The Holocaust Research Paper

1. The Background

The historical origins of the Holocaust remain an object of ongoing debate. Whereas some scholars consider the extermination of the Jews as the consequence of a specific evolution of German history, at least from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, others interpret the Holocaust as an outgrowth of modernity, the implementation of a pitiless instrumental rationality at the service of a totalitarian racial utopia. Both approaches are not incompatible.

The rise of racial anti-Semitism, the spreading of social Darwinism, and the publication of the first theories of racial anthropology and eugenics turned the late nineteenth century into a breeding ground of ideological trends that were to become central tenets of the Nazi worldview. And, although political anti-Semitism declined in the Wilhelminian Reich at the beginning of the 1900s, an increasingly vocal anti-Jewish hostility spread throughout wide sectors of German society. In this evolution, the outbreak of World War I became a major turning point.

After a brief period of national unity, the unforeseen prolongation of the conflict and the growing political polarization which it induced triggered a radicalization of anti-Jewish attitudes, mainly in the nationalist conservative camp. The defeat of Germany, the revolutionary upheavals that followed, and the birth of a republic hated and rejected by an important sector of the population, as well as the vast majority of the traditional elites, fanned the already virulent anti-Semitism even further. The Jews were accused of bearing the responsibility for the national humiliation (the ‘stab in the back’ myth), of controlling the new republic, of instigating bolshevism and, above all, of conspiring to dominate the world, as described in the most widely read anti-Semitic forgery of the century, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1919).

It was in this postwar atmosphere that Adolf Hitler began his political career by joining the tiny German Workers’ Party (DAP) in Munich, in late 1919. In 1920, the DAP became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) with anti-Semitism figuring prominently in its twenty-five point program. Notwithstanding the failed putsch of 1923 and Hitler’s brief incarceration, the resumption of his political agitation in 1925 along with systematic organization, unrelenting propaganda, and, more than anything else, the impact of the Great Depression, propelled the party into prominence on the national scene.

Anti-Semitism lay at the center of Hitler’s worldview from the outset of his political career and remained so after his accession to power on January 30, 1933. Reduced to its core, this anti-Semitism viewed historical evolution as determined by a merciless racial struggle dominated by the confrontation between Aryan and Jew. The outcome of this struggle was to decide the fate of mankind and particularly of the Aryan race. Hitler’s faith had an apocalyptic dimension, presented in terms of ‘scientific’ theories. But how far this worldview concretely led to the systematic planning of the anti-Semitic policies of the regime, or, obversely, to what extent these measures were the result of uncoordinated initiatives stemming from a growing radicalization of the party and its agencies, remains an open question. One could argue that the ideological guidelines indicated a general framework for action, but that the ‘twisted road’ followed by the implementation of the anti-Jewish policies was dictated by changing circumstances. In any case, during the 1930s, no plan for a physical extermination of the Jews existed; the ever-more extreme anti-Jewish policies of the prewar years had two successive and identifiable aims: the exclusion of the Jews from the national racial community (the Volksgemeinschaft) and, thereafter, their expulsion from the Reich.

From the outset of the new regime the Jews were dismissed from the civil service, from a growing number of professions, and from all major fields of German cultural life. Moreover, all that belonged to or had been influenced by the ‘Jewish spirit’ had to be cleansed from the German cultural sphere: Freud’s or Einstein’s theories, Heine’s poetry, Mendelssohn’s music, books, works of art, memorial plaques, films, libretti—anything. A stream of anti-Jewish incitement was daily spewed out by all the propaganda channels of party and state, under the guidance of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and chief party ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg; it found its most rabid expression in Der Sturmer, the ‘specialized’ anti-Jewish organ of the Gauleiter of Franconia, Julius Streicher. The entire education system soon absorbed the anti-Semitic message, as did the Hitler Youth (HJ) and the League of German Girls (BdM). The indoctrinated youngsters of the 1930s were to become the soldiers of the 1940s.

In September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws added strict biological separation to social and cultural segregation by forbidding marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Germans (the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor). The Reich Citizenship Law reduced the Jews to second-class citizens. Finally, the first ‘Supplementary Decree’ to the Reich Citizenship Law defined who was a Jew or, alternatively, a ‘mixed breed’ of the first or second degree (November 1935). Any transgression of the ‘Blood Law’ was considered as ‘race defilement’ (Rassenschande), and the offenders (usually the Jewish male offenders) were sent to jail or a concentration camp.

