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Date Posted: 05:12:09 04/30/02 Tue
Author: Fred
Subject: Just my Hwk

The Holocaust was the Nazis' assault on the Jews between 1933 and 1945. It culminated in what the Nazis called the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe', in which six million Jews were murdered.
The Jews were not the only victims of Nazism. It is estimated that as many as 15 million civilians were killed by this murderous and racist regime, including millions of Slavs and 'asiatics', 200,000 Gypsies and members of various other groups. Thousands of people, including Germans of African descent, were sterilised.
The Jews figured in Nazi ideology as the arch-enemy of the Aryan race... These programmes are best seen as a series of linked genocides, each having its own history, background, purpose and significance in the Nazi scheme of things. The Holocaust was the biggest of the killing programmes and, in certain important ways, different from the others. The Jews figured in Nazi ideology as the arch-enemy of the 'Aryan race', and were targeted not merely for terror and repression but for complete extinction. The Nazis failed in this aim because they ran out of time, but they pursued it fanatically until their defeat in 1945. The Holocaust led to widespread public awareness of genocide and to modern efforts to prevent it, such as the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide.

The Origins of the Holocaust
The ideas and emotions that lay behind the Holocaust were not new, nor were they uniquely German. The Nazis were the heirs of a centuries-old tradition of Jew-hatred, rooted in religious rivalry and found in all European countries. When the Nazis came to carry out their genocidal programme, they found collaborators in all the countries they dominated, including governments that enjoyed considerable public support. Most people drew the line at mass murder, but relatively few could be found to oppose it actively or to extend help to the Jews.
Though it had ancient roots, Nazi ideology was far from a primitive, mediaeval throwback - it was capable of appealing to intelligent and sophisticated people. Many high-ranking Nazis had doctoral degrees and early supporters included such eminent people as philosopher Martin Heidegger, theologian Martin Niemoeller, and commander-in-chief of German forces in the First World War, General Erich Ludendorff. Hitler appealed with a powerful vision of a strong, united and 'racially' pure Germany, bolstered by pseudo-scientific ideas that were popular at the time.
The Nazis were the heirs of a centuries old tradition of Jew-hatred... Antisemitism, the new racist version of the old Jew-hatred, viewed the Jews as not simply a religious group but members of a 'Semitic race', which strove to dominate its 'Aryan' rivals. Among the leading ideologues of this theory were a French aristocrat, the Comte Joseph de Gobineau, and an Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Antisemitism proved a convenient glue for conspiracy theories - since Jews were involved in all sorts of ventures and political movements, they could be accused of manipulating all of them behind the scenes. Thus Jews were held responsible for Communism and capitalism, liberalism, socialism, moral decline, revolutions, wars, plagues and economic crises. As the Jews had once been demonised in mediaeval Europe, so the new antisemites (including many Christians) found new, secular ways of demonising them.
The Nazis brought their own strain of radical ruthlessness to these ideas. They glorified war and saw the uncompromising struggle for survival between nations and races as the engine of human progress. They rejected morality as a Jewish idea, which had corrupted and weakened the German people. They maintained that a great nation such as Germany had the right and duty to build an empire based on the subjugation of 'inferior races'. They looked eastwards to Poland and Russia (where, as it happened, the great majority of European Jews lived) for the territorial expansion of their 'living space' (Lebensraum).
Nazism was thus an unscrupulous and warlike ideology, which always had the potential for genocide. But it took some time for an organised killing programme to evolve.

Nazi Policy Before The War
Soon after they took power, the Nazis began their persecutions with a barrage of anti-Jewish laws, including the infamous Nuremberg Laws (1935), which defined Jews according to 'racial' criteria and stripped them of citizenship. Not yet securely in power, however, the Nazis at first refrained from major acts of violence.
By late 1938, the Nazis could claim an impressive series of successes. Germany had staged the 1936 Olympics, annexed Austria and part of Czechoslovakia, and was in the midst of a strong economic recovery fuelled by rearmament. These triumphs had increased the Nazis' popularity and their confidence. President Hindenburg had died and all opposition parties had been abolished. The last conservatives in the cabinet had been replaced by Nazis. The way was clear for radical action.
By the outbreak of war in September 1939, half of Germany's 500,000 Jews had fled... On the night of 9-10 November 1938, Nazi Propaganda Minister Dr Josef Goebbels organised the violent outburst known as Kristallnacht ('Crystal Night', the night of broken glass). While the police stood by, Nazi stormtroopers in civilian clothes burned down synagogues and broke into Jewish homes, terrorizing and beating men, women and children. Ninety-one Jews were murdered and over 20,000 men were arrested and taken to concentration camps. Afterwards the Jewish community was fined one billion Reichsmarks to pay for the damage.
After Kristallnacht, Jewish businesses were expropriated, private employers were urged to sack Jewish employees, and offices were set up to speed emigration. Imprisoned Jews could buy freedom if they promised to leave the country, abandoning their assets. By the outbreak of war in September 1939, half of Germany's 500,000 Jews had fled, as had many Jews from Austria and the German-occupied parts of Czechoslovakia.

