Holocaust

We explain what the Holocaust was, its historical context and its causes. In addition, its characteristics and consequences.

What was the Holocaust?

The Holocaust or Shoá (from the Hebrew “catastrophe”) was the genocide perpetrated by the Nazi regime of Germany during the Second World War against the European Jewish population. Nazi authorities called this extermination program the “final solution of the Jewish problem” (Endlösung der Judenfragein German).

It was a systematic plan of persecution and extermination of Jews deployed in the territories controlled by the third Reich in Europe. The exact dates of its beginning are difficult to specify, since the anti -Semitic activities in Germany led by Adolf Hitler began long before the start of the war.

The main background were the racial laws of Nuremberg of 1935with which the German government took civil rights to the German Jews, and the night of broken crystals (Kristallnacht) of 1938a series of episodes of anti -Semitic violence that resulted in deportation of about thirty thousand Jews to concentration camps.

The massive killings of Jews began after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and were reorganized from the January 1942 Wansee Conference, in which the so -called “final solution” was planned. They ended in 1945, with the German defeat in the war and the release of the extermination fields by the allied armies.

It is estimated that Around six million Jews were killed by the Nazi regimewhich also persecuted and murdered other social groups, such as gypsies, Slavs, Afro -descendants, homosexuals, people with disabilities, communists and other political dissidents.

See also: State terrorism

Origin of the Holocaust term

The term “Holocaust” was applied to the extermination of Jews for the first time in the 1950s by Jewish historians. The term comes from ancient Greek Olokaustosa translation of the Hebrew word Olah which refers to religious sacrifice by fire. It was used because its meaning was identified with the use of crematoriums in the Nazi extermination fields.

The Hebrew word is also used Shoá (“catastrophe”) and the term yidis Hurbanwhich translates as “destruction.” However, all these denominations are after the facts. At the time they occurred, the decision of the Nazis authorities to annihilate the European Jewish population received the name of the “final solution of the Jewish problem.”

Historical context of the Holocaust

The Holocaust It occurred during World War II, when Nazi Germany headed by Adolf Hitler It expanded throughout Europe and North Africa.

The war had begun in September 1939, when Hitler decided to invade Poland after annexing Austria and the Sudetes of Czechoslovakia and militarily occupy the rest of Czechoslovakia. After the invasion of Poland, the Western European powers (France and the United Kingdom), which had been complicating with Nazism through the appeasement policy, decided to declare war on Germany.

In the countries subject to Nazism, occupation regimes or puppet states that obeyed the orders dictated from Berlin were imposed. These orders were included The Nazi racial politics, which supported the superiority of the “Aria race” About the alleged mestizo or lower races, as was characterized among others to the Jews.

The war was devastating for the entire continent and ended in 1945. As the Nazis were defeated, the concentration camps were released by the allies and the first films of the victims of the Holocaust and of some of the more than forty thousand imprisonment facilities, forced labor and extermination throughout Europe were spread.

Causes of the Holocaust

Nazi ideology was guided by a kind of social Darwinism which stated that humanity was divided into higher and lower breeds. The German people were considered belonging to a higher race (the “Aria race”), while European Jews (including German Jews) were considered a lower race.

Anti -Semitism was a phenomenon prior to the Nazis who was taken to the extreme by Hitler, who in his book My fight Of 1925 he accused the Jews of being responsible for many of the evils of Germany, as their economic difficulties after the end of World War I. Besides, Hitler proposed to conquer a vital space in the east (Lebensraumin German) to install German population, which meant displacing from there Eslavas and Jewish populations.

When he came to power in 1933, Hitler began to implement measures related to these objectives. In April, the law for the restoration of civil service was promulgated, which excluded Jews from public officeand limitations were imposed on the access of Jews to education and the exercise of professional activities. In the following years, the racial policy of Nazism was deepened.

The German government justified the segregation of the Jews and their progressive internment in concentration camps with the argument that they were a lower breed that had been responsible for the economic difficulties that Germany was going through. This ideology justified in the eyes of the Nazis the submission of millions of Jews to forced labor, medical experiments and, finally, extermination.

