The Holocaust: The Basics

Paul Bartrop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351329897
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Olocausto

The Holocaust: The Basics is a concise introduction to the study of this seismic event in mid twentieth-century human history.

The book takes an original approach as both a narrative and thematic introduction to the topic, and provides a core foundation for readers embarking upon their own study. It examines a range of perspectives and subjects surrounding the Holocaust, including:

• the perpetrators of the Holocaust
• the victims
• resistance to the Holocaust
• liberation
• legacies and survivors' memories of the Holocaust.

Suppported by a chronology, glossary, questions for discussion, and boxed case studies that focus the reader's thoughts and develop their appreciation of the subjects considered more broadly, The Holocaust: The Basics is the ideal introduction to this controversial and widely debated topic for both students and the more general reader.

1

INTRODUCTION

Defining the Holocaust

When looking at the Holocaust it is always advisable, as survivor Elie Wiesel has told us, to begin with tales. As he wrote in an essay as long ago as 1976:

Let us tell tales. Let us tell tales—all the rest can wait, all the rest must wait.

Let us tell tales—that is our primary obligation. Commentaries will have to come later, lest they replace or becloud what they mean to reveal.

Tales of children so wise and so old. Tales of old men mute with fear. Tales of victims welcoming death as an old acquaintance. Tales that bring man close to the abyss and beyond—and others that lift him up to heaven and beyond. Tales of despair, tales of longing. Tales of immense flames reaching out to the sky, tales of night consuming life and hope and eternity.

Let us tell tales so as to remember how vulnerable man is when faced with overwhelming evil. Let us tell tales so as not to allow the executioner to have the last word. The last word belongs to the victim. It is up to the witness to capture it, shape it, transmit it and keep it as a secret, and then communicate that secret to others.

(1976: 258)

The tale with which we can begin here relates to one of the greatest of Jewish historians, the Russian-born Jewish scholar Simon Dubnow. His is not a survivor’s story.

During the World War II, the elderly Dubnow was living in Riga, Latvia. Given the opportunity to escape the fearsome potential that a German invasion might bring, he decided to remain where he was, determined not to flee and in so doing hand the Nazis a victory. A number of witnesses to his death were later to provide the following record of his last moments:

When the Nazis entered Riga they evicted Dubnow from his home and seized his entire library. They summoned him for questioning at Gestapo headquarters and then placed him in a home for the aged. After a short period of ghetto organization the Nazis liquidated the ghetto at the end of October 1941 and a month later they carried out their first “action” against the Riga Jews. Dubnow was seriously ill, but friends managed to conceal him for a while. On the night of December 7–8 the Nazis carried out their second “action.” All the old and sick as well as the women in advanced pregnancy were herded together in buses. Dubnow was also taken outside to be squeezed into one of these overloaded buses. He was in a high fever at the time and was hardly able to move his feebled legs. A Latvian militiaman then advanced and fired a bullet in Dubnow’s back and the sainted martyr fell dead on the spot. The next day several friends buried him in the old cemetery in the Riga ghetto. A story went round that the last words that Dubnow muttered as he was being led out to the bus were: “Brothers, don’t forget! Recount what you hear and see! Brothers, make a record of it all!”

(Pinson, 1970: 39)

This is the kind of story with which most survivors of the Holocaust could readily identify. All are driven by Dubnow’s exhortation to remember and recount, and in doing so, to bear witness.

How are we to approach the enormous topic that is the Nazi Holocaust of the Jewish people? It negated every positive achievement of the twentieth century, a genocidal explosion that saw a sudden and irrevocable break with all the humanistic traditions that had been developing in Europe over the previous thousand years. The relationship between mass death and the industrial state that became manifested in the Holocaust was intimate, and as a result of it having taken place we forever have a yardstick by which all other cases of genocide must be measured. Its message is so powerful that no definition of Western civilization can ever again be constructed without reference being made to where the corruption of that civilization can lead.

The period of National Socialist rule across Europe was a time of immense upheaval, occasioned by deliberate and massive political violence. At first confined to Germany, it then spread to Austria, Czechoslovakia, and, eventually, to most of Europe. Its brutality was, until 1938, almost exclusively directed against political opponents, but by the end of the 1930s it began targeting Jews solely because of their Jewish identity.

The SS, the Nazi organization responsible for planning and executing the antisemitic measures, sought the elimination of those who it considered posed a threat through their very existence. This would be a genocidal struggle, forming part of a much broader campaign that also intended to destroy communism, wipe out the free-thinking opposition, and (after the onset of war) reduce the status of the population in the occupied areas (particularly in Eastern Europe) to that of ignorant and impotent vassals or serfs.

For the Nazis’ aims to be realized, their leader, Adolf Hitler, needed the expertise of professionals capable of organizing the murder of vast numbers of people, as well as a bureaucracy comprised of men and women capable of implementing it. Hitler was able to call on the experts responsible for his ambitious pre-war eugenics scheme, which had seen the death of scores of thousands of so-called “defective” humans—Germans whom the Nazis referred to as having “life unworthy of life” with congenital illnesses, psychological problems, crippling injuries, or physical deformities, among other features distinguishing them from supposedly “normal” people. The experts responsible for killing these people had developed both the techniques and the mindset necessary for murdering large numbers of human beings. Adapting what they had already been doing to the much larger tasks required in Eastern Europe seemed, for many, to be a natural progression.

By 1941 the primary objective of Nazism had become the physical elimination of all of Europe’s Jews. As one survivor of Auschwitz, Fania Fénelon, was later to recall, “The behavior of the SS was ruled by the terrible phrase: ‘Woe to those who forget that everything that resembles a human being is not necessarily a human being’” (1977: 97–98).

The war ended in 1945, and the world that had been fought for by the democracies had been saved. With Nazism destroyed, optimism for the future was high. This excitement would be short-lived as the Cold War developed, but there was reason to hope that the postwar world would bring with it the realization of all liberal democracy’s best ideals. One of several measures to bring this about, adopted by the newly established United Nations in 1948, was international legislation to prevent and punish the crime of genocide.

At that time there seemed to be no difficulty for people to identify it for what it was. A vast number of Europeans, in particular, already instinctively knew about genocide, even if the name was not yet in broad usage. In Allied capitals around the world, reports through both official channels and the media had already been conveying for some time the realities of the Nazi Holocaust, as evidence of the worst expressions of inhumanity was uncovered by liberating forces.

The genocidal nature of the Nazi regime is now such an established fact that it would not seem to require further elaboration. It was, it might be argued, the paradigmatic genocide (Garber, 1994). The perpetrators of the Holocaust had but one aim in mind: the complete removal of all Jews falling under their rule. An alteration of status through religious conversion or naturalization would not change their fate; in the Nazi view, every Jew, by virtue of his or her very birth, “was the static expression of Evil … a natural-born, predestined, non-assimilable heretic, doomed to Apocalyptic hell-fire” (Rousset, 1951). The fate of the Jews was planned as a total annihilation, from which none would be allowed to escape. The Nazis intended nothing less than the physical destruction, through murder, of every Jew who fell into their net.

One of the questions often asked about the Holocaust, given its enormity, is whether or not it was unique within the annals of history (Rosenbaum, 2018). This, perhaps, is the wrong question. All historical phenomena are unique in that they will never again occur in exactly the same way or according to the time-and-place circumstances in which the original event happened. Every genocidal act of the past century, from the Hereros to the Armenians to the Ukrainians, from East Timor to Burundi to Cambodia to Rwanda to Bosnia to Darfur, has been characterized by specific developments which cannot be transferred from one setting to another—if only for the reason that human affairs do not act that way. The best that objective historians can hope to identify is the features that are common or different, and from this ascertain whether some sort of general pattern can be discerned.

As all cases of genocide have elements that are indeed unique unto themselves, the key question about the Holocaust should not be “was it unique?,” but rather, turning the issue upside down, ask “what was unique about it?”—in other words, to assume its uniqueness and thereafter move straight on to identifying the feature or features that define its specific character.

To develop this discussion, we can take one aspect of the Holocaust—probably the most important of them all—the massive killing and destruction the Nazis inflicted on the Jews of Europe. The means they employed to achieve their murderous aims, especially from early 1942 onwards, was of course the death (or extermination) camp (Vernichtungslager), and it is this institution, thoroughly unprecedented in purpose and design, that is arguably the starkest feature of the Holocaust from 1942 onwards (Wachsmann, 2015).

Nothing, either before or since, approximates the Nazi death camps in design, intention, or operation. Nowhere have any other regimes producing malevolent concentration camps introduced establishments like these, in particular the “Operation Reinhard” death camps of Treblinka, Bełżec, and Sobibór. They were, and remain, thoroughly unprecedented in human history (Arad, 1987).

The period of National Socialist rule in Europe was a time of immense upheaval and dislocation, occasioned by deliberate and massive political violence. Its most extreme brief was to wage a genocidal struggle against the Jews, which, under the direction of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, the SS undertook with what can best be described as a religious zeal. A vast array of different types of concentration camps evolved, with at least forty-three different categories existing at the height of the Nazis’ power.

All of these institutions, whether concentration or extermination camps, were places of unmitigated horror, where life was characterized by “hard work, poor diet, over-crowded and unsanitary living conditions, and SS cruelty” (Edelheit and Edelheit, 1994: 67). Death by beating, bullets, or other means lurked around every corner. Throughout the war years, disease and starvation were constant companions. Deprived of all rights, ordinary inmates were subjected to the caprice of Nazi guards and the other prisoners placed in positions of authority over them.

