Until 1939 the Nazi regime’s policy towards the Jews of Europe had been to drive them out. Persecute, beat, fine, confiscate, harass, until they emigrated or until they died of the conditions imposed on them. Hundreds of thousands had got out. Hundreds of thousands more were trapped, because the rest of the world had closed its borders.
The war changed everything. The German invasion of Poland in September 1939 brought another two million Jews under direct German control. The invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 brought another five million. The regime’s previous policy of forced emigration, never realistic at this scale, became impossible. The decision was made, in stages over the course of 1941, to kill them all.
This section covers the killing in the years from 1939 to 1943, from the first systematic shootings in occupied Poland through the development of the death camps to the height of the murder programme. It is, in volume of human suffering, the centre of the Holocaust.
What is here
The Shift from Persecution to Systematic Murder covers the decision-making process that turned the regime’s policy from emigration to extermination. The shift did not happen overnight and it did not result from a single signed order. It happened in stages, in the field as much as in Berlin, in the second half of 1941.
The Concentration Camps covers the camp system: how it grew from the early political prisons of 1933 into the network of forced-labour and extermination camps of the war years, and what the experience of being a prisoner inside the camps actually was. The pages there cover arrival and selection, the daily life of prisoners, the medical experiments, the gas chambers, the prisoner revolts, and the small group of prisoners who survived.
Beyond the Camps covers the killing that happened in the wider territories of occupied Europe: in the killing fields of the east, in the deportation operations from each occupied country, and in the various national and local responses, from the rescue effort in Denmark to the active collaboration of Vichy France, the Hungarian Arrow Cross and the Croatian Ustasha.
Specific Atrocities covers the major individual mass killings whose names are now part of Holocaust memory: Babi Yar, Iasi, Jedwabne, Ponary, Rumbula, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and its suppression. These are the events the regime tried to hide and that survivors and historians have spent the years since the war reconstructing.
The shape of the killing
The Holocaust was not one event. It was several killing programmes, run by different units, using different methods, at different stages of the war, against different parts of the Jewish population of Europe. The earliest mass killings were shootings of Polish civilians by SS units in the autumn of 1939. The largest single phase of the killing was the Einsatzgruppen shootings in the occupied Soviet territories in 1941 and 1942, which killed around 1.5 million Jews in pits at the edge of every town and city the German army took. The most familiar phase, in popular memory, was the gassing of around three million Jews at the Operation Reinhard camps and at Auschwitz between 1942 and 1944. The pages in this section cover all of it.
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards