"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]

The Holocaust (from the Greek (): holos, "completely" and kaustos, "burnt"), also known as (Hebrew: ), Churben (Yiddish: ), is the term generally used to describe the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a programme of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist German Workers? Party (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler.^[2]

Other groups were persecuted and killed by the regime, including the Gypsies; Soviets, particularly prisoners of war; Communists; ethnic Poles; other Slavic people; the disabled; homosexuals; and political and religious dissidents.^[3][4] Many scholars do not include these groups in the definition of the Holocaust, defining it as the genocide of the Jews,^[5] or what the Nazis called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." Taking into account all the victims of Nazi persecution, the total number of victims is estimated to be nine to 11 million.^[6]

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. 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 state."^[7]

Death penalty for Jews outside of the Warsaw ghetto and for Poles helping Jews in any way. German authorities official announcement in occupied Warsaw 1941.

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. Its Latin form (holocaustum) was first used with specific reference to a massacre of Jews by the chroniclers Roger of Howden^[8] and Richard of Devizes in the 1190s. Since the late 19th century, it has been used primarily to refer to disasters or catastrophes.

The biblical word Shoah (????) (also spelled Sho'ah and Shoa), meaning "calamity," became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s.^[9] Shoah is preferred by many Jews for a number of reasons, including the theologically offensive nature of the word "holocaust."^[10]

Definition

The word "holocaust" has been used since the 18th century to refer to the violent deaths of a large number of people.^[11] For example, Winston Churchill and other contemporaneous writers used it before World War II to describe the Armenian Genocide of World War I.^[12] Since the 1950s its use has been increasingly restricted, and it is now mainly used to describe the Nazi Holocaust, spelled with a capital H.

"Holocaust" was adopted as a translation of "Shoah" — a Hebrew word connoting catastrophe, calamity, disaster and destruction^[13] — which was used in 1940 in Jerusalem in a booklet called Sho'at Yehudei Polin, and translated as The Holocaust of the Jews of Poland. "Shoah" had earlier been used in the context of the Nazis as a translation of "catastrophe"; for example, in 1934, Chaim Weizmann told the Zionist Action Committee that Hitler's rise to power was an "unvorhergesehene Katastropha, etwa ein neur Weltkrieg" ("an unforeseen catastrophe, perhaps even a new world war"); the Hebrew press translated "Katastropha" as "Shoah."^[14] In the spring of 1942, the Jerusalem historian BenZion Dinur (Dinaburg) used "Shoah" in a book published by the United Aid Committee for the Jews in Poland to describe the extermination of Europe's Jews, calling it a "catastrophe" that symbolized the unique situation of the Jewish people.^[13][15] The word "Shoah" was chosen in Israel to describe the Holocaust, the term institutionalized by the Knesset on April 12, 1951, when it established Yom Ha-Shoah Ve Mered Ha-Getaot, the national day of remembrance. By the 1950s, its translation, "Holocaust," popularized by Yad Vashem, had come routinely to refer to the genocide of the European Jews.^[9][14]

The usual German term for the extermination of the Jews during the Nazi period was the euphemistic phrase Endlösung der Judenfrage (the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question"). In both English and German, "Final Solution" is widely used as an alternative to "Holocaust".^[16] For a time after World War II, German historians also used the term Völkermord ("genocide"), or in full, der Völkermord an den Juden ("the genocide of the Jewish people"), while the prevalent term in Germany today is either Holocaust or increasingly Shoah.

The word "holocaust" is also used in a wider sense to describe other actions of the Nazi regime. These include the killing of around half a million migrant Romani peoples, the Gypsies and Sinti, the deaths of several million Soviet prisoners of war, along with slave laborers, gay men, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled (See eugenics), and a vast assortment of perceived potential troublemakers 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 current sense 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 the other crimes of the Nazis.

Even more hotly disputed 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 by 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.

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."^[18] 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 antisemitic 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.^[18]

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:

The slaughter was systematically conducted in virtually all areas of Nazi-occupied territory in what are now 35 separate European countries.^[19] 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 England and Ireland.^[20]

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.^[21] All persons of recent Jewish ancestry were to be exterminated in lands controlled by Germany.^[22]

Medical experiments

A cold water immersion experiment at Dachau concentration camp presided over by Professor Holzlohner (left) and Dr. Rascher (right).

