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Etymology and usage of the term The term holocaust originally derived from the Greek word holokauston, meaning a "completely (holos) burnt (kaustos)" sacrificial offering to a god. Since the late 19th century, "holocaust" has primarily been used to refer to disasters or catastrophes. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word was first used to describe Hitler's treatment of the Jews from as early as 1942, though it did not become a standard reference until the 1950s. By the late 1970s, however, the conventional meaning of the word became the Nazi genocide. The term is also used by many in a narrower sense, to refer specifically to the unprecedented destruction of European Jews in particular. Some historians credited Elie Wiesel with giving the term 'Holocaust' its present meaning. The biblical word Shoa (שואה), also spelled Shoah and Sho'ah, meaning "calamity" in Hebrew, became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the early 1940s. Shoa is preferred by many Jews and a growing number of others for a number of reasons, including the potentially theologically offensive nature of the original meaning of the word holocaust. The word "genocide" was coined during the Holocaust. Features of the Nazi Holocaust The Nazi Holocaust had several characteristics that, taken together, distinguish it from other genocides in history. Efficiency
Scale The Holocaust was geographically widespread and systematically conducted in virtually all areas of Nazi-occupied territory, where Jews and other victims were targeted in what are now 35 separate European nations, and sent to labor camps in some nations or extermination camps in others. The mass killing was at its worst in Central and Eastern Europe, which had more than 7 million Jews in 1939; about 5 million Jews were killed there, including 3 million in occupied Poland and over 1 million in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands also died in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Documented evidence suggests that the Nazis planned to carry out their 'final solution' in other regions if they were conquered, such as the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. The extermination continued in different parts of Nazi-controlled territory until the end of World War II, only completely ending when the Allies entered Germany itself and forced the Nazis to surrender in May 1945. Cruelty The Holocaust was carried out without any reprieve even for children or babies, and victims were often tortured before being killed. Nazis carried out deadly medical experiments on prisoners, including children. Dr. Josef Mengele, medical officer at Auschwitz and chief medical officer at Birkenau, was known as the "Angel of Death" for his medical and eugenical experiments, e.g., trying to change people's eye color by injecting dye into their eyes. Aribert Heim, another doctor who worked at Mauthausen, was known as "Doctor Death". The guards in the concentration camps carried out beatings and acts of torture on a daily basis. For example, some inmates were suspended from poles by ropes tied to their hands behind their backs so that their shoulder joints were pulled out of their sockets. Women were forced into brothels for the SS guards. Russian prisoners of war were used for experiments such as being immersed in ice water or being put into pressure chambers in which air was evacuated to see how long they would survive as a means to better protect German airmen. Homosexual men suffered unusually cruel treatment in the concentration camps. They faced persecution not only from German soldiers but also from other prisoners, and many homosexual men were beaten to death. Additionally, homosexuals in forced labor camps routinely received more grueling and dangerous work assignments than other non-Jewish inmates, under the policy of "Extermination Through Work". German soldiers also were known to use homosexuals for target practice, aiming their weapons at the pink triangles their human targets were forced to wear. Infants No reprieve was shown for infants or children. Immediately after their arrival, infants were separated from their mothers. One recorded instance describes how an SS guard forcibly took an infant from its mother and threw it against the ground, shattering its body without showing any change in his expression. Children and adult prisoners Children under the age of around 12 were generally deemed unfit for work and were therefore immediately taken to the gas chambers. However, death may have been preferable because those who were allowed to work were treated with equal contempt by the SS. Upon having their prisoner ID tattooed on them, the children were sent to work in either a factory, quarry, or some other strenuous and monotonous place of work. Their shifts lasted from 10 to 14 hours. After the day's work was finished, the children were subjected to incredibly long roll calls, during which some even died. This routine continued for what could be months until the prisoners were either sent to the gas chambers or died from malnourishment or exhaustion. Between the time of registration into the camp and death, prisoners were subjected to a number of demeaning and torturous ordeals. Prisoners were often beaten, whipped, or hung from beams with their hands behind them. This ordeal was done with their feet just inches from the ground. Prisoners were also regularly shot so that the SS could maintain a feeling of control. These dreadful ordeals combined to create a genuinely miserable experience within the camps. As a result, many inmates embraced or welcomed death. Experiments At the Auschwitz concentration camp, Dr. Josef Mengele was infamous for carrying out medical experiments on human subjects. These included placing subjects in pressure chambers, testing various drugs on them, freezing them to death, and various other usually fatal traumas. Of particular interest to Mengele were twins, gypsies, dwarves and infants. Beginning in 1943, twins were selected and placed in special barracks. Almost all of Mengele's experiments were of little scientific value, including attempts to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, various amputations and other brutal surgeries, and in at least one case attempting to create artificial conjoined twins by sewing the veins of twins together. This operation was not successful and only caused the children's