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The Holocaust: A Chronology and Documentary
by
Robert A. Michael
Professor of European History
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
(New York: Jason Aronson Publishers, 1998)
1998 by Robert A. Michael
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Epigraph
Preface
Introduction
1933
1934
1935
1936
1937
1938
1939
1940
1941
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1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
Footnotes
References
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Epigraph
He is an older man, walking with his young daughter through
their disorderly English garden. She wonders aloud why all the mice
are gone. He tells her that snakes have eaten them all. With the
innocence of childhood, she looks into his face and asks, "Daddy, why
do living things kill each other?" The father looks down into his
daughter's face, reflecting on an answer. After a while his eyes fill with
tears as he replies, "I don't know, my darling. I don't know." This
anguished parent was Charles Darwin, a man who had answered so
many other complicated questions about life and death. But even he,
confronted by this fundamental issue can only utter an admission of
ignorance.
Imagine then the difficulty for an historian when confronted by
the horror of the Holocaust? How does the historian explain why the
Western world has chosen Jews as the metaphor for suffering and the
reality of victimization? How does the historian confront the monstrous
belief that the Jews are radical enemies of the state and of humanity,
inherently evil beings who must be eradicated from the face of the
earth? How does the historian explain the silence of the world to the
Nazi atrocities? How does the historian face the murder of two million
Jewish children? There are no easy answers for these questions. Eugon
Kogon has suggested that
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As you view the history of our time, turn and look at the
piles of bodies, pause for a short moment and imagine that this
poor residue of flesh and bones is your father, your child, your
wife, is the one you love. See yourself and those nearest to you,
to whom you are devoted heart and soul, thrown naked into the
dirt, tortured, starving, killed.
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Preface:
This chronology of the German war against the European Jews,
the Holocaust (also called by the Hebrew Shoah, the Yiddish Hrbn, and
in Nazi-Deutsch Endloesung der Juden Fragen, or Final Solution of the
Jewish Problem), traces the events of the years 1933 through 1946.
The intentional focus on the Jews victimized during the Holocaust is not
meant to diminish the suffering and deaths of millions of others during
this horrible period of history. A pragmatic German goal was to enslave
and exploit the non-Jewish populations of Europe; incidental to this
goal was the killing of millions of non-Jews. But the other, less
pragmatic and more ideological, intention was the slaughter of the
whole Jewish people in Europe.
A chronology of the Holocaust can never be totally accurate.
Authoritative histories differ not only as to the specific dates of
important and well-known wartime events, such as the Soviet
reconquest of Stalingrad (Volgograd), but they also disagree as to
many of the most important dates concerning the Holocaust, such as
the timetable for the decision on the Final Solution of the Jewish
Problem.
What follows is a chronology enhanced by eyewitness testimony,
the experiences of Jewish victims, their victimizers, and the
bystanders, all of whom speak for themselves. Included also are
descriptions of occurrences and the reproduction of primary documents
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before 1933 that run roughly parallel with the events and writtten
material of the Holocaust. Secondary material is kept to a minimum.
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Introduction:
Anti-Jewishness was the essential cause of the Holocaust. The
word antisemitism is a nineteenth-century German word
(Antisemitismus) replacing Jew-hatred (Judenhass) in polite discourse.
Antisemitism carries with it overtones of scientific authority and racism
and is often applied to modern, allegedly secular, anti-Jewishness.
Some scholars restrict the concept of antisemitism to those who not
only dislike or hate Jews, but who foment political action against Jews.1
But history has repeatedly shown that anti- Jewish action results from
anti-Jewish feelings. Are we to say that a bigot who writes anti-Jewish
material read by thousands or even tens of millions of people but who
does not directly connect to a political plan is not antisemitic?
Certainly, not in the common usage of the word. Admittedly, there are
distinctions to be made between St. Jerome, who claimed that all Jews
were Judases who betrayed God for money; St. John Chrysostom, who
argued that Jews grew fit for slaughter"; Martin Luther, who described
a multipoint plan to expropriate Jews, compel them into forced labor,
exile them, and kill them; and Adolf Hitler, who articulated the
previously existing anti-Jewish ideas and who expressed the previously
existing anti-Jewish feelings of his audience, showed them a way finally
to solve the "Jewish problem," and saw to it that it was carried out.
