HOLOCAUST.

The Holocaust (from the Greek holokauton, "burnt offering" or "sacrifice") is the term now most commonly used to describe the attempted Nazi genocide of European Jews. Between 1939 and 1945 mass shootings, gassings in specially constructed extermination camps, murderous labor, and other means resulted in the deaths of between 5.1 and 6.2 million Jews. The Nazis themselves referred to the extermination program as the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." This portmanteau phrase began life before Hitler had definitively resolved on mass murder but soon became a euphemism for genocide. During World War II contemporary Jewish observers and scholars used the Hebrew terms Churban (traditionally denoting the destruction of the temple) or Shoah (meaning devastation) to describe the Nazi program, and the latter word is still commonly used, particularly by those who reject the "Holocaust's" connotation of sacrifice. In the immediate postwar period, murders of Jews were subsumed under the more general rubric of "War Crimes," the official terminology for Axis misdeeds deployed at the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials. Historical literature in 1950s and 1960s, when it dealt with the subject at all, tended to refer to the "Final Solution."

Since the 1960s, the designation Holocaust has predominated. The term is normally reserved for the Jewish genocide, the most comprehensive, systematic, and unrelenting part of Nazi racially based extermination policies. Yet the Nazis targeted many other groups too, killing directly or through neglect many millions of Polish and Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war (POWs), Roma, the mentally and physically handicapped, and homosexuals. Nazi policies adopted toward Jews often intersected and dovetailed with other racial and resettlement measures.

PRECEDENTS

The Holocaust has provoked deep disagreements among historians as to its causes and meaning. Many see in it the culmination of a long European tradition of Christian anti-Semitism, accompanied since the Middle Ages by intermittent savage violence. The Enlightenment introduced the idea of civil toleration of Jews but also gave rise to new secular critiques of Judaism. In an era of growing legal equality, nineteenth-century opposition to Jews aimed increasingly not to achieve their Christian conversion but to dissimilate them. From the 1870s on, particularly in German-speaking lands, racial anti-Semitism emerged (and with it the coining of the term anti-Semitism itself), condemning Jews for prescriptive biological flaws that had little to do with their failure to endorse Christianity. The most extreme late-nineteenth-century texts by writers such as Eugen Dühring talked of the need to exterminate Jewry, though it is not clear whether physical killing was meant. Anti-Semitism became a cultural code for a large part of the nationalist-minded community in Germany and Austria.

While there are clear similarities between Dühring's language and that of Hitler, the strength, homogeneity, or violent character of pre–World War I anti-Semitic traditions should not be overemphasized. There was relatively little anti-Semitic violence in Germany before 1914, by which time Germany's few anti-Semitic political parties had dwindled to nothing. Contemporary observers around 1900, if they had predicted anti-Semitic atrocities in the future, would have anticipated them in the Russia of the pogroms, not in Germany.

Some scholars locate the Holocaust's roots less in anti-Semitism than in the modern world's search to control and order society. From the nineteenth century a growing cohort of medical and welfare professionals embarked on projects for improving the health of the population, which often involved controlling and segregating those seen as injurious to social peace. Social Darwinism and eugenics encouraged states to limit the reproduction of unhealthy elements while promoting the fertility of more valuable community members. In the early twentieth century, several world states carried out forced sterilizations of the mentally ill and others. Nazi sterilization, euthanasia, and exclusionary policies undoubtedly drew on these trends. There are parallels between these measures and the lethal modern rationality that can be seen in Germany's wartime plans for the racial resettlement and economic regeneration of eastern Europe, above all in Heinrich Himmler's notorious "Generalplan Ost." It is difficult, however, to see the single-minded and unrelenting commitment to eliminating Jewry as responding to any obvious societal logic.

The rise of modern nationalism was undoubtedly another important prerequisite, not just for the Holocaust but also for other twentieth-century genocides and ethnic cleansings. Modern nationalism, with its ethnic and populist conceptions of what it was that defined the people, created the logic for expunging from the nation those seen as alien. In the decades before World War I, the rise of nationalism in eastern Europe and the Balkan wars saw many acts of murderous ethnic cleansing, acts in turn eclipsed by the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in World War I. One million Armenians were murdered as part of a gigantic and violent resettlement program involving more than five million people. What distinguishes the Nazi campaign from most ethnic-nationalist rivalries, however, is that the German Jews were not competing for power on any kind of ethnic basis; they were highly acculturated, regarded themselves as Germans, and were not seeking a collective position within the German state.

Beyond ethnic nationalism, the Holocaust drew also on the European powers' recent experience of imperialism. "What India was for England," Hitler said in August 1941, "the eastern territories will be for us" (Traveso, p. 71). Hitler's notion of "living space," which described the Russian and eastern European territory to be cleansed and prepared for German settlement, had its origins in pre–World War I writing about colonial settlement in Africa. Among nineteenth-century European anthropologists the view was widely shared that the extinction of inferior races as a result of contact with superior ones was a law of nature. In Algeria, the Congo, the Ivory Coast, the Sudan, and elsewhere colonialism led to reductions among indigenous populations of genocidal proportions. In South West Africa, the imperial German administration carried out a genocide of the Herero in 1904 that has been seen by some scholars as a direct antecedent of the Holocaust.