hands to become badly infected. The full extent of Mengele's work will never be known because the two truckloads of records he sent to Dr. Otmar von Verschuer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute were destroyed by the latter. Subjects who survived Mengele's experiments were almost always killed after the experiments for dissection. While Mengele's experiments were the most notorious, his behavior was not an isolated aberration. Other Nazi physicians also engaged in human experimentation at several concentration camps, including Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, and Natzweiler concentration camps. Victims The victims of the Holocaust were Jews, Poles, Serbs, Russians, Belarusians, Communists, homosexuals, Roma & Sinti (also known as Gypsies), the mentally ill and the physically disabled, intelligentsia and political activists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roman Catholics, and Protestant clergy, trade unionists, psychiatric patients, Africans, Asians, enemy nationals, common criminals, people labeled as "enemies of the state" especially a large portion of the country's rich and liberal dissidents, and many who did not belong to the Aryan race. These victims all perished alongside one another in the camps, according to the extensive documentation left behind by the Nazis themselves (written and photographed), eyewitness testimony (by survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders), and the statistical records of the various countries under occupation. Death toll
Searching for records of victims Initially after World War II, there were millions of members of families broken up by the war or the Holocaust searching for some record of the fate and/or whereabouts of their missing friends and relatives. These efforts became much less intense as the years went by. More recently, however, there has a been a resurgence of interest by descendants of Holocaust survivors in researching the fates of their lost relatives. Yad Vashem provides a searchable database of three million names, about half of the known direct Jewish victims. Yad Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victims Names is searchable over the Internet at yadvashem.org or in person at the Yad Vashem complex in Israel. Other databases and lists of victims' names, some searchable over the Web, are listed in Holocaust (resources). Execution of the Holocaust The Enabling Act ( in German) was passed by Germany's parliament (the Reichstag) on March 23, 1933. Concentration and Labor Camps (1933-1945)
Persecution (1938-1941) In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler writes that Freemasonry has "succumbed" to the Jews and has become an "excellent instrument" to fight for their aims and to use their "strings" to pull the upper strata of society into their alleged designs. He continues, “The general pacifistic paralysis of the national instinct of self-preservation begun by Freemasonry is then transmitted to the masses of society by the Jewish press”. Many scholars date the beginning of the Holocaust itself to the anti-Jewish riots of the Night of Broken Glass ("Kristallnacht") of November 9, 1938, in which Jews were attacked and Jewish property was vandalized across Germany. Approximately 100 Jews were killed, and another 30,000 sent to concentration camps, while over 7,000 Jewish shops and 1,574 synagogues (almost every synagogue in Germany) were damaged or destroyed. Similar events took place in Vienna at the same time. A number of deadly pogroms by local populations occurred during the Second World War, some with Nazi encouragement, and some spontaneously. This included the Iaşi pogrom in Romania on June 30, 1941, in which as many 14,000 Jews were allegedly killed by Romanian residents and police, and the Jedwabne pogrom in which between 380 and 1,600 Jews were allegedly killed by local Poles. The preserved records of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office) show the persecution of the Freemasons. RSHA Amt VII, Written Records - overseen by Professor Franz Six - was responsible for "ideological" tasks, by which was meant the creation of anti-semitic and anti-masonic propaganda. While the number is not accurately known, it is estimated that between 80,000 and 200,000 Freemasons were exterminated under the Nazi regime. Freemasonic Concentration Camp inmates were graded as “Political” prisoners, and wore an inverted (point down) red triangle. In 1938 a forget-me-not badge – made by the same factory as the Masonic badge, and first used by the Grand Lodge Zur Sonne, in 1926 – was chosen for the annual Nazi Party Winterhilfswerk. Winterhilfswerk was a supposed charitable organization, which actually collected money used for rearmament. This coincidence enabled Freemasons to wear forget-me-not badge as a secret sign of membership. Euthanasia (1939-1941) The T-4 Euthanasia Program was established to "maintain the genetic purity" of the German population by systematically killing citizens who were physically deformed, disabled, handicapped, or suffering from mental illness. Between 1939 and 1941, over 200,000 people were killed. Ghettos (1940-1945)
Death squads (1941-1943)
Extermination camps (1942-1945)
Death marches and liberation (1944-1945)
Jewish Resistance Due to the careful organization and overwhelming military might of the Nazi German state and its supporters, few Jews and other Holocaust victims were able to resist the killings. There are, however, many cases of attempts at resistance in one form or another, and over a hundred armed Jewish uprisings. The largest instance of organized Jewish resistance was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, from April to May of 1943, as the final deportation from the Ghetto to the death camps was about to commence, the ZOB and ZZW fighters rose up against the Nazis. Most of the resistors were killed, but the few who did survive the war are currently residing in Israel. There were also other Ghetto Uprisings, though none were successful against the German military. There were also major resistance efforts in three of the extermination camps. In August 1943 an uprising also took place at the Treblinka extermination camp. Many buildings were burnt to the ground, and seventy inmates escaped to freedom, but 1,500 were killed. Gassing operations were interrupted for a month. In October 1943 another uprising took place at Sobibór extermination camp. This uprising