Holocaust
Holocaust
RACE AND RELIGION IN THE NAZI PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS
AESTHETICS, PUBLIC HEALTH, AND LAWS OF EXCLUSION
Winston Churchill described the mass murder of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its allies as “a crime without a name.” The perpetrators, the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany called it Die Endlösung der Judenfrage (the Final Solution of the Jewish Question). The number of Jewish victims is generally regarded to be between 5.8 and 6 million. Later, this extermination policy became known as the Holocaust, or “Shoah” in Hebrew. In a more generic and legalistic formula, the Holocaust was an example of genocide, a word invented by Raphael Lemkin in 1943. The word holocaust is derived from the Greek holokaustos, meaning a “burnt offering,” as used in a religious sacrifice.
Since the end of World War II and the development of more critical studies of this event, other racial, religious, asocial and political groups have been identified and included as victims of the Holocaust. These include the Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), victims of the T-4 program (killings carried out because of genetic disorders), Jehovah’s Witnesses, political prisoners, Poles, and homosexuals. The use of the word “Shoah” tends to limit the issue to Jews only, as is the case with the commemorative day on the Jewish calendar, the 27th day of the month of Nisan. In 2006, the United Nations adopted January 27 (the date on which the Auschwitz death camp was liberated in 1945 by troops of the Soviet Army) as an International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.
RACISM IN NAZI GERMANY
Racism played a key role in defining the victims of Nazi persecution, and it became lethal when it was mixed with German nationalism, folk concepts of blood and soil that helped define insiders and outsiders, issues of degeneracy, fear of chaos and outside enemies, a world war, and the application of modern scientific and medical technologies to mass killing. In the case of the extermination of the Jews, race was also indistinguishable from Jewish religious practice. In 1931 the National Socialist Party established the Race and Resettlement Office (Rasse-und Siedlungshauptamt, or RuSHA), which became a Schutz-staffel (SS) Main Office in 1935. Ultimately, this office was concerned with population transfer policies and the extermination of the Jews and other undesirable groups.
However, while race was the defining issue in the Holocaust, other factors were also present, including economic motivations that involved German medical doctors, lawyers, and businesses getting rid of their Jewish competitors in order to improve wage conditions; the seizure or sale of property during a process called “Aryanization,” in which the Jewish owners received only a small percentage of the property value; the seizure and sale in other countries of “degenerate art” from museum collections, and, later, the massive pilfering of private Jewish art collections. Aryanization and the subsequent ethnic cleansing of Jews in occupied countries made it easy to justify property transfers from Jews to members of the local nation, such as Poles, Slovaks, Croatians, and Hungarians. The seizure of property was all done with legal decrees. Hence, a long paper trail was left by the German bureaucracy, which later provided the basis for material claims against the postwar German government. In parts of Eastern Europe, especially those states created after 1918, local individuals saw the Germans and Jews as controlling industry. This was especially true in those sections of Poland that were formerly part of the German Empire. The historian Raul Hilberg has also pointed out that once the Holocaust commenced, there was no authorized budget for it. It was, therefore, the sale of Jewish assets that paid for the killing.
In the eyes of both perpetrators and bystanders, however (with variations from country to country), there were collateral factors that had developed during the long presence of the Jews within European Christendom. Among these were biblical allegations of responsibility for the crucifixion of Christ (particularly Acts 5:30, “The God of our fathers raised up Jesus whom you murdered by hanging on a tree.”) and the multigenerational responsibility for this crime (Matthew 27:25, “His blood be on us and on our children.”). Another factor was the fear of vertical social and political mobility by a formerly tolerated minority, the Jews, who had a generally supportive attitude on issues of democratization. In Claude Lanzmann’s film SHOAH (1985), a Polish peasant woman remarks that Jewish women were seen as rivals for their “beauty,” owing to the fact that they did not work and hence were sought after by Polish men. Whether this testimony is true remains conjectural.
All of these factors pointed to the Jew as “other” or “stranger,” despite long residencies in the countries where the Holocaust would play itself out. Nevertheless, it is important to point out that Jews were often killed not by German killing squads but by local populations. The most notorious cases, perhaps, were in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania, and the Polish town of Jedwabne. In the latter massacre, which took place on July 10, 1941, approximately 1,#0 Jews were killed by Poles. However, despite a 2001 apology for the massacre by President Aleksander Kwasniewski, both the facts and interpretation of this event remain contentious because of the nationalist view that the Poles were also victims of Nazism.
