adolf Hitler and other members of the Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) hierarchy as part of the so-called final solution to the “Jewish question.” Hitler proposed the need for a “solution” to the Jewish problem early in his political career. Following his military successes in the early years of World War II, he and high-ranking members of the Nazi leadership met to determine the fate of European Jews. Heinrich Himmler, commander of the Schutzstaffel (SS), and SS lieutenant general Reinhard Heydrich were appointed architects of the “final solution,” a program that sought the elimination of all of the Jews of Europe.

Under their direction, the Holocaust began almost immediately in Germany and in German-occupied Poland. Jews were rounded up and forced to live in ghettos; many were beaten, tortured, and starved to death. The genocide program expanded to include groups such as homosexuals, Roma (Gypsies), political opponents, and prisoners of war. As Germany’s military conquests extended into Eastern Europe and Russia, special squads called Einsatzgruppen entered each newly conquered town to round up all ethnic Jews along with other “undesirables.” At first, the prisoners were either immediately shot or taken on forced marches to isolated areas, where they were all shot and buried in mass graves.

Although hundreds of thousands were killed in this way, it proved too slow and cumbersome for the Nazi leadership, and a more efficient method of mass was sought and found in concentration camps, which could handle thousands of prisoners at a time. Jews from all over Europe, including the newly occupied countries of France, Belgium, and Holland, were transported to concentration camps in special freight trains to work as slaves or to be destroyed en masse.

The shootings and burials could not keep pace with the huge numbers arriving in the camps daily, and the Nazis began to consider alternative methods of mass murder. Preliminary experiments suggested that poison gas could provide the mechanism for mass killing. The effectiveness of poison gas was first tested in vans, but the numbers that could be killed at one time were too small. To counter this problem, the Nazis built large gas chambers that could hold hundreds of people at a time at major concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka. These proved deadly efficient for their intended purpose, gassing thousands every day. The dead were placed in crematoriums, and the remains were buried in nearby fields or in pits dug especially for disposal.

As the tide of war turned against them, the Nazis tried to conceal the of the Holocaust and its victims. In some areas they were able to dismantle and destroy a number of concentration camps before Allied forces arrived. They also excavated many mass graves, cremated the remains, and either reburied the ashes or scattered them.

Forensic Investigation

Forensic scientists began to investigate the facts of the Holocaust immediately after the war. They faced two primary tasks: first, to prove that Holocaust victims were murdered using poison gas, and, second, to attempt to identify victims based on the meager remains. Beginning in 1945, the International Military Tribunal conducted the postwar investigation of the crimes committed in the concentration camps and other mass killings that became known as the Holocaust. The investigation focused on the remains found in the gas chambers at the concentration camps that had been captured intact by the Allies. In spite of the Nazi authorities’ strict secrecy regarding their genocidal activities, the investigators were able to gather from survivors detailed testimonies of gassings and other atrocities. German officials countered the witnesses by claiming that the gas chambers were used only for delousing prisoners.

At Auschwitz, forensic toxicology tests conducted in the gas chambers and on the remains determined that hydrogen cyanide (Zyklon B) was most likely used to murder the prisoners, but this conclusion was again challenged because cyanide was also the gas used for delousing clothing. Further forensic analysis performed by the Institute for Forensic Research in Kraków, Poland, in 1945 detected the presence of Prussian blue, a derivative of hydrogen cyanide, in the gas chambers; this was consistent with the probable use of the gas as a weapon of mass murder. Traces of Prussian blue found in the hair of victims also helped confirm the use of poison gas.

The second task of the forensic scientists was to locate the remains of Holocaust victims and excavate them so that they could try to identify individuals using techniques such as forensic odontology and anthropometry. Identification proved almost impossible, however, as most of the remains were in the form of fragments that had been burned, buried, and reburied, often several times. In those instances where sufficient remains were found to allow examination of the teeth, identification through forensic odontology proved difficult, as any dental records that may once have existed for the victims had been destroyed during the war.

It is possible that modern forensic techniques, including DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) analysis and other molecular-based techniques, may yet provide some degree of kinship identification of the sparse remains. For this reason, the Nazi extermination facilities at Auschwitz-Birkenau have been preserved in the hope that they may yet yield forensic evidence needed to provide additional useful information about both the victims of the Holocaust and their destruction.

Holocaust investigation continued to in the 2010s and 2020s. During this time, many antisemitic and conspiracy groups across the world continued to engage in Holocaust distortion, arguing that the horrific genocide was grossly exaggerated or never occurred. Forensic evidence was used by experts to help combat these claims.

Bibliography

Germain, Ellen. "Why Confronting Holocaust Distortion and Denial Matters." US Department of State, 31 Jan. 2022, www.state.gov/why-confronting-holocaust-distortion-and-denial-matters/. Accessed 15 Aug. 2024.

Hoffman, Eva. After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York: PublicAffairs, 2004.

Pelt, Robert Jan van. The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.

Shermer, Michael, and Alex Grobman. Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

"What Americans Know About the Holocaust." Pew Research, 22 Jan. 2020, www.pewresearch.org/religion/2020/01/22/what-americans-know-about-the-holocaust/. Accessed 15 Aug. 2024.