WHAT IS THE HOLOCAUST?
The Holocaust (also called the Shoah, a Hebrew word meaning “devastation” or “sudden destruction”) was the state-sponsored, systematic, intentional murder of approximately 6 million European Jews – including 1.5 million Jewish children – by the Nazis, their allies and collaborators between 1933 and 1945. When Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945 and the genocide stopped, fully two thirds of Europe’s Jews – or one third of world Jewry – were dead. The consequences of this demographic trauma are still evident, as world Jewry has yet to recover its pre-1939 population level, and will continue to be felt for generations to come.
WHY IS THE HOLOCAUST UNIQUE ?
It is often pointed out that the Nazis did not kill Jews only. This is true. They also marshaled the machinery of the state to persecute millions of other people who threatened their political supremacy or who hindered their goal of creating a world dominated and populated by the so-called "Aryan race." Among the Nazis’ 5 million other victims were Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), Russians and Poles, priests and ministers, political and cultural dissidents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the mentally and physically disabled, and lesbians and gays. In addition, tens of millions of soldiers and civilians died fighting the Nazis.
However, it is important to understand that the Holocaust was a destruction process in which the Nazis targeted for death and hunted down every person who was Jewish or whom they defined as Jewish (that is, who had at least one Jewish grandparent), without exception. Moreover, they persisted in this even to the detriment of their war effort. As Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel writes: “Not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims.” To which may be added historian Lucy Dawidowicz’s words: “Never before in modern history has one people made the killing of another the fulfillment of an ideology, in whose pursuit means were identical with ends.”
The Nazi attitude toward the Jews was expressed in the words of one of their popular marching songs: Wenn das Judenblut vom Messer spritzt, dann gehts nochmal so gut! (“When Jew-blood spurts from the dagger, then things will go twice as well.”) While every issue of Der Stürmer, the Nazi newspaper, carried the slogan “Die Juden sind unser umgluck.” (“The Jews are our misfortune.”)
HOW WAS THE HOLOCAUST CARRIED OUT?
The Holocaust began in 1933 and ended in 1945 – twelve years marked by increasing brutality in the areas under German occupation. Historian Raul Hilberg explains: “The destruction process was a development which began with mild measures and ended with drastic action.”
January 30, 1933: Within weeks of this date, which marked the election of the Nazi Party and the appointment of its head, Adolf Hitler, as Chancellor of Germany, the German Jews began to be systematically excluded from German life.
September 15, 1935: The Nuremberg Laws institutionalized racial antisemitism by declaring that only so-called “Aryans” were German citizens and by stripping so-called “non-Aryans” (that is, Jews) of their citizenship and civil rights. During the next three years, hundreds of additions to these laws segregated Jews from non-Jews socially and economically, depriving them of their livelihoods, possessions, and property. The Nazis even destroyed art and literature created by Jews in an effort to “purge” German culture of any so-called “degenerate influence.”
November 9 and 10, 1938: On Kristallnacht (the “Night of Broken Glass”), the Nazis burned synagogues and vandalized Jewish homes and businesses throughout Germany and Austria, beating or killing hundreds of Jews and imprisoning thousands in concentration camps.
September 1, 1939: Germany ’s invasion of Poland started World War II and led to the expansion of its anti-Jewish policies throughout Europe. The Germans identified the Jews in each country, ordered them to wear badges to distinguish them from non-Jews, forced them from their homes, and took away their livelihoods and property. In Poland and the western parts of the Soviet Union, which had the largest Jewish populations in Europe, they imprisoned them in ghettos, where terror, filth, disease and starvation quickly decimated the population.
June 22, 1941: During the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazis assigned mobile shooting squads (Einsatzgruppen) to murder Jews in large-scale operations in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.
January 20, 1942: After the Wannsee Conference – a secret meeting of high-ranking officials and bureaucrats convened in Berlin – ratified the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” Jews throughout Europe were deported by railroad to one of the six death camps in Poland: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek. There, they were gassed in gas chambers or gas vans and their bodies burned in crematorium ovens designed for this purpose by well-known German industrial concerns. Millions also died in slave labor and concentration camps as a result of exhaustion, exposure, starvation, brutality, disease, and execution.
HOW DID THE WORLD RESPOND TO THE HOLOCAUST?