1Richard Levy, Antisemitism in the Modern World,2-11.
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What does it take to convince average people to murder defenseless
Jewish adults and children, sick and elderly? Certainly not simply the
ravings of a madman. It takes a charismatic leader who articulates the
hatred and anger that the audience already feels toward the Jews and
points out a remedy.
Neither Sts. Jerome and Chrysostom nor Luther could have been
Nazis; they lived centuries earlier. But what is so appalling is that their
ideas parallel those of the Nazis. There is a "seamless web" among all
three of these Jew haters, each of whom participated in establishing
that Jews were evil and in giving authoritative "permission" to attack
Jews for their alleged evil. As when a pebble is thrown into a pool, the
resulting ripples are not equally powerful. At the heart of the horrors of
the Holocaust were the Nazis and Germans, followed closely by their
collaborators. Then came many citizens of the Allied nations, of
occupied Europe, and of neutral Europe who knowingly turned their
backs on the Jews.
Antisemitism suggests that it was not the religion of the Jews
that stirred hostility; it was instead aspects of the Jews' character (for
example, greed and political radicalism) manifested in their behavior
that caused anti-Jewish antagonism. But in the minds of those hostile
toward Jews, anti-Jewishness is both a religious antipathy and an attack
on the expression of the Jews nature and behavior. Because of this, I
will use the words Jew-hatred, antisemitism, Judeophobia, and anti-
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Jewishness synonymously. I apply the word antisemite to anyone who
writes, or otherwise expresses a prejudice, against Jews, or who acts in
an anti- Jewish manner.
Christian anti-Jewishness is not by itself a sufficient cause of the
Holocaust, but it is a necessary cause. The anti-Jewishness that
sustains, indeed dominates, antisemitism is essentially a religious
antipathy to Jews deeply rooted in Christian ideology. For nearly two
millennia, theological animosity toward Jews and toward the Jewish
spirit stands as the most significant explanation of Jew-hatred. The
more entrenched Christianity became, for example, the worse and
more frequent the anti-Jewish rhetoric of secular Roman law became.
Christianized Roman emperors of the fourth and fifth centuries
considered the Jews:
sacrilegious assemblies
polluted with the Jewish disease
contaminated with Jewish sacraments
insulters of the Christian faith
a plague that spreads widely
the abominable and vile
enemies of Roman law
monstrous heretics
the worst of men
blindly senseless
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The emperors referred to Judaism as
a deadly and sacrilegious sect
a brothel
the Jewish perversity, alien and hostile to the Roman Empire
the mark of Jewish filth
corrupt with the filth of its particular sect
the insanity of the Jewish blasphemy
an abominable sect and rite
frightful and hideous
These descriptions mirrored the language of the Church Fathers.
Long before Hitler and the Nazis declared the Jews socially dead,
Christians had proclaimed them evil. St. Ambrose, who saw any
contact with Jews as a defilement, believed that due to "the stench of
its crimes, the Jewish people soiled its pretended bodily purity by the
internal feces of its soul." What does it take to convince average
people to murder defenseless adults and children? Certainly not just
the ravings of a madman. It takes a charismatic leader who articulates
the hatred and anger that the audience already feels. St. Augustine
called them Cains. St. John Chrysostom called for their deaths: like
useless animals, Jews grew fit for slaughter. This is why Christ said:
As for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over
them, bring them here and slay them before me.
The Church Fathers, medieval theologians and Popes, the
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sixteenth-century founders of Protestantism (Luther and Calvin),
eighteenth-century philosophers, nineteenth-century writers and
politicians, and many, if not most, ordinary people in the twentieth-
century until after the Holocaust felt that the Jews were alienated,
dishonored people unworthy of human rights and protection, existing
only by virtue of Christian charity. Anti-Jewish theology was so
influential that even when Christians knew no Jews personally, a high
degree of anti-Jewishness did exist.
