Download The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and
murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.
"Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who
came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially
superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the socalled German racial community.
During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups
because of their perceived "racial inferiority": Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and
some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others). Other groups were
persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them
Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals.
In 1933, the Jewish population of
Europe stood at over nine million. Most
European Jews lived in countries that Nazi
Germany would occupy or influence during
World War II. By 1945, the Germans and
The Holocaust
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their collaborators killed nearly two out of
every three European Jews as part of the "Final Solution," the Nazi
policy to murder the Jews of Europe. Although Jews, whom the
Nazis deemed a priority danger to Germany, were the primary
victims of Nazi racism, other victims included some 200,000 Roma
(Gypsies). At least 200,000 mentally or physically disabled patients,
mainly Germans, living in institutional settings, were murdered in
the so-called Euthanasia Program.
As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe, the Germans and their
collaborators persecuted and murdered millions of other people.
Between two and three million Soviet prisoners of war were
murdered or died of starvation, disease, neglect, or maltreatment.
The Germans targeted the non-Jewish Polish intelligentsia for killing,
and deported millions of Polish and Soviet civilians for forced labor
in Germany or in occupied Poland, where these individuals worked
and often died under deplorable conditions. From the earliest years
of the Nazi regime, German authorities persecuted homosexuals and
others whose behavior did not match prescribed social norms.
German police officials targeted thousands of political opponents
(including Communists, Socialists, and trade unionists) and religious
dissidents (such as Jehovah's Witnesses). Many of these individuals
died as a result of incarceration and maltreatment.
Extensive propaganda was used to spread
the regime's goals and ideals. Upon the
death of German president Paul von
Hindenburg in August 1934, Hitler assumed
the powers of the presidency. The army
swore an oath of personal loyalty to him.
Europe 1933,
Germany indicated
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Hitler's dictatorship rested on his position as
Reich President (head of state), Reich Chancellor (head of
government), and Fuehrer (head of the Nazi party). According to
the "Fuehrer principle," Hitler stood outside the legal state and
determined matters of policy himself.
Hitler had the final say in both domestic legislation and German
foreign policy. Nazi foreign policy was guided by the racist belief
that Germany was biologically destined to expand eastward by
military force and that an enlarged, racially superior German
population should establish permanent rule in eastern Europe and
the Soviet Union. Here, women played a vital role. The Third
Reich's aggressive population policy encouraged "racially pure"
women to bear as many "Aryan" children as possible.
Within this framework, "racially inferior" peoples, such as Jews and
Gypsies, would be eliminated from the region. Nazi foreign policy
aimed from the beginning to wage a war of annihilation against the
Soviet Union, and the peacetime years of the Nazi regime were
spent preparing the German people for war. In the context of this
ideological war, the Nazis planned and implemented the
Holocaust, the mass murder of the Jews, who were considered the
primary "racial" enemy.
Open criticism of the regime was suppressed by the Gestapo (secret state police)
and the Security Service (SD) of the Nazi party, but Hitler's government was
popular with most Germans. There was, however, some German opposition to
the Nazi state, ranging from nonconformity to the attempt to kill Hitler on July 20,
1944.
The Allies defeated Nazi Germany and forced a German surrender on May 8,
1945.
Antisemitism and the persecution of Jews represented a central tenet of Nazi
ideology. In their 25-point Party Program, published in 1920, Nazi party members
publicly declared their intention to segregate Jews from "Aryan" society and to
abrogate Jews' political, legal, and civil rights. Nazi leaders began to make good
on their pledge to persecute German Jews soon after their assumption of power.
The first major law to curtail the rights of Jewish citizens was the "Law for the
Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" of April 7, 1933, according to which
Jewish and "politically unreliable" civil servants and employees were to be
excluded from state service.
The new Civil Service Law was the German authorities' first formulation of the socalled Aryan Paragraph, a kind of regulation used to exclude Jews (and often by
extension other "non-Aryans") from organizations, professions, and other aspects
of public life. In April 1933, German law restricted the number of Jewish students
at German schools and universities. In the same month, further legislation sharply
curtailed "Jewish activity" in the medical and legal professions. Subsequent laws
and decrees restricted reimbursement of Jewish doctors from public (state) health
insurance funds.