was more successful; 11 SS men and a number of Ukrainian guards were killed, and roughly 300 of the 600 inmates in the camp escaped, with about 50 surviving the war. The escape forced the Nazis to close the camp. On October 7, 1944, the Jewish Sonderkommandos (those prisoners kept separate from the main camp and involved in the operation of the gas chambers and crematoria) at Auschwitz staged an uprising. Female prisoners had smuggled in explosives from a weapons factory, and Crematorium IV was partly destroyed by an explosion. The prisoners then attempted a mass escape, but all 250 were killed soon after. There were a number of Jewish partisan groups operating in many countries (see Eugenio Calò for the story of a Jewish Italian partisan). Also, Jewish volunteers from the Palestinian Mandate, most famously Hannah Szenes, parachuted into Europe in a failed attempt to organize resistance. Resistance of Jehovahs Witnesses Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany were persecuted between 1933 and 1945. They were scorned by the name Ernste Bibelforscher (Earnest Bible Students) at that time, because Jehovah's Witnesses would not give allegiance to the Nazi party, and refused to serve in the military, they were detained, put in concentration camps, or imprisoned during the Holocaust. Unlike Jews, homosexuals and Gypsies who were persecuted for racial, political and social reasons, Jehovah's Witnesses were persecuted on religious ideological grounds. The Nazi government gave detained Jehovah's Witnesses the option if they were to renounce their faith, submit to the state authority, and support the German military they would be free to leave prison or the camps. Approximately 12,000 Jehovah's Witnesses were sent to concentration camps where they were forced to wear a purple triangle that specifically identified them as Jehovah's Witnesses. In the end, about 2,000 of their members who were incarcerated perished under the Nazi system. All lost their employment. Dr. Detlef Garbe Historian and director at the Neuengamme (Hamburg) Memorial stated: “Taking everything into consideration, it has been established that no other religious movement resisted the pressure to conform to National Socialism with comparable unanimity and steadfastness.” Rescuers
Who was directly involved in the mass murder? A wide range of German soldiers, officials, and civilians were in some way involved in the Holocaust, from clerks and officials in the government to units of the army, the police, and the SS. Many ministries, including those of armaments, interior, justice, railroads, and foreign affairs, had substantial roles in orchestrating the Holocaust; similarly, German physicians participated in medical experiments and the T-4 euthanasia program. And, though there was no single military unit in charge of the Holocaust, the SS under Himmler was the closest. From the SS came the Totenkopfverbände concentration camp guards, the Einsatzgruppen killing squads, and many of the administrative offices behind the Holocaust. The Wehrmacht, or regular German army, participated directly far less than the SS in the Holocaust (though it did directly take part in the massacre of some Jews in Russia, Serbia, Poland, and Greece), but it supported the Einsatzgruppen, helped form the ghettos, ran prison camps, occasionally provided concentration camp guards, transported prisoners to camps, had experiments performed on prisoners, and used substantial slave labor. German police units, all under the control of the Nazis during the war, also directly participated in the Holocaust; for example Reserve Police Battalion 101 in just over a year shot 38,000 Jews and deported 45,000 more to the extermination camps. Even private firms helped in the machinery of the Holocaust. Nazi bankers at the Paris branch of Barclays Bank volunteered the names of their Jewish employees to Nazi authorties, and many of them ended up in the death camps. * European collaborationist countries In addition to the direct involvement of Nazi forces, collaborationist European countries helped the Nazis in the Holocaust. Collaboration took the form of either rounding up of the local Jews for deportation to the German extermination camps or a direct participation in the killings. Fascist Italy In Fascist Italy, a law from 1938 restricted civil liberties of Jews. This effectively reduced the country's Jews to second-class status, although Mussolini never made it official policy to deport Jews to concentration camps. After the fall of Mussolini and his creation, the Italian Social Republic, Jews started being deported to German camps. The deported numbered about 8,369, and only about a thousand survived. Several small camps were built in Italy and the so-called Risiera di San Sabba hosted a crematorium; from 3,000 to 5,000 people were killed in San Sabba, only a few of whom were Jews. Vichy France In France, Philippe Pétain, who became premier after Paris had fallen to the German Army, arranged the surrender to Germany. He then became the head of the Vichy government, which collaborated with Nazism, claiming that it would soften the hardships of occupation. Opposition to the German occupation of northern France and the collaborationist Vichy government was left to the French Resistance within France and the Free French Forces led by Charles de Gaulle outside of France. The police, the Milice ("militia", which worked as the Gestapo's aid), as well as members of Jacques Doriot's Parti Populaire Français (PPF) rounded up 75,000 Jews for deportation to concentration camps. The Vichy regime attracted all of the far-right counterrevolutionary sectors of French society, monarchists and other pseudo-fascist movements. Klaus Barbie, "the Butcher of Lyon", captured and deported 44 Jewish children hidden in the village of Izieu, killed Resistance leader Jean Moulin, and was in total responsible for the deportation of 7,500 people, 4,342 murders, and the arrest and torture of 14,311 resistance fighters were in some way attributed to his actions or commands. Maurice Papon was the number two official in the Bordeaux region and supervisor of its "Service for Jewish Questions". In 1997, following revelations from Le Canard Enchaîné newspaper, he was finally charged with complicity of crimes against humanity. Papon was accused of ordering the arrest and deportation of 1,560 Jews, including children and the elderly, between 1942 and 1944; most of his victims were