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The Holocaust (from the Greek holókauston from holos "completely" and kaustos "burnt"), also known
as Ha-Shoah (Hebrew: השואה), Churben
(Yiddish: חורבן), is the term generally used to describe the killing of
approximately six million European Jews during World War II,
as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist
German Workers Party in Germany led by Adolf Hitler.[2]
While there were other groups of people killed by the Nazi regime, scholars typically do not include them in the definition of
the Holocaust, defining it as the genocide of the Jews,[3] or what the Nazis called the "Final Solution of the Jewish
Question." Taking into account all the victims of Nazi persecution, the death toll is estimated at between 9 and 11
million.[4]
The persecution and genocide
were accomplished in stages. Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society was
enacted years before the outbreak of World War II. Concentration camps were
established in which inmates were used as slave labour until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where the Third Reich conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings.[5] Jews and Roma were crammed into ghettos before being transported hundreds of miles by freight train to
extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them were
killed in gas chambers. Every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the mass murder, turning the country
into what one Holocaust scholar has called "a genocidal nation."[6]
Etymology and use of the term
-
The term holocaust originally derived from the Greek word holókauston, meaning a "completely (holos) burnt (kaustos)" sacrificial offering
to a god. Since the late 19th century, it has been used primarily to refer to disasters or catastrophes. The biblical word
Shoa (שואה) (also spelled Shoah and Sho'ah), meaning "calamity," became the standard
Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s.[7] Shoa is preferred by many Jews for a number of reasons, including the
theologically offensive nature of the original meaning of "holocaust."
Definition
Although the word "holocaust" has been widely used since the 17th century to refer to the violent death of a large number of
people (eg before World War II the word was used by Winston Churchill and others to
describe the Armenian Genocide of World War
I[8]), since the 1950s one particular use has become
increasingly common, and if used without a qualifying context it now mainly refers to the Nazi Holocaust, and in that sense is
usually treated as a proper noun with an initial capital. The word was adopted as a translation of "Shoah," which appeared for
the first time in 1940 in Jerusalem in a booklet called Sho'at Yehudei Polin and was consolidated when the Jerusalem
historian BenZion Dinur (Dinaburg) stated that the Jewish people were undergoing a "catastrophe".[9][10] By
the 1950s, the term had come in the USA to refer to the genocide of the European Jews.[7]
The Nazi euphemism for the extermination of the Jews during the Nazi period was Endlösung
der Judenfrage (the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question"). In both English and German, "Final Solution" is used as an
alternative to the Holocaust.[11]
The word "Holocaust" is also used in a wider sense to describe other actions of the Nazi regime. These include around half a
million Roma and Sinti, the deaths of several million
Soviet prisoners of war, along with slave
laborers, gay men, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled, and political opponents. The
use of the word in this wider sense is objected to by many Jewish organizations, particularly those established to commemorate
the Jewish Holocaust. Jewish organizations say that the word in its application to the Nazi genocide was originally coined to
describe the extermination of the Jews, and that the Jewish Holocaust was a crime on such a scale, and of such specificity, as
the culmination of the long history of European antisemitism, that it should not be
subsumed into a general category with other crimes of the Nazis.
Also controversial is the extension of the word to describe events that have no connection with World War II. The terms
"Rwandan Holocaust" and "Cambodian Holocaust" are used to refer
to the Rwanda genocide of 1994 and the mass killings of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia respectively, and "African Holocaust" is used to describe the
slave trade and the colonization of Africa, also known as the Maafa.
Distinctive features
Compliance of Germany's institutions
Ghettos were established in Europe in which Jews were confined before being shipped to
extermination camps.
The Nazis methodically tracked the progress of the Holocaust in thousands of reports and documents. Pictured is the
Höfle Telegram sent to
Adolf Eichmann in January,
1943, that reported that 1,274,166 Jews had been killed in the four
Aktion Reinhard
camps during 1942.
