Holocaust

Significance: “Holocaust” is the term used to describe the Nazi effort to exterminate Europe’s Jews during the period from 1933 to 1945. Its implications for Jewish American relations with other groups remain enormous.

The Holocaust was Nazi Germany’s planned total destruction of the Jewish people and the actual murder of nearly six million of them. That genocidal campaign—the most systematic, bureaucratic, and unrelenting the world has seen—also destroyed millions of non-Jewish civilians. They included Roma, Slavs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, LGBTQ populations, the intellectually disabled, the physically handicapped, and the insane. The Nazis believed that their threat to the Third Reich approached, though it could never equal, the one posed by Jews.

In German, this unprecedented destruction process became known euphemistically as die Endlösung—the Final Solution. The Hebrew word Shoah, which means catastrophe, is also used to name it, but the term “Holocaust” most commonly signifies the event. That word has biblical roots. In the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew word olah is translated as holokauston. In context, olah means that which is offered up. It refers to a sacrifice, often specifically to “an offering made by fire unto the Lord.” Such connotations make “Holocaust” a problematic term for the devastation it names. The word’s religious implications seem inappropriate, even repulsive, to many people, including many Jews. Still, Holocaust remains the term that is most widely used.

Nazi Germany’s system of concentration camps, ghettos, murder squadrons, and killing centers took more than twelve million defenseless human lives. Between five million and six million of them were Jewish, including approximately one million children under fifteen. Although not every Nazi victim was Jewish, the Nazi intent was to rid Europe, if not the world, of Jews. Hitler went far in meeting that goal. Although Europe’s Jews resisted the onslaught as best they could, by the end of World War II two-thirds of European Jews—and about one-third of Jews worldwide—were dead. The vast majority of the Jewish victims came from Eastern Europe. More than half of them were from Poland; there, the German annihilation effort was 90 percent successful. At Auschwitz alone—located in Poland, the largest of the Nazi killing centers—more than one million Jews were gassed.

How did the Holocaust happen and why? Those questions are both historical and ethical. Their implications are huge. As Elie Wiesel , Jewish survivor of Auschwitz and winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, has said of Birkenau, the major killing area at Auschwitz: “Traditional ideas and acquired values, philosophical systems and social theories—all must be revised in the shadow of Birkenau.”

Further controversy regarding the Holocaust erupted in 2015 when Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, made statements suggesting that the idea of the genocide of the European Jews had not actually been Hitler's. Netanyahu claimed that the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, had suggested the plan to Hitler during a meeting in 1941 as a means of avoiding large amounts of expelled Jews from relocating to Palestine. Holocaust victims, historians, and commentators widely criticized Netanyahu's statements for the lack of historical evidence and the detraction from Hitler's responsibility for the crime against humanity.

History

Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. He soon consolidated his power through tyranny and terror. Within six months, the Nazis stood as the only legal political power in Germany, Hitler’s decrees were law, basic civil rights had been suspended, and thousands of the Third Reich’s political opponents had been imprisoned.

Emphasizing the superiority of the German people, Nazi ideology was anti-Semitic and racist to the core. The Nazis affirmed that German racial purity must be maintained. Building on precedents long established by Christianity’s animosity toward Jews, the Nazis went further and vilified Jews as the most dangerous threat to that goal. Nazi ideology defined Jewish identity in biological and racial terms. Nazi ideology was also directly influenced by race policy in the US. Hitler admired such racist measures implemented in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America that had effectively excluded some races from obtaining citizenship, such as the Immigration Act of 1924. Furthermore, he took inspiration from anti-Black policies enacted in the Jim Crow South and the widespread killing of Native Americans earlier in history.

German law established detailed conditions to define full and partial Jews. To cite three examples, if one had three Jewish grandparents, that condition was sufficient to make one fully Jewish. If one had only two Jewish grandparents and neither practiced Judaism nor had a Jewish spouse, however, then one was a Mischlinge (mongrel) first-class. A person with only a single Jewish grandparent would be a Mischlinge second-class. The identity of one’s grandparents was determined, paradoxically, not by blood but by their membership in the Jewish religious community. Once these Nazi classifications were in effect, the identity they conferred was irreversible.