Another distinctive feature was the extensive use of human subjects in medical experiments. German physicians carried out such experiments at Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen and Natzweiler concentration camps.^[23]

Romani children in Auschwitz, victims of medical experiments.

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.^[23] 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.^[24] Subjects who survived Mengele's experiments were almost always killed and dissected after the 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."^[25] Vera Alexander was a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz who looked after 50 sets of Romani twins:

Victims and death toll

The exact number of people killed during the Holocaust is not known, and so estimates and ranges of this figure are given instead. The groups of people that are defined to be victims of the Holocaust has a large impact on the number of victims. If Jews are considered to be the sole victims of the Holocaust, then the number of victims is estimated to be around 6.0 million. If the three million Soviet POWs, 150,000 disabled and mentally ill people, 130,000 to 285,000 Roma and Sinti, 5-15,000 homosexuals, political prisoners and religious dissenters are included as victims of the Holocaust, then the death toll is estimated to be around nine million people. Including the deaths of two million ethnic Poles as victims of the Holocaust brings the number of victims to around 11 million. The broadest definition of the Holocaust would also include Soviet civilian victims, raising the death toll to 17 million people.^[35]

Jews

Members of the Sonderkommando burn corpses in the firepits at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Photographer Alberto Errera, August 1944. Courtesy of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum, Poland.^[36]

Figures from Lucy Dawidowicz showing the annihilation of the Jewish population of Europe.^[26]

Hilberg estimate of 5.1 million, in the third edition of The Destruction of the European Jews, includes over 800,000 who died from "ghettoization and general privation"; 1,400,000 killed in open-air shootings; and up to 2,900,000 who perished in camps. Hilberg estimates the death toll of Jews in Poland as up to 3,000,000.^[40] Hilberg's numbers are generally considered to be a conservative estimate, as they typically include only those deaths for which records are available, avoiding statistical adjustment.^[41]

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.^[42] Lucy S. Dawidowicz used pre-war census figures to estimate that 5.934 million Jews died (see her figures (left) here).^[43]

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 six 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. 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. 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.

The number of people killed at the major extermination camps is estimated as: Auschwitz-Birkenau: 1.4 million;^[45] Treblinka: 870,000;^[46] Belzec: 600,000;^[47] Majdanek: 360,000;^[48] Chelmno: 320,000;^[49] Sobibór: 250,000;^[50] and Maly Trostinets: 65,000.^[51] This gives a total of over 3.8 million; 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 one million Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet territories (an approximate figure, since the Einsatzgruppen killings were frequently undocumented).^[52] Many more died through execution or of disease and malnutrition in the ghettos of Poland before they could be deported.

Other Groups

Slavs

One of Hitler's ambitions at the start of the war was to exterminate, expel, or enslave most or all Slavs so as to make living space for German settlers. This plan of genocide^[53] was to be carried into effect gradually over a period of 25-30 years.^[54]

Ethnic Poles

Execution of Poles by Einsatzkommando ? Leszno, October 1939

The genocide against ethnic Poles was not at the scale of the genocide against ethnic Jews. Nazi planners decided that a genocide against ethnic Poles at the same scale as against ethnic Jews could not proceed in the short run since "such a solution to the Polish question would represent a burden to the German people into the distant future, and everywhere rob us of all understanding, not least in that neighbouring peoples would have to reckon at some appropriate time, with a similar fate".^[55] Between 1.8 and 2.1 million non-Jewish Polish citizens perished in German hands during the course of the war, about four-fifths of whom were ethnic Poles with the remaining fifth being ethnic minorities of Ukrainians and Belarusians, the vast majority of them civilians.^[28][29] At least 200,000 of these victims died in concentration camps with about 146,000 being killed in Auschwitz. Many others died as a result of general massacres such as in the Warsaw Uprising where between 120,000 and 200,000 civilians were killed.^[58] The policy of the Germans in Poland included diminishing food rations, conscious lowering of the state of hygiene and depriving the population of medical services. The general mortality rate rose from 13 to 18 per thousand. ^[59] Overall, about 5.1 million of the victims of Nazism were Polish citizens,^[29] both Jewish and non-Jewish, and over the course of the war Poland lost over 16 percent of its pre-war population; 3.1 million (90 percent) of the 3.4 million Polish Jews and 2.0 million (six percent) of the 31.7 million non-Jewish Polish citizens died in German hands.^[60] Over 90 percent of the death toll came through non-military losses, as most of the civilians were targeted by various deliberate actions by Germans and Soviets.^[58]