At their annual party rally held in Nuremberg in September 1935,
the Nazi leaders announced new laws which institutionalized many
of the racial theories prevalent in Nazi ideology. These "Nuremberg
Laws" excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship and prohibited
them from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of
"German or German-related blood." Ancillary ordinances to these
laws deprived them of most political rights. Jews were
disenfranchised (that is, they had no formal expectation to the right
to vote) and could not hold public office.
The Nuremberg Laws did not identify a "Jew" as someone with
particular religious beliefs. Instead, the first amendment to the
Nuremberg Laws defined anyone who had three or four Jewish
grandparents as a Jew, regardless of whether that individual
recognized himself or herself as a Jew or belonged to the Jewish
religious community. Many Germans who had not practiced Judaism
or who had not done so for years found themselves caught in the
grip of Nazi terror. Even people with Jewish grandparents who had
converted to Christianity could be defined as Jews.
In the weeks before and during the 1936 Winter and Summer
Olympic Games held in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Berlin,
respectively, the Nazi regime actually toned down much of its public
anti-Jewish rhetoric and activities. The regime even removed some
of the signs saying "Jews Unwelcome" from public places. Hitler did
not want international criticism of his government to result in the
transfer of the Games to another country. Such a loss would have
been a serious blow to German prestige. Likewise, Nazi leaders did
not want to discourage international tourism and the revenue that it
would bring during the Olympics year.
In 1937 and 1938, German authorities again stepped up legislative persecution of
German Jews. The government set out to impoverish Jews and remove them from
the German economy by requiring them to register their property. Even before
the Olympics, the Nazi government had initiated the practice of "Aryanizing"
Jewish businesses. "Aryanization" meant the dismissal of Jewish workers and
managers of a company and/or the takeover of Jewish-owned businesses by nonJewish Germans who bought them at bargain prices fixed by government or Nazi
party officials. In 1937 and 1938, the government forbade Jewish doctors to treat
non-Jews, and revoked the licenses of Jewish lawyers to practice law.
Following the Kristallnacht (commonly known as "Night of Broken Glass") pogrom
of November 9-10, 1938, Nazi leaders stepped up "Aryanization" efforts and
enforced measures that succeeded increasingly in physically isolating and
segregating Jews from their fellow Germans. Jews were barred from all public
schools and universities, as well as from cinemas, theaters, and sports facilities.
In many cities, Jews were forbidden to enter designated "Aryan" zones. German
decrees and ordinances expanded the ban on Jews in professional life. By
September 1938, for instance, Jewish physicians were effectively banned from
treating "Aryan" patients.
In August 1938, German authorities decreed that by January 1, 1939, Jewish men
and women bearing first names of "non-Jewish" origin had to add "Israel" and
"Sara," respectively, to their given names. All Jews were obliged to carry identity
cards that indicated their Jewish heritage, and, in the autumn of 1938, all Jewish
passports were stamped with an identifying letter "J". As the Nazi leaders
quickened their preparations for the European war of conquest that they intended
to unleash, antisemitic legislation in Germany and Austria paved the way for more
radical persecution of Jews.
The term "euthanasia" (literally, "good death") usually refers to the inducement of
a painless death for a chronically or terminally ill individual. In Nazi usage,
however, "euthanasia" was a euphemistic term for a clandestine program which
targeted for systematic killing institutionalized mentally and physically disabled
patients, without the knowledge or consent of themselves or their families.
In the spring and summer months of 1939, a number of planners -- led by Philipp
Bouhler, the director of Hitler's private chancellery, and Karl Brandt, Hitler's
attending physician -- began to organize a secret killing operation targeting
disabled children. Beginning in October 1939, children with disabilities, brought to
a number of specially designated pediatric clinics throughout Germany and
Austria, were murdered by lethal overdoses of medication or by starvation. Some
5,000 disabled German infants, toddlers, and juveniles are estimated to have
been killed by war's end.
Euthanasia planners quickly envisioned
extending the killing program to adult
disabled patients living in institutional
settings. In the autumn of 1939, Hitler
signed a secret authorization in order to
protect participating physicians, medical
"Euthanasia"
centers, Germany
1940-1945
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staff, and administrators from prosecution;
this authorization was backdated to September 1, 1939, to suggest
that the effort was related to wartime measures. The secret
operation was code-named T4, in reference to the street address
(Tiergartenstrasse 4) of the program's coordinating office in Berlin.