The First Years Of War: 1939-1941
Organized killing began with the outbreak of war in September 1939, but the first victims were not Jews. The Nazis set about killing people with physical and mental disabilities, whom they regarded as a burden on the state and a threat to the nation's 'racial hygiene'. About 170,000 people were eventually killed under this so-called 'Euthanasia programme', which also pioneered techniques and employed many of the people later used to kill Jews.
When the Nazis occupied western Poland in 1939, two-thirds of Polish Jews - Europe's largest Jewish community - fell into their hands. The Polish Jews were rounded up and placed in ghettos, where it is estimated that 500,000 people died of starvation and disease. Nazi policy at this point was aimed at forced emigration and isolation of the Jews rather than mass murder, but large numbers were to die through attrition.
Mass Killing Begins
With the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22 1941, the Nazis launched a crusade against "Judaeo-Bolshevism", the supposed Jewish-Communist conspiracy. Behind the front lines, four police battalions called Einsatzgruppen (operations groups) moved from town to town, rounding up Jewish men and suspected Soviet collaborators and shooting them. In subsequent sweeps, making heavy use of local volunteers, the Einsatzgruppen targeted Jewish women and children as well. In total, the Einsaztgruppen murdered some two million people, almost all Jews.
The Final Solution
Death camp operations began in December 1941... While these massacres were happening, the Nazis elsewhere were laying plans for an overall "solution to the Jewish question". Death camp operations began in December 1941 at Semlin in Serbia and Chelmno in Poland, where people were killed by exhaust fumes in specially modified vans, which were then driven to nearby sites where the bodies were plundered and burnt. 250,000 Jews were killed this way at Chelmno and 15,000 at Semlin.
More camps opened in the spring and summer of 1942, when the Nazis began systematically clearing the ghettos in Poland and rounding up Jews in Western Europe for 'deportation to the East'. The killing of the Polish Jews, code-named 'Project Reihardt', was carried out in three camps: Treblinka, near Warsaw (850,000 victims); Belzec, in southeastern Poland (650,000 victims); and Sobibor, in east-central Poland (250,000 victims). Some Jews from Western Europe were sometimes taken to these camps as well, but most were killed at the biggest and most advanced of the death camps, Auschwitz.

Industrial Killing: Auschwitz-Birkenau
Originally a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners, Auschwitz was greatly expanded in 1941 with the addition of a much larger camp at nearby Birkenau. In all, Auschwitz-Birkenau and its sub-camps held 400,000 registered prisoners including 205,000 Jews, 137,000 Poles, 21,000 Gypsies, 12,000 Soviet POWs and 25,000 others (including a few British POWs). In this largest and worst of all the Nazi concentration camps, 210,000 prisoners died of starvation and abuse.
Some of the new arrivals were inducted into the camp as registered prisoners, but the great majority were gassed immediately. But Auschwitz-Birkenau became more than a concentration camp. In the spring of 1942 gas chambers were built at Birkenau and mass transports of Jews began to arrive. Some of the new arrivals were inducted into the camp as registered prisoners, but the great majority were gassed immediately. These gassing operations were greatly expanded in the spring of 1943 with the construction of four purpose-built gas chamber and crematorium complexes, which included such refinements as electric lifts to carry bodies up to the crematoria. Each crematorium could handle 2,000 victims daily. In a nearby group of barracks, nicknamed 'Canada' by the prisoners, victims' belongings were sorted for transportation to the Reich. The victims' hair was used to stuff mattresses; gold teeth were melted down and the gold deposited to an SS account.
In all about 900,000 people were gassed at Birkenau without ever being registered as prisoners, almost all of them Jews. This brought the total death toll of the Asuchwitz complex to about 1.1 million, of whom one million were Jewish.

The End of the Holocaust
The Final Solution moved into its last stages as Allied forces began to close in on Germany in 1944. The Project Reinhardt camps were razed. A prisoner work-gang called the Blobel Commando began digging up and burning the bodies of those killed by the Einsatzgruppen. Prisoners remaining in Auschwitz and other concentration camps were transported or force-marched to camps within Germany. Hardly fit for such an effort, thousands of prisoners on these death marches succumbed to starvation, exhaustion and cold, or were shot for not keeping up the pace.
When British troops came across the camp on April 15 1945, they encountered 10,000 unburied corpses... Jewish prisoners were concentrated at Bergen-Belsen, hitherto not known as one of the worst camps; but in the chaotic final months of the war conditions were allowed to deteriorate catastrophically. When British troops came across the camp on April 15 1945, they encountered 10,000 unburied corpses, a raging typhus epidemic and 60,000 sick and dying prisoners crammed into overcrowded barracks without food or water.

