The Holocaust was made up of many specific killings, in many specific places. The pages in this section cover the major individual mass killing events whose names have entered the historical record: pogroms, massacres, ghetto liquidations, single operations that were the work of a few days but that killed people in numbers normally reserved for whole battles. Each is a discrete event with a date and a place. Each was carried out by named units, in many cases by named men, against named populations whose individual identities have, in many cases, been recovered by post-war research.
What is here
The pages are arranged broadly in chronological order. The Iasi Pogrom of late June 1941 was the largest pogrom in modern European history, carried out by Romanians on Romanians. The Jedwabne Massacre of 10 July 1941 was the burning alive of around 340 Polish Jews by their Polish neighbours in a small town in eastern Poland. The Ponary Massacre ran from July 1941 to August 1944 and was the killing ground of Vilna Jewry, around 70,000 Jews shot and buried at one wooded site outside the city. Babi Yar at Kyiv on 29 and 30 September 1941 was the largest two-day killing of the entire Holocaust, 33,771 Jews shot at the edge of a ravine. The Rumbula Massacre at Riga in late November and early December 1941 was the second largest, around 25,000 dead.
The Stroop Report is the German official account of the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April and May 1943. It is included here both because the suppression itself was one of the great atrocities of the Holocaust, killing around 13,000 Jews directly and deporting another 56,000 to their deaths at Treblinka, and because the report is one of the most extraordinary documents the perpetrators produced about themselves.
Why these and not others
These are not the only mass killings of the Holocaust, and they are not even the largest. The deportations to Treblinka in summer 1942 killed around 800,000 Jews in three months. The deportations of Hungarian Jews in May to July 1944 killed around 437,000 in eight weeks. Each phase of the death camp killings was bigger in absolute numbers than any of the events listed in this section. But the pages in this section cover events that have a particular place in Holocaust memory: events that happened on a date and at a place, that were carried out by identifiable units, and that have come down in the record with their own names. The death camp killings, by contrast, ran for years and have to be told as a system rather than as a series of events.
The events covered here are also the events that come up most often in argument with deniers, partly because the documentary record on each is exceptionally thorough, and partly because each one has a name that anyone can be expected to recognise.
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