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The Holocaust: An Introductory History
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The Holocaust: Table of Contents I Glossary of Terms I What Makes this Tragedy Unique?
The Holocaust (also called Ha-Shoah in Hebrew) refers to the period from January 30, 1933 - when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany - to May 8, 1945, when the war in Europe officially ended. During this time, Jews in Europe were subjected to progressively harsher persecution that ultimately led to the murder of 6,000,000 Jews (1.5 million of these being children) and \he destruction of 5,000 Jewish communities. These deaths represented two-thirds of European Jewry and one-third of all world Jewry.
The Jews who died were not casualties of the fighting that ravaged Europe during World War II. Rather, they were the victims of Germany's deliberate and systematic attempt to annihilate the entire Jewish population of Europe, a plan Hitler called the "Final Solution" (Endlosung).
Background
After its defeat in World War I, Germany was humiliated by the Versailles Treaty, which reduced its prewar territory, drastically reduced its armed forces, demanded the recognition of its guilt for the war, and stipulated it pay reparations to the allied powers. With the German Empire destroyed, a new parliamentary government called the Weimar Republic was formed. The republic suffered from economic instability, which grew worse during the worldwide depression after the New York stock market crash in 1929. Massive inflation followed by very high unemployment heightened existing class and political differences and began to undermine the government.
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party, was named chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg after the Nazi party won a significant percentage of the vote in the elections of 1932. The Nazi Party had taken advantage of the political unrest in Germany to gain an electoral foothold. The Nazis incited clashes with the communists and conducted a vicious propaganda campaign against its political opponents - the weak Weimar government and the Jews whom the Nazis blamed for Germany's ills,
Propaganda: "The Jews Are Our Misfortune"
A major tool of the Nazis' propaganda assault was the weekly Nazi newspaper Der Stormer (The Attacker). At the bottom of the front page of each issue, in bold letters, the paper proclaimed, "The Jews are our misfortune!" Der Stormer also regularly featured cartoons of Jews in which they were caricatured as hooked-nosed and apelike. The influence of the newspaper was far-reaching: by 1938 about a half million copies were distributed weekly.
Soon after he became chancellor, Hitler called for new elections in an effort to get full control of the Reichstag, the German parliament, for the Nazis. The Nazis used the government apparatus to terrorize the other parties. They arrested their leaders and banned their political meetings. Then, in the midst of the election campaign, on February 27, 1933, the Reichstag building burned. A Dutchman named Marinus van der Lubbe was arrested for the crime, and he swore he had acted alone. Although many suspected the Nazis were ultimately responsible for the act, the Nazis managed to blame the Communists, thus turning more votes their way.
The fire signaled the demise of German democracy. On the next day, the government, under the pretense of controlling the Communists, abolished individual rights and protections: freedom of the press, assembly, and expression were nullified, as well as the right to privacy. When the elections were held on March 5, the Nazis received nearly 44 percent of the vote, and with 8 percent offered by the Conservatives, won a majority in the government.
The Nazis moved swiftly to consolidate their power into a dictatorship. On March 23, the Enabling Act was passed. It sanctioned Hitler's dictatorial efforts and legally enabled him to pursue them further. The Nazis marshaled their formidable propaganda machine to silence their critics. They also developed a sophisticated police and military force.
, The Sturmabteilung (S.A., Storm Troopers), a grassroots organization, helped Hitler undermine the German democracy. The Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei, Secret State Police), a force recruited from professional police officers, was given complete freedom to arrest anyone after February 28. The Schutzstaffel (SS, Protection Squad) served as Hitler's personal bodyguard and eventually controlled the concentration camps and the Gestapo. The Sicherheitsdienst des ReichsfOhrersSS (S.D., Security Service of the SS) functioned as the Nazis' intelligence service, uncovering enemies and keeping them under surveillance.
With this police infrastructure in place, opponents of the Nazis were terrorized, beaten, or sent to one of the concentration camps the Germans built to incarcerate them. Dachau, just outside of Munich, was the first such camp built for political prisoners. Dachau's purpose changed over time and eventually became another brutal concentration camp for Jews.
By the end of 1934 Hitler was in absolute control of Germany, and his camp~ign against the Jews in full swing. The Nazis claimed the Jews corrupted pure German culture with their "foreign" and "mongrel" influence. They portrayed the Jews as evil and cowardly, and Germans as hardworking, courageous, and honest. The Jews, the Nazis claimed, who were heavily represented in finance, commerce, the press, literature, theater, and the arts, had weakened Germany's economy and culture. The massive government-supported propaganda machine created a racial anti-Semitism, which was different from the longstanding anti-Semitic tradition of the Christian churches.
The superior race was the "Aryans," the Germans. The word Aryan, "derived from the study of linguistics, which started in the eighteenth century and at some point determined that the Inda-Germanic (also known as Aryan) languages were superior in their structures, variety, and vocabulary to the Semitic languages that had evolved in the Near East. This judgment led to a certain conjecture about the character of the peoples who spoke these languages; the conclusion was that the 'Aryan' peoples were likewise superior to the 'Semitic' ones" (Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 36).
