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DAVID CESARANI
THE
HOLOCAUST
A GUIDE FOR STUDENTS AND TEACHERS
David Cesarani was Research Professor in History, Royal Holloway University of
London, and Britain’s leading historian of the Holocaust prior to his untimely death
in 2015.
Design by David O’Connor Designs.
© Holocaust Educational Trust 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or any information storage and retrieval system without prior permission
in writing from the publisher.
Cover Photograph: Part of the “Wall of Names” at the Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris.
The wall bears the first and last names of 76,000 Jews deported from France
to death camps in Poland, including 11,000 children. Arranged alphabetically
according to the year of deportation, each victim’s name is accompanied by their
date of birth.
Image Credits
Cover photograph by Jono David © Jono David,
2006.
Page 3: Photograph taken from Wikimedia
Commons, originally posted to Flickr by
Inabel & Nir at http://www.flickr.com/photos/
inbal_nir/3650699/. Licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License.
Page 5: Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library.
Page 8: “A woman burns money in her stove”,
(Signatur 6/FOTB000751) Bildarchiv im AdsD.
Page 32: The Wiener Library.
Page 33: The Yad Vashem Photo Archive.
Page 34: The Yad Vashem Photo Archive.
Page 36: Both images, The Yad Vashem Photo
Archive.
Page 37: Manuscript Collection # 361 The World
Jewish Congress, The Jacob Rader Marcus
Center of the American Jewish Archives.
Page 38: The Wiener Library.
Page 9: Professor Randall Bytwerk, German
Propaganda Archive, Calvin College.
Page 39: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Page 11: United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum.
Page 41: The Yad Vashem Photo Archive.
Page 40: The Yad Vashem Photo Archive.
Page 12: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Page 42: L’Osservatore Romano – Photographic
service.
Page 13: Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz,
Berlin, 2009.
Page 43: The Imperial War Museum.
Page 15: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Page 17: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Page 18: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Page 19: The Yad Vashem Photo Archive.
Page 20: The Imperial War Museum.
Page 21: Political Archives of the Federal
Foreign Office, Germany.
Page 22: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Page 25: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Page 26: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Page 27: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Page 28: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Page 30: The Yad Vashem Photo Archive.
Page 44: Suzanne Bardgett, The Imperial War
Museum.
All maps are used with kind permission and
are taken from Martin Gilbert, The Routledge
Atlas of The Holocaust 4th Edition 2009, ISBN
9780415484817 HB & 9780415484862 PB.
Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis
Books UK.
We are grateful to The United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum for many of the photographs
that appear in this book.
The views or opinions expressed in this book,
and the context in which the images are used,
do not necessarily reflect the views or policy
of, nor imply approval or endorsement by, The
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
THE
HOLOCAUST
A GUIDE FOR STUDENTS AND TEACHERS
DAVID CESARANI
THE HOLOCAUST
A guide for students & teachers
CONTENTS
1 The Jews
3
2
Germany, Hitler, and the Rise of the Nazis 8
3
The Third Reich and the Jews, 1933-1939
11
4
War, Ghettos and Genocide 1939-1941
16
5
The Final Solution 1941-45
21
6
Jewish Responses to Persecution
27
7
Responses to the Persecution
and Mass Murder of the Jews
32
8Liberation
39
9Retribution
40
10 The Echoes of Genocide
42
THE HOLOCAUST
THE HOLOCAUST
A guide
A guide
for students
for students
& teachers
& teachers
The Jews
T
he origins of the Jewish
people lie in the Middle
East, but the emergence
of this ancient people is
shrouded in myth. Even the phrase
“the Jews” is rather misleading
because it refers to a religion that
nomadic tribes adopted in the
process of becoming a nation –
one distinguished by the belief in
a single god (monotheism), and a
particular code of laws.
The Israelite tribes migrated to an area
they called the Land of Israel where
they settled and established a state
under the rule of the legendary kings
Saul, David, and Solomon, who built
the first Temple. After the death of
Solomon the Israelite state split into
two kingdoms, the longest lasting of
which was called Judah. Over time
the religion of Judah evolved and
changed. It crystallized after invaders
destroyed the first temple and exiled
the Judean elite to Babylon.
When the exiles were allowed to return
they rebuilt the temple and began to
practice a religion that is recognisably
the forerunner of modern Judaism.
This saga is told in the five books of
Moses, prophetic writings, psalms,
sayings, and historical chronicles that
comprise the Hebrew Bible, known
also as the Old Testament. Judea, as
their homeland was known, developed
under various local and foreign rulers
for six hundred years. The Jews lost
their independence totally when a
revolt against Roman rule in 70 CE
failed and the temple was destroyed.
Many fled into exile. The Jewish
population of Judea was further
dispersed after an unsuccessful bid
to regain independence was crushed
sixty years later.
1
The Jewish people were scattered
around the Mediterranean world,
mostly in trading communities that
had been established many years
earlier. This was the origin of the
Jewish population of Europe. Jews
moved northwards through the Roman
empire and settled in areas that are
today France and Western Germany.
These Jews, who became known
as Ashkenazim, developed different
customs to the Jews who settled in
North Africa and the Near East, known
as Sephardim.
Origins of Conflict
For a thousand years the life of the
Ashkenazi Jews in Europe was shaped
by the dominant Christian religion. To
understand the troubled relationship
A contemporary photograph of Judea – the ancient
homeland of the Jews and one of the first sites of human
settlement in history.
between Jews and Christians it
is necessary to go back to Judea
and the origins of Christianity. The
early Christians, followers of Jesus
of Nazareth, were Jews who saw
themselves as a Jewish sect; but
to establish a separate identity they
exaggerated the differences between
their beliefs and traditional Judaism
as prescribed by the priestly caste
associated with the Temple. They were
3
THE HOLOCAUST
A guide for students & teachers
© Martin Gilbert
Two Thousand Years of
Jewish Life in Europe
NORWAY
88 years
ESTONIA
600 years
LATVIA
400 years
HOLLAND
800 years
WHITE RUSSIA
550 years
LITHUANIA
600 years
DENMARK
317 years
POLAND
850 years
GERMANY
1,618 years
UKRAINE
822 years
BELGIUM
700 years
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
1,000 years
LUXEMBOURG
653 years
FRANCE
1,936 years
AUSTRIA
1,030 years
ITALY
2,100 years
HUNGARY
1,900 years
RUMANIA
1,800 years
CRIMEA
1,900 years
YUGOSLAVIA
1,000 years
GREECE
2,239 years
This map show the age of Jewish communities in Europe as of 1939. Many of these
pre-dated the nation-states in which the Jews lived.
For discussion
How can an
understanding
of the origins
of Christianity
help to explain
hostility towards
Jews in Europe?
4
also keen to distinguish themselves
from the rebellious Jews who caused
so much trouble to the Romans.
The early Christian writings that
comprise the New Testament were a
form of propaganda against Judaism,
largely directed to winning converts
from amongst the Jews and pagans.
The New Testament depicts Judaism
as a rigid, unforgiving creed. The Jews
are held responsible for conspiring
with the Romans to achieve the
death of Jesus. The story that Judas
betrayed Jesus for money began the
stereotypical association of Jews
with greed and material gain. In the
gospel of Saint John the Jews are even
depicted as the children of the devil.
Christianity was thereby responsible
for the depiction of Jews as ruthless,
cruel, conspiratorial, money-obsessed,
and Satanic.
Because Christianity was one of the
foundations of European culture, a
negative depiction of the Jews was
built into that culture and survived
even when religious belief began to
decline. Christianity helped to transmit
THE HOLOCAUST
and disseminate hateful stereotypes
of “the Jew” across the centuries. This
is the basis of what became known in
modern times as antisemitism.
Once Christianity was recognised as
the religion of the Roman Empire it was
passed on to successor states as the
sole, official religion: Europe became
Christendom.
Religious Persecution
The Jews in Europe
For centuries the Jews survived in
Europe as a persecuted and despised
minority. But just as the nobility, the
Church, the cities, and the guilds were
allowed to govern themselves, so
were the Jews. They were regarded
as aliens, a foreign population, but
they were permitted to live according
to their own laws in their own
communities.
There were frequent explosions of antiJewish violence, notably during the
Crusades. Much violence was triggered
by horrible folk myths about the Jews,
some spread by the Church. The most
tenacious was the malicious legend
that Jews killed Christians and used
their blood for ritual purposes. The
first so-called blood-libel actually took
place in England.
For discussion
Why were
Jews in Europe
persecuted?
© Lebrecht Music & Arts Photo Library
The Church encouraged secular
powers, kings and princes, to
pass laws that penalised the
Jews for their refusal to accept
Jesus as the messiah. They were
held collectively responsible
for the death of Christ and
punished. Discriminatory
laws and degrading treatment
were also ways to symbolise
the supremacy and truth of
Christianity.
A guide for students & teachers
Yet the Jews were not exterminated
like other heretics. Instead, the
Church maintained that they should
be preserved to witness the second
coming of Christ, when they would
admit their error and convert. This
would signify the ultimate triumph of
Christianity.
In the meanwhile, they had to suffer.
Jews were forbidden to own land
at a time when most people farmed
for a living. They were also barred
from many forms of manufacture in
the cities because craftsmen had to
belong to Christian guilds. Jews were
consequently confined to money
lending, which was forbidden to
Christians, and trade. This economic
discrimination cemented the linkage
of Jews with money and dealing, as
against more obviously “productive”
occupations such as farming and
manufacturing.
A 15th Century depiction of European Jews celebrating
Passover. Rituals such as these are part of the rich
religious and cultural history of the Jews, and continue to
be practised today.
Beginning with England (in 1290)
Jews were expelled from one country
after another. This was the start of
5
THE HOLOCAUST
A guide for students & teachers
in a positive light because they were
close to the first Christians. After
centuries of warfare between Catholics
and Protestants, philosophers and
political leaders began to argue that
religious uniformity was less important
than peace and prosperity.
The new idea that states should
promote trade and industry led to a
more rational way of seeing Jews:
they were regarded as useful and their
presence was tolerated. This was why
the Protestant revolutionary, Oliver
Cromwell, readmitted the Jews to
England in the mid-1650s.
Enlightenment & Emancipation
Drawing of Kazimierz the Great, the 14th Century King of
Poland. Kazimierz was a Christian who defended the rights
of Jews and offered those persecuted in Europe a safe
haven in Poland.
For discussion
What
developments
allowed for a
more tolerant
attitude towards
Jews to emerge?
a great migration eastwards to the
land of Poland-Lithuania where Jews
were welcomed for the contribution
they could make to developing the
economy. Jewish life flourished
there for several centuries. Jews
also enjoyed tolerance in Spain and
prospered while it was under Muslim
rule. In 1496, following the Christian
reconquest of the Iberian peninsular,
the Jews along with the Muslims were
driven out or forcibly converted.
Wherever Jews remained they were
forced to live in enclosed areas known
as ghettos. The first ghetto was
established in Venice in 1516. Many
states passed special “Jewry laws”
that regulated how many Jews could
live in a ghetto, how many could marry,
and what occupations they could
perform. In some places they had to
wear distinctive clothing or badges.
The Protestant Reformation began
the process which led to religious
toleration in Europe. The more radical
Protestant thinkers were interested in
the Hebrew Bible and saw the Jews
6
During the 18th century scientific
investigation and rationalism began to
challenge views of the world based on
superstition or blind faith. Prejudice
and discrimination on the grounds
of religion were increasingly seen as
medieval, even barbaric. The Jews
were no more loved, and Judaism was
certainly not valued, but “enlightened”
men and women did question the way
Jews were treated. Their squalid and
overcrowded ghettos, their poverty,
their despised occupations and their
imposed foreignness were seen
less as a just punishment than as a
consequence of Christian intolerance.
Beginning in the 1780s, enlightened
rulers began scrapping laws that
singled out the Jews, although they
expected them to become useful
subjects in return. Jews responded
to the changing mood with their own
“Enlightenment”. Some Jewish thinkers
argued that they should make a greater
effort to integrate, even at the expense
of modifying Judaism, and acquire
professions that showed they could be
useful and productive members of the
community.
The French Revolution made the Jews
equal citizens of a European state
for the first time. The Rights of Man
THE HOLOCAUST
proclaimed that men should be treated
equally no matter what religion they
followed. Between 1790 and 1870 in
one country after another the Jews of
Western Europe were freed from life in
ghettos and restrictive, discriminatory
laws.
It was not a smooth process and
there were many setbacks. In some
places the struggle for equality, also
called “emancipation”, took decades.
Many Jews felt that the offer of equal
treatment was conditional on merging
as far as possible into the majority
population, even to the extent of giving
up their Jewish identity. In Eastern
Europe very little changed until the
1860s. Jews in the Tsarist Empire did
not get full equality until the Russian
Revolution in 1917.
