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| Hungarian Jews on the selection ramp at Auschwitz. Those who were not deemed “fit for work” were immediately sent to the gas chambers. Photo: Yad Vashem, from the Auschwitz Album |
Introduction
The term "Holocaust" comes from the Greek words "holos" meaning "whole" and "kaustos" meaning "burned". Basically, it refers to a sacrificial offering that was burned on an altar. Basically, it was the systematic persecution and mass killing of millions of people in Europe, including Jews, Roma, the mentally disabled, political dissidents, and homosexuals, by the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945.
After years of the Nazi regime in Germany, Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution" (which is now called the Holocaust) came to pass in the course of World War II. Concentration camps were used as mass killing centres. Approximately 6 million Jews and about 5 million other people, who were targeted for reasons of race, politics, ideology and behaviour, perished in the Holocaust. More than 1 million of the victims were children.
Holocaust
The word 'holocaust' originates from Ancient Greek meaning 'burnt offering'. Even before World War II, the term 'holocaust' was used to refer to the deaths of a large number of people. However, since 1945, 'holocaust' has come to mean 'the murder of European Jews during World War II'. This is why we refer to it as 'the holocaust'. In addition, 'Holocaust' is also referred to by the Jewish people as 'Shoah', which is a shoah in Hebrew.
What Was The Holocaust? | History | PhiloSophicCauses of the Holocaust
The primary cause of the Holocaust is the extermination of the Jewish population by the Nazis. However, the desire to eliminate the Jewish population did not originate from a sudden onset of antisemitism. It must be viewed in the context of the long-standing animosity towards the Jewish people, contemporary racism, and national chauvinism.
Jews have been hated and persecuted for centuries in Europe, usually for religious reasons. First, they were blamed for Jesus' death. During the Middle Ages, people were forced to live apart from each other in separate neighbourhoods or ghettos, and they weren't allowed to work in certain jobs. In times of war, they were often used as sacrificial lambs. During the plague in 1350, they were driven out and persecuted. In 1881, after the murder of Tsar Alexander, there were riots in Russia where groups of Jews were beaten or killed. In the nineteenth century, with the rise of racist ideas, people started to think that Jews were part of a different race and that they weren't part of the people or the nation.
Germany lost World War I in 1918, and right-wing extremists accused the Jewish community of being capitalists who took advantage of others. They also said that the Jews were communists who wanted to take over the world by revolution.
It is difficult to draw a direct correlation between the anti-Semitism of the Nazis and the Holocaust. While Adolf Hitler made no secret of his hatred for the Jews and his belief that they had no place in Germany, he did not initially contemplate mass murder. It was only after the outbreak of World War II that the Nazi leadership began to contemplate the idea and possibility of murdering European Jews.
Consequently, the Holocaust can best be viewed as the result of a series of events, which were influenced by circumstances. In some cases, the initiative may have come from lower-level Nazis, who were seeking extreme solutions to the issues they were facing. Furthermore, competition between different government departments may have contributed to the more extreme measures taken against the Jews. Ultimately, however, the final decisions were made by Hitler himself.
Eliminating the Jews from Germany
The Nazis made life hard for the Jewish people in Germany between 1933 and 1939. They discriminated against them, forced them out of their homes, stole from them, and used violence against them. The Nazis killed some people, but not all of them.
At the time, the Nazis' main objective was to get rid of the Jews in Germany by forcing them to leave. To make this happen, they took away people's livelihoods. They didn't let Jews work in certain jobs. They weren't allowed in certain pubs or parks. The Nuremberg Laws came into effect in 1935. Jews weren't allowed to get married to non-Jews. They were also stripped of their citizenship, which basically meant they were second-class citizens and didn't have the same rights as non-Jews. In 1938, the Nazis put on a pogrom all over Germany called the "Crystal Night". Jewish homes, synagogues and shops were ransacked and thousands of people were taken to concentration camps. By September 1939, around 250,000 Jews had already fled Germany due to the violence and discrimination.
The Second World War: The Persecution of the Jews and How it Radiated
When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, it marked a new, more extreme phase of the persecution of the Jewish people. The war made it almost impossible for them to leave the country. By the end of the occupation, around one and a half million Polish Jews were living under German rule. They were living in ghettos that were more like prisons, with lots of families living in one house. People were going hungry and not getting enough medical care. They weren't allowed to leave the ghettos without permission, and sometimes they had to do forced labour. In the first few months of the occupation, thousands of Jews and non-Jews were executed.
