Understanding the History of the Holocaust I
The Holocaust Events
The Holocaust, or the Shoah(as it is known in Hebrew), is perhaps the most significantevent of modern Jewish history, and one of the most central events of all time. Justifiably, it has been called "The Third Destruction of World Jewry" (Jacob Lestschinsky, Crisis, Catastrophe and Survival).Besides the destruction of the first two Temples, the Holocaust may have been the most devastating event in the annals of Jewish history, changing the condition of the Jewish People in every respect.
This Morasha class is devoted to providing insight into thehistory of the Holocaust. The unspeakable horrors of those years molded the face of modern Jewry, and its history is crucial to understanding the issues that continue to confront the Jewish People. The second Morasha class on the history of the Holocaust will address Jewish resistance, miracles and righteous Gentiles, and a third one will discuss The Holocaust and Jewish Faith.
In this class we will discuss the following:
- What were the forms of persecution inflicted on the Jews of Germany before the war?
- What happened to Jews in the countries invaded by the Germans?
- What happened to Jews after they were taken prisoner by the Nazis?
- In what way were the events of the Holocaust unprecedented and unnatural?
- How did the world respond (or not)?
Class Outline
Section I. Basic Events of the Holocaust
Part A. Germany before the War – Harassment and Humiliation
Part B. Kristallnacht and Organized Persecution
Part C. Upon Invasion: Ghettos and Killing Squads
Part D. The Death Camps
Part E. Death Marches and War’s End
Section II. The Unprecedented Scope of the Holocaust
Part A. The Obsession of Adolf Hitler
Part B. The Nazi Party and the German People
Part C. Collaboration and Passivity in Europe
Part D. Abandoned by the Free World
Part E. The Horror of the Holocaust
Part F. The Holocaust in the Context of Jewish History
Postscript. The Difficulty ofAcceptance
Appendix: Timeline of the Holocaust (in separate document)
Section I: Basic Events of the Holocaust
Providing an overview of the Holocaust is a tremendous challenge. The events of the Holocaust were so horrific that a discussion of every aspect of the Jewish people’s terrible suffering during those years could fill many volumes. It is probably impossible to enumerate the greatly varied forms of torture, and ultimately cold-blooded murder, that the Jews of Europe endured. Consequently, the very brevity of an overview of the Holocaust makes it a poor vehicle to convey the reality and magnitude of what took place during those years. Nevertheless, we can isolate a number of main categories of persecution that occurred during that time, which will give us an inkling of the horrors that the Jewish people suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
1. “About the Holocaust,” yadvashem.org – The enormity of the Nazis’ crime
The Holocaust was the murder by Nazi Germany of six million Jews. While the Nazi persecution of the Jews began in 1933, the mass murder was committed during World War II. It took the Germans and their accomplices four and a half years to murder six million Jews. They were at their most efficient from April to November 1942 – 250 days in which they murdered some two and a half million Jews. They never showed any restraint, they slowed down only when they began to run out of Jews to kill, and they only stopped when the Allies defeated them.There was no escape. The murderers were not content with destroying the communities; they also traced each hidden Jew and hunted down each fugitive. The crime of being a Jew was so great, that every single one had to be put to death – the men, the women, the children; the committed, the disinterested, the apostates; the healthy and creative, the sickly and the lazy – all were meant to suffer and die, with no reprieve, no hope, no possible amnesty, nor chance for alleviation.
Most of the Jews of Europe were dead by 1945. A civilization that had flourished for almost 2,000 years was no more. The survivors – one from a town, two from a host – dazed, emaciated, bereaved beyond measure, gathered the remnants of their vitality and the remaining sparks of their humanity, and rebuilt. They never meted out justice to their tormentors – for what justice could ever be achieved after such a crime? Rather, they turned to rebuilding: new families forever under the shadow of those absent; new life stories, forever warped by the wounds; new communities, forever haunted by the loss.
2. Professor Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry 1933-1945, Shocken Books, p. 5 – Experiences of the Jews throughout Europe in the Holocaust
At first victims of Nazi propaganda, the Jews of Europe ultimately became victims of the most appalling murder machine in history. A relentless process of persecution, segregation and deportation to death camps claimed almost six million Jews, a million and a half of whom were children. With them perished a unique religious and intellectual civilization as well as immense contributions to general European life. In Germany, the descent from persecution to death took several years. In the western countries overrun by Germany the process was much swifter. But in eastern Europe, where the largest masses of Jews were concentrated, the process was swiftest of all and was made possible by the stepped-up tempo of war.Part A. Germany before the War – Harassment and Humiliation
Before the actual violence against the Jews began, they were already heavily persecuted. Hitler’s strategy began with a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses and the passing of intensely anti-Semitic laws.
1. Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror, Basic Books, p.90 –The beginning of the end
Between the Jewish boycott of April 1933 and the passage of the infamous Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, a large body of anti-Semitic legislation was passed that served to destroy further the Jews’ economic chances of survival, to exclude them from the German community as a whole, and to persuade them to leave the country.2. Ibid., p. 104 – The Nuremberg Laws
Enacted on the last day of the annual Nuremberg Party Rally (in 1935) and on the heels of yet another wave of popular outrages and anti-Semitic boycotts . . . the “Nuremberg Laws” provided the police and legal authorities with powerful new weapons to be used in persecuting the Jews. The new laws excluded Jews from citizenship rights, provided a legal definition of a Jew, and proscribed physical relations between Jews and non-Jews.The Nuremberg Laws reflected the warped philosophy of racial supremacy advocated by Hitler and his cronies.
3. “The Holocaust: Crash Course in Jewish History,” Rabbi Ken Spiro, aish.com – The Nuremberg laws aimed to separate the Jews from the “Aryan race.”
Some three years before he made his strides into Europe, Hitler was already putting into place his program to get rid of the Jews.It began in 1935 with the Nuremberg Laws. These laws basically canceled all the rights that Jews had won in Germany post-Enlightenment.
For so many years before the Enlightenment, Jews were hated because they were different and refused to assimilate. Post-Enlightenment, in the very country where the Jews assimilated the most easily, they were now hated because they were blending in too well. Hitler's ultimate nightmare was that Jews would intermarry with Germans and poison the gene-pool of the master race.
Hence the following laws were passed to preserve "the purity of German blood":
•"Marriages between Jews and subjects of German or kindred blood are forbidden."
•"Extramarital relationships between Jews and subjects of German or kindred blood are forbidden."
•"A Reich citizen can only be a state member who is a German of German blood and who shows through his conduct and is both desirous and fit to serve in the faith of the German people and Reich. The Reich citizen is the only holder of political rights."
•"A Jew cannot be a citizen of the Reich. He cannot exercise the right to vote. He cannot occupy public office."
•"Jews are forbidden to display the Reich's national flag or to show the national colors."
Systematically, Jews lost their citizenship, their political rights, and their economic rights.
Part B. Kristallnacht and Organized Persecution
While the years between 1933 and 1938 were already rife with anti-Semitism in Germany, matters came to a head with the notorious Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938.
1. Berel Wein, Faithand Fate: The Story of the Jewish People in the Twentieth Century, Artscroll/Mesorah Publications, p. 137 –Kristallnacht marked a turning point, when the anti-Semitic tide in Germany came to a head.
Anti-Semitic propaganda and increasing violence culminated in a mass pogrom on November 9, 1938 when Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” overwhelmed German Jewry. Synagogues were torched; Jews were killed in the hundreds and arrested in the thousands. Many ordinary Germans agreed with these anti-Jewish atrocities. Hitler’s propaganda machine had been broadcasting vastly inflated figures as to the number of Jewish doctors, lawyers, bankers and teachers in Germany, thus fanning German resentment. Anti-Semitism and the belief that Jews somehow “had gone too far” in integrating themselves into German society were deeply ingrained in the minds and hearts of the German citizenry.The horrors of the pogrom were premeditated and coordinated, carried out by Hitler’s soldiers with the ruthless efficiency that would soon typify the Nazis’ brutal conduct for the rest of the war.
2. The Holocaust, Nora Levin, Shocken Books, p. 81 –American witness, describing the night of Kristallnacht in Leipzig, Germany.
Jewish dwellings were smashed into and the contents demolished or looted. In one of the Jewish sections, an eighteen-year-old boy was hurled from a three-story window to land with both legs broken on a street littered with burning beds and other household furniture … Jewish shop windows by the hundreds were systematically and wantonly smashed throughout the city at a loss estimated at several millions of marks … The main streets of the city were a positive litter of shattered plate glass … The debacle was executed by SS men and Storm Troopers, not in uniform, each group having been provided with hammers, axes, crowbars, and incendiary bombs.Part C. Upon Invasion: Ghettos and Killing Squads
Over the ensuing years, persecution of the Jews, both in Germany and the many countries conquered by the Nazis, took many forms. Everywhere the Germans invaded (a total of twenty-one countries), their arrival heralded disaster for the Jews of that country – either instant death or a prolonged period of torment that ended, more often than not, in death as well.
1. Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews, Shocken Books p. 395 – Nazis instituted comprehensive, oppressive anti-Semitic laws, established ghettos and killed large numbers of Jews.