The Jews Are Isolated from Society
The Nazis then combined their racial theories with the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin to justify their treatment of the Jews. The Germans, as the strongest and fittest, were destined to rule, while the weak and racially adulterated Jews were doomed to extinction. Hitler began to restrict the Jews with legislation and terror, which entailed burning books written by Jews, removing Jews from their professions and public schools, confiscating their businesses and property and excluding them from public events. The most infamous of the anti-Jewish legislation were the Nuremberg Laws, enacted on September 15, 1935. They formed the legal basis for the Jews' exclusion from German society and the progressively restrictive Jewish policies of the Germans.
Many Jews attempted to flee Germany, and thousands succeeded by immigrating to such countries as Belgium, Czechoslovakia, England, France and Holland. It was much more difficult to get out of Europe. Jews encountered stiff immigration quotas in most of the world's countries. Even if they obtained the necessary documents, they often had to wait months or years before leaving. Many families out of desperation sent their children first.
In July 1938, representatives of 32 countries met in the French town of Evian to discuss the refugee and immigration problems created by the Nazis in Germany Nothing substantial was done or decided at the Evian Conference, and it became apparent to Hitler that no one wanted the Jews and that he would not meet resistance in instituting his Jewish policies. By the autumn of 1941, Europe was in effect sealed to most legal emigration. The Jews were trapped.
On November 9-10, 1938, the attacks on the Jews became violent. Hershel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Jewish boy distraught at the deportation of his family, shot Ernst vom Rath, the third secretary in the German Embassy in Paris, who died on November 9. Nazi hooligans used this assassination as the pretext for instigating a night of destruction that is now known as Kristallnacht (the night of broken glass). They looted and destroyed Jewish homes and businesses and burned synagogues. Many Jews were beaten and killed; 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
The Jews Are Confined to Ghettos
Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, beginning World War II. Soon after, in 1940, the Nazis began establishing ghettos for the Jews of Poland. More than 10 percent of the Polish population was Jewish, numbering about three million. Jews were forcibly deported from their homes to live in crowded ghettos, isolated from the rest of society.
This concentration of the Jewish population later aided the Nazis in their deportation of the Jews to the death camps. The ghettos lacked the necessary food, water, space, and sanitary facilities required by so many people living within their constricted boundaries. Many died of deprivation and starvation.
The "Final Solution"
In June 1941 Germany attacked the Soviet Union and began the "Final Solution." Four mobile killing groups were formed called Einsatzgruppen A, B, C and D. Each group contained several commando units. The Einsatzgruppen gathered Je'{Vs town by town, marched them to huge pits dug earlier, stripped them, lined them up, and shot them with automatic weapons. The dead and dying would fall into the pits to be buried in mass graves. In the infamous Babi Yar massacre, near Kiev, 30,000-35,000 Jews were killed in two days. In addition to their operations in the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen conducted mass murder in eastern Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. It is estimated that by the end of 1942, the Einsatzgruppen had murdered more than 1. 3 million Jews.
On January 20, 1942, several top officials of the German government met to officially coordinate the military and civilian administrative branches of the Nazi system to organize a system of mass murder of the Jews. This meeting, called the Wannsee Conference, "marked the beinning of the full-scale, comprehensive extermination operation [of the Jews] and laid the foundations for its organization, which started immediately after the conference ended" (Yahil, The Holocaust, p. 318).
While the Nazis murdered other national and ethnic groups, such as a number of Soviet prisoners of war, Polish intellectuals, and gypsies, only the Jews were marked for systematic and total annihilation. Jews were singled out for "Special Treatment" (Sonderbehandlung), which meant that Jewish men, women and children were to be methodically killed with poisonous gas. In the exacting records kept at the Auschwitz death camp, the cause of death of Jews who had been gassed was indicated by "SB, " the first letters of the two words that form the German term for "Special Treatment."
By the spring of 1942, the Nazis had established six killing centers (death camps) in Poland: Chelmno (Kulmhof), Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Maidanek and Auschwitz. All were located near railway lines so that Jews could be easily transported daily. A vast system of camps (called Lagersystem) supported the death camps. The purpose of these camps varied: some were slave labor camps, some transit camps, others concentration camps and their subcamps, and still others the notorious death camps. Some camps combined all of these functions or a few of them. All the camps were intolerably brutal.
The major concentration camps were Ravensbruck, Neuengamme, Bergen-Be/sen, Sachsenhausen, Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, Flossenburg, Natzweiler-Struthof, Dachau, Mauthausen, Stutthof, and Dora!Nordhausen.
In nearly every country overrun by the Nazis, the Jews were forced to wear badges marking them as Jews, they were rounded up into ghettos or concentration camps and then gradually transported to the killing centers. The death camps were essentially factories for murdering Jews. The Germans shipped thousands of Jews to them each day. Within a few hours of their arrival, the Jews had been stripped of their possessions and valuables, gassed to death, and their bodies burned in specially designed crematoriums. Approximately 3. 5 million Jews were murdered in these death camps.
Many healthy, young strong Jews were not killed immediately. The Germans' war effort and the "Final Solution" required a great deal of manpower, so the Germans reserved large pools of Jews for slave labor. These people, imprisoned in concentration and labor camps, were forced to work in German munitions and other factories, such as /. G. Farben and Krupps, and wherever the Nazis needed laborers. They were worked from dawn until dark without adequate food and shelter. Thousands perished, literally worked to death by the Germans and their collaborators.