Michael Berenbaum writes that Germany became a "genocidal nation."[6] Every arm of the country's
sophisticated bureaucracy was involved in the killing process. Parish churches and the Interior Ministry supplied birth records
showing who was Jewish; the Post Office delivered the deportation and denaturalization orders; the Finance Ministry confiscated
Jewish property; German firms fired Jewish workers and disenfranchised Jewish stockholders; the universities refused to admit
Jews, denied degrees to those already studying, and fired Jewish academics; government transport offices arranged the trains for
deportation to the camps; German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners; companies bid for the contracts to
build the ovens; detailed lists of victims were drawn up using the Dehomag company's punch card
machines, producing meticulous records of the killings. As prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all
personal property, which was carefully catalogued and tagged before being sent to Germany to be reused or recycled. Berenbaum
writes that the Final Solution of the Jewish question was "in the eyes of the perpetrators … Germany's greatest
achievement."[12]
Saul Friedländer writes that: "Not one social group, not one religious community,
not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the
Jews."[13] He writes that some Christian
churches declared that converted Jews should be regarded as part of the flock, but even then only up to a point.
Friedländer argues that this makes the Holocaust distinctive because anti-Jewish policies were able to unfold without the
interference of countervailing forces of the kind normally found in advanced societies, such as industry, small businesses,
churches, and other vested interests and lobby groups.[13]
The dominance of ideology and the scale of the genocide
In other genocides, pragmatic considerations such as control of territory and resources were central to the genocide policy.
Yehuda Bauer argues that:
[T]he basic motivation [of the Holocaust] was purely ideological, rooted in an illusionary world of Nazi imagination, where an
international Jewish conspiracy to control the world was opposed to a parallel Aryan quest. No genocide to date had been based so
completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract, nonpragmatic ideology — which was then executed by very rational, pragmatic
means."[14]
The slaughter was systematically conducted in virtually all areas of Nazi-occupied
territory in what are now 35 separate European countries.[15] It was at its worst in Central and Eastern Europe, which had more than seven million Jews in 1939.
About five million Jews were killed there, including three million in occupied Poland, and over one million in the Soviet Union.
Hundreds of thousands also died in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Yugoslavia, and Greece. The Wannsee Protocol makes clear that the Nazis also intended to carry out their "final solution of the
Jewish question" in Britain and Ireland.[16]
Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was to be exterminated without exception. In other genocides, people were able
to escape death by converting to another religion or in some other way assimilating. This option was not available to the Jews of
occupied Europe.[17] All
persons of recent Jewish ancestry were to be exterminated in lands controlled by Germany.[18]
Medical experiments
- Further information: Doctors' Trial, Josef
Mengele, Nazi human
experimentation, and Miklós Nyiszli
A cold water immersion experiment at
Dachau concentration camp presided over
by Professor Holzlohner (left) and Dr. Rascher (right). The victim is wearing a
Luftwaffe
garment.
Another distinctive feature was the use of human subjects in medical experiments. German physicians carried out such
experiments at Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen and
Natzweiler concentration camps.[19]
The most notorious of these physicians was Dr. Josef Mengele, who worked in Auschwitz.
His experiments included placing subjects in pressure chambers, testing drugs on them, freezing them, attempting to change eye
color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, and various amputations and other brutal surgeries.[20] The full extent of his work will never be
known because the truckload of records he sent to Dr. Otmar von Verschuer
at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute were destroyed by von Verschuer.[21] Subjects who survived Mengele's experiments were almost always
killed and dissected after the experiments.
Romani children in
Auschwitz, victims of medical experiments.
He seemed particularly keen on working with Romani children. He would bring them sweets and toys, and would personally take
them to the gas chamber. They would call him "Onkel Mengele."[22] Vera Alexander was a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz who looked after 50 sets of Romani
twins:
I remember one set of twins in particular: Guido and Ina, aged about four. One day, Mengele took them away. When they
returned, they were in a terrible state: they had been sewn together, back to back, like Siamese twins. Their wounds were
infected and oozing pus. They screamed day and night. Then their parents—I remember the mother's name was Stella—managed to get
some morphine and they killed the children in order to end their suffering.[22]
Victims and death toll
Jews
-
Since 1945, the most commonly cited figure for the total number of Jews killed has been six million. The Holocaust
commemoration center, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in
Jerusalem, comments:
There is no precise figure for the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. The figure commonly used is the six million quoted
by Adolf Eichmann, a senior SS official. Most research confirms that the number of
victims was between five and six million. Early calculations range from 5.1 million (Professor Raul Hilberg) to 5.95 million (Jacob Leschinsky). More recent research, by Professor Yisrael Gutman and Dr.