RACE AND RELIGION IN THE NAZI PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS
Race and cognate terms in Greek and Latin have been used for 2,000 years to describe the existence of social or ethnic groups of various kinds. However, in the late nineteenth century, the word race was applied to European Jews in a novel manner, combining a mixture of the new pseudoscience of eugenics, romantic ideas from the arts, and religious ideas to construct the idea of “the Jewish race.” While Nazi theorists had constructed the idea of the “Aryan” along racial lines as having white skin, blond hair, blue eyes, and a right to rule because of natural selection, the Jews were constructed in an opposite light. Jews were often described as having Middle Eastern origins, no matter how long they had lived in Germany. According to Nazi propaganda, as indicated in the notorious 1940 film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), Jews were considered a mixed race “with negro admixture.” In addition, racists considered the Jewish Diaspora to be a potential threat because Jews were situated in many places and hence difficult to defeat at once. Jews were also described as both inbred (unlike the “Aryans’’) and having a cunning power because of their intelligence. It was also held that the specific occupations that they held in society (bankers, intellectuals, etc.) put them in a position to dominate the modern world of the twentieth century. However, Jews were also said to be “feminized” because of their lack of a country and an army. They needed protection from others, and they were therefore vulnerable when policies of toleration broke down.
As Nazi racism developed, the issue of what constituted race became more complex. Religion entered the discourse not for Jews, but rather for Jews who had converted to Christianity but were still considered Jews by Nazi law. For example, the 1935 Nuremberg Laws imposed a state-defined racial definition on Jews based on grand parentage, irrespective of current religion. This was a negation of the Christian concept of religious conversion: After the Nuremberg Laws, Christian mission to the Jews was prohibited. In the long run, despite race theory being based on “blood,” the racial attack on the Jews also necessitated attacks on synagogues and Jewish books, as well as on the Jews themselves.
Adolf Hitler attacked the Jews in his writings from 1920 onwards. However, the Nazi Party (officially, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party) did not attempt to define Jews with specificity until 1935. Hitler’s landmark book, Mein Kampf (1925), became the source of the essential ideology of Nazi Germany. In the book, a series of struggles of opposites were laid out: light against darkness, health against sickness, the visible against invisible, form against formlessness in the arts and thought, culture against decadence, and Aryan against Jew. Deviations from the worldview found in Hitler’s thought were viewed as forms of sickness, which could be changed through surgery. For the Nazi state, that surgery took the form of genocide.
Under German National Socialism, the führer was viewed as a charismatic and authoritarian leader who emerged from the chaotic conditions in Germany at the end of World War I. While his rise was also linked to Germanic nationalism and folklore, Hitler positioned himself as a new Siegfried prepared to avenge a betrayed nation and restore equilibrium. What followed in the Nazi program was a form of salvation that was both romantic and artistic: It was interested in a memory of the past, especially as it concerned race and spirit of a people. Using myths of the German past, Hitler and his cohorts constructed the new myth that no German hero could be defeated except by a “stab in the back,” a phrase popularized by General Eric Ludendorff.
It was through this logic that the explanation of the German defeat of 1918 was revealed through two critical events. The first was the Russian Revolution of November 1917, described by its enemies as “Jewish Bolshevism.” The second was the questioning within the nation-state of who was a true German and who was a stranger. The latter proved to be the Jews, who had a long history in Europe as being the “other,” and who were often linked erroneously to the outbreak of chaotic situations. This included Christian myths of deicide in the Bible, accusations about the defiling of culture, and ultimately race mixing through conversion to Christianity. Thus, anti-Semitism, which minimally might be simply a dislike of Jews because of religious or cultural reasons, became infested with racism based on biological concepts.
Nazi rhetoric also had within it a strong relationship to Christian rhetoric. In November 1934 at Nuremberg, Deputy Führer Rudolph Hess stated: “The party is Hitler, but Hitler is also Germany, just as Germany is Hitler.” This extravagant claim was derived from the language of the Gospel of St. John, which reads, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” (John 14:10) The general propaganda of the era suggested that Hitler had been chosen to put the German universe back in order and that Nazism was a Christian movement.
