43 The Holocaust

In a few short years, between 1939 and 1945, some 6 million Jews—two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population—were systematically murdered by the Nazis. The magnitude of the horror contained within this bald statement is almost impossible to grasp.

Nor is it easy to comprehend the motives of the perpetrators, who took that most hateful and twisted of human delusions—belief in the superiority of one race over others—to its logical conclusion. It was not the first nor the last example of genocide, but it was on a scale that humanity has not so far surpassed.

The word “holocaust,” first used in this context by historians in the 1950s, comes from a Greek word meaning “burned whole,” and was applied in the Old Testament to animal sacrifices in which the victim was entirely consumed by fire—the allusion being to the burning of the bodies of murdered Jews in the crematoria of the extermination camps. To Jews, the attempted annihilation of European Jewry is simply the Shoah, the Hebrew word for “catastrophe.”

The roots of anti-Semitism Jewish communities had settled around the Mediterranean during Roman times, and from there spread throughout Europe. In those lands ruled by Muslims, such as medieval Spain, they were generally tolerated, but the Christian church tended to regard Jews as “Christ killers,” leading to intermittent bouts of persecution—such as the massacres of Jews during the religious fervor of the First Crusade and later at the time of the Black Death, which many claimed had been caused by Jews poisoning the wells. With their separate religion and culture, Jews, like other outsider groups through history, were groundlessly suspected of all sorts of abominations—such as the sacrifice of Christian children—and became a convenient scapegoat when things went wrong. Some countries, such as England in the late 13th century and Spain in 1492, expelled their Jewish communities altogether. It was almost 400 years before Jews were allowed back into England.

In western Europe, Jewish communities tended to be prosperous, middle-class and relatively assimilated—significant numbers even converted to Christianity. Many worked in commerce and banking—often because the professions, the civil service and the army had been barred to them—and their financial success often inspired envy, or worse.

Other victims of the Nazis

Jews were not the only victims of the Nazi doctrine of “racial hygiene”: nearly 400,000 Gypsies were also killed, together with untold numbers of Slavs, homosexuals and people with mental or physical disabilities. Also targeted for extermination were Jehovah’s Witnesses, communists, socialists, and any others regarded by the Nazis as enemies of the state. In addition, over 3 million Soviet prisoners of war—more than half of those taken by the German army—died during their captivity, so appalling were the conditions in which they were kept. In all, the Nazis killed an estimated 14 million people whom they regarded as Untermenschen (“sub-human”).

Toward the “final solution” During the later 19th century there emerged a perversion of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection that held that, to ensure the future of the human race, only the fittest specimens, in both physical and mental terms, should be allowed to breed. A pseudo-science of “eugenics” arose, which identified all those who should be prevented from having children—the mentally ill, criminals, alcoholics, those of limited intellectual capacity, those born with physical defects, and so on. Alongside eugenics, a new form of racism emerged, which identified some “races” as “superior” to others using pseudo-scientific techniques such as measuring skull dimensions, and which advocated maintaining the “purity” of the “superior races” by preventing mixed marriages. Into this heady brew, the Nazis threw in a strong dose of traditional anti-Semitism to come up with a determination to find a “final solution to the Jewish question.”

“We Germans must finally learn not to regard the Jew … as people of our own kind …”

Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, March 5, 1936

After Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, Jews were expelled from the civil service, and Jewish shops and businesses were boycotted. Two years later, the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of their German citizenship and forbade them from marrying “Aryans” (as the Nazis described the blond and blue-eyed Germanic and Nordic “race”). On November 9, 1938, on Kristallnacht (“the night of broken glass”), attacks were made on Jewish homes, shops and synagogues across Germany, and nearly 100 Jews were murdered. Many wealthier Jews had already fled Germany, but many remained, and it became increasingly difficult for would-be refugees to find a country that would accept them.

The Second World War gave the Nazis the opportunity to fulfill their genocidal policies, not only in Germany, but in all the countries they conquered. As the German army swept through Poland in 1939, and then on into Russia in 1941, they were accompanied byEinsatzgruppen (“task forces”) of SS troops whose job it was to eliminate Soviet political commissars and round up and “resettle” the Jewish population. “Resettlement” was a euphemism for extermination, and by early 1942 the Einsatzgruppen had killed more than half a million Jews, mostly by shooting. But things were going too slowly for the Nazi leadership, and in January 1942 a group of senior officials met in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss the achievement of the “final solution.”

The outcome was a ruthlessly efficient system for the industrialization of murder. Vast camps were built in Poland, at places such as Auschwitz and Treblinka. Trainload by trainload, the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe were transported in cattle trucks to the camps. As they disembarked, doctors identified the fitter ones and these were put to work as slave labor. Others became the subject of brutal medical experiments. The majority—men, women, children, babies—were herded away, ordered to strip and ushered into what they thought were shower blocks. But then the doors were locked, and from the ceiling there flowed not water, but Zyklon-B, a lethal gas containing hydrogen cyanide. It took the victims up to twenty minutes to die. One SS doctor, after he had witnessed his first gassing, recorded in his diary that “Dante’s hell seemed like a comedy in comparison.” Once all were dead, the bodies were carted off to the crematoria, which were soon belching smoke both by day and by night.

“I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone—terribly alone in a world without God and without man.”

Elie Wiesel, Night, 1958, an account of his experiences as an inmate at Auschwitz and Buchenwald

Even as the Red Army advanced remorselessly toward the German Fatherland, the Nazis diverted precious resources into maintaining the rate of extermination, even evacuating camp inmates westward in appalling “death marches.” It was madness on an unimaginable scale, but the men and women involved in carrying out the “final solution” were not inhuman monsters but ordinary men and women who had been so indoctrinated that they believed they were just doing their job, efficiently and in accordance with the Führer’s will. The realization of the darkness that had settled in the heart of Europe—Germany, the land of Schiller, Goethe and Beethoven—brought about a profound shift in the continent’s view of itself. Indeed, humanity as a whole could never look at itself in the same way ever again.

the condensed idea

Genocide on an unsurpassed scale