On September 1st, 1939, the German forces invaded Poland, and the second World War in a generation began. Within a few weeks, the country had been overrun, save for the zone occupied by the Russians, in which (as shortly after in the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) the Soviet order was introduced. The German-occupied area contained upwards of 2,000,000 Jews – in the main poverty-stricken but imbued with unbounded vitality and deep loyalty to Jewish tradition and values. They were exposed forthwith to a systematic campaign of oppression. It was simple in a country under martial law to impose crushing fines, to carry out wholesale executions, to institute compulsory labor service, or to demand a supply of Jewish girls for the military brothels. But all this was incidental. There was hardly a town or village throughout the country in which Jews were not butchered at this period by the German soldiery, sometimes in fantastic numbers. The food ration allotted to Jews later on was barely sufficient to maintain life, being only one-half of what was allowed to Polish Christians and a quarter of that enjoyed by Teutons. Shortly after the conquest of the country, the wearing of a Badge of Shame to distinguish Jew from non-Jew was instituted (November, 1939), as prescribed in the Middle Ages but never enforced in Europe since the period of the French Revolution. In the following year, the Ghetto, too, was reintroduced as a formal institution legally enforced. The largest, holding even at the outset upwards of 350,000 souls, was that of Warsaw, inaugurated in the autumn of 1940. This was surrounded by an eight-foot wall of concrete with several massive gates – a gloomy city within the city; there was a similar walled enclosure at Lodz, while in a dozen other cities there were segregated areas, cut off by electrically-charged wire fences. In the Middle Ages, egress from the Jewish quarter was allowed except at night; now, it was entirely forbidden without special permission, under pain of death for a second offense. The institution was, however, only a temporary expedient.2. Yadvashem.org – Nazi brutality upon occupying Poland.
As they marched into the towns of Poland, Germans preyed on the Jews they encountered, subjecting them to humiliation and beatings, shearing the beards of the Orthodox and organizing public hangings to terrorize the population. The perpetrators were members of special SS units who accompanied the regular military units. They torched synagogues and Jewish homes, and abducted Jews on the street for forced labor to repair the damage from the battles. After receiving enormous monetary fines for having “caused” the World War and its attendant devastation, Jewish leaders were inundated by decrees, such as the registration of a Jewish labor force and the imposition of compulsory labor. The Jews were steadily dispossessed of their possessions and deprived of their sources of livelihood. Throughout the occupied areas, the Germans restored the medieval practice of requiring Jews to wear a badge of shame – armbands with the Star of David or yellow Stars of David on their lapels – in order to identify them as Jews.A special division of the German army called the Einsatzgruppen (killing squads) was designated to enter each town, weed out its Jewish residents, and murder them en masse.
3. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933-1945,Penguin Books 1975, pp. 165-168– Two million Jews were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen.
The unit assigned to killing the Jews of a given place would enter a village or city and order the prominent Jewish citizens to call together all Jews for the purpose of resettlement. They were requested to hand over their valuables to the leaders of the unit, and shortly before the execution to surrender their outer clothing. The men, women and children were led to a place of execution which in most cases was located next to a more deeply excavated anti-tank ditch. Then they were shot, kneeling or standing, and the corpses thrown into the ditch …At Nuremberg the International Military Tribunal concluded that of the approximately six million Jews murdered, two million were killed by the Einsatzgruppen and other units of the security police.
In many places, Jews were herded into ghettos – tiny, fenced-in areas large enough to hold no more than a fraction of the number of people the Germans confined there. In these ghettos, living conditions were abysmal.
4. “Daily Life in the Ghettos,” Yadvashem.org – The horrid conditions of the ghettos where Jewish victims of German persecution lived.
The Jews were only permitted to take a few personal items with them to the ghetto, in the process being stripped of the homes and property that they had left behind. The ghettos were extremely crowded and often lacked basic electrical and sanitary infrastructure. The food rations were insufficient for supporting the ghettos’ inhabitants, and the Germans employed brutal measures against the smugglers, including both public and private executions. Starvation increased and worsened in the ghettos and many of the inhabitants became ill or perished.Part D. The Death Camps
The brutal persecution of the Jews continued as many were shipped off either to “death camps,” where most were ruthlessly murdered, or to “labor camps,” which meant backbreaking slave labor. Often, this labor ultimately ended in death, as well.
1. Rabbi Berel Wein, Faith and Fate, Shaar Press, p. 170 – Overview of the concentration camps.
The first large killing camps were Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chmelno, Majdanek, and Maly Trostenets. This latter camp was just outside of Minsk in White Russia. It was the only large killing camp not on Polish soil. It boasted a record of no known survivors. But these camps, murderous as they were (over two million people – mostly Jews – died in them), were minor league in comparison to the enormous killing camp built at Auschwitz-Birkenau in southern Poland. From 1941 until its closing in 1944 when the Red Army stood at its gates, more than 2,500,000 people were killed at the camp. It was also a work camp where the thousands who were not killed immediately were nevertheless worked to death slowly and painfully. Fritz Saukel, the head of the German slave-labor apparatus, described his goals succinctly: “All the inmates must be fed, sheltered and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the fullest possible extent, at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure.” It is no wonder that in 1943, in Auschwitz alone, 25,000 workers died of “natural causes.” Ironically, the slave-labor factories remained uniformly unsuccessful economically. The Germans set up concentration camps in France, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Germany and the Baltic States. Although some of these camps were not officially killing camps, innocent people died in vast numbers in all of them.The brutal treatment of the Jews began even before they were interred in the death camps, when they were initially rounded up to be dispatched there.