Robert Rozett in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, estimates the Jewish
losses at 5.59–5.86 million, and a study headed by Dr. Wolfgang Benz presents a range from 5.29–6 million. The main sources for
these statistics are comparisons of prewar censuses with postwar censuses and population estimates. Nazi documentation containing
partial data on various deportations and murders is also used. We estimate that Yad Vashem currently has somewhat more than four
million names of victims that are accessible.[23]
Raul Hilberg, in the third edition of his ground-breaking three-volume work,
The Destruction of the European Jews, estimates that 5.1
million Jews died during the Holocaust. This figure includes "over 800,000" who died from "Ghettoization and general privation";
1,400,000 who were killed in "Open-air shootings"; and "up to 2,900,000" who perished in camps. Hilberg estimates the death toll
in Poland at "up to 3,000,000".[24] Hilberg's numbers are
generally considered to be a conservative estimate, as they generally include only those deaths for which some records are
available, avoiding statistical adjustment.[25] British
historian Martin Gilbert used a similar approach in his Atlas of the Holocaust,
but arrived at a number of 5.75 million Jewish victims, since he estimated higher numbers of Jews killed in Russia and other
locations.[26]
Lucy S. Dawidowicz used pre-war census figures to estimate that 5.934 million Jews
died (see her figures here).[27]
One of the most authoritative German scholars of the Holocaust, Wolfgang Benz of the Technical University of Berlin, cites
between 5.3 and 6.2 million Jews killed in Dimension des Volksmords (1991), while Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett
estimate between 5.59 and 5.86 million Jewish victims in the Encyclopaedia of
the Holocaust (1990).[28]
There were about 8 to 10 million Jews in the territories controlled directly or indirectly by the Nazis (the uncertainty
arises from the lack of knowledge about how many Jews there were in the Soviet Union). The 6 million killed in the Holocaust thus
represent 60 to 75 percent of these Jews. Of Poland's 3.3 million Jews, over 90 percent were killed. The same proportion were
killed in Latvia and Lithuania, but most of Estonia's Jews were evacuated in time. In Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Netherlands and
Yugoslavia, over 70 percent were killed. More than 50 percent were killed in Belgium, Hungary and Romania. It is likely that a
similar proportion were killed in Belarus and Ukraine, but these figures are less certain. Countries with notably lower
proportions of deaths include Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Italy and Norway. Finally, of the 750,000 Jews in Germany and Austria in
1933, only about a quarter survived. Although many German Jews emigrated before 1939, the majority of these fled to
Czechoslovakia, France or the Netherlands, from where they were later deported to their deaths.
The number of people killed at the major extermination camps has been estimated as
follows:
Auschwitz: 1.4 million;[29] Belzec: 600,000;[30] Chelmno:
320,000;[31] Jasenovac: 53,000 [32] - 600,000;[33]
Majdanek: 360,000;[34] Maly Trostinets: 65,000;[35] Sobibór: 250,000;[36] and Treblinka: 870,000.[37]
This gives a total of over 3.8 million, excluding Jasenovac (where most victims were ethnic Serbs). Of these, 80–90% were
estimated to be Jews. These seven camps alone thus accounted for half the total number of Jews killed in the entire Nazi
Holocaust. Virtually the entire Jewish population of Poland died in these camps.
In addition to those who died in the above extermination camps, at least half a million Jews died in other camps, including
the major concentration camps in Germany. These were not extermination camps, but had large numbers of Jewish prisoners at
various times, particularly in the last year of the war as the Nazis withdrew from Poland. About a million people died in these
camps, and although the proportion of Jews is not known with certainty, it was estimated to be at least 50 percent. Another
800,000 to 1 million Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet territories (an approximate figure,
since the Einsatzgruppen killings were frequently undocumented). Many more died through execution or of disease and
malnutrition in the ghettos of Poland before they could be deported.
|
|
This table need to be checked and referenced (Politicals, Disabled, Serbs and ethnic Poles). Please
also see talk page. The table is is missing citations or needs footnotes.
