World Genocide And Conflicts

The Holocaust

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.

During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived "racial inferiority": Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others). Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals.

In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at over nine million. Most European Jews lived in countries that Nazi Germany would occupy or influence during World War II. By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the "Final Solution," the Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe. Although Jews, whom the Nazis deemed a priority danger to Germany, were the primary victims of Nazi racism, other victims included some 200,000 Roma (Gypsies). At least 200,000 mentally or physically disabled patients, mainly Germans, living in institutional settings, were murdered in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe, the Germans and their collaborators persecuted and murdered millions of other people. Between two and three million Soviet prisoners of war were murdered or died of starvation, disease, neglect, or maltreatment. The Germans targeted the non-Jewish Polish intelligentsia for killing, and deported millions of Polish and Soviet civilians for forced labor in Germany or in occupied Poland, where these individuals worked and often died under deplorable conditions. From the earliest years of the Nazi regime, German authorities persecuted homosexuals and others whose behavior did not match prescribed social norms. German police officials targeted thousands of political opponents (including Communists, Socialists, and trade unionists) and religious dissidents (such as Jehovah's Witnesses). Many of these individuals died as a result of incarceration and maltreatment.

In the early years of the Nazi regime, the National Socialist government established concentration camps to detain real and imagined political and ideological opponents. Increasingly in the years before the outbreak of war, SS and police officials incarcerated Jews, Roma, and other victims of ethnic and racial hatred in these camps. To concentrate and monitor the Jewish population as well as to facilitate later deportation of the Jews, the Germans and their collaborators created ghettos, transit camps, and forced-labor camps for Jews during the war years. The German authorities also established numerous forced-labor camps, both in the so-called Greater German Reich and in German-occupied territory, for non-Jews whose labor the Germans sought to exploit.

Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) and, later, militarized battalions of Order Police officials, moved behind German lines to carry out mass-murder operations against Jews, Roma, and Soviet state and Communist Party officials. German SS and police units, supported by units of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS, murdered more than a million Jewish men, women, and children, and hundreds of thousands of others. Between 1941 and 1944, Nazi German authorities deported millions of Jews from Germany, from occupied territories, and from the countries of many of its Axis allies to ghettos and to killing centers, often called extermination camps, where they were murdered in specially developed gassing facilities.

In the final months of the war, SS guards moved camp inmates by train or on forced marches, often called “death marches,” in an attempt to prevent the Allied liberation of large numbers of prisoners. As Allied forces moved across Europe in a series of offensives against Germany, they began to encounter and liberate concentration camp prisoners, as well as prisoners en route by forced march from one camp to another. The marches continued until May 7, 1945, the day the German armed forces surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. For the western Allies, World War II officially ended in Europe on the next day, May 8 (V-E Day), while Soviet forces announced their “Victory Day” on May 9, 1945.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many of the survivors found shelter in displaced persons (DP) camps administered by the Allied powers. Between 1948 and 1951, almost 700,000 Jews emigrated to Israel, including 136,000 Jewish displaced persons from Europe. Other Jewish DPs emigrated to the United States and other nations. The last DP camp closed in 1957. The crimes committed during the Holocaust devastated most European Jewish communities and eliminated hundreds of Jewish communities in occupied eastern Europe entirely.

The best known of the war crimes trials held after World War II was the trial of “major” German war criminals held in Nuremberg, Germany. Leading officials of the Nazi regime were tried before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, before judges from Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. The IMT tried 22 Germans as major war criminals on charges of conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

But the Nuremberg trial did more than just try leading Nazi officials in government, the armed forces, and the economy. Its lasting legacy included the deliberate assembly of a public record of the horrific crimes, including those of the Holocaust, committed by the Germans and their collaborators during World War II.