In the last months of Hitler's Reich, as the German armies retreated, the Nazis began marching the prisoners still alive in the concentration camps to the territory they still controlled. The Germans forced
the starving and sick Jews to walk hundreds of miles. Most died or were shot along the way. About a quarter of a million Jews died on the death marches.
Jewish Resistance
The Germans' overwhelming repression and the presence of many collaborators in the various local populations severely limited the ability of the Jews to resist. Jewish resistance did occur, however, in several forms. Staying alive, clean, and observing Jewish religious traditions constituted resistance under the dehumanizing conditions imposed by the Nazis. Other forms of resistance involved escape attempts from the ghettos and camps. Many who succeeded in escaping the ghettos lived in the forests and mountains in family camps and in fighting partisan units. Once free, though, the Jews had to contend with local residents and partisan groups who were often openly hostile. Jews also staged armed revolts in the ghettos of Vi/na, Bialystok, Bedzin-Sosnowiec, Cracow, and Warsaw.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the largest ghetto revolt. Massive deportations (or Aktions) had been held in the ghetto from July to September 1942, emptying the ghetto of the majority of Jews imprisoned there. When the Germans entered the ghetto again in January 1943 to remove several thousand more, small unorganized groups of Jews attacked them. After four days, the Germans withdrew from the ghetto, having deported far fewer people than they had intended. The Nazis reentered the ghetto on April 19, 1943, the eve of Passovet; to evacuate the remaining Jews and close the ghetto. The Jews, using homemade bombs and stolen or bartered weapons, resisted and withstood the Germans for 27 days. They fought from bunkers and sewers and evaded capture until the Germans burned the ghetto building by building. By May 16 the ghetto was in ruins and the uprising crushed.
Jews also revolted in the death camps of Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz. All of these acts of resistance were largely unsuccessful in the face of the superior German forces, but they were very important spiritually, giving the Jews hope that one day the Nazis would be defeated.
Liberation and the End of War
The camps were liberated gradually, as the Allies advanced on the German army. For example, Maidanek (near Lublin, Poland) was liberated by Soviet forces in July 1944, Auschwitz in January 1945 by the Soviets, Bergen-Be/sen (near Hanover, Germany) by the British in April 1945, and Dachau by the Americans in April 1945.
At the end of the war, between 50,000 and 100,000 Jewish survivors were living in three zones of occupation: American, British and Soviet. Within a year, that figure grew to about 200,000. The American zone of occupation contained more than 90 percent of the Jewish displaced persons (DPs). The Jewish DPs would not and could not return to their homes, which brought back such horrible memories and still held the threat of danger from anti-Semitic neighbors. Thus, they languished in DP camps until emigration could be arranged to Palestine, and later Israel, the United States, South America and other countries. The last DP camp closed in 1957 (David S. Wyman, "The United States," in David S. Wyman, ed., The World Reacts to the Holocaust, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, pp. 70710).
Below are figures for the number of Jews murdered in each country that came under German domination. They are estimates, as are all figures relating to Holocaust victims. The numbers given here for Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania are based on their territorial borders before the 1938 Munich agreement. The total number of six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, which emerged from the Nuremberg trials, is also an estimate. Numbers have ranged between five and seven million killed.
COUNTRY Jews Killed Country Jews Killed
Africa 526 Hungary 305,000
Albania 200
Austria 65,000
Belgium 24,387
Czechoslovakia 277,000
Denmark 77
Estonia 4,000
France 83,000
Germany 160,000
Greece 71,301
Yugoslavia 67,122
Sources: Holocaust Memorial Center
6602 West Maple Road West Bloomfield, Ml 48322
Tel. (248)6610840 Fax. (248)6614204
Italy 8,000
Latvia 85,000
Lithuania 135,000
Luxembourg 700
Netherlands 106,000
Norway 728
Poland 3,001,000
Romania 364,632
Soviet Union 1,500,000
TOTAL: 6,258,673
i nfo@holoca ustcenter. org; http ://www.holocaustcenter.org
The Holocaust: What Makes the Holocaust Unique?
The Holocaust: Table of Contents I Glossary of Terms I Introductory History
The eminent Jewish philosopher, Emil Fackenheim, offers a concise outline of the distinguishing characteristics of the Holocaust in his book, To Mend the World:
• The "Final Solution" was designed to exterminate every single Jewish man, woman and child. The only Jews who would have conceivably survived had Hitler been victorious were those who somehow escaped discovery by the Nazis.
• Jewish birth (actually mere evidence of "Jewish blood") was sufficient to warrant the punishment of death. Fackenheim notes that this feature distinguished Jews from Poles and Russians who were killed because there were too many of them, and from "Aryans" who were not singled out unless they chose to single themselves out. With the possible exception of Gypsies, he adds, Jews were the only people killed for the "crime" of existing.
• The extermination of the Jews had no political or economic justification. It was not a means to any end; it was an end in itself. The killing of Jews was not considered just a part of the war effort, but equal to it; thus, resources that could have been used in the war were diverted instead to the program of extermination.
• The people who carried out the "Final Solution" were primarily average citizens. Fackenheim calls them "ordinary job holders with an extraordinary job." They were not perverts or sadists. "The tone-setters," he says, "were ordinary idealists, except that their ideals were torture and murder." Someone else once wrote that Germany was the model of civilized society. What was perverse, then, was that the Germans could work all day in the concentration camps and then go home and read Schiller and Goethe while listening to Beethoven.