Using inline citations helps guard against copyright violations and factual
inaccuracies. |
| Victims |
Killed |
Source |
| Soviet POWs |
2–3 million |
[38] |
| Politicals |
1–1.5 million [citation needed] |
|
| Serbs |
600,000 |
[39] |
| Poles |
200,000+[40] |
[41] |
| Roma |
220,000–500,000 |
[42] |
| Freemasons |
80,000–200,000 |
[43] |
| Disabled |
75,000–250,000[citation needed] |
|
| Spanish POWs |
7,000–16,000 |
[44] |
Jehovah's
Witnesses |
2,500–5,000 |
[45] |
-
Soviet POWs
According to Michael Berenbaum, between two and three million Soviet prisoners-of-war—57 percent of all Soviet POWs—died of
starvation, mistreatment, or executions between June 1941 and May 1945, most of them during their first year of captivity. The
death rates decreased as the POWs were needed to work as slaves to help the German war effort; by 1943, half a million of them
had been deployed as slave labor.[38]
According to other estimates by Daniel Goldhagen, an estimated 2.8 million Soviet
POWs died in eight months in 1941-42, with a total of 3.5 million by mid-1944.[46] The USHMM has estimated that 3.3
million of the 5.7 million Soviet POWs died in German custody—compared to 8,300 of 231,000 British and American
prisoners.[47] Nearly 5,000 Soviet POWs died every day in
October 1941, according to the USHMM.[48]
Roma
-
Map of persecution of Roma (Gypsies)
Because the Roma and Sinti are traditionally a secretive people with a culture based on oral
history, less is known about their fate than about that of any other group.[49][50] Yehuda Bauer writes that the lack of information can be
attributed to the Roma's distrust and suspicion, and to their humiliation, because some of the basic taboos of Romani culture
regarding hygiene and sexual contact were violated at Auschwitz. Bauer writes that "[m]ost [Roma] could not relate their stories
involving these tortures; as a result, most kept silent and thus increased the effects of the massive trauma they had
undergone."[51]
Donald Niewyk and Frances Nicosia write that the death toll was at least 130,000 of the nearly one million Roma and Sinti in
Nazi-controlled Europe.[49] Michael
Berenbaum writes that serious scholarly estimates lie between 90,000 and 220,000.[52] A detailed study by the late Sybil Milton, formerly senior historian
at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, calculated a death toll of at least 220,000, and possibly closer to 500,000.[53][54] Ian Hancock, Director of the Program of Romani Studies and the
Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin, has argued in favour of a higher figure of between
500,000 and 1,500,000.[55] Hancock writes that,
proportionately, the death toll equaled "and almost certainly exceed[ed], that of Jewish victims."[56]
| “ |
… they wish to toss into the Ghetto everything that is
characteristically dirty, shabby, bizarre, of which one ought to be frightened and which anyway had to be destroyed. |
” |
|
—Emmanuel Ringelblum on the Roma.[57]
|
Before being sent to the camps, the victims were herded into ghettos, including several
hundred into the Warsaw Ghetto.[58] Further east, teams of Einsatzgruppen tracked down Roma encampments and murdered the inhabitants on the spot, leaving no records
of the victims. They were also targeted by the puppet regimes that cooperated with the Nazis, e.g. the Ustaše regime in Croatia, where a large number of Roma were killed in the Jasenovac concentration camp.
In May 1942, the Roma were placed under the same labor and social laws as the Jews, and on December 16, 1942, Himmler issued a decree that "Gypsy Mischlinge
(mixed breeds), Roma Gypsies, and members of the clans of Balkan origins who are not of German blood" should be sent to
Auschwitz, unless they had served in the Wehrmacht.[59] On January 29, 1943, another decree ordered the deportation of all German Gypsies to
Auschwitz.
