The Holocaust

As it is currently used, the term "Holocaust" (derived from the Greek holo, "whole" and caustos, "burned"), refers to the systematic genocidal extermination of five million Jews in central and eastern Europe by Nazi Greater Germany. This genocide did have some contemporary precedents, not least of which was the massacre of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. Further, the anti-Semitism that was a necessary precondition for the massacre of the Jews had an exceptionally long history in Europe's Christianities, dating back almost as far as Christianity's foundation and manifested in the form of pogroms as early as the 11th century CE. The Holocaust, inasmuch as it was unique in this world's history (and sadly, present in the history of many other worlds), was inspired by a poisonous fusion of historic anti-Semitism with eugenics theory that identified all Jews as biologically inferior vermin that threatened the supremacy of the Aryan race through genetic and ideological contamination.

Even before the Second World War began, the roughly 700 thousand Jews that lived in Greater Germany had been subjected to literally dozens of anti-Semitic laws that stripped all Jews of their German citizenship, denied Jewish professionals the right to practice their careers, expelled many immigrant Jews and their families to their countries of birth and created the basis for the concentration camp network. After the successful occupation of Poland at the beginning of the Second World War, however, more than 2.4 million Jews fell under Nazi rule. It was in Poland, not Greater Germany, that the harshest restrictions were placed on local Jewish populations. The Jews of Poland were subjected to summary massacre by the regular army and by the SS; captured Jewish soldiers were executed as a matter of course. Moreover, the Greater German occupation regime forced Poland's Jews to move into urban ghettos in the major cities of Poland. These ghettos -- surrounded by walls and barbed wire -- functioned as autonomous captive city-states, governed by a Jewish council that was responsible for housing, sanitation, and economic production for the Greater German war efforts. As purely urban areas, these areas depended heavily upon imports of food and coal, but Greater Germany consistently supplied insufficient food and coal to keep the inhabitants of the various ghettos fed and warm. As a result, massive epidemics and endemic malnutrition vastly increased the pre-war death rate. By 1942, Poland's Jews were little more than disposable slaves.

The Greater German declaration of war against the Soviet Union in May of 1941 and the subsequent German eastward offensive opened up a new radical phase of Nazi anti-Semitic persecution. Beginning almost as soon as the invasion began, after the regular Greater German army destroyed Soviet military forces in a particular region detachments of the SS (the Nazi Party guard) were dispatched to the newly occupied Soviet territories to kill all Jews on the spot, usually by gathering the entire Jewish population of a town or city in a secured rural area and shooting all the Jews. These mobile detachments, known as Einsatzgrüppen (action squads), soon reaped a horrendous death toll; by the end of 1941, almost a million Jews -- most of the Jews of Ukraine and Belarus -- had been massacred and the massacres continued as the Greater German army penetrated deep into the heart of the Soviet Union. Occasionally, these massacres were witnessed by soldiers, local residents, or even by surviving Jews. Before long, eyewitness reports of the killings smuggled at great expense into Romania or Czechoslovakia made it to the world press, prompting British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to compare the sufferings of eastern European Jewry to that of Palestinian Jewry following the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE.

Soon after the Einsatzgrüppen began its massacres in occupied eastern Europe, Hitler's deputy Hermann Göring sent a directive to the chief of the Reich Security Main Office, Reinhard Heydrich, charging him with the task of organizing a "final solution to the Jewish question" in all German-occupied territories. The introduction, in September of 1941 of compulsory armbands marked with a yellow star for all surviving Jews in Greater Germany and Poland, signalled the beginnings of the deportations of Jews.

At first, Greater Germany's Jews were sent to the Jewish ghettos of Poland. By the beginning of 1942, however, Greater German Jews joined Polish Jews in the death camps newly erected in occupied Poland. (Although some death camps were erected on Greater German soil, Poland was home to the majority of the death camps both to keep Greater Germany's population from learning what was happening to the Jews and as an economy measure, to be as close as possible to the Jewish heartland in eastern Europe.) These death camps -- ostensibly detention camps -- served both as forced-labour camps that produced goods for German war industry and facilities for processing Jews under Nazi control for systematic murder by gassing. The deportations from Polish ghettos began in earnest in the summer of 1943; from the Warsaw Ghetto alone, more than 300 thousand were removed. Generally speaking, women, children, the elderly, and the ill were the first to be slaughtered, while adult men were kept alive to work but were themselves eventually murdered. Most chillingly, some Jews were subjected to ghastly and inhuman medical experiments by SS doctors, or simply tortured to death by sadistic camp guards. To destroy the bodies of the dead, large crematories were constructed so that the bodies of the gassed could be incinerated. The property of the deportees was routinely collected and distributed for use by the Greater German military or suitable Aryans, so as to avoid waste.