Holocaust history

In 1935, the Nazi regime of Germany headed by Adolf Hitler promulgated the racial laws of Nurembergwhich declared that the German Jews were not citizens of the Reich and, therefore, did not have the same rights as the citizens considered of “German blood.” These laws also prohibited marriages between people of “German blood” and Jewish origin, since they considered that their offspring contaminated German racial purity.

In these laws, the person who had Jewish ancestry, regardless of whether or not religion was considered Jewish. For this reason, Nazi anti -Semitism is usually characterized as a form of biological or biological racism.

Violence antijudia of The Night of Broken Crystals (from November 9 to 10, 1938) marked a new stage aimed at segregation of the Jewish population. Thirty thousand Jews were deported to concentration fields and the legislation that imposed limits to the professional and educational life of the Jews of Germany and Austria was deepened.

Simultaneously, Hitler began to specify his expansion plan to the east With the annexation of Austria and Los Sudetes in 1938, the invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939 and, already initiated World War II, the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

Deportations and ghettos

The Nazi persecution of the Jewish people was accompanied by a gigantic propaganda campaign that sought to justify discrimination and segregation of the Jews before the German citizens who were not Jews.

After the laws that They were removed civil rights and banned them to exercise professionsconducting own businesses or having bank accounts, people of Jewish origin were forced to bring identity cards to accredit this condition. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the Polish Jews were forced to bring a white bracelet with a star of David Azul, an idea that later extended to other regions of the third Reich.

In 1941 the mandatory use of the Jewish badge was imposedwhich consisted of a star of David Amarilla sewn in the clothes, in the chest and in the back. One of the objectives of this badge was to easily identify the people who would be deported to the ghettos or the extermination fields.

Forced deportations to ghettos began in Poland in 1939. They were separate neighborhoods from the rest of the city, frequently walled and with police controlled access, in which the Jews were installed to keep them separated from the rest of the population. In the ghettos the overcrowding of whole families, forced to live in precarious and stripped buildings of everything they could not carry with them was common.

Some of the most important ghettos were those of Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow. In addition to segregation and conditions of unhealthiness and abuse in the ghettos, Many people were deported from there to concentration camps or forced labor. From the implementation of the “final solution” in 1942, the population of the ghettos began to be transferred to extermination fields.

The “final solution”

The so -called “final solution” was devised by Nazi domes in 1941. On July 31, 1941, one month after the German Invasion of the Soviet Union, Nazi leader Hermann Göring wrote a letter to Reinhard Heydrich (director of the Central Office of Security of the Reich) in which he ordered him to present a plan for the execution of the “final solution of the Jewish problem”.

Before deciding the extermination, the Nazis planned a forced deportation of the Jews, to the east or even the Island of Madagascar, in Africa. However, this plan was too expensive, in a context in which the Jewish population under German control had grown considerably after the invasion of Poland in 1939.

When the German army put the Barbarroja and The invasion of the Soviet Union In June 1941German troops were accompanied by execution squads (called Einsatzgruppen), who had the function of mass shooting to the Soviet political personnel and the Jewish and gypsy civilians who will be in their march. They also used gas trucks to kill asphyxiation. It is estimated that they murdered almost a million and a half people, most of Jewish origin.

On January 20, 1942, a meeting of senior Nazi officials coordinated by Reinhard Heydrich in Wansee, a suburb of Berlin, He decided the implementation of the “final solution of the Jewish problem” through the “evacuation to the east.” Actually, it was Forced transfer to extermination fields in Polandbuilt with the specific objective of mass murdering people of Jewish origin (men, women and children).

Extermination fields

The first extermination fields They were built in Poland as part of the “Operation Reinhard” of the SS (Nazi paramilitary and penitentiary forces, calls Schutzstaffel). Thus the fields of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka II were born, which began functions in 1942, while the concentration camp of Majdanek was turned into an extermination field. Previously the extermination field of Chelmno, in December 1941.

In addition, the huge concentration camp of Auschwitz’s political prisoners with an extermination field, known as Auschwitz-Birkenou or Auschwitz II, where four gas cameras were installed With capacity for several hundred people. Next to each gas chamber there was a crematorium where the bodies burned.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest extermination field and it was where the SS first tested the Zyklon B gas. There were killed one million one hundred thousand people between 1942 and 1945, of which 90 % were Jews (mainly of Hungary and Poland). Besides, Many prisoners of the fields died in the “marches of death”when the Nazis transferred them away from the front as the allies advanced.

