Holocaust

V

Rise of the Nazis to Power

Until 1929 the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP), as the Nazi Party was officially called, was a small political party. Then, in the parliamentary elections of 1930, the party received more than 18 percent of the total votes cast, compared to about 2.5 percent in 1928. The bulk of the votes for the Nazis came from the middle classes and the well-to-do rather than from workers and unemployed people. The major factors in the Nazis’ electoral success were lingering anger at Germany’s military collapse toward the end of World War I; resentment toward the Versailles treaty, which had ended the war and imposed harsh conditions on Germany; the worldwide economic depression of the 1930s; fear of the spread of Communism; and Hitler’s charismatic personality.

By 1930 German society was unable to forge a political consensus. The fact that no party was able to establish a majority government created a vacuum of power and a political stalemate in the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament. Most Germans wanted to replace the republic and its multitude of competing parties with an authoritarian system that promised stability and employment. Hence the Nazis gained in popularity in the 1930 elections. In the parliamentary elections of September 1932, the Nazis did even better, receiving about 38 percent of the votes. They did not win a majority of the seats in the Reichstag, but the support Hitler received from the Conservative Party provided the necessary basis for a coalition government. And so on January 30, 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor (prime minister).

VI

German Jews Under the Nazi Regime

As soon as the Nazis assumed power, they made racism and anti-Semitism central components of their regime. During its first months in power the Nazi Party instigated anti-Semitic riots and campaigns of terror that climaxed on April 1, 1933, in a countrywide boycott of Jewish-owned shops and Jewish professionals, such as physicians and lawyers. In addition, the new government issued regulations and ordinances to deprive Jews of their civil rights and economic means of survival. On April 7, 1933, the Reichstag enacted a law that allowed the government to dismiss Jews from the German civil service. Later, quotas were adopted to limit the numbers of Jewish students. However, Hitler and the other Nazi leaders viewed these piecemeal regulations as insufficient, and so they decided to implement a comprehensive legal framework for their anti-Semitic policies.

One early decree was a definition of the term Jew. Crucial in that determination was the religion of one's grandparents. Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was automatically a Jew, regardless of whether that individual was a member of the Jewish community. Those with two Jewish grandparents, known as half-Jews, were considered Jewish only if they themselves belonged to the Jewish religion or were married to a Jewish person. All other half-Jews, and persons who had one Jewish grandparent, were classified as Mischlinge (half-breeds). Jews and Mischlinge were “non-Aryans,” in contrast to “pure” Germans, who were “Aryans.” In Nazi doctrine, such emphasis on descent was regarded as an affirmation of race, but the principal purpose of these categorizations was the clear delimitation of a target for discriminatory laws and directives.

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On September 15, 1935, the Reichstag met in Nürnberg and passed two laws, known as the Nürnberg Laws. The first, the Reich Citizenship Law, declared that only individuals of “German blood” could be citizens of the German Reich (state), thus depriving German Jews of their citizenship. The second, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, formalized barriers between Jews and Germans, forbidding marriage and sexual relations between Jews and “Aryans.” Thus, the Nazis deprived German Jews of all civil rights and effectively excluded them from social and cultural life. Their policy was then aimed at expropriating Jewish property with a view to compelling Jews to emigrate from Germany.

In 1938 Jews were barred from the medical and legal professions and were forced to register their property as a preliminary measure for its confiscation and “aryanization,” or forcible sale to Germans. As a practical matter, the government compelled Jews to accept payments representing only a fraction of the property’s true value from “Aryan” buyers.

When the Nazis took power in Germany, the German Catholic bishops believed that Hitler would protect Europe’s Christian civilization from Bolshevism. As a result, they accommodated the Nazi regime, supporting its nationalistic foreign policy. Despite their opposition to Hitler’s racial doctrine, Catholic and other Christian church leaders failed to take a public stand against his anti-Semitic policies. The major Christian churches gave pastoral care to Jewish converts to Christianity who were persecuted by the Nazis, but they failed to react when the Nazis introduced racial legislation, instigated physical attacks on Jews, or began the deportation and extermination of Jews.

The attitude of the top leadership of the Roman Catholic Church under Pope Pius XII largely paralleled that of the German Catholic bishops. The pope never criticized the persecution of the Jews in an encyclical, nor did he ever threaten to excommunicate Hitler, nominally a Catholic, or other Catholics involved in the Holocaust. Moreover, although the pope and his advisers were fully informed about the extermination of the Jews during World War II, they refused to condemn it on the grounds that Vatican City, the tiny independent state under the authority of the pope, had to maintain strict neutrality in international affairs.

After Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, all the same anti-Semitic measures were implemented there. A year later, these measures were implemented in Bohemia and Moravia, which the Germans occupied following their dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.

By 1938 two-thirds of German Jews had left the country, and 60 percent of those who stayed had lost their livelihood. The anti-Semitic actions of the Nazis culminated in the Kristallnacht (“night of broken glass”) pogrom, which occurred all over Germany and Austria on the night of November 9, 1938. During that night, Nazi mobs murdered more than 90 Jews, beat hundreds more, demolished 76 synagogues and set fire to 191 more, and destroyed and looted thousands of shops and businesses owned by Jews. The authorities arrested 30,000 Jews and sent them to concentration camps, where they were severely mistreated. The Kristallnacht pogrom marked a crucial milestone in the Nazis’ actions against the Jews, for it was the first occasion in the modern era in which widespread violence was directed against Jews in a western European country. At a meeting held two days after the pogrom, top Nazi leaders decided that the Jews of Germany should bear the cost of the destruction regardless of insurance coverage.

VII

Nazi Anti-Semitic Policy, 1939-1940

On January 30, 1939, Hitler delivered a chilling threat in an address to the Reichstag: “In my life I have often been a prophet and … today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will be not the Bolshevization of the world and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

After the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, the Nazis searched for what they termed a “final solution to the Jewish question.” The top leaders contemplated a “territorial solution” for European Jews. Leaders of the SS, an elite section of the Nazi Party, were put in charge of solving the “Jewish question.” They proposed two options. The first option was the establishment in southeastern Poland of a reservation to which Jews would be deported. The second option, which was proposed as the Germans anticipated an imminent victory over Britain following their defeat of France in July 1940, was the deportation to the island of Madagascar of all 4 million Jews in the countries then occupied or controlled by Germany. At that time, Madagascar, off the southeastern coast of Africa, was a colony of France.

Neither of these proposals was adopted. In late 1940 the Nazis began planning an invasion and conquest of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). That planning led them to abandon the idea of a reservation in Poland, because such a reservation would be in the center rather than on the periphery of an enlarged German empire. The Nazis abandoned their Madagascar plan because Britain did not surrender, and continued British control of the Suez Canal closed the route to Madagascar to German ships.

Before these plans were dropped, however, the Germans carried out a preliminary step to future deportations to concentration camps or to the planned Jewish reservation. Jews in Poland were forced to move into ghettos, where they were ordered to set up Jewish councils that would carry out German orders. They were also forced to wear a yellow Jewish star on their clothing and to perform forced labor. Atrocious living conditions, such as overcrowding, lack of proper sanitation and health services, and meager food rations, resulted in a high mortality rate among the inhabitants of the ghettos. In the Warsaw ghetto, for example, 20 percent of the population died in 1941.

While Polish Jews were sealed in ghettos, Jews in western European countries occupied or controlled by the Nazis faced ruthless anti-Semitic measures. From Norway to North Africa all Jews lost their rights and property. They were forced to live in designated neighborhoods or were imprisoned in closed camps.

VIII

Beginnings of the Extermination

In the spring of 1941, as preparations were under way for the invasion of the USSR, Hitler proclaimed that a war of destruction was about to start. He called for the annihilation of the Bolshevik leadership, thus laying the foundation for the extermination of what Hitler considered to be the biological source of Bolshevism: the Jews of the USSR. The killings were to be conducted by four mobile SS units called Einsatzgruppen (action squads), each consisting of some 1,000 men. In addition to the Einsatzgruppen, there were other SS and police units commissioned to shoot Jews who were to be assembled in front of mass graves dug by the Jews themselves. On many occasions after the military campaign started in June 1941, the German army was called on to provide support to the SS and police units. Thus, the total number of Germans involved in the mass shootings of Jews was around 30,000.

On July 2, 1941, Reinhard Heydrich, head of Germany’s Sicherheitsdienst (SD; Security Service) and an instrumental figure in organizing the extermination of the Jews, issued his Commissars’ Order, according to which all Jews in official positions in the Soviet administration were to be executed. However, the Einsatzgruppen commanders broadly interpreted this order to mean all adult male Jews. Large numbers of them were immediately shot regardless of whether they held official Soviet positions. In August 1941 the killings were expanded to include Jewish women and children. For example, on August 1, 1941, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, issued an order to SS units preparing to comb the Pripet Marshes in Belarus: “All male Jews must be shot. Drive the female Jews into the swamp.” The SS officer in charge of the operation advised his superiors that “Driving women and children into the swamps did not have the intended success because the swamps were not deep enough for the Jews to drown.” Beginning in late September 1941 German forces carried out large-scale actions in which whole Jewish communities were wiped out. For instance, 33,000 Jews of Kiev, in Ukraine, were killed on September 29 and 30, 1941, in a ravine outside Kiev called Babi Yar.

In the autumn of 1941 a new phase began. Until then the targets had been Soviet Jews, but now the killing was extended to Jews in parts of Poland and Serbia. For these killings the Germans also used gas vans, specially sealed vans in which the exhaust fumes from the engine were piped into a storage compartment filled with victims to asphyxiate them. During the winter of 1941 to 1942 there was a pause in the shootings because, in part, the frozen ground prevented the digging of pits for burying the murdered Jews. In addition, the Germans had to send many Jews to Germany to serve as slave labor for the war effort. However, in the spring of 1942 the intensive campaign of killing resumed. This time even Jewish slave laborers were murdered.

