1. religion and spirituality
2. judaism

HOLOCAUST
THE
What it was
Why it was
Why it is remembered
Paul Kopperman
Professor of History
Oregon State University
© 2003 Paul Kopperman
Printed in the
United States
of America
All rights reservedA Publication of
the Anti-Defamation League
© 2003 Paul Kopperman
Printed in the United States of America • All rights reserved
Note to readers:
This is one of three booklets on the Holocaust written by Paul Kopperman.
All are available from the ADL, which should be contacted for further information.
The Holocaust: Essentials is directed especially to public school students and more
generally to readers who seek a brief introduction to the subject.
The Holocaust: What It Was - Why It Was - Why It Is Remembered is intended for a general
readership. Somewhat more detailed, it is also illustrated and is supplemented by readings.
Ashes and Smoke: The Holocaust in Its History is the most detailed and is designed
for teachers, college students, and others who may desire a fuller study of the Holocaust,
its background, and its implications. It is illustrated and a guide to readings and a list
of resources for teachers are appended.
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
BACKGROUND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
HITLER AND THE HOLOCAUST . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
CREDITS
AND
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The photograph captioned “Ringed by
COMMON QUESTIONS
REGARDING THE HOLOCAUST . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
smiling SS men ...” (p. 32) is reproduced
How much is actually known? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
by permission of Archive Photos.
How much was known while
the Holocaust was taking place?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
I wish to thank Charles Lind, who drafted the
map on p. 16; Karen Freeman, who scanned many of
Why didn’t the Jews flee,
to escape the Nazis? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
the images that I have used as illustrations;
Why didn’t the Jews fight back? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Dianna Fisher and Teresa Preddy, who gave of
their time and computer savvy to help bring this
Could anything have been
done to help the Jews? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
project to fruition. Finally, I would like to thank
What were the perpetrators like? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
the Western Civ. student who, twenty years ago,
set this project in motion by asking me,
"How could the Holocaust have happened?"
Book Design & Layout: David Kopperman
Was the Holocaust unique? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
The Holocaust took place more than
fifty years ago.. Why study it now? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
WORDS TO PONDER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
This booklet is dedicated to the scholars,
artistic performers, and others who have
participated in the Holocaust Memorial
BACK
GROUND
Program at Oregon State University since its
inception in 1987, and especially to the
survivors, rescuers, liberators, and witnesses
who through the years have given freely of
their time and energy to speak at OSU and in
local schools:
Eva & Leslie Aigner
Eline Hoekstra
Jacques Bergman
Edgar Krasa
Jacob Boas
Chella Kryszek
Murray Brown
Fred Manela
Knud Dyby
Sibylle Niemoller
Alex Fischler
Sam Soldinger
Moshe Garfein
Stanley Swan
Diana Golden
Al Wiener
Miriam Greenstein
Itka Zygmuntowicz
By bearing witness to the high cost of hatred,
they lead the way toward tolerance.
“Holocaust” is the name often given to the campaign of murder that cost the lives of about six
million Jews during World War II. It was organized and “Holocaust”
carried through
the often
Nazis of
is theby
name
Germany
andtoby
their
allies and
supporters
given
the
campaign
of murder
almost throughout Europe. The Holocaust itself
that cost the lives of about six
was mainly confined to the years 1941-45, but in
Jews how
during
World
War
II.
order million
to understand
it could
have
happened
it is necessary
to start
much further
back and to
It was
organized
and carried
review the course of the prejudice that prompted
through by the Nazis of Germany
genocide.
and by their allies and supporters
almost throughout Europe.
The Holocaust itself was mainly
confined to the years 1941-45, but
in order to understand how it could
have happened it is necessary
to start much further back and
to review the course of the
prejudice that prompted genocide.
Nazi wartime poster;
caption reads,
“Behind the
enemy powers:
the Jew”
A
ntisemitism, or prejudice against Jews, can
be traced back thousands of years and has
been maintained in many cultures. However, the
type that led ultimately to the Holocaust
primarily grew out of early Christianity. Almost
from the moment that Christianity branched off
from Judaism, there were angry accusations on
both sides. Certainly the most devastating
charge, however, was that of decide: that Jews
were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus because, according to the New Testament,
a Jewish mob in Jerusalem had called for his
execution - and it soon became common for
Christian authorities to claim that the guilt
extended to all Jews, for all time.
As both Judaism and Christianity spread
into Europe, the two communities carried with
them mutual hostility. Many early Christian
leaders looked on Judaism as an unacceptable
alternative to what they regarded as the “true”
faith, and they also considered Jews to be rivals
as they sought to convert pagan Europeans to
Christianity. In fact, Jews did not seek converts
to nearly the degree that Christians did, and
partly for this reason Christianity soon became
predominant in Europe. By 1000 almost all
European nations were overwhelmingly
Christian, and although there were Jewish
communities to be found in most regions,
Jews always represented a small minority.
Moreover, they were for the most part passive,
living quietly, neither seeking converts nor
challenging government authority. Nevertheless,
Antisemitism continued strong.
Christian animosity was translated into
policy by the various churches, notably the
church that was based in Rome (later to be
known as Roman Catholic). This church was not
more hostile to the Jews than were others, but it
1
several synagogues that had been destroyed by
Christian mobs. On the other hand, he endorsed
the anti-Jewish policies of the Spanish government.
Violence he opposed, but he felt that some
persecution was necessary, in order to reduce
Jewish influence and promote conversion.
From about 300 onward, the cause of
Christianity benefited from the willingness of
Christian rulers to work in cooperation with the
church. One result of this alliance was an
increase in persecution of the Jews. Government
decrees imposed many penalties on Jews and
some rulers went further, demanding that their
Jewish subjects accept baptism and threatening
death to those who refused it.
Gregory I
was easily the most important in shaping the
Christian aspect of Europe. Early church policy on
the Jews focused on removing Jewish influence
over Christians. Several popes forbade all
communication between Christians and Jews,
and although these sweeping decrees probably had
little impact they summed up the more general
policy. A series of church councils prohibited
marriages between Christians and Jews and
demanded that Jews not be granted any
government offices that gave them authority
over Christians. Individual bishops sought the
elimination of Judaism within their dioceses,
ordering that Jews either convert to Christianity
or leave, and a council in Toledo in 638 took this
policy to a national level, banishing from Spain
all Jews who refused to be baptized. Papal policy,
especially as put forward by Gregory I (pope,
590-604), tended to be more moderate. Gregory,
whose influence was to be felt for centuries, stated
that Jews should not be converted by force and
that they and their property should not be
harmed. He even ordered the rebuilding of
2
Beyond the particular policies of church and
state, there was the general theme: that Jews
were the enemy of Christians and therefore must
be dealt with harshly. In the late fourth century,
John Chrysostom, patriarch of Constantinople,
insisted that “it is incumbent upon all Christians
to hate the Jews.” Around 1450, another
influential cleric, the Italian friar Giovanni da
Capistrano, stated, “To fight the Jew is a duty of
the Catholic, not a choice.” The message had
John Chrysostom
endured for more than a thousand years
and had become fixed in the minds of countless
Europeans. Not surprisingly, it encouraged
violence.
Jews were subjected to occasional mob
assault during the centuries prior to 1000, but it
seems rather to have been during the period
1000-1500 that large-scale violence became
common. Often events that spurred religious
fervor in Christian Europe were the occasion for
massacre. At the time of the First Crusade
(1095-99), for example, crusaders and peasant
mobs killed at least 30,000 Jews in France,
Germany, and Hungary. After the crusaders
took Jerusalem, they forced the local Jews into
their central synagogue, then burnt it to the
ground. Several later crusades were likewise
accompanied by massacres of Jews.
Religious fanaticism was most dangerous
when linked to nationalism. The Jews were
looked on as outsiders, wherever they lived, and
the more nationalism intensified, the more likely
they were to face violence. In Spain, where Jews
enjoyed some measure of toleration and prosperity
during the period 1100-1300, rising nationalist
feeling, accompanied by religious bigotry,
moved mobs to attack the Jews again and again
during the Late Middle Ages (1300-1500).
The worst violence came in 1391-92, when
perhaps 70,000 Jews were killed and an equal or
greater number were forced to accept baptism.
In the overall period, as many as 120,000 Spanish
Jews lost their lives. Finally, in 1492, the Jews
were expelled from Spain, as they earlier had
been from England (1290) and France (1306).
The growth of mob violence reflects the
fact that Antisemitism had taken on a life of its
own and could flourish with or without the
Jews are burnt in Cologne, 15th century
encouragement of church and state. Violence
against the Jews often took place even when
church leaders and major government officials
sought to prevent it. In 1096, a mob of crusaders
and townspeople rose against the Jewish
community of Mainz, and the bishop there
offered the Jews protection in his own large
residence. Nevertheless, the mob, as reported by
a chronicler, “attacked the Jews in the hall with
arrows and lances. Breaking the bolts and doors,
they killed the Jews, about seven hundred in
number, who in vain resisted the force and attack
of so many thousands. They killed the women,
also, and with their swords pierced tender
children of whatever age or sex.”
During the Middle Ages, Jews faced the
greatest danger when government was weak.
Usually, the state, seconded by the church
leadership, tried to prevent mob violence. But at
the same time church and state continued to
promote persecution and vilification of the Jews,
thereby encouraging a mentality that made
violence inevitable.
In this atmosphere of hatred, even the
wildest rumors about the Jews were widely
believed. During the period 1000-1500 a vast
range of Antisemitic myths and stereotypes
3
German
depiction
of horned
legend had existed for more than a millennium,
but the myth gained prominence in the twelfth
century. After it became popular, there were
hundreds of cases of Jews, sometimes entire
communities, being killed when some Christian
child was found dead and the rumor arose that
he had been murdered by them. The Blood Libel
persisted into the twentieth century, despite the
fact that from the beginning it was denounced as
preposterous by some Christian authorities.
faded they left a dangerous residue.
The Europeans of Hitler’s time may not have
believed that Jews had horns, but they continued
to imagine that they were monstrous and not
truly human. They may have doubted that Jews
really drank the blood of Christian children or
that they were given to assaulting the Host, yet
they readily accepted the implicit message: that
Jews hated Christians and all things Christian.
Jew, 15th
century
sprung up in Europe. One popular myth had it
that Jews were horned. The belief probably grew
from another: that Jews were children of the
devil (who was thought to have horns). Other
myths about the Jewish body - for example, that
they were hunchbacked - also became common.
These myths made Jews appear to be monstrous
and magnified the fear and hatred of them.
Another popular myth was that Jews
sometimes stole the Host (a consecrated wafer,
supposed to be the body of Jesus) and pierced it
with knives or used it to parody the Mass.
In 1298 a report that Jews in one German town
Jewish stockbroker; German, Nazi period
Jewish
moneylender
lives well
at expense
of debtors;
German,
Other myths portrayed the Jews as evil
and dangerous. One, the “Blood Libel,” had it
that Jews occasionally murdered Christian
children and drank their blood. Versions of this
Jews
knifing
Host;
German,
15th
century
had desecrated the Host prompted a nobleman
named Rindfleisch to build an army and lead it
through Austria and Bavaria, plundering and
destroying Jewish communities as it went.
Before the year was out, many thousands of Jews
- estimates went as high as 100,000 - had
perished. Although this was the worst violence
to spring from a rumor of Host desecration, it
was not the only mass assault.
Depiction of a case of ritual murder,
with names affixed to Jews accused of
the crime; German, 15th century
4
16th century
These myths were widely and literally
believed for many centuries, but even when they
Stereotypes, too - negative portrayals that
were fairly associated with some individuals,
but were unjustifiably applied to their group at
large - also poisoned medieval attitudes toward
the Jews. Among these, one of the most
damaging was the Jew as moneylender.