Wherever Jews were given freedom
they flourished. Jews appeared to
be amongst the beneficiaries of the
modern era: they embraced education
and the sciences; they became
prominent in the “free professions”
(law, medicine, journalism) and
A painting of Ashkenazi Jews praying
on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of
Atonement. For centuries Jews
lived in Central and Eastern Europe,
making significant social and cultural
contributions.
A guide for students & teachers
business and they led innovation in
the arts.
The Emergence of
Antisemitism
With success came resentment. The
Roman Catholic Church regarded the
Jews as freethinkers and blamed them
for the decline of traditional beliefs.
Small shopkeepers believed that
Jewish-owned department stores were
putting them out of business. During
the economic depression of the 1870s,
many people suspected (wrongly) that
Jewish bankers were responsible for
their woes. Conservatively minded
people saw Jews at the forefront of
modern trends in the arts and sciences
and blamed them for undermining oldfashioned values.
By the 1880s there were anti-Jewish
movements in every European country.
These movements drew on oldestablished expressions of hatred
rooted in Christianity. But they also
made use of new ideas that were
potentially more dangerous. The new
Jew-haters claimed that they were not
acting on the basis of superstition or
old-fashioned religious beliefs. Instead,
they argued that Jews were different
and inferior on the grounds of race:
they called this idea antisemitism.
For discussion
What were the
catalysts of
antisemitism in
19th Century
Europe?
According to these pseudo-scientific
theories, Jews were unlike other
people because of their nature or their
blood or their genetic make-up. The
key here was that Jews could not
change: they could talk like Frenchmen
or worship German culture but
inside they would always be “alien”.
Moreover, if humanity was divided
into different races, these races were
not all equal. Some racist thinkers
adapted Charles Darwin’s ideas about
the survival of species to suggest that
there was a struggle between races.
In Germany various agitators began to
talk of a life-or-death battle between
the Jews and the “Aryans”.
7
THE HOLOCAUST
2
A guide for students & teachers
Germany, Hitler, and
the Rise of the Nazis
I
n 1919 Germany was
in crisis. The country
had lost a gruelling war
(1914-18) and suffered
humiliation at the Versailles Peace
Conference. The economy was in
ruins and a Communist-inspired
revolution seemed imminent. In the
province of Bavaria a small group
of angry nationalists formed the
German Workers’ Party dedicated
to reversing Germany’s fortunes and
preventing a left-wing takeover.
© Bildarchiv im AdsD
During the height of the economic crisis in 1923,
inflation in Germany spiralled out of control. Money
was so devalued it became worthless, with some
people even burning their banknotes for warmth.
The party attracted the attention of the
German Army which was trying to curb
the revolutionary movement. It sent
one of its agents to join and monitor
their activity. He was Adolf Hitler.
Adolf Hitler was born in Austria in 1889,
the son of a customs official. During
his youth he attempted to become
a painter, but failed to get into an art
8
school and ended up drifting around
Vienna working as a commercial
artist. Vienna was a hotbed of German
nationalism and antisemitic politics.
Hitler picked up many ideas there, but
showed no political inclinations. In
1914 he volunteered for the German
Army and fought bravely in the
trenches.
Germany’s defeat came as a terrible
shock to him. He swallowed the Army’s
propaganda that revolutionaries,
some of whom happened to be Jews,
had “stabbed Germany in the back”.
From 1918 he began to develop twin
obsessions: that he had a mission
to save Germany from the Jews and
from the menace of Communism.
In 1920 he left the Army to work full
time for the German Workers’ Party.
A talented speaker who drew large
crowds, he soon became its leader
and renamed it the National Socialist
German Workers’ Party - the NSDAP
(Nationalsozialistische Deutsche
Arbeiter-Partei) or Nazis, for short.
At first the NSDAP was only one
of many right-wing, nationalist and
antisemitic parties in Bavaria. There
was nothing special about Hitler either.
But in 1923 he joined with other rightwingers to stage a coup in Munich, the
provincial capital. The coup failed and
he was sentenced to a short prison
term. His trial made him famous and
while he was locked up he wrote Mein
Kampf (My Struggle) in which he set
out his world view.
Ideology, Antisemitism &
Racism
Hitler saw everything in racial and
biological terms. Humanity was divided
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into distinct “races”,
each biologically
different and ranged in
a hierarchy. He believed
that the “Aryans”
were the superior
“race” responsible
for all civilisation. The
Germans and other
“Nordic” peoples
were “Aryans”. The
Jewish race was
purely destructive.
Hitler believed in the
Protocols of the Elders
of Zion, a notorious
forgery by the Tsarist
secret police that
claimed to expose an
international Jewish
conspiracy against
Christianity and the
established order. But
he went still further.
To him the Jews were
a demonic force, not
even human, conspiring
to undermine
civilisation and destroy
the “Aryans”. If they
succeeded life on earth
would be wiped out!
A guide for students & teachers
For discussion
How new and
revolutionary
was Nazi
ideology?
A Nazi propaganda poster showing a sword killing a
snake which has a red Star of David on its head. Some
of the words around the snake’s body are: Versailles,
unemployment, war guilt lie, Marxism, Bolshevism and
inflation.
Hitler wanted to restore
Germany’s greatness.
To do this he thought
it was essential to
strengthen the German
people (the Volk) by eliminating all
biologically weak and “racially” foreign
elements, especially the Jews. He
believed it was then necessary for
Germany to conquer land in “the East”,
for living space (lebensraum). The
destruction of the Soviet Union would
also end the threat of Communism,
which he regarded as a Jewish
invention.
First he had to win power. Hitler did not
hide his contempt for democracy but
said he would use the parliamentary
system to destroy it. He saw
propaganda as the way to mobilise
the masses, using simple, nationalistic
slogans and hate-figures to build
support for the Nazis until they could
take power and end elections forever.
He believed in the leadership principle:
one man, once he was given power,
had the right to command everyone
else.
Only a core of Nazi supporters shared
this brutal vision. In the late 1920s the
Nazi Party attracted people because it
was youthful and appeared idealistic.
9
THE HOLOCAUST
A guide for students & teachers
It was not tarred with the brush of
failed policies. Hitler preached a vision
of communal solidarity and national
rebirth that many found attractive, even
if he was vague on policy details. But
the NSDAP was just one of several
extreme nationalist, anti-socialist and
antisemitic parties. During the years
of prosperity and political stability
from 1924 to 1929 the Nazis seemed
politically irrelevant.
During the years of prosperity
and political stability...
the Nazis seemed politically
irrelevant.
The Great Depression
For discussion
What
conclusions can
be drawn from
the graph below?
Percentage of the votes
40
That changed in 1929 with the onset
of the global financial crisis. The Great
Depression in Germany caused mass
unemployment, widespread discontent,
and fear of a Communist revolution.
In the parliamentary elections of 1928
the Nazis had obtained just 810,000
votes. In 1930 their vote jumped to
over 6 million and in 1932 it reached
14 million. This made the NSDAP the
largest party in the German parliament.
Hitler was seen as a dynamic, new,
young leader who had proven his
love for Germany in the war. His party
was well-organised and efficient
at mobilising voters. By 1932 the
NSDAP had 800,000 members with
2 million more in the party militia, the
SA (Sturmabteilung) or Stormtroopers
(called Brownshirts). This was a
formidable electoral machine. The
party was also good at taking care of
its supporters. The Nazis promised
something for everybody and
conveniently blamed the Jews for
all the country’s ills. By contrast the
other parties seemed out of touch, just
talking to one class or interest group in
society.
A succession of left-wing and rightwing governments tried to deal with
the economic crisis and failed. None
of the conservative parties had mass
support and they became increasingly
afraid of a Communist victory. Eventually, in January 1933 a group of
conservative politicians offered Hitler
the Chancellorship at the head of a
coalition government. This offer came
just in time because the Nazi vote was
dipping and the party was exhausted.
Hitler seized his chance.
NSDAP:
ational Socialist German
N
Workers’ Party (Nazi)
SPD:
Social Democratic Party
KPD:
German Communist Party
30
20
ZENTRUM: Centre Party
10
0
May 1924
Dec 1924
May 1928
Sept 1930
July 1932
DNVP:
erman National People’s
G
Party
DVP:
German People’s Party
Nov 1932
NSDAP
SPDthe share
KPD
ZENTRUM
DNVP
Graph showing
of the popular
vote among
the main DVP
political parties in Weimar Germany,
during the elections of 1924 to 1932
10
THE
THE
HOLOCAUST
HOLOCAUST A guide for students & teachers
The Third Reich and
the Jews, 1933-1939
T
he Nazis came to power
legally at the head of
a right-wing coalition.
Hitler’s initial priorities
were to consolidate his grip
on power by crushing political
opposition and to revive the
economy. Nazi propaganda depicted
an arson attack on the Reichstag
(the German parliament building)
in February 1933 as the first step
in a Communist insurrection. This
gave Hitler the excuse to demand
extraordinary powers from the
parliament. Few delegates dared
oppose him. Hitler became the
dictator at the head of a one-party
state.
3
- even sporting groups. Thousands
of communists, socialists, and
liberals were arrested and sent to
concentration camps.
The Nazis did not come to
power with elaborate plans for
dealing with the Jews.
But at this stage the key to Hitler’s rule
was consent rather than compulsion.
Central and local government,
politicians and civil servants, the
police and the Army, voluntarily lined
up with the Nazis because they agreed
broadly with Nazi policies. Terror was
only used against specific groups who
often lacked broad public sympathy.
Selective terror, however, also sent a
signal to everyone else not to defy the
regime.
For discussion
What was the
“racial state”?
How did it relate
to politics?
Creating the “Racial State”
Adolf Hitler poses with SS members
shortly after his appointment as
Chancellor in January 1933. The SS
would become the main agents in the
persecution and later extermination of
the Jews.
The Nazis did not come to power
with elaborate plans for dealing with
the Jews. Nazi policy on the “Jewish
Question” was only one element in the
creation of a “racial state”. The Nazis
believed that social characteristics
were inherited biologically. According
to the Nazi ideal men were destined
to be warriors, farmers and workers;
women were to be mothers and
homemakers. Anyone who did
not conform to these norms was
victimised.
In a few months the Nazis dissolved
the other parties, eliminated the
trade unions, and Nazified almost
every social and cultural association
People with physical or mental
disabilities that Nazi-oriented doctors
considered to be genetically inherited
were targeted for sterilization. Gay
11
THE HOLOCAUST
A guide for students & teachers
A mixed faith German family enjoying a Sunday afternoon in the woods,
Kaiserslautern, Germany. Prior to 1933, marriages betwen Jews and Christians were
not uncommon.
For discussion
What
significance
should we give to
the laws passed
during 1933?
men, those labelled “asocial” (Gypsies
and travellers, beggars, tramps, the
long term unemployed or “work-shy”),
and “hereditary criminals” were sent for
“correction” in concentration camps.
Germany’s small black population
suffered, too. Germans of African
descent fell into two groups. There
were the offspring of marriages
between German settlers and
indigenous people in Germany’s pre-
The Jews were to be eliminated
from politics, government
service, public life and cultural
activity by a combination of
law and intimidation.
1914 African colonies; and there were
the so-called “Rhineland bastards”
who were the result of relationships
between French North African soldiers
and German women during the French
12
military occupation of the Rhineland.
Black Germans were forcibly sterilised
and many ended up in special camps.
Above all, the Jews were to be
eliminated from politics, government
service, public life, and cultural
activity by a combination of law and
intimidation. In parallel to this the
German people, the Volk, was to be
strengthened by racial-biological
measures to promote marriage
between “Aryans”, large families, and
better public health.
The new government quickly passed
a raft of laws to implement these
steps. In April 1933 the “Law for the
Reconstruction of the Civil Service”
enabled the expulsion of political
opponents and Jews (except those
exempted because of war service)
from government employment. The
June 1933 law on unemployment
and family forced women back to the
home. The July 1933 law for “The
Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased
Progeny” sanctioned the compulsory
sterilisation of women and castration
of men. By 1939 committees of
doctors, psychiatrists and lawyers had
THE HOLOCAUST
supervised the forced sterilisation of
about 350,000 Germans.
Persecuting the Jews
There were 520,000 Jews in Germany,
under one per cent of the total
population, although most lived in a
few big cities. Jews made up a high
proportion of those in the professions
and commerce; while not especially
rich or powerful, they were a visible
minority. Despite their patriotism they
were widely regarded as “unGerman”.
Although the persecution of the Jews
was not a high priority for the Nazi
leadership, the SA were impatient
to strike at the Jews and there was
sporadic anti-Jewish violence. In April
A guide for students & teachers
The 1935 Nuremberg Laws
In 1934 the Nazi regime was
preoccupied with domestic politics,
but in 1935 the pressure to act on
the “Jewish Question” grew. The
civil service and the Army wanted to
end confusion over who was a Jew.
