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The Holocaust

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The Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah, was the genocide of Europe's Jews during the Second World War. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered around six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, about two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.[1][2] The Nazi regime also persecuted and murdered millions of other people, including Roma and Sinti, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish and other Slavic civilians, and political opponents, for different reasons and under different policies.[3]

Background

Jews had lived in Europe for more than two thousand years and had long faced prejudice and discrimination, known as antisemitism. In the 19th and early 20th centuries a new, racial form of antisemitism spread, falsely claiming that Jews were a separate and dangerous race.[4] Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party made this hatred central to its ideology. After Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933, the Nazis quickly banned other parties, took control of the press and set up camps to imprison political opponents without trial.[5]

Persecution

About 500,000 Jews lived in Germany in 1933, less than 1 per cent of the population. The regime passed around 1,500 anti-Jewish measures, pushing Jews out of jobs, schools and public life. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 took away their full citizenship.[4] On 9–10 November 1938 the Nazis organised a nationwide attack known as Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass"): thousands of Jewish shops were looted, more than 1,000 synagogues were damaged or destroyed, at least 90 Jews were killed and as many as 30,000 Jewish men were arrested.[6][7]

After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 and began the Second World War, the occupiers forced Jews into crowded, closed-off districts called ghettos.[5]

Murder of Europe's Jews

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, German units and local collaborators carried out mass shootings of Jews in the occupied east, killing 1.5 to 2 million men, women and children.[5] In January 1942 senior officials met at the Wannsee Conference to coordinate what the Nazis called the "Final Solution", a plan to murder all the Jews of Europe.[8] Jews from across the continent were deported to occupied Poland. Most of the victims were killed in 1942, the deadliest year, when more than three million Jews were murdered.[5]

Camps and ghettos

Concentration camps, first set up in 1933, held political prisoners and others the regime persecuted; many prisoners died from hunger, disease, forced labour and ill-treatment. From late 1941 the Nazis also built extermination camps whose purpose was mass murder, mainly by poison gas: Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau, all in occupied Poland. About 2.7 million Jews were murdered in these camps, around one million of them at Auschwitz. Up to a million more died in ghettos, labour camps and concentration camps.[2]

People in many occupied and allied countries helped the perpetrators by identifying, arresting and deporting Jews. Others risked their lives to hide or rescue them.[9]

Other victims

The Nazis and their allies murdered millions of other people. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, they included:[2]

  • about 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, most of whom died from deliberate starvation, disease and ill-treatment;
  • about 1.8 million non-Jewish Polish civilians;
  • at least 250,000, and possibly as many as 500,000, Roma and Sinti, whom the Nazis persecuted on racial grounds, as they did Jews;
  • 250,000–300,000 disabled people living in institutions, including at least 10,000 children. About 70,000 of them were murdered in the so-called "T4" programme of 1940–41;[10]
  • more than 310,000 Serb civilians murdered by the Ustaša regime in Croatia;
  • tens of thousands of German political opponents, and others the regime labelled "criminals" or "asocial";
  • about 1,700 Jehovah's Witnesses, persecuted for refusing to swear loyalty to the regime or to serve in the army;
  • hundreds, possibly thousands, of gay and bisexual men, and an unknown number of Black people living in Germany.

Liberation and aftermath

As Allied armies advanced, the Nazis tried to destroy evidence of their crimes and forced camp prisoners on long marches into Germany, on which many died.[4] Soviet troops reached Majdanek in July 1944 and Auschwitz on 27 January 1945; British and American forces liberated camps in Germany in the spring of 1945. In January 1945 more than 700,000 people were still held in the camp system, and as many as a third died before the war ended.[11]

Many survivors could not return home; many later settled in Israel, founded in 1948, or in the United States. Leading Nazis were tried by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945–46, and later trials included that of Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961, though most perpetrators were never tried.[5] The crimes led to the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948. Germany has paid compensation to survivors and to Israel since the 1950s.[7]

Remembrance

The Holocaust is one of the most thoroughly documented events in history. Records kept by the Nazis themselves, the testimony of survivors and witnesses, and the evidence presented at post-war trials provide overwhelming proof of what happened.[2] It is remembered through memorials, museums such as Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and education worldwide. In 2005 the United Nations made 27 January, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, International Holocaust Remembrance Day;[12] in the United Kingdom it is marked as Holocaust Memorial Day. In 2022 the UN General Assembly condemned Holocaust denial, the false claim that the Holocaust did not happen or has been exaggerated.[13]

References

  1. ↑ Landau, Ronnie S. (2016). The Nazi Holocaust: Its History and Meaning (3rd ed.). I.B. Tauris. pp. 3, 124, 126. ISBN 978-0-85772-843-2.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (26 September 2023). "How Many People did the Nazis Murder? (Documenting numbers of victims of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution)". Holocaust Encyclopedia.
  3. ↑ Stone, Dan (2023). The Holocaust: An Unfinished History. Penguin. ISBN 978-0-241-38870-9.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Longerich, Peter (2010). Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-280436-5.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 Gerlach, Christian (2016). The Extermination of the European Jews. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-70689-6.
  6. ↑ Cesarani 2016, pp. 184–187; Gerlach 2016, p. 44.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Cesarani, David (2016). Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0-230-76891-8.
  8. ↑ Gerlach 2016, pp. 84–85.
  9. ↑ Bergen, Doris (2016). War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1-4422-4228-9.
  10. ↑ Gerlach 2016, p. 58; Kay, Alex J. (2021). Empire of Destruction: A History of Nazi Mass Killing. Yale University Press. p. 38. ISBN 978-0-300-26253-7.
  11. ↑ Gerlach 2016, p. 117.
  12. ↑ United Nations General Assembly (1 November 2005). "Resolution 60/7: Holocaust remembrance". A/RES/60/7.
  13. ↑ United Nations General Assembly (20 January 2022). "Resolution 76/250: Holocaust denial". A/RES/76/250.
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