Some Jews did in fact lend money to Christians,
often at high interest. But other Jews interacted
with the broader community in ways that had no
negative connotation. Jewish physicians provided,
in hundreds of towns, the most professional
medical help that was available, and there is
ample evidence that many communities valued
their work. Nevertheless, the image of Jew as
physician did not impress itself on the public
mind. On the other hand, the image of the Jew as
moneylender not only became an important element
in the overall stereotype, but it was adapted by
later ages to encompass the Jew as banker,
financier, stockbroker, industrialist, capitalist - in
short, the Jew as manipulator and as exploiter.
In point of fact, few major European bankers and
industrialists of later centuries were Jewish,
and whatever harm these men were responsible
for could not reasonably be blamed just on the
Jews among them, and even less on Jews as a
group. But the stereotype was not reasonable.
Possibly the most pervasive charge
hurled against medieval Jews was that they were
a nation unto themselves and were hostile to the
countries where they happened to reside.
Building on this belief was the myth that Jews
were conspiring to destroy Christian Europe.
A catastrophic early manifestation of the fear of
an “international Jewish conspiracy” came in
1348-49. The Black Death (bubonic plague) was
sweeping Europe at the time, killing millions,
and the story spread that Jews had caused the
5
outbreak. Rumor had it that Jewish leaders from
all over Europe had met in Prague, and their
chief had given them vials of poison, with
instructions that at a specified time they should
empty the contents into the wells in their home
districts, thereby causing a pestilence. Despite
the fact that Jews themselves were dying from
the Plague in great numbers, and despite a papal
pronouncement that they were innocent, the
rumor was widely believed. Within months,
mobs in Poland, Germany, and elsewhere
slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews. Belief in
an international Jewish conspiracy would echo
down the ages. In the end, it would prove to be
a major cause of the Holocaust.
The boundless hatred reflected in these reports,
the desire of the killers to cause not merely death
but agonizing death, these attitudes would be
mirrored in the Holocaust.
Even after the massacres ceased, virulent
Jew-hatred continued to thrive in this region.
Among the common people it retained a
medieval flavor, drawing heavily on myths that
had by now been discounted in the west.
The churches, too, continued to play a large part
in promoting Antisemitism. But perhaps what
set the region off most dramatically from the rest
of Europe was that the state was so active in
persecuting the Jews.
A statue of Chmielnicki, Kiev
The demonization of Jews was promoted
by rumor, exaggeration, and sheer myth. Hatred
was woven into Christian prayers and hymns,
and it was a common feature of sermons.
Works of fiction, too, played their part in driving
home the message. In societies that were
predominantly illiterate, stage pieces had the
greatest impact, for unlike printed literature they
reached a mass audience. Crowds that might not
have distinguished fact from fiction and were
willing to believe the worst saw Jewish
characters on stage (though not Jewish
performers) admitting to evil deeds and
promising that worse was to come.
The Reformation of the sixteenth century
saw Antisemitism grafted onto Protestantism by
the founder of that movement, Martin Luther,
who wrote in 1543, “we cannot tolerate [the
Jews] if we do not wish to share in their lies,
curses, and blasphemy.” Not all Protestants, even
at this early date, were as hostile to the Jews as
was Luther. The Calvinists (denominations
inspired by John Calvin, d. 1564) were often
more tolerant, and it was an English Calvinist,
6
Luther
Oliver Cromwell, who invited the Jews to return
to England (1655). It is also worth noting that
during the Holocaust period the Scandinavian
countries, which were predominantly Lutheran,
had an unmatched record for protecting the
Jews. Luther’s impact, however, was not just as
a religious leader, but as a nationalist, and among
his German followers he reinforced the
conviction that Jews were a danger to Germany.
By the close of the Middle Ages, most
Jews had either fled, or had been expelled from,
western Europe. Some sought refuge in the
Muslim world, but most instead traveled to central
Europe, especially Poland, where the
government offered them toleration. While the
government might be tolerant, however - and even
this was to change - the populace seems always
to have been hostile. Indeed, all future massacres
of European Jews, including the Holocaust,
were to be concentrated in central Europe.
The first major assault on the Jews of this
region came in 1648, when armies of Ukrainians
and Cossacks, led by Bogdan Chmielnicki,
massacred Jews throughout the Ukraine and on
into Poland and Lithuania. As violence spread,
local mobs joined in the carnage. The Chmielnicki
massacres, which continued until 1657, cost the
lives of at least 100,000 Jews, possibly several
times that figure, making them more devastating
than any such campaign prior to the twentieth
century. But even beyond numbers, accounts
testify to the brutality of the murderers. They tell
of men being flayed, of women being cut open
and having live cats sewn into them, of infants
being spitted and roasted alive. A contemporary
described one massacre as follows: “The [rabbi]
was the first to offer himself as a martyr. Young
and old saw the tortures, sufferings and wounds
of the teacher who did not cease exhorting them
to accept martyrdom in the name of God.
The victims were killed with spears in order that
they would die more slowly. Husbands, wives
and children fell in heaps. They were not buried
and dogs and swine fed on the bodies.”
The Russian government was consistently
hostile. In the late fifteenth century, Jews were
barred from residing in Russia. Moreover, as the
empire expanded and swallowed up areas where
Jews lived, it dealt with them harshly. For example,
when in 1563 Russian forces seized a Polish city,
the tsar, Ivan the Terrible, ordered that the Jews
there be forcibly converted to Christianity.
Those who resisted were to be drowned.
During the eighteenth century Russia came to
control a vast tract of land in central Europe,
a tract that was home to the majority of European
Jews. Rather than allow these Jews to enter
Russia, in 1772 Catherine the Great restricted
them to the newly acquired areas, the “Pale of
Settlement.” Russian expansion continued, and
eventually the Pale came to encompass a region
that extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea and
included Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine.
Most Jews remained fixed in the Pale until it was
abolished in 1917, after the Russian Revolution.
Within the Pale, a typical Jew lived in a
shtetl (a predominantly Jewish village). Jewish
culture and communal life flourished in these
7
surroundings, so much so that the world of the
shtetl - a world finally destroyed in the
Holocaust - is even today recalled nostalgically
by many Jews. It was, however, in some ways a
harsh world, marked by incessant persecution
emanating from the government of the tsar.
L e g a l l y b a r re d f ro m a g r i c u l t u re , most
professions, and many forms of business, Jews
were kept in poverty. Beyond that, however, they
were kept in fear, for the government was quite
open in its determination to solve the Jewish
Problem, one way or another.
For the relatively small Jewish
communities of Germany and western Europe,
the situation was somewhat better. From the
sixteenth through the early twentieth century,
Jews in this region were seldom subjected to mob
violence. And although governments were
usually hostile to some degree, the level of
persecution that was the norm in the Pale was
rare here. Still, Antisemitism continued strong,
even in periods that were characterized by new
ideas and the abandonment of old ones.
From about 1700 on, it became less
fashionable for educated Europeans to justify
Jew-hatred solely on religious grounds. Instead,
nationalism provided the primary justification.
To Europeans generally, the Jews appeared to
constitute a separate nation. Some believed,
furthermore, that Jews like other nations partook
of an essential nature that was uniquely theirs.
Even if they converted to Christianity, they could
not change that nature. The Germans were a
nation, the French were a nation, the English
were a nation - the Jews were a nation.
Ever since the Middle Ages the claim had
been heard that Jews were essentially different
from the broader populations among whom they
8
lived and that this difference was not only the
result of their upbringing, but of innate qualities,
what later ages would call “genetics.” During
the latter half of the nineteenth century, however,
the rather fuzzy concept of differentness was put
forward in a much more rigorous way. The new
dividing line that would set Jews apart was race.
Although there were many contributors,
racialism sprung particularly from Essay on the
Inequality of Human Races, a two-volume work
written by a French aristocrat, Count Joseph
Arthur de Gobineau, and published 1853-55.
Gobineau argued that history was shaped by the
conflict and interaction of the human races.
Among the components of the white race, he
argued, none was more important than the IndoEuropean, or “Aryan,” the creator of all
European civilizations. Another racial subgroup was the Semites, which included the Jews.
Soon other writers were embroidering
Gobineau’s basic concept with a web of theory
and “scientific” observation that seemed scholarly.
In part because of this, racialism came to have a
special appeal to those who fancied themselves
intellectual. Soon, too, racialists began to cast
the Semites - which, in the context of Europe,
meant the Jews - as a wholly despicable race and
as the main threat to the Aryans, hence,
to civilization. German racialists, and some of
other nationalities, further argued that while
most European nations had already been
debased by “semitization” - interbreeding with
the Jews - Germans had largely retained their
racial purity. For this reason, the argument went,
Jews had a particular hatred for Germany, and an
obsession with destroying it, as they had
destroyed other European civilizations.
Yet another product of nineteenthcentury thought that was in some cases to prove
damaging to Jews was Marxism. Not all Marxists
were Antisemitic, and indeed some, including
Karl Marx himself, were of Jewish descent,
though few practiced Judaism. But many of them
were hostile to the Jews, identifying them with
capitalism. Marx wrote, “What is the worldly
Gobineau
“Race,” as the term was used by
Gobineau and his successors, was in part defined
by physical attributes like skin color. But a
person’s intelligence, capabilities, behavior, and
mentality - inner being, perspectives, values were likewise thought to be racially determined,
making each race very different from the others.
It was also widely believed that all races
were mutually hostile.
Marx
cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his
worldly god? Money.... Emancipation from
huckstering and from money, and consequently
from practical, real Judaism, would be the selfemancipation of our era.” The Marxist tendency
to see capitalism as innate in Jews encouraged
Antisemitism on the left, while racialism
appealed to the right.
In Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, and
some other areas, these ideologies were not
always linked to Jew-hatred, for Jews had been to
some degree accepted as simply an element in
the population. Generally, however, the new
doctrines did much to magnify Antisemitism.
Furthermore, to Europeans who were becoming
more secular in outlook, they helped to
modernize Jew-hatred, by reducing the
importance of religion in the mix.
Even as new arguments to justify
Antisemitism were gaining popularity, Jews
were becoming more integrated into European
society. For several centuries prior to 1800, most
Jews in western and central Europe had lived in
- in many cases, had been legally restricted to walled quarters, often called “ghettos.”
Beginning in about 1750, however, young Jews
began to leave the ghettos, seeking advancement
in business and the professions. Within a
century, Jews were achieving prominence in
broader society and were making an impact not
only as professionals and businessmen but as
artists and politicians. Furthermore, by the
middle of the nineteenth century, Jews had won
full citizenship in most nations of central and
western Europe, and at least on paper they
enjoyed the same rights as did their nonJewish countrymen. As these developments
demonstrate, there was at least grudging
acceptance of the Jews in some quarters.
Nevertheless, many Europeans feared the new
direction, believing that Jews were poised to take
over European politics and culture. For centuries,
9
Jews had been hated for standing apart from
broader European society. Now, they were hated
for taking an increasingly active role in it.
Yet another dramatic reflection of the
depth of Jew-hatred came in Russia (as well as
Poland and the Ukraine), where political crises
led the government to exploit popular
Antisemitism by encouraging mob attacks on the
Jews, the “pogroms.” Nor did the fall of the
tsarist government quickly bring violence to an
end. During the years 1918-20 tens of thousands
of Jews were massacred, mostly by Ukrainian
nationalists and by Russians who opposed the
newly installed Bolshevik regime (which they
believed to be under the control of the Jews).
perspectives. To nationalists, Jews were
strangers, their own nation, “the enemy within.”