The Outside World
The discovery of Belsen brought home the shocking truth about Nazi atrocities, but the facts had been known for some time. As early as the summer of 1941, British signals intelligence had intercepted and decoded radio messages from German police units co-operating with the Einsatzgruppen, and details of the killings of Jews were included in the monthly summaries that were sent to Churchill. Churchill responded with a speech on August 24 1941 in which he called the massacres "a crime without a name" but erroneously identified the victims as "Russian patriots defending their native soil'. Otherwise, these facts were not made public.
In June 1942, a report from the Jewish Workers' Bund in Poland reached London. The Bund report described the massacres in the East and estimated that 700,000 Jews had been killed; but when a Polish courier mentioned this number to a British journalist he was advised to 'drop a zero or two' if he wanted to be believed.
Another Polish courier, Jan Karski, reached the West in November 1942 carrying messages from Jewish leaders in Poland. He had himself witnessed the conditions in the Warsaw ghetto and in what he believed to be the Belzec death camp, and was eager to inform the world. Karski saw Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and US President Roosevelt, but they seemed to be more interested in military intelligence than in atrocity stories. Partly as a result of Karski's mission, however, the Allies agreed to a joint declaration, read to Parliament on December 17, which acknowledged Nazi war crimes and threatened punishment for the perpetrators. Subsequently millions of leaflets were dropped in the course of bombing raids on German cities to inform Germans of the facts, but these had little or no effect.
By the spring of 1944, detailed descriptions of the killing operations at Auschwitz-Birkenau received from escaped prisoners were published. This prompted calls for the camp or its railway approaches to be bombed, but these proposals were rejected on technical grounds.
Britain treated refugees from Nazi Germany as economic migrants and took in only those who would be of economic benefit to the country. Britain's attitude to Jewish refugees from Nazi-controlled areas was strongly influenced by its role as the mandatory power in Palestine, where it had to mediate between Jewish and Arab interests. In December 1941, the Struma, a ship carrying 769 Jewish refugees, left the Romanian port of Constantsa hoping to reach Palestine. Towed into Istanbul harbour when its engines failed, it became the subject of diplomatic discussions between Britain and Turkey. Britain's chief concern was to discourage what it regarded as an undesirable traffic, and it proposed that the ship be returned to Romania. After ten weeks of wrangling the Struma was towed out to sea, its engines still disabled, where it was sunk by a Soviet submarine. There was one survivor.

Jewish refugees were the subject of two international conferences, at Evian in 1938 and Bermuda in 1943. Neither conference resulted in any concrete action. In general, Britain treated refugees from Nazi Germany as economic migrants and took in only those who would be of economic benefit to the country. About 10,000 Jewish children were brought to Britain in 1939 under the so-called Kindertransport scheme and placed with British families, but their parents were excluded and had to pay for their children's support. The best that can be said for Britain's refugee policy is that it was less ungenerous than that of most other European states at the time.

By Dr Steve Paulsson,
Lecturer at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.
Gunnar S. Paulsson was born in Sweden and has lived in Canada and Britain. His mother was a survivor of Auschwitz. D.Phil., University of Oxford, 1998. His doctoral thesis, 'Hiding in Warsaw: the Jews on the "Aryan side", 1940-1945', was co-winner of the 1998 Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History and is to be published by Yale University Press. He has also published articles on the flight of the Danish Jews to Sweden in 1943 and on Polish-Jewish relations. He was Senior Historian in the Holocaust Exhibition Project Office at the Imperial War Museum, 1998-2000, and now lectures at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.

This international unrest in the world would unfortunately seem to have given rise to the view amongst the Jews within Germany that the time has come openly to oppose Jewish interests to those of the German nation. From numerous places vigorous complaints have been received of the provocative action of individuals belonging to this people, and the remarkable frequency of these reports and the similarity of their contents point to a certain system of operation.
...The only way to deal with the problem which remains open is that of legislative action. The German Government is in this controlled by the thought that through a single secular solution it may be possible still to create a level ground [eine Ebene] on which the German people may find a tolerable relation towards the Jewish people. Should this hope not be fulfilled and the Jewish agitation both within Germany and in the international sphere should continue, then the position must be examined afresh.
The third [law] is an attempt to regulate by law [the Jewish] problem, which, should this attempt fail, must then be handed over by law to the National-Socialist Party for a final solution.
Behind all three laws there stands the National-Socialist Party and with it and supporting it stands the German nation.
N.H. Baynes, ed., The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, I, London, 1942, pp. 731-732.

Europa kann nicht eher zur Ruhe kommen, bevor die j�dische Frage ausger�umt ist. Die Welt hat Siedlungsraum gen�gend, es mu� aber endg�ltig mit der Meinung gebrochen werden, als sei das j�dische Volk vom lieben Gott eben dazu bestimmt, in einem gewissen Prozentsatz Nutznie�er am K�rper und an der produktiven Arbeit anderer V�lker zu sein.
Das Judentum wird sich genauso einer soliden aufbauenden T�tigkeit anpassen m�ssen, wie es andere V�lker auch tun, oder es wird fr�her oder sp�ter einer Krise von unvorstellbarem Ausma� erliegen.
Europe will not have peace until the Jewish question has been disposed of. The world has sufficient capacity for settlement, but we must finally break away from the notion that a certain percentage of the Jewish people are intended, by our dear God, to be the parasitic beneficiary of the body, and of the productive work, of other peoples.
Jewry must adapt itself to respectable constructive work, as other peoples do, or it will sooner or later succumb to a crisis of unimaginable proportions.

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