Ideology was not the only cause of the Nazi Holocaustpolitical,
economic, psycho-social factors also contributed. But the anti-Jewish
aspects of Christian thought and theology, the anti-Jewish Christian
mindset and attitudes, and the precedents provided by the churches'
historical relationship to Jews significantly conditioned the plan,
establishment, and prosecution of the Holocaust. The churches and
their theologians had formulated a compelling religious, social, and
moral ideology (ideas with emotional impact) that provided a
conceptual framework of the Jew as less than human or inhuman--as
traitors, murderers, plague, pollution, filth, devils, and insects--long
before the Christians of the Third Reich did. As Aldous Huxley observed
that If you call a man a bug, it means you propose to treat him as a
bug.
Judeophobia was rife not only among Allied government officials
but also among the Allied peoples and writers. That many of the
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greatest American and British writers, the creators and caretakers of
Western culture, were antagonistic to Jews reveals the depth and
breadth of anti-Jewish attitudes. One single example, of dozens, before
and during the Holocaust will suffice here. Employing traditional
images of Judas and Shylock, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote this of a Jew
who sat across from him at dinner one night:
There sat the very Jew of Jews; the distilled essence of all the
Jews that have . . . been born since Jacob's time; he was Judas
Iscariot; he was the Wandering Jew; he was the worst, and at the
same time, the truest type of his race . . .. I never beheld
anything so ugly and disagreeable, and preposterous, and
laughable, as the outline of his profile; it was so hideously Jewish,
and so cruel . . .. I rejoiced exceedingly in this Shylock, this
Iscariot; for the sight of him justified me in the repugnance I have
always felt towards his race.
In The Marble Faun, Hawthorne seems more "modern" in his anti-
Jewishness when he refers to the Jews as the ugliest, most evil-
minded people, resembling . . . maggots when they over-populate a
decaying cheese. This striking image is replicated by Adolf Hitler in
Mein Kampf: If you cut even cautiously into [the Jewish] abscess, you
found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden
lighta kike!
It has been asked how Christian people could permit such
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atrocities against the Jews as occurred during the Holocaust and why
so few tried to intercede. The answer is that the same principles that
run through earlier Christian assaults on Jews, Judaism, and
Jewishness--on the Jewish spirit--drive the attack on the Jews during the
Holocaust. It is obvious that Hitler and his collaborators (German and
non-German) were not good Christians, yet almost all of them were
born and raised in Christian homes; they and their children were
baptized, confirmed, and married in churches, attended Church
services, listened to priests' and ministers' sermons, served as altar
boys, and were officially recorded as Christians. I am not implying that
every Christian was anti-Jewish. Indeed, the evidence suggests that a
sizable minority of Christians in every generation sympathized with
Jews, had friendly relations with Jews, even married Jews. But anti-
Jewish feelings were so prevalent among Christian individuals who
have made their mark on history that we are surprised at least up to
1945 when an important Christian is not anti-Jewish.
The most notorious racist of the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler,
oftentimes talks as a traditional biological racist. But his rhetoric
reminds us of Catholic Spain in the sixteenth century, when and where
the first institutionalized racism occurred in the Christian government's
purity of blood laws. Near the end of his life, Hitler concludes that
biological racism is a sham. It is the Jewish mind and values, the
Jewish spirit, that he hates. The only way to rid the world of this
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Jewish spirit, he determines, is to destroy the Jewish bodies that house
it.The Jews are an abstract race of the mind [that] has its origins,
admittedly, in the Hebrew religion . . .. A race of the mind is something
more solid, more durable than just a [biological] race, pure and
simple. This description of Jews is close to the traditional religious
anti-Jewishness and helps answer the question as to why Hitler and his
collaborators chose the Jews to die in the first place. These ideas
permeated Western Christian culture and ideology.
Hitler's anti-Jewish ideas were imposed neither on the Germans
nor on others who hated Jews, because they were already convinced
that Jews were evil, and that is why Hitler and Nazi propaganda were
so effective. Hitler was expressing ideas and feelings publicly and
radically that many, if not most, Europeans--and many Americans--
already entertained in regard to the Jews.
The historical continuity of anti-Jewish ideas and imagery over
the last two millennia is clear testimony that no essential difference
exists between anti-Judaism and antisemitism.Three analogies from
the chemical, medical, and biological sciences help clarify
antisemitisms ideological, social, and psychological nature. First,
although they exist within different historical contexts,anti-Jewish
ideas, emotions, and behaviors are reactive elements easily combining
with other ideologies, such as nationalism, racism, social Darwinism,
conservatism, fascism, and socialism to form an explosive compound.
