The Holocaust did not begin with the gas chambers. It began with a decision, taken by a modern European state, that the Jews were the source of Germany’s misfortunes and had to be removed from German life. From that decision, taken by identifiable men in identifiable places, a chain of escalating actions led, over twelve years, to the murder of six million people. Understanding how it happened requires understanding the sequence: the ideology that preceded the regime, the persecution that preceded the killing, the killing that preceded the industrialised murder. Each stage made the next easier to contemplate.
The shape of the story
The story begins before 1933. The ideology that the Nazi party brought to power had been assembled over decades from the existing materials of European antisemitism, pseudo-scientific race theory, and the political grievances of a Germany that had lost a war it expected to win. The Weimar Republic, the democratic government that preceded Hitler, never fully stabilised. The humiliation of the Versailles settlement, hyperinflation, mass unemployment, and the fear of Bolshevism created the conditions in which a political movement promising national restoration and a named enemy could win elections. The Nazis provided both.
From 1933 the persecution of German Jews was systematic and legal. The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 stripped Jews of citizenship and prohibited marriage between Jews and non-Jews. The Évian Conference of 1938 demonstrated that no country was willing to accept large numbers of Jewish refugees. Kristallnacht in November 1938 showed that the violence against Jews could be state-organised and nationwide without provoking international intervention. By the time Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, German Jews had been expropriated, excluded from professional life, publicly humiliated, and stripped of the protections of the law. The regime had been testing what it could do. The answer, consistently, was: almost anything.
The invasion of Poland in 1939 brought three million Polish Jews under German control overnight. The immediate response was ghettoisation: the forced concentration of Jewish populations into walled districts of major cities, deliberately overcrowded, deliberately undersupplied. The Warsaw Ghetto held around 460,000 people within 3.4 square kilometres. Łódź held around 200,000. The intention was not yet systematic murder; the regime’s policy was still, at this stage, forced emigration. But the conditions in the ghettos killed. Around 800,000 to one million Jews died in the ghettos of Poland and the western Soviet Union before the deportations to the death camps began, from starvation, disease, and direct violence.
The decision to murder
The shift from persecution to systematic murder came in 1941. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 was accompanied from the outset by the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units whose explicit function was to kill Jews, Soviet political commissars, and others the regime classified as enemies. At Babi Yar on 29 and 30 September 1941, Einsatzgruppe C shot 33,771 Jews from Kiev in two days. At Rumbula in November and December 1941, around 25,000 Latvian Jews were shot. By the end of 1941 the Einsatzgruppen had killed approximately 500,000 people. The killing was being done in the open, by men with rifles, in front of local populations.
The Wannsee Conference of January 1942 did not decide on murder; it coordinated the bureaucratic machinery for implementing a decision already in effect. The death camps that formed the operational backbone of what the regime called the Final Solution were built on Polish soil: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chełmno, Majdanek. Between 1942 and 1944 Jews were deported to these camps from across German-occupied Europe, from France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Hungary, Italy, and the Baltic states. At Auschwitz alone, around 1.1 million people were murdered, the great majority of them Jews.
The killing continued until the regime collapsed. In Hungary in 1944, after German forces occupied the country in March, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in 56 days, between May and July. The gas chambers at Birkenau were operating at maximum capacity. The war was already lost; the deportations continued regardless. The death marches of early 1945, in which prisoners were driven west as Soviet forces advanced from the east, killed tens of thousands more. The last deaths at Auschwitz occurred in January 1945, days before Soviet troops arrived.
What these pages cover
The pages in this section trace the whole sequence. The Roots and Rise addresses the ideology and political conditions that made Nazism possible. The Persecution Begins covers the legal and physical destruction of Jewish life in Germany between 1933 and 1939. Poland and the Ghettos covers the ghettoisation of Polish and Eastern European Jewry and the armed resistance that the ghettos produced. The Killing Begins covers the concentration camps, the Einsatzgruppen, and the first phase of systematic murder. The Final Solution covers the death camps, the Wannsee Conference, and the deportation of Jews from across occupied Europe. Aftermath covers the survivors, the displaced persons crisis, and the path to the founding of Israel. Liberation and the Death Marches cover the end of the killing and what the liberating forces found.
The sections do not repeat one another. Each owns its own period and its own material. Read in sequence they form the complete story. Read individually they each stand.
Sources
- Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd edition, Yale University Press, 2003
- Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins, 1992
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2009
- Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust, Franklin Watts, 2001
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Doris L. Bergen, The Holocaust: A Concise History, Rowman and Littlefield, 2009