World War I was in many ways as significant an experience as all the above. It introduced European nations to technological mass slaughter, exercising a terrible hold on the European imagination. The image of men gassed at the front would reappear in Hitler's rhetoric against the Jews. At home, states became used to taking a direct interest in the nation's health and efficiency. In Germany, concern with "wastage" of scarce resources led to a starvation regime in many mental hospitals that anticipated later Nazi policies. Growing hardship and disillusionment on the German home front exacerbated internal divisions and led to a radicalization of anti-Semitism. The outbreak of revolution, first in Russia, then in Germany and eastern European countries, fomented widespread belief that Jewish circles were sowing discord in Europe's capitals. In this context, Germany's wartime social tensions and defeat could be blamed by the Right on the Jews. It used to be thought that Adolf Hitler had learned his radical anti-Semitism in Vienna, where he spent his later youth, but it seems that it was in the atmosphere of Germany's defeat and in the fevered postwar political climate in Munich that Hitler fixed his hatred. All across Europe, the postwar era saw the spread of virulent anti-Semitism, particularly in states that had lost the war or felt mistreated by the postwar settlements.

In Germany, the 1918–1919 revolution and civil war carried the violence of war onto domestic streets and ushered in a new paramilitary style of politics. Radical splinter groups on the left and right sprang up out of nowhere; the early years of the new republic were dominated by fear and conflict. The respectable classes were open to violence, if it assured stability. Virulent right-wing politics dominated the student unions, though until 1932 not the national polls.

PREPARATIONS

It has long been debated when and with what clarity Adolf Hitler formulated the idea of exterminating the Jews. By the mid-1920s he was virulently anti-Semitic. His two-volume autobiography Mein Kampf, dictated in prison in 1924, and his second unpublished book, written in 1928, were obsessed with Jewry. Other groups too fell foul of Hitler's racial vision, but only the Jews were seen as conspiring against the nation. Hitler's language is extraordinarily violent and bloodthirsty, redolent with metaphors of plague and parasite. The Jew was variously a maggot, a blood-sucking spider, a rat, a harmful bacillus, or a vampire. His followers expected a brutal reckoning with the Jews, but it seems that Hitler's main aim was to force German Jews to leave the country. The violent rhetoric may not have been a plan for genocide—nevertheless, the language of pests and parasites would give the later genocidal decisions a retrospective claim to consistency. Looking back in 1941 and again at the end of the war, Hitler would say that he had followed a straight path.

Hitler's racial anti-Semitism enjoyed wide resonance in Germany but was arguably not the reason millions of voters turned to the Nazis in Weimar's final crisis years. Indeed, from 1930 the party toned down the anti-Semitic content of its electoral materials in order to increase its appeal.

After Hitler's accession to power on 30 January 1933, Germany's Jews were targeted almost immediately. A government-sponsored boycott of Jewish businesses in April was followed by a purge of the civil service. Between 1933 and 1934 Jews were removed almost completely from German public life. After a brief lull, the period 1935–1937 saw a raft of further measures: in the so-called Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, Jews lost their citizenship and were forbidden to have sexual relations with Aryans. Toward the end of 1937, Jews were denied any possibility of earning an independent living. The regime massively increased the pressure to emigrate. After the Anschluss in March 1938, Austria with its particularly widespread anti-Semitism stepped into the vanguard for a while. But on Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), 9–10 November 1938, Nazi brutality smashed through the doors and windows of almost every remaining Jewish home and business in Germany. By the outbreak of World War II, two-thirds of the Jews in Germany and Austria had managed to emigrate, while those left behind formed a huddled, terrified, and aging remnant.

As part of wider debates about the nature of the Nazi system, historians were long divided over the reasons for this rapid radicalization. While the "intentionalists" emphasized Hitler's purposeful drive to exclude the Jews, the "functionalists" believed that what took the regime into uncharted waters was competition between subordinates seeking to make their mark in an unregulated power jungle. It is now known that Hitler probably did send the decisive signals, but the energy of the program depended on the willing compliance of a large number of players, who often shared the idea that Jewish influence should be removed from Germany. In the early years, state officials at national and local levels vied with Nazi Party members to be the torchbearers. When Jewish businesses and property were up for grabs, popular greed added further energy. Toward the end of the 1930s, the influence of the Heinrich Himmler's SS (Schutzstaffel) and police empire grew; during the war it would be the dominant force.

The tide of discriminatory measures was aimed toward the goal of a Jew-free society, not murder. In 1938 and 1939, special centers were established in Vienna and Berlin to "facilitate" Jewish emigration. As late as April 1940, the hardliners in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) laid down that Jewish emigration should be pursued with increased emphasis. Toward the end of the 1930s, however, the growing suspicion of Nazi expansionism by the rest of the world confirmed Hitler's view that an international Jewish conspiracy was manipulating world events. His pronouncements and warnings grew more threatening in an effort to intimidate the "Jewish-controlled" foreign powers from interfering with German ambitions. In a speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, Hitler "wished to make a prophecy: if international Jewry in and outside Europe once again forced the nations into a world war the result would not be the Bolshevization of the earth and victory for the Jews but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."

