History Department

 World War II: The Holocaust  

I.                   The Holocaust – Government planned, industrially executed, systematic extermination of entire people: 1941 – 1944: Nazi Germany murders at least 6,000,000 Jews and 6,000,000 others who were defined as “racially inferior”   

II.               Deep-background Causes  

 

Religious Anti-Semitism:  Ancient split within Judaism;  Christian-Jews vs. Traditional Jews;  expansion of Christianity;  Jews as minority;  Deep ambiguity among Christians:  Jews as “older brothers and sisters” vs. Jews as “the enemy”

Folk Anti-Semitism: Medieval Europe;  Jews are the most obvious minority; Scapegoating; mass of discriminatory laws; ghettos;  yet – some intermarriage, cooperation;  deeply embedded anti-Semitic stereotypes – Jews are “not like us;” “foreign;” “dangerous;” “clever” but “stupid;” “dirty;” “stingy”

Political Anti-Semitism: 1700s – Jews become active supporters of Change; defenders of Civil Rights & Freedom of Conscience;  Conservatives label Jews as “radicals”

Racist Anti-Semitism:  1800s – rise of Nationalism;  can a Jewish person be “German” or “French” or “Russian;” racist-nationalism: “German” “French” “Russian” are BIOLOGICAL terms;  Jews are “outsiders;” Jews are to blame!

 III.           Mid-Term Causes

A.      Europe 1900 – Massive Change; Jews in general welcome change as liberation from discrimination

B.      Conservatives oppose change; label Jews as THE troublemakers

C.       Radical-Conservatism:

·          Authoritarianism (not democracy)

·          Militarism (not peaceful solutions)

·          Imperialism (not free markets)

·          RACIST NATIONALISM (not international “fraternité”)

D.      Rise of Political & Racist Anti-Semitism

·    Dreyfus Affair in France, 1890s

                    E.   Germany – Anti-Semitism is central to Radical Conservatism

  IV.              Short-term Causes: Nazism

A.      Hitler’s obsession with race & anti-Semitism

B.      Hitler’s obsessions merge with Radical Conservatism

C.       Hitler’s “Real War” – the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem in Europe”

 V.                  Implementing the Holocaust

A.      1933-34 – DISCRIMINATION

·    Aryan Paragraph quotas

·    Anti-Jewish Boycotts

B.      1935 – 39 – SEGREGATION

·    1935 NUREMBERG LAWS – Jewish Germans are NOT German citizens

·    1939: Occupation of Poland;  Jewish Poles Jews segregated from Christian Poles;  recreation of “Ghettoes”

C.       1941 – REMOVAL

·    Plans to relocated European Jews in “reservations” somewhere in Russia?

·    Arrests, transport to holding camp

D.  JEWISH RESISTANCE:

• Escape

• Britain's "Jewish Legion" in North Africa

• Joining the "Partisans" -- Vilna Partisans

• Rebellion -- Warsaw Ghetto rebellion (1943)

E.      1941-45 – EXTERMINATION

·    1941: EINSATZGRUPPEN – mobile units in Russia; hundreds of massacres

·    1941: first experiments with gassings

·    1942: WANNSEE CONFERENCE – bureaucrats merge Removal with Extermination

·    DEATH CAMPS: Auschwitz; Treblinka

 

                Adolf Hitler insisted to anyone who would listen that his real war was the war against the Jews.  In his mind, everything else was secondary.  Hitler had not invented anti-Semitism, of course, but he carried anti-Semitism to its logical extreme.  From the moment he came to power on January 30, 1933, until his suicide on April 30, 1945, Hitler was obsessed with using the might of the German state to solve, finally, what he called “the Jewish problem.”

            There remain dozens of unanswered questions about just what happened.

·          Who knew what about the Holocaust and when did they know it? 

·          Had the death-camp system been planned well in advance, or did it evolve, helter-skelter, during the chaos of the war?

