The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic, intentional murder of approximately 6 million European Jews – including 1.5 million Jewish children – by the Germans, their allies and collaborators between 1933 and 1945. When Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945 and the genocide stopped, fully two thirds of Europe’s Jews – or one third of world Jewry – were dead.
Jews were the primary victims in the Holocaust. Six million were murdered. The Holocaust was a destruction process in which the Germans targeted for death every person who was Jewish or whom they defined as Jewish without exception.
Others were caught up in the machinery designed for the Jews. These groups included Roma and Sinti, Russians and Poles, political and cultural dissidents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the mentally and physically disabled, and lesbians, gays, other queer victims. Millions of soldiers and civilians also died fighting the Germans.
The Holocaust began in 1933 and ended in 1945 – twelve years marked by increasing brutality in the areas under German occupation. Historian Raul Hilberg explains: “The destruction process was a development which began with mild measures and ended with drastic action.”
January 30, 1933: With Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Worker’s Party (or “Nazi” Party) having won a large plurality in the elections of November 1932 and with no one else in a position to put together a coalition government, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor of Germany. Within weeks, German Jews began to be systematically excluded from German life.
September 15, 1935: The Nuremberg Laws institutionalized racial antisemitism by declaring that only so-called “Aryans” were German citizens and by stripping so-called “non-Aryans” (that is, Jews) of their citizenship and civil rights. During the next three years, hundreds of additions to these laws segregated Jews from non-Jews socially and economically, depriving them of their livelihoods, possessions, and property. The Nazis even destroyed art and literature created by Jews in an effort to “purge” German culture of any so-called “degenerate influence.”
November 9 and 10, 1938: On Kristallnacht (the “Night of Broken Glass”), the Nazis burned synagogues and vandalized Jewish homes and businesses throughout Germany and Austria, beating or killing hundreds of Jews and imprisoning thousands in concentration camps. This pogrom and its aftermath made normal life impossible for the Reich’s Jews.
September 1, 1939: Germany’s invasion of Poland started World War II and led to the expansion of its anti-Jewish policies throughout Europe. Jews throughout occupied Europe would be identified and forced to wear badges to distinguish them from non-Jews. They would be forced from their homes and made to forfeit their livelihoods and property. In Poland and the western parts of the Soviet Union, which had the largest Jewish populations in Europe, Jews were imprisoned in ghettos, where terror, filth, hard labor, disease and starvation quickly decimated the population.
June 22, 1941: During the invasion of the Soviet Union, SS Einsatzgruppen (mobile shooting squads) murdered Jews in large-scale operations in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. They murdered some 1.5 million men, women, and children, effectively destroying the Jewish communities in what was once “the Pale of Settlement” – the heart of the historic Jewish “heartland.”
January 20, 1942: After the Wannsee Conference – a secret meeting of high-ranking officials and bureaucrats convened in Berlin – ratified the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” Jews throughout Europe were deported by railroad to one of the six death camps in Poland: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, Auschwitz II-Birkenau and Majdanek. There, they were gassed in gas chambers or gas vans and their bodies burned in crematorium ovens designed for this purpose by well-known German industrial concerns. Millions also died in slave labor and concentration camps as a result of exhaustion, exposure, starvation, brutality, disease, and execution.
The Nazis could not have accomplished the murder of two-thirds of European Jewry and the destruction of 1500 years of Jewish culture, community and history in the space of 12 years without the complicity of others. Such complicity included not only those who collaborated with them, but also those who remained neutral or indifferent, and those who kept silent.
Allies and Neutrals: In the 1930s, despite widespread press coverage of the persecution of German Jewry, the United States, Great Britain, and other countries, influenced by antisemitism and the fear of a flood of refugees, were unwilling to change their immigration policies. By 1942, despite confirmed reports about the “Final Solution,” they argued that defeating Germany took precedence over rescue efforts, and so they made no large-scale attempts to stop or slow the destruction process. Neutral countries like Sweden and Switzerland were indifferent to the Jews’ plight either because trade with Germany was benefiting their economies or because – until 1943 – they believed Germany would win the war. And Pope Pius XII refrained from public condemnation of German policy not only because he considered communism a greater threat than Nazism, but also because he feared that speaking out would lead to German occupation and possible destruction of the Vatican.
For European Jews, life was a ceaseless confrontation with death. The Holocaust presented a situation for which no historical or contemporary experience could have prepared them. Previous regimes either did not target every Jew for annihilation or did not have the resources to implement such a goal as systematically as the Nazis. Moreover, as late as mid-1942, most Jews were unaware that the “Final Solution” was even being planned: either because they had no concrete knowledge of death camps and mass murder or because, unable to believe that such atrocities could take place in the 20th century, they dismissed the information as rumor and propaganda. Without allies or support networks, facing starvation and disease, responsible for parents and siblings, wives and children, they believed what they were told – that they were going to be “resettled” to work. The reality did not sink in until it was too late.
Individuals everywhere struggled to stay alive and to keep their loved ones alive. They also attempted evasive or confrontational responses: jumping from trains, seeking refuge in the attics, cellars, and closets of non-Jews, or attacking their captors.
In the ghettos, they kept the community intact by running soup kitchens, hospitals, and orphanages and sponsoring cultural and educational events. They kept diaries and journals, took photographs and drew pictures, and maintained secret archives.
They organized armed revolts in ghettos, concentration camps, and even in the death camps, and formed Jewish partisan units in the forests. Although they were a small minority, the fact they existed at all is remarkable.
Holocaust deniers call themselves “Revisionists,” to pretend to a scholarly “objectivity” in their so-called “research.” However, they are actually pseudo-historians, cloaking themselves in respectability to find a wider audience for their antisemitic and anti-democratic propaganda. They represent neo-Nazis, neo-fascists, and other hate groups who want to erase the memory of Nazi Germany’s crimes and atrocities. To counter such hate and to help ensure that the future will be marked by understanding and mutual respect, the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and other Holocaust centers throughout the world dedicate themselves to bringing the truth of the Holocaust, its relevance, and its implications to our children, our fellow citizens, and our communities.
Our mission is to teach the history of the Holocaust, applying its lessons to counter indifference, intolerance, and genocide.
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