Nazi officials at the Buchenwald concentration camp, c. 1941
Hitler’s virulent anti-Semitism can be gleaned from reading his autobiographical Mein Kampf. The Jew had become the nation’s scapegoat for all that was wrong with Germany, including the harsh terms imposed on Germany following her defeat in the First World War. The erosion of Jewish identity began as soon as the Nazis came to power, and by September 1939 half of Germany’s Jewish population had migrated. The Nazi disdain for the physically and mentally disabled resulted in a programme of mass euthanasia. Gypsies, homosexuals and all other minorities considered deviant and subhuman by the Nazis fell prey to German brutality. The Nürnberg Laws of 1935 stripped Jews of German citizenship and the violent, state-organized Kristallnacht, the ‘Night of Broken Glass’, on 9–10 November 1938, razed much of what was left of Jewish identity throughout Germany.
With the outbreak of war, the Nazis immediately began killing or ghettoizing Jews. Over a million Jews had been shot on the edge of grave pits, but the Nazi hierarchy considered the process too time-consuming and detrimental to the mental health of the murder squads, often recruitedfrom the local populations in conquered areas, who, although willingly collaborated in the killings, eventually found the task gruelling. Seeking alternative methods, the Germans began experimenting with gas, using carbon monoxide in mobile units, but it was considered too slow and inefficient.
Eventually, after experiments on Soviet prisoners of war in Auschwitz during September 1941, Zyklon B, a gas capable of murdering vast numbers at a time, was introduced throughout all death camps. As well as the extermination camps, there were the labour camps, where inmates were worked to death on, for example, the production of the V-1 and V-2 rockets; and concentration camps, that had been in existence since 1933 for rounding up political opponents of the Nazi regime.
On 20 January 1942, senior Nazis met at Berlin’s Lake Wannsee to formalize the ‘Final Solution’ – the programme to eliminate all Jews – in a two-hour meeting chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, whom Hitler called ‘the man with an iron heart’. Heydrich became Hitler’s representative in Czechoslovakia and ruled his protectorate with ruthless brutality until his assassination in Prague on 27 May 1942. He died a week later, on 4 June.
In July 1944, Soviet forces liberated the first extermination camps, including Treblinka, and in January 1945, Auschwitz. Only the very weakest prisoners remained; the rest the Germans had taken with them on horrific death marches westwards back to Germany. By the end of the war, 6 million Jews had been murdered, a third of whom were children. Only one fifth of Jews in German-occupied Europe, including women and children, survived the war.