A sign of the relatively unplanned way in which the Nazis edged toward genocide of the Jews is that the drift toward using murder as a tool of racial policy began not with Jews and not as the result of anti-Semitism but out of the desire to remove the "burden" of the mentally and physically handicapped. Earlier in the 1930s the Nazis had implemented draconian measures of racial health, introducing compulsory sterilization for the mentally ill. By the outbreak of war 350,000 to 400,000 people, or more than 1 percent of the German childbearing population, would be forcibly sterilized. These measures did not initially target Jews and, indeed, much of the impetus came from medical and scientific proponents of eugenics, who until the early 1930s were not necessarily advocates of more völkisch racial thought. The enforced sterilization of the so-called Rhineland bastards in 1934 marked a first crossover toward combining eugenic and ethnic categories that, however, still did not target Jews.

In 1938 Hitler approved the killing of a handicapped child and in 1939 a nationwide program (dubbed "T4" after the Berlin address, Tiergarten 4, whence it was administered) for administering such killings. Hitler was acting in keeping with the attitude of an influential minority in the medical profession who regarded such "lives unworthy of living" as an exorbitant burden on the state. A program to eliminate mentally handicapped adults began in the same year. These operations claimed the lives of seventy thousand people over the following two years. The program also created precedent and expertise for the gassing of Jews. In summer 1940, a sign of the slippage, all mentally ill Jews in German psychiatric institutions were murdered.

In the longer view, the decisive event in unleashing the Nazis' full murderous potential was the outbreak of war. The war encouraged new radicalism and presented new challenges. Britain and its commonwealth were now closed as emigration destinations. The Nazis had acquired a huge Jewish population in occupied Poland. It was clear that for this group emigration was out of the question. The Nazis were stuck with millions of Jews.

Over the next eighteen months, the SS and other authorities would experiment with enforced resettlement of Jews onto a series of special reservations, first in eastern Poland, whither many thousands were dispatched under appalling conditions, then in Madagascar, though no Jews were ever sent there, and then in some distant part of Russia. These projects were much more lethal in intent than the drive to force emigration. The reservations would be policed and controlled—proposals included separating the sexes—and it was not assumed or desired that the deportees would thrive. Each of these projects failed to materialize, however. In the case of Madagascar and Russia implementation was predicated on military victories that did not transpire.

The problems in Poland revealed that Nazi attempts at Jewish resettlement were intersecting with far-reaching plans for the reorganization, ethnic cleansing, and partial Germanization of eastern Europe. It was Himmler's efforts to repatriate several hundred thousand ethnic Germans from the Soviet Union and elsewhere into German-held territory in western Poland that helped to stymie the Jewish reservation plan. To make way for the German settlers, western Polish farms were needed, and to clear the occupants, all available capacities were taken up bringing in ethnic Germans into western Poland and transferring almost half a million Poles (some Jewish, the majority not) out of that area and dumping them in the General Government, the rump Polish territory to the east. At this stage, then, Germanization and plans for Jews collided with each other. Later, they would reinforce each other in disastrous ways, as the Nazis own planning created problems and shortages that led them to look at the Jews as a surplus and unnecessary population.

In 1939–1940, the German authorities in Poland, anticipating the Jews' eventual removal to a reservation, acted with enormous brutality to isolate and concentrate Polish Jews and remove them from the economy. Several thousands of Jewish leaders were killed as part of a wider program of decimating the Polish intelligentsia to crush any national revival. Jews were forced to wear special armbands and were subject to confiscations and special taxes. Jews throughout Poland, except those performing protected tasks for the Wehrmacht, were pushed out of gainful employment. As hopes of speedy deportations crumbled, Nazi leaders sealed up Jewish ghettos. Horribly overcrowded and underresourced, the ghettos were at the whim of local officials' willingness to allow them to earn their keep. In Warsaw, the largest ghetto, presiding authorities systematically starved the occupants, sending death rates soaring in 1940 and 1941. According to official German figures, by the end of 1942 three quarters of a million Jews had died in the ghettos of "natural causes," quite apart from the killing programs that were by then well under way. In many parts of Poland, Jews were conscripted for forced labor under such unbearable conditions—as for example in building fortifications along the Bug River—that many died.

FROM MASS MURDER TO GENOCIDE

It was the war against the Soviet Union that sent the German authorities over the edge to mass murder. As in previous campaigns, special task squads (Einsatzgruppen) prepared to eliminate security threats behind the front lines. But because of the Nazi conception of the Bolshevik system, the scale and the character of the task was defined very differently. This was not an ordinary war, Hitler told his generals, but a fight to the death between two ideologies. The communist officials were all criminals and must be treated as such. Since Hitler believed Jews were at the heart of the communist system, his aim was the elimination of the "Judeo-Bolshevik intelligentsia." In Russia, therefore, the campaign against the elites was to be from the beginning also a campaign against the Jews, with the limits of the Jewish culpability and participation very poorly defined.

The climate for killing was further heated up by economics. Hitler's military strategy and longer-term plans depended on ruthless commandeering of Soviet resources, above all its foodstuffs. Civilian deaths in seven figures were a deliberate and integral part of the campaign. The German high command made no provision to feed the anticipated large numbers of Soviet prisoners. The result would be an astonishingly high death toll—two million by the end of 1941—making Soviet POWs the first group in German hands to die in the millions.