Other examples of mass murder exist in human history, such as the atrocities committed by Pol Pot in Cambodia and the Turkish annihilation of the Armenians. But none of those other catastrophes, Fackenheim argues, contain more than one of the characteristics described above.
Jews do not need to compete in a morbid contest as to who has suffered the most in history. It is important, however, to explain why the Holocaust is a unique part of human history.
Sources: Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World, (IN: Indiana University Press, 1994).
Meanings of the Holocaust
Lecture: 1/12 Lecturer: Elly Dlin
Lecture 1: Is the Holocaust Unique?
Isn't this a stupid question? Isn't every event unique?
What is uniqueness? If by uniqueness we mean the dictionary definition of "one and only; single; sole" them isn't every event unique? Aren't you reading this lecture for the very first time ever? (You must be, since this is the first time that I've ever submitted anything to JUICE.) But would anyone call this a unique historical event? Likely not. Yet why not?
One answer is that dictionaries reflects usage, and people use words in contradictory, confused and inconsistent ways. Webster's gives two more definitions for unique: "2. having no like or equal; unparalleled" and "3. highly unusual, extraordinary, rare". From this we learn that the same word might mean different things according to the subjective intention of the user.
Let's look. at a dramatic, contemporary event. Was the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin unique? Well, that might depends. It was certainly "highly unusual, extraordinary, rare" but was it "having no like or equal; one and only"? Politically motivated assassinations are not unknown in Israel (I can immediately think of Haim Arlasorov, Reszo Israel Kastner, Emil Greensweig). Nor is the murder of a Head of State in the Middle East unprecedented (King Abdallah of Jordan was killed in Jerusalem) and then there is the example of Anwar Sadat, a Head of State who was murdered as a direct result of his peace policies.
The 2 aspects of Uniqueness
So what might make something unique? I wish to argue here that there are two (2) key aspects: subjectivity and universality. Subjectivity refers to whether the event is personally significant to ME. An event of enormous significance to one person (such as a near fatal car accident) is likely to be largely irrelevant to the drivers in the cars behind it (at least once they get by the bottleneck). The shooting of President John F. Kennedy was "an epoch-making experience" (in the terms of Emil Fackenheim) for many of my generation, but is likely to engender blank stares from today's "screenagers" .
The second aspect is Universality, meaning that its significance is recognized on a broad and wide-ranging basis. The event must be seem to be personally significant for many people, in many places, and over time, i.e. across generations. In a paraphrase of E. H. Carr I would argue that any big historical event may be a candidate for uniqueness but that few events actually make the grade. On the face of it, the Holocaust is a very strong candidate indeed.
Absolute Uniqueness versus Relative Uniqueness
The absolutist side in the uniqueness argument assert that the Holocaust can't (often confused with the moral/ethical stand that it shouldn't) be compared with any other event. It is grasped as being sui generis, an event that is, by definition, totally unique. This is a position that reflects the first usage in the dictionary (one and only; single; sole). The second dictionary usage (having no like or equal; unparalleled) cannot be asserted in isolation but must be shown through comparison with "unlike", "unequal" or "non-parallel" events. For an event to be termed unique in the second sense of the definition the responsible user must be familiar with all possible parallels. This is at the heart of the "relativist" side.
The "absolutists" often use mystical or theological frames of reference and it is hardly coincidental that they tend to be philosophers or theologians. They talk in terms of "knowing" the unique essence of the Holocaust, and of realizing it as a kind of awakening, a revelation of some hidden truth. "Either you get it or you simply don't" says Theology Professor and Methodist Minister Franklin Littel (Temple University) and it seems to me that this same paradigmatic approach (albeit expressed in different, sometimes contradictory ways) is also present in the works of Rabbi Emil Fackenheim, Rabbi Richard Rubinstein and survivor- spiritual guru Elie Wiesel.
Who are the relativists? They tend to be political and social scientists or historians. Their approach is predicated on comparative human behaviour and they believe that understanding comes through the detailed study of conditions in their wider contexts and in relationship to other events, both more similar and less so. My own training (history) and my personal predilections put me in the latter category as a relativist. The rest of this lecture strives to expose the salient features of what makes sense to me around this issue of the relative uniqueness of the Holocaust..
Levels of Relative Uniqueness
There are 3: within Nazi Germany, within Jewish history and within General history.
a) Within Nazi Germany
Perhaps as many as 55 million people died in the Second World War, and 30 or 35 million in Europe, of whom nearly 6 million were Jews. The Nazis oppressed and murdered a very large number of innocent human beings
and that included a rather long list of "politicals" (communists, socialists, democrats, liberals, and even monarchists), "social deviants" (homosexuals, prostitutes, vagabonds, the chronically unemployed), "religious opponents" (Jehovah's Witness, priests and ministers that took their religious beliefs seriously), common criminals, as well as the "racials" (slavs, gypsies or Romi peoples, Jews) and the "defectives" (those with physical or mental handicaps).
But the Nazis did NOT lump all of these prisoners together. Rather, they carefully marked each separate category of prisoner with a sophisticated system of colour coordinated badges - red for communists, pink for homosexuals, black for priests, green for criminals, yellow for Jews ... More than that. The camps themselves were categorized to reflect the severity of the institutions (not unlike the principle of maximum, medium and minimum security prisoners.)