Despite all its anti-Jewish propaganda
the Nazis had no scientific definition of
a Jew and could not answer questions
about how half-Jews or converts
should be treated. On the eve of
the annual party rally at Nuremberg
Hitler demanded a law that he could
announce dealing with these issues.
For discussion
What did the
Nuremberg Laws
seek to achieve?
Were they
successful?
Civil servants in the Interior Ministry
quickly produced the “Law for the
Protection of German Blood and
© bpk, Berlin, 2009
In effect, Nazi
Germany became an
apartheid state.
1933 Hitler approved a boycott of
Jewish stores and shops to channel
this frustration. It was called off after
two days because it was unpopular
with shoppers and threatened to make
the economy worse.
To Hitler’s annoyance, many Jewish
lawyers, judges, and doctors remained
in government work because they
had fought for their country in the
war and were protected by President
Hindenberg who had led the German
Army in 1916-18 and felt a bond with
former soldiers.
However, throughout Germany
businesses, professional associations,
universities and cultural organisations
expelled Jewish members. In small
towns and villages there were boycotts
and violence against isolated Jewish
communities, forcing Jews to move to
the safety of the cities.
A park bench bearing the words “For Aryans Only”.
Discriminatory measures like these were intended to
further marginalize Jews from society, and intensified after
the Nuremberg Laws of 1935.
Honour”. It defined a person as Jewish
according to the number of his or her
grandparents who were Jews in a
religious, not racial, sense. “Aryans”
were forbidden from having sexual
relations with Jews or marrying them.
Jews lost their full citizenship and
13
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were reduced to second-class status.
Under the Nuremberg Laws and
supplementary regulations, Gypsies
and Blacks were also defined as
being of “non-Aryan blood”. In effect,
Nazi Germany became an apartheid
state: Jews were forced into their own
communities and increasingly isolated.
Crucially, there were no protests from
any section of German society.
During 1936 the pace of oppression
slowed. Due to the Berlin Olympics
Hitler wanted Germany to seem
peaceful and well-ordered. Hitler was
also focused on the first of his foreign
policy triumphs: the reoccupation of
the Rhineland.
Thousands of Jews tried
to emigrate, only to find
other countries throwing up
immigration restrictions.
Radicalisation 1937-1939
For discussion
Why was
Kristallnacht
such an
important event?
In 1937 Hitler dismissed the last
remaining conservatives from his
government and embarked on
aggressive, expansionist policies.
The previous year Hitler had placed
Heinrich Himmler, the head of the
SS (Schutzstaffel, or Elite Guard), in
charge of the police. The SS (originally
set up as Hitler’s bodyguard) were the
most fanatical Nazis. The Gestapo, the
secret police, now began to monitor
the Jews even more aggressively.
Hermann Goering was placed in
charge of the Four Year Plan, gearing
the economy for war. Part of this
preparation involved stealing the
wealth and assets of German Jews and
forcing them to sell their businesses
to “Aryans”. In April 1938, the
“Decree on the Declaration of Jewish
Assets” marked the first stage in this
systematic robbery.
14
In March 1938 Hitler ordered the
occupation of Austria. The Anschluss
(annexation) was accompanied by
anti-Jewish violence and plunder.
Thousands of Jews tried to emigrate,
only to find other countries throwing
up immigration restrictions. In Vienna
a young lieutenant in the SS, Adolf
Eichmann, developed a method
to speed up emigration using a
combination of terror and centralised
bureaucracy.
German Jews now faced a hail of
discriminatory regulations. Their assets
and property were seized. In October
1938, 60,000 Jews of Polish nationality
were expelled into Poland. The Poles
refused to admit them so they sat in
miserable refugee camps. A Polish Jew
in Paris, Herschel Grynszpan, whose
parents were amongst the expellees,
was so upset that he marched into the
German Embassy and shot an official
working there.
This assassination gave Joseph
Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief,
the pretext to unleash a wave of
attacks on the Jews of Germany and
Austria.
Kristallnacht
On the night of 9th-10th
November 1938 hundreds of
synagogues were burned down
and Jewish shops attacked.
Over ninety Jews were killed.
Thirty thousand were sent to
concentration camps and not
released unless they emigrated.
The Nazis called this riot
“Kristallnacht”, the Night of
Broken Glass, because of the
destruction it caused.
Although the pogrom was staged
with Hitler’s knowledge, Himmler and
Goering had not been consulted.
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The front of a Jewish-owned shop after “Kristallnacht”, Berlin, November 10th 1938. The scale of
violence and destruction seen during the pogrom marked a new stage in anti-Jewish persecution.
Goering was angry about the damage
to the economy. Paradoxically, this led
to even more radical measures against
the Jews in the Third Reich.
find countries that would accept them.
But at a time of high unemployment,
few countries wanted impoverished
Jewish refugees.
At a meeting convened by Goering,
Nazi leaders agreed to adopt the
Viennese model for “orderly” forced
emigration. As a result, the fate of the
Jews was placed in the hands of the
SS apparatus under the command of
Reinhard Heydrich, which was now
responsible for organising Jewish
emigration. Jews were also forced to
pay a huge fine to the government for
the assassination in Paris. Jews faced
a complete ban on economic activity.
After the annexation of Austria there
was an international conference at
Evian in France to discuss the “refugee
question”. The results were very poor:
every country claimed it lacked room.
This was a tragedy because at that
time Nazi policy was simply to make
the Jews leave, but there were few
places for them to go. Nevertheless,
about half of the German population
and two-thirds of Austrian Jews
managed to emigrate. Many went to
adjacent countries, such as France or
the Netherlands. Large numbers went
to Palestine (which was under British
rule), the United States, and Britain.
As immigration rules got tighter, they
went as far as Latin America and even
Shanghai to find refuge.
Even though German public opinion
was shocked by the destruction and
violence, there were no public protests.
German and Austrian Jews realised
that there was no future for them in the
Third Reich and tried desperately to
For discussion
What conditions
led to the
“refugee
question”?
Are there
contemporary
parallels?
15
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4
A guide for students & teachers
War, Ghettos and Genocide
1939-1941
H
itler’s decision for war
in September 1939 had
a military logic, but his
strategy was decisively
influenced by his belief that Jews
controlled policy in London, Paris,
Washington and Moscow. The
treatment of the Jews who fell under
Nazi control was closely linked to
the course of the war.
For discussion
What is meant
by the term
the “Jewish
Question”?
Motek Mysch, a Jewish man, served in
the Polish army during the 1930s. Mysch
was also a highly talented sportsman
who was the highest-scorer for his army
unit’s football and basketball teams.
In a speech in January 1939 Hitler
warned that if a world war developed
it would be the fault of the Jews and
they would pay the price. Incredibly, he
believed that he could hold the Jews
of Germany hostage against the good
behaviour of the Americans.
Hitler’s ultimate goal was to conquer
land and create an empire in Eastern
16
Europe (Poland, Ukraine, Russia)
that would make Germany a world
power strong enough to rival the
British Empire and the United States.
He dreamed of settling Germans in
“the East” and either destroying or
enslaving the local peoples.
The Occupation of Poland
German foreign policy from 1933-1938
had aimed at recovering land lost due
to the Versailles Treaty so Poland was
always a target. In September 1939
Germany and Russia carved up Poland
between them. Poland was home to 3
million Jews, half of whom ended up
under German rule.
War and the conquest of Poland forced
the Nazis to reassess their anti-Jewish
policies. From 1937-39 their aim was
to make Jews emigrate. In 1939-40
the policy became forced emigration
and expulsion. War diminished the
opportunities for emigration, but
occupied Poland offered a radical
alternative. In October 1939, the
Nazi leadership considered using
the area around Lublin as a “Jewish
reservation”. Adolf Eichmann organised
the first trial deportations of Jews from
Austria and the Czech lands to Poland.
This was just the first of several
attempts to find a “territorial solution”
to the “Jewish Question”; that is, to
settle Jews by force in territory at the
edges of or beyond the Nazi empire.
It was part of a barbaric vision for
reorganising entire populations in the
conquered territories. The plan was
to expel Jews and Poles from areas
annexed to the Reich, dump them in
an area of Poland called the GeneralGovernment, and replace them with
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A guide for students & teachers
thousands of ethnic Germans brought
“home” from Russia, the Baltic States
and Romania.
A million people were brutally shunted
to and fro in 1939-40 in an attempt
to realise this racial utopia, but the
Germans lacked the resources or the
time to complete the job.
In September 1939, Heydrich
decreed that the Polish Jews should
be concentrated in towns and cities
prior to being removed. They were
stripped of their rights and property,
denied work (except forced labour for
the Germans), and crammed into the
worst slum districts. The Jews were
soon afflicted by mass starvation and
disease.
To prevent the spread of epidemics
the Nazi authorities confined them
to certain districts and beginning in
spring 1940 built walls around the
Jewish “living quarters”, thereby
creating ghettos. This was a temporary
measure and more a case of
desperation than design; a sign that
the policy was failing.
The Ghettos in Poland and
“The Madagascar Plan”
In May-June 1940 the German army
conquered France and most of
Western Europe, bringing more Jews
under Nazi control. The fall of France
offered a new “territorial solution” for
the Jews. The German Foreign Office
suggested deporting the Western
European Jews to the French colony of
Madagascar, an island off east Africa.
The SS took up the plan and enlarged
it to include all the Jews of Europe.
The “Madagascar Plan” was latently
genocidal. It envisaged uprooting
millions of people and shipping them
to an island, under SS rule, unable
to support them all. It was never
implemented because as long as
Britain held out against the Third Reich
Photograph of residents in the Warsaw ghetto
buying goods from street vendors, summer 1941.
These goods would have been made by craftsmen or
smuggled into the ghetto, but very few people would
have been able to pay for them.
the Royal Navy denied freedom of the
seas to Germany.
In the meantime, conditions in the
Polish ghettos became critical due
to overcrowding, malnutrition and
epidemics. In the Warsaw ghetto alone
over 400,000 Jews were crammed
into an area covering a few square
miles. The Germans used starvation
to extort money and valuables from
the ghetto population. This led to the
mass death of those with no money
or skills, the old, sick, the very young
and Jews from other districts who
had no connections to get work.
However, it was soon evident that this
would simply lead to a slow attrition of
population with the attendant risk of a
public health disaster.
For discussion
Between 1939
and mid-1941,
how did Nazi
policies towards
the Jews
change? What
does this tell us?
Instead several Nazi regional chiefs
adopted a policy of “productivisation”
– supplying the ghettos with raw
materials and enough food to keep
workers and their families alive to
produce goods for the German war
effort. This was only ever seen as a
temporary solution. About 450,000
Jews would die in the Polish ghettos
from malnutrition, ill-treatment and
related diseases, but by mid-1941
conditions had stabilised.
17
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It seemed as if Nazi policy had
reached a dead end. However, when
Hitler ordered his generals to prepare
the invasion of the Soviet Union a
new possibility opened up. The Nazi
leadership was convinced that the
USSR would be easily defeated; after
victory they could deport Europe’s
Jews to the wastes of Siberia.
the means to manufacture anything.
The German Army envisaged the death
by starvation of 40 million Russians.
Ordinary soldiers were told by their
officers that they were rooting out the
racial enemy.
Mass Shootings in the Soviet
Union, 1941-42
In the weeks after the invasion
began on 22 June 1941, the
Einsatzgruppen shot to death
thousands of Jewish men.
In mid-summer Himmler
transferred more SS and police
troops to the killing fields. They
were assisted by locally recruited
auxillaries, especially in Ukraine,
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
Romanian troops also shot Jews
en masse.
The war against the Soviet Union was
intended by Hitler to be “an ideological
war of extermination”. The Nazis saw
Russia as the centre of Bolshevik and
The war against the Soviet
Union was intended by Hitler
to be “an ideological war of
extermination”.
Anna Glinberg was a threeyear-old Jewish girl killed
during the massacre at Babi
Yar, September 1941. Babi
Yar is a ravine outside Kiev,
Ukraine, where 33, 771 Jews
were murdered in two days of
shootings.
(mythical) Jewish power.
Orders were issued for
all captured commisars
(political officers) and
Jews who worked for
the Communist Party
and the state to be
shot by mobile killing
squads known as
Einsatzgruppen. Four
thousand SS personnel,
SS troops and policemen
were assigned to this
muderous task. The Army
assented to this criminal
order.
It was planned as a
genocidal war. The
conquered territory would
be exploited to feed the
Wehrmacht (German
Army) and supply Germany with food
and raw materials. The local urban
population would not be given food or
18
Einsatzgruppen
Policy now shifted to killing Jewish
men, women and children without any
discrimination. By the end of the year,
around 500,000 Jews in Soviet territory
had been murdered.