·          What role did ordinary Germans play? Did they endorse, directly or indirectly, genocide?

·          What role did other governments play?

·          Could the rest of the world have done anything to stop the killing?

·          What role did the Christian churches play?  Did they try to end the killing?  Did they close their eyes?  Did they actually encourage the killing?  

            But though there are scores of questions still unanswered, the basic facts are clear. The Nazi government adopted as government policy the extermination of Jews in particular, as well as other “inferior races” and anyone who dared to help them.  This extermination occurred in special facilities called “Death Camps.”              

The Death Camps

             The German National Socialists boasted that they would eliminate all the "communists," "liberals," "unpatriotic troublemakers" and others who, the Nazis insisted, were responsible for Germany's troubles.  The Nazis scoffed at "legal technicalities" and promised to take quick and immediate action.  The "carrot" to Nazism was its appeal to patriotism and community feeling; the Nazis promised to build a "folk‑community" (Volksgemeinschaft) in which all "true" Germans would feel at home.  Nazism would, Hitler explained, restore "traditional" values, and would make Germans proud to German again.  On a more practical level, the Nazi Party offered jobs and prestige to thousands of people.  Though the Nazis never did win a majority of the vote in a free election (their best scores were about 37% of the vote in the July 1932 election and 44% in the rigged March 1933 election), there is no doubt that at least in the mid‑ and late '30s they did have strong popular support.  Hitler, it seemed, improved the economy, restored law and order, scored a series of dazzling foreign policy victories, and made patriotism popular again.

            The "stick" to Nazism was systematic terror.  The Nazis used the "advantages of incumbency" to punish their opponents.  For the Nazis, politics was an extension of war, and rivals were to be destroyed.

            Four different types of prisons existed under the Nazi dictatorship.  First, the normal prison system continued to function.  People continued to be arrested for "normal" crimes, tried, and sentenced to "normal" terms.  The Nazis' major innovation here was to expand use of the death penalty. Draft resistance, and "anti‑patriotic activities," for instance, became capital offenses.

            Secondly, once World War II began, the German military established Prisoner of War camps.  POW camps for western Europeans and Americans were harsh, but no better and no worse than POW camps in other nations.  POW camps for Russians and Poles were horrendous; the vast majority of Russian and Polish POWs didn’t survive the German camps.

            Third were the "concentration" camps, in German, “Konzentrazionslager” or (KZ),   Within days after the Nazi takeover in 1933, Nazis were furious to discover that most of their enemies could not be charged with ordinary crimes.  The Nazis, therefore, set up their very own prison system.  It was run by the SS, a Party organization, not by ordinary government agencies.  People in the camps were not charged with specific crimes, they had no trials, they received no specific sentences; they were simply swept into the camps and held indefinitely.

            The first concentration camp was set up in Dachau, just outside Munich, in 1933.  By the end of the war, there were scores of other camps.  From the outside, they looked like military installations.  They were surrounded by electrically charged barbed wire fences; guards in watchtowers supervised the prisoners.  Prisoners lived in wooden barracks, and were marched to and from work details.  Some camps specialized ‑ Dachau was mostly for German political prisoners; Ravensbruck was for women; Thresienstadt (in Austria) was a "model" camp used to impress foreigners.  Other camps, notably Auschwitz (in Poland), evolved into gigantic installations, housing thousands of prisoners from all over Europe.

            Concentration camp prisoners were systematically brutalized.  Starvation, physical abuse, even small things like forcing people to stand naked in public or have their heads shaved, reduced the likelihood of rebellion.  It was also easier for the guards to control people once people ceased to look and act like normal human beings.

            Prisoners were usually used as slave labor.  Many German industries used concentration camp labor; Auschwitz was surrounded by several large factories. Prisoners died by the thousands, but at first there was no systematic effort to exterminate them.

            That changed in 1941/2, when the fourth type of camps were built, the extermination camps.  Some of the older camps, like Auschwitz, constructed their own extermination units (the Birkenau unit of the Auschwitz camp became the biggest killing center in the system); entirely new camps, such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, were constructed specifically for the purpose of extermination.