The American prosecutors at Nuremberg decided the best evidence against Nazi war criminals was the record left by the Nazi German state itself. They wanted to convict Nazi war criminals with their own words. While the Germans destroyed some of the historical record at the end of the war and some German records were destroyed during the Allied bombing of German cities, Allied armies captured millions of documents during the conquest of Germany in 1945. Allied prosecutors submitted some 3,000 tons of records at the Nuremberg trial. More than a decade later, beginning in 1958, the United States National Archives, in collaboration with the American Historical Association, published 62 volumes of finding aids to the records captured by the US military at the end of the war. More than 30 further volumes were published before the end of the 20th century

The US Army made many significant finds of Nazi booty and records, among them gold, currency, artworks, and documentation discovered on April 7, 1945, by engineers of the US 90th Infantry Division in the Kaiseroda Salt mine in Merkers, Germany. Millions of documents were captured at various locations, including records of the German Army High Command records; files from Krupp, Henschel, and other German industrial concerns; Luftwaffe (German air force) material; and records kept by Heinrich Himmler (the Chief of the German Police and Reich Leader of the SS), the German Foreign Office, and many others.

Even where central files had been destroyed, the Allies were able to some extent to reconstruct events and operations from the records they did secure. The Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) records, for example, were burned in the basement of its Prague regional headquarters but copies of many of RSHA records were found and collected from the files of local Gestapo (secret state police) offices across Germany. Captured German documents provided a record of the policies and actions of the Nazi state. Both the Wannsee Conference Protocol, which documented the cooperation of various German state agencies in the SS-led Holocaust, and the Einsatzgruppen Reports, which documented the progress of the mobile killing units assigned, among other tasks, to kill Jewish civilians during the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, were among the documents central to the Holocaust submitted at Nuremberg.

During the Nuremberg trial, Nazi Germany's dedicated filming of itself was also turned into evidence of its crimes. From the earliest beginnings of the Nazi Party in the 1920s, through the military invasions of World War II and graphic depictions of atrocities, German photographers and camera crews recorded (often proudly) what they accomplished in pursuit of their ideology. Toward the end of the war, teams of Allied military personnel worked tirelessly to locate, collect, and categorize this photographic and film record.

In addition to official photography and films produced at the behest of the Nazi state, German soldiers and police took numerous photographs and film footage of German operations against Jews and other civilians. They documented the public humiliation of Jews, their deportation, mass murder, and confinement in concentration camps. This became powerful visual evidence of Nazi war crimes submitted at Nuremberg. For example, Allied prosecutors submitted the so-called “Stroop Report,” which included as an appendix an album of photographs taken on the orders of SS and Police Leader Jürgen Stroop to document his destruction of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in spring 1943. According to Stroop's own calculations, his forces captured more than 55,000 Jews and of these, killed at least 7,000 and sent 7,000 more to the Treblinka killing center.

Further visual documentation came from the US Army Signal Corps, which, in the course of photographing and filming American operations in World War II, also played a crucial role in documenting evidence of Nazi atrocities and the Holocaust. Many of the early still and moving pictures of newly liberated Nazi concentration camps were taken by Army photographers such as Arnold E. Samuelson and J Malan Heslop. A number of these images were later transmitted to news agencies in the United States and other countries, where they helped to inform the world about the horrors of Nazism and the plight of concentration camp prisoners.

On November 29, 1945, the IMT prosecution introduced an hour-long film titled "The Nazi Concentration Camps." When the lights came up in the Palace of Justice all assembled sat in silence. The human impact of this visual evidence was a turning point in the Nuremberg trial. It brought the Holocaust into the courtroom.

Eyewitness testimony from both perpetrators and survivors laid the foundation for much of what we know about the Holocaust, including details of the Auschwitz death machinery, atrocities committed by the Einsatzgruppen and other SS and police units, the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, and the original statistical estimate of six million murdered Jews. Many people directly involved in the killing program died before the end of the war, but the Allies interrogated many of those who were still alive in preparation for the trial. None of the perpetrators denied the Holocaust. Most just tried to deflect their responsibility for the killings.