To racialists, they were innately malevolent and
were corrupters of the superior Aryan race.
To Marxists and laborers, they were capitalist
exploiters. The poor saw them as rich and
envied their wealth. The weak saw them as powerful and resented their influence. Arguments
put forward to justify Antisemitism were many,
but the bottom line was always the same: hatred
of the Jews.
Clearly, the Holocaust did not spring
from nowhere. The hatred of Jews was age-old,
and it had often caused violence in the past.
During the Nazi period, and particularly in
Germany and in the former Pale of Settlement,
there were literally tens of millions who were
eager to see the Jews victimized by violence.
When the Holocaust came, many of these people
would take part in the killing. Others would
turn the Jews in for slaughter. Great numbers of
Europeans would simply turn a deaf ear to the
Jews who so desperately needed refuge. And a
few, but only a few, would risk their own lives to
help their Jewish neighbors.
The Jew-hatred that descended to the
twentieth century was multi-faceted. Religiously
based Antisemitism was still widespread,
especially in some regions of Europe, and it was
not uncommon to hear the hatred of Jews being
justified on the grounds that they were antiChristian or were Christ-killers. But the nature
of justification had broadened during the
nineteenth century, and it allowed for many
10
The Jew portrayed as an enemy
of Christianity; Rumanian, c.1910
HITLER
A
AND THE
HOLOCAUST
lthough Adolf Hitler was to become the
embodiment of virulent Jew-hatred and
of the Holocaust that it occasioned,
his Antisemitism was in no way original.
Hitler, who was born in April 1889 in the
Austrian village of Braunau, was probably
exposed to conventional Antisemitism at an
early age, and according to a boyhood friend,
even as an adolescent he was given to making
negative comments about the Jews. Hitler himself,
however, later claimed that he had undergone
a sudden conversion to Antisemitism and that it
had come in 1909, when, on the streets of Vienna,
he encountered “an apparition in a long caftan
with black locks. Is this a Jew? was my first
thought.... But the longer I stared at this alien
face ... the more my first question was
transformed into a new conception. Is this a
German?” So it was that Hitler, on the basis of
seeing one Jew in traditional costume, had a
revelation: A Jew could not be a German.
In the case of Hitler, the key question is
not when he became an Antisemite but rather
when he became virulently Antisemitic.
This transformation may not have occurred until
the last months of World War One. What is
certain is that by the close of the war his Jewhatred was intense and that he had accepted a
complex of accusations and stereotypes that
showed the Jews to be not only a potential but a
present danger, already with much German
blood on their hands and on the verge of triumph
over the culture and people of Germany.
The defeat of Germany in the war had not come
on the battlefield, he believed, but rather because
the “November Criminals” - Jews and their
accomplices - had stabbed the nation in the back
by forcing out the kaiser and agreeing to the
armistice that had brought the war to a close in
November 1918. In 1921 he wrote, “The army
11
command made one mistake: that it did not
string up in good time all the filthy Jewish
rabble that drove our people into the dreadful
calamity of 1918.”
Hitler was obsessed by the Jewish
Problem. In a speech of February 1925, he stated,
“The greatest danger is and remains the alien
poison in our body. All other dangers are
transitory.” Again and again, he evoked the
image of the Jew as parasite, as leech, as destroyer:
“The Jew has never founded any civilization,”
he said in 1922, “though he has destroyed
hundreds.” He further claimed that the Jew had
remained unchanged for 2000 years: “He poisons
the blood of others, but preserves his own.”
Judaism was not a religion, he insisted, but only
a cover for greed. For centuries the Jew had
prospered by sucking the blood of the masses,
but even this was not enough: “In keeping with
the ultimate aims of the Jewish struggle,
which are not exhausted in the mere economic
conquest of the world, but also demand its
political subjugation ... he stops at nothing, and
in his vileness he becomes so gigantic that no one
need be surprised if among our people the
personification of the devil as the symbol of all
evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.”
Hitler imagined the Jews to be nearing
their goal of world domination. He blamed
World War One on international Jewish finance,
publicly stating this on a number of occasions.
In January 1939, during a speech to the
Reichstag, he addressed the possibility of
another war. Again, he pointed to Jews as the
instigators, and warned of the price they would
pay: “If international finance Jewry in and
outside Europe succeeds in plunging the peoples
into another world war, then the end result will
not be the Bolshevization of the earth and the
12
consequent victory of Jewry but the annihilation
of the Jewish race in Europe.”
During his early period of prominence,
1920-32, Hitler spoke or wrote countless times of
what should be done to the Jews of Germany.
Sometimes he called for the expulsion of Jews
from Germany, sometimes for their “disappearance.”
Occasionally, however, he spoke of liquidation.
In 1922, he told a crowd, “If I am ever really in
power, the annihilation of the Jews will be my
first and foremost task.” Some historians believe
that Hitler was fantasizing when he made such
statements and that at this early date he was not
actually conceiving of the destruction of
European, even German, Jewry. Nevertheless,
three points can be made with assurance, and all
bear on the Holocaust: Hitler’s hatred and fear
of the Jews was central to his world-view; as his
drive into war suggests, he was quite willing to
use violence on a massive scale; he considered
life, especially non-Aryan life, very cheap.
Albert Speer, who entered Hitler’s inner circle in
1934, wrote in 1969, “For him who cared to hear,
Hitler had never concealed even his intention to
exterminate the Jewish people.” There appears
little room for doubt that already by the early
1920’s Hitler saw severe persecution of German
Jews as being essential if Germany was to be
saved. Whether he envisioned persecution
moving to liquidation is the only point at issue.
In his rise to power, Hitler used
Antisemitism as a political weapon, blaming the
Jews for Germany’s defeat in the First World
War, portraying them as capitalist exploiters of
the German people, linking them to the
Bolshevik threat - in general, encouraging
everyone in his audience to place personal or
national failures and fears at the door of the Jews.
That his characterizations of the Jews were often
contradictory - for example, that they were both
capitalists and communists - made little
difference. Audiences believed him. More than
a thousand years of Antisemitism had
predisposed them to believe.
Hitler became chancellor of Germany in
January 1933, and by the close of March his
authority was almost absolute. Even as he was
consolidating power, he began to move against
the Jews. April 1933 brought a series of new
pronouncements and policies that were intended
to reduce Jewish involvement with the broader
community. The government declared an official
boycott of Jewish shops, doctors, and lawyers.
Nazi boycott, 1933
It effected the dismissal of all Jewish
schoolteachers and of any civil servant who had
even a single Jewish grandparent. The admission
of Jews to public schools and to universities was
sharply curtailed. Hitler offered to respect the
independence of the judiciary, provided that
various “necessary measures” were taken,
including the dismissal of all Jewish staff.
The judges agreed.
In stages, the Jews were stripped of the
legal protection enjoyed by other Germans.
April 1933 saw the enactment of no fewer than
eleven laws that impacted specifically on Jews.
This hectic pace reflected how seriously the
Nazis took their Antisemitic campaign, and there
was no letup. In all, nearly 200 pieces of AntiJewish legislation were generated between 1933
and 1939. Perhaps most significant were the
Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which: defined the
term “Jew” (anyone with three Jewish
grandparents, or two if he associated with the
Jewish community); barred Jews from marrying
Aryans; and denied them the status of “citizen of
the Reich.” By other legislation, German Jews
were barred from various occupations and were
placed under a number of legal disabilities.
Abroad, this legislation was widely
criticized, but aside from a few privately
sponsored boycotts of German goods nothing
was done. Indeed, while Germany went further
in institutionalizing Antisemitism than did other
nations, a number of European governments
initiated anti-Jewish policies during the 1930’s,
and discrimination against Jews was accepted
almost everywhere - if not by everyone - including
the United States. Fully one-third of Americans
responding to a poll in 1939 said that something
should be done to limit the power of Jews in the
business world; one-tenth of the respondents
said that Jews should be deported.
13
The Nazis placed a high priority on
insuring that the rising generation would be firm
in its Jew-hatred. German textbooks repeatedly
attacked the Jews, insisting that, in dozens
of ways, they had oppressed Germans and
had attempted to engineer the destruction of
Germany. Schoolteachers were expected to
reinforce the message in the texts by regularly
pointing out to their classes how dominant and
how dangerous to Germany Jews were - or at
least had been, before Hitler had stepped
forward to protect the German people.
Furthermore, if they had any Jewish pupils,
they were to heap ridicule on them. Outside the
schools, Hitler Youth, an organization that Aryan
teenagers were required to join, promoted
virulent Antisemitism among its members.
The press likewise vilified the Jews, both by
the printed word and in cartoons. So did films
and countless speeches.
The sources of
propaganda were numerous, and their message
was incessant.
From the first, the Nazi government
condoned acts of violence against German Jews,
and soon it turned to direct sponsorship. In early
November 1938, a Jewish teenager, infuriated
when the Germans deported his parents to their
native Poland, murdered a German official in
Paris. This was the occasion for the Nazis to
launch an intense verbal assault on the German
Jewish community and to encourage mob
violence against the Jews, promising that the
police would not interfere with “the spontaneous
reaction of the German people.” On November
9-10, “Crystal Night,” mobs throughout
Germany looted Jewish homes and businesses,
destroying 7000 Jewish-owned shops and many
synagogues. Thousands of Jews were beaten and
91 were murdered, but as promised, the
perpetrators went unpunished. Indeed, the Jewish
14
architect of the Holocaust in its early phase
(he was assassinated by Czech freedom fighters
in 1942). Heydrich not only helped Himmler rule
his empire, but had particular charge of mobile
units known as Einsatzgruppen (“Task Forces”),
which were to play a central role in
the Holocaust.
By mid-1941, the elements necessary to
engineer the “Final Solution” - the destruction of
European Jewry - were largely
in place.
Not only in Germany but throughout Nazioccupied or allied Europe, the Jews had been
stripped of most legal protection. In many cases,
as in the ghettos, they were physically cut off
from the broader community, and even in
regions where they were not, they were in general
easily distinguished, for the Germans and most
collaborationist or allied governments required
Jews to wear a yellow Star of David (the “badge
of shame”). The Jews were totally exposed,
with few friends and few defenses.
On July 31, 1941, Hermann Goering,
Hitler’s confidant and favorite, issued an order
charging Heydrich to make “all necessary
preparations in regard to organizational and
A synagogue ablaze on Kristallnacht
community was heavily fined for damage that
it had “caused” on this occasion, and shortly
thereafter 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration
camps - among the first in a long line that would
face incarceration and ultimately death.
While the Nazis had been mounting their
increasingly virulent campaign of Antisemitism,
they had also been organizing the corps that
would engineer the Holocaust. By 1939 Heinrich
Himmler - aside from Hitler, the most powerful
man in Germany - was in charge of a network of
units that even today are synonymous with
terror: the SS (Schutzstaffeln, “Protection
Squads”), a paramilitary police force that was the
core of the network; the Gestapo, or secret police;
and the Waffen SS, a conglomerate of armed
units that included the Order Police and the
Death’s Head Division. Himmler’s right-hand
man was Reinhard Heydrich, probably the chief
financial matters for bringing about a complete
Himmler
solution of the Jewish question in the German
sphere of influence in Europe. Wherever other
governmental agencies are involved, these are to
cooperate with you.” With this order, the Final
Heydrichj
Solution became a fixed element in state policy.
But mass killing had already begun. Just before
The first months of war in 1939 saw the
Germans sweep through Poland. This success,
combined with the earlier annexation of Austria
and much of Czechoslovakia, brought almost
four million Jews under German control.