These killing operations followed a
pattern: Jewish men in a town or
village were rounded up and marched
off to a nearby forest, forced to dig
mass graves and then shot. Sometimes
anti-tank ditches or natural ravines
were used. Women and children
were rounded up later and murdered
in batches. Some large Jewish
populations could not be wiped out
in one blow and they were forced into
temporary ghettos.
During the spring and summer of 1942,
the Germans organised a “second
sweep” of the occupied territories,
wiping out the remaining ghettoised
communities and hunting down any
Jews who fled into the forests.
Captured soldiers of the Red Army
and civilians also suffered appallingly.
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In Poland the Jews were
confined to ghettos. Many were
now manufacturing goods for
the German war effort in return
for supplies and the population
had stabilised even though
conditions were awful. Their
Nazi overlords still wanted to
get rid of them.
A column of captured Soviet soldiers, being led
to a prisoner of war camp, 1941. Of the 5.7 million
Soviet soldiers captured by the Nazis, some 3.3
million had lost their lives by 1945.
Of the 3 million prisoners of war taken
by the Wehrmacht in 1941-42, over 2
million died due to deliberate neglect.
Eight hundred thousand inhabitants
of Leningrad perished in the course
of a siege that was intended to cause
starvation.
The mass murder of Soviet Jews
was a genocide within a genocide,
yet the origins of both lay in the Nazi
concept of racial war, conquest and
exploitation. The German Army and the
civilian administration were complicit
in this murderous enterprise alongside
the SS.
Steps Towards Industrialised
Mass-Murder
On 31st July 1941, Heydrich obtained
authorisation from Goering to prepare
a plan for the “complete solution of
the Jewish Question in Europe”. This
was probably envisaged as a vast
programme of deportations, pushing
the Jews beyond the Nazi empire. The
Jewish Bureau of the SS Head Office,
under Adolf Eichmann, was given the
task of preparing the plan.
Unexpectedly, however, the invasion of
Russia did not culminate in a German
victory. The resistance of the Red
Army prevented the Nazis from using
Siberia as the destination for unwanted
Jews. German policy-makers faced a
dilemma.
Hitler was under pressure
from Nazi party bosses to
remove the remaining Jews
from German cities in order to
re-house Germans bombed out
of their homes and fulfil the promise
to “cleanse” Germany of Jews. In
October 1941, he agreed to the
deportation of German and Austrian
Jews to ghettos in Lodz, Lvov, Lublin,
Kovno, Riga, and Minsk, but decreed
that they were not to be murdered.
They were useful as hostages to
prevent Jews in the free world pushing
America into the war, which Hitler
fantastically believed lay within
their power.
For discussion
Why did some
local populations
collaborate
in genocide?
Why did some
“ordinary men”
in the German
Army not refuse
to take part?
Unexpectedly the invasion of
Russia did not culminate in a
German victory...German policymakers faced a dilemma.
Heydrich simultaneously ordered the
“cleansing” of the Czech lands and
ordered the creation of a ghetto at
Theresienstadt, near Prague. It was
also used as a place to hold elderly
and distinguished German and
Austrian Jews.
The news that more Jews would be
added to the ghettos dismayed the
Nazi regional bosses in the East.
Where would they put them? To “make
room” the Einsatzgruppen massacred
tens of thousands of Jews from the
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© The Imperial War Museum, EA 62183
A photograph of members of staff of the Hadamar sanatorium standing outside the
institution. As one of the main sites of the “euthanasia programme”, nearly 15,000
men, women and children were killed at Hadamar by the psychiatric staff between
1941 and 1945.
For discussion
Why is the
euthanasia
programme so
significant to
understanding
the ideology and
mechanics of
the Holocaust?
ghettos of Vilna, Kovno, Riga, Minsk,
and Lublin.
murder were transferred to the killing
of Jews.
However, constant mass shooting was
too public and wearing on the killers.
Already in the summer of 1941 Himmler
ordered SS commanders to find a more
discreet and efficient killing method.
They made a connection with the
secret Nazi programme of compulsory
euthanasia, codenamed “T4”.
In November 1941 construction work
began on the first death camp at
Belzec, near Lublin in Poland. Two
more were planned in the region
of Warsaw (Treblinka) and Lublin
(Sobibor). On 8th December 1941, gas
vans operating from a makeshift camp
in the town of Chelmno began the
systematic murder of Jews from nearby
Lodz. Jews were loaded into the back
of lorries converted so that the exhaust
fumes from the engine were piped into
the airtight compartment. The vans
were then driven a few miles to mass
graves in a forest, where the Jews, now
sufficated to death, were unloaded and
buried.
Between August 1939 and September
1941, over 70,000 mentally or
physically disabled inmates of
sanatoria and asylums in Germany and
Austria were murdered after doctors
certified them as “life unworthy of life”.
The victims were transported to one of
six clinics equipped with gas chambers
where they were poisoned with carbon
monoxide gas piped through false
shower heads in mock bathrooms. The
personnel of the clinics were attached
to the SS.
The programme was suspended after
the relatives of some of the victims
worked out what was happening.
Church leaders protested, and Hitler
ordered the suspension of the killing
because he feared the effect on morale
at a time of war. Instead, the personnel,
expertise and technology of mass
20
Meanwhile, the commandant of
Auschwitz concentration camp
experimented with lethal Zyklon-B
(cyanide) gas. The first victims were
Russian prisoners of war.
This was still not a European-wide
genocide. Although anti-Jewish
measures had been enacted
throughout Western Europe there were
no preparations to deport all the Jews.
And the existing death camps were too
small for such a task.
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The Final Solution 1941-45
5
H
istorians still debate
exactly when Hitler
initiated the genocide
against Europe’s Jews
and what triggered it. The decision
was shrouded in secrecy and the
surviving documentary evidence is
fragmented. The trigger may have
been America’s entry into the war in
December 1941. The Jews were no
longer useful as hostages and Hitler
publicly repeated his “prophecy”
that if Germany was forced into a
world war the Jews would pay.
He may have acted in a state of
euphoria, believing the war to be as
good as won, or in fury that he had
been thwarted at the gates of Moscow.
What is beyond doubt is that he now
had the power and the freedom to turn
his murderous hatred of the Jews into
actual genocide.
There were grotesquely rational
economic reasons, too. On the one
hand, the deportation of the Jews
would give the Germans access to
their wealth and property at a time
when the German economy was
straining to support the war effort.
Letting the people of occupied Europe
share some of this loot would bind
them to the Nazi cause. On the other
hand, there would be fewer demands
on the dwindling food supply in
occupied Europe, especially in Poland
where over two million Jews were still
confined in the ghettos.
In late November 1941 Heydrich
summoned leading civil servants
and SS officers to a meeting on 9th
December to coordinate the “Final
Solution of the Jewish Question”
in Europe. The meeting, held in the
Berlin suburb of Wannsee, had to
Table taken from the “Wannsee-Protocol” – the minutes of the
Wannsee Conference as drawn up by Adolf Eichmann. This table
was compiled by Eichmann and circulated among attendees
to show the distribution of the Jewish population in Europe,
according to religious belief. All were earmarked for destruction.
be postponed to 20th January 1942
because Germany declared war on
America. We know roughly what was
said because Adolf Eichmann took the
minutes and one copy survived. He
also testified about the meeting when
he was put on trial in Israel in 1961.
At the Wannsee Conference Heydrich
announced the systematic deportation
of Jews from across Europe to “the
21
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For discussion
Was the Final
Solution
inevitable?
A guide for students & teachers
A child separated from his family prior to deportation from the Lodz ghetto to his
death at Chelmno, September 1942. In this month alone, 15,000 Jews were deported
as part of the “Gehsperre Action”, including many children under the age of 10.
East”. The fit would be put to work on
roads; those unable to work would be
put to death. The survivors of harsh
forced labour would eventually also
be murdered. Heydrich may have
originally intended to preside over
The local genocides with
limited objectives...were now
merged into a vast project.
the mass deportation and dumping
of Jews in Siberia, but by early 1942
there was no chance of that “solution”
and successful experiments with mass
murder had shown the Nazis that they
could annihilate masses of people.
Killing on a vast scale was explicitly
discussed at the Wannsee meeting
and Heydrich obtained agreement from
the key ministries to cooperate in the
programme.
The local genocides with limited
objectives that had been underway
22
in Russia (the Einsatzgruppen) and in
Poland (the fixed-site death camps)
were now merged into a vast project
that required elaborate planning and
new facilities. The Nazis also needed
the cooperation of numerous foreign
allies and collaborationists. The entire
operation was managed by Office IVB4
of the SS Head Office under Adolf
Eichmann.
Genocide in the East
The extermination camps in Poland
– Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and
Chelmno – were not ready or were too
small: they had been designed for local
needs. At Auschwitz the gas chambers
were improvised from converted
peasant huts near the Birkenau subcamp. Construction of purpose-built
gas chambers and crematoria at
Birkenau did not begin until mid-1942
and they were not ready until March
1943.
Due to the demands of the Eastern
front, transport did not become
available until spring 1942. The
deportations to Belzec commenced in
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mid-March 1942 and halted in midMay while the gas chambers were
enlarged. The killing resumed in midJuly and continued until the end of
December 1942. About 600,000 Jews
were murdered at Belzec.
Sobibor operated from May to July
1942, paused while the rail line serving
the camp was strengthened to take
the unusual volume of traffic to which
it was being subjected, and continued
from September 1942 to October
1943. It is estimated that 250,000 Jews
were murdered there.
After a false start in August 1942,
Treblinka was active continuously from
September 1942 to August 1943. No
less than 870,000 Jews were killed
there. Over 215,000 originated from
Warsaw alone and were murdered
in a five week period from July to
September 1942.
Majdanek, a concentration camp that
was equipped with gas chambers
using Zyklon-B, accounted for 125,000
Jews being gassed and shot.
The methods of murder were the same
in all the killing centres. Having been
tricked or forced onto the deportation
trains the Jews spent anything from
one to five days crammed in cattle
trucks with no sanitation, food or
water. Some transports of Jews from
Western Europe used converted
passenger carriages. Some Jews had
to pay for the cost of their transport.
They were guarded all the way; anyone
attempting escape was shot.
On arrival men were separated from
women and children. They were forced
to hand over all their valuables and
told to undress so they could shower.
The hair of the women was cut off (it
was used for industrial purposes). The
“showers” were in fact airtight rooms
into which poison gas was released.
Special teams of Jews spared
A guide for students & teachers
immediate murder were used to clear
out the gas chambers and transport
the bodies to pits where they were
burned.
In Auschwitz-Birkenau a proportion
of each transport was selected for
work. After a quarantine period, during
which many were tattooed, they were
sent for slave labour in the Auschwitz
camp complex or to other sites. Some,
especially twins, were selected for
“medical” experiments.
Genocide in Central and
Western Europe
The implementation of the “Final
Solution” varied from country to
country and was influenced by the
extent of German control and the
stage in the war at which it was put
into effect.
Denmark preserved its own
government. Norway was under a Nazi
commissioner who governed through
the civil service. The Netherlands were
under a similar system, while Belgium
and northern France were controlled
by the German Army. Part of France
was unoccupied until November 1942,
and the entire country was technically
neutral, with its own government.
For discussion
Why did
European
governments
collaborate in the
“Final Solution”?
The Czech lands were ruled directly as
a “protectorate”. Slovakia and Croatia
had puppet governments. Greece was
under joint Italian and German military
occupation. Hungary, Romania and
Bulgaria were independent countries
but closely allied to Germany. Italy
was, theoretically, an equal partner to
the Third Reich in the “Axis” alliance.
Hungary and Romania had a long
tradition of antisemitism and passed
anti-Jewish laws in the 1930s.
Italy adopted “race laws” in 1938.
Slovakia and Croatia adopted antiJewish laws soon after they gained
“independence”. France passed
an anti-Jewish statute in 1940
23
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A guide for students & teachers
after its surrender to Germany, but
without being forced to do so. In the
Netherlands anti-Jewish regulations
were issued by the German authorities
and enforced by local agencies and the
police.
In every country anti-Jewish laws
involved the registration and
confiscation of Jewish property and
In every country anti-Jewish
laws involved the registration
and confiscation of Jewish
property and assets.
For discussion
What features
made the
Holocaust a
“modern” event?
assets. Sometimes the Germans
instigated the “Aryanisation” of
Jewish businesses; sometimes they
competed with local initiatives. Once
the deportation of Jews started there
was a huge and lucrative market
in “abandoned” flats and houses,
“ownerless” companies and shops,
frozen stocks and shares, “dormant”
bank accounts, unclaimed insurance
policies, artworks, jewellery, furniture
and furnishings, tableware, musical
instruments, clothing, and even toys.
The Jews of Slovakia were the first
to be deported en masse, starting
in March 1942, on the initiative of
the Slovak government. German,
Austrian and Czech Jews were
deported to Theresienstadt or Lublin.
Theresienstadt was merely a pause
on the way to Auschwitz. Jews sent to
Lublin were soon murdered in Belzec.