During this time, the Nazis had plans to take the Jews out of the occupied territories and put them on reservations in Poland, or send them to the new Soviet Union after it had been taken. Another plan was to take the Jews to Madagascar. It's important to note that the Nazis didn't put any rules in place about where the Jews would live or what kind of living conditions they would have, but they did start taking Jewish property. That means the Nazis were counting on a high death rate for the Jews.
The invasion of the Soviet Union: Mass executions of the Jewish people
In June 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Adolf Hitler declared war on the communist regime, and the army command was told that there would be no punishment for war crimes and that they could execute anyone suspected of war crimes without trial. The German government wanted to take over the Soviet Union and turn it into a colony for Germany.
Behind German military lines, special killing teams were sent to kill communist officials, guerrillas, and Jewish men aged 15 to 60. The goal was to prevent resistance from the people of the Soviet Union. But from August 1941, the German Einsatzgruppe often killed old people, women, and even children. It's hard to see their murders as revenge.
In the Occupied Territories, the Jewish population was typically required to report to a designated central point, often under the pretence of expulsion, or to be apprehended during raids. From there, the Nazis would transport the Jewish population to a remote location for execution. In total, approximately 900,000 Soviet Jewish victims were murdered in this manner in the course of the war.
Making the choice to commit genocide
Historians dispute the exact moment when Hitler ordered the extermination of all European Jews. There is no signed order to this effect. However, on the basis of other evidence and events, it is highly probable that this decision was made in the late 1940s or early 1941. Mass murder seems an even more extreme option than the earlier plans for extermination.
The war prevented the deportation of Jews to Madagascar. The plan to drive the Jews further east was not possible because the victory of the Soviet Union had not yet been achieved. Thus, the so-called ‘final solution’ of the Jewish question became the extermination of the 11 million Jews in Europe. On January 20, 1942, Nazi leaders held a meeting at which they discussed the implementation of the plan to murder the 11 million Jews.
The first extermination camps - Aktion Reinhard
At the end of November 1941, the Nazis started planning for the extermination of more than 2 million Jews living under the General Government in occupied Poland. In other occupied and annexed regions of Eastern Europe, the Nazis experimented with mass murder using gas. In the town of Chelmno, the Nazis used gas to exterminate Polish Jews. The method was quicker and less ‘disturbing’ to the participating SS officers than shooting people.
Aktion Reinhard was a code name for the extermination camps built by the Nazis. Belzec was one of them. Sobibor was another. Treblinka was another. The victims were killed in gas chambers filled with diesel exhaust fumes as soon as they arrived.
The only goal of the death camps was to exterminate humans. Only a few Jews were left alive to aid in the extermination. In November 1943, the extermination camps were shut down and their bodies were dug up and burned. After that, the Nazis planted trees to erase their crimes. It's estimated that at least a million and a half Jews were killed.
The Other Victims of the Nazis
During the war, the Nazis didn't just kill Jewish people. They also killed political opponents, disabled people, gays, Slavs, Roma, and Sinti. But the murder of European Jews stands out. In fact, they were the biggest group of victims. The Nazis wanted to wipe out the entire Jewish population.
Roma and Sinti were the only other group that were going to be wiped out as a whole. The Nazis were a bit less harsh on these groups, but they still killed between 200,000 and 500,000 of them in Germany and the Occupied Territories. This massacre is known as Porajmos, or 'the eating'.
The Holocaust Legacy
It took a long time for the wounds of the Shoah (also known as the Shoah, or catastrophe) to heal. For survivors of the camps, returning home was almost impossible, as many lost their entire families and were shunned by non-Jews. The result was an unprecedented wave of refugees, prisoners of war and displaced persons moving through Europe in the late 1940s.
In an attempt to punish the perpetrators of the holocaust, the Allied powers held the so-called Nuremberg Trials in 1945-46. These trials brought Nazi crimes to light. The pressure to create a nation-state for the Jewish survivors of the holocaust would culminate in the 1948 Mandate for the State of Israel.
In the years since, ordinary Germans have been dealing with the lingering effects of the Holocaust, with survivors and their families trying to get back money and possessions that were taken from them during the Nazi era. In 1953, Germany started making payments to individual Jewish people and the Jewish community as a way to show that the German people were responsible for the crimes that were committed against them.