Some Jews were killed and others deported,
but the main aim of German policy at this time,
especially in Poland, was to force them into ghettos,
where they could be isolated and so more easily
be managed. The policy of ghettoization
continued through 1940, a year marked by
Germany’s conquest of the Netherlands,
Belgium, and France, victories that imperiled
additional thousands of Jews.
German forces moved into the U.S.S.R.,
Einsatzgruppen commanders were informed,
“The Führer has ordered the liquidation of all
Jews, Gypsies, and Communist functionaries in
the entire area of the Soviet Union in order to
secure the territory.” The massacre of Jews
commenced almost at the moment the invasion
was launched, on June 22.
Goering’s order placed the entire
machinery of the state at Heydrich’s disposal.
During the months that followed, it was
particularly Heydrich who planned strategy for
obliterating the Jews of Europe. While the Nazis
15
had established concentration camps as early as
In late 1941 a second facility, Birkenau,
the mid-1930’s, Hitler’s order prompted the
was established there, and early in 1942 it began
construction of several camps that served no
to function as a death camp. All six camps were
function other than to effect the killing of as
in Poland (including a portion in the west that
many human beings as possible, as quickly as
had been annexed by Germany), which had the
possible. At all of these camps, the preponderant
largest Jewish population in Europe.
majority of those killed were Jews. The first of the
death camps, Chelmno, commenced operations
in December 1941.
By July 1942, Treblinka,
Belzec, and Sobibór were functioning.
Maidanek, established as a prisoner of war camp
in July 1941, became a killing center two years
later. The largest facility of all, Auschwitz,
had been opened as a concentration camp in 1940.
Once the Final Solution had been
undertaken, it was pursued with singlemindedness. Trains that were transporting Jews
to the death camps were given priority over even
those that were carrying German troops or
munitions. Nor were there exceptions to the rule
of death for Jews. During the war, Germany
faced a desperate labor shortage, and high
government officials like Speer pleaded that Jews
who could do essential jobs be allowed to live so
long as they were needed. Such requests were,
however, pushed aside by the SS, which had the
ear of Hitler. Some Jews were allowed to live and
labor for a time in ghettos or in camps like
Auschwitz, but the reprieve was intended to be
only temporary. Every Jew in Nazi-controlled
Europe lay under a death sentence.
Within the death camps, Nazi officials
and technocrats cooperated in streamlining the
process of liquidation. The Nazis took great
pride in these death camps, both in their efficiency
and their purpose. One visitor to Belzec,
a professor of hygiene, watched the gas chamber
in action, then told camp officials, “When one
sees the bodies of the Jews, one understands the
greatness of your work!” One of those who took
pride in efficiency of the killing process was
Rudolf Hoess, commandant at Auschwitz for
most of the war. Hoess later recalled that at
Treblinka the victims were killed with carbon
monoxide, a process that he considered
“not ... very efficient”: “So at Auschwitz, I used
Cyclon B, which was a crystallized prussic acid
dropped into the death chamber. It took from
three to fifteen minutes to kill the people in the
chamber, according to climatic conditions.
We knew when the people were dead because
they stopped screaming.” The gas chambers at
Auschwitz could, by his estimate, accommodate
2000 human beings - ten times more, he noted,
than could those at Treblinka.
A trainload of Hungarian Jews
arrives at Auschwitz
Europe, 1942
16
Hoess on trial
To the death camps came trainloads of
Jews from throughout Nazi-controlled Europe.
Jews were expected to pay for their passage, in
cash or with anything they possessed that might
have value. To the extent possible, the Final
Solution was intended to be self supporting.
Even years later, at Auschwitz and other camps,
the piles of clothing, glasses, and shoes taken
from Jews on arrival continue to bear witness to
the effort to make the victims pay for the process
that took their lives.
17
Once the Jews arrived, camp officials
concentrated on “processing” them quickly.
Husbands and wives, parents and children,
would be forcibly separated. They would then
be required to undress, and women would have
their hair shorn - clothing and hair were of use to
the regime. Last would come the gas chambers.
Within a few hours of their arrival, the Jews
would be dead. After the bodies were checked
for gold teeth, they were disposed of, most often
being incinerated in specially designed ovens
or in open pits.
At some camps, virtually all of the
arrivals were marked for immediate death.
At others, like Auschwitz, there were selections,
and some Jews (usually a minority of them) who
were judged to be fit enough to work were
allowed to live temporarily. To be a young child
meant certain death; as Hoess put it, “Children of
tender years were invariably exterminated since
by reason of their youth they were unable to
work.” Their parents, especially their mothers,
might be sent with them to the gas chambers.
Even Jews who passed the initial review would
usually fall into physical decline because of
A selection at Auschwitz; women with children,
separated from men, are destined for gassing
18
overwork, meager rations, or illness, and they
would be sent to the gas chambers at a later
selection, for the process was ongoing.
Kievan Jews
pass a body
on their way
to Babi Yar
By the time that the collapse of Nazi
Germany brought the Holocaust to a close,
perhaps three million Jews had been murdered
in the camps, especially the six that were mainly
designed for extermination. Auschwitz itself
was the site of about 1.1 million deaths.
The other main organ of the Holocaust was the
killing
squads,
particularly
Heydrich’s
Einsatzgruppen. These units killed about 1.5
million Jews. They were most active in 1941-42,
especially in Russia and the Ukraine. In one
instance, September 29- 30, 1941, a detachment of
Einsatzgruppe C shot 33,771 men, women, and
children, almost all of them Jews, by the ravine at
Babi Yar, near Kiev. Matters were so arranged
that as each victim was shot, he or she fell into
the ravine, thereby completing the disposal
process. That such an exact account of the
killings at Babi Yar can be given, including even
a precise total of those shot, is due to the fact that
the commander of the unit responsible carefully
reported the affair to Berlin. He added,
“The population scarcely knew that the Jews
were liquidated, but the latest experience
suggests that they would not have objected.”
Besides the vast numbers who were
murdered in the camps or at the hands of the
killing squads, the Holocaust swept in
approximately 1.5 million other Jews. Many of
these victims died in the ghettos, some of
starvation or disease, others in massacres carried
out by the Nazis or their accomplices. In the
camps, Jews were worked to death by their Nazi
overlords. Some were killed on the whim of a
guard or officer. And many died of epidemics in
these overcrowded, pest-ridden centers.
This was especially common late in the war.
Many of the Jews who were freed by advancing
armies during the spring of 1945 were gravely ill,
and indeed some of them died shortly after
liberation. Among those who did not live to be
liberated was Anne Frank, the Dutch girl whose
diary, composed during two years in hiding,
was to become perhaps the most famous
document of the Holocaust.
Anne Frank
Many of the Jews who were swept away
in the Holocaust were killed by non-German
paramilitary forces, mobs, and individuals.
In Rumania, the pro-Nazi Iron Guard massacred
thousands. Polish mobs were responsible for
killing many Jews. “Hiwis,” predominantly
Ukrainian or Lithuanian auxiliaries that operated
under the control of the Germans, participated in
massacres and were often given the assignment
of scouring the ghettos that were being cleared,
making certain that no Jews escaped. Croatia,
a state created by Germany and heavily influenced
by it, was the scene of incessant persecution and
murder. Croatian military units massacred many
Jews, and thousands more were gassed, shot,
or beheaded in Croatian concentration camps,
including perhaps 20,000 at the largest facility,
Jasenovac. As the war proceeded, the Nazis
recruited ever more non-Germans into the forces
that strove to effect the Final Solution. By 1945,
20 of the 38 divisions of the Waffen SS were
mainly non-German in composition.
In regions where Antisemitism was
especially widespread and virulent, the Germans
often let local mobs or militia attend to the Jews.
During the summer of 1941 the officer
commanding an Einsatzgruppe unit in Lithuania
reported that at Kovno, on June 25-26,
“the Lithuanian partisans exterminated fifteen
hundred Jews.... On the following nights, twentythree hundred Jews were liquidated in similar
fashion.” Throughout Nazi-occupied Europe the
Germans offered rewards for turning in or
betraying Jews who were in hiding, and sometimes
they paid for their murder, as well. According to
an eyewitness, at Korets, in the Ukraine,
“announcements were posted in the streets
stating that any person who brought the head
of a Jew to the Kommandant would receive 2.2
pounds of salt. The Ukrainian murderers fanned
19
out through the forests to hunt Jews.
They murdered them, cut off their heads, and
brought them to the Kommandant.”
In western Europe, too, the Nazis
received much assistance in carrying through
their campaign of mass murder. When the
Germans recruited locals for military and police
duty, the response was generally enthusiastic.
In the Netherlands, 30,000 men tried to enlist in
the Waffen SS, and 17,000 were accepted.
An additional 15,000 volunteered to serve
in various military auxiliary organizations or
in the police.
Laval
Probably no government outside of
central Europe proved itself more eager to help
than did the fascist regime in Vichy France.
The premier, Pierre Laval, cooperated in the
deportation of thousands of foreign Jews who
had sought refuge in France. He then insisted
that the Germans arrange to take the children
who had been left behind - this, despite the fact
that they had not asked and were not ready.
An eyewitness had this account of the day that
the children boarded the trains bound for
Auschwitz: “I noticed one gendarme take the
bundle of a boy of four or five to help him walk.
But he was immediately reprimanded by an
20
adjutant, who told him rudely that a French
soldier did not carry the bags of a Jew.... Once we
were in the station, the children were loaded
onto the trains in a sudden burst of speed....
It was at this point that the children
felt frightened. They didn’t want to go and
started to cry.”
As this report suggests, even while the
Nazis could count on Laval’s cooperation,
so could he count on French police and soldiers and, indeed, on many French civilians - to carry
through a policy that resulted in the death of tens
of thousands of French Jews and Jewish refugees.
In May 1944 Anne Frank wrote in her diary,
“I don’t believe that the big men, the politicians
and the capitalists alone, are guilty of the war.
Oh no, the little man is just as guilty.” The same
may be said of the Holocaust. Big men like Hitler
and Laval could lay out policy regarding the
Jews. But it was the “little man” who carried that
policy through, and he was to be found almost
throughout occupied Europe.
Many of the killings that were perpetrated
by non-Germans took place late in the war,
when the Germans were in retreat. Perhaps the
killers feared that if they did not act promptly
they would lose the opportunity to eliminate
the Jews. In Hungary, a pro-Nazi paramilitary
force, the Arrow Cross, became more active in
1944, and during the chaotic weeks before the
Red Army moved into Budapest they terrorized
the Jews of the city, murdering thousands, often
after first torturing them. A witness recalled,
“We had a Jewish orphanage with 200 orphans
and one Christmas night ... the Arrow Cross
people ... took each and every [child] and every
teacher out of the orphanage. The children were
in their nighties and barefooted. They marched
them through Budapest ... and they shot each
and everyone of them, killing them into the
Danube, the frozen Danube.... They said that we
cannot send you to Auschwitz.... So we take care
of you any way we can.”
Hitler regarded the Final Solution as a
mission of the highest importance. He believed,
or claimed to believe, that the war on Jewry
would benefit not only Germany but all
humanity, and he sought allies in the effort,
even among nations that he despised. In the
“Political Testament” that he dictated on April
29, 1945 (the day before he committed suicide),
he asserted, “It is untrue that I ... wanted the war
in 1939. It was desired and instigated solely by
those international statesmen who were either of
Jewish descent or worked for Jewish interests....
Centuries will pass away, but out of the ruins of
our towns and monuments hatred will grow
against those finally responsible for everything,
International Jewry, and its helpers.” So it was
that Hitler, who advocated the big lie, reiterated
in his last hours one of the biggest. Yet, it was
a lie that he almost certainly believed.
Jewish Conspiracy was the model by which
he understood the world, and he never
departed from it.
By the time of Germany’s surrender in
May 1945, about two-thirds of the nine million
Jews who had lived in Europe in 1939 had
perished. The greatest carnage had taken place
in Poland, where of about 3.3 million Jews living
in 1939, only 100,000 remained (1,000 of these
survivors were murdered by Polish mobs in a
series of pogroms in 1945-46). Some had
managed to escape during the war, and others
had left when the camps were liberated, rather
than again settle in Poland, but about 90% of the
3.3 million perished in the Holocaust. In the
Ukraine, 900,000 (60% of the 1939 population)
were dead; 228,000 (90%) in the Baltic states;
350,000 in Russia (25%); 600,000 in Hungary and
Czechoslovakia (75%); 300,000 in Rumania
(50%); 210,000 in Germany and Austria (90%).
These, the nations of central and eastern Europe,
accounted for most of the dead, though high
percentages of Jews died in almost all regions
that the Germans occupied or controlled.
The dead at
Flossenberg,
May 1945
21
COMMON
QUESTIONS
REGARDING
THE
HOLOCAUST
HOW MUCH
IS ACTUALLY KNOWN?
The Holocaust is one of the best
documented episodes of the twentieth century.
To begin with, we have the testimony of Jews
who were caught up in it. Some of these witnesses,
like Anne Frank, did not survive, but were
nevertheless able to leave some record of their
suffering. In addition, thousands of Jews who
survived the camps have written or spoken
publicly of their experiences. The Shoah Project,
organized by Steven Spielberg, has interviewed
50,000 survivors, and their videotaped testimony
is now available to researchers. Many non-Jews
with direct knowledge of some aspect of the
Holocaust have also borne witness.
corroborated much of what was already known
about that campaign and provided additional
details, as well. In all, more than 80,000 Germans,
as well as tens of thousands of non-Germans,
have been convicted of war crimes. While many
of the trials do not relate specifically to actions
against Jews, thousands do, and their records
document the Holocaust in detail.
Historians do not face a shortage of
material on the Holocaust. Rather, their problem
lies in making sense of a vast quantity of data.
The trend in recent scholarship has therefore
been to focus on particular aspects of the
Holocaust, confining coverage to a manageable
framework. However, the general history of the
Final Solution has already been well covered by
a generation of older scholars.
Eichmann on trial
Perhaps the most important sources,
however - the most detailed, the most
voluminous - were provided by the perpetrators
themselves. Although during the last months of
the war the Germans destroyed many thousands
of documents relative to the Holocaust, much
material survived to be seized by the Allies.
No category of sources is of greater importance
than the records of the war crimes trials, and
especially of the trials held at Nuremberg by the
International Military Tribunal in 1945-46.
The testimony and documents introduced as evidence
in these proceedings have been published,
and they are a rich source of information to
historians. These trials were followed up by many
others that bore on the Holocaust. Best known of
the later trials is that of Adolf Eichmann, held in
1961 in Jerusalem. During the war, Eichmann,
as head of the Jewish Affairs section of the
Gestapo, had done more than any individual to
coordinate the killing campaign. In statements
during interrogation and at the trial, Eichmann
HOW MUCH WAS KNOWN
WHILE THE HOLOCAUST
WAS TAKING PLACE?
By mid-1942, accounts of the mass assault
on Jewry were being disseminated by western
newspapers and by the BBC, which reached into
Germany itself. In November 1942 Jan Karski,
a courier from the Polish underground, arrived
in London on a mission to detail for Allied leaders
what was going on in Poland. A principal charge
was to tell of what was happening to Polish
Jewry. Karski, a Catholic, had himself toured the
Warsaw ghetto and had listened as Jewish leaders
there told him of what was happening to Jews in
the ghettos and camps. Based on his reports and
other evidence, on December 17, 1942, the U.S.,
Britain, and other allies issued a statement that
“the German authorities ... are now carrying into
effect Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to
exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.”
22
If reports of the Holocaust were spreading
in the west by 1942, it is not surprising that in
Germany and occupied Europe the news was
also filtering through. The Nazis made no secret
of the fact that they were persecuting Jews and
were deporting them to concentration and labor
camps. They did, on the other hand, try to cover
up their campaign of murder, and they threatened
harsh penalties for civilians or uniformed
personnel who spread “rumors” about the
treatment of the Jews. Nevertheless, the Holocaust
soon became common knowledge in central
Europe, where most of the killing took place,
much of it quite openly. Word eventually spread
throughout Germany and occupied Europe.
Among the Jews themselves, reports of
the killing spread quickly but unevenly. Jews in
Poland heard the stories early on. The news
came later to Jewish communities elsewhere in
occupied Europe, but those who had access to
the Allied media soon heard of the danger.
In areas that were isolated and poorly fed by
news, however, the Jews remained unaware until
it was too late. Even as the Germans were
advancing into the U.S.S.R., many Jews in the
Ukraine and Russia continued in the dark.
In July 1941 a German officer reported,
“The Jews are remarkably ill-informed about our
attitude toward them.... Even if they do not think
that under German administration they will
have equal rights with the Russians, they believe,
nonetheless, that we shall leave them in peace if
they mind their business and work diligently.”
Although reports of the killing campaign
became widespread, there were those who
refused to believe them. Atrocity stories
were common during wartime, and often they
turned out to be fabricated. Also, the fact that
the reported victims were Jews made many
indifferent to the news.
23
WHY DIDN’T THE JEWS FLEE,
TO ESCAPE THE NAZIS?
In fact, they did, in large numbers. By the
outbreak of World War II, more than half of all
Jews who had lived in Germany as of 1933 had
departed. Jews outside Germany generally did
not anticipate that they would fall under Nazi
control, but once the onslaught began and the
danger became apparent, many of them also
attempted to leave.
The decision to go was seldom an easy
one. It meant leaving behind siblings, parents,
and grandparents. Many Jews, even knowing
the risks, opted to stay with their families and
ultimately perished with them. And Jews who
chose to leave still faced daunting prospects.
For most of those in central Europe, escape
meant, first, fleeing the ghettos that they had
been forced into. But guards ringed the ghettos
and often shot Jews who were caught trying to
flee. Those who escaped might be killed by
non-Jewish countrymen or betrayed to the Nazis.
Elsewhere in Europe, too, fleeing Jews faced
murder or betrayal.
immigration policies that had in part been
inspired by a desire to hold down the number of
Jews coming in from central and eastern Europe.
Even in a time of crisis, they were unwilling to
increase the quotas for Jewish refugees, or to cut
red tape so that they might enter quickly.
One episode epitomized the difficulties of
Jews who were attempting to emigrate. In May
1939 the St. Louis sailed from Hamburg with 937
Jewish passengers. The Jews had visas that
guaranteed them entry into Cuba, and some
were hoping to go on to the United States. But on
arriving in Havana they were informed that the
Cuban government refused to honor the visas.
They were not allowed to disembark there,
nor did the Americans allow them entry.
In early June the St. Louis returned to Europe.
Passengers
on the
To find refuge, most Jews had to be able
to escape the Nazi-controlled area. Switzerland,
Sweden, and Spain, all neutral nations, came to
harbor thousands of Jews. Italy, despite being a
German ally, served many Jews as a place of
refuge. Some Jews who escaped to the east
found a temporary haven in the Soviet Union though Russian troops drove back others - while
perhaps 20,000 went on to Shanghai.
Many Jews who tried to escape found the
doors closed. Western countries, including the
United States, had established restrictive
24
into Palestine, many others were turned back.
Some ships bound for Palestine were sunk by the
Germans or others. One, the Struma, was towed
into the Black Sea by the Turks and left to drift,
its engine inoperative. It was soon torpedoed by
the Soviets, with a loss of 769 refugees.
WHY DIDN’T THE
JEWS FIGHT BACK?
The image persists of Jews going meekly
to their doom. Certainly, many did, even in the
death camps. But there is much more to the story
than that. Jews arrived at the camps after days of
travel in filthy, crowded cattle cars, with little
food or water. Emerging at their destinations,
weak and faint, they were hurried along by
screaming guards. Their oppressors had the
guns, the whips, and the dogs. Yet, even in such
a hopeless situation, many Jews refused to die
quietly. Hoess wrote, “at Auschwitz we
endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that
they were to go through a delousing process.
Of course, frequently they realized our true
intentions and we sometimes had riots and
difficulties due to that fact.”
Above: Captured resistance fighters in Warsaw
Below: The Warsaw Ghetto in flames
St. Louis,
1939
Jews did indeed fight back. There were
risings in several Polish ghettos in the spring of
1943, the best known being in Warsaw,
During the 1930’s and the Holocaust period
itself, many European Jews sought to escape to
Palestine (now Israel), which was then under a
British mandate. In May 1939, however,
the British, bowing to Arab pressure, agreed to
sharply curtail Jewish immigration into
Palestine. During the war, the British enforced
this policy to the extent that, while some Jewish
refugees from Europe were able to gain entry
where between April 19 and June poorly armed
resistance fighters held out against a strong
German force, inflicting heavy casualties.
About 300 escaped, and some of them went on to
fight with Soviet partisans. In almost all of the
There were even risings in the death
camp revolts, however, as in the ghetto risings,
camps. The most famous and successful effort
the Jews were overpowered by superior arms,
came at Sobibór, where, on October 14, 1943,
and many were killed. Most of them knew
a majority of the 600 Jews in the camp rose up,
beforehand that this would be the outcome.
killing over two dozen SS and Ukrainian guards.
Theirs was not so much a fight to live as to die
25
with dignity. As one of the Warsaw fighters told
his captain, “If I have to die, I shall die like a man
and not like a sheep in a flock.”
Jews fought the Nazis in other ways,
as well. Those living in countries at war with the
Axis enlisted in the armed forces, often out of all
proportion to their share of the population.
Within Nazi-occupied Europe, Jews joined
resistance movements. They played a noteworthy
role in the resistance in Yugoslavia and
Czechoslovakia, and it is estimated that 15-20%
COULD ANYTHING
HAVE BEEN DONE
TO HELP THE JEWS?
Since the war, it has been something of a
commonplace for Europeans who merely stood
by during the carnage to claim that nothing they
could have done would have made a difference.
In fact, however, many Jews were saved by
non-Jewish neighbors who hid them or helped
them flee. Others benefited through the
intervention of church or state.
families were sometimes executed for no offense
other than having protected a Jew Even whole
communities might suffer. One village was burnt
to the ground because the residents were accused
of providing food and shelter to Jews who were
hiding out in the nearby forest. Outside Poland,
the penalties were typically less severe.
Nevertheless, many who were found to be
sheltering or aiding Jews were sent to
concentration camps, including one of the men
who had helped to maintain the Franks during
their two years in hiding.
of French resistance fighters were Jewish.
In Poland, where Antisemitism was so deep that
would-be freedom fighters who were Jewish
were often turned away by resistance groups,
Jews organized their own units.
But perhaps one should also consider
more broadly what it meant to “resist” the Nazis.
Certainly there were Jews who broke under the
strain of ghetto and camp life.
Some were
willing to do anything to stay alive, even if it
meant appeasing their Nazi overlords by
betraying the hiding places of fellow Jews.
But many refused to break. In the ghettos,
Jews resisted Nazi attempts to destroy their
sense
of
identity
and
of
community.
They maintained libraries, orchestras, welfare
agencies, and schools. At the camps, too, they
found ways to defy their oppressors. The Nazis
not only attacked the bodies of the Jews, but
regularly tried to break their spirit. In one case,
on Yom Kippur, a day of fasting for Jews, camp
authorities offered Jewish prisoners delicious
Those who provided help did so for various
reasons. Some were motivated by greed and
aided Jews who could pay handsomely.
Likewise eager to take advantage were religious
communities, mainly convents, that took in
Jewish children and then sought to convert them.
But there were also the individuals and communities
that offered help without expecting reward.
These altruists, or “Righteous Gentiles,” were to
be found throughout Europe, though more
commonly in some regions than in others.
Some altruists shielded Jewish friends,
but it appears that more often the people that
they aided were slight acquaintances or total
strangers. What prompted them to help?
Sometimes it was a strong aversion to Nazism
that caused them to look with favor on the group
that suffered most from Nazi oppression.
Generally, however, they were moved less by
hatred of the Nazis than by compassion for their
victims. They simply could not turn away from
those who so desperately needed their help.
food and dessert, far different from the
horrendous provisions that were the norm.
The aim was obvious: to weaken the Jews’ spirit
by inducing them to break their fast. But the Jews
refused the food. This, too, was resistance.
26
Shielding Jews was difficult and
dangerous. This was notably so in Poland,
the country that was treated most harshly by the
German occupiers. There individuals and their
Wallenberg
Some altruists concentrated on protecting
an individual or a single family, while others
took part in underground movements that
ferried the Jews to places of refuge. A few,
however, were in situations where they could
provide help on a massive scale. The most
successful, Raoul Wallenberg, gave up the security
of a comfortable life in Sweden to travel to
Budapest in 1944. There he took on the position
of attaché to the Swedish Embassy, with a particular
mission to rescue the Jews of Hungary.
By issuing certificates of protection and by other
contrivances, he was able to save perhaps
100,000 Jews from deportation to the death
camps. His fate, however, underlines the risk
that the altruists ran, and the fact that danger did
not come from the Nazis alone. When Budapest
was “liberated” by the Soviet Army, he was
seized. It took more than three decades before
western governments made a serious attempt to
locate him, and it was not until 2000 that a
former Soviet official confirmed that Wallenberg
had been executed in 1947. Another of the altruists,
Oskar Schindler, a Sudeten German industrialist,
has become known to a broad public in recent
years, being the subject of a novel and an
acclaimed film. He succeeded in shielding over
1000 Jews in his factories and unlike Wallenberg
he lived to be thanked for his efforts.
Aiding the Jews was often lonely work.
In regions where Antisemitism was widespread
and intense, altruists could expect little support,
and the threat of exposure was very real.
Almost ninety percent of Polish altruists who
responded to a survey during the 1980’s reported
that even as they had provided sanctuary to Jews
they had feared that locals would inform on
them. Occasionally, however, people joined
together in an effort to save Jews. In Poland,
a group called “Zegota” was instrumental in
rescuing 4000 Jewish children. Many of the
residents of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a French
village near the Alps, shielded Jewish refugees or
helped ferry them to safety in Switzerland.
The best known case of community
involvement came in Denmark. Realizing that
military opposition was futile, Denmark in 1940
became a most unwilling ally of Germany.
But despite German pressure early in the war,
Danish Jews were protected from persecution.
The Germans occupied Denmark in August 1943,
and an order was given to seize the Jews
27
for deportation. This roundup was planned for
October 1, but during the last night of September
the vast majority of Danish Jews, approximately
7200, were ferried to Sweden. Many Danes knew
about the evacuation, and a high percentage
participated. About 400 Jews who had been left
behind were in fact deported, but the Danish
government made inquiries after them and was
able to win them comparatively good treatment.
It does not appear that any Danish Jew was
gassed. Without the intervention of the people
and government of Denmark, the outcome might
have been very different.
The evacuation from Denmark
Outside Nazi-occupied Europe, efforts on
behalf of the Jews were haphazard and ineffectual.
Among countries at war with Germany,
the highest priority was of course military victory,
not saving the Jews. But the Allied efforts in
combating the Holocaust were so feeble as to
suggest that a focus on the war effort was not the
only issue. In January 1944 Henry Morgenthau,
the American Secretary of the Treasury, sent
President Roosevelt a memorandum: “Report to
the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This
Government in the Murder of Jews.”
Morgenthau wrote: “Certain officials in our State
Department ... have been guilty ... of wilful
attempts to prevent action from being taken to
rescue Jews from Hitler.” The State Department
28
does indeed seem to have been an impediment,
and so were equivalent bureaus in other Allied
governments. It would be unfair to say that
officials in these bureaus approved of the Final
Solution. But many of them, whether because of
sheer Antisemitism or just a desire to maintain
the status quo at home, were fearful that if the
Allied nations liberated the Jews they would be
flooded with refugees. Early in 1945 a reporter
asked a Canadian government official how many
Jewish refugees Canada would accept at the
close of the war. The official responded,
“None is too many.”
It was not only government officials who
stood by idly during the Holocaust. The highest
leadership of most European churches,
Protestant and Catholic alike, failed to act, even
to the extent of condemning what was happening
to the Jews. The unwillingness of the churches to
speak out during the war has brought them great
criticism in recent years. No individual has been
more angrily attacked than Pope Pius XII, who
made no public statement even when roundups
of Jews were taking place in Rome itself and
Catholic prelates were pleading with him to
openly denounce the deportations. Pius appears
to have been absorbed by the issue of what was
Pius XII
best for his church. He may have believed that if
he took a stand on behalf of the Jews the church
would suffer retribution at the hands of the
Nazis and their allies. Whatever his reasoning,
he was the ultimate bystander, and he locked the
church into a non-policy.
Even among the church leaders who tried
to temper the drive against the Jews, more than a
few appealed mainly on behalf of Jews who had
accepted baptism, and there were some who saw
in the killing campaign an opportunity to coerce
Jews into accepting Christianity. The idea of
standing up for practicing, faithful Jews was
alien to them.
Nevertheless, many individual clergymen,
including some in high positions, did have the
altruistic spirit. Almost throughout occupied
Europe, there were clergy who condemned the
persecution and deportation of Jews. A number
of churchmen were able to do more than protest.
Few individuals of any type saved more lives
than did Angelo Roncalli, the papal nuncio in
Istanbul. During the war, he helped perhaps
25,000 Jews in southeastern Europe to escape and
he also encouraged leaders of the Bulgarian
government to stand up to Germany on the
matter of deportations. Later, as Pope John XXIII,
he was to lead the Catholic Church toward
reconciliation with the Jews.
In all, it appears that 500,000 Jews,
perhaps one million, were saved by individuals,
groups, or communities. Many more could have
been saved had it not been for the indifference or
hostility of the populace at large. The Holocaust
period saw the majority of Europeans stand
aside, neither promoting the killing campaign
nor doing anything to inhibit it. Undoubtedly,
some bystanders wanted to help the Jews,
but were fearful of consequences or were
uncertain of what they could do to make a
difference. Undoubtedly, too, there were
bystanders who did not realize what fate really
awaited the Jews who were being loaded into
cattle-cars; they may have heard the rumors,
but discounted them. A high proportion
of Europeans, however, wanted the Jews
out of their midst, and they cared little
how this was accomplished. Bystanders they
may have been, but they were by no
means “innocent” bystanders.
WHAT WERE THE
PEREPETRATORS LIKE?
One common image of the perpetrator is
that of a psychotic, who enjoyed inflicting pain
and even death on helpless victims. Certainly,
there were those who seem to have found
pleasure in their work. In some cases, they may
simply have been satisfying a sadistic urge,
and the identity of their victims may have meant
little. It appears, however, that even sadism was
generally magnified by Antisemitism.
Some of the perpetrators were products
of special indoctrination by the Nazis, often
through Hitler Youth or the SS. Moreover,
they were led to believe that their duty was
necessary to save the fatherland. The men of the
Einsatzgruppen were told that the killing
campaign would help defeat the “JudeoBolshevik threat” to Germany. Guarding the
camps were members of the SS Death’s Head
units, and they were encouraged to value
the assignment. But many of those who handled
the killing at the death camps were
non-Germans, often Ukrainians and Lithuanians.
Moreover, they were notorious for their brutality.
29
Yet, they were not indoctrinated by the Nazis,
except perhaps for brief exposure to Antisemitic
propaganda. Their hatred of Jews represented
the legacy of bigotry that was medieval in origin
and reflected religious and national animosity.
It was what they had grown up with, and now
they were being given a chance to torture and kill
those whom they had long hated.
Very different in circumstances and
behavior, but still necessary to effect the
Holocaust, was the group of people sometimes
called “desk murderers.” This category included
bureaucrats, clerks, and others who helped to
engineer the Final Solution without participating
directly in the killing. Heading the group were
officials of the governmental agencies that
shared aspects of management of the complex
process of ghettoization, transportation,
and liquidation. There were constant turf wars
among these men, as they attempted to increase
the power and prestige of their respective
agencies, and often the “turf” involved was their
share of control over the eradication of the Jews.
Besides the directors, every branch of
government included many bureaucrats and
clerks, who assisted in the killing without
themselves pulling a trigger. A clerk might plan
the vacation trip of a Nazi official and minutes
later be working on the itinerary of a train
transporting Jews to Auschwitz.
To many, Eichmann has seemed the
quintessential desk murderer. When on trial in
Jerusalem, he maintained, “I never killed a Jew
[and] I never gave an order to kill,” although he
admitted “aiding and abetting ... one of the greatest
crimes in the history of Humanity.” Hannah
Arendt, in her famous report on the trial,
commented, “It would have been very comforting
indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster....
30
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so
many were like him, and that the many were
neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were ...
terribly and terrifyingly normal.”
Akin to the desk murderers were the
corporate leaders who exploited the Final
Solution to increase their profits, using Jews as
slave labor or providing gas for their liquidation.
Many professionals, notably engineers and
scientists, likewise played a part in designing
and supplying the apparatus of death. By no
means were all perpetrators ignorant thugs.
Among the professionals who involved
themselves in the Holocaust, few were more
notorious as a group than were the Nazi doctors.
The best known of them, Josef Mengele, regularly
presided over the selection process at Auschwitz,
deciding by a flick of the wrist which Jews might
live awhile longer and which would be gassed
immediately. He also conducted experiments on
Jewish prisoners. Often he used sets of identical
twins, and when he felt the need he had no
compunction about ordering that a child be
killed so that he could dissect the body.
Mengele
But Mengele was not alone, for other doctors
pursued their own programs of experimentation.
Like other perpetrators, these men found
arguments to justify their activity. When one of
them was asked how, being bound by medical
ethics, he could participate in a program of
torment and mass murder, he responded,
“Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve
life. And out of respect for human life, I would
remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased
body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the
body of mankind.”
Those involved in the killing process
could also salve their consciences - assuming
salve was necessary - with the notion that they
were doing their duty as good soldiers.
At Nuremberg and for years afterwards, men on
trial for their role in the Holocaust argued that
they had “only followed orders.” During the
war, in fact, Nazi officials directing the Final
Solution constantly emphasized the importance
of following orders, even when to do so was
painful. Not surprisingly, the SS leadership was
especially blunt on this issue. In October 1943,
Himmler told an assembly of SS officers,
“It’s one of those things it is easy to talk about.
‘The Jewish race is being exterminated,’ says one
Party member, ‘that’s quite clear....’ Most of you
must know what it means when 100 corpses are
lying side by side, or 500 or 1,000. To have stuck
it out and at the same time ... to have remained
decent fellows, that is what has made us hard.”
