The Holocaust was the deliberate murder, by the German state and its collaborators, of around six million Jews between 1939 and 1945. It was carried out by an industrial bureaucracy across an entire continent, with the cooperation of governments, railways, factories, banks, churches and hundreds of thousands of ordinary men and women. It killed two thirds of all the Jews of Europe. It is the most thoroughly documented mass killing in human history, and it is still, eighty years later, the central moral event of the modern age.
What it was
It was a genocide. The word genocide was coined by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944 specifically to describe what was being done to the Jews of Europe. A genocide is the deliberate attempt to destroy a people. It is different in kind from a war crime, a massacre or a pogrom. The Nazi regime did not kill Jews as collateral damage in the prosecution of a war. It set out to identify every Jew in every country it controlled, by birth and parentage, and to kill all of them. Children were killed because they were the children of Jews. Old people were killed because they had once given birth to Jews. The killing was the point.
Approximately six million Jews were murdered. Of those, around three million were Polish, around one million Soviet, and the rest from Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy, Germany, Austria, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Norway and Luxembourg. The number includes around one and a half million children. The pre-war Jewish population of Europe was around nine and a half million. Two thirds of it was killed.
What it was not
It was not the only Nazi mass killing. The regime also murdered approximately three million Soviet prisoners of war, around two hundred thousand to half a million Roma and Sinti, around two hundred and fifty thousand people with disabilities under the T4 programme, an unknown but very large number of Soviet civilians during the eastern campaign, and tens of thousands of political prisoners, homosexual men, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others. Each of these is a real and documented atrocity, covered on its own pages on this site. None of them is the Holocaust. The Holocaust is the specific name for the killing of the Jews.
This is sometimes contested by people who would prefer a broader term that brings in the other victim groups. There are good reasons to want such a term, because the other victim groups deserve their own recognition and have often had to fight for it. But the case for keeping the word Holocaust for the killing of the Jews specifically is that the killing of the Jews specifically was the Nazi regime’s central ideological project. The other killings, terrible as they were, served other purposes. The killing of the Jews was the project for which the camps and the gas chambers and the bureaucracy were ultimately built. To dilute the term is to lose the analytic specificity that makes the event understandable.
When it was
The most common dating is 1933 to 1945, the years of the Nazi regime. That is the date range used in most museums and on most memorials. It is right in the sense that the persecution that led to the killing began in 1933. It is misleading in the sense that the killing itself began in 1939 with the invasion of Poland, accelerated to industrial scale with the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, and ran with full intensity for around three years before tailing off as German forces retreated in 1944 and 1945. The years that matter most are 1941 to 1944. The most lethal single year was 1942, in which around half of all Holocaust deaths occurred.
Where it was
Everywhere German forces could reach. The pre-war German Jewish community was largely emigrated by the time the killing started, and many of the Jews murdered in the camps were not German at all. The killing fields were the territories of occupied Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine and the western Soviet Union. The death camps were all in occupied Poland: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Bełżec, Majdanek, Chełmno. The shooting massacres were everywhere from the Baltic to the Crimea. The deportations came from every German-occupied country and from several allied countries, including Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Croatia and France.
Who did it
The senior figures were a small group of Nazi Party officials and SS officers. The killing itself involved many more people. The SS was around 800,000 strong by 1944. The German army knew about the killing and in some sectors took part in it. The German railways operated the deportation trains as a normal commercial service. Local police forces in occupied countries provided round-up and security. Many tens of thousands of non-German collaborators in occupied Europe joined SS units, served as camp guards, ran ghetto administrations or pointed out their Jewish neighbours. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Germans bought confiscated Jewish property at below-market prices and lived in the houses of murdered families. The Holocaust was not the work of a few demons. It was the work of a society.
Why it still matters
It matters because it happened in living memory, in the most advanced country in Europe, and it was carried out by people who were in most respects unremarkable. The doctors who selected children for the gas chambers had been trained at the same universities as their pre-war predecessors. The clerks who organised the deportations had been doing roughly similar paperwork before the war. The neighbours who pointed out where the Jews lived went on living in the same streets afterwards. None of this is reassuring. The lesson of the Holocaust is not that monsters exist; it is that ordinary societies can produce conditions under which ordinary people will do monstrous things. That is the lesson the rest of this site exists to set out.
See also
- Hungary
- Romania
- Raphael Lemkin Who Coined the Word Genocide
- The Invasion of Poland and the Ghettos
- The Baltic States
- Political Prisoners
Sources
- Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Yale University Press, 2003
- Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945, HarperCollins, 2007
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press, 2004
- USHMM: Introduction to the Holocaust