A document from 15 January 1941 drafted by Reinhard Heydrich head of the RSHA and presented as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials of War criminals distinguishes concentration camps according to three (3) levels, and gives examples. Dachau was on level 1. There was no mass extermination program at Dachau and out of a total of 206,206 registered prisoners there were 31,591 deaths. Mauthausen is his example of a camp at level 3. Post-war estimates are that 199,404 prisoners passed through Mauthausen; 119,000 of them died and 38,120 of those victims were Jews.
Simply put - most prisoners survived Concentration Camps. If the Nazis wanted to build a place where every prisoner was to be killed, they both could and did. The Death Camps were such a hell-on-earth and the few who escaped them did so against explicit Nazi intentions. They were designed and built for the purpose of murdering each and every Jewish person that was sent to them.
It is not a contradiction to maintain that Concentration Camps were not intended for Jews and that many hundreds of thousands of Jews were in actuality interned in the Concentration Camps of the Third Reich. Initially (in 1933) 90% of the camp population was non-Jews and Jewish prisoners had not been arrested because they were Jewish. The use of yellow badges coincides with the arrest of significant numbers of Jews (some 30,000) in the wake of the Krista II Night pogroms of November 9-10, 1938. But those Jewish prisoners who could get out of Germany were given their release from the camps and few Jews were interred in Concentration Camps when the War began 10 months later. After 1939 the destination of choice for Jews were ghettos in the East and then Death Camps. Jews return to Concentration Camps (particularly their satellite labour facilities) after 1942, as slave to be worked to death while many others were marched westwards in 1945 when the Death Camps were liberated. But as a rule Jews are not directed to Concentration Camps.
Concentration Camps were inte_nded for "politicals", "social deviants", "religious opponents", and common criminals - not "racials". These were prisoners whose crimes were seen by the Nazis as having come as a consequence of their own choosing. A communist chooses to be a communist. Just as any criminal who commits an illegal act, he must be punished, society must be protected. But a person can change their politics, or their religion just as a bank robber can decide to stop robbing banks.
Not so the "racials". A Jew is a Jew because his blood is Jewish; being racially a Slav or a Gypsy is an immutable condition. "Prisoners of choice" are curable (at least in theory) whereas "Prisoners by race" are not. Nothing they do or is done to them will affect their racial make-up. They are "terminally diseased", like the handicapped who, by the way, were the first victims to be gassed to death.
Yet there was neither the drive nor the over-riding need to murder all handicapped persons or all Slavs. Some could be useful; some could have a place in the New Order that was to be created in the Nazi-dominated Worldto-Come. A document presented to Hitler by Heinrich Himmler on 25 May 1940 outlines his plan for the enslavement of the Slavs . It is a ghastly plan of oppression and subjugation, but it assumes that most of them will continue to live on this earth - an option that the Nazis deprived from Jews. Until 1943 the German army knowingly allowed officers who were Gypsies to serve in its ranks whereas a decade earlier Jews had been relentlessly hounded out of the most casual social clubs in Germany.
The Nazis (Hitler and his cabal of true-believers) were fervently convinced that they were locked in a cosmic battle with the forces of Jewish evil for control over the whole world. They were totally convinced that Jews were the source of all of the evil in the world and that evil would exist as long as the Jew remained in the world. They knew that their struggle (Mein Kampf) was the battle to the death against the multi-faced Jewish enemy. Only one side could emerge victorious; the other would be totally eliminated.
And only the Jew was seen in these terms; only the Jew was the total embodiment of evil; only the Jew was without any place in the world of the future; and only the Jew was to be totally murdered to the very last one. The final solution (die entloesung) applied to Jews and to Jews alone and it meant the death of each and every Jew.
This is the uniqueness of the Jew within the Holocaust.
b) Within Jewish history
The Jewish people have suffered pogroms and massacres before - but never like this, never on this scale, never applied to all. The mass murder planned in Shushan was never implemented but even so, it was localized to Persia . The Pharoah limited his killing to first-born sons and the Spanish Inquisition did not actually target Jews (who were supposed to all be gone from the area) but focused on ostensible Christian converts who retained Jewish beliefs and practises in secret. Like Bogdan Chmielnicki in the mid-17th century and the Legions of the Black One Hundreds (for example Kishinev, 1903) these attacks were geographically limited. To none of them did it matter that there were Jews living in Amsterdam or Thessaloniki.
But to the Nazis all Jews were the same; all Jews were part of the same deadly enemy and all Jews had to be eliminated, from wherever they would hide.
c) Within general history
The Turkish massacre of Armenians was centered geographically in Anatoly province. Except for two limited operations in Istanbul in April 1915, Armenians living outside of the area of dispute were left alone. The Turkish authorities controlled Jerusalem until December 1917. While the brutal massacres were proceeding in Turkey, not a one of the residents of the Armenian Quarter - or any other Armenian living in the Land of Israel of any other part of the Turkish Empire were in danger for their lives. In this comparative context it is more similar to a big pogrom than to a Holocaust.