Three key perpetrators gave evidence directly related to the Holocaust: Hermann Göring, the highest official of the Nazi state tried at Nuremberg, testified openly and frankly about the persecution of German Jews from the rise of the Nazi party to power in 1933 until the outbreak of war in 1939; Otto Ohlendorf testified directly about his unit, Einsatzgruppe D, killing 90,000 Jews in the southern Ukraine in 1941; and the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, testified frankly about the gassing of more than a million Jews at the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center during the war. All three claimed that they carried out the legitimate orders of the state.

While the testimony of perpetrators is often chilling in its frankness about the killing program, testimony from survivors, then and today, is often the best antidote to Holocaust denial. Holocaust survivors directly experienced Nazi genocidal policies. Their testimony is personal, immediate, and, for this reason, compelling. Survivors like Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier who testified at Nuremberg about her experiences at Auschwitz, and Elie Wiesel, who, after the war, wrote the book Night about his deportation from Hungarian-occupied Transylvania to Auschwitz in 1944, provide the human element. Such witnesses convey what it felt like to be the target of genocide.

Taken together, the documents, photographs, film, and perpetrator and survivor testimony at postwar trials provided an inescapable and undeniable documentation of the Holocaust.

January 30, 1933: President Hindenburg appoints Adolf Hitler Chancellor of Germany

March 20, 1933: SS opens the Dachau concentration camp outside of Munich

April 1, 1933: Boycott of Jewish-owned shops and businesses in Germany

April 7, 1933: Law for the Reestablishment of the Professional Civil Service

July 14, 1933: Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases

September 15, 1935: Nuremberg Race Laws

March 16, 1935: Germany introduces military conscription

March 7, 1936: German troops march unopposed into the Rhineland

August 1, 1936: Summer Olympics begin in Berlin

March 11-13, 1938: Germany incorporates Austria in the Anschluss (Union)

November 9/10, 1938: Kristallnacht (nationwide pogrom in Germany)

May 13, 1939: The St. Louis sails from Hamburg, Germany

September 29, 1938: Munich Agreement

August 23, 1939: Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Agreement

September 1, 1939: Germany invades Poland, starting World War II in Europe

September 17, 1939: The Soviet Union occupies Poland from the east

October 8, 1939: Germans establish a ghetto in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland

April 9, 1940: Germany invades Denmark and Norway

May 10, 1940: Germany attacks western Europe (France and the Low Countries)

July 10, 1940: Battle of Britain begins

April 6, 1941: Germany invades Yugoslavia and Greece

June 22, 1941: Germany invades the Soviet Union

July 6, 1941: Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) shoot nearly 3,000 Jews at the Seventh Fort, one of the 19th-century fortifications surrounding Kovno

August 3, 1941: Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen of Muenster denounces the “euthanasia” killing program in a public sermon

September 28-29, 1941: Einsatzgruppen shoot about 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar, outside Kiev

November 7, 1941: Einsatzgruppen round up 13,000 Jews from the Minsk ghetto and kill them in nearby Tuchinki (Tuchinka)

November 30, 1941: Einsatzgruppen shoot 10,000 Jews from the Riga ghetto in the Rumbula Forest

December 6, 1941: Soviet winter counteroffensive

December 7, 1941: Japan bombs Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declares war the next day

December 8, 1941: The first killing operations begin at Chelmno in occupied Poland

December 11, 1941: Nazi Germany declares war on the United States

January 16, 1942: Germans begin the mass deportation of more than 65,000 Jews from Lodz to the Chelmno killing center

January 20, 1942: Wannsee Conference held near Berlin, Germany

March 27, 1942: Germans begin the deportation of more than 65,000 Jews from Drancy, outside Paris, to the east (primarily to Auschwitz)

June 28, 1942: Germany launches a new offensive towards the city of Stalingrad

July 15, 1942: Germans begin mass deportations of nearly 100,000 Jews from the occupied Netherlands to the east (primarily to Auschwitz)

July 22, 1942: Germans begin the mass deportation of over 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka killing center

September 12, 1942: Germans complete the mass deportation of about 265,000 Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka