The Holocaust An Overview of Its Origins Execution And Implications.

The Holocaust

An Overview of Its Origins

Execution

And Implications

Defining Terms

1. When and what was the Holocaust?2. What is the nature of the events that

make them worth study and assessment?

3. What is the evidence upon which our understanding of events are based?

4. How accurate are the numbers presented?

When and What

Properly speaking, the period from 1941-1944 was the time of the most effective and systematic mass murder of civilian populations throughout Europe; the deaths came about due to calculated measures at the highest levels of government and implemented in a variety of forms and locations.

What is the Evidence

Three sources of evidence provide the basis for the narrative:

--eyewitness accounts by victims, liberators, perpetrators

--material evidence of murder sites such as camps and excavations of burials

--documentary sources principally, but not exclusively, from the German government

What about the Numbers

Estimates vary due to he absence of central census data, some numbers are derived from statistical extrapolation, others by rough guesses; however, best and most conservative estimates are taken from the captured German documents. Raul Hilberg estimates minimum of 5 million Jews out of a total civilian population of 10 million murdered.

Origins in Religion

• Anti-Judaism with domination of Christianity after 4th century C.E.;

• Uneasy coexistence punctuated by persecution, expulsion, and murder;

• Culmination in series of expulsions throughout western Europe: 1290 England, 1306 France, 1492 Spain, 1495 Portugal.

Reformation

• Luther hoped to make allies of the Jews against Catholic Church;

• Refusal to join, but remain neutral, provoked violent diatribes by Luther and other Protestants to expel and murder Jews, burn them and their books;

• Luther’s call to German pride linked inextricably to anti-Judaism.

Burning the Jews

These two images are separated by almost 600 years, yet reveal both desire and reality in Jewish/Christian relations from the medieval period through to the Renaissance and Reformation. The image on the left, is from a chronicle account regarding actions in the wake of Crusaders in the late 11th century; the image on the right (circa 1628), depicts the fruits of intolerance during the wars of religion that plagued Europe during the 16-17th centuries.

National Socialism

• Eliminate class-conflict;• Assure care for all Germans;• Redeem national honor by repudiating

Versailles Treaty, reassert European leadership;

• Punish Germany’s enemies, both inside and outside, enemies defined in political, economic and racial terms.

Unity in Community

• “One people, one nation, one Leader” became the rallying cry;

• Race defined as the governing principle in accordance with pseudo-Darwinian theories;

• Expunge all enemies of the people: trade unionists, Socialists and Communists first and foremost.

Milestones in Persecution• 1933: Jews removed from all public service, state-

employee posts• 1934: Expansion of concentration camps• 1935: Nuremberg Laws, establishing racial criteria

for citizenship with the concomitant protections, clearly identify who is not a German in racial terms

• 1938: Kristallnacht, state-sponsored pogrom to hasten flight of Jewish population

• 1941: No further emigration from Germany or German occupied territories

Scope of the Kristallnacht Pogrom

Some of the 20,000 Jews Arrested on Kristallnacht

Expansion of the Camp System

Cleansing the Race• First victims of racial policy of mass murder

were Germans;• Euthanasia program (T-4) begun in 1939

coincident with invasion of Poland;• Expunge the race of useless mouths to feed,

redirect resources to the healthy for the struggle to survive;

• T-4 officially abandoned in 1941 under a combination of Church protests and new focus on a “final solution” for the “Jewish problem.”

Gas Vans and their Field of Operation

Men of the Operation Groups and Their Handiwork

First Fruits

• Operation Reinhardt: by March 1942, begin the creation of four camps, explicitly for the mass-murder of Jews;

• Eastern Poland chosen as remote sites for camps: Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka;

• Modification and addition to Auschwitz in the form of Birkenau (Auschwitz II).

Location of Operation Reinhardt Camps

Ghettoization and Transport

• Crowding, malnutrition, starvation, disease, and overwork push up daily deaths in the larger ghettos (Kovno, Lodz, Warsaw) into the thousands;

• Between 1940-1944, approximately 44,000 Jews died in the Lodz ghetto from the above causes.

The Jewish Cemetery, Lodz

The Ghetto Field, then and today (2003)

Complicity

• Mass-murder of the Holocaust did not occur in a vacuum, nor did commission rest with a small minority;

• The wholesale identification, removal, transportation, murder, and disposal of “assets” required the cooperation of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people.

Business

• I.G. Farben, for example, knowingly appropriated slave labor for its sundry subsidiaries, including the planned manufacturing facility for artificial rubber (Buna) known as Auschwitz III or also as Monowitz;

• Clothing manufacturers, armaments producers, transportation companies (e.g., VW) chemical plants, steel works all used slave labor from the camps and occupied countries.

Medicine

• Physicians represented a disproportionately high percentage of NS party members, making use of camp inmates as experimental subjects, sponsored and encouraged by pharmaceutical companies;

• Published results made it obvious that the conditions of many experiments were done without any consideration to the human subjects, yet no formal complaint from other medical professionals in the US (for example).

Children as Medical Subjects

The Churches• Protestant churches, both Reform and Lutheran,

aided in the search for Jewish converts (in line with racist policies), as did the Catholic Church;

• Protestant and Catholic Church leadership ignored mass murder from the onset, a complicity of silence (hence the current, intense debate about Pius XII and proposed canonization);

• Catholic Church active in “ratlines” to help former SS and NS leaders, perpetrators escape.

Things to Read

• Wladyslaw Szpilman, The Pianist• Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of European

Jewry ( one volume student edition)• Jane Marks, The Hidden Children• Richard Rashke, Escape from Sobibor• Gitta Sereny, Into that Darkness• Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men• Robert Ericksen and Susannah Heschel,

Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust

Things to Watch

• Amen• Auschwitz (two DVD set)• Conspiracy (an HBO special film)• Everything is Illuminated• Life is Beautiful• Night and Fog• Trial of Adolf Eichmann (PBS documentary)