there are some things that must never be forgotten

8/7/2019 There are some things that must never be forgotten

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Th e Beginning


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To say that the Holocaust of European Jewry (1933-1945) is anunprecedented episode in the history of the Jewish nation is notmerely an understatement. It is an inaccuracy of the greatestmagnitude, for such an event is unmatched in any recordedhistory. Millions of Jewish people suffered for twelve years under the terror of Nazi rule, where anti-Jewish propaganda,segregation, and then murder were the norm.

Though there are other cases in history of Genocide, theHolocaust was characterized by its methodical, systematic,efficient, almost scientific murder of any person with Jewish roots.Assimilation or conversion offered no protection in this situation.

At the core of the Holocaust we find modern anti-Semitism, thecurrent version of Jew Hatred - that same phenomenon whichappeared throughout the centuries, perhaps finding its mostblatant manifestation with the medieval Church. The modernGerman anti-Semitism was based on racial ideology which statedthat the Jews were sub-human ( u ntermensch ) while the Aryanrace was ultimately superior. The Jew was systematicallyportrayed as a low-life, as untouchable rot ( faul niserschein u ng )and as the main cause of Germany's problems.

Germany had major problems resulting from World War I. TheWeimar Republic, which was established on the ruins of thedefeated Germany, had relinquished land on almost all fronts, hadsuccumbed to military jurisdiction under the Allies, and was forcedto pay reparations beyond the prevalent economic capabilities.The rocketing inflation and economic insecurity became evenworse with the advent of the Great Depression of 1929. By 1932,unemployment in Germany peaked, and it was in this economicand political climate that Adolf Hitler established the Nationalist-Socialist Party (with Mein Kampf as its manifesto). With Hitler'srise to power in 1933 began the national policy of organizedpersecution of the Jews.


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The Nazi Emblems


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The aim of the Nazis during this time was to "cleanse" Germanyof her Jewish population ( J ud enrein ). By making the lives of the

Jewish citizenry intolerable, the Germans indirectly forced them toemigrate. The Jewish citizens were excluded from public life,were fired from public and professional positions, and wereostracized from the arts, humanities, and sciences. Thediscrimination was anchored in German anti-Jewish legislationsuch as the Nurnburg Laws of 1935. At the end of 1938, thegovernment initiated a pogrom against the Jewish inhabitants ona particular night which came to be known as Kristallnacht. This

act legitimized the spilling of Jewish blood and the taking of Jewish property. The annexation of Austria in 1938 ( Ansch lu ss )subjected the Jewish population there to the same fate as that inGermany.

During this time, the Nazi policy took on a new dimension: Theoption of emigration (which was anyway questionable because of the lack of countries willing to accept Jewish refugees) wasbrought to a halt. The Jew-hatred, which was an inseparable partof Nazi policy, because even more extreme with the outbreak of World War II. As the Nazis conquered more land in Europe, moreJewish populations fell under their control: Jews of Poland,Ukraine, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, etc. The Jews wereplaced in concentration camps and compelled to do forced labor.Ghettos were set up in Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states inorder to segregate the Jewish population. In the camps andghettos, great numbers of Jews perished because of impossible

living conditions, hard labor, starvation, or disease.Hitler's political police force, the Gestapo, had been founded twomonths after the Nazi rise to power. It became the most terrifyingand deadly weapon of the Nazi government, and was used for thedestruction of millions of Jews


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Th e Final Solution


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How to get rid of the Jews was a question answered by Adolf Hitler. His answer was to murder Jews throughout Europe along

with other races that were believed to be sub-humans. Thisanswer was called the Final Solution, a solution that started inthe summer of 1941 and was believed to answer the JewishQuestion and create an end to the Jews.

Hitler first explained and thought about his solution since 1919.Hitler believed his race was pure, which was the Aryan race.Wanting to protect racial purity, he then thought about getting ridof all Jews throughout Europe, along with other races he believedto be sub-human, including Slavs, Gypsies, Homosexuals, thementally ill and disabled people. Shortly after 1933, Hitler and hisNazi party obtained power in Germany and tried to force Jewish

emigration. In 1938, the Nazis defended the Jewish Policy bythreatening and taking away some privileges hoping for them toleave. Some countries did not accept them, sending almost all of them back to Germany. Hitler, having a great amount of power,along with his army, had almost total control over Europe. TheNazis considered the Jewish Question no longer a Germanissue, but a European issue.

It was decided. Hitler had to reason with the Jews one way or another. He had to carry out his idea of the Final Solution andmake it a reality. Germany then invaded the Soviet Union to


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gather up more Jews. They collected as many Jews as they couldgrab a hold of. Hitler had sent SS (Schutzstaffel) units to search

Adolf Hitler- The Fuehrer of Germany and leader of the NAZI party whose anti semitism was the among

main agenda of the his rise and conquests.


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town to town throughout most of Europe to track down all theJews in their path. Some Jews were killed right there on the spot,but most were sent to death camps built by Nazis and still under construction. They were going to be sent to Auschwitz, and other death camps where mass murder would shortly begin. The FinalSolution was in progress, and the answer to solve the Jewish

Question had begun.

Having the Final Solution in progress, The Germans began tokill Jews using simple methods at first. They fired at them withguns and put the bodies in pits. This did not work well as planned,it killed very few using too much time. By fall 1941, techniqueswere developed. With amounts of death camps, the number of Jews being assassinated greatly increased. They were sent tocamps by trainloads as if they were animals. Load by load, theywere all killed each day and it continued for quite a time. ManyJews died from starvation or were often killed in concentrationcamps. Unlike death camps, more than 6,000 died from GasChambers alone, each day. Gas Chambers consisted of thepoisonous chemicals known as Zyclon B. After instant death, thebodies were gathered and thrown into crematoriums where theyburned. Some bodies were even pushed by bulldozers into thegiant pits, many Jews also died by failing physical tests, checkedby SS doctors, known as selections. The weak and the ill oftendied. Having a doctor raise a single hand, another life was gone.


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The ones who failed, were sent to showers. Not knowing, theshowerheads were fake. The doors were shut on them, and theywere poisoned by cyanide gas that poured from the showerheads.

Quick execution of prisoners before

the arrival of the Allied forces


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Prisoners being

liberatedThe bodies were later burned as well. The Final Solutionappeared to be successful for Hitler and was continuedthroughout the war.

Liberation-

As Allied troops moved across Europe in a series of offensives

against Nazi Germany, they began to encounter tens of thousands of concentration camp prisoners. Many of theseprisoners had survived forced marches into the interior of Germany from camps in occupied Poland. These prisoners weresuffering from starvation and disease.Soviet forces were the first to approach a major Nazi camp,reaching Majdanek near Lublin, Poland, in July 1944. Surprisedby the rapid Soviet advance, the Germans attempted to hide the

evidence of mass murder by demolishing the camp. Camp staff set fire to the large crematorium used to burn bodies of murderedprisoners, but in the hasty evacuation the gas chambers were leftstanding. In the summer of 1944, the Soviets also overran thesites of theBelzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers. The


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Germans had dismantled these camps in 1943, after most of theJews of Poland had already been killed.The Soviets liberated Auschwitz, the largest extermination andconcentration camp, in January 1945. The Nazis had forced themajority of Auschwitz prisoners to march westward (in what wouldbecome known as "death marches"), and Soviet soldiers foundonly several thousand emaciated prisoners alive when theyentered the camp. There was abundant evidence of mass murder in Auschwitz. The retreating Germans had destroyed most of thewarehouses in the camp, but in the remaining ones the Sovietsfound personal belongings of the victims. They discovered, for example, hundreds of thousands of men's suits, more than

800,000 women's outfits, and more than 14,000 pounds of humanhair.


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Prisoners being liberated.

In the following months, the Soviets liberated additional camps inthe Baltic states and in Poland. Shortly before Germany'ssurrender, Soviet forces liberated the Stutthof, Sachsenhausen,and Ravensbrueck concentration camps.U.S. forces liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, on April 11, 1945, a few days after the Nazisbegan evacuating the camp. On the day of liberation, anunderground prisoner resistance organization seized control of Buchenwald to prevent atrocities by the retreating camp guards.American forces liberated more than 20,000 prisoners atBuchenwald. They also liberated Dora-Mittelbau,Flossenbrg, Dachau, and Mauthausen.British forces liberated concentration camps in northern Germany,including Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen. They entered the


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Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, near Celle, in mid-April 1945.Some 60,000 prisoners, most in critical condition because of atyphus epidemic, were found alive. More than 10,000 of them diedfrom the effects of malnutrition or disease within a few weeks of liberation.Liberators confronted unspeakable conditions in the Nazi camps,where piles of corpses lay unburied. Only after the liberation of these camps was the full scope of Nazi horrors exposed to theworld. The small percentage of inmates who survived resembledskeletons because of the demands of forced labor and the lack of food, compounded by months and years of maltreatment. Manywere so weak that they could hardly move. Disease remained an

ever-present danger, and many of the camps had to be burneddown to prevent the spread of epidemics. Survivors of the campsfaced a long and difficult road to recovery.