Biafra, Rwanda, Cambodia are contemporary examples of civil wars, tribal conflicts (partially with religious and regional overtones) and, at least in the case of the last example, self-inflicted "auto-genocides" - a people killing itself. When CNN transmitted pictures of starving inmates standing behind barbed wire fences in Bosnia, everyone thought "Holocaust". Yet when we look carefully at the similarities and the differences I think that we see more differences than similarities. It is this which leads me to conclude that the Holocaust has "no like or equal; unparalleled".
In itself though, the observation that the Holocaust is unique in history doesn't necessarily mean anything at all. In later lectures I will try to sketch out what I think it might mean (or rather, what it means to me) and in the final lecture I intend to raise the question of whether or not there is anything to learn from the Holocaust and, if there were, is ii desirable that we do so?
Final Word
I do not want to engage in a kind of "Genocide Sweepstakes" - we suffered more than you did; our pain is greater than yours. A death is a death is a death and pain cannot, should not, must not be quantified or ranked in order.
What is being compared is NOT the suffering of the victims but the intentions of the perpetrators. The uniqueness of the Holocaust is not connected to anything that the Jews did or did not do; it is rooted with the Nazis and their accomplices.
In my understanding uniqueness is NOT an inherent quality of an historical event that exists "out there" for anyone who wishes to discover it. Uniqueness exists in a personal relationship with an event and it is held only by those who choose to recognize it.
Many people around the world consider the Holocaust to have marked a turning point in human history (an epoch-making event) and some of these see ii also as a seminal event or "root experience" (Fackenheim again) that challenges them to reach a new faith, identity or understanding of the world. Are you one of them?
In A Spacious Place
Reflections on the Journey in Christ by Christopher Page
Is The Holocaust Unique? August 20, 20 IO in Holocaust I Tags: Genocide, Holocaust
The Jewish Holocaust raises many questions that must be confronted. One of the contentious issues surrounding
the study of the Holocaust is the question of uniqueness. There have been countless horrific acts of terror and
injustice perpetrated throughout history. But, many scholars argue that a number of characteristics make the
Jewish Holocaust distinct from these other tragedies.
The following notes are not ideas I have originated. I have gathered them from a number of sources and simply
place them here in an attempt to grasp the distinctive nature of the Holocaust.
1. The twentieth century Jewish Holocaust was part of a centuries' long pattern of antisemitism. The Holocaust
did not spring out of nowhere; it is not an isolated incident. It takes its place in a long line of discrimination and
violence against Jewish people spanning centuries and continuing to this day.
2. The persecution and extermination of Jews between 1933 and 1945 was systematically pursued as a
calculated strategy of the democratically elected governments of"civilized" European countries (Germany,
Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland) for at least a decade.
3. The "Final Solution" was designed to exterminate every single Jewish man, woman and child. The intended
extermination of Jews knew no geographical boundaries; it was conducted in what are now thirty-five separate
European countries. The intention was to rid the whole of Europe, if not the world, of every Jew for no other
reason than the fact that they carried even a trace of Jewish blood.
Jewish birth was sufficient cause for death. Assimilation for Jews was impossible. Conversion to another faith
offered no protection. The biological connection to Jewish grandparents was guilt enough.
4. The extermination of the Jews had no political, economic, or social justification. It was carried out for purely
ideological reasons. It was not a means to any end; it was an end in itself. The killing of Jews was a war in itself
running parallel to the German war against the Allies. Enormous resources were diverted from the main
European battle to facilitate extermination of the Jews.
5. The atrocities of the Jewish Holocaust were not primarily carried out by monsters or people who were mad.
The perpetrators of the "Final Solution" were for the most part average citizens. Jews were swept away to
concentration camps and death camps because in many cases they were betrayed by their neighbours and
friends. Those running the camps worked all day in the most inhumane conditions imaginable and then went
home at the end of the day to the comfmi of their families. At the end of the war, many people who had
participated in conducting the horrors of the Holocaust, simply returned to their normal lives.
6. The persecution of Jews between 1933 and 1945 unfolded without organized official opposition from any
government in the world, despite the fact that details of growing persecution against Jews began to be
internationally known as early as 1933. Certainly the terrifying details ofKristallnacht (Nov. 9 & 10, 1938)
were widely publicized in the international press by correspondents who, in many cases, were eyewitnesses of
the events they reported. Yet it took the invasion of Poland in September 1939 (ten months later) before the
Allies, who at that point were required to intervene by their own treaty obligations, began military intervention
in the affairs of Europe. It is difficult to avoid the impression that the world's apathy at the unfolding horror in
Europe was not in part a result of underlying subtle antisemitism.
On July 30, 1939 British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain wrote in a private letter about Kristallnacht: "I
believe the persecution arose out of two motives; A desire to rob the Jews of their money and a jealousy of their
superior cleverness." He then went on: "No doubt Jews aren't a lovable people; I don't care about them myself;
- but that is not sufficient to explain the Pogrom."
7. The governments of all nations share responsibility for the extent of the unimaginable devastation to the
Jewish population of Europe. The circumstances of the Jews in Europe in the 1930's were known around the
world. The nations of the world had numerous opportunities as the events leading up to and during the Second
World War unfolded to take measures that might have confined the damage done to the Jewish population of
Europe. None of these steps was taken until far too late.