The six death camps located in Poland—Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka—transformed the nature and course of Nazi concentration camp development. They were a departure from anything previously visualized in both their design and character, planned to methodically and efficiently murder millions of people, specifically Jews. They became the most lucid and unequivocal statement National Socialism made about itself, demonstrating beyond doubt that it was an anti-human ideology in which respect for life counted for nothing.

An understanding of the concentration and death camp system can add to our knowledge of Nazism in two important ways. First, it shows how a regime dedicated to mass murder mobilized all its resources for the purpose of feeding the demands of an industry that had been deliberately assigned the tasks of incarceration, degradation, and annihilation. Second, the history and fate of the camps demonstrates that the regime was aware that its activities were of a criminal and morally repugnant nature. After all, the Nazis chose to carry out their murderous assignments in places far removed from key population centers, accompanied by an exhaustive effort to destroy as much evidence of the killing as possible prior to being overrun by the advancing Allied forces. Put together, these aspects of what the death camps represented added up to a new dimension of inhumanity.

Millions of people suffered and died as a direct result of Nazi actions during World War II, but only the Jews were murdered because of the “crime” of their very existence (Berkowitz, 2007). Only the Jews were intended for total, complete, and utter annihilation, in which they would become extinct as a people. Why, therefore, does the Holocaust still matter? Because ignorance will triumph, and hatred, intolerance, bigotry, discrimination and thuggery will again become fashionable if it is forgotten. The passions unleashed against the Jewish people between 1933 and 1945 are the same kind that are still being unleashed against others, today. In our own self-interest, we must remember what happened, and take careful note, because, it might be argued, we dare not forget.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

• When speaking about the “Holocaust,” what time period are we referring to?
• Why were the Jews singled out for extermination?
• What were the distinctive features of the Holocaust?
• Is it possible to define the Holocaust without reference to the Nazi campaign of annihilation against the Jews of Europe? Why/Why not?

2

OUTLINES, ORIGINS, AND CONSEQUENCES

OVERVIEW

The Holocaust is the term in English most closely identified with the attempt by Germany’s National Socialist regime, in conjunction with its European allies, to exterminate the Jews of Europe during the period of World War II—particularly during its most destructive phase between 1941 and 1944. While an exact number of those murdered is impossible to determine, the best estimates settle at a figure approximating around six million Jews, one million of whom were children under the age of 12, and another half million of whom were aged between 13 and 18 (Laqueur, 2001).

The term “Holocaust” is most commonly used to describe the event, but two other terms are also employed, particularly within the Jewish world. The Hebrew word Churban, or “catastrophe,” which historically has been employed to describe the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem, is one of these; the other, utilized increasingly, is the Hebrew term Shoah (“calamity,” or, sometimes, “destruction”).

The first step on the road to the Holocaust took place on the night of February 27–28, 1933, when the Reichstag building in Berlin, the home of the German parliament, was deliberately set on fire. Who was responsible for the arson has long been a matter of dispute (Hett, 2014), but the next day, on the pretext that it had been set by communists and that a left-wing revolution was imminent, newly appointed Chancellor Adolf Hitler prevailed upon President Paul von Hindenburg to sign an emergency proclamation entitled the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State. It suspended all the basic civil and individual liberties guaranteed under the Weimar Constitution, empowering the government to take such steps as necessary to ensure that what was touted as a threat to German society was removed. In the first few days hundreds were detained, with tens of thousands more in succeeding weeks.

Then, on March 20, 1933, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler announced the establishment of the first compound for political prisoners, about 15 kilometers northwest of Munich, on the outskirts of the town of Dachau (Dillon, 2015). Other camps soon followed, among them Oranienburg, Papenburg, Esterwegen, Kemna, Lichtenburg, and Börgermoor (Wachsmann, 2015).

These camps were originally places of political imprisonment, and were nicknamed “Wilde-KZ” (“wild concentration camps”), alluding to the fact that they sprang up like wildflowers after refreshing rain following a long period of drought. There was little in the way of planning or procedure, and the camps frequently operated without any apparent system or direction. Often, the very location of these places was impromptu. Dachau was a former gunpowder factory; Oranienburg was originally a brewery (and later, a foundry); and Börgermoor and Esterwegen were initially simply rows of barracks set down on open expanses of marshy heathland. In other camps, prisoners had to build their own housing, and started their camp life living in tents.

It is important to note that these camps were originally places for political prisoners. Captives were selected by using political criteria, the intention being to isolate political opposition and frighten the population into accepting Nazi rule—the regime itself viewed the incarceration of communists and related enemies as...