In 1936, the Reichsfuhrer SS, Heinrich Himmler, was put in command of all German police forces. This reorganization of the control and terror apparatus led to the appointment of SS General Reinhard Heydrich, previously chief of the security service of the SS (Sicherheitsdienst or SD) to the command of both the SD and the newly established Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei), which included the Gestapo and the Criminal Police. After the outbreak of the war, these agencies were further centralized within the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA). While the planning of direct anti-Jewish terror was mainly Himmler’s and Heydrich’s preserve, the plundering of Jewish assets and enterprises was orchestrated by Hermann Goering’s Four Year Plan Administration, and, after the dismissal of the conservative minister of the economy, Hjalmar Schacht (who had managed to protect some measure of Jewish economic life), by his Nazi successor, Walther Funk.

After the annexation of Austria, in March 1938, the drive to compel the Jews to leave the ‘Greater German Reich’ (‘Old Reich’ and Austria) became overwhelming. During that year, ‘compulsory Aryanization’ and, ultimately, the prohibition of any Jewish economic activity destroyed the material basis of Jewish existence in Germany. Notwithstanding the widespread reticence of most countries to take in Jewish refugees (easily identifiable since, at the demand of the Swiss government, their passports were marked with a ‘J’), forced emigration and even expulsion over the borders became standard Nazi practice. Finally, on November 9 and 10, following the killing of a German diplomat by a Jewish youth in Paris, a nationwide eruption of state-organized violence, the so-called ‘Night of the Broken Glass,’ destroyed the remnants of Jewish life in Germany. The Jews of the Reich now desperately attempted to flee. The panic soon extended to the Jews of the ‘Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,’ after the German occupation of Prague in March 1939. Yet, it was the German attack on Poland, on September 1, 1939 and the outbreak of World War II that entirely changed the fate of European Jewry.

2. The Immediate Context Of The ‘Final Solution’ (1939–41)

During the first two years of the war, the goal of Nazi anti-Jewish policies still appeared uncertain. Jewish emigration from the Reich and occupied Europe remained a possibility, although wartime conditions soon reduced it to a trickle. The goal frequently alluded to was a territorial concentration of Europe’s Jews, first in the easternmost part of Poland, in the Lublin area of the newly established ‘General Government’ (the name used for the nonannexed area of Poland which was put under the authority of the Nazi ‘Governor General,’ Hans Frank), then, after the victory over France, in the French island colony of Madagascar, and, finally, after the attack on the USSR, in Arctic Russia or Siberia. None of these plans ever materialized, except for some short-lived attempts to deport Jews from Vienna and the Protectorate to the Lublin area, in the fall of 1939 and in early 1941.

A few months after the occupation of Poland, the Nazis started to deport hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles from territories annexed to the Reich, such as the Warthegau (a part of western Poland), into the General Government; they drove the Jews into ghettos in larger towns and even dumped Jews from the Reich into Vichy France, in the fall of 1940. The deportations within ex-Poland may have been linked in part to the regime’s policy of ingathering ethnic Germans from the Baltic countries, the Russian occupied territory of Poland, and the Balkans in the ‘Great Germanic Reich.’ Thus, the deportations of Jews and of Poles from the Warthegau were meant to make space for the incoming Volksdeutsche. The policy was pursued under the orders of Himmler, as newly appointed ‘Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom’ (RKF). It was meant to be the first stage of what became known as ‘General Plan East’ (General Plan Ost), aimed at establishing German domination in the East for centuries to come. The enslavement of entire nations and the death of tens of millions of local inhabitants was taken into account. This policy was probably not directly linked to the genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ since it cannot explain the deportations from the west (to be described later on).

Simultaneously, from October 1939, an entirely separate but not unrelated operation had started in the Reich: the systematic mass murder of the mentally ill, the so-called euthanasia or ‘Aktion T-4’: personnel were trained and killing methods were developed that were to be used for the mass extermination of Jews after the scaling down of T-4, in the summer of 1941, to a less visible ‘euthanasia’ operation (Aktion 14f13).

In Western Europe, the much smaller Jewish populations were not secluded (except for the establishment of a semi-ghetto in Amsterdam) or as brutally treated as the Jews of Poland. But their exclusion from public service and the liberal professions, growing curtailment of their economic activity, the registration of persons and property, limitations on travel, and police surveillance, turned them into pariahs. Their persecutors were not only the Germans, but also satellite regimes such as Vichy France.

After the German occupation of Yugoslavia and Greece in April 1941, Serbia remained under direct military control and Croatia became a satellite; in both countries, harsh anti-Jewish measures were introduced. Slovakia’s anti-Jewish policy followed strict German orders. Romania implemented fierce anti-Semitic measures of its own, and only Hungary and Bulgaria maintained semi-independent policies in this domain.