A common German practice in occupied Poland was to round up random civilians on the streets of Polish cities. The term "?apanka" carried a sardonic connotation from the word's earlier use for the children's game known in English as "tag." Between 1942 and 1944 there were around 400 victims of this practice daily in Warsaw alone, with numbers on some days reaching several thousand. For example, on September 19, 1942, close to 3000 men and women caught in the round-ups all over Warsaw the previous two days were sent by train to Germany.^[61] Additionally, between 20,000 and 200,000^[62] Polish children were forcibly separated from their parents and, after undergoing scrutiny to ensure that they were of "Nordic" racial stock, were sent to Germany to be raised by German families.^[63]

South and East Slavs

The Kragujevac massacre

In Belarus, Nazi Germany imposed a brutal racist regime, burning down some 9,000 villages, deporting some 380,000 people for slave labour, and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. More than 600 villages, like Khatyn, were burned along with their entire population and at least 5,295 Belarusian settlements were destroyed by the Nazis and some or all of their inhabitants killed. Altogether, 2,230,000 people (24 percent of the population) were killed during the three years of German occupation.^[72] This includes 370,000 military dead^[73] and 245,000 Jews killed by the Einsatzgruppen.^[43]

In Ukraine, the total human losses during the war and German occupation are estimated at between 5.5 to 7.0 million people (13-17 percent of the population), including 1.366 million military dead^[74] and around 600,000 to 900,000 Jews killed by the Einsatzgruppen.

Soviet POWs

Soviet POWs in German captivity

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.^[75] Michael Berenbaum writes that serious scholarly estimates lie between 90,000 and 220,000.^[80] 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.^[81][82] 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.^[83] Hancock writes that, proportionately, the death toll equaled "and almost certainly exceed[ed], that of Jewish victims."^[84]

Before being sent to the camps, the victims were herded into ghettos, including several hundred into the Warsaw Ghetto.^[85] 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 Usta?e 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. On December 16, 1942, Heinrich Himmler, Commander of the SS and regarded as the "architect" of the Nazi genocide,^[86] 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.^[87] 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."^[88] Bauer argues that this adjustment reflected Nazi ideology that the Roma, originally an Aryan population, had been "spoiled" by non-Romani blood.^[89]

Disabled and mentally ill

"60,000 RM is what this person with genetic defects costs the community during his lifetime. Fellow German,^[90] that's your money too ?"^[91]

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.^[92]

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.^[93] 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).^[93] Another 300,000 were forcibly sterilized.^[94]

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),^[95] 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 vs. 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.

Tens of thousands were convicted between 1933 and 1944 and sent to camps for "rehabilitation," where they were identified by yellow armbands^[4] and later pink triangles worn on the left side of the jacket and the right trouser leg, which singled them out for sexual abuse.^[96] Hundreds were castrated by court order.^[97] They were humiliated, tortured, used in hormone experiments conducted by SS doctors, and killed.^[33] 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 two percent) of German homosexuals were persecuted by Nazis.^[96]

Freemasons and Jehovah's Witnesses

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.

Refusing to pledge allegiance to the Nazi party or to serve in the military, roughly 12,000 Jehovah's Witnesses were forced to wear a purple triangle and placed in camps, where they were given the option of renouncing their faith and submitting to the state's authority. Between 2,500 and 5,000 were killed.^[34] Historian Detlef Garbe, director at the Neuengamme (Hamburg) Memorial, writes that "no other religious movement resisted the pressure to conform to National Socialism with comparable unanimity and steadfastness."^[103]

Political activists

German communists, socialists and trade unionists were among the earliest domestic opponents of Nazism^[104] and were also among the first to be sent to concentration camps. They concerned Hitler due to their ties with the Soviet Union and because the Nazi Party was intractably opposed to communism, claiming that it was a Jewish ideology which the Nazis termed "Judeo-Bolshevism". The Nazis started rumors of impending communist violence as justification for the Enabling Act of 1933, the law which gave Hitler his original dictatorial powers. Herman Göring later testified at the Nuremberg Trials that the Nazis' willingness to repress German communists prompted Paul von Hindenburg and the old elite to cooperate with the Nazis. The first concentration camp was built at Dachau, in March 1933, to imprison German communists, socialists, trade unionists and others opposed to the Nazis.^[105] Communists, social democrats and other political prisoners were forced to wear a red triangle.

