HOLOCAUST

Term commonly used in English (Hebrew, Shoah) to denote anti-Jewish policies conducted by the Third Reich (Nazi Germany, 1933–1945), resulting in the systematic and bureaucratically organized genocide of approximately 6 million Jews.

Exploiting anti-Jewish themes present in Christian theology and culture, but going far beyond them by incorporating them onto a racist worldview, Nazi ideology presented the Jews as a satanic and corrupting element and demanded their "total removal" (the formulation of Germany's dictator, Adolf Hitler: "Entfernung der Juden überhaupt" ) from human society. They held a special place among a variety of undesirable elements (Gypsies, homosexuals, people deemed genetically defective or incurable) that had to be eliminated.

History

During the 1930s, Nazi policies gradually crystallized: German Jews were legally defined, humiliated through propaganda and education, and disenfranchised. Many were deprived of their livelihoods and property and openly encouraged to emigrate. These policies became harsher and more brutal after Nazi Germany's annexations and conquests of 1938 and 1939. After September 1939, the more than 2 million Jews living in Nazi-occupied Poland were herded into ghettos, where they were exposed to death by hunger and disease on a massive scale. The occupation of western, central, and southern Europe resulted in the legal, political, economic, and social disempowerment of the Jews, causing harsh living conditions, followed by their deportation to camps in eastern Europe beginning in 1942.

In January 1939, Hitler foreshadowed a more radical policy when announcing that, if the nations would be plunged "once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe." It took, however, more than two years for this vision to begin to be implemented. Germany's mass murder of Jews began in mid-1941 with mass executions, led by special death squads (Einsatzgruppen) accompanying the advancing troops that invaded the Soviet Union; it was supported and aided by other German units, including the German army; by local collaborators; as well as by Germany's ally, Romania. During the summer and fall of 1941, the shape of a Europe-wide "Final Solution" crystallized both in theory and practice, and in November and December Hitler's final decision became known to his entourage. On 20 January 1942, a meeting of senior Nazi bureaucrats in Berlin (the Wannsee Conference) coordinated plans for the systematic murder of the rest of European Jewry, stage by stage. The method of choice was gassing, administered in specially designed or adapted annihilation camps in Poland: Chelmno, Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. By far the greatest number of Jews and Gypsies perished at a sixth location: the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, to which Jews from all over Europe were shipped aboard freight trains for immediate death in gas chambers. Many Jews also died while on the way to the annihilation camps or as a result of being worked to death in forced labor camps.

The Holocaust cast its shadow over the Middle East and North Africa as well as over Europe. For several months during 1942, the Jews of Palestine feared the prospect of annihilation at the hands of the German armies under the command of General Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, which threatened to overrun Palestine. The threat was lifted following the Allied victory at the battle of al-Alamayn (23 October–2 November 1942) in Egypt. Jews in German-occupied Tunisia and Libya were not so fortunate. They suffered humiliation and persecution—some were deported to Italy and others were brought to the Bergen-Belsen camp—but they were spared the full force of the Final Solution.

From the end of 1944, when the Allied advance moved toward Germany and Poland, hundreds of thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates of concentration camps were marched away from the front lines; more than half of the evacuated inmates died in these death marches. Some 200,000 European Jews probably survived the camps; a smaller number survived in hiding or as partisan fighters against the Germans.

The Jews of Europe received little help from the Allied powers or from the local population of the countries where they lived. Yet a small number of non-Jews, subsequently honored as "righteous Gentiles," endangered their lives to hide or help rescue Jews. The most significant example of Jewish armed resistance, lasting several weeks, took place in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. Elsewhere, there were instances of Jewish escape, rebellion, and participation in underground and partisan resistance, but with little tangible result against overwhelming odds and in inauspicious conditions. Prominent among the resisters were Jewish youth who had been members of various Zionist and non-Zionist youth movements.

Repercussions for the Middle East

The impact of the Holocaust on the Middle East has been felt in several ways. German-Jewish emigration

to Palestine increased shortly after the Nazi rise to power, aided by the August 1933 ha-Avara (property transfer) agreement between the Jewish Agency for Palestine and the German government. The desperation of European Jews also contributed to illegal immigration to Palestine (Aliyah Bet) in the late 1930s, during World War II, and in the wake of the Holocaust (1945–1948).

The responses of the Yishuv (the organized Jewish community in Palestine) and Zionist leadership toward Nazi policies were the cause of much controversy within Jewish circles. Did the leadership emphasize the building up of a Jewish national home in Palestine at the expense of wider international efforts to rescue European Jewry? After the outbreak of World War II, the plight of the European Jews was used, unsuccessfully, as a major argument against the 1939 White Paper's limitations on Jewish immigration. Arab and Palestinian spokesmen countered that the two issues should not be linked. Later on, the Holocaust served as a motive for establishing the Jewish Brigade within, and the recruitment of Jews from Palestine into, the British army.