When the German troops swept in to the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, four motorized Einsatzgruppen of six hundred to one thousand men each followed behind, with additional manpower supplied by police battalions and Waffen SS units. In close cooperation with the German army, these units carried out mass shootings of leading Bolsheviks, Soviet army political officers, state officials, intellectuals, and Jews. Very rapidly, the task squads moved to target all Jewish men of armsbearing age, and in late summer extended their remit to women and children. The shootings took place at mass graves away from towns and cities, to which the Jews were marched or driven. In the Baby Yar valley in Ukraine, 33,771 Jews were murdered in just two days in September 1941. It is clear that the expansion of the scale of murder coincided with high level meetings between Hitler and Himmler in July. In August, Himmler instituted experiments on the effectiveness of using gas as a means of killing, though shooting would remain the preferred option in the Soviet Union. Where demand for Jewish labor was low, and particularly where the male Jews had already been killed, the surviving Jewish populations were simply deemed "useless eaters." In this way the original racial-security concept shifted to a racial-economic one, with only a few skilled male workers enjoying temporary reprieve. By the end of the year more than three quarters of a million Soviet Jews had been killed, a number that eventually would reach two million.

The summer 1941 onslaught against Soviet Jews marked the single most significant step in the descent into genocide, yet it is not clear if the Nazis had yet resolved to murder all European Jews. Rather than a single moment of decision, a number of parallel developments took place in the months after July 1941 as the climate created by the Soviet killings progressively altered policy assumptions.

In September 1941, Hitler agreed that even before the end of the Soviet campaign German Jews could be deported to relieve pressure on housing stock depleted by bombing. By early fall the Nazis had clearly resolved that all Jews should be subject to some kind of territorial or more directly murderous solution. Emigration even of German Jews was now barred for all but a few exceptions. In readiness for deportations, all German Jews had to be clearly marked with the yellow star and were concentrated in special houses. Mass deportations from Germany to Lodz began in October and would be followed by transports to Minsk, Kovno, and Riga in November and December.

It is not clear that the deportees were slated for certain death, though Reinhard Heydrich's planning for the Lodz ghetto condemned nonworkers to overcrowding on a scale that suggested that death through disease would be most welcome. The knock-on effect of the planned deportations, however, was to incur the protest of the receiving authorities, particularly in Lodz. As a result Himmler and the local gauleiter, Artur Greiser, agreed on the construction of an extermination center at Chelmno to eliminate Polish Jews as a way of "making space" for the German deportees. The Chelmno gas camp would begin killing on 8 December 1941.

In September and October, it became clear to Nazi authorities in the General Government that the slow advance in the Soviet Union would not allow the Polish territories to off-load their Jews in the near future and thus that yet another reservation project had failed. Having excluded Jews from almost any way of earning a living, Nazi officials began discussing what to do with their "useless" subjects. The SS leader in the Lublin district, Odilo Globocnik, had been authorized to prepare his region for a German settlement program. In October, after a meeting with Himmler, he began preparations for the Belzec extermination facility, where killing would start in March 1942.

The available records do not allow historians to reconstruct Hitler's precise role in these developments, which seem to have arisen from regional initiatives, though always in coordination with Himmler. Hitler's own recorded pronouncements are seldom unambiguous. What is clear, however, is that by the end of 1941 Nazi leaders were assuming all Jews would be killed—and that such an assumption would have required Hitler's imprimatur. The infamous Wannsee Protocol reveals that by January 1942 at the latest Nazi leaders knew that all Jews would die through exhaustive labor or direct killing, though the final details of the program may not have been fully worked out even then.

The implementation of murder developed in stages in spring 1942, as Himmler and Heydrich progressively expanded the killing process. After Heydrich's assassination in June 1942, Himmler radically stepped up the pace of killings in Poland, in July calling for the entire General Government to be cleared of Jews by the end of the year. By December 1942 just over a quarter of a million Jews in the region remained alive. German Jews began to be killed in large numbers beginning in May 1942 and even those ostensibly reprieved to live out their days in the "old-age ghetto" of Theresienstadt would for the most part be sent on to Auschwitz. Large-scale transports of Jews from western Europe began to roll in June, most of them to Auschwitz. Though the Holocaust was a protracted affair, it is a macabre fact that more than half of all its Jewish victims were dispatched within eleven months. The period from mid-March 1942 to mid-February 1943 marks probably the most intensive period of murder in the history of mankind.

KILLING FIELDS

Half the Jews murdered in the Holocaust did not die in the gas chambers. The majority of these were shot on the plains of Russia. Others were worked or mistreated to death on labor sites throughout Europe. Tens of thousands more were shot near the end of the war. The view of the Holocaust as an almost automated affair, taking place with industrial precision in hidden death factories, is thus inaccurate. This was mass killing at close quarters and on open view, though much of it away from German soil.

But the Nazis' most radical innovation was indeed the creation of death factories in which the technology and efficiency of industrial production was transferred to the killing, processing, and destruction of human bodies. The camps themselves varied considerably in character. Because there were so few survivors, the Chelmno camp near Lodz, and the three extermination camps in the General Government—Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka—are less well known than Auschwitz, though together they accounted for twice as many deaths. Like the regular concentration camps they were ultimately under Himmler's control, but they stood outside the main camp system and were run locally, with the "Action Reinhardt" camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka under the command of SS Major General Odilo Globocnik in Lublin. Within the camps, security police personnel and transferees from the euthanasia program were in charge while Ukrainian auxiliaries did much of the day-to-day guard duty. There were no selections at the camps: with the exception of the small Jewish labor force temporarily required to keep the machine running, all Jews brought there were murdered. The Chelmno camp near Lodz eliminated its inmates in specially constructed mobile gas vans, whose carbon monoxide fumes were pumped back into the sealed holds. The bulk of the camp's work was done between December 1941 and April 1943, but it was restarted in summer 1944 to eliminate the remnants of the Lodz ghetto. The Action Reinhardt camps used fixed installations into which motor engines pumped carbon monoxide. New arrivals were rushed into the extermination process. Under pretext of being prepared for delousing baths, they were made to undress, have their hair cut, and were sent into the gas chambers all within a couple of hours of exiting the often horrifically overcrowded trains. In the first five weeks of its operation, Treblinka, the most efficient of the three, "processed" three hundred thousand people, predominantly Jews from Warsaw. Overall, as many as nine hundred thousand Jews may have died there—almost as many as in Auschwitz. Between spring 1942 and fall 1943, the Chelmno and Action Reinhardt camps together were responsible for the deaths of perhaps two million Jews. Successful camp uprisings in 1943 allowed a few hundred inmates to escape Treblinka and Sobibor, but from Chelmno and Belzec together there were only three or four survivors.

