The Holocaust

Antisemitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler. Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust—even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine.

The Enlightenment, spanning the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious tolerance, and in the 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended many long-standing restrictions on Jews. Antisemitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.

The roots of Adolf Hitler’s particularly virulent ideological brand of antisemitism are unclear. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I. Like many antisemites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the country’s defeat in 1918.

Soon after World War I ended, Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP)—the Nazi Party. While imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the propaganda memoir “Mein Kampf” (or “my struggle”), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in “the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.”

Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” a pseudoscientific racial category, and with the need for “Lebensraum,” or living space, for that race to expand. In the decade after he was released from prison, Hitler exploited the weakness of his rivals to enhance his party’s status and rise from obscurity to power.

On January 30, 1933, he was named chancellor of Germany. After the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler anointed himself Fuhrer, becoming Germany’s supreme ruler.

The twin goals of racial purity and territorial expansion formed the core of Hitler’s worldview, and from 1933 onward, they would combine to form the driving force behind his foreign and domestic policies.

Early on, the Nazis reserved their harshest persecution for political opponents such as Communists or Social Democrats. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the earliest prisoners sent there were Communists.

Like the network of concentration camps that followed, which became the killing grounds of the Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler, head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS) its Reich leader and later chief of the German police.

By July 1933, German concentration camps (Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) held some 27,000 people in “protective custody.” Huge Nazi rallies and symbolic acts such as the public burning of books by Jews, Communists, liberals and foreigners helped reinforce the regime’s message of strength and unity.

In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around 525,000—just one percent of the total German population. During the next six years, Nazis undertook an “Aryanization” of Germany, dismissing Jews and other non-Aryans from civil service, liquidating Jewish-owned businesses and stripping Jewish lawyers and doctors of their clients.

Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge (half-breeds).

Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became routine targets for stigmatization and persecution. This culminated in Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass” in November 1938, when German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish homes and shops were smashed. Some 100 Jews were killed and thousands more arrested.

From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany did, while those who remained lived in a constant state of uncertainty and fear.

In September 1939, Germany invaded the western half of Poland, starting World War II. German police soon forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettos, giving their confiscated properties to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside Germany who identified as German), Germans from the Reich or Polish gentiles.

Ringed by high walls and barbed wire, the Jewish ghettos in Poland functioned like captive city-states, governed by Jewish Councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overpopulation and poor sanitation made the ghettos breeding grounds for diseases such as typhus.

Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected around 70,000 Germans institutionalized for mental illness or physical disabilities for killing by gas in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

After prominent German religious leaders protested, Hitler publicly halted the program in August 1941, though killings of the disabled continued in secrecy, and by 1945 about 275,000 people the Nazis deemed disabled from all over Europe had been killed. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program served as a pilot for the Holocaust.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler’s empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Roma, were transported to ghettos in occupied Poland.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in warfare. Mobile killing units of Himmler’s SS called Einsatzgruppen murdered more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others, usually by shooting, over the course of the German occupation.

A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler’s top commander Hermann Göring to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD, the SS security service, referred to the need for an Endlösung (Final Solution) to “the Jewish question.”

Beginning in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory was marked with a yellow, six-pointed star, marking them as targets for persecution. At least tens of thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettos and cities in the German-occupied Soviet Union.

Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz, near Krakow, Poland. That August, SS personnel gassed 600 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust.

In late 1941, the Germans started mass transports from the ghettos in occupied Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak, as well as the very young.

The first mass gassings began at Belzec extermination camp, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more extermination camps were built in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz.

From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to extermination and concentration camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.

Amid the deportations, disease and constant hunger, incarcerated people in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in armed revolt.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 19 to May 16, 1943, ended in the deaths of 7,000 Jews, with 50,000 captured survivors sent to extermination camps. But the resistance fighters had held off the Nazis for almost a month, and their revolt inspired revolts at camps and ghettos across German-occupied Europe.

Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of the camps secret, the scale of the killing made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses reported Nazi atrocities in Poland to Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or publicize news of the mass slaughter.

This lack of action was likely mostly due to the Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but also stemmed from the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was met, and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be occurring on such a scale.

At Auschwitz alone, about 1.1 million people were murdered in a process resembling a large-scale industrial killing operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp there. While Jews made up the vast majority of those gassed, other groups were also killed this way, and thousands more died of starvation or disease.

In 1943, SS physician and committed eugenicist Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz to begin his infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners. His special area of focus was conducting medical experiments on twins, injecting them with everything from petrol to chloroform under the guise of giving them medical treatment. His actions earned him the nickname “the Angel of Death.”

By the spring of 1945, German leadership was dissolving amid internal dissent, with Goering and Himmler both seeking to distance themselves from Hitler and position themselves as successors.

In his last will and political testament, dictated shortly before his suicide, on April 29, Hitler blamed the war on “International Jewry and its helpers” and urged the German leaders and people to follow “the strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples”—the Jews.

The following day, April 30, Hitler died by suicide. Germany’s formal surrender in World War II came a week later, on May 8, 1945.

German forces had begun evacuating many of the camps in the fall of 1944, sending inmates under guard to march away from the advancing enemy’s front line. These so-called “death marches” continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 people.

In his classic book Survival in Auschwitz, the Italian Jewish author Primo Levi described his own state of mind, and that of his fellow inmates, in Auschwitz on the day before Soviet troops liberated the camp in January 1945, “We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to conclusion by the Germans in defeat.”

The wounds of the Holocaust—known in Hebrew as “Shoah,” or catastrophe—were slow to heal. Survivors of the camps found it nearly impossible to return home, as in many cases they had lost their entire family and been denounced by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, the late 1940s saw an unprecedented movements of refugees, POWs and other displaced populations moving across Europe.

In an effort to punish the Nazi leaders responsible for the Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, which brought Nazi atrocities to light. Growing pressure on the Allied powers to create a homeland for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would lead to international support for the 1947 UN partition plan, paving the way for Israel’s creation in 1948.

Over the decades that followed, many Germans grappled with the Holocaust’s bitter legacy, as survivors and the families of victims sought restitution for wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years.

Beginning in 1953, the West German government made payments to individual Jews and to the Jewish people as a way of acknowledging national responsibility for the crimes committed in their name.

The Holocaust. The National WWII Museum. What Was The Holocaust? Imperial War Museums. Introduction to the Holocaust. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Holocaust Remembrance. Council of Europe. Outreach Programme on the Holocaust. United Nations.