AESTHETICS, PUBLIC HEALTH, AND LAWS OF EXCLUSION
Art and public health programs were also a part of Nazi race theory and biology, known as Rassenkunde (Race Science). The concept was sufficiently simple. It meant that good breeding creates a sense of race in a people. Race was a myth linked to art, bodily aesthetics, and racial hygiene, and it was an ideal to be accomplished. Any intrusion by aliens, such as Jews, threatened this process. Such eugenic ideas were not new, nor were they specifically German. Hitler’s attacks on the Jews as a race, however, necessitated an attack both on Jewish art and creativity and on the physical characteristics of the Jews. Hitler believed that the idea of creative work had to be anti-Semitic. Thus, the Jewish presence in Germany, and later Europe, was seen as evil not only because of the threat of interbreeding, but also because of the infiltration of “inferior” Jewish art and music. The German word entarte (degenerate) was applied to modern art, swing music, people who had nontraditional life styles, and individuals with mental disorders and physical handicaps, as well as to Jews, Afro-Germans, and the Sinti and Roma (Gypsies). Many applications of “degeneracy” were made to the works of non-Jews, but ultimately all Jewish influences on culture were to be eliminated.
Once Hitler came into power on January 30, 1933, the Jews were the main focus of exclusionary laws based upon state-authored racism. Those laws were similar to the “Jim Crow” laws that established the segregation of races in the United States, although Jews in Germany were Caucasian, spoke German, and often had German family names. Some had in fact been Christians for generations, and were therefore not Jews according to the religious precepts of the Jewish community. More than 2,000 anti-Jewish laws were passed between 1933 and 1945 creating a wall of separation between newly defined “Jews” and “Aryans.” The initial laws were more general in nature, including the Law for Restitution of the German Civil Service (April 1933), the Law to Prevent the Overcrowding of German Schools (April 1933), the Law for the Protection of Hereditary Health of the German People (July 1933), and the Editorial Law (October 1933). Later laws of exclusion grew more and more specific.
For the Nazis, the Jews were the group that caused fear and anomie. The solution, at first, was separation and a push for them to emigrate. Only later did the issue become one of extermination. The German laws that removed Jews from professions and left them without a livelihood were an invitation for them to leave the country. A decree of February 10, 1935, authorized the Secret State Police (or Gestapo) to forbid all Jewish meetings that propagandized for the continuing residence of Jews in Germany. On February 8, 1936, the Gestapo applied a ban on the Association of Jews Faithful to the Torah, because such an organization “cannot promote the emigration of Jews and is likely to impede the supervision of Jews.” Other laws made it more and more difficult for Jews to live in Germany. Thus, through the “First Supplemental Decree” of the Nuremberg Laws, which was passed on November 14, 1935, the civil rights of Jews were cancelled, their voting rights were abolished, and those Jewish civil servants who were still working were retired (this process of removal began in April 1933). On December 21, 1935, the “Second Supplemental Decree” led to the dismissal of all professors, teachers, physicians, lawyers, and notaries who were state employees.
Other laws created racial and social separation between Aryans and Jews. This included a prohibition
on marriages between Jews and citizens of “German or kindred blood.” In addition, sexual relations outside of marriage between Jews and nationals of “German or kindred blood” were forbidden, and Jews were not permitted to employ female citizens of “German or kindred blood” as domestic servants. A decree of August 17, 1938, required Jews to have a red “J” stamped in their passports, while Jewish men had to take the middle name “Israel” and women the middle name “Sara.” These were clear identifiers of “Jewish race.”
If any law is useful for understanding the political construction of “race” in Nazi Germany, it is the law of August 31, 1936, when the Reich Finance Ministry announced that religious affiliation had to be indicated on tax forms. Soon thereafter, on October 4, 1936, another decree indicated that the “conversion of Jews to Christianity has no relevance with respect to the question of race. The possibility to hide one’s origin by changing one’s religious affiliation will entirely vanish as soon as the offices for racial research begin their work.”