This was adjusted on November 15, 1943, when Himmler
ordered that, in the occupied Soviet areas, "sedentary Gypsies and part-Gypsies (Mischlinge) are to be treated as citizens
of the country. Nomadic Gypsies and part-Gypsies are to be placed on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration
camps."[60] Bauer argues that this
adjustment reflected Nazi ideology that the Roma, originally an Aryan population, had been
"spoiled" by non-Romani blood.[61]
Disabled and mentally ill
-
!["60,000 RM is what this person with genetic defects costs the community during his lifetime. Fellow German,[62] that's your money too …"[63]](http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/3/3f/180px-EnthanasiePropaganda.jpg)
"60,000
RM is what this person with genetic defects costs the community during his
lifetime. Fellow German,
[62] that's your money too
…"
[63]
| “ |
Our starting point is not the individual: We do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry,
give drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked … Our objectives are different: We must have a healthy people in order to prevail
in the world.
|
” |
|
—Joseph Goebbels, 1938.[64]
|
Aktion T4 was a program established in 1939 to maintain the genetic purity of the German population by killing or
sterilizing German and Austrian citizens who were disabled or suffering from mental illness.[65]
Between 1939 and 1941, 80,000 to 100,000 mentally ill adults in institutions were killed; 5,000 children in institutions; and
1,000 Jews in institutions.[66] Outside
the mental health institutions, the figures are estimated as 20,000 (according to Dr. Georg Renno, the deputy director of
Schloss Hartheim, one of the euthanasia centers) or 400,000 (according to Frank
Zeireis, the commandant of Mauthausen concentration camp).[66] Another 300,000 were forcibly
sterilized.[67]
The program was named after Tiergartenstraße 4, the address of a villa in the Berlin
borough of Tiergarten, the headquarters of the Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil und
Anstaltspflege (General Foundation for Welfare and Institutional Care),[68] led by Philipp Bouhler, head of Hitler’s private
chancellery (Kanzlei des Führer der NSDAP) and Karl Brandt, Hitler’s
personal physician.
Brandt was tried in December 1946 at Nuremberg, along with 22 others, in a case
known as United States of America v. Karl Brandt et al., also known as the Doctors'
Trial. He was hanged at Landsberg Prison on June
2, 1948.
Gay men
-
The Homomonument in Amsterdam, a memorial to the gay victims of Nazi Germany.
|
A memorial for Loge Liberté chérie, founded in November 1943 in Hut 6 of Emslandlager VII (KZ Esterwegen), the only
Masonic lodge founded in a Nazi concentration camp.
|
Between 5,000 and 15,000 gay men of German nationality are estimated to have died in concentration camps.[69] James D. Steakley writes that what
mattered in Germany was criminal intent or character, rather than criminal acts, and the "gesundes Volksempfinden"
("healthy sensibility of the people") became the leading normative legal principle.[70] In 1936, Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the SS, created the "Reich Central
Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion." Homosexuality was declared contrary to "wholesome popular
sentiment,"[69] and gay men were
regarded as "defilers of German blood." The Gestapo raided gay bars, tracked individuals using the address books of those they
arrested, used the subscription lists of gay magazines to find others, and encouraged people to report suspected homosexual
behavior and to scrutinize the behavior of their neighbors.[69][70]
Tens of thousands were convicted between 1933 and 1944 and sent to camps for "rehabilitation," where they were identified by
yellow armbands[citation needed] and later pink triangles worn on the left side of the jacket and the right
pant leg, which singled them out for sexual abuse.[70] Hundreds were castrated by court order.[71] They were humiliated, tortured, used in hormone experiments
conducted by SS doctors, and killed. The allegation of homosexuality was also used as a convenient way of dealing with Catholic
priests.[69] Steakley writes that
the full extent of gay suffering was slow to emerge after the war. Many victims kept their stories to themselves because
homosexuality remained criminalized in postwar Germany. Nevertheless, only a small percentage (around 2%) of German homosexuals
was persecuted by Nazis.[70]
Freemasons and Jehovah's Witnesses
-
In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that Freemasonry had "succumbed" to the Jews: "The
general pacifistic paralysis of the national instinct of self-preservation begun by Freemasonry is then transmitted to the masses
of society by the Jewish press."[72] Freemasons were sent
to concentration camps as political prisoners, and forced to wear an inverted
!["Selection" on the Judenrampe, Auschwitz, May/June 1944. To be sent to the right meant slave labor; to the left, the gas chambers. This image shows the arrival of Hungarian Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, many of them from the Berehov ghetto. It was taken by Ernst Hofmann or Bernhard Walter of the SS. Courtesy of Yad Vashem.[1]](http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/6/6a/300px-Selection_Birkenau_ramp.jpg)