The preparations for the “Final
Solution” in France, the Netherlands
and Belgium began in spring 1942.
Jews in all three countries had been
forced to register as Jews the previous
year. In May 1942 they were compelled
to wear the Yellow Star. Eichmann
met with his field officers in June to
24
agree the transportation schedules.
From July, Jews were ordered to report
for “resettlement” in “the East” or
seized in roundups. The civil service
and local police (except in Belgium)
provided the necessary manpower
for these operations. Jews were first
held in transit camps: Drancy, in Paris;
Malines, outside Antwerp; Westerbork,
near Amsterdam.
The camps were near railway lines.
Trains, each carrying roughly 1000
people, took most to Auschwitz. Some
transports from Western Europe went
to Sobibor and Treblinka. In March
1943 the large purpose-built gas
chambers and crematoria came into
operation at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Over
1.1 million Jews from all over Europe
were murdered there between May
1942 and October 1944.
Expropriation
The distribution of plunder
created a common interest
between the Germans and their
collaborators. Thousands of rail
trucks and barges filled with
household goods and clothing
were transported to the Reich
and distributed amongst German
families bombed out of their
homes or given as a reward to
loyal Nazis. The plunder of the
Jews helped finance the German
war machine and assuaged
discontent amongst the German
population.
During 1943 it became harder for the
Nazis to extract Jews from countries
in Western Europe. Thanks to the
German defeat at Stalingrad, even
Germany’s allies began to get nervous.
Nevertheless, the Nazis were still able
to deport the entire Jewish population
of Salonika in Northern Greece. In
THE HOLOCAUST
A guide for students & teachers
Prisoners in the Order Commando at Auschwitz sort through the belongings of a
recently arrived transport, May 1944. The section of the camp which handled loot such
as this was called “Canada” by prisoners, in reference to the imagined riches of North
America.
the wake of the Warsaw ghetto revolt
in April 1943 Himmler ordered the
remaining large ghettos and camps
to be liquidated in an “Aktion” called
“Harvest Festival”. More than 17,000
Jews were murdered on 3rd November
1943 in Majdanek alone.
Although Danish resistance foiled the
attempt to seize all the 7,800 Jews in
Denmark, the occupation of Italy led
to the rounding up of a similar number
of Jewish Italians. The Pope was silent
while the Jews of Rome were seized in
streets adjacent to the Vatican.
By 1944 the 750,000 Jews on
Hungarian territory were the largest
surviving population. Paradoxically,
because they had been shielded from
the “Final Solution” for so long they
felt safe. But when the Hungarian
government tried to negotiate peace
with the Allies the Germans moved in.
The Nazis saw this as an opportunity
to seize valuable economic assets and
slave labour. The Hungarians were
eager to assist. In just four months the
Jews were ghettoised, plundered, and
437,000 were deported to Auschwitz-
Birkenau where most were killed
on arrival. Tens of thousands were
selected for brutal work in the Nazi jet
fighter and rocket factories.
The 70,000 Jews from Lodz who were
transported to Auschwitz in August
1944 was the last major community
to be destroyed. Two months later the
gas chambers ceased to function and
the Germans started destroying the
evidence of genocide.
For discussion
Why might the
Nazi leadership
have been
divided over
using Jewish
labour?
Extermination Through Labour
The Nazi leadership was divided over
the exploitation of the Jews for labour.
When the German war economy ran
short of workers and it was clear the
war would drag on, the Nazis started
using forced and slave labour, even
Jews.
During the deportations of 1942 and
1943 the Jewish inhabitants of the
ghettos who had skills or were fit
for work were routinely exempted.
Workshops existed in the ghettos.
However, Himmler repeatedly
demanded the elimination of “work
Jews” and in late 1943 succeeded
25
THE HOLOCAUST
A guide for students & teachers
in wiping out most of this labour
force and moving the remnant into
labour camps. Only the Lodz ghetto
workshops survived, until August 1944.
In mid 1944 tens of thousands of
deported Hungarian Jews were
selected for work in AuschwitzBirkenau. They joined a concentration
camp population of 700,000, largely
non-Jewish, working in appalling
conditions. Because the supply of
labour was plentiful and the work
was mainly unskilled there was no
incentive to treat the workers decently.
Thousands died in camps such as
Dora-Mittelbau working on special
weapons projects.
For discussion
What was the
purpose of the
death marches,
if the Second
World War was
already lost?
The End of the Extermination
Camps and the Death Marches
Belzec stopped operating in August
1943 and the Nazis destroyed traces
of its existence. Sobibor was shut
down after a prisoner revolt in October
1943 and the evidence destroyed.
Treblinka was closed after an uprising
in November 1943. Chelmo was
discontinued in 1943 and revived for
a period in 1944 when the last camps
were liquidated. Over 150,000 Jews
were murdered there. Majdanek was
captured almost intact by the Red
Army in July 1944.
Simon Trampetter removes the Star of
David from the coat of his fellow Jewish
survivor, Joseph Keller, January 1945.
26
In early November 1944 murder by
gas at Birkenau stopped although
killing by shooting and lethal injection
went on for weeks. Later that month
orders were given to dismantle the gas
chambers. This work and demolition
of the crematoria extended into
December, while the last functioning
unit was blown up by retreating SS
men on 26 January 1945. About 1.25
million people had been murdered
there, of whom some 1.1 million
were Jews. Other large victim groups
included Gypsies and Soviet Prisoners
of War. Tens of thousands of Poles
were shot and tortured to death in the
Auschwitz main camp.
During the winter of 1944-45, as the
Red Army drew near, the Nazis started
to evacuate Auschwitz, where 70,000
prisoners remained, as well as other
concentration camps. The aim was to
transport the prisoners to camps deep
in areas still under German control. But
transport and provisioning broke down.
Thousands perished on the wintery
roads of eastern Germany. Guards and
local people mercilessly shot those too
weak to march.
Nor could the reception camps cope
with the influx. In the last months of the
war starvation and disease ran out of
control. The worst disaster occurred in
Bergen-Belsen.
This former prisoner of war camp
was converted in 1943 to hold Jewish
hostages and Jews to be exchanged
for Germans in Allied hands.
Conditions were reasonable until
Autumn 1944 when Jews from other
camps flowed in, taking the camp
population from 15,000 to 60,000.
Eventually 40,000 Jews died of hunger
and illness in Belsen. Despite a heroic
relief effort, typhus and malnutrition
claimed 14,000 lives after the camp
was liberated by British troops in
April 1945.
THE HOLOCAUST
THE HOLOCAUST
A guide
A guide
for students
for students
& teachers
& teachers
Jewish Responses to
Persecution
6
I
n the aftermath of the
war, Jews were criticised
for not having escaped
from Europe while they
had the chance and failing to resist
the Nazis. Some historians even
accused the Jews of collaborating
in their own destruction. A more
balanced view of Jewish behaviour
now prevails, although there is
still argument over whether one
response would have been better
than another.
In Germany and Austria
German and Austrian Jews were the
first to face persecution and more
than half did emigrate. However, it was
easier to leave if you were young or
well-off. Many with aged parents felt
they should stay and care for them.
The level of persecution rose and fell;
until 1938 it was possible to believe
that things would improve. By then
few countries would accept Jewish
immigrants.
Mordechai Rumkowski, Chairman of the Jewish Council
in Lodz, meets with German officials on the street of the
ghetto. Rumkowski remains a controversial figure whose
leadership of the Judenrat continues to divide opinion.
young Jews went underground and
survived in hiding or with false papers.
In 1942 a small group of Jewish
Communists launched sabotage
attacks against the regime; they were
quickly rounded up by the Gestapo.
In the Polish Ghettos
In what became the pattern for other
communities, the German Jewish
community set up schools for Jewish
children and welfare agencies for
those thrown out of work by the
Nazis. Jewish cultural life flourished
when professors, teachers, artists
and musicians were taken into their
own community. Because the Nazis
banned art, writing, and music by
Jews cultural activity was also a form
of defiance.
After the conquest of Poland, Heydrich
decreed that Jews in every city had to
set up a Jewish Council, a Judenrat.
Its members were selected by the
Germans. Initially the Councils had
the task of supplying the Germans
with Jewish forced labour. Later
they organised food rationing,
manufacturing, sanitation, welfare
and child care in the ghettos. Each
ghetto had a police force to implement
sanitation rules and rationing.
None could have known what lay in
the future. When the deportations
started, hundreds of elderly Jews
committed suicide rather than submit
to further indignities. Numbers of
Tragically, when the deportations from
the ghettos commenced the Germans
made the Judenrat responsible for
filling daily quotas. Adam Czerniakow,
the head of the Judenrat in Warsaw,
For discussion
Can we make
fair judgements
on how Jews
responded to the
Holocaust?
27
THE HOLOCAUST
A guide for students & teachers
refused to comply and committed
suicide. Chiam Rumkowski, elder of
the Jews in Lodz, believed that if the
ghetto complied it would be possible
to save at least some, as long as they
remained productive. Several heads
of Jewish councils, like Efraim Barash
in Bialystok, covertly encouraged
armed resistance. Ultimately though,
no strategy succeeded in thwarting
German intentions.
The deportations were carried out
with terrifying ferocity. The Jewish
Councils were told that non-essential
Jews were to be “resettled in the East”
and they were given daily quotas to
meet. As an incentive, the Jews were
told that if they went voluntarily to the
embarkation points they would receive
extra rations.
In many ghettos the “working Jews”
were physically divided from the Jews
regarded as “surplus”. To begin with
“surplus Jews” were lured to the
A Jewish orchestra performs in the Kovno ghetto, 1944.
In 1941, many musicians were targeted for extermination,
prompting the Judenrat to make them policemen in an
attempt to protect them. During the “Police Action” of spring
1944, only the musicians were spared from death.
assembly points by the promise of
food. But as rumours spread about
mass murder the Jewish police
28
were charged with rounding up the
necessary numbers each day. When
more and more Jews hid, heavily
armed teams of SS men and auxiliaries
stormed through streets, courtyards
and buildings grabbing anyone they
found and using sniffer dogs to
uncover hiding places.
The onslaught against the ghettos
was so sudden and brutal that it
was hard for the Jews to respond
effectively. The Nazis initially
demanded that the Jewish Councils
select “useless mouths” – those
considered unproductive and therefore
expendable. They never said how
many would be removed so the Jewish
Councils always hoped that each
transport would be the last.
In Soviet Territory (Eastern
Poland, Baltic States, White
Russia, Ukraine)
The German onslaught in mid 1941
was so swift that Jews had little
time in which to react. In the areas
annexed to the Soviet Union many
local people turned on the Jews,
because they (wrongly) identified all
Jews with the Communist Party and
saw the Germans as liberators. In
several places Poles, Ukrainians, and
Lithuanians spontaneously massacred
Jews.
Where Jews had time, many escaped
or were evacuated with the factories
and government agencies they worked
in. Once the first wave of pogroms
and mass shootings had passed the
surviving Jews took stock. Where large
ghettos lasted long enough, such as
Vilna, Kovno, Bialystok, the Jewish
Councils pursued the policy of working
to survive. They too set up welfare
agencies and cultural activities to try
to make life more bearable. However,
thanks to the first wave of mass
shootings they had few illusions about
what was in store for them in the long
run.
THE HOLOCAUST
Jewish Revolts 1942 - 45
River N
eim
Ponary
19 May 1944
Key
Ghettoes in which Jews rose up
in revolt against the Germans
Vilna
1 September 1943
Death Camps in which Jews
revolted
Mir
9 August 1942
Nieswiesz
22 July 1942
Kuldichvo
25 March 1943
Bialystok
16 August 1943
Riv
Armed Resistance
er V
istu
la
Kletsk
21 July 1943
Treblinka
2 August 1943
Warsaw
19 April 1943
Minsk Mazowiecki
10 January 1943
Chelmno
17 January 1945
Krushin
17 December 1942
Sobibor
14 October 1943
Lakhva
3 September 1942
Ri
e
v
a
Riv
Bedzin
3 August 1943
Auschwitz
7 October 1944
Lutsk
12 October1943
t
ul
s
Vi
er
B
ug
Chenstochov
25 October 1943
Lublin
3 November 1943
r
Armed resistance presented
huge challenges. The ghettos
were large, fixed communities
with women and children and
elderly folk, not small guerrilla
units that could hit and run.
Usually there was no place to
flee or hide. The Jews had little
experience of military operations
and almost no arms. Most Jews
of military age had been called
to serve with the Polish or Soviet
army. It was nearly impossible
to obtain weapons once the
ghettos were sealed. The Polish
underground were reluctant
to part with any of their guns
for what they perceived as a
hopeless cause.
en
© Martin Gilbert
A few young Jews in each
ghetto, mainly Zionist youth or
socialists, decided to escape
into the forests and to resist
as partisans. In some ghettos
they dug bunkers and prepared
to fight or hide when the next
onslaught began. Several ghetto
leaders secretly helped the
Jewish underground and made
contact with Soviet partisans.