FURTHER DEFINING THE VICTIMS
A major problem with the “Jewish Question,’’inGermany, as it was termed, was that there were no clear statistics about the number of Jews living among the German population of approximately 66 million people. The general belief was that the Jewish population in Germany was 530,000, or about eight-tenths of one percent of the total population. Statistics released in April 1935 indicated there were 75,000 half-Jews (Mischlinge, or “half-breeds’’) and 475,000 full Jews, totaling more than a million Jews. Other sources placed the total number of Jews and half-Jews at no more than 600,000. Certainly many German Jews were so assimilated they could not be differentiated from Germans by any objective criteria.
Thus, the dilemma of determining the number of Jews and half-Jews (who were also half-German) produced the necessity of a more precise law in order to enforce prior and future decrees. This discussion led, in September 1935, to the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor (the first Nuremberg Law), and to the subsequent decrees of November 14, 1935, which attempted to perfect the definition of a Jew. However, these laws led to many anomalies over the question of half-Jews, or Mischlinge.
According to the Nuremberg Laws, a Jew was a person descended from three or four Jewish grandparents, regardless of their current religious affiliation. A “Mischling, First-Degree” was a person with two Jewish grandparents who fell into one of the following categories: he or she belonged to the Jewish community religiously; was married to a Jew; or was the offspring of legal or nonlegal sexual intercourse with a Jew. A “Mischling, Second-Degree” was a person with one Jewish grandparent. Thus, theoretically, an Aryan was someone with no Jewish grandparents. However, the law revealed some of the artificiality of the construction of race in the definition of a first-degree Mischling, which included membership in the religious community as a determinant of race. In Poland, which was occupied by Germany during World War II, a change in the law permitted children born to a Mischling family before May 31, 1941, to be regarded as Aryans, while those born after May 31, 1941, were considered Jews.
THE PUSH TO EMIGRATE
These decrees and laws took away German citizenship and made Jews technically “stateless,” suggesting that the race policy of Germany between 1933 and the beginning of World War II was designed to promote the emigration of Jews rather than their extermination. The July 1938 Evian Conference was convened by thirty-two countries in an effort to solve the growing refugee problem, but little was decided and the conference had only a minor impact. The hypocrisy of the Western nations in criticizing the German policies on Jews but being unwilling to accept an extensive number of the refugees only encouraged and emboldened Hitler. However, the issue of accepting refugees was never popular among the populations of democratic countries and leaders often reflected that they were following democratic opinion on this question. Nonetheless, before the end of 1938, while hundreds of separation laws were being decreed, the violence against Jews was often lethal, but hardly genocidal.
Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass” (November 9–10, 1938), was the first German nationwide outburst against the Jews. It was allegedly caused by the murder of a German official in Paris by a Jew upset with his parents’ deportation to a “no-man’s land” on the Polish border. On Kristallnacht, mobs throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland attacked Jews and Jewish property, including places of worship. Ninety-six Jews were killed and hundreds were injured, and hundreds of synagogues were subjected to arson and destroyed, as were 7,#0 businesses. Cemeteries and schools were also vandalized. In the immediate aftermath, between 26,000 and 30,000 Jews, mostly men, were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Most were eventually released on the assumption that they would leave Germany. The difficulty, however, was finding a country of refuge. A heavy fine was levied on the Jewish community for their responsibility for the event. Most significantly, Kristallnacht marked the transfer of Jewish policies to the Schutzstaffel, or SS, headed by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler.
Emigration did pick up after Kristallnacht. However, a major problem in successful emigration was the world economic depression, which limited entry visas into other countries. In addition, even the world’s democracies had varying levels of anti-Semitism, which affected their immigration policies.
Some of the prohibitive laws that were passed before and after Kristallnacht limiting Jewish rights were dazzling in their specificity and emphasis on things usually considered trivial. For example, an April 1933 decree forbad the use of Yiddish in the State of Baden’s cattle markets. A law passed on December 1, 1933, proclaimed: “The Association of Retail Traders in Frankfurt forbids Jewish shops from using Christian symbols during Christmas season sales.” On June 21, 1934, the Hessian Education Ministry excluded the Old Testament from the Protestant religious educational curriculum, replacing it with additional passages from the New Testament. On September 28, 1935, the Mayor of Königsdorf, a village in Bavaria, decreed that cows purchased directly or indirectly from Jews could not be inseminated by the common village bull. However, it was not until September 3, 1941, that a decree mandated that Jews remaining in Germany had to wear the Yellow Star identification on their outer clothing. It is of note that this requirement was imposed on Jews in the occupied territories even earlier, after the beginning of World War II and occupation policies of 1939.
The T-4 Euthanasia Program that led to the killing of Germans who were physically and mentally impaired began officially on September 1, 1939. It included gassing operations, and an estimated 100,000 patients were killed. Others were killed through starvation or injections of phenol directly into the heart. The numbers killed by each method are imprecise, and more natural causes of death were often written into death certificates. Doctors who served in the T-4 program also aided in the selection process for arriving inmates at German death camps in occupied Poland after 1941.
RACIAL PROPAGANDA
Alongside the various decrees separating the Jews from “Aryans” was a constant barrage of racial epithets that came from the Ministry of Propaganda and the notorious anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, edited by Julius Streicher. Der Stürmer began publication in 1923, ten years before the Nazis achieved power. It was a perfect example of a “rag” newspaper, with stories that were sensationalist and anti-Semitic (and pornographic, in their own way). The stories were drawn often from standard anti-Semitic mythologies of the past, and from the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a notorious forgery from the turn of the twentieth century that purported to reveal a Jewish plot of world domination. There were exaggerated stories about alleged “ritual murders” of Christian children and about the alleged predatory nature of Jewish men seeking out pure Aryan women for sexual relations (a myth that Hitler obsessed about). Jewish men were almost always depicted in what would be considered a “racial” type of imagery—long hooked noses, rounded bodies, large ears, thick glasses, and long devilish fingernails—and these images were linked to images of capitalist as well as communist domination. The offensiveness of Der Stürmer was so intense that Streicher was sentenced to be hanged at the 1945 International Tribunal at Nuremberg, although he had never personally ordered or carried out a murder.
By the autumn of 1938, after five and a half years of National Socialist rule, the living conditions of the German Jews had worsened dramatically as the result of the discriminatory measures planned and executed by the state. Many were unable to believe that things could get worse. Others, however, were convinced that the openly declared threat of a “solution to the Jewish question” would be carried out.
Concurrent with the persecution of the Jews was the reclassification of the Gypsy population from “asocial” to a “race.” After 1936, the Nuremberg Laws were applied to them, even though they were not mentioned in the decree. In 1937, German law classified Gypsies as “asocials,” but in May 1938 they were reclassified as a racial group by the Central Office for Fighting the Gypsy Menace. The racial classification created some contradictions in strict Nazi racial policy, as the Roma were from India, thereby placing them in the structure of Indo-European peoples, and hence Aryans. Nevertheless, the Gypsies, already the subject of social ostracism because of their perceived lifestyle, became the subject of eugenic studies using the same pseudoscientific methods of bodily measurements as those used on the Jews. This included measurement of nose and skull size and descriptions of hair and eye color.
An SS decree of December 16, 1942 (referred to in other German documents, though the original has not been found), ordered the deportation of Gypsies to concentration camps. At Auschwitz, the Nazi medical researcher and eugenicist Dr. Joseph Mengele took particular interest in Gypsies. The artist and former Auschwitz prisoner Dina Gottlieb has testified about a series of paintings and drawings of Gypsy women she did on Mengele’s order, emphasizing the structure of the ear. At least half a million Gypsies perished in concentration camps and killing centers, including Babi Yar near Kiev, Auschwitz, and a killing site called Lety in the Bohemian Protectorate.
FROM EMIGRATION TO GENOCIDE
The steps toward genocide, toward a “racial purification program” of mass killing, started with the German attack on Poland on September 1, 1939. While no written order apparently exists for what became the “final solution of the Jewish question,” the general consensus of historians is that a written order should not be expected in a modern bureaucratic state such as Nazi Germany. However, the general idea of the removal of the German Jews had been in the air for a long time and is found frequently in Hitler’s speeches. For example, in Hitler’s speech given on January 30, 1939, he indicated that war would bring some sort of extermination program. He stated, “Today I will be once more a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” The speech may be said to have paved the way to a further radicalization of anti-Jewish policies, although it was not until 1940 that extermination appeared to be a realistic goal.