            These extermination camps were designed to solve a peculiar and sinister problem.  The Nazis had reintroduced massacre into European warfare.  The targets of massacre were the Nazis' "real enemies," the Jews.  When the Germans invaded Russia in the summer of 1941, the SS organized four "task forces," or "Einsatzgruppen" to follow in the army's wake and wage the "real war."  The Einsatzgruppen roved through western Russia, slaughtering Jewish peasants by the thousands;  by December 1941, they has massacred at least 2,000,000 people.  But mass shootings were very public and very messy;  they terrified Russians into anti-German resistance;  a handful of Germans, witnessing these slaughters, complained in horror;  the whole operation was far too cumbersome and disorganized.  A "better technique" for mass murder was needed.

Treblinka

            In the spring of 1942, Colonel Franz Stangl received orders to establish a "special" camp about a hundred miles northeast of Warsaw.  Stangl was an SS man, not an army man. A few years before, he had worked in the euthanasia program, which had been designed to cut welfare costs by killing the retarded, mentally ill, and elderly.  He was experienced in "special projects."

            The camp Stangl established near the village of Treblinka was a surprisingly small installation. It covered only about 45 acres (the Queens campus is about 35 acres), and had a staff of just 100 ‑ 20 German SS officers and men, and about 80 Ukrainian civilians.  The camp was surrounded by barbed wire, and consisted of barracks for the staff, and an area for the "special" work (see the attached plan).

          The work at Treblinka would go roughly like this:

            Dawn.  A train pulls up to the camp.  Behind the engine is a car for the dozen or so train guards (SS men like the camp guards). Next come, perhaps, 20 boxcars.  In each boxcar are 100 people.

            For the train guards, the trip is easy.  Their hardest task is at the beginning, loading the people into the boxcars.  A day or two before the trip, people in a town or village somewhere in Europe, usually Jews, would be ordered to assembly at the train station on the departure date.  They are told that they are to be evacuated to the East to work in factories.  They may take one suitcase per person.

            Departure day is always chaotic.  People want to know where they are going, children cry, boys and girls get lost.  The SS guards, sometimes brusquely, sometimes pleasantly, explain that they don't have any information, that the people just have to get into the boxcars, that regular train cars aren't available.  Sometimes there is trouble, but the guards quickly learn that when the tranportees are a mixed group of old people and young people, parents and children, there is little violence.  The guards load the people into the boxcars, slide the heavy doors closed, and padlock them.  For the guards, the rest of the trip is easy.

            For the people in the cars, the trip is brutal.  They freeze in the winter, swelter in the summer.  They receive no food or water, and since there are no sanitation facilities in the boxcars, they foul themselves.  Always, one or two people die. At first, they shout and cry, and people who see the trains go by know that something odd is happening. Later, exhausted, the people in the cars become quiet.  Sometimes they try to slip photographs and notes through the doors; Polish peasants who see the trains rolling toward Treblinka remember later that the tracks were littered with bits of clothing and scraps of paper.

            The man who arranges the transportation, Adolf Eichmann, lives in Berlin.  He is an official with the SS, which has been charged with implementing the Final Solution.  He works from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm in his office, matching trains with people, writing schedules and reports.  By the end of the war, he will ship somewhere around 10,000,000 people to various camps. He sees none of the people he moves.

            When the train finally stops next to the little military‑looking camp at Treblinka, the camp guards take over from the train guards.  The camp guards only unlock one boxcar.  They hustle the dazed people outside and line them up in a little quadrangle.  The transportees, if they notice anything, might notice the barracks, the barbed wire, the many trees, and the little railroad station.  The station is fake, designed only to calm the transportees.

            The guards tell the 100 or so people from the first boxcar that they must shower.  They are ordered to remove all their clothes.  There is some embarrassment at that, but the people are so tired they do not protest.  Suitcases go here, the guards explain, shoes and clothes go there.  The people pile their possessions carefully so they can find them again after their shower.

