The Holocaust did not begin with murder. It began with ideas, proceeded through law, moved through social exclusion, became economic confiscation, and only at the end became systematic killing. The progression took twelve years: from Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in January 1933 to the operation of the gas chambers at Birkenau in 1942 to 1944. Tracking the progression is part of understanding how an ordinarily literate European country reached the point of industrial mass murder of its neighbours.
Stage one: ideology, 1919 to 1933
The first phase was the development and dissemination of the racial-political doctrine that would become Reich policy after 1933. The Nazi Party programme of 1920 set out the basic position: Jews were not Germans, Jews could not be German citizens, and Jewish economic and cultural influence in Germany was to be ended. Mein Kampf of 1925 set out the elaborated argument. Streicher’s Der Stürmer from 1923 onwards provided the popular weekly version. Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century of 1930 provided the theorised version. The doctrine was developed in public, propagated through millions of print copies, and rehearsed in thousands of party meetings, before the party took power. It was not a secret programme imposed on an unsuspecting population in 1933.
Stage two: legal exclusion, 1933 to 1935
The first months of the Nazi regime introduced the basic legal framework of exclusion. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of 7 April 1933 dismissed Jews from the civil service. The Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour of September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws, stripped Jews of citizenship and banned marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews. The supplementary decrees of November 1935 defined who counted as a Jew. Around 1,400 antisemitic laws, decrees and regulations were enacted between 1933 and 1939. The legal framework excluded Jews from the German nation as a juridical matter, before the violence of the late 1930s and the killings of the 1940s.
Stage three: social and economic exclusion, 1935 to 1938
The middle years of the regime saw the steady removal of Jews from German economic and social life. Jewish businesses were progressively boycotted, then forced into Aryanisation, the forced sale of Jewish-owned firms to non-Jewish German buyers at confiscatory prices. Jewish doctors were barred from treating non-Jewish patients. Jewish lawyers were barred from non-Jewish clients. Jewish children were progressively excluded from German state schools. Jews were barred from public swimming pools, parks, theatres and increasingly from public spaces of all kinds. The German Jewish population fell from around 525,000 in 1933 to around 215,000 by 1939 through emigration. Most who remained were elderly, less mobile, or unable to find a country willing to take them.
Stage four: violence and confiscation, 1938 to 1939
Kristallnacht, the night of 9 to 10 November 1938, was the moment at which legal exclusion gave way to organised state violence. Around 91 Jews were murdered in the pogrom. Around 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Around 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses were destroyed. Around 1,400 synagogues were burned. The Jewish community of Germany was fined a billion Reichsmarks as collective punishment. The remaining German Jewish economy was dismantled in the months that followed. The Évian Conference of July 1938 and the failure of the international community to receive Jewish refugees in any meaningful numbers had already established that there was nowhere for the German Jewish population to go.
Stage five: ghettoisation and the killing of Polish Jews, 1939 to 1941
The German invasion of Poland in September 1939 brought around two million more Jews under German control. The Jewish populations of the major Polish cities were forced into ghettos: Warsaw, Łódź, Kraków, Lublin, Białystok and dozens of others. The ghettos were the institutional precursors of the killing programme. Conditions were deliberately made unliveable. Around 800,000 Polish Jews died of starvation, disease and shooting in the ghettos before the deportations to the killing sites began.
Stage six: the killing on the eastern front, June 1941 to early 1942
The German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 began the killing phase. The Einsatzgruppen units following the Wehrmacht into the occupied Soviet territories conducted mass shootings of the Jewish populations of every town and village they reached. Around 1.5 million Jews were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen and supporting units in the second half of 1941 alone. The killing was conducted in public, witnessed by German soldiers, local civilians and the victims’ surviving relatives. The decision to extend the killing from Jewish men of military age to all Jewish men, then to women and children, was taken in stages between July and August 1941 by Himmler and Heydrich and communicated to the Einsatzgruppen commanders.
Stage seven: industrial killing, 1942 to 1944
The Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 communicated to the senior Reich civil service that the killing was to be extended to all eleven million European Jews. The Operation Reinhard camps at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka began the systematic killing of Polish Jewry in spring 1942. The Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers came online in spring 1943. Around four million Jews were killed at the dedicated extermination sites between spring 1942 and autumn 1944. Combined with the around 1.5 million killed by the Einsatzgruppen in 1941 and 1942 and the around 1 million killed in ghetto conditions, in slave labour, on the death marches, and elsewhere, the total Jewish death toll of the Holocaust reached around six million people.
What the progression shows
The Holocaust was not a sudden eruption of violence. It was the end stage of a twelve-year political project that began with ideology and law, moved through social exclusion and economic confiscation, became operational killing only after 1941, and reached industrial scale only in 1942 to 1944. Each stage created the conditions for the next. Each stage required the active participation, or the passive acceptance, of large numbers of ordinary German civilians and senior German institutions. The most dangerous moment of the progression was probably stage two, the legal exclusion of 1933 to 1935, because it normalised the categorical separation of the German Jewish population from the rest of the country. The killings would not have been possible without the law that had preceded them.
See also
- The Einsatzgruppen
- The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution
- The Nuremberg Laws
- The Invasion of Poland and the Ghettos
- Der Sturmer and the Pornography of Hate
- Alfred Rosenberg
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, HarperCollins, 1997
- Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945, HarperCollins, 2007
- Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Holmes and Meier, 1985
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, Yad Vashem, 2004
- USHMM: The Holocaust