In 1940 the highly propagandistic and racist film, Der ewige Jude was shown in German movie theaters. Produced by Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels and filmed by Fritz Hippler in the Lodz ghetto, the film conjures up images of Jews as both a public health menace
and a group racially inferior to the Aryans (they are ultimately compared with an infestation of rats). The film ends with Hitler’s speech of January 30, 1939. Hitler repeated the threat of the destruction of the Jews in later speeches, including those given on January 30, 1941; February 24, September 30, and November 8, 1942; and February 24, 1943. Parallel to Hitler’s pronouncements at this time were additional directives within the Nazi Party by Joseph Goebbels, Reichmarshall Hermann Goering, and Heinrich Himmler, the commander of the SS. Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the SS Main Office and the second-ranking officer in the SS, approached Hermann Goering in July 1941 and asked him to authorize his department to begin plans for a “total solution” of the “Jewish question.” A return letter from Goering to Heydrich, dated July 31, 1941, seems to establish bureaucratic approval for the extermination of the Jews on a racial basis. In this document, Goering wrote: “I hereby commission you to carry out all necessary preparations … for a total solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.”
Early Executions . Heydrich had convened a conference on September 21, 1939, to discuss racial policy in Poland. A decision was made to evacuate up to 1.5 million Jews into the Lublin district, into what would be called, for the time being, a “reservation.” The first Nazi ghettos were established for Jews in October 1939. The Star of David, in white and yellow colors, was introduced as an insignia for Polish Jews on November 23, 1939. Executions of Jewish male leaders in towns and cities followed. On December 10, 1942, the London-based Polish government in exile made the following request: “The Polish Government asks that the United Nations shall take effective measures to help the Jews not only of Poland but of the whole of Europe, three to four millions of whom are in peril of ruthless extermination.”
The most well-known study of shooting units is Christopher Browning’s 1992 book Ordinary Men, in which he examines Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) Reserve Police Unit 101, based in Hamburg. This unit killed over 38,000 Jews by shooting, beginning in July 1942 in the village of Jozefow, and it was later involved in the deportation of 45,000 others to Treblinka. Later, when the ghettos were better organized, they became the vehicle for a slower but consistent method of deportation to the death camps. Beginning in the summer of 1942, for example, more than 300,000 Jews were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka, a process that prompted the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that began on April 19, 1943.
The beginning of the war against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, clearly mixed the territorial ambitions of the Reich with a policy of racial annihilation. Four mobile killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen, followed the regular army onto the territory of the USSR and began the liquidation of the Jewish population, and of anyone linked to the Soviet political class. Mass murder was carried out mainly by shooting the victims in pits, though there was some experimentation with killing people in gas vans. While the local population killed Jews in some of the Eastern countries under occupation, the SS preferred “organized killing” rather than spontaneous pogroms. Slovakia solved its Jewish problem in an interesting way: It paid the Germans 500 Reichmarks for the removal of each Jew.
The mechanism for killing the Jews had also been put in process early in 1941. Auschwitz, a Polish army camp, was taken over on June 14, 1940, and turned into a concentration camp. In October 1941, the SS leader Heinrich Himmler authorized the construction of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp for Soviet prisoners of war. After the first test gassings of prisoners at Auschwitz I in September 1941, the first selections and gassings took place in May 1942 at Birkenau, which had been converted from a place of incarceration for Soviet prisoners to the principal destination for the mass murder of the Jews. Eventually, the six major death camps were established on the territory of the former Polish state: Auschwitz, Majdanek, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
While the death camps were being built on the territory of the prewar Polish Republic, which was now divided into occupation zones, on October 23, 1941, the Security Police forbade the emigration of Jews from Nazi-controlled territories for the duration of the war. This ended all emigration solutions, including the one most talked about in inner Nazi circles, that of sending the Jews to the island of Madagascar.
Wannsee and the Final Solution . The Wannsee Conference, convened at a lakeside resort south of Berlin on January 20, 1942, is best interpreted as a bureaucratic evaluation of extermination policy to date. Debates took place on strategies such as the immediate need for the Final Solution versus the labor needs of the Reich. The minutes from this conference taken, by Obersturmbannführer Adolph Eichmann, indicate the advanced plans to murder all of European Jewry and suggest the entire German bureaucracy was becoming involved in the process. They also suggest that the participants discussed creating a mood for compliance in mass murder among the diverse branches of the SS and the bureaucracy.