Six gassing installations for adults were eventually established as
part of the Euthanasia Program: Bernburg, Brandenburg, Grafeneck,
Hadamar, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein.
Beginning in January 1940, adult patients were selected by specially
recruited T4 physicians for death. These doctors rarely examined
the patients themselves, but often based their decisions on medical
files and the diagnoses of staff at the victims' home institutions.
Those selected were transported by T4 personnel to the sanatoria
that served as central gassing installations. The victims were told
they would undergo a physical evaluation and take a disinfecting
shower. Instead, they were killed in gas chambers using pure
carbon monoxide gas. Their bodies were immediately burned in
crematoria attached to the gassing facilities. Ashes of cremated
victims were taken from a common pile and placed in urns without
regard for accurate labeling. One urn was sent to each victim's
family, along with a death certificate listing a fictive cause and date
of death. The sudden death of thousands of institutionalized
patients, whose death certificates listed strangely similar causes and
places of death, raised suspicions. Eventually, the clandestine
Euthanasia Program became an open secret.
Describes fleeing from a clinic
where, his mother feared, he
was to be ...
Personal stories
Hitler ordered a halt to the Euthanasia Program in late August 1941,
in view of widespread public knowledge of the measure and in the
wake of private and public protests concerning the killings,
especially from members of the German clergy. According to
internal T4 statistics, approximately 70,000 adult disabled patients
were murdered during this initial gassing phase. However, this did
not mean an end to the Euthanasia killing operation. The child
Euthanasia Program continued as before.
Moreover, in August 1942, the killings resumed, albeit more carefully concealed
than before. Victims were no longer murdered in centralized gassing installations,
but instead killed by lethal injection or drug overdose at a number of clinics
throughout Germany and Austria. Many of these institutions also systematically
starved adult and child victims. The Euthanasia Program continued until the last
days of World War II, expanding to include an ever wider range of victims,
including geriatric patients, bombing victims, and foreign forced laborers.
Historians estimate that the Euthanasia Program, in all its phases, claimed the
lives of 200,000 individuals.
The Euthanasia Program instituted the use of gas chambers and crematoria for
systematic murder. The personnel who participated in the Euthanasia Program
were instrumental in establishing and operating the extermination camps Belzec,
Sobibor, and Treblinka, later used to implement the "Final Solution."
Resources
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The Online Etymology Dictionary (http://www.geocities.com/etymonline/g2etym.htm) offers this origin of
the word ghetto:
1611, from It. ghetto ”part of a city to which Jews are restricted,” various theories of its origin include:
Yiddish get ”deed of separation;” special use of Venetian getto “foundry” (there was one near the site of
that city’s ghetto); Egitto, from L. Aegyptus “Egypt” (presumably in memory of the exile); or It. borghetto
“small section of a town” (dim. of borgo “borough”). Extended 1892 to crowded urban quarters of other
minority groups.
On November 9, 1938, the Nazis unleashed a wave of pogroms against
Germany's Jews. In the space of a few hours, thousands of synagogues and
Jewish businesses and homes were damaged
or destroyed. This event came to be called
Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") for the
shattered store windowpanes that carpeted
German streets.
The pretext for this violence was the November
7 assassination of a German diplomat in Paris,
Ernst vom Rath, by Herschel Grynszpan, a
Jewish teenager whose parents, along with
17,000 other Polish Jews, had been recently
expelled from the Reich. Though portrayed as
spontaneous outbursts of popular outrage,
these pogroms were calculated acts of
retaliation carried out by the SA, SS, and local
Nazi party organizations.
Stormtroopers killed at least 91 Jews and injured many others. For the first
time, Jews were arrested on a massive scale
and transported to Nazi concentration camps.
About 30,000 Jews were sent to Buchenwald,
Dachau, and Sachsenhausen, where hundreds
died within weeks of arrival. Release came
only after the prisoners arranged to emigrate
and agreed to transfer their property to
"Aryans."
Kristallnacht culminated the escalating violence
against Jews that began during the
incorporation of Austria into the Reich in March
1938. It also signaled the fateful transfer of
responsibility for "solving" the "Jewish
Question" to the SS.