In Canada, we like to think of ourselves as an open, compassionate society. But Canada is among the countries
whose response to the Holocaust at the time it was unfolding was most inadequate. Although made fully aware
at the Evian Conference in 1939 of the horror facing Jews, Canada refused to increase its immigration quota and
admitted only around 6,000 Jewish refugees throughout the entire 1930's. This is one of the worst records of
any country that received refugees.
After Kristallnacht (1938), the Government of Canada rejected a proposal by the Canadian Jewish Congress to
guarantee financial support for 10,000 Jewish refugees to Canada and refused to allow them to immigrate. In
1939, when more than 900 German Jewish refugees on board the SS St. Louis were turned away from Cuba,
Canada refused entry to Canada. They were returned to Europe.
On January 30, 1939 Prime Minister William Mackenzie King, told Parliament "that Canada w?uld not throw
her doors wide open to political refugees, but would deal with special cases on their merits." This is the same
day Hitler warned that in the event of war, "The result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth and thus the
victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."
The impediment to Jews finding their way to safety did not lie in Germany's willingness to let them go. The
Nazis viewed emigration as a useful tool for solving the "Jewish problem." The obstacle lay in the willingness
of countries like Canada to receive refugees from Europe. It was not until 1948, when Canada needed workers
to support the booming post-war economy, that immigration requirements were relaxed. Nearly two million
refugees w~re welcomed to Canada in the next ten years.
8. Other examples of mass murder exist in human history: Mao Zedong 1949-87 (10 million executions, 30
million by starvation mostly during the "Great Leap Forward 1958-61), Stalin 1932-39 (at least 20 million
died), atrocities committed by Pol Pot in Cambodia (2 million died), Turkish annihilation of Armenians (1.5
million died), Rwanda 1994 (800,000 died). Each of these atrocities is a violent affront to humanity that should
never have happened. But none of these terrible events share all the characteristics of the systematic murder of
six million Jews in the Holocaust.
***************
The distinctive features of the twentieth century European Holocaust do not diminish the horror and injustice of
any other genocide in history. But it is important to confront the human capacity for evil and to struggle with the
painful questions raised by any mass slaughter of human beings. In many ways the European Holocaust of the
Second World War still lies on our doorstep. We share in this tragedy and must heed the lessons it so graphically
holds before us.
14. Is the Holocaust Unique?
We are mall. no! only individually but nationally. \Ve muse restrain manslaughtc:r and isola1ed murders. But what of war and the much-vaun1ed crime of slaugh-1ering whole f><!Oples?
-Seneca. S a.c."!-A.D. 65
Is ic possible to measure evil? Is it less terrible to kill 150,000 peop:<! than it is to kill l million? Is it
better in some way for ··only" 30,000 people to die than 2 million? Six million? Is it easier to be killed by a bomb than a bullet? By a knife than by gas?·
These are not foolish questions. They are among the kinds of things discussed when the topic is the Holocaust. Underlying the discussion· is the fundamental question: ls the Holocaust unique? Has anything like it ever happened before-or since?
Trying to answer that requires going back in history, but not very far back. Events from the last 150 years or so offer examples of crimes against masses of people that, some believe, prove the Holocaust was only one among history's most terrible occurrences.
NATIVE AMERICANS-THE INDIANS
The United States underwent great growth in the nineteenth century. The population grew and set,led in areJs that had been the. homebnds of Indian nations for many hundreds of years. The land was being taken from them piece by piece. often by force. The growth seemed unstoppabk. ln
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S\10KE AND :\Sill::-
I ~3(l. rhc lmJi:rn R-:m11val .-\cc was p:1s:---:d C': <. ·, 'li:.'.1\·,,
Tl10usands up1111 chou:--anJs lli" ltH.lians in r!t .. : :--1,uli1<::i,, .1n,i "1uri1\\·c:--1 \\"l'("l' forcinly rnun1.kd ur JOU cakcn from their l:1mi h_, th,: f ·L·,k:·;ti ~\l\'<'1"11-
1111.'nl. Tht:y werL' (11 be ri::settkd in areas '-L'! as1ll1...' 1,,r ,ilL'!ll :n ~:111s:1:--. Nebraska and Oklahoma. Guarded ny che l'n1ted St:1i<...·, -\ri11;. lh1...·: 1ntlkccl. Linaccuswmed co the cold. hunJret.b 1n11~~fff Other-. starved when their supplies ran out. still othas LiieJ 111° disease. The Chl'rokees called their forced trek the "Trail of Tears ... The Cred nacion lost -+0 percent of ics population.
Among the Indian nations were the Seminuk. Sha\\·ncc:. Wyand1H. Delaware. Cherokee. Chickasaw, Creek and Ch11cww. This erisoJe of American history marked the end of compkx and rid1 cullun:s that haJ been in this land perhaps thousands of years before che arrival 11f the white man.
THE ARrvtENlANS
In the early years of this century, a movement for independence Jcveloped among the 2.5 million Chri · rmenians in Muslim Turkey. Afraid they would aid the ene_!;P during World War I. the Turkish government in 1915 ordered them expelled from their homes and dcpurceJ to Palestine and Syria.
The army and police first rounded up all educated Armenian~ :rnd slaughtered them. then went from village to village and did the san1c with all able-bodied males. The remaining leaderless old men. women and children we.re marched-on foot-across hundreds of miles of dcser1 and mountains. They died of thirst. starvation and disease. Even more were massacred. as the able-bodied men had been. by soldiers and the police. le is estimated that close to 1.5 million died.