The Wannsee Conference also raised the question of race through a discussion of the fate of the Mischlinge, or the half-Jews. The discussion at Wannsee, as revealed in the minutes of the meeting, indicated the imprecision in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, especially when related to the labor needs of the Third Reich. For example, it was decided at the conference that persons of mixed blood of the second degree were to be treated “essentially as Germans,” probably because of the labor shortage in the country. There were some bizarre exceptions, however. For example, this policy did not apply to any person who, from a racial viewpoint, had an “especially undesirable appearance that marks him outwardly as a Jew,” nor did it apply to anyone who had a “particularly bad police and political record that shows that he feels and behaves like a Jew.”
The discussion on first-degree Mischlinge (those with two Jewish grandparents) indicated that many exemptions had already been made and that cases should be reexamined based on “personal merit.” This pattern of reinterpretation indicates that racial definitions, so critical in 1935, were now being rethought. However, in order to prevent any additional mixed offspring, first-degree Mischlinge were to be sterilized. Other very precise situations of marriages between Jews and Aryans, with or without children, were discussed, and remedies advanced for the deportation of Jews to what was called “the old-age ghetto” of Theresienstadt.
Reinhard Heydrich became the effective leader of early plans to implement the Final Solution. He and his subordinate, Adolf Eichmann, controlled the bureaucratic apparatus to implement this policy In addition, Heydrich also controlled the operations of the Einsatzgruppen and the work of SS-Obergruppenführer Odilo Globocnik in the Lublin district of the General-Government (the central part of occupied Poland). According to what is regarded as the “functionalist” model of the Holocaust, Heydrich created a coherent and systematic plan for the extermination of European Jews by merging a series of diffuse internal systems. After Heydrich’s assassination in April 1942 near Prague, this phase of the destruction process adopted the name “Operation Reinhard.” The death camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were associated with this destruction process. By the end of 1942, approximately 4 million Jews had been killed in the various extermination processes.
As German control of Europe expanded into military occupations, the extermination of Jews intensified. The killing process was more ruthless in the East, featuring mass shootings by Einsatzgruppen on Soviet territory; the use of gas vans; and two forms of gas chambers, using carbon monoxide and Zyklon B gas (prussic acid), at the Auschwitz and Majdanek extermination camps.
Poland, the Ghettos, and Forced Labor . The implementation of the Holocaust in Poland included a rapid identification and isolation of the Jews. On November 23, 1939, all Jews over the age of ten years were required to wear the Star of David as an identification mark. The Nazi occupation authorities would eventually establish 400 ghettos in occupied Eastern Europe. The two largest were in Warsaw and Lodz, Poland. The Warsaw Ghetto was created on November 23, 1939. From both a racial and a supposed public health point of view, the ghettos were designed to separate the Jews from the rest of the local populations.
However, a debate existed among the Nazi elite about the purpose of the ghettos. On one hand, because of a shortage of labor, the ghettos could provide, theoretically, a reserve of slave labor. On the other hand, the poor and dismal living conditions, combined with poor diet and the absence of health care created conditions for what would appear to be a natural decline of the Jewish community through an increased death rate. A third interpretation was that the ghettos were way stations to the death camps. Ghettos were subject to frequent raids
by the SS, who often removed the very people who might be part of a useful slave labor force. German capitalist enterprises also benefited from the slave labor potential. Virtually every German company used some form of slave labor. Perhaps the most well-known case is that of I.G. Farben, which ran Auschwitz Camp III-Buna with slave labor supplied by the SS. Eventually, all of the ghettos were liquidated, with the remaining populations sent to death camps or other slave labor facilities, or else sent on death marches into Germany itself.
The ghettos began to be emptied in 1942 during “Operation Reinhard.” As the war progressed and defeat became probable for the Germans after the loss at Stalin-grad on February 2, 1943, the attempt to exterminate the remainder of European Jews under German control intensified. This is best documented in the deportation of Hungarian Jews, who had previously been protected by the Hungarian regent, Admiral Miklos Horthy. However, the Germans occupied Hungary in mid-March 1943, and the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz began in May. Within a short time, 440,000 Jews were deported from Hungary.