See also: Nazi Campos

Jewish resistance

The Nazi regime attempts to exterminate the entire European Jewish population faced in some cases with acts of resistance. The best known was The lifting of the Warsaw ghettowhich took place between April and May 1943, during the second wave of mass deportations towards the extermination fields.

With guerrilla tactics, a group of Jews led by Mordechai Anielewicz They resisted the SS troops commanded by Jürgen Stroop until, on May 16, they were definitely defeated. In addition to the thousands of insurgent dead in the clashes, almost forty thousand were deported to extermination fields.

Other important incidents took place in Treblinka II, where an insurrection in August 1943 allowed three hundred prisoners to escape (most subsequently recaptured or killed), and in Auschwitz, where two units of SONDERKOMMMANDO (Jewish prisoners forced to work in the crematoriums) They organized to exploit a gas chamber and its crematorium. Although they started an attack and some managed to escape, then they were captured and executed.

Consequences of the Holocaust

After the German defeat in World War II in 1945, A group of Nazi hierarchs was judged in the nuremberg trials for charges such as war crimes and crimes against humanity.

However, Some leaders involved in the Acts of the Holocaust managed to escape. Such was the case of Josef Mengele, who experienced with prisoners in the concentration and extermination fields and fled to South America, and Adolf Eichmann, one of the main responsible for the “final solution.” Eichmann lived in Argentina until in 1960 he was found by the Mossad (Israeli Intelligence Service), was tried in Israel and executed by hanging in 1962. Eichmann’s trial motivated Hannah Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. A study on the banality of evil (1963).

The Holocaust left a deep brand in German society. Nazism has been prohibited in Germany since thenas well as any racist or xenophobic pronouncement in public, with fine and prison sentences.

On the other hand, the Zionist movement born in Europe at the end of the 19th century, which proposed the establishment of a Jewish national state in the Palestinian territories, He gained strength after the Holocaust. Thousands of survivors traveled clandestinely to these territories. Finally, with the support of the winning countries in the war, integrated into the UN (United Nations Organization), The Zionist leaders managed to create the state of Israel on May 14, 1948.

Presence of the holocaust in cinema and literature

Numerous artistic works, especially literary and cinematographic, deal with holocaust. It is considered one of the worst tragedies of modern history.

The Holocaust demonstrated to what extent the organizational capacity of the human being can be applied to cruelty and how many individuals may be willing to fulfill orders even if they mean launching massive annihilation methods.

Some works that deal with the Holocaust are:

• Ana Frank’s diary (Book, 1942-1944) by Ana Frank.
• Auschwitz’s trilogy (Books, 1947, 1963 and 1986) by Primo Levi.
• Without destiny (Book, 1975) by Imre Kertész.
• Shoah (Filme, 1985) by Claude Lanzmann.
• Maus (Graphic novel, 1991) by Art Spiegelman.
• Schindler’s list (Filme, 1993) by Steven Spielberg.
• Life is beautiful (Filme, 1997) by Roberto Benigni.
• The final solution (Filme, 2001) by Frank Pierson.
• The pianist (Filme, 2002) by Roman Polanski.
• The boy with striped pajamas (Book, 2006) by John Boyne.
• The boy with striped pajamas (Filme, 2008) by Mark Herman.

Denial

The term “denialism” refers to A conspiracy theory that denies the existence of Jewish genocide caused by the Nazi regime during World War II. According to this theory, it would be a propaganda hoax, or the great of an exaggeration, elaborated by Jewish interests that sought to benefit through victimization.

This conspiracy theory It is usually defended by anti -Semitic groups. Their arguments have been discredited by the existing evidence, including testimonies of survivors, film and photographic record and documents of the time.

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References

• Berenbaum, M. (2023). Holocaust. Britannica Encyclopedia. https://www.britannica.com/
• Evans, RJ (2007). THE THIRD REICH IN POWER. Peninsula.
• Evans, RJ (2011). The third Reich at War. Peninsula.
• Rees, L. (2023). Auschwitz. The Nazis and the “final solution”. Criticism.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (SF). Introduction to Holocaust. Holocaust encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/
• Yad Vashem (SF). The Holocaust. Yad Vashem. World Commemoration Center of the Shoá. https://www.yadvashem.org/