The Einsatzgruppen provided Hitler with reports on the numbers of Jews and others who had been killed. These documents represent the primary source of knowledge about the mass shootings in eastern Europe up to the spring of 1942. It is estimated that from the summer of 1941 to the summer of 1942, the Nazis shot more than a million Jews in front of mass graves.

On December 12, 1941, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister for propaganda and national enlightenment, noted in his diary, “As concerns the Jewish question, [Hitler] is determined to make a clean sweep. He had prophesied to the Jews that if they once again brought about a world war they would experience their own extermination. This was not just an empty phrase. The World War is there, the extermination of Jewry must be the necessary consequence.”

IX

The “Final Solution”

In the fall of 1941 the Nazis began deporting all the Jews of occupied Europe to the east (Poland and the western USSR) in order to exterminate them. In the meantime, in Germany they had already carried out their program of exterminating people who were mentally impaired or severely disabled.

In the so-called euthanasia program, which had begun in the fall of 1939, Nazi doctors killed Germans with mental or physical disabilities. Tens of thousands were murdered, mostly by the administration of carbon monoxide gas supplied in large metal bottles. In addition, many were killed in gas vans. Hitler ordered the euthanasia program discontinued in August 1941 because it was causing public disquiet. However, the experience acquired was used in the “final solution,” as the program of killing all the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe came to be known. The gas vans and their personnel from the euthanasia program were moved to eastern Europe and placed at the disposal of Odilo Globocnik, the SS officer in charge of the Lublin area in occupied Poland.

When the euthanasia teams arrived in the east in late 1941, they began planning the construction of killing facilities. From September through December 1941 they tested different types of poison gas. In September 1941 they carried out gassing experiments at Auschwitz, killing 600 Soviet prisoners of war with cyanide gas produced from Zyklon-B, the commercial name of a pesticide based on hydrocyanic acid. In November 1941, 30 prisoners were killed in a gas van at the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin. At the concentration camp of Chelmno, not far from Łódź, the site of a large Jewish ghetto in western Poland, gassing began on December 8, 1941.

As the Nazis improved their gassing techniques, they decided to deport all Jews from occupied Europe to their deaths in the east. The countries from which Jews were deported included countries under German occupation—such as Norway, France, The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Greece—as well as countries allied with Germany—such as Italy and Hungary. On January 20, 1942, a meeting of high-ranking officials chaired by Heydrich was convened in an SS-owned mansion in the Berlin neighborhood of Wannsee. This meeting came to be known as the Wannsee Conference. Attached to the summonses to attend the Wannsee Conference was a directive from Nazi leader Hermann Göring to Heydrich to prepare a European-wide “final solution” to the Jewish question. Heydrich told the conference participants that Jews unfit for work were to be killed and that any Jews who survived forced labor, having thereby shown their physical stamina, were for that very reason to be killed as well. The Wannsee Conference was an important signpost in the evolution of the policy of extermination because it was there that the participants were instructed to coordinate efforts for the extermination of the Jews.

Shortly after the Wannsee Conference the extermination of the European Jews intensified. First in line were the 3 million Polish Jews. In July 1942 Himmler laid down a schedule for their elimination in death camps. For this operation, code-named Operation Reinhard, three main gassing centers were built: Bełżec and Sobibór, in southeastern Poland not far from Lublin, and Treblinka, northeast of Warsaw. Gassing commenced at those three camps in the period from March through July 1942. From 750,000 to 950,000 Jews were gassed at Treblinka; from 500,000 to 600,000 at Bełżec; and about 200,000 at Sobibór.

Other camps were built that combined forced labor and extermination facilities. Two camps were built near Auschwitz (Oświęcim in Polish), a small town in the region of Upper Silesia. The smaller camp was known as Auschwitz I. The larger camp was called Auschwitz II and was also known as Birkenau. Most of the extermination occurred at the larger camp: About 1 million Jews died there as a result of gassing, starvation, or disease.

At the same time that the Polish Jews were being put to death in these camps, the program of deporting Jews from other parts of occupied Europe to the east was put in motion. In various European countries, teams of SS men were sent to direct the roundups and deportation of Jews by train to the killing centers and concentration camps in Poland. These operations were supervised by Adolf Eichmann, who worked under Heydrich and was entrusted with responsibility for carrying out and coordinating the “final solution.” Their task was done in stages: First the poorer members of a Jewish community were rounded up, then foreign Jews and Jewish refugees, and finally the rest of the Jewish community. Some western European Jews were initially transported to ghettos in the east and later to the concentration camps. Others were sent directly to the extermination centers.

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