Even men who engineered the Holocaust
later claimed that they had been compelled to act
by a sense of duty. In the memoir that he wrote
in the months before his execution in 1947,
Hoess, insisted that because he was in command
he had been forced to be hard and to follow
orders without question: “I had to watch coldly,
while the mothers with laughing or crying
children went into the gas chambers.... I had to
watch hour after hour, by day and by night, the
removal and burning of the bodies, the extraction
of the teeth, the cutting of the hair, the whole
grisly, interminable business.... I had to look
through the peephole of the gas chambers and
watch the process of death itself, because the
doctors wanted me to see it.”
Another superintendent of death was
Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka (and earlier
Sobibór), 1942-43. Like Hoess, he later claimed
that coping with his assignment had been
difficult. Shortly before he died in prison in 1971,
he told an interviewer that “the worst place” at
Treblinka for him had been “The undressing
barracks.... I avoided it from my innermost
being; I couldn’t confront them; I couldn’t lie to
them; I avoided at any price talking to those who
were about to die.” To overcome his initial
aversion to the killing, he added, he had resorted
to drink. Later, however, he had begun to think
of the victims as “cargo.” Like the Nazi doctor
who likened the Jew to a “gangrenous
appendix,” Stangl dehumanized his victims.
In the same series of interviews, Stangl dealt with
the problem of why, if he found his assignment
Stangl
31
so repugnant, he did not seek to avoid it.
He insisted, “if I had made public what I felt, and
had died ... it would have made no difference.
Not an iota. It would all have gone on just the
same, as if it and I had never happened.”
Despite the “only following orders”
defense, however, and despite the protestations
of men like Hoess and Stangl that theirs had been
a difficult duty, it appears that generally it took
little persuasion to cause men to kill the Jews.
Testimony given in Hamburg during the 1960’s
underscores this point. At issue was the fate of
several former SS officers, who were accused
of having committed war crimes in Germanoccupied Poland in 1942-43, while heading an
Order Police battalion (a German unit that was
intended to maintain control over occupied
territory). About 220 veterans of the battalion
made statements prior to the trial. In particular,
they spoke of the first time that they were called
upon to kill: a day in July 1942 when, one by one,
they shot about 1500 Jews, most of whom were
women and children.
They were neither sadists nor psychopaths.
It does not appear that they had been intensively
indoctrinated by the Nazis, for although they
were certainly subjected to wartime propaganda,
they were for the most part 35-45, hence too old
to have been in Hitler Youth or to have received
indoctrination in school. Being the product of an
earlier generation did not, however, mean that
they did not share with the Nazis a hatred of
the Jews, and probably all of them were
Antisemitic to some extent.
It may be reassuring to believe that those
who killed the Jews were automatons who had
been brainwashed into blind obedience, or that
they were psychotics. Either characterization
leaves untouched a generally positive sense of
32
While there were many categories of
perpetrator, a study of them leads to one general
conclusion: Most of the people who were
responsible for the Holocaust quite willingly
accepted their various roles. Some were eager to
take part, while others, who may have been
reluctant at first, soon rationalized their
participation in the killing of Jews.
WAS THE HOLOCAUST
UNIQUE?
A number of the witnesses recalled that
after their commander had told the men of the
orders to liquidate he had promised that any of
the older men in the battalion who was unwilling
to participate would receive alternative duty.
Despite this offer, only one officer and about
twelve men had asked to be excused. Explaining
the fact that so few had withdrawn, some of the
witnesses said that members of the battalion had
hoped for advancement within the corps and
had felt that they might jeopardize their careers
by backing out. Others had been fearful of being
considered cowards or unmanly if they refused
to join in the shooting.
Most members of the battalion seem to
have been reasonably stable family men.
human nature. The evidence, however, does not
support these depictions. Time and again the
sources tell of camp guards and SS men tormenting
Jewish prisoners to no other end but to derive
pleasure. Randomly they murdered Jews;
randomly, too, they pointed pistols at them, then
purposely shot a little wide and laughed as they
saw terror in the victim’s face. Only following
orders? By no means. Psychotic? In some cases,
probably so. But psychosis, however defined,
is an abnormality, and it does not appear that by
and large the perpetrators were abnormal.
Ringed by smiling SS men,
a Polish Jew prays over murdered brethren
The uniqueness of the Holocaust can be
examined in two ways: as opposed to other
episodes of mass murder in Jewish history;
as opposed to large-scale killing campaigns that
have targeted other groups. We have seen that
the mass murder of Jews was not unique to the
Holocaust, for there had been many such
episodes in preceding centuries. But no previous
episode had been on the geographical scale of the
Holocaust or had exacted nearly so high a death
toll, points that might be taken to suggest the
uniqueness of the Holocaust in Jewish history.
If the Holocaust is truly unique in this respect,
however, it is as much because of the
unprecedented extent of state involvement.
In previous centuries, European governments
had vilified the Jews, persecuted them, banished
them, and sometimes murdered them.
But usually, killing campaigns undertaken by
the state had been limited in scope,
and governments had not encouraged wholesale
slaughter; on the contrary, they had usually
stood against it. Episodes of mass murder, such
as the Chmielnicki massacres, had been mob
actions (though often some socially prominent
figures, like crusaders, had provided leadership),
and usually they had taken place when central
authority was weak. Even in the case of the
pogroms, while the tsarist government approved
of and encouraged the violence, at least to some
extent, it did not initiate or manage it. Regarding
the Holocaust, the situation was altogether
different, for this killing campaign was
organized and massively supported by the state.
As for the question of how unique the
Holocaust is in relation to killing campaigns
directed against groups other than the Jews,
we need not look beyond the twentieth century,
for it saw more episodes of mass murder than
did any other. The Nazis and their allies were
responsible for killing several hundred thousand
Roma (Gypsies). Murder campaigns were
common in lands that Germany invaded or occupied, and millions of civilians died in
consequence, especially in Poland and the Soviet
Union. In addition, many groups were persecuted
by the Nazis, including Jehovah’s Witnesses and
homosexuals. Germans deemed by the state to
be leading “lives unworthy of life,” such as the
retarded, mentally disturbed, or epileptic,
were done away with. Beginning in 1940,
the killing was sometimes accomplished by gas practice, as it turned out, for men who would
later direct the gassing of Jews.
33
What distinguished the Holocaust was
the totality of the Nazis’ aim. In no other case
did those who planned and managed the killing
campaign seek total destruction. It was the
intention of Hitler and the other architects of the
Final Solution to entirely wipe out the Jews of
Europe, and perhaps beyond. Furthermore, their
plan was pursued far more single-mindedly than
was the effort targeting any other group.
The Nazis committed many men and vast
resources to the effort to eradicate the Jews, and
they continued the campaign even when their
armies were in retreat. Nazi officials like
Eichmann regarded the killing of the Jews as
their main function, pursuing it avidly almost
to the day when Germany surrendered.
Truly, Germany was fighting two wars, for as the
historian Lucy Dawidowicz was later to observe,
it undertook not only its contest against the
Allies, but a “war against the Jews.”
Even leaving the Nazis aside, the list of
mass murder campaigns is so lengthy that only
some of the largest-scale episodes can be noted
here. In 1915, the Turkish government
spearheaded a campaign that resulted in the
death of perhaps one million Armenians. Several
episodes of mass killing occurred in the Soviet
Union during the Stalinist period. Beginning in
1928, Josef Stalin demanded that peasants
surrender their land for collectivization.
Large numbers refused, and about ten million
were either killed outright or were sent to
Siberia, where many starved or froze to death.
In the years 1936-39, Stalin’s “Great Purge” cost
another two million lives. Finally, Stalin was
responsible for the killing or starvation of several
million Europeans whose lands his armies
occupied during and after the Second World War.
Japan’s conquest and occupation of China
34
Stalin
during the period 1931-45 cost the lives of many
millions of Chinese civilians. The Chinese
“Cultural Revolution” of the 1960’s likewise
swept away millions of real or imagined
opponents of the government of Mao Zedong,
and indeed the total death toll, including those
who died of starvation amid the chaos, may have
exceeded twenty million. In the period 1975-79
more than one million Cambodians - some
sources claim three million - out of a total
population of seven million, were killed in
a campaign masterminded by Pol Pot. And as
recently as 1994, one million died in Rwanda,
victims of tribal warfare, many of them hacked
to death with machetes.
Clearly, the Holocaust was not unique in
the sense of being the only case of mass murder
in the twentieth century or in Jewish history.
But there were unique aspects of it, just as there
were of all other such campaigns. Some might
claim that since the Holocaust was not the only
episode of this type, it deserves less attention
than it has received. On the contrary, the
problem is not that the Holocaust has received
too much attention, but that other episodes have
received too little, and therefore, the impact of
whatever lessons they might teach is lost.
The frequency of mass murder in the
twentieth century suggests there are chronic
problems that human society needs to confront if
similar episodes are to be avoided in the future.
Certainly, every case of mass murder is in some
respects unique, and as has been mentioned it is
important to study each individually. But it is
likewise important to see patterns. Most twentiethcentury campaigns of mass murder have shared
four characteristics. First, they were directed by
the government, and more specifically, by a
revolutionary government, which did not accept
laws or customs that had traditionally protected
minorities and individuals. Second, they were
abetted by large social elements, which, motivated
either by old hatreds or by revolutionary zeal,
effected much of the slaughter. Third, they were
directed against groups that seemed not to fit,
either because they were a traditionally hated
religious or ethnic minority (Jews, Armenians),
or because the revolutionary leader (Hitler,
Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) saw in them a threat to his
power or his policies. Fourth, they occurred in
closed societies, and several, including the
Holocaust, took place under cover of war.
There are lessons in these patterns.
THE HOLOCAUST
TOOK PLACE MORE
THAN FIFTY YEARS AGO.
WHY STUDY IT NOW?
Hitler’s Holocaust is long over, and nothing
can bring back the six million. But there are
still important reasons for remembering. Recent
surveys have shown that the preponderant
majority of Americans believe that it is important
for young people to learn about the Holocaust.
Yet, Holocaust education has for the most part
been a recent development. That the Holocaust is
today being widely taught in the United States
(and in some other countries, notably Germany)
is obvious. Whether it should be is another matter.
What justifies the teaching of any historical
subject is the sense that one can learn from it,
as well as about it. And it is on this ground that
the value of Holocaust study is best established.
Important lessons may be learned by
studying the Holocaust, especially when this
study is augmented by an awareness of the
history of Antisemitism and of the modern
tendency toward mass murder. One lesson has
already been suggested: Neither the Holocaust
nor any other campaign of mass murder should
be seen as an aberration that is entirely unique.
To simply dismiss each episode as an oddity that
will never recur reduces concern and begs
the question of why mass murder has so
studded recent history.
Other lessons likewise stand out:
1) It is dangerous to allow vilification,
stereotyping, and scapegoating of any
group to go unchecked. Antisemitism,
indeed all forms of bigotry, can have
devastating consequences, and must
not be shrugged off as trivial.
2) As not only the Holocaust but Jewish
history in general shows, bigotry
does not simply go away, but rather
persists, unless it is combated.
3) Legal safeguards that insure personal
security must be instituted and
maintained for all social groups.
No society or government has the
35
right to endanger any group solely
because it does not conform.
4) Wartime atrocity stories cannot simply
be dismissed as propaganda. They
may be true, as were the reports of the
Holocaust that were so widely discounted.
5) Persecuted and endangered groups
must have a safe haven.
As pope (1958-63), the former Angelo Roncalli
showed a real affection for the Jews. Early in his
pontificate, he eliminated negative references
to Jews from several Catholic prayers.
Then, toward the end of his life, he took a move
of fundamental importance, calling the Second
Vatican Council to, among other things,
redefine the attitude of the Catholic Church
toward non-Christian faiths.
