Holocaust

X

Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis

Jewish resistance to the Nazis was not widespread, but it did occur. Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were completely disarmed, and the Nazis went to great lengths to convince people that they were merely being deported to work camps. Resistance by Jews was made more difficult because the local population, out of anti-Semitism, fear of Nazi retribution, or callous indifference, did not support or help them. Throughout occupied Europe, people who opposed the Nazis and the occupation of their countries organized resistance movements. These movements received instructions from governments in exile in Britain or other Allied countries, as well as supplies from the Allies, the coalition of nations that was fighting against Germany. However, the Jews had no government in exile, and the Allies did nothing to support them.

Despite the overwhelming odds against the Jews, there were many examples of Jewish armed resistance. In the ghettos of eastern Europe, Jewish fighting groups were formed. Jews who managed to escape from the ghettos joined the partisans (the anti-Nazi resistance movement) in the forests. About 30,000 Jews from eastern Europe fought in the ranks of Soviet partisans. Armed uprisings broke out in several ghettos, the most noteworthy being in Warsaw in April 1943. The majority of the combatants in the Warsaw ghetto uprising died fighting. Even in the death camps of Sobibór, Treblinka, and Auschwitz revolts broke out. In the occupied countries of western Europe, Jews joined all the national resistance organizations. They concentrated their efforts on hiding Jewish children and smuggling Jews across borders to find refuge in neutral countries such as Switzerland and Spain.

XI

Responses of Other Nations

In the parts of Europe that were occupied by Germany, Jews were sent to the death camps regardless of the attitudes of the local population. In some occupied countries, such as Belgium, and even in some countries that were allied with Germany, such as unoccupied France under the Vichy government, a few church dignitaries protested when Jews were rounded up. In Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, on the other hand, thousands of people joined the Nazi killers voluntarily, as did many Croats, Ukrainians, and Slovaks. Jews were sometimes protected for economic reasons, as in Hungary until 1944, when Eichmann arrived to supervise the destruction of the Hungarian Jews. Bulgarians protested against the cooperation of their government officials with the Nazis. The Vichy government in unoccupied France sent about 70,000 foreign Jews and Jewish refugees to the concentration camps, but only a few of its own Jewish citizens.

Italy had a fascist government and was allied with Hitler. However, anti-Semitism was rare among Italians, and they did not turn over many Jews to the Nazis. The Italians surrendered to invading Allied troops in 1943, but German forces occupied the northern half of the country. This occupation made it possible for the Germans to round up many Italian Jews. In The Netherlands and Belgium, most citizens were anti-Nazi, and many helped hide Jews. In Norway there was a Nazi puppet government, but the Norwegian resistance helped many Jews escape to neutral Sweden. In Denmark, in spite of the German occupation, Jews were protected by the government. When the Nazis tried to round them up, the Danish people smuggled most of them to safety in Sweden.

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A relatively small number of men and women risked their lives to help persecuted Jews. Some 18,000 of them have been honored by the state of Israel with the title of Righteous Among the Nations. They include Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who issued 4,500 protection passports to save Jews in Hungary, and German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who protected Jews working for him in Poland.

Historical documents have shown that the Allied governments were informed of the Nazi extermination policy. As early as November 1941 coded reports sent to Berlin on the mass murders by the Einsatzgruppen in the USSR were intercepted and decoded by British intelligence. In August 1942 reports on the deportation and extermination of Jews in countries occupied by the Nazis were sent from Jewish organizations in Switzerland to top government officials in Britain and the United States. In mid-1944 two Slovak Jews who had escaped from Auschwitz gave accounts of the systematic extermination of Jews at Auschwitz. However, the Allied governments were reluctant to rescue Jews. After the war British government officials said they had not wanted to reveal that their agents were successfully decoding German communications. Allied military leaders said they did not believe that rescue missions so far to the east would succeed. As part of their strategic campaign to destroy Germany’s ability to wage war, the Allies bombed factories at Auschwitz, but they failed to target the gas chambers.