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Second, like a virus, anti-Jewishness rests dormant at different levels of
the societal and individual psyche, surfacing especially during the
throes of social or personal crisis. Third, although Jews have often been
compared to parasites in both medieval and modern antisemitic
imagery, antisemitism itself is a parasitic idea, growing more powerful
by feeding on the negative human emotions of fear, anger, anxiety,
and guilt.
The major themes that emerge from the following chronology
are:
1. There was widespread acceptance of Hitler's attitudes and
policies in his attempt first to exile and then to murder the Jews of
Europe. Just as the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal observed of
Hitler's Foreign Minister--"It is because Hitler's policy and plans
coincided with his own ideas that Ribbentrop served him so willingly to
the end"--so it can be said that many, if not most, Europeans, not just
Germans, followed Hitler's directives not because they had to, but
because they wanted to. Apathy, passivity, and fear assuredly
influenced them, but Hitler pointed the way to "solving" the Jewish
"problem," and, because centuries of anti-Jewish feelings had severed
the bonds of human community between Christians and the Jews, most
Europeans may not have wanted the Jews dead, but they certainly
were willing to have them put out of the way. So pervasive were anti-
Jewish feelings that many of Hitler's enemies in Germany, Eastern
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Europe, France, England, and the United States sympathized with his
antagonism toward the Jews.
2. In the eighteenth century, George Washington had promised
the Jewish congregation of Newport, R.I., that All [American citizens]
possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. . . .
For happily the government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no
sanction, to persecution no assistance . . .. May the children of the
stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy
the goodwill of the other inhabitants. Yet despite their claims to be
fighting a war for democracy and human rights, the attitudes of many
important American and British officials concerned with foreign policy
and refugees paralleled those of the Nazis and their collaborators. The
Allied governments' antipathy toward Jews was far removed from the
Nazi death factories, but even the indirect nature of this prejudice
became murderous when it shut off all avenues of hope and relief for
the millions of Jews trapped in Europe. Fear of the foreigner and
economic concerns certainly influenced the Allied leaders and their
peoples against Jewish immigrants, but anti-Jewishness had a
permanent, widespread, and continually devastating impact. The silent
or secret collaboration of the Allies confirmed to Hitler and his
European accomplices the "validity" of their anti-Jewish ideology and
Final Solution.
3. Palestine, then under British control, was geographically and
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historically the best destination for Jewish refugees. The British War
Cabinet and many other government officials, however, opposed
allowing Palestine to serve as a refuge for Jews. These officials
indicated, even when they realized that the Nazis were murdering
millions of Jews, that they lacked the sense that Jews were human
beings.
4. Members of the Allied governments, including the British and
the American, knew of the Final Solution almost as soon as it was
begun through American reporters trapped in Germany until 1941,
reports from the Polish Government-in-Exile in London, testimony of
Jewish escapees, diplomatic channels, and through intercepted and
decoded German radio messages.
5. Thousands of individuals in the Allied nations and in occupied
Europe treated the Jews with respect and the Holocaust with the
urgency it deserved. As during the centuries that preceded the
Holocaust, thousands of Jews are saved by thousands of Christians who
overcame their fear of the Nazis and their collaborators and chose to
risk their lives to save the innocent. These Christians passed the moral
test of the times, which necessariily involved their attitudes and
behavior towards Jews.
6. Many governments and many people in Europe, later allies of,
or occupied by, Nazi Germany participated in a legal, political,
economic, social, and finally murderous attack on Jewish civilians under
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their control. Once the Third Reich's forces occupied these nations,
they increasingly collaborated with Germany to destroy the Jews, their
culture, and their religion.
7. Jews react in a variety of ways to the Nazis and their
collaborators. A few Jews collaborated with the Germans, some
American Jews fled from the attempt to put political pressure on their
government to help with coreligionists, other Jews refused to face the
realities of the Final Solution, but most Jews fell into a spectrum that
ran from persistent adherence to their Judaism to guerrilla warfare
against the murderers.