6) Attempts to define who belongs in
a community or nation may have
dangerous consequences. Invariably,
some groups are left outside, to be
less valued, less respected,
and less supported.
Driven by these lessons, institutions and
individuals have begun to act. Stereotyping of
Jews and other groups, which was formerly so
common that it was accepted as a fact of life,
even by those who disapproved, is now widely
frowned upon, and although obviously it
continues it is far more muted than it was in the
generations before the Holocaust.
John XXIII
In October 1965, two years after John’s
There has also been a drive to replace
stereotype with understanding. Especially since
about 1960, there has been an ongoing effort to
promote reconciliation between Jews and the
various Christian churches, and many church
leaders have spoken of a need to change
attitudes. In both the religious and the secular
worlds, the animosity and apathy associated
with the Holocaust has been replaced by a desire
to reach out.
death, the council promulgated a declaration that
included a strong denunciation of Antisemitism:
“The Church, mindful of the patrimony she
shares with the Jews ... decries hatred, persecutions,
displays of antisemitism, directed against Jews at
any time and by anyone.” On the issue of deicide,
which had provided ammunition to Antisemites
for so many centuries, the declaration read,
Catholic initiatives found parallels in
several Protestant churches and the movement to
eliminate anti-Jewish messages from Christianity
has progressively gained momentum during the
past few decades. The advance has been uneven,
with some churches moving more rapidly than
others, and advocates of reconciliation recognize
that there is more to do. Nevertheless, most
major churches have taken steps to purge
themselves of doctrine and teachings that
encourage hostility toward Jews.
The process of unlearning is also advancing
in the secular world. Many developments might
be mentioned, but one is especially noteworthy,
bearing in mind how the Holocaust came to be.
As we have seen, from the mid-nineteenth century
through the Nazi period racialism was extremely
popular, not just in Germany but elsewhere,
and because it seemed so scientific it appealed to
academics, students, and those who fancied
themselves scholarly or sophisticated. The shock
of the Holocaust has helped bring about a
dramatic shift. Today, racial “science” is
generally dismissed as foolishness.
An awareness of the Holocaust has
therefore resulted in meaningful change. But this
does not mean that the process is complete or
that all the lessons have been learned. It is up to
a new generation to study the Holocaust and the
broader history that explains it. Few if any
historical episodes teach more, and what it
teaches is valuable, even if often painful.
Forgotten history means forgotten lessons.
“the Jewish authorities and those who followed
their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still,
what happened in His passion cannot be charged
Countless individuals have contributed
to this effort, but none more than John XXIII.
36
against all the Jews, without distinction, then
alive, nor against the Jews of today.”
37
I
t is rating our conjectures too high to roast people
something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered
alive for them.
its load - little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it - saw it
- Michel de Montaigne (d. 1592), Essays,
“Of Cripples” [Observation on burning
people accused of witchcraft.]
with my own eyes ... those children in the flames.
(Is it surprising that I could not sleep after that?
Sleep had fled from my eyes.)
A
arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau.]
- Attributed to Edmund Burke (d. 1797)
T
he citizens of the United States of America have a
right to applaud themselves for having given to
mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy a
policy worthy of imitation.... It is now no more that
A
las, it has been destined for us to witness the
dreadful spectacle of children, women and old
men being treated like vile beasts; of families being
torn apart and deported to unknown destinations....
The Jews are our brethren. They belong to mankind.
No Christian dare forget that!
toleration is spoken of as if it was by the indulgence
- Jules-Gérard Saliège, archbishop of
Toulouse, one of a number of French
exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily
prelates to protest the persecution and
the government of the United States, which gives to
deportation of French Jews.
secrets away to the Germans.... Would Christians
requires only that they who live under its protection
should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving
it on all occasions their effectual support.... May the
I
magine that someone knocks on your door. And
that someone is a mother with a small child, both
sporting the yellow badge of shame. They are seeking
Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this
shelter from the sharp teeth of the Nazi wolf. Look
land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the
deeply into the panic-inflamed eyes of the mother,
other Inhabitants, while every one shall sit in safety
and then imagine the wolf carrying off the child.
under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be
Then decide: Will I shut my door to these creatures,
none to make him afraid.
or will I usher them into my home, and if need be,
- George Washington, letter to the
Jews of Newport, 1790
share with them my bed.
Once you come to a
decision, go to sleep. If you wake up happy and
refreshed, you have made the same decision I have.
If you have a disturbed, restless night, possibly even a
G
W
ermany awake! Judah perish!
nightmare, you chose the worst solitude a man can
discover: his own exclusion from the family of man.
Because if you opt against opening your home and
hoever knows the Jews, knows the Devil!
heart to an innocent fugitive, you have no place in the
community of the just.
- Nazi slogans
- Pieter Miedema, altruist, as quoted in
André Stein, Quiet Heroes [Drawn from
ot far from us, flames were leaping from a
a sermon that Miedema, a Dutch minister,
ditch, gigantic flames.
delivered in 1942.]
They were burning
means of making people talk.... We always hear that
we’re all fighting together for freedom, truth, and
right! Is discord going to show itself while we are still
fighting, is the Jew once again worth less than another?
Oh, it is sad, very sad, that once more, for the
umpteenth time, the old truth is confirmed:
what one Jew does is thrown back at all Jews.”
T
his morning our vegetable man was picked up
for having two Jews in his house. It’s a great
blow to us, not only that those poor Jews are
bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,
38
has changed.... The Christians blame the Jews for giving
“What one Christian does is his own responsibility,
of one class of people that another enjoyed the
N
o our great horror and regret we hear that the
behave differently in our place? The Germans have a
good men to do nothing.
WORDS
TO
PONDER
urge to kill, to murder and rage.
attitude of a great many people towards us Jews
- Elie Wiesel, Night [Wiesel is recalling his
ll that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for
T
T
here’s in people simply an urge to destroy, an
balancing on the edge of an abyss, but it’s terrible for
the man himself.
I
t’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my
ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible
to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of
everything I still believe that people are really good at
heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation
consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the
world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear
the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us
too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet,
if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all
come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that
peace and tranquillity will return again.
- Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl
[These entries date from May and July 1944.
On August 4, the Gestapo raided the attic
in Amsterdam where the Frank family
was hiding. In March 1945 Anne, not yet
sixteen, died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen.]
39
T
here
were
many
Jehovah’s
Witnesses
in
Sachsenhausen. A great number of them refused
to undertake military service and because of this
[Himmler] condemned them to death.
They were
shot in the presence of all the inmates of the camp
duly assembled. The other Jehovah’s Witnesses were
placed in the front rank so that they must watch the
he persecution of the Gypsy population in
T
came to the mountains.... The passage of rivers ...
Europe predated the Nazi rise to power in 1933.
was always an occasion of wholesale murder.
There is nevertheless no comparison between the
Women and children were driven into the water,
persecution suffered by the Gypsies before the
and were shot as they struggled.
coming of Hitler and that suffered after.... The Nazis
- A contemporary report on the Armenian
added to the general public’s vague feelings of
massacres of 1915, quoted from
mistrust and dislike of the Gypsies the racist view that
proceedings.
Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat
Gypsies are hereditarily infected beings, of unworthy,
- Rudolph Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz
[Hoess commanded at Sachsenhausen before
moving on to Auschwitz.]
primitive, alien blood, necessarily involved in asociability
and criminality.... It is not known when exactly it was
decided that the Gypsies should be exterminated, but
the Armenians?
it is likely that the initial decision was made by the
- Hitler, in 1939 [Hitler may have been
head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, sometime in 1942....
referring to another set of Armenian
[at Flossenberg].... The work of quarrying, dynamiting,
Whereas most of the Gypsies who were caught and
massacres, which took place during the 1890’s
hewing and dressing was extremely arduous,
interned in the various occupied lands eventually met
and was widely condemned in Europe.]
and only Jews and homosexuals were assigned to it....
their death in the Nazi concentration camps,
Just like the prison camp itself, the granite quarry was
there were instances of mass slaughter near their
completely surrounded by barbed wire, and guarded
homes at the hands of local militias....
W
e gays were assembled into work detachments
...
to
work
in
the
granite
quarry
outside and inside by SS sentries. No prisoner was
permitted to get closer than five metres to the wire.
Anyone who did so was shot by the SS guards
without warning, since this transgression was already
considered as attempted escape.
For shooting a
T
hey
[the
Nazis]
came
for
ell me [Winston Churchill asked Stalin in August
For I wasn’t a Communist.; They came for
1942], have the stresses of this war been as bad to
the Socialists, and I didn’t object - For I
you personally as carrying through the policy of the
wasn’t a Socialist; They came for the trade
T
The best documented contingent of Gypsies was the
Collective
Farms?”
...
“Oh,
no,”
he
said,
one at Auschwitz, where the Nazis had decided to
“the Collective Farm policy was a terrible struggle.”
create a special camp for them.... There were two
“I thought you would have found it bad,” said I,
a trade unionist; They came for the Jews,
“because you were dealing ... with millions of small
and I didn’t object - For I wasn’t a Jew.
men.” “Ten millions,” he said, holding up his hands....
Then they came for me - And there was
unionists, and I didn’t object - For I wasn’t
large massacres of Gypsies there in the spring of
three days’ special leave.... One way of tormenting
1943.... The rest were exterminated at some point in
Jews and homosexuals that the SS in the quarry were
July or possibly August of 1944. [As one witness later
very fond of was to drive crazy prisoners who were
reported,] “We were within easy earshot of the terrible
already physically at the end of their tether. A man
final scenes as German criminal prisoners using clubs
who had not done anything in particular would have
and dogs were let loose in the camp against the
and were wiped out by their laborers.” ... I record as
women, children and old men.”... Gypsies who were
they come back to me these memories, and the strong
brought to Auschwitz after the liquidation of the
impressions I sustained at the moment of millions of
Gypsy camp were gassed upon arrival.
men and women being blotted out or displaced for
Protestant group that during
ever.... I did not repeat [Edmund] Burke’s dictum,
the 1930’s stood up to the Nazis
“If I cannot have reform without injustice, I will
on many religious issues.
him down, while the SS men and Capos banged on
the bucket with their sticks. The terrible noise
amplified through the bucket soon brought the victim
to such a pitch of terror that he completely lost his
- Bohdan Wytwycky, The Other Holocaust
mind and his sense of balance was destroyed.
himself in time. And if he staggered inside the 5-metre
zone, he was fired on in the usual way. “Games”
such as these were a favorite pastime for some of
the SS guards.
- Heinz Hagar, The Men with the Pink Triangle
“What happened?,” I asked. “Oh, well,” he said,
“many of them agreed to [give up their land].
F
rom the moment they left the outskirts of the
towns, they were never safe from outrage.
no one left to object.
Some of them were given land of their own to
cultivate ... but the great bulk were very unpopular
not have reform.”
Then the bucket was suddenly removed and he was
pushed towards the wire fence. He could seldom right
the
Communists, and I didn’t object -
prisoner who “attempted escape,” an SS man received
a metal bucket placed over his head. Two men held
40
W
ho after all speaks today of the annihilation of
- Churchill, The Hinge of Fate [Although
- Martin Niemoller
[Niemoller was the founder of the
Confessing Church, a German
He was interned 1937-45, mainly
at Sachsenhausen and Dachau.]
Stalin ignored the fact, many peasants
The ... peasants mobbed and plundered them as they
who refused to give up their land were
passed through the cultivated lands, and the
shot by soldiers or police.]
gendarmes connived at the peasants’ brutality....
There were still more horrible outrages when they
41