Holocaust
From JudaismWiki
HOLOCAUST. In the Jewish people’s long history of martyrdom, the catastrophe that eventuated from the six years of Nazi conquest in Europe between 1939 and 1945 was unprecedented in suffering and death. The Jewish people lost more than 6 million people, or two-thirds of its European community, and one-third of the entire Jewish people.
On February 24, 1920, an ex-corporal in the German army named Adolf Hitler and a group of professional antisemitic agitators, including Julius Streicher, Alfred Rosenberg, and Gottfried Feder, met in a Munich beer hall and founded the National Socialist Party. (Streicher and Rosenberg were later sentenced to death by hanging by the International War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg in October 1946. Hitler escaped the world’s verdict by committing suicide in his private bunker in Berlin at the end of April 1945.)
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[edit] Nazi Program
The core of the National Socialist Party (Nazi) program was the racist doctrine that “only he in whose veins German blood flows” might be considered a citizen of Germany, and therefore “no Jew can belong to the German nation.” Antisemitism was the emotional foundation of the Nazi movement; every member of the Nazi party was an antisemite.
Hitler, the Fuehrer, or dictatorial leader, of the Nazi Party, announced his antisemitism as well as his inhumanity proudly: “Yes, we are barbarians! We want to be barbarians! It is an honorable title. We shall rejuvenate the world! This world is near its end… We are now at the end of the Age of Reason…The Ten Commandments have lost their validity. Conscience is a Jewish invention. It is a blemish, like circumcision…There is no such thing as truth, either in the moral or in the scientific sense…We must distrust the intelligence and the conscience, and must place our trust in our instincts…And was not the whole doctrine of Christianity, with its faith in redemption, its moral code, its conscience, its conception of original sin, the outcome of Judaism? The struggle for world domination will be fought entirely between us, between Germans and Jews.”
This, then, was the double aim of the Nazi revolution: to destroy both the Jew and the spirit of Judaism and, simultaneously, the spirit of Christianity. The Nazi regime came into power in Germany in 1933. It trained its weapons, during the first, pre¬war phase (1933-1939), on the Jewish spirit. Christianity suffered persecution and harassment at the same time. The climax of Nazi barbarism against Jewish culture occurred when hundreds of books by Jewish and anti-Nazi authors were burned in a gigantic bonfire in the square before the famed Berlin Opera House on May 10, 1933.
In its second phase (1938-1944), Nazism broke through the boundaries of Germany and embarked on a war of conquest against Europe. During these years, as country after country fell to the Nazis, the character of the war changed from one of hate propaganda to one of organized mass murder. Men, women, and children were sent into the death camps’ gas chambers and crematoria.
The Nazi blueprint for the extermination of European Jews from 1939 on was conceived and carried out in two systematic stages. The first stage began in 1939 with the Nazi occupation of Poland and lasted until June 1941 when Germany attacked Soviet Russia. Jews were physically isolated in ghettos, concentration camps, and special forced-labor camps, sealed off from the outside world. The second stage entailed the systematic mass murder of the entire Jewish populations of all Nazi-occupied areas by means of mass executions before open graves, convoys of sealed boxcars, and specially constructed death-factories like Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek, in which millions were methodically gassed and then cremated. This stage lasted from the summer of 1941 until the Nazi collapse in the spring of 1945.
Typical of what was happening in Germany during the pre-war stage of the antisemitic program was the Nazi crusade against German-Jewish scientists and intellectuals. Within the ranks of German Nobel Prize winners Jews numbered 25 percent, although only one percent of the German population was Jewish. Despite records like this one of brilliant achievement and high international standing, Jewish professors were excised from the universities, Jewish doctors from the hospitals, and Jewish scientists from the laboratories. Internationally known refugees who sought haven at this time in the U.S. and other free nations were received with open arms and urged to carry on their work. Later, many of these scientists lent vital assistance to the free world in the decisive battle for strategic and military superiority over Nazi Germany.
Although the war against Jewry continued unabated, the Nazis attempted at all times to mask their real intentions. In Nuremberg in 1935, for example, when the first of a series of antisemitic laws was passed depriving Jews of equal citizenship rights and forbidding intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews, Nazi leaders declared that they asked the Jews of nothing more than peaceful withdrawal “to their own areas” and cessation of intermingling “with alien peoples.” These same protestations later accompanied the creation of the ghettos.
[edit] The Ghettos
After the Nazis occupied Poland, their first move was to isolate Jews from the rest of the Polish population. In February 1940, the Ghetto of Lodz, renamed Litzmanstadt by the Nazis, was formed, to be followed in October by the Warsaw Ghetto. Determined to preserve to the end the pretext of “legality,” the Germans set up “Jewish Councils,” or governing bodies and a system of Jewish police within the ghetto walls. These devices were intended to prove that the ghettos enjoyed a measure of “Jewish autonomy,” to cloak their real function as death traps for Polish Jews, for which they had been designed from the beginning. To allay suspicion, Nazi leaders pointed out that they were doing nothing worse than reviving an old medieval institution: providing separate living areas for the Jewish population. But the electrified barbed wire surrounding the ghetto walls told a different story, as did the heavily armed Nazi patrols on constant watch at the ghetto gates. And whereas Jews of the Middle Ages had unrestricted freedom of movement outside of the ghetto walls by day, the penalty for leaving a Polish ghetto without official permission at any time was instant death.
