Holocaust

Holocaust

The word “holocaust” hails from two Greek words “holos” meaning whole and “kaustos” meaning burned. Therefore, the Holocaust is a name that was used to historically define a sacrificial offering that was burned on an altar. However, from 1945, the word holocaust attained a new and horrible meaning. Accordingly, it was used to define the mass murder of 6 million European Jews. The Jews were killed along with some other persecuted groups such as homosexuals and Gypsies. Therefore, as it is now, the term Holocaust is used to define the mass murder of the Jews. The paper will explore the occurrences surrounding the Holocaust.

Before the Holocaust

Adolf Hitler did not mark the beginning of Anti-Semitism in Europe. Regardless of the fact that the term itself came into use in the 1870s, evidence pertaining to hostility toward Jews dates back to as far as the ancient world (Crowe 45). Thus, this was when the Roman authorities obliterate the Jewish temple that was situated in Jerusalem (Crowe 45). Subsequently, they forced the Jews to leave Palestine. In addition to this, the Enlightenment during the 17th and 18th centuries accentuated religious intolerance (Crowe 47). In the 19th century, Napoleon together with other European rulers established legislations that marked the end of the long-standing restrictions on Jews (Crowe 52). The Anti-Semitic feeling in most of the situations took a racial form rather than a religious one. Conversely, the Hitler’s specific slanderous brand regarding anti-Semitism is not precisely known.

Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust

Like most the anti-Semites in Germany, Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat in the First World War in 1918 (Crowe 81). While in prison due to his role in the Beer Hall Putch of 1923 leading to treason, he authored a propaganda tract and a memoir. It was referred to as “Mein Kampf” meaning “My Struggle” (Crowe 95). In this piece of work, he foretold a general European war that would lead to the wiping out of the Jewish race in Germany. Hitler had an obsession with the idea of the superiority of the pure German race. He referred to this as “Aryan”. He also pointed out that there need for Levensraum otherwise referred to as living space for the expansion of the German race (Bergen 30).

Subsequently, when Hitler was released from prison, he took advantage of the weaknesses of his rivals and improved the status of his party. He took the position of the Chancellor of Germany in the year 1933. Between 1933 and 1939, Hitler revolutionized the Nazi (Crowe 107). The goals of the Nazi Revolution were the spatial expansion and racial purity, Hitler’s core principles. These two goals informed the domestic and foreign policy. Initially, the Nazis used the harshest persecutions for political opponents such as the Social Democrats and the Communists (Bergen 23). March 1933 marked the establishment of the first official concentration camp at Dachau. Most of the first prisoners at the camp were Communists (Bergen 54). Conversely, this was followed by a network of concentration camps which became killing grounds for the Holocaust.

 Holocaust Events

The German Nazi regime was in charge of committing the murders during the Second World War. According to Adolf Hitler, who was the anti-Semitic Nazi leader, Jews were an inferior race. He considered them an alien threat to the German community and racial purity (Bergen 63). Consequently, Jews were consistently persecuted during the Nazi rule. The Gypsies (Roma), the Poles (Slavic people) and the disabled were persecuted along with the Jews because they were also perceived as inferior races (Crowe 122). Moreover, other groups were persecuted on behavioural, ideological and political grounds including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Socialists and Communists (Crowe 138).

The Germans and their collaborators used different mechanisms to eliminate the lives of the Jews and other people considered to be threats. Accordingly, about 2-3 million Soviet prisoners of war were killed or left to die as a consequence of maltreatment, neglect, disease, starvation (Bergen 172). The Germans also deported millions Soviet and Polish civilians for forced labour in German-occupied Poland and Germany and targeted the non-Jewish Polish intelligentsia for killing (Bergen 117). The individual who worked under forced labour died under deplorable conditions. Aside from this, from the time when the Nazi regime took power, the German authorities persecuted homosexuals and other people whose behaviours did not harmonize with the prescribed social norms (Stone 119). Other persons who were targeted by the Germans police officials including religious dissidents such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and political opponents such as trade unionists, Socialists and Communists dies as a consequence of maltreatment and incarceration (Crowe 132).

By 1933, the population of the Jewish people is Europe was more than nine million. In Germany, the population of the Jews was about 525,000 (Crowe 105). They were only 1 percent of the German population. A larger percentage of the European Jews resided in countries that were influenced by or were occupied by the Nazi Germany during the Second World War. By the year 1945, the Germans and their collaborators had claimed the lives of almost two in three European Jews. This was considered a part of the “Final Solution” which was a part of the Nazi policy (Stone 147).

The persecution of the Jews took place in what the Nazis referred to as the “Aryanization” of Germany. In the next six years after Nazi Revolution, the non-Aryans were dismissed for the civil service (Crowe 117). The Jewish doctors and lawyers were stripped of their clients. Furthermore, the Jewish-owned businesses were liquefied. With reference to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, an individual who had 3-4 Jewish grandparents was termed as a Jew (Crowe 128). The Nuremberg Laws contributed to the persecution and stigmatization of the Jews. Even though the Jews were the primary target in the Holocaust because they were perceived as threats to the Germans, the Holocaust also claimed the lives of 200,000 Gypsies and at least 200,000 patients who were either physically or mentally disabled. The patients were mostly Germans, and they were killed through the Euthanasia Program (Bergen 121).