A guide for students & teachers
Tuchin
3 September 1942
Tarnow
1 September 1943
Brody
17 May 1943
Cracow
22 December 1942
Kremenetz
9 September 1942
Lvov
1 June 1943
Stryj
28 April 1943
C Z E C H O S L O VA K I A
H U N G A RY
Ri
ve
r
Dn
ie
st
er
This map shows the location of camps and ghettos where Jews
revolted against the Nazis and their collaborators, 1942-1945.
Neverthless, armed Jewish resistance
did develop. In Warsaw it grew up
around young Zionists and Jewish
socialists who joined to form the
Jewish Fighting Organisation. In
Vilna the ghetto leader initially
helped set up the United Partisan
Organisation. In Bialystok the head of
the Council turned a blind eye while
the underground built bunkers and
acquired arms.
The largest uprising occurred in the
Warsaw ghetto in April-May 1943 when
a few hundred young fighters held
the Germans at bay for weeks. Other
ghetto revolts occurred in Bialystok,
Bedzin, Czestochowa, and Krakow.
Ghetto uprisings occurred when
Jews had lost any illusions about the
chances of surviving through work or
rescue from the outside. They were
more a gesture of defiance than a
survival strategy.
There was even resistance
in the death camps... these
revolts convinced Himmler to
liquidate them.
Jewish partisans fought throughout
Poland and Russia wherever
there were favourable conditions.
29
THE HOLOCAUST
A guide for students & teachers
them as pro-Soviet.
There was even resistance in the death
camps. The first revolt occurred in
Treblinka on 2nd August 1943 amongst
the Jews temporarily spared the gas
chambers for work purposes. Few
Jews escaped but part of the camp
was destroyed. In October 1943 a
Jewish Red Army officer led a rising
of skilled workers who were kept alive
in Sobibor. Dozens managed to break
through the wire and the surrounding
minefield to reach the forests. These
revolts convinced Himmler to liquidate
the death camps.
A group of Jewish partisans fighting in Lithuanian forests in
1944. In addition to resistance in the ghettos and camps, a
number of Jews were active in fighting the Nazis and their
collaborators on and behind the Eastern front.
Tuvia Bielski and his brothers from
Novogrudek led a remarkable partisan
group in the Nalibocki Forest where
they created a family camp. Yehiel
Grynszpan led a Jewish partisan unit
that successfully attacked German
targets around the Parcew Forest.
Other groups operated in the Wlodowa,
Wola and Janow forests.
Up to mid-1944, about 40,000
Jews survived in Poland in
hiding or in disguise.
However, the Jewish partisans faced
daunting odds. Unless Jews already
had weapons few established partisan
units were willing to accept them.
Groups of armed Jews were frequently
attacked by antisemitic elements of
the Polish Home Army or Ukrainian
nationalist guerrillas which regarded
30
In October 1944 the Sonderkommando, the special work force
that operated the gas chambers and
crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau,
revolted. The prisoners succeeded in
killing several SS men and blowing
up some installations before the SS
crushed the revolt.
Evasion
It is estimated that 25,000 Jews fled
the Warsaw ghetto and found refuge
on the “Aryan side”. The escapees
were Jews who had connections with
Christian Poles through intermarriage,
former business dealings or as
employees. With their help they
constructed “melinas” or hiding places.
A Jew could not survive underground
without food, and it was essential to
have a team of helpers. Some Jews
could pass as Christian Poles by virtue
of their looks, or, if they were middle
class and Polonised, because they did
not speak Polish with a Yiddish accent.
However, they too needed contacts in
order to obtain ID and ration cards.
Up to mid-1944, about 40,000 Jews
survived in Poland in hiding or in
disguise, supported by many times that
number of Christians who risked their
lives and the welfare of their families
every day. The Zegota organisation
THE HOLOCAUST
played a vital role channelling aid to
the Jews in hiding.
Unfortunately, the Polish national
uprising in 1944 was fought over the
very ground in Warsaw where Jews
were concealed. Many emerged from
their “melinas” because they thought
liberation was imminent and were
killed in the subsequent mayhem.
Spiritual Resistance
After the war praise was heaped on
those who fought back in the forests
or in the ghettos. Much later it was
realised that because the Nazis set
out to break the spirit of the Jews and
dehumanise them, every effort to retain
their dignity and to maintain Jewish
traditions was a form of defiance.
Schools, theatres, songs, artworks,
and hidden prayer rooms were all
ways of resisting Nazi aims. Keeping
a record, collectively or individually,
defied the Nazi aspiration to hide their
crimes and wipe out any memory of
the Jews.
Because the Nazis wanted to starve
the Jews, food smuggling was a form
of resistance. The “criminals” in the
ghettos and the children able to crawl
through tiny openings in the walls
became folk heroes. The strategy of
the Jews was “iyberlebn”: to survive
or overcome, which in the face of
genocide was resistance.
Patterns of Response in
Western Europe
There were a wide variety of responses
in Western Europe reflecting the
fractured nature of Jewish societies.
Native born Jews tended to behave
obediently until the last moment,
putting their faith in their countrymen
to protect them.
Foreign-born Jews were more
vulnerable, but had stronger
organisations and were more
A guide for students & teachers
politicised. Many were Zionists,
Bundists and Communists with militant
traditions and links with other political
organisations that could help them to
go underground or resist.
In each country the Nazis set up a
Jewish Council to transmit orders to
the Jewish population. The councils
also arranged welfare, education,
and cultural activities. They were later
criticised for fostering complacency,
but their responses were governed by
information which was sporadic and
confused. It was hard to believe the
rumours from “the East”.
For discussion
What factors
do we need to
consider when
discussing
resistance?
When the deportations began,
German deception strategies were
highly effective. Many Jews believed
in “resettlement” in “the East”. Even
if Jews decided to flee or hide,
geography influenced their survival
chances. The Jews of France were
able to move to the unoccupied zone,
the Italian occupation zone, or scatter
into the large, sparsely populated
interior of the country. This was not
possible in Belgium or the Netherlands.
Timing was also crucial. By early 1943
Germany’s allies were getting cold
feet. Romania was reluctant to deport
its Jews. Vichy France withdrew its
cooperation too. When the Germans
tried to round up the Danish Jews,
neutral Sweden was less worried
about annoying Germany and helped
the Danish resistance evacuate the
Jews to safety.
There was also extensive resistance.
This took the form of locating or
creating safe places for children and
manufacturing forged papers. Many
Jews joined the underground and
some formed all-Jewish resistance
groups such as the Armée Juive in
southern France. In April 1943, the
Jewish communist underground in
Belgium derailed a train and helped
231 deportees escape.
31
THE HOLOCAUST
7
A guide for students & teachers
Responses to the Persecution
and Mass Murder of the Jews
H
For discussion
Most Germans
knew about the
mass killings.
What can we
learn from their
response?
The Germans who voted for Hitler were
not necessarily anti-Jewish, but his
hatred of the Jews did not put them
off the Nazis. Anti-Jewish prejudice
and discrimination pervaded Germany.
While only a proportion of Germans
shared Hitler’s radical racial-biological
view of the world, many more disliked
the Jews because they saw them
as too “modern”, or too “foreign”,
or because they were not Christian.
Traditional antipathies were a bridge to
the Nazis more radical racial-biological
antisemitism.
After 1933 Germans were subjected
to constant anti-Jewish propaganda.
Social and commercial contacts with
Jews were progressively severed. In
1938 Germans may have recoiled at
Traditional antipathies were
a bridge to the Nazis more
radical racial-biological
antisemitism.
massive anti-Jewish violence, but few
felt any empathy with their suffering.
By the time the deportations began
in 1941 Jews were confined to “Jew
houses” and almost invisible. Ironically,
many Germans did not like it when
Jews were forced to wear the Yellow
32
© Photo: The Wiener Library
istorians have debated
the extent to which
ordinary Germans were
antisemitic and how
much they knew about the genocide
against the Jews.
Poster advertising the Nazi exhibition
“The Eternal Jew” (Der ewige Jude) in
the German Museum, Munich 1937.
Star in September 1941 because it
made them visible again.
Information about the mass killings in
the East was widespread in 1941-42.
Soldiers on leave brought back stories
of what they had seen and even sent
photos home. By 1943 there were
rumours about death camps. The BBC
broadcast explicit reports about the
deportations and death camps on its
German-language service; the Gestapo
was aware that people tuned into the
broadcasts.
But the Nazis actually turned this
limited knowledge to their benefit.
Goebbels used propaganda that hinted
at the mass murder of the Jews to
create the sense that all Germans were
now complicit. When German cities
THE HOLOCAUST
A guide for students & teachers
experienced fierce bombing raids it
was common for Germans to remark
that Jews were sending the planes in
revenge for what Germany had done to
their people.
So, if the average German did not
know exactly what was happening
they knew enough not to want to
know more. There was certainly no
expression of opposition. The main
German resistance to Hitler actually
agreed with moderate discrimination
against the Jews! Only a few, like
the tiny White Rose group, explicitly
condemned the mass murder.
There was one public protest against
the deportations from Berlin. In
February 1943 “Aryan” women who
were married to Jewish men protested
when their partners were rounded
up for deportation. The question of
those of “mixed race”, converts, and
Jews married to “Aryans” was always
tricky for the Nazis because it involved
many “pure” Germans, so the regime
frequently back-peddled. In this unique
case the interned Jews were released
and survived the war.
In Occupied Europe
Antisemitism was widespread
throughout Europe. The Nazis found
rich soil for their propaganda, and
when they seemed all powerful,
people under Nazi rule tended to align
with their point of view, especially if
there was money to be made from
plundering the Jews. When the tide of
war turned, opinions about the fate of
the Jews changed too.
Poland was subjected to the most
brutal occupation regime, and Poles
were preoccupied with their own
suffering. They tended not to see the
Jews as fellow-countrymen. Traditional
Catholic antisemitism and antiCommunism also cut across sympathy
for the Jews. Before long Poles began
to profit from the liquidation of Jewish
The founding members of the White Rose group – Hans
and Sophie Scholl with Christoph Probst, 1942. From
the University of Munich, the group distributed anti-Nazi
propaganda, before all three founding members were
arrested in February 1943 and executed for treason.
property and assets, yet about 40,000
Jews went underground or hid with
help from Christian Poles.
Antisemitism was widespread
throughout Europe. The
Nazis found rich soil for their
propaganda.
In the portion of Poland occupied by
the USSR in 1939 and in the Baltic
States annexed in 1940, the period
of Soviet rule inflamed local attitudes
towards the Jews. Left-wing Jews
initially welcomed the invaders,
although the Soviet secret police
soon destroyed any independent
Jewish life. Soviet rule was harsh
and thousands were deported to the
gulags. When the Germans drove out
the Red Army in July 1941, there were
several murderous pogroms by Poles,
Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Latvians
who associated the Jews with the
Communist regimes.
For discussion
How do the local
pograms of 1941
contribute to our
understanding of
the Holocaust?
33
THE HOLOCAUST
A guide for students & teachers
of war. In October 1940 the Vichy
regime passed strict anti-Jewish laws.
A Jewish bureau was set up in March
1941 to register and confiscate Jewish
property.
When the Nazis first discussed the
deportation of the Jews, the French
authorities suggested they take Jews
from the internment camps and foreign
Jews. During 1942 French police
rounded up Jews for deportation.
However, by 1943 the mood changed
and police cooperation was limited.
The Germans could only rely on
extreme right-wing groups.
The Head of State of the Vichy regime, Henri Phillipe
Pétain. A former military hero of World War One,
Pétain promoted collaboration with the Nazis
including active persecution of France’s Jewish
population.
For discussion
How, and in what
ways, was the
Holocaust a truly
European event?
Tens of thousands of White Russians,
Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Latvians
served as auxiliary policemen and in
Waffen-SS units. The first waves of
recruits in 1942-43 were voluntary; later
they were conscripted. They guarded
ghettos, took part in mass shootings,
and provided the security units at the
death camps in Poland.
Tens of thousands of White
Russians, Ukranians,
Lithuanians and Latvians
served as auxillary policemen
and in Waffen-SS units.
In France there were strong right-wing
and anti-Jewish currents. Thousands of
foreign Jews, mostly refugees from the
Nazis, were interned at the outbreak
34
Over 20,000 Jewish children were
hidden with non-Jewish families,
in country villages, and in Catholic
schools. In a few exceptional cases
the population of entire villages took in
Jewish refugees and worked together
to protect them. Of around 350,000
Jews in France, 78,000 were deported.
Sephardi Jews in French North Africa
– Morrocco, Algeria, Tunisia – also
suffered anti-Jewish laws. The ItaloGerman occupation of Tunisia in
1942-43 led to a period of harsh forced
labour and extensive plunder.
In the Netherlands there was no deep
antisemitic tradition. However, the
cooperation of the Dutch civil service
and the police, in combination with
a compliant Jewish population, had
devastating results. Approximately
110,000 out of 140,000 Jews in the
Netherlands were deported. About
15,000 survived in hiding.
By contrast, in Belgium 22,000
out of roughly 90,000 Jews were
successfully hidden. Only some 26,000
were deported. This reflected the
unenthusiastic attitude of the military
government and the courage of leftwing Belgians and Catholic clergy who
helped the Jews.
In Slovakia the government was
THE HOLOCAUST
officially Catholic and was initially
eager to get rid of its Jews, especially
if it could seize the wealth they left
behind. Hungarians too saw the
“Jewish Question” as one of economic
gain and collaborated enthusiastically
with the Nazis.
Romania was a country with a
ferociously antisemitic record.
Romanian troops killed tens of
thousands of Jews on Soviet territory,
while “foreign” Jews in annexed areas
were massacred or forced into camps.
Over 100,000 Romanian Jews were
deported to the annexed zone, called
Transnistria, and around 200,000
Romanian Jews perished. But in
1943 the regime refused to allow the
deportation of its Jewish citizens to
Auschwitz; they survived.
Italy ended the war with a benign
reputation. Italian troops protected
Jews wherever they were stationed in
France and the Balkans. Yet Italy also
passed anti-Jewish laws in 1938, and
hard core Italian Fascists rounded up
Jews in 1943 and 1944. Approximately
7,800 were deported.
Denmark was the only country with a
significant Jewish population where
a concerted effort by the resistance
thwarted Nazi aims. However the
Danes had previously enjoyed kidglove treatment from the Germans who
were keen not to upset a country that
was otherwise placid and, even more
important, was a crucial source of
food. There is evidence that the effort
to round up the Danish Jews was
half-hearted, although the brave men
and women of the resistance did not
know this.
In the “Free World”
From 1933 to 1938, most democratic
governments in Europe were intent
on appeasing Hitler. They felt guilty
about the way Germany had been
treated after the First World War.
A guide for students & teachers
Many politicians sympathised with
Hitler’s anti-Communism, his social
policies and his goals of strengthening
Germany. His treatment of the Jews
From 1933 to 1938, most
democratic governments
in Europe were intent on
appeasing Hitler.
did not intrude into their diplomatic
reckoning. There were also powerful
anti-Jewish and pro-Nazi lobbies that
made a pro-Jewish line politically
expensive.
When Jews started to emigrate from
Germany in 1933 the numbers were
relatively small, and most Western
countries accepted them. However,
there was constant pressure to restrict
immigration, notably due to high
unemployment. After 1938 Jewish
emigration turned into a stampede.
The international conference at Evian
that attempted to find havens for
refugees was a farce.
Britain controlled Palestine where
it was overseeing the development
of a Jewish National Home. Over
60,000 Jews emigrated there, with
the connivance of the German
government. However, in 1937 violent
opposition from the Arab population
led Britain to curb Jewish immigration.
In turn, in 1938 Britain relaxed its
domestic immigration controls and
allowed in 50,000 refugees, including
9,000 unaccompanied Jewish children
who came on special children’s trains –
the Kindertransport.
For discussion
To what extent
do those
governments
which appeased
Hitler in the
1930s bear
responsibility for
the Holocaust?
Once war began Jews were trapped,
although the emigration of some
German Jews did continue until
October 1941. Switzerland, which was
neutral, accepted a trickle of refugees,
35
THE HOLOCAUST
A guide for students & teachers
In the 1990s, declassified documents
from American intelligence agencies
revealed that all the neutral countries
had traded extensively with Nazi
Germany throughout the war years.
The Germans paid for vital raw
materials, components, munitions,
and food using gold plundered from
conquered countries and from the
Jews. Some of this gold originated as
the fillings extracted from the mouths
of Jews murdered in the gas chambers.
Photograph of Jewish children arriving
in London on the Kindertransport in
December 1938. Children were officially
only allowed in on a temporary basis,
with their parents excluded for fear of
increasing competition for jobs.
but its policy was influenced by antiJewish attitudes in the police force
and fear of provoking the Germans.
At the height of the “Final Solution”
Switzerland sealed its borders and sent
back more than 25,000 Jews who tried
to reach safety from France.
Paradoxically, the fascist regimes
in Spain and Portugal took a rather
lenient view of Jewish refugees.
Several Portuguese consuls gave out
large numbers of valuable transit visas
to Jews, while Spain allowed Jews
to pass through (legally and illegally)
despite pressure from Germany to
close its frontier with France.
Sweden operated tight immigration
controls, discriminating against
Jews until 1943 when news of the
mass murders and the turning tide
of the war led to a more open-door
policy. Swedish diplomats, notably
Raoul Wallenberg, helped to protect
thousands of Hungarian Jews in the
last year of the war.
36
Bankers and businessmen in
Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal, Turkey
and Spain had a shrewd idea where
the money and gold was coming
from. However, they did not object
and helped maintain the Nazi war
machine, and therefore helped prolong
the genocide. Fortunes were made in
Switzerland trading in artworks that
were looted from the Jews; again, no
questions were asked.
Raoul Wallenberg
Raoul
Wallenberg
was a Swedish
diplomat who
worked in
Budapest from
the summer of
1944. Wallenberg was sent to
the Hungarian capital as part
of a change in Swedish foreign
policy. The government of
Sweden now took steps to try
and protect some 200,000 Jews
within the city who were yet to
be deported to Auschwitz. The
young diplomat saved thousands
of lives by issuing “protective
passports”, going to even
greater lengths to personally
rescue hundreds from the death
marches to the Austrian border.
THE HOLOCAUST
A guide for students & teachers
The “Riegner Telegram” sent in August 1942. In the message Gerhart Riegner
informed the Western world of intelligence that the Nazis planned to annihilate
Europe’s Jews. It would take some months before this information was believed.
Could the Allies have done more
to help the Jews? There is now
no doubt that the governments in
London and Washington knew a
genocide was taking place. In the
summer of 1941 Winston Churchill
read intercepted radio traffic between
the Einsatzgruppen and Berlin that
showed German “police troops” were
slaughtering Jews in Russia. However,
at this phase of the war there was little
he or anyone could do about it except
make condemnatory statements.
As the persecution gathered pace
governments-in-exile, especially the
Poles, raised the issue publicly. In
mid-1942 intelligence sources and
couriers from Poland provided details
about the scale of the deportations
and the existence of extermination
camps, even if the precise location and
methods were still clouded.
The fragmentary reports and
scepticism about “atrocity
propaganda” held up any response.
There was also a belief that
antisemitism was so strong in Britain
and the USA that an expression
of support for the Jews would be
counterproductive.
However, by December 1942
the evidence was overwhelming.
The Allied governments issued a
solemn declaration condemning
the extermination of the Jews. The
declaration, which promised retribution
against German war criminals,
triggered a burst of public outrage. In
response the Allies agreed to hold a
conference at Bermuda in April 1943 to
discuss aid for Jewish refugees. It was
nothing but an empty gesture.
For discussion
Why, given their
knowledge of
events, did
the Allies not
respond more
convincingly to
the Holocaust?
The Allies could have pressured neutral
states to accept more refugees. They
could have taken up several offers
to give sanctuary to Jewish children.
37
THE HOLOCAUST
A guide for students & teachers
However, at a time when the war hung
in the balance, saving Jews was not a
priority.
In 1944 the Germans were on the
defensive and the Allies had the
power to intervene. After the Germans
occupied Hungary in March 1944 and
began to deport Jews to AuschwitzBirkenau, Jewish leaders implored
Winston Churchill to order the Royal
© Photo: The Wiener Library
For discussion
What
conclusions
can be drawn
from the way in
which the world
responded to the
persecution and
mass murder of
the Jews?
Frank Foley
Frank Foley was
a British spy
based in Berlin
during the 1930s,
working under
the cover of a
passport officer. Based at the
British embassy, Foley travelled
to concentration camps to
present visas that enabled
imprisoned Jews to travel. He
also hid Jews in his home, and
used his position to secure false
papers, passports, and visas.
In so doing, Foley was breaking
British law and risking his life, for
if he had been discovered as a
spy he would have no diplomatic
immunity from the Nazi regime. It
is estimated Foley saved 10,000
people.
Air Force to bomb the gas chambers
or the railways leading to the camp.
The RAF objected that this was too
dangerous and a diversion of resources
from the war effort.
Similar pleas to the US president
failed too. However, in early 1944
Franklin D Roosevelt did approve the
establishment of the War Refugees
Board which managed to help Jews
in various ways. One of the most
controversial “rescue” schemes
38
concerned negotiations between
Eichmann and Jewish leaders in
Budapest. Eichmann offered to stop
the deportation of the Hungarian Jews
if the Allies gave the Germans 10,000
trucks to use against the Red Army.
A Jewish representative took this
message to Istanbul, but the Allies
refused to negotiate with the Germans.
The offer was a trick, intended to
divide the British and Americans from
their Russian allies, but little effort was
made to exploit the opportunity to at
least bluff the Germans.
The Vatican remained silent about the
persecution of the Jews despite ample
information about what was happening
and what was being done by nominally
Catholic governments. The reasons for
this silence are hotly debated. Pope
Pius XII tended to sympathise with
Hitler’s war against Bolshevism, but
even when Catholics were suffering in
Poland he did not want to protest and
endanger the neutrality of the Vatican.
In July 1944 the Pope did send a
message to the Hungarian ruler,
Admiral Horthy, criticising the treatment
of the Jews. This helped secure a halt
to the deportations.
The Red Cross operated through
national committees and was largely
neutral during the war as far as the
Jewish issue was concerned. However,
the International Committee of the Red
Cross, based in Switzerland, could
have intervened by asking to inspect
certain camps. Instead it seems to
have been easily duped by the Nazis.
Red Cross delegates twice visited the
ghetto of Theresienstadt and each time
they were fooled by their Nazi guides
who arranged for it to be “beautified”.
The inmates were forced to act as if
all was well, and the delegates did not
press their hosts about what happened
to those who were transported from
the camp to “the East”.
THE HOLOCAUST
THE HOLOCAUST
A guide
A guide
for students
for students
& teachers
& teachers
Liberation
8
T
he first of the
concentration and
extermination camps
to be liberated were
Majdanek in Poland in July 1944
and Natzweiler in Eastern France
in September 1944. Auschwitz fell
in January 1945. Most of the camps
(Ohrdruf, Nordhausen, Buchenwald,
Belsen, Dachau) were overrun in
April. Mauthausen in Austria, and
Theresienstadt near Prague, were
the last to be freed in the first week
of May 1945.
Allied troops entering the camps
were shocked by what they found.
General Eishenhower, Supreme Allied
Commander in the West, ordered the
press and teams of Allied officers to
inspect the evidence of Nazi crimes.
German civilians from neighbouring
towns were forced to confront what
had been done “in the name of the
German people”.
For the prisoners liberation was not
a clear cut experience. Some were
too ill to know they were free. After
initial euphoria many found they were
confined to the camps until epidemics
were brought under control. It took
weeks or months for former prisoners
to get home.
Jewish survivors, especially those
from Eastern Europe, had no homes to
go to or did not want to return. Their
families had been murdered; they were
disorientated and lost. Most wanted
to emigrate to the USA or to Palestine
and start new lives. But America
retained strict immigration controls
until 1948 and the British refused to
increase the numbers permitted to
enter Palestine.
A Russian prisoner of war identifies a former camp guard
in Buchenwald, April 1945.
Jews congregated in camps for
“Displaced Persons” (DPs) where they
were cared for by the United Nations.
By 1947 there were about 250,000
Jews in the British and US zones of
occupation of Germany, of whom
about 150,000 had crossed from
Poland (having survived the war in
Russia).
Jewish relief organisations sent aid to
the camps and set up rehabilitation
centres. Many married and started
families, showing an amazing will to
overcome past traumas and rebuild
Jewish life. Cultural life flourished. The
establishment of the State of Israel
in May 1948 enabled the majority of
survivors to leave Europe. Thousands
also went to Australia, Canada, and
the USA.
For discussion
For Survivors, to
what extent did
the damage and
upheaval of the
Holocaust end
upon liberation?
Survivors who returned to their homes
in Europe faced a cold reception.
They were only a tiny part of the flood
of returning prisoners of war, forced
labourers, and imprisoned resistance
fighters. In France the resistance
fighters were lionised at the expense
of the “racial deportees”. The Dutch
looked with horror and embarrassment
on the bedraggled Jews who trickled
back. Many Hungarian and Polish
Jews found their homes occupied. In
Poland dozens of Jews were murdered
by antisemitic Poles.
39
THE HOLOCAUST
9
A guide for students & teachers
Retribution
The defendants during the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg 1945-46.