Th e Aftermat h


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In late 1944, the tide of war had turned and Allied forces movedacross Europe in a series of offensives on Germany. The Nazisdecided to evacuate outlying concentration camps. In the finalmonths of the war, SS guards forced inmates on death marches


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in an attempt to prevent the Allied liberation of large numbers of prisoners.

Those death marches passed directly through many towns, andmany died literally at the front doors of townspeople. Many diedfrom starvation, disease, exhaustion, and cold, and thousandsmore were shot along the way. It is estimated that 250,000concentration camp prisoners were murdered or died in theforced death marches that were conducted during the last 10months of World War II.

Allied forces began to encounter and liberate concentrationcamp prisoners in the late spring and early summer of 1945.

Many of the freed prisoners were so weak that they couldn't eator digest the food they were given and died shortly after liberation.

The Third Reich collapsed in May 1945. SS guards fled andmany of the concentration camps were turned into displacedperson camps. Between 1948 and 1951, nearly 700,000 Jewsemigrated to the new state of Israel. Approximately 140,000Holocaust survivors came to America after 1948, most settling

in New York.Many Nazis were put on trial at Nuremberg, and found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Nazi medical doctorswere accused of involvement in the horrors of humanexperimentation. One such doctor was Karl Brandt, Hitler'spersonal physician. He was sentenced to death, along withdozens of other Nazi leaders.

Current estimates, based on Nazi war records and officialgovernment documents from various countries, place the death


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toll of the Holocaust at anywhere from 10 million (a conservativefigure) to 26 million people.

The sobering fact about the Holocaust is how close the Naziscame to total victory. In such countries as Poland, which, beforeWorld War II, still included parts of the Ukraine and Belarus, theJewish death toll surpassed 90 percent.

It is important to note, however, when looking at this atrociousevent in world history, that the Jews were by no means the onlyvictims of the Holocaust. Other ethnic groups suffered heavylosses. For instance, there were nearly as many non-J ewish Poles killed (approximately 3 million) as there were

Jewish Poles.Many survivors have expressed disgust that the Holocausthappened in full public view, and reached its awful resultsbecause people were content to be bystanders and look theother way. Although the full extent of what was happening inGerman-controlled areas was not known until after the war, therewere many rumors and eye-witness accounts throughout Europethat indicated that a great number of Jews were being killed.

The German Rail Company, which was used to transportprisoners to various concentration camps, had more than 1million employees, and had to be fully aware of the reality of lifein the camps. British historian Ian Kershaw has written: "Theroad to Auschwitz was built by hate, and paved by indifference."

Some also have questioned why the prisoners didn't revolt, sincethe inmates vastly outnumbered the soldiers stationed at thecamps. There were uprisings, but one has to remember that theprisoners, for the most part, lacked any kind of organizational or military experience. They came from various European countriesand therefore spoke different languages. Most importantly, theywere extremely weak because of their living conditions.

The 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, the coordinator of the Final Solution, set off an angry debate about Jewish honor


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Mass graveyards


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and resistance. Why didn't victims put up more of a fight? Thereal mystery is not why the Jews failed to resist, but how anyonemanaged to survive at all.

There were about 8 to 10 million Jews in the territories controlleddirectly or indirectly by the Nazis (the uncertainty arises from thelack of knowledge about how many Jews there were in the SovietUnion). The six million killed in the Holocaust thus represent 60 to75 percent of these Jews. Of Poland's 3.3 million Jews, over 90percent were killed. The same proportion were killedin Latvia and Lithuania, but most of Estonia's Jews wereevacuated in time. Of the 750,000 Jews in Germany and Austriain 1933, only about a quarter survived. Although many GermanJews emigrated before 1939, the majority of these fledto Czechoslovakia, France or the Netherlands, from where theywere later deported to their deaths. In Czechoslovakia, Greece,the Netherlands, and Yugoslavia, over 70 percent were killed.More than 50 percent were killed in Belgium, Hungary, andRomania. It is likely that a similar proportion were killedin Belarus and Ukraine, but these figures are less certain.Countries with notably lower proportions of deaths

include Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Italy, and Norway. Albaniawas the only country occupied by the Nazis that had asignificantly larger Jewish population in 1945 than in 1939. Abouttwo hundred native Jews and over a thousand refugees wereprovided with false documents, hidden when necessary, andgenerally treated as honored guests in a country whosepopulation was roughly 60% Muslim. Additionally, Japan, as anAxis member, had its own unique response to Nazi policies

regarding Jews.

