Hitler’s Attempt to exterminate Europe’s Jews

Hitler’s view:

"We swear we are not going to abandon the struggle until the Last Jew in Europe has been exterminated and is actually dead.  It is not enough to isolate the Jewish enemy of mankind-the Jew has got to be exterminated."

Why “evolution”?

What we now call the Holocaust (“burnt offering”), or Shoah (“calamity”, the term preferred by many Jews), did not begin as a highly sophisticated plot to wipe out all of Europe’s Jews.

It progressed from point to point, becoming increasingly oppressive and murderous as time went on...

1) LegislationGermany’s Nuremberg Laws made bigotry

state policy

Jews were (among other things) forbidden to: Employ a German (Aryan) Marry a German Have sexual relations with a German Belong to a German professional , social or cultural

organization Vote/ Hold elected office

2) Official Oppression

The most dramatic example of this was the infamous Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”) in November, 1938

This was a country-wide pogrom organized and encouraged by the Ministry of Propaganda, led by Josef Goebbels

What happened?

Destruction of synagogues

Public humiliation of Jewish citizens

Vandalism of Jewish businesses

3) Invasion of Poland: The Ghettos

With the invasion of Poland came a challenge:

What to do with its large Jewish population?

The answer was to establish ghettos

The systematic murder of Europe's Jews began with “Operation Barbarossa”, summer 1941

Close to one million Jews had been killed before extermination camps had been built

The groups that carried these murders were called the einsatzgruppen— “Task Forces”

The methods used in this first stage of mass murder were crude by later standards...

The leaders of the “Final Solution”Reinhard Heydrich

Adolf Eichmann

Chief of all security police, second in command of the SS

Personal secretary to Heydrich, responsible for aministrattion of the SS camp system transport

Heinrich Himmler, Head of the SS

All was reported to Adolf Hitler

3) The Wannsee ConferenceThe decision had been made to exterminate Europe’s Jews in the autumn of 1941

January, 1942 — conference convened in Wannsee (outside Berlin) to discuss the organization of Hitler’s industrialized murder of Europe’s Jews

Carbon monoxide poisoning was a key method the SS used to murder Jews and other camp inmates .

Mobile units, essentially sealed buses, were loaded with prisoners, driven long enough to ensure the death of the passengers, then unloaded by other camp inmates.

Initial experiments had already been carried out on Russian prisoners of war using carbon monoxide and Zyklon-B (a pesticide)

Eventually, large gas chambers were built in various camps and the bodies were either buried or incinerated in industrial furnaces, or “ovens”.

The largest of these centres was Auschwitz-Birkenau

Auschwitz was the largest of 6 purpose-built extermination camps. Auschwitz was a factory-slave labour camp (Monowitz) and death camp.

The others were:

SobiborTreblinkaMaijdanekChelmno Belzec

All were located in Poland

The results:Estimates of the total number of dead are around 10 million+

6 million Jews2 million Russian POWs1.5-2 million Poles800 thousand+ Gypsies

(Roma, Sinta)Countless other “enemies of

the state”

What made the Shoah different from past atrocities?

Its scaleIts focus on race and ideologyModern, “civilized” perpetrators—Germany was a modern and sophisticated European state

Lasting results?

“Genocide” entered the lexiconUN Universal Declaration of Human RightsSympathy for recognizing the sate of IsraelLong-term emotional suffering of survivors, families