Within the ghetto walls, hunger and privation held sway. Because of unspeakably cramped living conditions, epidemics were rampant. The ghetto population was constant prey to attacks of indescribable cruelty at the whim of its Nazi overseers. Yet despite these hardships, the ghettos displayed a remarkable vitality and almost unbelievable capacity for survival. Cultural and religious activities animated the underground life of the ghetto. Moving dramas of devoted selflessness were played out within its walls. And in perhaps the most sublime triumph of the human spirit to be written in the annals, Jews of the Polish ghetto, tortured, doomed, and alone, summoned up the magnificent courage to rise in revolt against their Nazi jailers.
Camouflage and deception were also characteristic of the mass murder of European Jewry, which the Nazis disguised as “the final solution to the Jewish question.” The infamous death camp at Auschwitz was disguised as a labor camp with numerous factories and workshops. Over the entrance a gate was emblazoned with the slogan: FREEDOM THROUGH WORK. The transports which daily drove into the center of the camps, bearing victims from all corners of Nazi-occupied Europe, were falsely identified as part of the “Resettlement Project for Colonization in the East.” The gas chambers with crematoria-ovens were disguised as public baths for the purposes of disinfection.
[edit] The Balance Sheet of Annihilation
Statistics on the Jewish catastrophe are indicated in the table on the next page, published by the World Jewish Congress. It should be noted that the only unclear part of the record refers to the fate of Jews of the Soviet Union.
The table representing the percentage of Jewish losses in individual countries warrants closer scrutiny. Significant differences are apparent, for example, the disparity between the 14% loss suffered in Bulgaria and the 90% toll in Latvia and Lithuania. The Polish figures particularly demand clarification. Deducting from the total number of Polish survivors the more than 200,000 who were temporarily evacuated by the Russians to a point deep within the heart of Soviet territory out of reach of the Nazis, the proportion of the victims who re¬mained in Poland becomes more than 90 percent, the highest toll of all European Jewry. Individual political, social, and technical factors also affected the fate of Jews in different countries. In Hungary, for example, the Nazis were thwarted in their attempt at the extermination of Jews by heavy losses at the war front. In other countries, such as Italy, France, and Belgium, the non-Jewish population helped rescue its Jewish neighbors. These acts of generosity were most frequent in rescuing children. Unusual instances of individual heroism occurred in nearly all the occupied countries. Unfortunately, only Denmark organized mass resistance to the extermination of its Jewish citizens.
At the end of 1942, when the Nazi conquerors invaded Denmark and proceeded to set in motion their war of Jewish extermination, King Christian X registered instant protest. He threatened to abdicate; when the Nazis made it known that henceforth every Jew was to be identified by a yellow arm band bearing a Star of David, King Christian announced that he would be the first to don the badge of Judaism. Finally, just as the Gestapo, the dreaded German secret police, had completed their plans for dealing with Jews without Danish assistance, there occurred a noble example of human solidarity. Of the 6,500 Danish Jews officially marked for death by the Nazis, approximately 6,200, or 95%, were secretly smuggled out of Denmark into Sweden with the help of a special rescue fleet of small Danish fishing ships. Between September 26 and October 12, 1942, the Danes rescued all but a few hundred Danish Jews from the gas chambers.
[edit] Survivors
Each Jewish survivor of the catastrophe owed his or her life either to a freak accident or a chain of fortunate coincidences. The Nazi murder-decree against the Jews lasted until the final moment of the war. Soviet troops entering Poland in 1944 seized the death camp Maidanek, near Lublin, while it was still operating its ultra-modern machinery for murder for the world to see. In April 1945, when the victorious Allied armies under General Eisenhower marched into Germany, they succeeded in taking the still functioning camps at Dachau, Buchenwald, and Bergen Belsen by surprise.
The full extent of the Jewish tragedy came to light only with the final collapse of Nazism and the Allied liberation of Europe. Gradually the survivors began to emerge from their hiding places to make their stories known. There were Jews who had been living in concealed underground bunkers, women who had lived as “Aryans” on forged documents, children, mainly orphans, who had been sheltered in monasteries or among kind-hearted Christian neighbors, and brave men and women who fought the Nazis as partisans in the forests of Poland.
In May 1960, Adolf Eichmann, one of the cruelest masters of the Nazi extermination system, was captured in Argentina by Jews and brought to Israel for trial. After lengthy hearings in 1961, he was convicted and executed in May 1962.
[edit] Fifty years later
Unlike most historical events, the Holocaust refuses to recede into the past. It continues to prey on the collective consciousness of the Jewish people and the human race. In Israel, such organizations and museums as Yad Vashem and the Diaspora Museum document and study the Holocaust. The U.S. Government has established a major Holocaust Museum in the Nation’s Capital, which is attended yearly by millions. Holocaust museums and memorials have proliferated throughout the world. Books, articles, documentary films and plays about the Holocaust appear nearly every day. Many thinkers, both Jews and non-Jews, regard the Holocaust as the turning point in the moral history of the world. On the other hand, there are writers, professors, or hate-mongers around the world, including in the U.S., who spread theories denying or minimizing the Holocaust. It is still too early to determine what the lasting impact of the Holocaust on the Jews in particular and the world in general will be. But there is little doubt that it will be profound.