As the first deportation trains from Occupied Russia made their way to the death camps in April of 1942, reports of mass deaths eventually reached the League of Nations and major European governments, as well as members of the surviving Jewish communities. At this stage, many Jewish communities staged armed revolts against Greater German forces, not so much in the hopes of surviving as in the hope of ending the lives of their members in relatively dignified fashion. The most spectacular uprising was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which lasted for five weeks in February and March of 1943.

Throughout German-occupied territories these deportations created immense problems for Greater German authorities. In Poland, Ukraine and Occupied Russia, the indiscriminate massacre and deportation of the Jews of both countries enraged even traditionally anti-Semitic populations and helped push many Ukrainians and Russians -- Jews and non-Jews alike -- into the growing partisan movement. The Baltic States, surrounded since the summer of 1942 by Greater German forces on all sides, simply refused to deport their Jews to Nazi death camps. In response, Greater Germany invaded the Baltic States; Lithuania was annexed by Greater Germany and its Jews promptly deported to the Polish death camps, while Latvia was placed under Greater German military administration so that the Einsatzgrüppen could shoot Latvian Jews without fear of interruption. (Estonia and Karelia alone managed to evacuate their six thousand Jews to Finland ahead of the Greater German invaders.)

The Greater German invasions of southern and western Europe that were launched in early 1943 were launched, in part, in order to secure more Jews for the death camps. (In 1943, France and Hungary were each home to one million Jews, while a half-million Jews were lived in Czechoslovakia and Romania and 150 thousand Jews lived in the Netherlands; smaller populations were present in Belgium, Greece, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Italy, and the Scandinavian states.) The protracted Greater German occupation of the main Jewish centres in western Czechoslovakia condemned half of that country's Jewish population to the death camps. Elsewhere in Europe, though, the briefness of the German presence (in northeastern France and the Low Countries), the sparseness of the local Jewish populations (in northeastern Italy and western Hungary), and the evacuation of Jews to defensible regions (most notably the evacuations of Danish Jews to Sweden) spared the Jews of the territories most recently invaded by Greater Germany from slaughter.

Towards the end of the Second World War, the Holocaust was accelerated. Much to the disgust of some officers in the German military, which desperately depended upon the Greater German railway network to ship reinforcements to one of Greater Germany's many fronts, the growing influence of the SS led to the commandeering of large segments of Greater German and eastern European railway networks to accelerate the extermination of eastern European Jews. After the fall of Munich and Vienna to a combined Italo-Brazilian offensive in February of 1944, the SS initiated a horrible period of slaughter. The organized slaughters came to an end, and were replaced by horrific butcheries of the remaining weakened inmates of the death camps. Some particularly radical elements of the SS even took to sacrificing Jews in public to the Nazi Aesir in bizarre religious rites.

When the Second World War came to an end, both the League of Nations and the Soviet Union found themselves in occupation of large segments of the Greater German death camp networks. As an aghast world looked on, the number of Jewish dead was eventually calculated at almost five million people -- one-third of the world's pre-War Jewish population. (Of this number, roughly three million were slaughtered in concentration camps, 1.5 million died at the hands of the Einsatzgrüppen and in other massacres, and at least a half-million people as a result of horrible conditions inside the Polish ghettos.) 3.1 million Jews lived in Poland before the Second World War; only 200 thousand survived to see that war's end. Similarly high death tolls prevailed in Ukraine, in the Baltic States, and in areas of Russia occupied in wartime. The vast and brilliant Jewish culture that had thrived in central and eastern Europe for centuries -- and more importantly, the millions of individual human beings who had created and maintained that culture, the irreplaceable individuality of each of this culture's members -- had been destroyed beyond any repair.

The sheer enormity and brutality of the Holocaust shocked the entire world. To some extent, the Holocaust dealt a death blow to racism; faced with the results of racism taken to its endpoint, discrimination against people of other creeds and races became still more unpopular. It also provided the motivation for the stern post-war occupation of greater Germany's different successor states. The Holocaust was also one of the war crimes that precipitated the post-war Berlin War Crimes Trials.