The Holocaust: A Chronology and Documentary
by Robert Michael
Epigraph
He is an older man, walking with his young daughter through
their disorderly English garden. She wonders aloud why all the mice
are gone. He tells her that snakes have eaten them all. With the
innocence of childhood, she looks into his face and asks, "Daddy, why
do living things kill each other?" The father looks down into his
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daughter's face, reflecting on an answer. After a while his eyes fill with
tears as he replies, "I don't know, my darling. I don't know." This
anguished parent was Charles Darwin, a man who had answered so
many other complicated questions about life and death. But even he,
confronted by this fundamental issue can only utter an admission of
ignorance.
Imagine then the difficulty for an historian when confronted by
the horror of the Holocaust? How does the historian explain why the
Western world has chosen Jews as the metaphor for suffering and the
reality of victimization? How does the historian confront the monstrous
belief that the Jews are radical enemies of the state and of humanity,
inherently evil beings who must be eradicated from the face of the
earth? How does the historian explain the silence of the world to the
Nazi atrocities? How does the historian face the murder of two million
Jewish children? There are no easy answers for these questions.
As you view the history of our time, turn and look at the
piles of bodies, pause for a short moment and imagine that this
poor residue of flesh and bones is your father, your child, your
wife, is th one you love. See yourself and those nearest to you, to
whom you are devoted heart and soul, thrown naked into the
dirt, tortured, starving, killed.2
2Eugon Kogon citation is in Schoenberner, yellow star
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Preface:
This chronology of the German war against the European Jews,
the Holocaust, traces the events of the years 1933 through 1946. The
intentional focus on the Jews victimized during the Holocaust is not
meant to diminish the suffering and deaths of millions of others during
this horrible period of history. A pragmatic German goal was to enslave
and exploit the non-Jewish populations of Europe; incidental to this
goal was the killing of millions of non-Jews. But the other, less
pragmatic and more ideological, intention was the slaughter of the
whole Jewish people in Europe.
A chronology of the Holocaust can never be totally accurate.
Authoritative histories differ not only as to the specific dates of
important and well-known events, such as the Soviet reconquest of
Stalingrad (Volgagrad), but they also disagree as to many of the most
important dates concerning the Holocaust, such as the timetable for
the decision on the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem.
What follows is a chronology enhanced by eyewitness testimony,
the experiences of Jewish victims, their victimizers, and the
bystanders, all of whom speak for themselves. Secondary material,
including the author's own opinions, is kept to an absolute minimum,
being layed out almost exclusively in the Introduction.
Introduction:
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The word antisemitism, anti-Jewishness, the essential cause of
the Holocaust, is a nineteenth-century German word, Antisemitismus,
replacing Jew-hatred (Judenhass) in polite discourse and carrying with
it overtones of scientific authority and racism.3 But in the minds of
those hostile to Jews, antisemitism is not just an attack on the Jewish
"race" (the expression of the Jews biological nature); it is also
frequently a religious antipathy. For nearly 2,000 years before the
Holocaust takes place, religious antipathy toward Jews and toward the
Jewish spirit stands as the most significant explanation of Jew-hatred.
The more entrenched Christianity became, the worse and more
frequent the anti-Jewish rhetoric of Roman law became. The Jews were
sacrilegious assemblies (353 C.E.),
polluted with the Jewish disease (383),
contaminated with Jewish sacraments (384),
insulters of the Christian faith (408)
a plague that spreads widely (408),
the abominable and vile (409),
3See Moshe Zimmermann, Wilhelm Marr: The
Patriarch of Antisemitism (Oxford 1986), 113. TheGreat Brockhaus dictionary of 1882 clearly defined
antisemite as a Hater of Jews. Opponent of
Judaism. See also Ben Halpern, What Is
Antisemitism? Modern Judaism 1(1981), 251-62.
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enemies of Roman law (438),
monstrous heretics (438),
the worst of men (438),
and blindly senseless (438).
Judaism was referred to as
a deadly and sacriligious sect (329),
a brothel (329),
the Jewish perversity, alien and hostile to the Roman Empire
(409),
the mark of Jewish filth (415),
corrupt with the filth of its particular sect (417),
the insanity of the Jewish blasphemy (425),
an abominable sect and rite (438),
frightful and hideous (438).4
4C.T. 3:1:5, 15:5:5, 16:5:44, 16:7:3, 16:8:7, 16:8:19,
16:8:22, 16:9:4 and Codex Justinianus 1:9:3, 1:7:5,
and 1:5:7. See also Novella 3 to the law of Theodosius
II of 31 January 438, in Linder, The Jews in Roman
Imperial Legislation, doc. 54. See also Clyde Pharr,tr., The Theodosian Code and Novels and the
Sirmondian Constitutions (Princeton 1952), 489.