sent to Auschwitz. As during Adolf Eichmann's trial, one of the main issue was to determine to what extent an individual should be held responsible in a chain of responsibility. He was given in 1998 a 10-year prison term. However, he was released on grounds of poor health in 2002. Many people thought both the relatively light sentence and his release were scandalous, especially when it was known to all that following the war, Papon went on to enjoy a civil service career, which led him to be the chief of the Paris police, held by historian Luc Einaudi as being directly responsible for the 1961 Paris massacre during the Algerian War (1954-62); Papon even became budget minister of president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in the 1970s. He was finally arrested because of the Canard Enchaîné 's revelations, which themselves followed a fiscal control ordered by Papon with the aim of intimidating the satirical newspaper. Antonescus Romania The Romanian Antonescu regime was directly responsible for the deaths of between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews. An official report*. released by the Romanian government concluded, "Of all the allies of Nazi Germany, Romania bears responsibility for the deaths of more Jews than any country other than Germany itself. The exterminations committed in Iasi, Odessa, Bogdanovka, Domanovka, and Peciora, for example, were among the most hideous acts committed against Jews anywhere during the Holocaust." In cooperation with German Einsatzgruppen and Ukrainian auxiliaries, Romanians killed hundreds of thousands of Jews in Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and Transnistria. Some of the larger massacres included 54,000 Jews killed in Bogdanovka, a Romanian concentration camp along the Bug River in Transnistria, between 21 and 31 December 1941. Nearly 100,000 Jews were killed in occupied Odessa and over 10,000 were killed in the Iasi pogrom. The Romanians also massacred Jews in the Domanevka and Akhmetchetka concentration camps. Hungary
Ustašes Croatia The Croatian Ustaše regime killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs (estimates vary widely, but by all sources more than 330,000-390,000, and possibly well over a million), over 20,000 Jews and 26,000 Roma, primarily in the Ustase's Jasenovac concentration camp near Zagreb. The Ustase also deported 7,000 more Jews to Nazi extermination camps. Croats were also victims of the Nazi regime and those who opposed it ended in concentration camps. A lot of Croats risked their lives during the Holocaust in order to save Jews from extermination by the Nazis (Croatian Righteous Among the Nations). Serbia Serbia was set up as a Nazi puppet state under Serbian army general Milan Nedić, which was known as Nedić's Serbia. The internal affairs of the Serbian puppet state were moderated by German racial laws, that were introduced in all occupied teritories with immediate effects on Jews, Roma people, as well as imprisonment of left oriented persons. The two major concentration camps in Serbia were: Sajmište and Banjica. Of 40,000 Serbian Jews around one half lost their lives in Nazi concentration camps both in Serbia and German Reich, where most of the captured Serbian Jews were transferred. Under Nedić, Belgrade was declared to be Judenfrei in 1942. Serbs were also victims of the Nazi regime, and most of the victims in Banjica were Serbian. Nazis had a policy of killing 100 Serbs for each killed German soldier and 50 killed Serbs for each wounded, resulting in widespread taking of hostages and executions such as Kragujevac massacre. Despite these represive measures, Serbs rebelled, and most Serbs saw Jews as their fellow victims in WWII, dying together in Nazi represion and genocide in Sajmište, Banjica and Jasenovac. Legends about Serbs saving the Jews in WWII are widespread in Serbia, and 152 Serbs have been honored as righteous Gentiles. Bulgaria Bulgaria, mainly through the influence of the Bulgarian East Orthodox Church, saved all of its own Jewish population from deportation and certain death. However, although civil and military administration for parts of Northern Greece and Macedonia had been turned over to Bulgaria by Germany, Bulgaria did not prevent the deportation by German authorities of the Jews from those territories to the concentration camps. Slovakia Slovakia's Tiso regime deported approximately 70,000 Jews, of whom 65,000 were killed. German-occupied Soviet territories In the German-occupied Soviet territories local units represented over 80% of the available German forces providing a total of nearly 450,000 personnel organised in so-called "Schutzmannschaften" formations. Practically all of these units participated in the round-ups and mass-shootings. The overwhelming majority were recruited in the western Ukraine and the Baltic region, areas recently occupied by the Soviets for which the Jews were typically scapegoated, which exacerbated pre-existing anti-Semitic attitudes. Thus for instance, Ukrainian nationalists killed 4,000 Lviv Jews in July 1941, and an additional 2,000 in late July 1941 during the so-called Petliura Days pogrom Nazi Einsatzgruppen, together with Ukrainian auxiliary units, killed 33,000 Kievan Jews in Babi Yar in September 1941. Ukrainian auxiliaries participated in a number of killings of Jews, among them in Romanian concentration camps in Bogdanovka and in Latvia. Baltic collaborators Lithuanian and Latvian auxiliary military units (Schutzmannschaft) with Nazi Einsatzgruppen detachments participated in the extermination of the Jewish population in their countries, as well as assisting the Nazis elsewhere, such as deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto. The Arajs Commando, a Latvian volunteer police unit, for example, shot 26,000 Latvian Jews, at various locations after they had been brutally rounded-up for this purpose by the regular police and auxiliaries and was responsible for assisting in the killing of 60,000 more Jews. About 75% of Estonia's Jewish community, aware of the fate that otherwise awaited them, managed to escape to the Soviet Union; virtually all the remainder (between 950 and 1000 people) were killed by Einsatzgruppe A and local collaborators before the end of 1941. The Netherlands Of the 140,000 Dutch Jews, the German occupiers deported about 107,000 of which 101,800 were murdered. This death toll of 73% is the highest in Western Europe. Reasons that have been suggested