For many of those Jews sent to Majdanek near Lublin and Auschwitz near Kraków, the experience was similar—death came a few hours after arrival and took place in camouflaged shower rooms, this time with prussic acid (Zyklon B). The corpses were searched for valuables and gold teeth before being cremated. These camps began their existence not as killing centers, however, but as part of the Nazi concentration camp empire, and even in their killing phase continued to hold a sizable working population—including many non-Jews. Jews arriving in these camps were subject to a selection, so that of the 1.3 million people taken to Auschwitz, four hundred thousand were initially selected for labor and given numbers. Because it was the largest complex, the size of a small town, and because it saw the most survivors, it is Auschwitz that has gripped our imagination. Whereas the pure extermination camps had all been shut down by the end of 1943 (though Chelmno would briefly be reopened), Auschwitz's peak murder period came in summer 1944, when 430,000 Hungarian Jews were dispatched in just seven weeks. By the time of its liberation, around 1 million Jews and perhaps 150,000 others had died there. Auschwitz is also noteworthy, though not unique, for the extensive and horrific medical experiments carried out on living patients there, causing many patients to die excruciating deaths in the name of dubious science.

Although a substantial minority of the concentration camp arrivals were selected for labor, the camp regime militated against their being deployed productively. The Nazi goal of "extermination through labor" was inherently contradictory, and the work remained senseless and brutal, designed to eliminate the worker as much as produce anything useful. An IG Farben plant attached to Auschwitz (Auschwitz III or Monowitz), and intended to manufacture artificial rubber, achieved no usable output throughout the war. Even Jews sent to concentration camps that were not formally extermination sites were often subject to such appalling working and living conditions that the camps were de facto killing centers. By 1944, however, German labor shortages were such that Jews began to be deployed more productively, including in factories on German soil. Auschwitz became a giant sieve, to which Jews from all over Europe were brought, subject to selection, and survivors sent on to subcamps in Germany and elsewhere to contribute to the German war effort. While conditions for many were appalling, being involved in useful factory work offered more chance of survival than remaining in the main camp.

Himmler forbade camp commanders from allowing inmates to fall into enemy hands. From January 1945, as foreign troops closed in on Auschwitz and other concentration camp sites, the prisoners were dispatched on senseless, grueling journeys inland, sometimes in open train cars in winter, often on foot, and often without food. Those who fell by the wayside were shot. Between one-third and one-half of all concentration camp inmates still alive in January 1945 perished in these so-called death marches (among Jewish prisoners the proportion was more like 50 percent).

JEWISH RESPONSES

For much of the postwar period, the picture painted of the Jewish response to the Holocaust was one of passivity. The oft-used phrase "like sheep to the slaughter" not only conveyed the similarity between abattoirs and death factories but also implied that Jewish communities put up no resistance to their fate. In the 1960s, Hannah Arendt and Raul Hilberg added to this general picture their influential and very critical judgment of the role played by the Judenräte or Jewish councils.

What is undoubtedly true is that only a small number of active Nazi personnel were required to achieve very large numbers of deaths. One of the Holocaust's most insidious features was that the Nazis incorporated Jewish involvement into the machinery of extermination. In the 1930s Jewish community leaders in Germany and Austria were made responsible for drawing up lists of names, passing on instructions, later even for assembling deportation lists. In September 1939 Heydrich ordered the creation for Poland of Jewish councils responsible for enforcing German orders. The ghettos were self-administered by these so-called Judenräte, who found themselves having to make ever more excruciating choices. In July 1942, for example, the Vilna ghetto leadership handed over the elderly and ill to the Nazis, and in September 1942 the Lodz ghetto council handed over all children under ten and elderly over sixty-five, in both cases to what they knew was certain death. It was the ghetto leaders, most notoriously Jacob Gens of Vilna and Chaim Rumkowski of Lodz (both of whom were eventually murdered by the Nazis), of whom Hilberg and Arendt were particularly critical. Even in the extermination camps, much of the dirty work was done by Jewish prisoners themselves. In Auschwitz, so-called Jewish Sonderkommandos greeted the arriving prisoners, collected and sorted their belongings, ushered them into the fake showers, searched the corpses for valuables, and burned the corpses.