             The guards hurry the people down a gravel path.  There is a barbed wire fence along either side of the path; the guards call this the "chute" or the "tube." The people might not notice the fences since they are hidden by vines and shrubs, and besides, the guards rush them along quickly and there is little time to look around.

            At the end of the "chute" is a medium‑sized, window‑less white building, with a sign that says "showers."  The guards jam the people into building so tightly that there is scarcely room to move.  The ceiling is low, and adults can easily touch it.  There are showerheads in the ceiling.

            The guards bang the door closed and lock it.  People inside begin to shout and cry.  The guards release the poison gas.  Through peep‑holes, the guards can watch the people die. Because of the crowding in the room, most die standing up.  Many scratch and tear at the ceiling before they die.

            The gas kills them within minutes.  The guards open the door at the other end of the building and pull the corpses out.  When the camp first started, the bodies were buried. Later, they were piled on wooden platforms and burned.  Now there are crematoria, and the bodies can be incinerated.  It takes, from the time the people first get off the train, to the time when their corpses are incinerated, at most 30 minutes.

            The guards then hurry back to the train, open the second boxcar, and rush the next group down the same path.  It takes less than 10 hours to kill all 1000 people.  In fact, this would be a slow day.  At its most efficient, the hundred or so guards at Treblinka could kill over 5000 people by noon.

            The Treblinka camp operated from the summer of 1942 until the summer of 1943.  Once, on August 2, 1943, there was a riot, and an entire train‑load of people almost escaped. Normally, though, there was very little trouble.  In 1943, fearful of the advance of the Russian Army, Stangl's superiors ordered him to destroy the camp and late that summer, the buildings were demolished and the staff

reassigned.  The guards built a little village on the site to deceive the Russians.  In their year of work, the Treblinka staff exterminated somewhere between 800,000 and 1,200,000 people; statistics are incomplete.  82 transportees managed to escape.

Auschwitz

            Rudolf Hoess was the Camp Commander at Auschwitz. Auschwitz was an enormous camp‑complex, which included factories, prisons, and extermination units. In 1942, Birkenau was added to Auschwitz, and Auschwitz-Birkenau became the Nazis’ largest killing center.  After the war, he was arrested, tried, and hanged for war crimes.

            At his trial, Hoess explained how the system at Auschwitz worked:

The two large crematoriums, numbers I and II ... each had five three‑section ovens, and together they could cremate about 2000 bodies in less than twenty‑four hours.  Crematoriums I and II had gas‑chambers in the  basement.  The bodies of people gassed in the basement were taken by elevator     to the ovens on the upper floor. Together, about 3000 people could be gassed in these two chambers ...  Crematoriums III and IV were smaller  ... they could burn about 1500 bodies every 24 hours ...   Crematorium V was the biggest; its capacity was almost  unlimited, and it could operate day and  night ... The largest number of people gassed and burned in a single day at Auschwitz was about 9000, more or less.

            (from: Spielvogel, Nazi Germany).

            It was important that Auschwitz be run in a "rational" and "efficient" manner.  Material was to be salvaged from persons liquidated and sent back to Germany to be used in the war effort.  In February 1943, for instance, Commandant Hoess sent Heinrich Himmler a list of items "recovered" from persons "liquidated" at Auschwitz.  The list included:

       3,000 kilograms of women's hair

       9,000 girl's dresses

      15,000 children's coats

      22,000 pairs of girl's shoes

      76,000 sets of women's clothing

      97,000 sets of men's clothing

     155,000 women's coats      (from: Gilbert, The Holocaust).

     Auschwitz opened in June 1940, and Birkenau was added in 1942.  The whole system was closed in the fall of 1944.  In that time, several million people passed through its gates from all over Europe. Of them, at Auschwitz alone, at least minimum of about 2,000,000 were exterminated.