THE AFTERMATH
By the time the Holocaust ended in the East, Jewish losses were severe: 2.8 million from Poland were killed; 1.5 million on the territory of the Soviet Union; 277,000 from Czechoslovakia; 0,000 from Hungary; and 270,000 from Romania, plus other losses in Greece (60,000) and Yugoslavia (65,000). However, the war between Germany and the Soviet Union has to be assessed as being a war not only between competing ideologies but also as a conflict that involved racial ideas.
In Western Europe, Jews were identified for deportation to the East and annihilation. The imposition of “Race Laws” or registration laws helped in defining Jews, especially by the wearing of a yellow star, and this was a prelude to isolation and deportation. In the Netherlands, the Jewish population was 159,000 at the outset of war. Registration was mandated there by the German occupation authorities in January 1941. Eventually, 107,000 were deported and 102,000 died. Up to 30,000 Dutch Jews were hidden, two-thirds of whom survived. Belgium’s Jewish population was 66,000 at outset of the war, of whom 28,500 were deported, beginning in September 1942. France’s Jewish population was approximately 225,000, and 77,000 of them were deported. Of Norway’s approximately 1,500 Jews, 770 escaped to Sweden, while 761 were deported by ship to Stettin and on to Auschwitz. Jews were also deported from the British Channel Islands, which were occupied by the Germans.
Under Mussolini, Italy was generally reluctant to give up its Jews, despite imposition of the race law in 1938. However, after the initial fall of fascism, Mussolini established the Northern Italian Republic of Salo on September 23, 1943, with German support. This led to the beginning of the deportation of 8,000 Italian Jews (about 20% of Italy’s Jewish population) in October 1943, and 95 percent of those who were deported died. About 40,000 Italian Jews survived the war without deportation.
The last phase of the Holocaust was defined by death marches and the liberation of the Western concentration camps in April and May 1945. As territory under German control contracted, the SS began to march inmates from the camps in the East to concentration camps in Germany. During these marches, stragglers who fell by the wayside were beaten and killed. The sadism of the guards during the death marches has been recalled with particular detail by many survivors, raising the question of whether they were obeying the orders of the SS guards, or whether this was a reflection of their own racism toward the prisoners. The survivors of the death marches and transports wound up in concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Flossenburg, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and other places inside pre-1938 German borders.
The Holocaust ended with the end of World War II on May 7, 1945. The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel has suggested that without Hitler, there would have been no Holocaust. However, the period before the Holocaust witnessed an intense development of race theory, anti-Semitism and racial hygiene in the realm of public health policies that demonized the “others” who lived in Germany. The whole issue of how non-Europeans, as the Jews and Roma/Sinti were defined, fit into the nation-state idea of the 1930s, when race became a political factor, suggests the explosive aspects of policies based on tolerance of “others” and “strangers.”
The postwar International Military Tribunals (IMT) at Nuremberg, and the later zonal trials, clearly established the nature of the Nazi criminal offenses, not only in conspiracy and aggressive war, but also in war crimes and crimes against humanity that were racist and genocidal in nature. For those anti-Semitic states, individuals, and organizations that deny the event happened, the trials, the huge amount of documents from the event, and Germany’s own admission of guilt are the most effective rebuttals. In addition, there is extensive documentation of the testimony of victims, particularly through such video projects as the Fortunoff Archive at Yale University, the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, and the work done within research divisions of Holocaust museums, such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.
Since 1945 the study of the Holocaust has become a template for understanding acts of genocide that came before and after the Nazi era. The intensity of racism, especially as authored by a modern state, and the technological aspects of the German killing machine, as well as the extended time frame and the attempts to kill Jewish victims outside German borders (but in occupation zones) provide a certain uniqueness to the plan of the perpetrators. However, this assessment is not to suggest that the Holocaust is so different that it excludes comparisons with other genocides. On the contrary, the study of the genocide of the Herero, the Armenian genocide, and the genocides in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in Rwanda, and in Darfur have been more identifiable and better understood because of the legacy and historiography of the Holocaust.
SEE ALSO Anti-Semitism; Ethnic Cleansing; Genocide; Roma.
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Stephen C. Feinstein