In order to facilitate their control over the Jews— beyond territorial concentration—as well as to degrade them, the Nazis compelled all those over the age of six to display a ‘Jewish star’ on their clothing, first in Poland, then, from September 1941 on, in the Reich and the Protectorate, and, in the spring of 1942, in all countries of occupied Western Europe. But the principal instrument of Nazi domination was the ‘Jewish Councils.’ These councils, composed of representatives of the Jewish communities, received German orders, conveyed them to the Jewish populations, and were responsible, upon pain of death, for their implementation. Moreover, in Eastern Europe the Jewish Councils became agencies of a Jewish self-administration of sorts, struggling against impossible odds; justly or unjustly, they often became targets of sarcasm, resentment, and even hatred in their own communities. Some historians have adopted a highly critical stance toward the councils, considering them as instruments in the hands of the Nazis for the destruction of their own people. Others have questioned this overall characterization as the differences in the behavior of the councils were considerable. All in all, the councils’ members were ordinary people confronted with entirely unprecedented circumstances: their own reasoning was incompatible with the murderous strategy of the Nazis.

3. The Extermination

Systematic mass extermination of Jewish populations began with the German attack on the USSR, on June 22, 1941. Whereas in most newly occupied Soviet territory mainly Jewish men were executed until August 1941, in the Baltic countries and in Transnistria (where the Romanian army was the principal ally of Germany), entire Jewish communities were butchered from the outset. The killing of Jews in party or state positions had been ordered by Heydrich on the eve of the campaign; the perpetration of pogroms by local inhabitants was also explicitly fostered by the Germans. Whether the killing that engulfed the entire Jewish population from August 1941 onwards was independent of any instrumental goals, or whether, as with the starving to death of two million Russian POWs before the spring of 1942 (around 3.3 million died before the end of the war), it derived from difficulties experienced by the Wehrmacht in securing sufficient food supplies for the army is not clear. In any case, the mass murder of Jews on Soviet territory (around 500,000 victims by the end of 1941) was not perpetrated solely by the ‘intervention units’ of the Security Police and the SD (Einsatzgruppen), by local auxiliaries, and by the Romanian army in the south, but also by tens of Reserve Police Battalions and regular Wehrmacht units. In other words, not only the ‘troops of the ideological war’ (the SS) but ordinary men, possibly ten of thousands of them, were involved, often willingly so, in the mass murder of the Jews.

Few historians would now argue that the decision to exterminate all the Jews of Europe predated the attack on the USSR. Some contend that this decision was taken by Hitler soon after the German onslaught, during the period of ‘euphoria,’ due to the apparent success of the invasion, and that it found its expression in Goering’s letter to Heydrich of July 31, 1941, ordering him ‘to take all necessary measures to prepare the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe.’ Others argue that such an order was issued in the early fall, when doubts may have risen in Hitler’s mind about the prospects of a quick victory in the East. Others still link the order to the USA’s entry into the war, in other words to the transformation of the European war into the ‘world war,’ which, as Hitler had ‘prophesied’ in his Reichstag speech of January 30, 1939, would see ‘the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe.’ This last interpretation seems bolstered by documentary evidence. On December 18, according to Himmler’s appointments diary, the SS chief met with Hitler and wrote down: ‘Jewish question eradicate as partisans.’ The reference to ‘partisans’ is clearly a way of describing an enemy lurking behind the lines, an internal foe, who, just as in 1917 18, would stab Germany in the back if given the chance. Finally, some historians doubt the existence of any clear order given at the highest level and consider total extermination as resulting from the cumulative effects of local initiatives.

By October 1941, the killings had extended to Jews from the Greater Reich and the Protectorate who were deported mainly to Lodz, Riga, Kovno, and Minsk. In Riga and Kovno, thousands were shot on arrival. The others were exterminated later with the inhabitants of their ghettos. They had also spread to Serbia, where the Wehrmacht executed some 6,000 Jews in reprisal for partisan attacks. During the same month, Jews were forbidden to leave the continent, ‘in view of the coming final solution of the Jewish Question’ and the construction of the Belzec extermination camp (possibly that of Sobibor too) began in the General Government.

In early December, the first extermination site became operational at Chelmno, near Lodz, principally for the murder of Jews from the Warthegau. On January 20, 1942, in a meeting in Berlin (am Grossen Wannsee), Heydrich informed an array of state secretaries, senior SS officers and other selected officials of the general extermination program that, according to his computations, was to apply to 11 million European Jews. From then on total extermination became a problem of logistics and of some measure of haggling between the Germans and various governments or local authorities about handing over their Jews. In almost all cases, foreign Jews were arrested and delivered first, local Jews followed (as will be indicated further on, in some rare cases Jews were not handed over at all).