Hitler and the Nazis also hated German leftists because of their resistance to the party's racism. Many leaders of German leftist groups were Jews, and Jews were especially prominent among the leaders of the Spartacist Uprising in 1919. Hitler already referred to Marxism and "Bolshevism" as a means of "the international Jew" to undermine "racial purity" and survival of the Nordics or Aryans (sometimes of all white Europeans), as well to stir up socioeconomic class tension and labor unions against the government or state-owned businesses. Within the concentration camps such as Buchenwald, German communists were privileged in comparison to Jews because of their "racial purity."^[106]

Whenever the Nazis occupied a new territory, members of communist, socialist, or anarchist groups were normally to be the first persons detained or executed. Evidence of this is found in Hitler's infamous Commissar Order, in which he ordered the summary execution of all political commissars captured among Soviet soldiers, as well as the execution of all Communist Party members in German held territory.^[107][108] Einzatsgruppen carried out these executions in the east.^[109]

Nacht und Nebel (German for "Night and Fog") was a directive () of Hitler on December 7, 1941 signed and implemented by Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces Wilhelm Keitel, resulting in kidnapping and disappearance of many political activists throughout Nazi Germany's occupied territories.

Development and execution

Origins

At 10 a.m. on April 1, 1933, members of the Sturmabteilung moved into place all over Germany, positioning themselves outside Jewish-owned businesses to deter customers. These stormtroopers are outside Israel's Department Store in Berlin. The signs read: "Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews." ("Deutsche! Wehrt Euch! Kauft nicht bei Juden!")^[110] The store was ransacked during Kristallnacht in 1938, then handed over to a non-Jewish family.

Jewish intellectuals were among the first to leave. The philosopher Walter Benjamin left for Paris on March 18, 1933. Novelist Leon Feuchtwanger went to Switzerland. The conductor Bruno Walter fled after being told that the hall of the Berlin Philharmonic would be burned down if he conducted a concert there: the Frankfurter Zeitung explained on April 6 that Walter and fellow conductor Otto Klemperer had been forced to flee because the government was unable to protect them against the "mood" of the German public, which had been provoked by "Jewish artistic liquidators."^[111] Albert Einstein was visiting the U.S. on January 30, 1933. He returned to Ostende in Belgium, never to set foot in Germany again, and calling events there a "psychic illness of the masses"; he was expelled from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and his citizenship was rescinded.^[112] Saul Friedländer writes that when Max Liebermann, honorary president of the Prussian Academy of Arts, resigned his position, not one of his colleagues expressed a word of sympathy, and he died ostracized two years later. When the police arrived in 1943 with a stretcher to deport his 85-year-old bedridden widow, she committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturates rather than be taken.^[112]

Throughout the 1930s, the legal, economic, and social rights of Jews were steadily restricted. Friedländer writes that, for the Nazis, Germany drew its strength for its "purity of blood" and its "rootedness in the sacred German earth."^[113] In 1933, a series of laws were passed to exclude Jews from key areas: the Civil Service Law; the physicians' law; and the farm law, forbidding Jews from owning farms or taking part in agriculture. Jewish lawyers were disbarred, and in Dresden, Jewish lawyers and judges were dragged out of their offices and courtrooms, and beaten up.^[114] Jews were excluded from schools and universities, and from belonging to the Journalists' Association, or from being newspaper editors.^[113] The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of April 27, 1933 wrote:

In 1935, Hitler introduced the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship and deprived them of all civil rights. In his speech introducing the laws, Hitler said that if the "Jewish problem" cannot be solved by these laws, it "must then be handed over by law to the National-Socialist Party for a final solution (Endlösung)."^[115] The expression "Endlösung" became the standard Nazi euphemism for the extermination of the Jews. In January 1939, he said in a public speech: "If international-finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging the nations into yet another world war, the consequences will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe."^[116]

The question of the treatment of the Jews became an urgent one for the Nazis after September 1939, when they occupied the western half of Poland, home to about two million Jews. Himmler's right-hand man, Reinhard Heydrich, recommended concentrating all the Polish Jews in ghettos in major cities, where they would be put to work for the German war industry. The ghettos would be in cities located on railway junctions, so that, in Heydrich's words, "future measures can be accomplished more easily."^[117] During his interrogation in 1961, Adolf Eichmann testified that the expression "future measures" was understood to mean "physical extermination."^[117]

Increasing persecution and pogroms (1938?1942)

Berlin's Fasanenstrasse synagogue after Kristallnacht, November 9?10, 1938.

On Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, on November 9, 1938, Jews were attacked and Jewish property was vandalized across Germany. Approximately 100 Jews were killed, and another 30,000 sent to concentration camps, while over 7,000 Jewish shops and 1,668 synagogues (almost every synagogue in Germany) were damaged or destroyed. Similar events took place in Austria, particularly Vienna.

A number of deadly pogroms by local populations occurred during the Second World War, some with Nazi encouragement, and some spontaneously. This included the Ia?i pogrom in Romania on June 30, 1941, in which as many 14,000 Jews were killed by Romanian residents and police, and the Jedwabne pogrom, in which between 380 and 1,600 Jews were killed by local Poles in July 1941.^[118]

Madagascar plan

While Jews were murdered on mass scale since 1939, in 1940 some Nazis considered eliminating Jews by the unrealistic Madagascar Plan which, however futile, in retrospect did constitute an important psychological step on the path to the Holocaust.^[119] The planning was carried out by Eichmann's office; Heydrich called it a "territorial final solution". The plan was to ship all European Jews to Madagascar. In view of the difficulties of supporting more population in the General Gouvernment in July 1940, Hitler, still hoping for success with the Madagascar plan, stopped the deportation of Jews there.^[120] This was temporary, however, as the military situation offered no possibility to conquer Britain. The plan may have been foreseen as a remote and slower genocide through the unfavorable conditions on the island.^[121] Although the Final Solution was already in place and Jews were being exterminated, the formal declaration of the Plan's end was abandoned on February 10, 1942, when the German Foreign Office was given an official explanation that due to the war with the Soviet Union Jews are going to be "sent to the east" ^[122]

Early measures in German occupied Poland

Germany 1941, including occupied Poland and the General Government area.

German policemen tormenting a Jew in Rzeszów, Poland.

Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, leading Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, and France to declare war. Hans Frank, a German lawyer, was appointed Governor-General in October.

In September, Himmler appointed Reinhard Heydrich head of the Reich Security Head Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA), a body overseeing the work of the SS, the Security Police (SD), and the Gestapo in occupied Poland and charged with carrying out the policy towards the Jews described in Heydrich's report. (This body should not be confused with the Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt or Race and Resettlement Main Office, RuSHA, which was involved in carrying out the deportation of Jews.) First organised murders of Jews by German forces occurred during Operation Tannenberg and through Selbstschutz units. Later the Jews were herded into ghettos, mostly in the General Government area of central Poland, where they were put to work under the Reich Labor Office headed by Fritz Saukel. Here many thousands were killed in various ways, and many more died of disease, starvation, and exhaustion, but there was still no program of systematic killing. There is no doubt, however, that the Nazis saw forced labor as a form of extermination. The expression Vernichtung durch Arbeit ("destruction through work") was frequently used.

When the Germans occupied Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France in 1940, and Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941, anti-Semitic measures were also introduced into these countries, although the pace and severity varied greatly from country to country according to local political circumstances. Jews were removed from economic and cultural life and were subject to various restrictive laws, but physical deportation did not occur in most places before 1942. The Vichy regime in occupied France actively collaborated in persecuting French Jews. Germany's allies Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Finland were pressured to introduce antisemitic measures, but for the most part they did not comply until compelled to do so. The German puppet regime in Croatia, on the other hand, began actively persecuting Jews on its own initiative .

During 1940 and 1941, the murder of large numbers of Jews in German occupied Poland continued, and the deportation of Jews from Germany, Austria and the "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia" (today's Czech Republic) to General Gouvernment was undertaken. Eichmann was assigned the task of removing all Jews from these territories, although the deportation of Jews from Germany, particularly Berlin, was not officially completed until 1943. (Many Berlin Jews were able to survive in hiding.) By December 1939, 3.5 million Jews were crowded into the General Government area.

The Governor-General, Hans Frank, noted that this many people could not be simply shot. "We shall have to take steps, however, designed in some way to eliminate them." It was this dilemma which led the SS to experiment with large-scale killings using poison gas. This method had already been used during Hitler's campaign of euthanasia in Germany (known as "T4"). SS Obersturmführer Christian Wirth seems to have been the inventor of the gas chamber.

Although it was clear by 1941 that the SS hierarchy led by Himmler and Heydrich was determined to embark on a policy of killing all the Jews under German control, there were important centers of opposition to this policy within the Nazi regime. The grounds for the opposition were mainly economic, not humanitarian. Hermann Göring, who had overall control of the German war industry, and the German army's Economics Department, representing the armaments industry, argued that the enormous Jewish labor force assembled in the General Government area (more than a million able-bodied workers) was an asset too valuable to waste while Germany was preparing to invade the Soviet Union.

During this period there were a few conflicts between the Army and the SS over policy in Poland. Ultimately, neither Göring nor the army leadership was willing or able to challenge Himmler's authority, particularly since Himmler made it clear he had Hitler's support.

Concentration and labor camps (1933?1945)

April 12, 1945: Lager Nordhausen, where 20,000 inmates are believed to have died.

• Further information: Extermination through labour, List of Nazi German concentration camps, Nazi concentration camps, Nazi concentration camp badges.

• The major concentration and extermination camps: Auschwitz, Belzec, Bergen-Belsen, Che?mno, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Grini, Jasenovac, Klooga, Majdanek, Maly Trostinets, Mauthausen-Gusen, Ravensbrück, Treblinka.

• Camp badges: Black triangle, Pink triangle, Purple triangle, Yellow badge.

Leading up to the 1933 elections, the Nazis began intensifying acts of violence to wreak havoc among the opposition. With the cooperation of local authorities, they set up camps as concentration centers within Germany. One of the first was Dachau, which opened in March 1933. These early camps were meant to hold, torture, or kill only political prisoners, such as Communists and Social Democrats.^[123]

These early prisons — usually basements and storehouses — were eventually consolidated into full-blown, centrally run camps outside the cities. By 1942, six large extermination camps had been established in Nazi-occupied Poland.^[123] After 1939, the camps increasingly became places where Jews and POWs were either killed or forced to live as slave laborers, undernourished and tortured.^[124] It is estimated that the Germans established 15,000 camps in the occupied countries, many of them in Poland.^[125][126]

New camps were focused on areas with large Jewish, Polish intelligentsia, communist, or Roma and Sinti populations, including inside Germany. The transportation of prisoners was often carried out under horrifying conditions using rail freight cars, in which many died before reaching their destination.

Extermination through labour, a means whereby camp inmates would literally be worked to death — or frequently worked until they could no longer perform work tasks, followed by their selection for extermination — was invoked as a further systematic extermination policy. Furthermore, while not designed as a method for systematic extermination, many camp prisoners died because of harsh overall conditions or from executions carried out on a whim after being allowed to live for days or months.

Upon admission, some camps tattooed prisoners with a prisoner ID.^[127] Those fit for work were dispatched for 12 to 14 hour shifts. Before and after, there were roll calls that could sometimes last for hours, with prisoners regularly dying of exposure.^[128]

Ghettos (1940?1945)

• Further information: Emanuel Ringelblum, Judenrat, Ghettos in occupied Europe 1939-1944, Oyneg Shabbos

• Main ghettos: Cluj Ghetto, Kraków Ghetto, ?achwa Ghetto, ?ód? Ghetto, Lwów Ghetto, Theresienstadt Ghetto, Warsaw Ghetto, Wilna Ghetto

A child dying in the streets of the crowded Warsaw Ghetto, where hunger and disease killed 43,000 in 1941 alone.^[85]

From 1940 through 1942, starvation and disease, especially typhoid, killed hundreds of thousands. Over 43,000 residents of the Warsaw ghetto died there in 1941,^[85] more than one in ten; in Theresienstadt, more than half the residents died in 1942.^[129]

Each ghetto was run by a Judenrat (Jewish council) of German-appointed Jewish community leaders, who were responsible for the day-to-day running of the ghetto, including the provision of food, water, heat, medicine, and shelter, and who were also expected to make arrangements for deportations to extermination camps. Heinrich Himmler ordered the start of the deportations on July 19, 1942, and three days later, on July 22, the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto began; over the next 52 days, until September 12, 300,000 people from Warsaw alone were transported in freight trains to the Treblinka extermination camp. Many other ghettos were completely depopulated.