to explain this phenomenon are: The occupation regime in the Netherlands was formed by fanatic Austrian Nazis; the degree of efficiency and the high level of administrative organization of the pre-war Dutch civilian administration; the typical Dutch landscape without mountains or woods made it practically impossible to find shelter; the majority of the Dutch Jews lived in the larger cities and thus they formed relatively easy targets for persecution and segregation; the Jewish leaders chose, "in order to prevent worse", a policy of collaboration with the Nazis; the Dutch pre-war society can be characterized as a conglomerate of different groups, which lived separately from another and this fact made it easy for the Germans to segregate and persecute the Jewish section of society; Because the Jews were being cut off from public life, they lost almost all of the support that could have been provided by other groups in society; active assistance by Dutch collaborators, such as the Henneicke Column group that hunted and "delivered" 8,000 to 9,000 Jews for deportation. All of these circumstances made it relatively easy for the SS, regularly aided by Dutch police officers, to roundup the Jewish population. Norway After Norway was invaded, the Nazis took control of the government and the true government went into exile. Power was given to the German Reichskommisioner Josef Terboven and the Norwegian Fascist leader Vidkun Quisling. Quisling had attempted to establish himself as the leader of occupied Norway, but the Nazis only used him as leader of a puppet government. The Nazis, as well as some Norwegian police units, rounded up 750 Jews. However, the Nazis and their collaborators were very unpopular in Norway, causing a strong resistance movement, so the German government's aims for Norway were never fulfilled. Many Jews and other people were saved by the actions of Norwegians, including Norwegian police. Quisling and other Norwegians who collaborated with the Nazis were executed as traitors after the war. Also, 245 Sinti and Roma were deported to the Nazi extermination camps, of which 190 were murdered. Who authorized the killings? Hitler authorized the mass killing of those labelled by the Nazis as "undesirables" in the T-4 Euthanasia Program. Hitler encouraged the killings of the Jews of Eastern Europe by the Einsatzgruppen death squads in a speech in July, 1941, though he almost certainly approved the mass shootings earlier. A mass of evidence suggests that sometime in the fall of 1941, Himmler and Hitler agreed in principle on the complete mass extermination of the Jews of Europe by gassing, with Hitler explicitly ordering the "annihilation of the Jews" in a speech on December 12, 1941 (see Final Solution). To make for smoother intra-governmental cooperation in the implementation of this "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Question", the Wannsee conference was held near Berlin on January 20 1942, with the participation of fifteen senior officials, led by Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann, the records of which provide the best evidence of the central planning of the Holocaust. Just five weeks later on February 22, Hitler was recorded saying "We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew" to his closest associates. Arguments that no documentation links Hitler to "the Holocaust" ignore the records of his speeches kept by Nazi leaders such as Joseph Goebbels and rely on artificially limiting the Holocaust to exclude what we do have documentation on, such as the T-4 Euthanasia Program and the Kristallnacht pogrom. Who knew about the killings? Some claim that the full extent of what was happening in German-controlled areas was not known until after the war. However, numerous rumors and eyewitness accounts from escapees and others gave some indication that Jews were being killed in large numbers. Since the early years of the war the Polish government-in-exile published documents and organised meetings to spread word of the fate of the Jews. By early 1941, the British had received information via an intercepted Chilean memo that Jews were being targeted, and by late 1941 they had intercepted information about a number of large massacres of Jews conducted by German police. In an entry in the Friedrich Kellner Diary dated October 28, 1941, Friedrich Kellner recorded a conversation he had with a German soldier who had witnessed a massacre in Poland. In the summer of 1942 a Jewish labor organization (the Bund) got word to London that 700,000 Polish Jews had already died, and the BBC took the story seriously, though the United States State Department did not. By the end of 1942, however, the evidence of the Holocaust had become clear and on December 17, 1942, the Allies issued a formal declaration confirming and condemning Nazi extermination policy toward the Jews. The US State Department was aware of the use and the location of the gas chambers of extermination camps, but refused pleas to bomb them out of operation. On May 12, 1943, Polish government-in-exile and Bund leader Szmul Zygielbojm committed suicide in London to protest the inaction of the world with regard to the Holocaust, stating in part in his suicide letter: I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being killed. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave. By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people. Debate also continues on how much average Germans knew about the Holocaust. Recent historical work suggests that the majority of Germans knew that Jews were being indiscriminately killed and persecuted, even if they did not know of the specifics of the death camps. Robert Gellately, a historian at Oxford University, conducted a widely-respected survey of the German media before and during the war, concluding that there was "substantial consent and active participation of large numbers of ordinary Germans" in aspects of the Holocaust, and documenting that the sight of columns of slave laborers were common, and that the basics of the concentration camps, if not the extermination camps, were widely known. Historical and philosophical interpretations The Holocaust and the historical phenomenon of Nazism, which has since become the dark symbol of the 20th century's crimes, is the subject of numerous historical, psychological, sociological, literary, and philosophical studies. All types of scholars have tried to give an answer to what appears as the most irrational act of the Western World, which, until at least World War I, had been so sure of its eminent superiority to other civilizations. Frankfurt school philosopher Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer thus began the Dialectic of Enlightenment: "Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. Theodor Adorno went as far as ceasing to work as a composer, declaring: "writing any more poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" (Nach Ausschwitz noch ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch). Thus, Auschwitz became the metonymic name for the Holocaust and the Nazi barbarity. Although Adorno later retracted this statement, declaring that "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream...", the concepts of civilization and of progress themselves were severely called into question, and in a much greater manner than had happened due to World War I's massive killings. Germany, which was considered one of the most enlightened European countries, radiant with literature and philosophy (Goethe, Hegel, etc.), art (Bach, Bauhaus, etc.), and which had quickly followed in Great Britain's and France's steps during the competition induced during the New Imperialism period (starting in 1860s), had made itself guilty of one of the biggest crimes against humanity ever committed. Thus, the juridical concept of crimes against humanity was created to qualify what could not be qualified. It was left to literature, such as Primo Levi's If This Is a Man (1947) or Robert Antelme's The Human Race (1947) to describe what poetry, according to Adorno, couldn't describe. Thus, until this day, many different people have tried to explain what many deemed unexplainable due to its horror. One important philosophical question, addressed as early as 1933 by Wilhelm Reich in Mass Psychology of Fascism, was the mystery of the obedience of the German people to such an "insane" operation. Hannah Arendt, in her 1963 report on Adolf Eichmann, presented him as a symbol of dull obedience to authority in what was at first seen as a scandalous book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), which has since become a classic of political philosophy. Thus, Arendt opposed herself to the first, immediate, explanation, which accused the Nazis of "cruelty" and of "sadism". Later, the historians' debate concerning functionalism and intentionalism also demonstrated that the question couldn't be simplified to a question of cruelty. Many people who participated in the Holocaust were normal people, according to Arendt, and that is the real scandal. This led Stanley Milgram's to conduct psychological experiences on obedience, opening up the way to understanding the psychological experiences of "authority" and charisma. The question of charisma was renewed by Gustave Le Bon's 19th century studies about crowd psychology. Thus, his work acquired new force, although Hitler himself had been inspired by Le Bon's description of propaganda techniques to write Mein Kampf. Furthermore, Hannah Arendt and some authors such as Sven Lindqvist and Olivier LeCour Grandmaison tried to point toward a relative continuity between the crimes committed against "primitive" people during colonialism and the Holocaust. They most notably argued that many techniques that the Nazis industrialized had been experimented on in other continents, starting with the concentration camps invented during the Second Boer War if not before. This thesis was met with fierce opposition by some groups who argued that nothing could be compared to the Holocaust, not even other genocides: although the Herero genocide (1904-07) and the Armenian genocide (1915-17) are commonly considered as the first genocides in history, many argued that the Holocaust had taken proportions that even these crimes against humanity hadn't achieved. The Holocaust was indeed characterized by an industrial project of extermination; compared to it, other genocides seemed to lack "professionalism". This led authors such as Enzo Traverso to argue in The Origins of Nazi Violence that Auschwitz was "an authentic product of Western civilization". Beginning his book with a description of the guillotine, which according to him marks the entry of the Industrial Revolution into capital punishment, and writes: "Through an irony of history, the theories of Frederick Taylor" (taylorism) were applied by a totalitarian system to serve "not production, but extermination." (see also Heidegger's comments). In the wake of Hannah Arendt, Traverso describes the colonial domination during the New Imperialism period through "rational organization", which lead in a number of cases to extermination. However, this argument, which insists on the industrialization and technical rationality through which the Holocaust itself was carried out (the organization of trains, technical details, etc. — see Adolf Eichmann's bureaucratic work), was in turn opposed by other people. These point out that the 1994 Rwandan genocide only used machetes. Others have presented the Holocaust as a product of German history, analyzing its deep roots in German society: "German authoritarianism, feeble liberalism, brash nationalism or virulent anti-Semitism. From A. J. P. Taylor's The Course of German History fifty-five years ago to Daniel Goldhagen's recent Hitler's Willing Executioners, Nazism is understood as the outcome of a long history of uniquely German traits", writes Russell Jacoby. Furthermore, while many pointed out that the specificity of the Holocaust was also rooted in the constant antisemitism from which Jews had been the target since the foundation of Christianism (and the myth of the "deicide people"), others underlined that in the 19th century, pseudo-scientific racist theories had been elaborated in order to justify, in a general way, white supremacy. In his works on "biopolitics", philosopher Michel Foucault also traced the origins of "state racism" to the eugenicist policies invented during the 19th century (it is one of the few praise that Foucault accorded to Freud's psychoanalysis, that he adamantly opposed himself to such a project of "racial hygiene"). Obedience Stanley Milgram was one of a number of post-war psychologists and sociologists who tried to address why people obeyed immoral orders in the Holocaust. Milgram's findings demonstrated that reasonable people, when instructed by a person in a position of authority, obeyed commands entailing