The Nazis could not have accomplished the murder of two-thirds of European Jewry and the destruction of f 1500 years of Jewish culture and history in the space of twelve years without the complicity of others. Such complicity included not only those who collaborated with them, but also those who remained neutral or indifferent, and those who kept silent.
Allies and Neutrals: In the 1930s, despite widespread press coverage of the persecution of German Jewry, the United States, Great Britain, and other countries, influenced by antisemitism and the fear of a flood of refugees, were unwilling to change their immigration policies. By 1942, despite confirmed reports about the “Final Solution,” they argued that defeating Germany took precedence over rescue efforts, and so they made no specific attempts to stop or slow the destruction process.
Europeans: Although it is important to keep the actions of rescuers in perspective, as they represented less than 1/2 of 1% of occupied Europe’s total population, it is equally important to remember that throughout occupied Europe, certain individuals and groups from a variety of backgrounds did risk their lives to rescue those targeted by the Nazis. Some were motivated by opposition to fascism, others by kindness, others by religious or moral principles, and still others were paid for their efforts. Nevertheless, all acted at great risk to themselves and their families. For example:
1940-1945: Supported by Zegota (an anti-Nazi alliance of Poles), Irena Sendlerowa and Irena Schultz, two Polish social workers, along with Eva Rechtman, a Jewish woman in the Warsaw Ghetto, organized a network that saved some 3000 Jews, including 2500 children.
1940-1941: In the face of his government’s opposition, Chiune Sugihara, Japanese consul-general in Kovno ( Kaunas), Lithuania, granted some 1,600 transit visas to stranded Jewish refugees, enabling them to make their way safely out of Europe.
1942: Irene Gut Opdyke, a young Polish nursing student working as a housekeeper for a German officer, hid 18 Jews from the Ternopol Ghetto in the basement of his villa.
1942-1945: Marion van Binsbergen Pritchard, a Dutch social work student, saved 125 Jews over the course of the war, among them numerous children.
1942-1945: The 5000 villagers of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon ( France) managed to hide and maintain some 3,000 Jewish men, women, and children.
October 1943: The Danes managed to smuggle almost their entire Jewish community – some 7200 individuals – to safety via a boatlift to neutral Sweden.
Summer 1944: In Budapest, diplomats Raoul Wallenberg and Per Anger ( Sweden) and Carl Lutz ( Switzerland) and Italian businessman Giorgio Perlasca (posing as a Spanish diplomat), using “protective passports” and “safe houses,” led a rescue effort that saved nearly 100,000 Jews.
October 1944: Oskar Schindler, a German businessman, saved 1100 Jewish men, women, and children by transferring them from the Płaszów concentration camp outside of Kraków, Poland, to his armaments factory in Brünnlitz, Czechoslovakia.
HOW DID THE JEWS RESPOND TO THE HOLOCAUST?
For European Jews, life was a ceaseless confrontation with death. Coping with this required unflagging resourcefulness and heroic reserves of spiritual resistance. Most Jews responded to the onslaught by persistently “choosing life,” struggling to stay alive and to keep their loved ones alive. Even in the worst circumstances, they never let go of their faith, hope, values and ideals, remaining determined to bear witness for the sake of the world and future generations. Some chose armed resistance, organizing revolts in ghettos, concentration camps, and even in the death camps, and forming Jewish partisan units in the forests. Although they were a small minority, the fact that they existed at all is remarkable. As historian Lucy Dawidowicz concluded, after considering the overwhelming difficulties and extreme dangers of taking up arms against the Nazis: “The wonder…is not that there was so little resistance, but that, in the end, there was so much.”
WHY DO SOME DENY THE HOLOCAUST HAPPENED?
Holocaust deniers call themselves “revisionists,” pretending to a scholarly “objectivity” in their so-called “research.” However, they are actually pseudo-historians and sham-intellectuals, cloaking themselves in respectability to find a wider audience for antisemitic and anti-democratic propaganda. They represent neo-Nazis, neo-fascists, and other hate groups who want to erase the memory of Nazi Germany’s crimes and atrocities. To counter such hate and to help ensure that the future will be marked by understanding and mutual respect, the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and other Holocaust centers throughout the world dedicate themselves to bringing the truth of the Holocaust, its relevance, and its implications to our children, our fellow-citizens, and our communities.
Compiled by Dr. Frances G. Sternberg, MCHE