Research over the last several decades has placed many of the Jewish leaders in a more sympathetic light. For one thing, the genocidal character of Nazi policy was often not immediately visible. After the outbreak of war, Polish communities hoped that traditional responses to hostile authorities of paying fees, fines, and bribes could deflect the worst. Local Jewish leaders often stepped in of their own initiative to provide labor for Nazi conscription, hoping to avert the wild press-ganging of passers-by. In doing so, they found themselves caught up in a pattern of compliance to alleviate the worst, from which it was hard to withdraw. Nazi policy was initially inconsistent, giving hope of survival, particularly where communities could offer skilled labor to the German war effort. Even when evidence of Nazi murderousness was objectively overwhelming, it was understandable that Jewish leaders found it hard to believe the signs. Reprisals against refractory Jewish councils were utterly ruthless. In Stanislau in Ukraine, for example, the entire council was shot for failing to provide conscript labor. Confronted with such dilemmas, the head of the Warsaw ghetto, Adam Czerniakow, chose in July 1942 to commit suicide rather than superintend or actively resist imminent mass deportations to Treblinka.

The Jewish response was in any case far from passive. The most common and most successful stratagem was evasion—through emigration, escape, and hiding. As many as one million Jews survived by these means, including the majority of the Austrian and German Jewish communities, who managed to emigrate abroad, three hundred thousand Polish Jews who fled into the Soviet part of occupied Poland when the Nazis took over the western part, and some two hundred thousand Jews across Europe who survived in hiding. In the ghettos, for the most part unable to escape, Jewish communities worked hard to maintain educational, spiritual, and cultural life. The early years of Nazi occupation in Warsaw, Lodz, and the Theresienstadt old-age ghetto in the Czech protectorate saw remarkable cultural activity. In Warsaw, Kovno, and other ghettos, organized groups made great efforts to record events for posterity, leaving behind rich and telling chronicles for the postwar world. The lack of arms and outside support made armed resistance extremely difficult—and Nazi reprisals against nonparticipants made it a morally agonizing choice. Full-scale uprisings, as in the Warsaw ghetto in April 1942 and in Bialystok in August of that year, took place only when it was clear that death was inevitable. Even so, there were many incidents of armed opposition. Perhaps as many as one hundred thousand Jews fought with partisans in Poland, Russia, and elsewhere. Ten percent of the French Maquis (resistance) were Jewish. There were armed uprisings in several camps, leading to successful breakouts in Sobibor and Treblinka in 1943 and the destruction of one of the crematoria in Auschwitz in 1944.

PERPETRATORS, COLLABORATORS, BYSTANDERS—AND RESCUERS

If historical research has in recent years been kinder to Jewish leaders and stressed the activism of Jewish responses, treatment of those not in the Holocaust's firing line has taken an opposite trend, widening the circle of those directly involved in the killing process, blurring the dividing line between bystanders and perpetrators, and drawing attention to the large number of European collaborators.

In the early postwar years, the extermination of the Jews was seen as the work of a small circle of SS men, conducted in secret in camps far away from public view. As scholars became aware of the huge bureaucratic apparatus required to identify the circle of victims, brand mark, expropriate, segregate, and transport them, the image of the perpetrator shifted from the secretive uniformed psychopath to the paper-pushing everyman with no vision beyond his or her immediate task. By the late twentieth century the diverse range of institutions and players involved actually in killing Jews became more clear. In the occupied territories in Russia and eastern Europe, the killing was carried out by a heterogeneous array of German institutions—including the army, civilian administrations, and regular police forces as well as the SS. Even generals who would later join the plot against Hitler willingly cooperated with the extermination process. Postwar trials proved that participants had not acted under duress. The wide involvement was a sign that the war against the Jews proved surprisingly consensual. In both state and party institutions, and particularly in the RSHA, high-powered young men could be found who had already demonstrated strong commitment to Völkisch politics and right-wing activism in the 1920s. Anti-Semitism was far from the only motive—as the willing involvement of Nazi units in the mass murder of gypsies (of whom perhaps a quarter of a million were killed) of non-Jewish Poles and of Soviet POWs and conscripts revealed. Most participants, even those with strong ideological credentials or prehistories of violent activism, had been carried along by the regime's radicalization process to a point very far from what they would have regarded as thinkable and right just a few years earlier.

For the German population as a whole, concrete information about the killings in the Soviet Union was widely available in 1941, as soldiers on leave shared firsthand experiences from the front. Rumors of extermination camps circulated in 1942, though not with the same clarity or universality. The German public reacted with passivity and indifference, and with a certain degree of acceptance of the need for radical measures. In the course of the war, the German population grew increasingly frightened at the possibility of reprisals, and some interpreted the Allied air attacks as divine retribution for what was happening in the east.

Since the end of the Cold War there has been growing recognition of the extensive role of collaboration among foreign countries and nationals. In some cases, the collaboration took place at government level. In 1941–1942 Romania murdered or indirectly caused the death of more than a quarter of million Jews in territories it acquired from the Soviet Union. At different points in the war, Slovakia, Croatia, and Hungary all proved enthusiastic participants in the Final Solution, deporting all or most of their Jewish subjects. Of German allies, Italy and Bulgaria were the least willing to accede to anti-Semitic policies, and most of their Jewish populations survived. Some governments were happy to deport foreign Jews, but saw it as an infringement on their prestige to deport Jews with national citizenship; this was true of Bulgaria, which handed over Macedonian and Thracian Jews; of Romania, which, despite its earlier savagery, persecuted but did not deport most of its own Jews; and of Vichy France, which volunteered sending even children of stateless Jews to the death camps rather than include French citizens in the deportations.