XII

Other Victims of the Nazis

Jews were not the only victims of the Nazis during World War II. Many Germans and people in German-occupied countries who opposed the Nazi regime on grounds of ideology were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Among them were political opponents, particularly Communists and Socialists; dissenting clergy; and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Nazis also singled out Roma, commonly called Gypsies; people with mental retardation, mental illness, and severe disabilities; and German male homosexuals.

Of the non-Jewish victims, two groups were sent to extermination centers: the Roma and the mentally impaired and severely disabled. The Nazis did not appear as determined to wipe out the Roma and the mentally impaired and severely disabled as they were to annihilate the Jews. Nevertheless, their actions against the Roma undoubtedly represented genocide according to the definition of the United Nations’ International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The Nazis defined the life experienced by the mentally impaired and severely disabled as “life unworthy of living.” In the fall of 1939 they started their euthanasia program, in which Nazi doctors murdered more than 70,000 mentally and physically disabled persons in six extermination centers. Public disquiet forced Hitler to order a halt to the program in August 1941, but many tens of thousands more were murdered in hospitals after that date despite the official end of the program. The Nazis viewed the bulk of the Roma as racially inferior, a threat to the “purity” of the German race, and a problem to be solved by selective mass murder. Within Germany itself there were some 40,000 Roma at the start of World War II. A few thousand were sterilized, and many thousands were deported to extermination centers in Poland. In various countries of eastern Europe, Roma were rounded up and shot. At the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp there was a special compound for Roma that held 20,000 inmates. In the course of the persecution, the Nazis and their collaborators murdered as many as 200,000 Roma.

Beginning in 1941, the Nazis murdered some 3.5 million captured Soviet soldiers, mainly by starvation but also by shooting and gassing, in prisoner-of-war camps, slave labor facilities, and concentration camps. Poles, who were considered both subhuman and an obstacle to Germany’s expansion, were also killed. To enslave the Polish population, the Nazis killed thousands of Polish intellectuals, political leaders, and clergy. Thousands of Polish children who were considered of Germanic origin were kidnapped and sent to Germany to be raised by German foster parents. About 1.5 million Polish civilians died during World War II as a result of the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland.

XIII

Aftermath and Legacy of the Holocaust

When World War II ended in 1945, the entire Jewish secular and religious culture in Europe had been obliterated, and from 5.6 million to 5.9 million Jews had been exterminated. Some 1.5 million of the victims were children.

After the war the Allies established an International Military Tribunal at Nürnberg, Germany, to prosecute the surviving Nazi leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity. At the most important of the war crimes trials, held in 1945 and 1946, 22 top leaders of Nazi Germany were found guilty, and of these 12 were sentenced to death. In addition, military and civilian tribunals in many countries conducted hundreds of trials. The occupation governments set up by the Allies in Germany removed tens of thousands of Nazis from official positions throughout Germany. In Germany alone, close to 90,000 war crimes cases were opened. Later, in 1948, a United Nations (UN) resolution established crimes against humanity as a crime under international law with no limitation period for the prosecution of those accused of such crimes. Based on this resolution, France has convicted a number of former Nazis and the United States has revoked the citizenship of several Nazi collaborators who had immigrated there.

A

Holocaust Survivors and Israel

After the war some 250,000 Jewish survivors made their way to camps for displaced persons that were operated by the Allies in Germany, Austria, and Italy. They pressed the U.S. Army and government to let them immigrate to Palestine, then under British rule, and the U.S. government in turn pressed the British to accept these refugees. The British refused, and thousands of Jewish survivors boarded ships to emigrate illegally to Palestine. The suffering of the survivors, who had nowhere else to go, and the British policy of stopping these ships and sending the survivors to detention camps in Cyprus caused an outcry in world public opinion. Jews in the United States soon mobilized in favor of solving the refugees’ problem by creating a Jewish state in Palestine. Under pressure from Jewish refugees and public opinion, the British were eventually forced to ask the UN to resolve the competing Jewish and Arab claims to Palestine. In 1947 the UN voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The Jewish state, Israel, was established in May 1948.

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