The real extent of the mass murder campaign in Europe penetrated only in November 1942. Afterwards, Zionist and Yishuv organizations contributed moral and financial aid to European Jews, some of it via a delegation based in Istanbul. In a few cases, missions were sent out (e.g., the dropping of some Palestine Jewish paratroopers into Slovakia and Hungary in 1944, in cooperation with the Royal Air Force) in attempts to rescue and support European Jews.

On the Palestinian side, the mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husayni, tried to establish contacts with the Italians and the Germans in the mid-1930s, viewing them as potential allies for his goal of removing British and Zionist influence from Palestine. Cooperation on several issues lasted until the downfall of Nazi Germany. The peak was on 28 November 1941, when the mufti met with Adolf Hitler; Hitler alluded to the Nazi Final Solution, while alHusayni emphasized common German-Arab interests. There is no evidence to support claims that it was the mufti who inspired Hitler to initiate the Final Solution.

The extent to which the Holocaust was a factor in the establishment of the state of Israel remains a question in both historiography and nonacademic polemics. One stream of Zionist historiographers and religious Zionist thinkers, along with many Arab and post-Zionist commentators, view the Holocaust as the single decisive factor in the creation of Israel. Careful historical research, however, undermines such a simple causal connection.

On the other hand, it is undeniable that the Holocaust helped Zionism become the dominant political stream within world Jewry. The immediate post-Holocaust trauma and disillusion of Jews everywhere were so extreme that many Jews in the United States and Western Europe became committed to promoting a Jewish state. Yet the Holocaust had decimated European Jewry so drastically that the very foundations of the Zionist solution for the so-called Jewish problem in Europe were undermined.

From 1944 onwards, many Holocaust survivors made their way to Palestine on their own initiative, even before Yishuv emissaries came to convince them to do so. The Zionist movement became active in directing people to Palestine, and the struggle of the ha Apala (overcrowded illegal immigration boats crossing the Mediterranean Sea) served as a major tool in Zionist propaganda for open immigration and an end to British restrictions. The link between the plight of the Holocaust survivors in the Displaced Persons (DP) camps in Germany and the creation of a Jewish state was accepted by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (1947), thereby strengthening the Zionist case.

Recent research suggests that guilt about the Holocaust had little effect on the UN decision to partition Palestine. Britain wanted the Jews to stay in Europe, and the United States considered the direction of DPs to Palestine a humanitarian issue and did not at first see it leading to adverse political consequences. Latin American states supported the 1947 partition plan because of Christian pro-Zionist feelings, while communist states cast their vote with the intention of weakening Britain and advancing the decolonization process.

After the establishment of Israel, the Holocaust became a central issue in the building of national identity. An annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, memorials, the trial of Rudolph Kasztner (1954) and its repercussions, the kidnapping and trial of Adolf Eichmann (1960–1961), literature and theater, and more recently journeys of youngsters to extermination sites in Europe all contributed to keeping this topic center stage. Holocaust imagery also deeply penetrates Israeli discourse. On several occasions, it has been politically linked to the Israeli–Arab conflict. For example, Prime Minister Menachem Begin justified the Israeli bombing of Iraq's Osirak nuclear facility in 1981 by vowing that Israel would not allow anyone to prepare a "second Holocaust" in his lifetime.

The Arab world has done little or nothing to deal directly with the issue of the Holocaust dissociated from the conflict with Israel. Arabs often claim that the establishment of Israel would not have occurred without the Holocaust to justify it; they accuse Jews and Israelis of manipulating the Holocaust to bolster Zionist claims to Palestine. Since the mid-1990s a few Arab and Palestinian intellectuals have displayed greater awareness of the gravity of the Holocaust, partially disconnecting it from the polemics of the Arab–Israel conflict. Reconciliation groups among Israeli Arabs (and Jews) have created courses and activities to sensitize Arab educators to the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish and Israeli thinking; one such activity was a joint Arab–Jewish pilgrimage to Auschwitz in summer 2003, led by a Palestinian priest from Nazareth. Yet, hardened by their own feelings of victimization and defeat at the hands of Israel's army, many Arabs find it difficult to empathize with Jewish suffering. A number of Arab authors and politicians have gone so far as to openly associate themselves with Holocaust deniers, while others downplay the extent of the Nazi genocide.

See also alamayn, al-; jewish agency for palestine; kasztner affair; rommel, erwin; united nations special committee on palestine, 1947 (unscop); world war ii; yishuv.

Bibliography

Arnow, David. "The Holocaust and the Birth of Israel: Reassessing the Causal Relationship." Journal of Israeli History 15, no. 3 (autumn 1994): 257–281.

Caplan, Neil. "The Holocaust and the Arab-Israeli Conflict." In So Others Will Remember: Holocaust History and Survivor Testimony, edited by Ronald Headland. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1999.

Laqueur, Walter, and Tydor Baumel, Judith, eds. The Holocaust Encyclopedia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.

Michman, Dan. Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective: Conceptualizations, Terminology, Approaches, and Fundamental Issues. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003.

Nicosia, Francis R. The Third Reich and the Palestine Question. London: I.B. Tauris, 1985.

Yahil, Leni. The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

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