National motives for collaboration varied. Anti-Semitism played a part, but so did the desire to gain German recognition or support. Targeting of foreign Jews was particularly attractive in newly acquired territories, where sharing out the vacated spoils and positions could be used to carve out jobs for the boys or win over local elites—a motive for Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. As the German star waned, some nations switched policies. Below government level, the Nazis were able to mobilize or foment local pogroms against Jews, as in Latvia, Ukraine, and briefly in parts of Poland in 1941. They also formed militias from indigenous elements, and most of the Action Reinhardt camp guards were so called "Trawniki" men, recruited in Ukraine. Material inducements were an important element in such recruitment. Some of the Ukrainians bought their way out of horrible conditions as POWs by serving in the camps.

For a long time, accounts of the Holocaust presented the Allies simply as liberators and read contemporary horror at the Holocaust on the faces of the Allied soldiers' and journalists who uncovered the nightmare of the camps. The critical mood occasioned by the Vietnam War and the resulting revisionist wave of American historiography, however, triggered a second look at Allied wartime policy, one that has been further refined as classified materials have become available. More evident now is the way government anti-Semitism, or government sensitivity to the limits of public tolerance of Jews, straitjacketed British and American efforts on behalf of refugees at a time when emigration was still possible. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's calling of the Evian conference in July 1938 to assist the refugees, a conference he did not himself attend, was as depressing as it was ineffectual. For the United States, the state department's assistant secretary in charge of the visa division, Breckinridge Long, has emerged as a particular villain, using administrative means in 1940–1941 to prevent even the modest immigration quotas from being fully exploited. Both British and U.S. governments and parliaments were, it must be said, understandably wary of admitting large numbers of foreigners at a time of continued mass unemployment. Once the Nazis moved to extermination, the Allies rapidly gained knowledge of the shootings through decoding German coded telegrams. Jewish and Polish sources gave them clear insight into genocide in summer 1942. Again, anti-Semitism in official circles or sensitivity to public opinion may have restrained Allied governments from mounting serious rescue operations. In 1943 they sought to limit domestic reporting on Nazi atrocities so as not to create pressure to act; the April 1943 Bermuda conference on the refugee problem was, according to the head of the British delegation, explicitly designed as a "façade for inaction." In 1944 the U.S. Air Force did not amend its bombing targets despite pressure from some quarters to destroy the railway lines to Auschwitz (the efficacy of so doing remains open to debate). There were, however, very obvious limits to what was achievable in wartime, other than defeating Germany as soon as possible. Moreover, behind the scenes in 1944 the U.S. War Refugee Board, acting in conjunction with American Jewish Joint Distribution Agency, did provide considerable financial and other relief where it could and even succeeded in negotiating for the release of a small number of Hungarian Jews.

The Holocaust thus found a great many people wanting, yet there were also rescue attempts to be found in every European country, again ranging from government measures to individual actions. The most spectacular was the Danish rescue of its Jews in October 1943, following a tip-off from German government circles that deportation was imminent. More than seven thousand Danish Jews were ferried to Sweden by boat. In many western European countries semiorganized religious and political networks provided hiding places for Jews. In Poland, despite the brutal German occupation, informal underground networks in "Aryan" Warsaw hid almost thirty thousand Jews, some twelve thousand of whom survived the war. Overall, somewhere between fifty thousand and five hundred thousand individuals risked their lives to provide assistance to Jews in danger. Rescue actions were prompted by a broad spectrum of motives from idealistic humanitarianism, to simple friendship, to material incentives, to crude calculation of the need to show the Allies that German measures had been resisted.

AFTERMATH

One third of world Jewry was eliminated by the Holocaust. Judaism's traditional spiritual centers in eastern Europe were almost completely destroyed, with 90 percent of Polish Jews murdered. The only other group targeted with anything like this comprehensiveness was the gypsies, perhaps one quarter of whose European population was killed. Almost 90 percent of German gypsies died.

At the end of the war between fifty thousand and ninety thousand Jews were on German soil along with seven to ten million other displaced persons (DPs), mostly conscript laborers from the German war machine. Whereas the non-Jews generally had homes to go to (though many Soviet citizens were sent home against their will), most Jews had nothing left behind them. Following the 1946 Kielce pogrom, Polish Jews who had survived the war in Russia and returned home to Poland in 1945 fled westward to the DP camps in Austria and Germany. By 1948 there were 250,000 Jewish DPs in Germany. Jewish leaders in Palestine with American support used the DP's plight effectively as an argument for the creation of an Israeli state, and by the early 1950s the DP problem had been solved through emigration to Israel, the United States, and other countries.

Allied discoveries of the horrors in the concentration camps added to the pressure for postwar trials, and the Holocaust was dealt with as part of the International War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg. Allied and former occupied countries also carried out their own trials in the postwar years. From the late 1950s the Federal Republic of Germany took up the issue with vigor and the 1963 Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt were the most high profile of a series of large legal cases that continued into the 1970s and 1980s. Of biggest international impact, however, was the Israeli trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961–1962 following Eichmann's capture and abduction from Argentina. Though these diverse legal actions left many perpetrators without or with only light punishment, and showed how hard it was to target individuals when the whole system had been criminal, they nevertheless collected huge amounts of valuable records and testimony about the Holocaust. The Eichmann trial and Hannah Arendt's book about it created huge international awareness of the Holocaust for the first time.