Hereafter, the Codex Justinianus will be referred to as
C.J.
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The most notorious racist of the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler,
oftentimes talks as a traditional biological racist. His rhetoric reminds
us of Catholic Spain in the 16th century, where the first
institutionalized racism occurred.5 But he concludes near the end of his
life that biological racism is a sham. It is the Jewish mind and values,
the Jewish spirit, that he hates. The only way to rid the world of this
Jewish spirit, he determines, is to destroy the Jewish bodies that house
it. Hitler tells his last private secretary, close associate, and second-in-
command, Martin Bormann, that
we use the term Jewish race as a matter of convenience, for in
reality and from the genetic point of view there is no such thing
as the Jewish race. There does, however, exist a community. . . .
It is [a] spiritually homogeneous group [to] which all Jews
throughout the world deliberately adhere . . . and it is this group
of human beings to which we give the title Jewish race.6
Hitler describes the Jews as an abstract race of the mind [that] has its
5Poliakov.
6First published in French by Fayard as Le Testament
politique de Hitler: Notes Recueillies par Martin
Bormann (Paris 1959), it contains an importantmonologue of 13 February 1945. Republished in
English as The Testament of Adolf Hitler: The Hitler-
Bormann Documents, February-April 1945 (London
1961).
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origins, admittedly, in the Hebrew religion . . .. A race of the mind is
something more solid, more durable that just a [biological] race, pure
and simple.7 In describing an ideological Jewishness, based on
religion, Hitler brings himself close to the traditional religious
antagonism toward Jews and helps answer the question as to why
Hitler and his collaborators chose the Jews to die in the first place.
Three analogies from the chemical, medical, and biological
sciences help clarify antisemitisms ideological, social, and
psychological nature. First, although they exist within different
historical contexts,8 anti-Jewish ideas, emotions, and behaviors are
reactive elements easily combining with other ideologies, such as
nationalism, racism, social darwinism, conservatism, fascism, and
socialism to form an explosive compound.9 Second, like a virus, anti-
Jewishness rests dormant at different levels of the societal and
individual psyche,10 surfacing especially during the throes of social or
7Hitler, The Testament of Adolf Hitler, 55-6.
8See Marcel Simon, Verus Israel (Eng.) 395.
9See Robert Wistrich, Antisemitism: The Longest
Hatred (London 1991), xvi-xvii.10As historical horizons shifted [antisemitism] could
maintain its power and still accommodate all sorts of
variations on the basic pattern. Alter, From Myth to
Murder, 41. See also Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in
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personal crisis. Third, although Jews have often been compared to
parasites in both medieval and modern antisemitic imagery,
antisemitism itself is a parasitic idea, growing more powerful by
feeding on the negative human emotions of fear, anger, anxiety, and
guilt.
The major themes that emerge from the following Holocaust
chronology are:
1. The widespread acceptance of Hitler's attitudes and policies in
his attempt first to exile and then to murder the Jews of Europe. Just
as the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal observed of Hitler's Foreign
Minister--"It is because Hitler's policy and plans coincided with his own
ideas that Ribbentrop served him so willingly to the end"11--so it can be
said that many, if not most, Europeans felt a strong antipathy toward
Jews. Apathy, passivity, and fear were assuredly influences on the
non-Jews of Europe. But Hitler also expressed the same feelings about
Jews that most Europeans had experienced for centuries. He pointed
the way to "solving" the Jewish "problem," and many Europeans, not
just Germans, followed Hitler not because they had to, but because
they wanted to. True, the traditional Christian ideological approach to
the Jews saw them punished but not perished. Christians were
sometimes envious, othertimes contemptuous of Jews, occasionally
Germany (Ithaca 1975), 276.
11Snyder,Encyclopedia of the Third Reich, 296.