Execution of the “Final Solution”

When the Nazi regime started its rule, the National Socialist government constructed concentration camps. The work of these camps was to detain imagined and real ideological and political opponents (Bergen 188). In the years prior the start of the war, the police and SS officials increasingly incarcerated the Roma, Jews and other victims of racial and ethnic hatred in the camps. With the aim of facilitating the later deportation of the Jews, the Germans, together with their collaborators established ghettos, forced-labour camps and transit camps for Jews in the years during the war (Stone 243). The German authorities also created a number of forced labour camps both in the territory occupied by Germans and in the Greater German Reich. These camps held non-Jews that the Germans were interested in their forced labour (Crowe 230).

Prior to the execution of the “Final Solution”, there had been occurrences that claimed the lives of the Jews and other minority groups. Accordingly, the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked the beginning of a novel level of brutality associated with warfare (Bergen 218). From September 1941, every Jew who was in the German territory was marked with a yellow star. This made the Jews open targets. From June of the same year, different experiments of mass killing were performed at the Ausschwitz concentration camp, near Krakow (Crowe 259). August of the same year, 500 officials gasses 500 POWs with a pesticide known as Zyklon-B to death. Accordingly, the SS ordered for large volumes of gas from a German pet-control firm in preparation for the Holocaust (Crowe 268).

The first occurrence was the Einsatzgruppen, which were mobile killing units. Through these units, more than 500,000 Soviet Jews were murdered. Most of them were killed by shooting. This was later followed by militarized battalions of the Order Police officials (Bergen 222). These officials moved behind the German lines and executed mass-murder operations against the Soviet state, Roma and the Jews. The mass murder operations were also committed against Communist Party officials the Waffen SS and the Wehrmacht units supported the Police and German SS units (Bergen 225). The supported enable the police and German SS units to murder more than one million Jewish children, women and men.

In a period between 1941 and 1944, the Nazi German engaged in the deportation of millions of Jews from Germany. The Germans drove Jews out of occupied territories and from countries that formed its Axis of allies to killing centres and ghettos (Stone 243). The killing centres were known as extermination camps. They included Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka, Chelmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau, which is the largest of them all. In this camp alone, more than 2 million people were killed (Crowe 260-262). In these camps, the Jews were killed in specially created gassing facilities.

End of the Holocaust

In the final months with regard to the Second World War, the SS guards employed the usage of the trains to transport camp inmates. In addition to this, they used forced marches to move some of the detainees. These marches are referred to as the “death marches” (Bergen 234). This exercise was engaged in with the aim of averting the Allied liberation of large numbers of prisoners. The Allied forces moved across Europe. They engaged in a series of offensives against Germany. Subsequently, they started to encounter and liberate prisoners held in concentration camps (Stone 295). They also freed prisoners en route which had been forced to march from one camp to another. The forced marches were carried out until May 7, 1945 (Stone 318). This was the day when the German military unconditionally gave up to the Allies. According to the Western Allies, the Second World War came to an end the subsequent day, thus, May 8th. The Soviet announced May 9, 1945, as their “Victory Day” (Stone 320).

The Aftermath of the Holocaust

After the end of the Holocaust, most of the survivors were sheltered in the camps meant for displaced persons who were under the Allied powers. In 1948-1951, about 700,000 Jews had emigrated to Israel (Crowe 393). This included 136,000Jewish people who had been displaced from Europe. Other Jewish displaced persons emigrated from the United States and other nations (Crowe 402). The year 1957 marked the closure of the last displaced personal camps The Crimes committed during the Holocaust were devastation to most of the Jewish communities in Europe (Crowe 430).

To some extent, the Jewish faith was affected by the Holocaust. They could not understand why God did not do anything such as performing miracles to get them out of the situation (Stone 346). Thus, they questioned why God had allowed such evil to proliferate and operate while He did nothing. Some of them rendered the covenant null and void. Others tried to establish whether the Holocaust was a punishment for not living in accordance with the covenant (Crowe 436). Accordingly, victims in this category tried their level best to keep the covenant by observing the Sabbath day and eating kosher foods (Crowe 347). Some lost faith and did not have hope in life. They held to it that such events could occur to them again. Some did not see the need to perpetuate Judaism. They abandoned Judaism as a way of preventing their descendants from the horrors they had experienced. Therefore, some converted and raised their children as non-Jews (Bergen 288).

Conclusion

The Holocaust is a dark history. It is based on the ideologies of a selfish leader who turns the whole nation toward hating an entire race. Thus, Hitler used his position as a leader to accomplish personal gains that did not necessarily benefit the Germans, but created hostility based on racial lines. Additionally, Hitler took advantage of the Second War because he knew the allies would be focused on the war. During this time, Jews were killed in masses.

Works Cited

Bergen, Doris. The Holocaust : a concise history. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers , 2009.

Crowe, David. The Holocaust: Roots, History, and Aftermath. Philadelphia, PA: Westview Press , 2008.

Stone, Dan. The Holocaust and historical methodology. Vol. 16. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012.