The arrests of Jews, mainly in Western Europe, and the logistics of the deportations were coordinated between the Higher SS and Police Leaders (HSSPF), Himmler’s delegates to each occupied country or major area, local authorities and police forces, and the Jewish Affairs section at the RSHA (IVB4) under Adolf Eichmann. Furthermore, the deportations demanded joint planning with the Reich Railways Authority (Reichsbahn) and its territorial subdivisions (Ostbahn, etc.). Once the Jews reached the camps, they passed under the command of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (SS Wirtschafts und Verwaltungshauptamt) under SS General Oswald Pohl (except for the Aktion Reinhard camps). In the camps, the Jews were destined for extermination; however, mainly in Auschwitz, selections separated the healthiest and the strongest from the mass of the inmates, submitting them to slave labor before sending them to their death.

The first stage of the extermination chiefly included the Jews of the Warthegau and of the General Government who, through 1942, were killed in the Aktion Reinhard camps (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek), as well as in Chelmno. The deportation of the Jews of Warsaw to Treblinka began in July 1942. Simultaneously, deportations from Western Europe (France, Belgium, and Holland) started. By then, the principal Auschwitz extermination camp (Auschwitz II or Birkenau) had become fully operational. The killing method shifted increasingly from the use of carbon monoxide gas to that of Zyklon B, a powerful pesticide utilized in the fumigation of army barracks and ships’ holds. Before they were killed, the victims’ valuables and clothes were taken away and their hair was shorn; after the gasings, gold teeth, and artificial limbs were removed from the corpses. The German economy recycled the ‘booty’: gold was smelted and delivered to the Reichsbank; hair was used for mattresses, slippers, etc.; clothes were distributed by the Winterhilfe (the German winter-relief organization). Homes, furniture, and other belongings left behind by the deportees, were distributed to deserving Volksgenossen or acquired, usually at dirt-cheap prices. This allocation of spoils spread to occupied countries in the West. Particularly valuable objects, mainly art, looted all over Europe by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg or ERR, were offered to Nazi leaders (Hitler and Goering headed the list), to German museums, and various other German institutions.

In 1943, the last batch of German Jews was deported to the extermination camps; the deportations from Western Europe continued, and, simultaneously, the Jews of the Balkans and, by the end of the year, of Italy (following the German occupation of the greater part of the peninsula) were included in the killing process. From March 1944 onward, after the occupation of Hungary by German troops, this country’s Jews became the last large national group of victims (over 400,000) to be sent to Auschwitz–Birkenau. On November 2, 1944, Himmler ordered the cessation of the mass exterminations; his order was frequently disregarded, even after the liberation of a growing number of camps by the Allies. ‘Death marches,’ organized by camp commanders or SS personnel, went on throughout the winter of 1944–5 and practically until the German surrender in May 1945. By the time the war in Europe drew to a close, approximately 5.5 million Jews had been exterminated.

The exterminations on Soviet territory had become widely known by the fall of 1941. Information about the mass killing of European Jewry beyond the Soviet border spread throughout the continent, and in Allied and neutral countries from the second half of 1942 onward, although the technical details of the ‘Final Solution’ may not have been widely known until 1944. The overall reaction was one of indifference and inaction, sometimes of outright collaboration. While Vichy authorities and police collaborated with the Germans in the arrests and deportations, Switzerland hermetically closed its borders to the Jews who attempted to flee. In general terms, the Christian churches intervened feebly, mainly on behalf of converted Jews. Thousands of Jewish children were hidden in Christian institutions; in most cases, their lot was conversion. The silence of Pope Pius XII, notwithstanding some help from the Vatican in hiding Jews in the fall of 1943, has, to this day, remained a matter of heated debate.

In some cases, the reactions were different. Spain and Portugal allowed the transit of Jews through their territory. Sweden attempted to take in the Jews of Norway when the deportations started and it took in almost all the Jews of Denmark (most of whom were transported to safety by the Danes themselves). Protests against the anti-Jewish measures were staged in Holland, in early 1941; the Italians tried to protect the Jews in their own country as well as those under their control. Bulgaria refused to deliver its own Jewish citizens, although it did deliver the foreign Jews. Finland rejected all German demands regarding its small Jewish population.

 ‘The abandonment of the Jews’ by the Western Allies is largely undisputed nowadays. Rejected or fatally delayed rescue plans involved transfers of ransom money to the Germans or their allies, or the bombing, in 1944, of the Auschwitz gas chambers and of the railway line connecting the camp with Hungary. Such refusal to help, whether known or merely sensed, could but contribute to the feeling of total isolation of the Jews of Europe in the face of the German extermination process.

The concrete possibilities of Jewish resistance were almost nil. Moreover, by the time most European resistance movements became active, the bulk of European Jewry had been exterminated. Hence Jewish armed revolt in the ghettos (the best-known instance being the Warsaw ghetto revolt of April 1943) or even in the camps, although hopeless, carried the utmost symbolic significance. As for the immense majority of European Jews, they had practically no options even when impending murder was obvious: flight and hiding were limited options; despair and numbness, overwhelming.

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