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murderous (six million Jews may have already been murdered within
Christendom over the previous 1900 years). Most Europeans wanted
the Jews out of the way. Centuries of antisemitism had severed the
bonds of human community between most Christians and Jews.
2. Thousands of individuals in the Allied nations and in Occupied
Europe treat the Jews with respect and the Holocaust with the urgency
it deserves. As during the centuries that preceded the Holocaust,
thousands of Jews are saved by thousands of Christians who overcame
their fear of the Nazis and their collaborators and choose to risk their
lives to save the innocent.
3. In the 18th century, George Washington had promised the
Jewish congregation of Newport, R.I., that All [American citizens]
possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. . . .
For happily the government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no
sanction, to persecution no assistance . . .. May the children of the
stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy
the goodwill of the other inhabitants.12 Yet despite their claims to be
12George Washington, A Reply to the Hebrew
Congregation of Newport, Paul Mendes-Flohr andJehuda Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World: A
Documentary History (New York 1980), Ch. 9,
Document 8. A century later, Russian Jews were
appealing to their American brothers to come to our
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fighting a war for democracy and human rights, the attitudes of many
important American and British officials concerned with foreign policy
and refugees parallel those of the Nazis and their collaborators. The
Allied governments' antipathy toward Jews is far removed from the
Nazi death factories, but even the indirect nature of this prejudice
becomes murderous when it shuts off all avenues of hope and relief for
the millions of Jews trapped in Europe. Fear of the foreigner and
economic concerns certainly influenced the Allied leaders and their
peoples against Jewish immigrants, but antisemitism had a widespread
and devastating impact. The silent or secret collaboration of the Allies
confirms to Hitler and his European accomplices the "validity" of their
anti-Jewish ideology and Final Solution.
4. Palestine, then under British control, is geographically and
historically the best destination for Jewish refugees. The British War
Cabinet and many other government officials, however, oppose
allowing Palestine to serve as a refuge for Jews. These officials indicate,
even when they realize that the Nazis are murdering millions of Jews,
that they lack the sense that Jews are human beings.
5. The long history of antisemitism had conditioned many,
perhaps most, Europeans and Americans to regard the Jews as
dangerous, evil people who should be kept out of Christian
help . . . let us touch the sacred soil of Washington.
Feingold, Zion in America, 118.
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society, if not fully exterminated. The position of the Church
Fathers themselves on the Jews is perhaps best summarized in
the words of the 4th century St. Ambrose, who sees any
contact with Jews as a defilement. He believes that due to "the
stench of its crimes, the Jewish people soils its pretended
bodily purity by the internal feces of its soul [ordures
interieures de l'ame]." Antisemitism is rife not only among Allied
government officials but also among the Allied peoples and writers.
That many if not most of the greatest American and British writers, the
creators and caretakers of our national heritage and culture, were
extraordinarily antagonistic to Jews reveals the depth and breadth of
antisemitism among the allied nations. One single example, of dozens,
should suffice here: Nathanael Hawthorne wrote this of a Jew who sat
across from him at dinner one night:
There sat the very Jew of Jews; the distilled essence of all the
Jews that have . . . been born since Jacob's time; he was Judas
Iscariot; he was the Wandering Jew; he was the worst, and at the
same time, the truest type of his race . . .. I never beheld
anything so ugly and disagreeable, and preposterous, and
laughable, as the outline of his profile; it was so hideously Jewish,
and so cruel . . .. I rejoiced exceedingly in this Shylock, this
Iscariot; for the sight of him justified me in the repugnance I have
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always felt towards his race.13
6. Many governments and many people in Europe, later allies of,
or occupied by, Nazi Germany participate in a legal, political,
economic, social, and finally murderous attack on Jewish civilians under
their control. Once the Third Reich's forces occupy these nations, they
increasingly collaborate with Germany to destroy the Jews, their
culture, and their religion.
7. Jews react in a variety of ways to the Nazis and their
collaborators. Some Jews collaborated with the Germans, some
American Jews fled from the attempt to put political pressure on their
government to help with coreligionists, other Jews refused to face the
realities of the Final Solution, but most Jews fell into a spectrum that
ran from persistent adherence to their Judaism to guerrilla warfare
against the murderers.
13Hawthorne, The English Notebooks (New York 1941), p. 321.
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