T
he Allies discussed
trying the top Nazis as
war criminals during
the war. This required a
major innovation in international
law. In August 1945 Britain, the USA,
France and Russia drew up the
charter for an International Military
Tribunal (IMT) to try the surviving
Nazi leaders. Its main purpose was
to indict the Nazis for conspiring to
wage an aggressive war as well as
crimes against humanity and war
crimes.
Hundreds of German war
criminals slipped away to
South America.
The trial in Nuremberg lasted from
November 1945 to October 1946.
Although the mass murder of the Jews
was mentioned, it was never central
to the prosecution case. The IMT did
result in the collection of evidence,
though, which was the cornerstone of
later historical research.
40
Several thousand German war
criminals and collaborators were also
put on trial in the countries occupied
by the Germans or once allied to
the Third Reich. In Nuremberg the
Americans also mounted a series of
twelve subsequent trials dealing with
the Einsatzgruppen, the role of the
German High Command, industry and
the judiciary, the exploitation of slave
labour, and medical crimes.
While the Allies were occupying
Germany they mounted a programme
of de-Nazification, investigating all
those connected with the NSDAP.
However, by 1946 the British and
Americans saw the Russians as
their main enemy and lost interest
in retribution. Hundreds of German
war criminals slipped away to
South America. Thousands more
Nazi-collaborators pretended to be
Displaced Persons and emigrated to
Britain, Canada, Australia and the USA.
Justice would not catch up with them
until the 1980s.
When the Federal Republic of Germany
(West Germany) was created in 1949
it was given the power to prosecute
THE HOLOCAUST
Hunting Perpetrators
In the last few months of the war,
thousands of people responsible
for perpetrating the Holocaust
were able to evade capture and
avoid being brought to justice.
Sometimes this was due to
preparation and planning, on
other occasions it was thanks to
indifference or officials turning
a “blind eye” to peoples’ past. A
number of perpetrators remained
in Europe, whilst others escaped
through “ratlines” to countries
in other continents. Since
1945, individuals like Simon
Wiesenthal, Beate and Serge
Klarsfeld and Efraim Zuroff of the
Simon Wiesenthal Centre, have
taken it upon themselves to hunt
down “the last Nazis” and hold
them to account for their crimes.
South America who worked with secret
organisations set up by ex-Nazis to
assist the flight of SS men. However,
he was tracked down, kidnapped by
the Israeli secret service, and taken to
Israel.
The Eichmann trial was the first in
which the persecution and mass
murder of the Jews were the main
focus. It gave a platform for survivors
to recall their experiences. Dramatic
scenes from the trial were shown in
cinemas and on TV around the world.
This helped to transform attitudes
towards the survivors and led to a
wave of publications.
A guide for students & teachers
For discussion
In the case of
perpetrators of
the Holocaust,
was justice
delivered or
delayed?
The trial stimulated a wave of
scholarship too. This marked the
origin of Holocaust Studies. Historical
research and the discovery of new
documentation has, in turn, provided
evidence of crimes and criminals from
the Nazi era. Efforts to achieve justice
continue to the present day.
Nazi-era criminals, but did so with little
enthusiasm. The civil service, police
and judiciary were full of ex-Nazis and
those complicit in the crimes they were
supposed to be investigating. By the
1950s many who had been imprisoned
were released.
In 1958, after a number of
embarrassing revelations that exNazis were still at large, a special
prosecuting office was set up in West
Germany. In the 1960s and 1970s it
went on to mount a series of important
trials of Einsatzgruppen personnel as
well as guards and commanders at
Auschwitz and Treblinka.
The most spectacular example of
retribution was the trial of Adolf
Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961-62.
Eichmann had adopted a false identity
in 1945 and gone into hiding. In 1950
he escaped to Argentina with the help
of pro-Nazi elements in the Vatican and
A document room used to hold evidence for the Nuremberg
Trials, 1945-1946. However inadequate, legal proceedings at
Nuremberg broke new ground in international law as prosecutors
sought to dispense justice to the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
41
THE HOLOCAUST
10
A guide for students & teachers
The Echoes of Genocide
S
urvivors began to collect
evidence of the genocide
as soon as the war was
over. The Displaced
Persons camps were centres for the
first historical research. In the late
1940s and 1950s dozens of books
were published, mainly in Yiddish,
German and Polish recalling the
terrible years. However, the first
historians of the Nazi era tended
to neglect these sources and left
it to Jewish scholars like Phillip
Freidman, Leon Poliakov and Gerald
Reitlinger to chronicle the “Final
Solution”.
© L’Osservatore Romano – Photographic service
Pope John Paul II at the Western Wall, Jerusalem, 2000.
Some of the leading intellectuals of the
post-war era tried to explain the origins
of Nazism and antisemitism. Jean-Paul
Sartre, Theodor Adorno, and Hannah
Arendt produced widely differing but
insightful analyses of Nazism. These
theories converged in depicting the
Jews as a scapegoat for social ills
and personal problems. Racism and
antisemitism were seen as crucial for
the development of national as well as
individual identities.
42
Leading psychologists such as
Bruno Bettleheim, Erich Fromm and
Wilhelm Reich tried to understand
“the Nazi mind”. They related ideas of
child rearing to authoritarianism and
suggested that Nazism offered people
a respite from the uncertainties of
complex, modern societies.
Theologians, especially in Germany,
began to examine the Christian roots
of Jew-hatred. This culminated in the
declaration of the second Vatican
Council in 1962-65 that the Jews could
not be held responsible for the death
of Christ. However, it was not until
the pontificate of John Paul II (19782005) that the Vatican came close to
acknowledging the role of Catholicism
in fomenting antisemitism, tolerating
Nazism, and remaining silent in the
face of genocide.
During the 1960s and 1970s many
scholars attempting to understand
human behaviour in times of crisis
turned to the Nazi mass murderers.
Stanley Milgram argued that their
behaviour was typical of people acting
under orders in hierarchical societies
in which actions were separated from
the consequences. Phillip Zimbardo
explained their behaviour in terms of
peer pressure within dehumanising
systems.
In the 1980s various thinkers, notably
Zygmunt Bauman, argued that
Nazism was the high point of rational
thinking. Rather than being a deviant
phenomenon, or a throw-back to
medievalism, it was a symptom of
modernity. It expressed the desire for
order and purity in it’s most radical
form. Modern bureaucracies and
technology also made mass killing
feasible.
THE HOLOCAUST
The end of the Cold War stimulated
many new approaches. First, the
collapse of the Soviet bloc led to
“ethnic cleansing” and genocide,
which reminded people of the potential
effect of unbridled hate. Second,
sensitive documents from wartime
intelligence agencies in archives
in the USA, Britain and the former
Soviet Union were made available to
researchers. These documents helped
reconstruct Nazi Germany’s trade with
neutral countries and the disposal of
looted gold.
They also revealed that Swiss banks
had not only traded in looted gold, but
after the war had quietly retained the
bank accounts of Jews murdered by
the Nazis. They made little attempt to
find the heirs to these accounts and
made it very difficult for survivors who
were legitimate claimants. A campaign
by the World Jewish Congress and
several law suits in the USA raised
the profile of these issues and led to
a series of international conferences
(London in 1997, Washington in 1998,
Stockholm in 2000) to resolve the
“unfinished business” of the Nazi era.
In order to assess the losses of Jewish
property and assets, as well as the
degree of local responsibility, historical
commissions were established in over
a dozen countries. The reports of
these commissions were a major step
forward in historical understanding.
© The Imperial War Museum, BOS 33
There was a prolonged debate
amongst historians in West Germany
about whether the Third Reich
could be considered a stage in the
modernisation of Germany, and hence
a normal period of history, or whether
it was extraordinary and should never
be treated on a par with other epochs.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen caused a
world-wide controversy when he
suggested that the Germans were
uniquely antisemitic and “Hitler’s
willing executioners”.
A guide for students & teachers
British troops deployed in Bosnia and Croatia as part of
the international community’s response to civil war and
genocide, 1992. The UN Protection Force were tasked with
protecting UN humanitarian aid convoys.
The new sources shed fresh light on
the role played by German industry
in processing the loot (including
dental gold), supplying poison gas,
and employing slave labour. Several
corporations, including Volkswagen,
commissioned historians to investigate
their wartime activities. At the start
of the 21st century, billions of dollars
were awarded to the survivors of Nazi
persecution as a result of negotiations
in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria
and court cases in several countries.
The democratisation of Eastern Europe
opened the way for the restitution of
Jewish property and the rebuilding of
Jewish life. While there was a wave
of anti-Soviet nationalism that tended
to glorify the men who collaborated
with the Nazis, there was also a more
honest confrontation with the past.
Historical commissions were set up
in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to
investigate local collaboration and
plunder. Sites of mass murder were
appropriately marked for the first
time, and annual commemorations
inaugurated.
For discussion
Some argue that
the Holocaust
was the defining
event of the
twentieth century
– to what extent
is this view valid?
As more and more became known
about the crimes of the Nazi regime
and the experience of the victims,
the period attracted the attention
of novelists, playwrights, and film-
43
THE HOLOCAUST
A guide for students & teachers
© Suzanne Bardgett, The Imperial War Museum
memory of the persecution and mass
murder of the Jews was confined
largely to Jewish communities. It is
now omnipresent, so much so that
some social scientists argue that it is
used in some societies as a substitute
for exploring their own historical
traumas.
Some critics argue that there is a
“Holocaust industry” designed to elicit
sympathy for the Jews and deflect
hostile comment about Israel. Others
maintain that commemoration has
gone so far that Jews are associated
with suffering and death at the
expense of recalling Jewish culture and
celebrating the Jewish present.
A section of the permanent Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial
War Museum, London. Since opening in June 2000, the
exhibition has been visited by over two million people and is
internationally recognised.
makers. A string of acclaimed and
controversial books and films –
Sophie’s Choice, Shoah, Schindler’s
List to name a few – brought what
was now universally known as “the
Holocaust” to a global audience.
For discussion
In the wake of
the Holocaust,
many have
proclaimed
“Never Again”.
In practical
terms, how can
we meet this
challenge?
By the 1990s, the Holocaust came to
be seen as the defining event of the
twentieth century. This message was
projected in impressive museums in
Washington (opened in 1993), London
(opened in 2000) and monuments, such
as that at the heart of Berlin (unveiled
2005). An Intergovernmental Task
Force for International Cooperation in
Holocaust Education, Remembrance,
and Research was initiated in 1998.
At the 2000 Stockholm conference,
many countries endorsed official,
government-supported annual
commemorations which focused on
extensive educational programmes.
For a quarter of a century after 1945
44
There is no doubt that at a time when
values are in flux and different cultures
are arguing their merits against one
another, the Holocaust seems to be
one evil that everyone can agree upon.
The recurrence of ethnic cleansing
and genocide, in Rwanda, the
Balkans, and Darfur, has only added
to the contemporary interest in the
“Final Solution” and the urgency of
understanding how it was possible.
Tragically, despite the often repeated
slogan “Never Again”, there is ample
evidence that antisemitism, racism in
all its forms, religious hatred, political
intolerance and terror have not been
banished from human society. This
makes the need to learn about the
Nazi era and the fate of the Jews as
important as ever.
Education and commemoration
will remain a vital part of efforts to
construct decent societies in which
difference is accepted and there are
shared standards of morality, civility
and legality. The abandonment of these
standards between 1933 and 1945
resulted in discrimination, persecution,
torture, oppression, enslavement,
ethnic cleansing, mass murder and,
ultimately, genocide.
About The Holocaust Educational Trust
The Holocaust Educational Trust was founded in 1988 during the passage of the War Crimes
Act. Our aim is to raise awareness and understanding in schools and amongst the wider
public of the Holocaust and its relevance today. We believe that the Holocaust must have a
permanent place in our nation’s collective memory.
One of the Trust’s earliest achievements was to ensure that the Holocaust was included in
the National Curriculum for England in 1991 – for Key Stage 3 students (11-14 year olds).
The Holocaust has remained on the National Curriculum since then. We also successfully
campaigned to have the assets of Holocaust victims and survivors released and returned to
their rightful owners in the late 1990s.
Since 1999 the Trust’s Lessons from Auschwitz Project has given thousands of post16 students and teachers the opportunity to visit the Nazi concentration and death camp
Auschwitz-Birkenau as part of a four-part educational programme. Since 2006 the Project has
received Government funding.
Having played a crucial role in the establishment of Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK in
2001, the Trust continues to play a key role in the delivery of this national commemorative day.
We work in schools, colleges and higher education institutions, arranging for survivors of the
Holocaust to speak to young people; providing teacher training workshops and lectures, as
well as teaching aids and resource materials.
For further information, please contact us:
Telephone: +44 (0)207 222 6822
Fax: +44 (0)207 233 0161
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.het.org.uk
Registered Charity no. 1092892