Holocaust

The Holocaust was the systematic killing of the Jews, and others deemed subhuman under the Nazi race and biological ideology of Europe by the Third Reich. Shoah refers specifically to the killing of Jews, but the killing machinery was used extensively against Soviet prisoners of war, political opposition, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc.

Over time, it built from persecution to industrialized killing. While Adolf Hitler was clearly the prime motivator, control did not centralize until roughly 1938, in the Schutzstaffel (SS) under Heinrich Himmler. Even then, there were distinct factional struggles for authority within the SS.

With respect to the specific targeting against Jews, there is still argument if the Nazis appealed to a preexisting tendency towards antisemitism in Germany, or if they either created the sentiment or simply went ahead without large-scale public knowledge. Several historians argue that in 1933-1939, antisemitism was a priority only for a minority of the Germans. Others argue there has been a German tendency that only needed tapping.

Origins

See also: Nazi race and biological ideology

The ideological underpinnings of the annihilation of the handicapped, Jews and Gypsies as well as the mass killings of Slavic populations in German-occupied eastern Europe were based on widely accepted theories of the inequality of races. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, in the controversial Hitler's Willing Executioners, suggests that there is a long tradition of German antisemitism, something to which the current government is extremely careful to avoid.

Eugenics, incorporating prescientific ideas of racial purity and purification had already existed long before the Nazis came to power. Other inferior groups, in Nazi ideology, included Slavs and Roma. The Holocaust also extended to ideological opponents including Communists and Jehovah's Witnesses.

Leadership and goals

Hitler was at the heart of the Holocaust. His antisemitism was evident in the First World War, when comrades in the trenches would recount how he would constantly complained of the "invisible foes", the Jews and Marxists.

While there is no confirmation, it is widely accepted that he gave the orders for the Final Solution verbally to Himmler and Hermann Goering, Goering then being his deputy and economic chief. Himmler then gave orders to Reinhard Heydrich, who was doing detailed planning from 1939 onwards, culminating in the 1942 Wannsee Conference.

There were two major factions in the SS, with different goals. The WVHA economic administration, under Oswald Pohl, sought to maximize the gain from the camps, as with slave labor. Its Inspector of Concentration Camps actually ran them, but its Amtsgruppe W for "SS businesses" had the greatest number of defendants in the Pohl Case (NMT)

The other faction was the RSHA security administration, first under Reinhard Heydrich and then Ernst Kaltenbrunner. The RSHA's predecessor, under Heydrich, directed the field killing of the Einsatzgruppen. RSHA offices included the Gestapo, whose Amt IVB, under Adolf Eichmann was the senior SS bureaucrat in charge of handling deportation and transportation to the camps.

The RuSHA, however, developed the racial policies and criteria for arrest. Its key personnel were separately tried in the RuSHA Case (NMT).

Timeline

Stage one: Persecution before Power

The early Nazis, before coming to power in 1933, focused on Jews as the "other" and existential enemy. Sturmabteilung (SA) "brownshirts" routinely harassed and attacked Jews, Communists, and others in the streets. Goebbels organized the first Nazi-sponsored pogrom on 13 October 1923.

Stage two: Emigration and sterilization

The second stage of Nazi policy concerning Jews, from 1933 to–1938, when Hitler was dictator in a peacetime Germany, involved the removal of Jews from all public office. The Nazis encouraged the Jews to leave and half of the Jewish population in Germany did so (including famous scientist Albert Einstein and the teenaged Henry Kissinger). The Nazis opened Dachau and other “concentration camps” to punish thousands of their political enemies—including many Jews. About 1,000 Jews were murdered in concentration camps inside Germany before 1939; these were distinct from the killing camps that were opened in 1942 in Poland.

Stage three: Forced relocation from Germany

Stage three, from 1938 to September 1939, involved increasingly severe and humiliating restrictions for Jews. “Kristallnacht” in November 1938 was a systematic violent attack on all synagogues. World public opinion grew hostile to the Nazi actions, who ; they responded by supporting pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic political movements in France and other countries, including the “German-American Bund.”

Stage four: Relocation outside Germany

After invading Poland in 1939, the Nazis forced two million Jews into a few ghettoes with below-starvation food allotments.

In rounding up Jews the Nazis sometimes had the enthusiastic cooperation of pro-Nazi governments (as in France and Slovakia). A few countries, including Italy and Hungary, tried to stall the Nazis, but the Germans took power directly and seized the Jews. Only Bulgaria and Denmark were largely successful in protecting their Jews.