Defining Jewish identity was crucial for identifying the population targeted by the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies. Those policies focused first on segregating Jews, making their lives intolerable, and forcing them to leave Germany. Between 1933 and the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, hundreds of decrees, such as the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, deprived the Third Reich’s Jews of basic civil rights. When Jews tried to emigrate from German territory, however, they found few havens. In general, doors around the world, including those in the United States, were opened reluctantly, if at all, for Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany.

World War II began with Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. With the notable exception of its failure to subdue England by air power, the German war machine had things largely its own way until it experienced reversals at El Alamein and Stalingrad in 1942. By the end of that year, four million Jews had already been murdered.

As Hitler’s forces advanced on all fronts, huge numbers of Jews, far exceeding the six hundred thousand who lived in Germany when Hitler took control, came under Nazi domination. For a year after the war began, Nazi planning had still aimed to enforce massive Jewish resettlement, but there were no satisfactory ways to fulfill that intention.

The Killing Begins

In the spring of 1941, as plans were laid for the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler decided that special mobile killing units—Einsatzgruppen—would follow the German army, round up Jews, and kill them. A second prong of attack in Germany’s war against the Jews became operational as well. Instead of moving killers toward their victims, it would bring victims to their killers.

Utilizing a former Austrian military barracks near the Polish town of Okwicim, the Germans made their concentration camp of Auschwitz operational in June 1940, when 728 Polish prisoners were transferred there. By the summer of 1941, the original camp (Auschwitz I) had been supplemented by a much larger camp at nearby Birkenau (Auschwitz II). Within the next year—along with five other sites in occupied Poland (Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek)—Auschwitz-Birkenau became a full-fledged killing center. Auschwitz employed fast-working hydrogen cyanide gas, which suppliers offered in the form of a deodorized pesticide known as Zyklon B. In 1943 new crematoria became available for corpse disposal. When Schutzstaffel (SS) leader Heinrich Himmler ordered an end to the systematic killing at Auschwitz in late 1944, his reasoning was not based entirely on the fact that Soviet troops were nearby. For all practical purposes, he could argue, the Final Solution had eliminated Europe’s “Jewish problem.”

At the same time, with the Allied forces encroaching further into German territory, German forces had begun evacuating many of these camps and forcing prisoners to march away from enemy advancements. Hundreds of thousands died in the process. In January of the following year, Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz. By the beginning of May, Hitler had committed suicide and Germany had officially surrendered.

Nazi war criminals, including high-ranking officials, were brought before a court. Thirteen trials, known as the Nuremberg Trials, were conducted between 1945 and 1949 in an attempt to bring justice in the face of such crimes against humanity. New laws and procedures had to be created to govern these unprecedented international trials. Over the next several decades, the German government, as well as others, made efforts to supply restitution funds for the survivors, who had suffered torture, property loss, and displacement. The United Nations General Assembly designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. As the years have continued to pass and fewer survivors remain alive, organizations and museums, such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, have continued to dedicate resources to study and education regarding the genocide.

Ethical Problems and Moral Challenges

The most crucial moral problem posed by the Holocaust is that no moral, social, religious, or political constraints were sufficient to stop Nazi Germany from unleashing the Final Solution. Only when military force crushed the Third Reich did the genocide end.

David Rousset, a French writer who endured German concentration camps, understated the case when he said simply, “The existence of the camps is a warning.”

The Holocaust warns about the depth of racism’s evil. If one takes seriously the idea that one race endangers the well-being of another, the only way to remove that menace completely is to do away, once and for all, with everyone and everything that embodies that race. If most forms of racism shy away from such extreme measures, Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitism did not. The Nazis saw what they took to be a practical problem: the need to eliminate “racially inferior” people. Then they moved to solve it.