what they believed to be the death or suffering of others. These results were confirmed in other experiments as well, such as the Stanford prison experiment. In his book Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), Wilhelm Reich also tried to explain this obedience. The work became known as the foundation of Freudo-Marxism. Nobel prize winner Elias Canetti also addressed the problem of mass obedience in Masse und Macht (1960 - "Crowds and Power"), developing an original theory of the consequences of commandments orders both in the obedient person and in the commander, who may well become a "despotic paranoiac". Two recent "experiments", one called The Third Wave and one conducted by Jane Elliott, tried answer the question of: "How can a people be a part of something terrible and then claim at the demise that they were not really involved?" Psychological mechanisms The Holocaust is a clear example of two factors at work. One is described by the "boiling frog" theory, which says that an enormous change will not be noticed if it occurs in gradual steps. The other factor is the primal and powerful mechanism of herding, which has its home in the limbic system and ensures that individuals conform to the group. This mechanism has evolved through natural selection to ensure that human groups survive. Together, these factors make conforming to the group a stronger impulse than breaking out, even if the individual does not agree with what the group is doing. So long as the gradual changes in group behaviour are small, herding can eventually take the group towards a state that is far removed from past behavior and is more and more extreme. Thus, participants in the Holocaust may have privately felt horror or disgust at what they were ordered to do but stayed in line with the group. These effects have been exploited many times in history by demagogues and revolutionaries; they are also seen in bullying. Functionalism versus intentionalism A major issue in contemporary Holocaust studies is the question of functionalism versus intentionalism. The terms were coined in a 1981 article by the British Marxist historian Timothy Mason to describe two schools of thought about the origins of the Holocaust. Intentionalists hold that the Holocaust was the result of a long-term masterplan on the part of Hitler's and that Hitler was the driving force behind the Holocaust. Functionalists hold that Hitler was anti-Semitic, but that he did not have a masterplan for genocide. Functionalists see the Holocaust as coming from below in the ranks of the German bureaucracy with little or no involvement on the part of Hitler. Functionalists stress that the Nazi anti-Semitic policy was constantly evolving in ever more radical directions and the end product was the Holocaust. Intentionalists like Lucy Dawidowicz argue that the Holocaust was planned by Hitler from the very beginning of his political career, at very least from 1919 on, if not earlier. Later, Dawidowicz was to date the decision for genocide back to November 11, 1918. Other Intentionalists like Andreas Hillgruber, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Gerhard Weinberg and Klaus Hildebrand suggested that Hitler had decided upon the Holocaust sometime in the early 1920s. More recent intentionalist historians like Eberhard Jäckel continue to emphasize the relative earliness of the decision to kill the Jews, although they are not willing to claim that Hitler planned the Holocaust from the beginning. Saul Friedländer has argued that Hitler was an extreme anti-Semite from 1919 on, but he did not decide upon genocide until the middle of 1941. Yet another group of intentionalist historians such as the American Arno J. Mayer claimed Hitler only ordered the Holocaust in December 1941. Functionalists like Hans Mommsen, Martin Broszat, Götz Aly, Raul Hilberg and Christopher Browning hold that the Holocaust was started in 1941-1942 as a result of the failure of the Nazi deportation policy and the impending military losses in Russia. They claim that what some see as extermination fantasies outlined in Hitler's Mein Kampf and other Nazi literature were mere propaganda and did not constitute concrete plans. In Mein Kampf Hitler repeatedly states his inexorable hatred of the Jewish people, but nowhere does he proclaim his intention to exterminate the Jewish people. Furthermore, Functionalists point to the fact that in the 1930s, Nazi policy aimed at trying to make life so unpleasant for German Jews that they would leave Germany. Adolf Eichmann was in charge of facilitating Jewish emigration by whatever means possible from 1937 until October 3, 1941, when German Jews were forbidden to leave, Reinhard Heydrich issuing an order to that effect. Functionalists point to the SS's support for a time in the late 1930s for Zionist groups as the preferred solution to the "Jewish Question" as another sign that there was no masterplan for genocide. The SS only ceased their support for German Zionist groups in May 1939 when Joachim von Ribbentrop informed Hitler of this, and Hitler ordered Himmler to cease and desist as the creation of Israel was not a goal Hitler thought worthy of German foreign policy. In particular, Functionalists have noted that in German documents from 1939 to 1941, the term "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was clearly meant to be a "territorial solution", that is the entire Jewish population was to be expelled somewhere far from Germany and not allowed to come back. At first, the SS planned to create a gigantic "Jewish Reservation" in the Lublin, Poland area, but the so-called "Lublin Plan" was vetoed by Hans Frank, the Governor-General of occupied Poland who refused to allow the SS to ship any more Jews to the Lublin area after November, 1939. The reason why Frank vetoed the "Lublin Plan" was not due to any humane motives, but rather because he was opposed to the SS "dumping" Jews into the Government-General. In 1940, the SS and the German Foreign Office had the so-called "Madagascar Plan" to deport the entire Jewish population of Europe to a "reservation" on Madagascar. The "Madagascar Plan" was cancelled because Germany could not defeat the United Kingdom and until the British blockade was broken, the "Madagascar Plan" could not be put into effect. Finally, Functionalist historians have made much of a memorandum written by Himmler in May, 1940 explicitly rejecting extermination of the entire Jewish people as "un-German" and going on to recommend to Hitler the "Madagascar Plan" as the preferred "territorial solution" to the "Jewish Question". Not until July 1941 did the term "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" come to mean extermination. Recently, a synthesis of the two schools has emerged that has been championed by such diverse historians such as the Canadian historian Michael Marrus, the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer and the British historian Ian Kershaw that contends that Hitler was the driving force behind the Holocaust, but that he did not have a long-term plan and that much of the initiative for the Holocaust came from below in an effort to meet Hitler's perceived wishes. Another controversy was started by the sociologist Daniel Goldhagen, who argues that ordinary Germans were knowing and willing participants in the Holocaust, which he claims had its roots in a deep eliminationist German anti-Semitism. Most historians have disagreed with Goldhagen's thesis, arguing that while anti-Semitism undeniably existed in Germany, Goldhagen's idea of a uniquely German "eliminationist" anti-Semitism is untenable, and that the extermination was unknown to many and had to be enforced by the dictatorial Nazi apparatus. Religious hatred and racism The German Nazis considered their duty to overcome natural compassion and execute orders for what they believed to be higher ideals. Much research has been done to explain how ordinary people could have participated in such heinous crimes, but there is no doubt that, like in some religious conflicts in the past, some people poisoned with racial and religious ideology of hatred committed the crimes with sadistic pleasure. Crowd psychology has attempted to explain such heinous acts, although Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895) was also a major influence of Mein Kampf, in particular relating to the propaganda techniques described in it. Sadistic acts were perhaps most notable in the case of the genocide committed by members of the Ustaše, whose enthusiasm and sadism in their killings of Serbs appalled Germans, Italians, and even German SS officers, who even acted to restrain the Ustashe. However, concentration camp literature, such as the one written by Primo Levi or Robert Antelme, described numerous individual sadistic acts, including ones committed by Kapos. Some authors, such as liberal philosopher Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist or French historian Olivier LeCour Grandmaison have also linked the Holocaust to colonialism. They argue that techniques put in place during the New Imperialism period (first of all, concentration camps during the Boer War), as well as the pseudo-scientific theories elaborated during this period (e.g. Arthur de Gobineau's 1853 Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) had been fundamental in preparing the conditions of possibility of the Holocaust. Others authors have adamantly opposed these views, on behalf of the "unicity" of the Holocaust, compared to any other type of genocide. Philosopher Michel Foucault also traced the origins of the Holocaust and of "racial policies" to what he called "state racism", which is a part of "biopolitics". Finally, many have pointed the ancient roots of antisemitism, which has been present in the Western world since the foundation of Christianity. Modern ecumenism efforts, in particular by the Roman Catholic Church who asked pardon to the Jews, are being done in order to avoid any repetition of such acts. Holocaust denial Holocaust denial, (referred to by its supporters as Holocaust revisionism), is the belief that the Holocaust did not occur, or, more specifically: that far fewer than around six million Jews were killed by the Nazis (numbers below one million, most often around 30,000 are typically cited); that there never was a centrally-planned Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews; and/or that there were not mass killings at the extermination camps. Those who hold this position often further claim that Jews and/or Zionists know that the Holocaust never occurred, yet that they are engaged in a massive conspiracy to maintain the illusion of a Holocaust to further their political agenda. As the Holocaust is generally considered by historians to be one of the most documented events in recent history, these views are not accepted as credible by scholars, with organizations such as the American Historical Association, the largest society of historians in the United States, stating that Holocaust denial is "at best, a form of academic fraud." Holocaust deniers almost always prefer to be called Holocaust revisionists. Most scholars contend that the latter term is misleading. Historical revisionism, in the original sense of the word, is a well-accepted and mainstream part of the study of history; it is the reexamination of accepted history, with an eye towards updating it with newly discovered, more accurate, and/or less biased information, or viewing known information from a new perspective. In contrast, negationists typically willfully misuse or ignore historical records in order to attempt to prove their conclusions, as Gordon McFee writes: 'Revisionists' depart from the conclusion that the Holocaust did not occur and work backwards through the facts to adapt them to that preordained conclusion. Put another way, they reverse the proper methodology ..., thus turning the proper historical method of investigation and analysis on its head. Public Opinion Quarterly summarized that: "No reputable historian questions the reality of the Holocaust, and those promoting Holocaust denial are overwhelmingly anti-Semites and/or neo-Nazis." Holocaust denial has also become popular among Muslim opponents of Israel. The doctoral dissertation of Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian National Authority since 2005, raised doubts that gas chambers were used for the extermination of Jews and suggested that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was "less than a million." Abbas has, however, not espoused this position since his appointment as Palestinian Prime Minister in 2003, and has denied being a Holocaust denier. In late 2005 Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad described the Holocaust of European Jewry as "the myth of the Jews' massacre." Public espousal of Holocaust denial is a crime in ten European countries (including France, Poland, |