As the Kielce pogroms and other postwar violence demonstrated, the Holocaust did not eliminate anti-Semitism from the world. In the 1950s, for example, U.S. holiday resorts were still more likely to be closed to Jews than German ones had been in the 1920s. But over time, the Holocaust impelled both Protestant and Catholic churches to rethink their historic attitudes and contributed more widely to greater Western sensitivity to the perils of racial hatred.

Indeed, it took time in general for the Holocaust's scale and implications to sink in. In the early years survivors found few listeners for their experiences and were themselves often keen to put the horrors behind them. In Israel, the United States, and elsewhere, however, the 1960s—with the Eichmann trial, a more confident Israeli state, and a greater tendency in general to celebrate one's ethnic differences and roots—was a watershed in public consciousness. In the work of writers such as Michel Foucault and postmodern theorists, the experience of the Holocaust seeped into the Western world's sense of the modern, helping to create greater unease at the negative potentials of the enlightenment, rationality, and technical progress. The 1980s saw an explosion of fictional and nonfictional writing on the subject. Novelists, poets, and artists, many of them survivors, turned to the Holocaust as a theme, or found their earlier works now enjoying global recognition. Museums sprang up across the Western world, and a number of countries introduced Holocaust remembrance days. The subject of representing and remembering the Holocaust itself became a major academic field.

The result is that the Holocaust is the best documented act of violence in human history. Even so, since the 1970s a number of individuals have sought to deny that the Holocaust took place. The growth of the Internet has made it easier to disseminate such claims, despite a number of highprofile legal cases that have established their fraudulent character. In the Arab world, old forgeries, such as the Protocols of Zion, and new denial claims are widely disseminated.

Partly by dint of its special character, partly by dint of the enormous interest it has received, the Holocaust continues to pose particular challenges of understanding and representation. It is almost impossible for survivors to convey the reality of the experience, but by repeatedly emphasizing the Holocaust's unrepresentability, scholars have attached to the event a sacredness, which equally belies its reality. The Holocaust is without doubt one of the most momentous events of the twentieth century, yet the enormous and understandable focus on it is in danger of creating something too abstracted from other Nazi policies and other acts of genocide and violence in the world. The thrust of the most recent scholarship, therefore, has been to place the Holocaust within broader comparative contexts. Even within the broader framework of the bloody twentieth century, the Holocaust will always stand out for its bureaucratic thoroughness, its search for continent-wide comprehensiveness, and its industrialization of murder.

See alsoAuschwitz-Birkenau; Concentration Camps; Germany; Israel; Jews; Wannsee Conference; World War II.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aly, Götz. "Final Solution": Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews. Translated from the German by Belinda Cooper and Allison Brown. London, 1999.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York, 1951.

——. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York, 1963.

Browning, Christopher. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Batallion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York, 1992.

Browning, Christopher, and Jürgen Matthäus. The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942. Lincoln, Neb., 2004.

Burleigh, Michael. Death and Deliverance: Euthanasia in Germany, 1900–1945. Cambridge, U.K., 1994.

Corni, Gustavo. Hitler's Ghettos: Voices from a Beleaguered Society, 1939–1944. Translated from the Italian by Nicola Rudge Iannelli. Oxford, U.K., 2002.

Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz and After. Translated from the French by Rosette C. Lamont. New Haven, Conn., 1995.

Friedländer, Saul, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution." Cambridge, Mass., 1992.

——. Nazi Germany and the Jews. Vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939. New York, 1997.

Gerlach, Christian. "The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler's Decision in Principle to Eliminate All European Jews." In The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath, edited by Omer Bartov, 106–161. New York, 2000.

Gross, Jan T. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Princeton, N.J., 2001.

Herbert, Ulrich, ed. National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies. New York, 2000.

Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. Chicago, 1961.

Ioanid, Radu. The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944. Chicago, 2000.

Kaplan, Marion. Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany. New York, 1998.

Kershaw, Ian. Hitler. Vol. 1: 1889–1936: Hubris. Vol. 2.: 1936–1945: Nemesis. London, 1999–2000.

Klee, Ernst, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, ed. "The Good Old Days": The Holocaust As Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders. Foreword by Hugh Trevor-Roper. Translated by Deborah Burnstone. New York, 1991.

Klüger, Ruth. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. New York, 2001.

Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated from the Italian by Raymond Rosenthal. New York, 1988.

Lewy, Guenter. The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsie s . New York, 2000.

Longerich, Peter. Politik der Vernichtung: Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung. Munich, Germany, 1998.

Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. New York, 2005.

Mommsen, Hans. "The Realization of the Unthinkable: The Final Solution of the Jewish Question." In From Weimar to Auschwitz: Essays on German History. Translated by Philip O'Connor. Princeton, N.J., 2000.

Peukert, Detlev. Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life. Translated by Richard Deveson. New Haven, Conn., 1987.

Roseman, Mark. The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution. London, 2002.

Sereny, Gita. Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder. London, 1974.

Traverso, Enzo. The Origins of Nazi Violence. New York, 2003.

Trunk, Isaiah. Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation. New York, 1972.

Wildt, Michael. Generation des Unbedingten: Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes. Hamburg, Germany, 2002.

Zimmermann, Michael. Rassenutopie und Genozid: Die Nationalsozialistische "Lösung der Zigeunerfrage." Hamburg, Germany, 1996.

Mark Roseman