Consequently, the Holocaust did not result from unplanned, random violence. It was instead a state-sponsored program of population elimination made possible by modern technology and political organization. As Nazi Germany became a genocidal state, its anti-Semitic racism required a destruction process that needed and got the cooperation of every sector of German society. The killers and those who aided and abetted them directly—or indirectly as bystanders—were civilized people from a society that was scientifically advanced, technologically competent, culturally sophisticated, and efficiently organized. These people were, as Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum has noted, “both ordinary and extraordinary, a cross section of the men and women of Germany, its allies, and their collaborators as well as the best and the brightest.”

Teachers and writers helped to till the soil in which Hitler’s virulent anti-Semitism took root; their students and readers reaped the wasteful harvest. Lawyers drafted and judges enforced the laws that isolated Jews and set them up for the kill. Government and church personnel provided birth records to document who was Jewish and who was not. Other workers entered such information into state-of-the-art data-processing machines. University administrators curtailed admissions for Jewish students and dismissed Jewish faculty members. Bureaucrats in the finance ministry confiscated Jewish wealth and property. Postal officials delivered mail about definition and expropriation, denaturalization and deportation. Driven by their biomedical visions, physicians were among the first to experiment with the gassing of lebensunwertes Leben (lives unworthy of life). Scientists performed research and tested their racial theories on those branded subhuman or nonhuman by German science. Business executives found that Nazi concentration camps could provide cheap labor; they worked people to death, turning the Nazi motto, Arbeit macht frei (work makes one free), into a mocking truth. Stockholders made profits from firms that supplied Zyklon B to gas people and from companies that built crematoria to burn the corpses. Radio performers were joined by artists such as the gifted film director Leni Riefenstahl to broadcast and screen the polished propaganda that made Hitler’s policies persuasive to so many. Engineers drove the trains that transported Jews to death, while other officials took charge of the billing arrangements for this service. Factory workers modified trucks so that they became deadly gas vans; city policemen became members of squadrons that made the murder of Jews their specialty. As the list went on and on, so did the racially motivated destruction of the European Jews.

Short of Germany’s military defeat by the Allies, no other constraints—moral, social, religious, or political—were sufficient to stop the Final Solution. Accordingly, a second Holocaust warning is the challenge that no one should take human rights for granted. Hans Maier, born on October 31, 1912, as the only child of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, considered himself an Austrian, not least because his father’s family had lived in Austria since the seventeenth century. Hans Maier, however, lived in the twentieth century, and so it was that in the autumn of 1935 he studied a newspaper in a Viennese coffeehouse. The Nuremberg Laws had just been passed in Nazi Germany. Maier’s reading made him see that, even if he did not think of himself as Jewish, the Nazis’ definitions meant that in their view he was Jewish. By identifying him as a Jew, Maier would write later on, Nazi power made him “a dead man on leave, someone to be murdered, who only by chance was not yet where he properly belonged.”

When Nazi Germany occupied Austria in March 1938, Maier drew his conclusions. He fled his native land for Belgium and joined the Resistance after Belgium was swept into the Third Reich in 1940. Arrested by Nazi police in 1943, Maier was sent to Auschwitz and then to Bergen-Belsen, where he was liberated in 1945. Eventually taking the name Jean Améry, by which he is remembered, this philosopher waited twenty years before breaking his silence about the Holocaust. When Améry did decide to write, the result was a series of essays about his experience. In English, they appear in a volume entitled At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. “Every morning when I get up,” he tells his reader, “I can read the Auschwitz number on my forearm. . . . Every day anew I lose my trust in the world. . . . Declarations of human rights, democratic constitutions, the free world and the free press, nothing,” he went on to say, “can lull me into the slumber of security from which I awoke in 1935.”

In The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future, Richard L. Rubenstein echoes Améry’s understanding. “Does not the Holocaust demonstrate,” he suggests, “that there are absolutely no limits to the degradation and assault the managers and technicians of violence can inflict upon men and women who lack the power of effective resistance?” Rubenstein believes that “the dreadful history of Europe’s Jews had demonstrated that rights do not belong to men by nature.” If Rubenstein is correct, then, practically speaking, people can expect to enjoy basic rights such as those proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—only within a political community that honors and defends those rights successfully.

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