Berenbaum writes that the defining moment that tested the courage and character of each Judenrat came when they were asked to provide a list of names of the next group to be deported. The Judenrat members went through the tried and tested methods of delay, bribery, stonewalling, pleading, and argumentation, until finally a decision had to be made. Some argued that their responsibility was to save the Jews who could be saved, and that therefore others had to be sacrificed; others argued, following Maimonides, that not a single individual should be handed over who had not committed a capital crime. Judenrat leaders such as Dr. Joseph Parnas in Lviv, who refused to compile a list, were shot. On October 14, 1942, the entire Judenrat of Byaroza committed suicide rather than cooperate with the deportations.^[130]

The first ghetto uprising occurred in September 1942 in the small town of ?achwa in southeast Poland. Though there were armed resistance attempts in the larger ghettos in 1943, such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Bia?ystok Ghetto Uprising, in every case they failed against the Nazi military, and the remaining Jews were either killed or deported to the camps, which the Germans euphemistically called "resettlement in the East."^[131]

Death squads (1941?1943)

A member of Einsatzgruppe D is about to shoot a man sitting by a mass grave in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, in 1942. Present in the background are members of the German Army, the German Labor Service, and the Hitler Youth.^[132] The back of the photograph is inscribed "The last Jew in Vinnitsa".

In these territories, there were fewer restraints on the mass killing of Jews than there were in countries like France or the Netherlands, where there was a long tradition of tolerance and the rule of law, or even Poland where, despite a strong tradition of antisemitism, there was considerable resistance to Nazi persecution of Polish Jews. In the Baltic states, Belarus, and Ukraine, native antisemitism was reinforced by hatred of Communist rule, which many people associated with the Jews. Thousands of people in these countries actively collaborated with the Nazis. Ukrainians and Latvians joined SS auxiliary forces in large numbers and did much of the dirty work in Nazi extermination camps. Raul Hilberg writes that these were ordinary citizens; the great majority were university-educated professionals.^[135] They used their skills to become efficient killers, according to Michael Berenbaum.^[132]

Despite the subservience of the Army high command to Hitler, Himmler did not trust the Army to approve of, let alone carry out, the large-scale killings of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories. This task was assigned to SS formations called Einsatzgruppen ("task groups"), under the overall command of Heydrich. These had been used on a limited scale in Poland in 1939, but were now organized on a much larger scale. Einsatzgruppe A (commanded by SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Franz Stahlecker) was assigned to the Baltic area, Einsatzgruppe B (SS-Brigadeführer Artur Nebe) to Belarus, Einsatzgruppe C (SS-Gruppenführer Dr. Otto Rasch) to north and central Ukraine, and Einsatzgruppe D (SS-Gruppenführer Dr. Otto Ohlendorf) to Moldova, south Ukraine, the Crimea, and, during 1942, the north Caucasus. Of the four Einsatzgruppen, three were commanded by holders of doctorate degrees, of whom one (Rasch) held a double doctorate.^[136]

According to Ohlendorf at his trial, "the Einsatzgruppen had the mission to protect the rear of the troops by killing the Jews, gypsies, Communist functionaries, active Communists, and all persons who would endanger the security." In practice, their victims were nearly all defenseless Jewish civilians (not a single Einsatzgruppe member was killed in action during these operations). By December 1941, the four Einsatzgruppen listed above had killed, respectively, 125,000, 45,000, 75,000, and 55,000 people?a total of 300,000 people?mainly by shooting or with hand grenades at mass killing sites outside the major towns.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tells the story of one survivor of the Einsatzgruppen in Piryatin, Ukraine, when they killed 1,600 Jews on April 6, 1942, the second day of Passover:

The most notorious massacre of Jews in the Soviet Union was at a ravine called Babi Yar outside Kiev, where 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation on September 29?30, 1941. The killing of all the Jews in Kiev was decided on by the military governor (Major-General Friedrich Eberhardt), the Police Commander for Army Group South (SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln) and the Einsatzgruppe C Commander Otto Rasch. It was carried out by a mixture of SS, SD and Security Police, assisted by Ukrainian police.

On Monday the Jews of Kiev gathered by the cemetery, expecting to be loaded onto trains. The crowd was large enough that most of the men, women, and children could not have known what was happening until it was too late: by the time they heard the machine-gun fire, there was no chance to escape. All were driven down a corridor of soldiers, in groups of ten, and then shot. A truck driver described the scene:

From left to right; Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Karl Wolff (second from the right) at the Obersalzberg, May 1939. Wolff wrote in his diary that Himmler had vomited after witnessing the mass shooting of 100 Jews.^[137]

In December 1941, a few cases of typhus broke out in the Bogdanovka concentration camp in Transnistria, where over 50,000 Jews were held.^[138] A decision