8.9 - The Holocaust

The Holocaust: Origins and Atrocities

Hitler’s Racial Ideology: When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, he openly expressed his belief in the superiority of the Aryan race, which he claimed were the descendants of ancient Germanic peoples. Hitler viewed the Jewish population of Europe as the greatest threat to this "master race" and began implementing policies to establish a new racial order.

Early Anti-Jewish Policies

Early Persecution (1933): Within months of Hitler taking power, the Nazis organized a boycott of Jewish businesses and fired Jews from government jobs, including teaching and the courts.

Nuremberg Laws (1935): The first major iteration of Hitler's racial policies came in the form of the Nuremberg Laws. These laws stripped Jews of their citizenship and made it illegal for "pure-blood" Germans to marry Jews.

Kristallnacht (1938): On November 9 to 10, 1938, Nazi mobs, led by the SA, attacked Jews across Germany and Austria, burning hundreds of synagogues and smashing thousands of Jewish shops (the name means "Night of Broken Glass"). About 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps. Afterward, Jews were pushed out of the economy entirely, and many tried desperately to emigrate, but most countries limited how many refugees they would take.

Jewish Emigration: Initially, Hitler considered various plans for Jewish emigration, including the idea of sending Jews to Madagascar. However, with the outbreak of World War II, these plans became unmanageable, and his focus shifted to more extreme measures.

Ghettos: After conquering Poland in 1939, the Nazis forced Jews into sealed-off ghettos, like the one in Warsaw, where hunger and disease killed tens of thousands. In 1943, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in an armed revolt that the Germans crushed.

Mass Shootings: When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, SS killing squads called Einsatzgruppen, helped by German police, soldiers, and local collaborators, shot more than a million Jews, often at the edge of pits. At Babi Yar, near Kyiv, they killed more than 33,000 Jews in two days (September 1941).

The Final Solution

Wannsee Conference (1942): In January 1942, SS leader Reinhard Heydrich chaired a meeting of 15 senior Nazi, SS, and government officials at Wannsee, near Berlin, to coordinate the "Final Solution": the murder of all of Europe's Jews. Mass killing had already begun, but the conference organized the deportation of Jews from every part of Europe to killing centers in occupied Poland. Hitler and Himmler did not attend, but the Final Solution was carried out with Hitler's approval and by Himmler's SS.

Death Camps: Starting in late 1941, the Nazis built six death camps (killing centers) in occupied Poland: Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. These were different from concentration camps like Dachau (1933), which held prisoners under brutal conditions but were not built mainly for mass murder. At Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec, almost everyone was killed within hours of arrival. At Auschwitz, the largest camp, SS doctors "selected" new arrivals: usually only a minority were chosen for forced labor, and the rest were sent straight to the gas chambers. About 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz, about 1 million of them Jews.

Method of Execution: Victims were told they would be showered and deloused, but instead they were locked in gas chambers. At Auschwitz and Majdanek, the SS used Zyklon B, pellets that released hydrogen cyanide gas; at Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec, they used carbon monoxide from engine exhaust. In total, about 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, roughly two-thirds of all the Jews in Europe.

Collaboration: The Nazis did not act alone. In France, the Vichy government passed its own anti-Jewish laws, and French police arrested about 13,000 Jews in Paris in the Vel' d'Hiv roundup (July 1942); in all, about 76,000 Jews were deported from France. Romania's government murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews on its own, and in 1944 Hungarian police helped deport more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in less than two months. Local collaborators in many occupied countries helped identify and round up Jews.

Targeting Other Groups

Additional Victims: The Nazis also murdered millions of people from other groups they considered inferior or dangerous. Historians estimate that between about 200,000 and 500,000 Roma were killed. About 3 million Soviet prisoners of war died from starvation, shootings, and neglect, and millions of Polish and other Slavic civilians were killed. Germany's "euthanasia" program murdered roughly 250,000 people with mental and physical disabilities, and its gassing methods were later used in the death camps. Thousands of gay men were sent to concentration camps, where many died, along with communists, socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other political and religious opponents.

World War II's Human Costs

A Generation of Men Lost: The war killed millions of young soldiers, especially Soviet and German men. The Soviet Union lost about 27 million people, and for decades afterward it had far more women than men. Germany lost more than 5 million soldiers.

European Jewry Destroyed: Jewish communities that had existed for centuries, especially in Poland (where about 90 percent of Jews were killed), Lithuania, and Ukraine, were almost completely wiped out. Many survivors later left Europe, especially for the new state of Israel (1948) and the United States.

Forced Migrations: Millions were uprooted. The Nazis took millions of people from occupied countries to Germany as forced laborers, Stalin deported whole ethnic groups like the Chechens and Crimean Tatars, and at the war's end 12 million or more ethnic Germans fled or were expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Eastern European countries as borders moved west.

Old Class Hierarchies Shaken: The war weakened the old upper classes. In Eastern Europe, Soviet-backed governments seized and broke up the great noble estates, including those of the Prussian Junkers. In Britain, shared wartime sacrifice and rationing led to demands for greater equality and the postwar welfare state (see 9.6).