Planning for more drastic action had begun, although it was focused on mass emigration or relocation rather than physical destruction. Goering wrote to Heydrich on 31 July 1941

In completion of the task that that was entrusted to you in the edict dated January 24, 1939, I herewith charge you with making all the necessary preparations by means of emigration or evacuation in the most convenient way possible, given the present conditions. I herewith charge you with making all the necessary preparations with regard to the organizational, practical and financial aspects for an Overall Solution (Gesamtloesung) of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe. Insofar as the competencies of other central organizations are affected, they are to cooperate with you. I further charge you with submitting to me promtly an overall plan of the preliminary organizational, practical and financial measures for the execution of the intended Final Solution (Endloesung) of the Jewish question.

Stage five: Active killing

Stage five began when the Germans invaded Russia in June 1941. Einsatzgruppen of the SS not only massacred large numbers of Jews, but routinely included handicapped persons in open-air mass shootings.

Stage six: the Final Solution

Stage 6 began at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 began stage five of Nazi power; it was then that when top Nazis decided on a “Final Solution” —to round up and secretly execute all the Jews of Europe. Killing centers were opened in Poland, and thousands of trainloads of Jews were transported there. and Jews were gassed immediately upon arrival.cmc3 Over three million Jews (and numbers of gypsies and other hated groups) were murdered, mostly in 1942–43.

Stage seven: Endgame

Stage 7 arrived when the Soviet armies overran the Polish camps in 1944–45 and, liberated the survivors. In all, six million Jews were murdered; most of the 300,000 survivors emigrated to the United States or Israel.

Defense

Resistance

Resistance took many forms, from individual acts to hundreds of examples of organized, armed resistance. The most famous episode was the month-long uprising of 60,000 remaining Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943. At the Sobibor Concentration Camp, an uprising in October 1943 allowed 600 prisoners to escape.

Rescuers

Rescuers hid potential victims as best they could. The Danish people managed to ferry their entire Jewish population to neutral Sweden in one night, under the noses of the Nazis.

The role of the Vatican remains extremely complex.

The most famous German rescuer was Oskar Schindler; —“Schindler’s List” the movie is a tells the true story about of how he saved 1,100 Jews from the Nazis by setting up factories that produced defective munitions..

Liberation

The Allies liberated the concentration camps in 1945. Questions have been asked if they could have done more to intervene.

Intelligence

First, the Allied high command did not necessarily realize the extent of the Holocaust or its facilities. For example, while there were photographs of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, they were not located and interpreted until 1970. A photographic plane was photographing a I.G. Farben factory in the general area, and didn't turn off its camera until after it had passed over the Monowitz camp . The factory was the main interest, and the WWII interpreters just marked Auschwitz as an unidentified installation. No one in that organization knew about human intelligence reports of the death camps, and only in the seventies did researchers learn the significance of the camp photographs. .

Brugioni explains why Allied intelligence knew little about the targets, even after the President asked that the camps be bombed. "When the bombing specialists were ordered to formulate plans for bombing the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex, officials of the Air Ministry, the Royal Air Force Bomber Command and the U.S. 8th Air Force bemoaned the lack of aerial photographic coverage of the complex. In fact, such photos were readily available at the Allied Central Interpretation Unit at Royal Air Force Station Medmenham, 50 miles outside of London and at the Mediterranean Allied Photo Reconnaissance Wing in Italy. The ultimate irony was that no search for the aerial photos was ever instituted by either organization. In retrospect, it is a fact that by the time the Soviet Army reached Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, the Allies had photographed the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex at least 30 times."

Refugee and underground human-source intelligence reports were not regarded as highly credible.

Diversion from defeating Germany

Second, there was a belief that defeating Germany in general was the best way to stop the killing. The extermination camps in Poland were beyond the range of serious bombing missions from the Western Allies, unless the aircraft could refuel in Russia. Refueling rights were denied.

Lack of sympathy

Third, there may have been some degree of antisemitism that prevented it from being a high priority. The Soviets were closer to the extermination camps, but antisemitism was Soviet policy.

Trials

The main war criminals were tried at the Nuremberg Trials (International Military Tribunal of the Major War Criminals) (IMT) in 1945–1947, and at smaller trials throughout Europe, especially the U.S. Nuremberg Military Tribunals. Individuals were also tried in the countries where atrocities were committed, such as Rudolf Hoess, the first commandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp, in Poland, following his testimony at the IMT.