THE UKRAINE ,
The Ukraine. a Soviet republic. is and was the major _..,ourcc of grain for the USSR. During the 1930s. then-Premier Joseph Stalin ordered the changeover from individually owned farms to nationali1.eJ or collectively owned ones. The fiercely independent Ukrainians n:sistcd aml Stalin "s secret police brought about the collectivization by force. killing thousands in the process. As punishment and to weaken any move toward independence. Stalin then ordered the bulk of Ukrainian whc:.it shipped out of the area and allowed none to be brought in. Between 19.1~ :.ind IY]> at least three million Uk.rainians died of starv::ition. This. rlus the continued
154
Is nu, 1101.oc,,usT liNl<.llll·.··
LTL1sl1111):'. oi" nationalistic stnvint!S that lasted until the I 1.1-Hl,. h<:111, c.,piain wh,· so nianv Ukrainian villa!.!cs welcomed the Na1.1, ;1, l1hL·ra!Prs Jurin!.'. . . ..... .......
\VorlJ \Var I I.
HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI
I he hrsc acom1c bomb tn history wa.s droppeJ by .-\111crican :.iirmen on Hiroshima. Japan. on August 6. 1945. The single bomb kvekd 90 percent of the cicy and killed an estimated 140.000 people. The second atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9. I 945. More than one-third of the city was complecely descroyed. and over 75 .000 people were killed. These bombs were used. ic is now said. to bring World War [I co ·a quicker end and save thousands of American lives. The Japanese surrendered on August 14. 1945.
TIBET
As it had for centuries. Buddhism ruled the lives of the Tibetan people. Until the 1960s. approximately one-sixth of the males were priests or monks: both the religious and secular leaders were priests. Communist China invaded Tibc!t in 1950. In 1959 the people revolted. and the! Chinese suppressed Che! rebellion by killing priests. monks and nuris, and destroying temples and religious shrines. There is no way of knowing exactly-110 history has been allowed to reach che West-but it is bc!lieved that thousands of temples were destroyed and millions of Buddhists slaughtered by the Chinese to restore and strengthen their control.
CAMROOIA (KAMPUCHEA)
Cambodia. the small country near Vietnam in Southeast Asia. was taken over by the Khnier Rouge communists in 1975. The leadership under Pol Pot was convinced that urban life was destructive and wanted to rebuild the country based on the land-immediately.
All educated or Westemi,zed people were massacred. Buddhism. the! major religion. was forbidden. temples destroyed and priests executed. The emire population of all the cities were expelled from their homes and forced to live in the country as slave laborers. Conditions were unspeakable, the Khmer Rouge soldiers uncontrolled in their brutality. It is estimated that two million people died in the space of four years.
BAHA 'IS IN !RAN
Baha'is follow a gentle. pacifistic religion foundcJ in the nineteenth ccn-
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SMOKE A,'- D .-\.'i 111:S
tury. When the . .\yatollah Khomeini anJ the Sh11k \lu:-.i1111:-. l1H>k 11,cr lra11 in 1979. the Bah:.i"is were pronounced u11hcliL·,cr:-, ;tnJ hcrL·tic:-.. They lti:-.t their jobs. were arresccd en massc and unkn\1\\·11 number:-. "cr1.· kilkd under the Prever.Ci1.i!l or Terrorism .'\ct. A!rlwu~h their p:.iss1h1rt:-, ;1rc takc!1 if they ask co k:.ive. over 30.000 of chc .,nU.(HlO in the 1.·uu1my h;1,c tkd. Thousamrs-inrve-been killed. "'f~-m::c n0111bc1 is u11kmm 11.
THE UNIQUENESS OF THE HOLOCAUST
That is enough. It is not necessary co mencion the massacre of Tami Is by Hindus and of Hindus by Tamils in Sri Lanka: nor the bloodshed between Sikhs and Hindus in India. Nor is it necessary to tell about the I I 0.000 Japanese-Americans herded into detention camps by the U.S. government during World War II-. but not German-Americans or Italian-Americans. Nor the Christian Phalangist massacre of tw() Palc:stinian Arab camps that
· the Israelis nearby did nothing to stop. Nor about Sl)Uth Africa ·s treatment of-its Blacks.
History is full of horrors. This is not a contest to win some awful prize for evil.
How. then. in light of all this. is the murder of six million European Jews different'? What is it about char event that makes it stand alone in history?
How is the Holocaust unique'? Among many historians of the period. two seem to have answered that
. question once and for all. The first historian. Eberhard Jackel. is German. "Never before had any state, with all the authority of its responsible
leader, decided and announced that it intended to kill off a particular group of human beings. including the old. the women. !he children and the sucklings. as compktcly as p\>ssiblc. and had 1h.:n translJtcJ 1his decision into action with every possible ... power Jl the stale ·s command."
The second historian. Lucy S. Dawidowicz. is AmcricJn. "In every case of terrible human destructiveness that we have known.
· .... killing was not an end in itself. but a means to an end .... But in the murder of the European Jews. ends and means were identical.
"The German dictatorship murdered the Jews for the purpose of murdering the Jews. For the Germans I took I to themselves the dt!cision as to who was entitled to live on chis earth and ,vho was not.
'That is the uniqueness of the Holocaust. ..
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