In addition to those who died in the aboveextermination camps, at least half a million Jews died in other camps, including the major concentration camps in Germany.These were not extermination camps, but had large numbers of Jewish prisoners at various times, particularly in the last year of the war as the Nazis withdrew from Poland. About a million


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Children being subjected to inhuman medical experiments andbodies (below).


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people died in these camps, and although the proportion of Jewsis not known with certainty, it was estimated to be at least 50percent.Another 800,000 to one million Jews were killed bythe E insatzgr u ppen in the occupied Soviet territories (anapproximate figure, since the E insatzgr u ppen killings werefrequently undocumented). [ Many more died through execution or of disease and malnutrition in the ghettos of Poland before theycould be deported.As most of the victims of the Holocaust were speakers of Yiddish,the Holocaust had a profound and permanent effect on the fateof Yiddish language and culture. On the eve of World War II, therewere 11 to 13 million Yiddish speakers in the world. TheHolocaust, however, led to a dramatic, sudden decline in the useof Yiddish, as the extensive Jewish communities, both secular and religious, that used Yiddish in their day-to-day life werelargely destroyed. Around 5 million, or 85%, of the victims of theHolocaust, were speakers of Yiddish.

After liberation, many Jewish survivors feared to return to their

former homes because of the antisemitism (hatred of Jews) thatpersisted in parts of Europe and the trauma they had suffered.Some who returned home feared for their lives. In postwar Poland, for example, there were a number of pogroms (violentanti-Jewish riots). The largest of these occurred in the townof Kielce in 1946 when Polish rioters killed at least 42 Jews andbeat many others.With few possibilities for emigration, tens of thousands of

homeless Holocaust survivors migrated westward to other European territories liberated by the western Allies. There theywere housed in hundreds of refugee centers and displacedpersons(DP) camps such as Bergen-Belsen in Germany. TheUnited Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA)


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The State of Israel


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and the occupying armies of the United States, Great Britain, andFrance administered these camps.A considerable number and variety of Jewish agencies worked toassist the Jewish displaced persons. The American Jewish JointDistribution Committee provided Holocaust survivors with foodand clothing, while the Organization for Rehabilitation throughTraining (ORT) offered vocational training. Refugees also formedtheir own organizations, and many labored for the establishmentof an independent Jewish state in Palestine.The largest survivor organization, Sh'erit ha-Pletah (Hebrew for "surviving remnant"), pressed for greater emigration opportunities.Yet opportunities for legal immigration to the United States abovethe existing quota restrictions were still limited. The Britishrestricted immigration to Palestine. Many borders in Europe werealso closed to these homeless people.The Jewish Brigade Group (a Palestinian Jewish unit of the Britisharmy) was formed in late 1944. Together with former partisanfighters displaced in central Europe, the Jewish Brigade Groupcreated the Brihah(Hebrew for "flight" or "escape"), anorganization that aimed to facilitate the exodus of Jewish refugeesfrom Europe to Palestine. Jews already living in Palestineorganized "illegal" immigration by ship (also known as Aliyah Bet).British authorities intercepted and turned back most of thesevessels, however. In 1947 the British forced the ship Ex odu s1947 , carrying 4,500 Holocaust survivors headed for Palestine, toreturn to Germany. In most cases, the British detained Jewishrefugees denied entry into Palestine in detention camps on the

Mediterranean island of Cyprus.With the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, Jewishdisplaced persons and refugees began streaming into the newsovereign state. Possibly as many as 170,000 Jewish displacedpersons and refugees had immigrated to Israel by 1953.


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In December 1945, President Harry Truman issued a directivethat loosened quota restrictions on immigration to the U.S. of persons displaced by the Nazi regime. Under this directive, morethan 41,000 displaced persons immigrated to the United States;approximately 28,000 were Jews. In 1948, the U.S. Congresspassed the Displaced Persons Act, which provided approximately400,000 U.S. immigration visas for displaced persons betweenJanuary 1, 1949, and December 31, 1952. Of the 400,000displaced persons who entered the U.S. under the DP Act,approximately 68,000 were Jews.Other Jewish refugees in Europe emigrated as displaced personsor refugees to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, western Europe,

Mexico, South America, and South Africa.

Epilogue-The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six millionJews by the Nazi regime and its collaborator.It will forever castaspersions on the nature of humanity and will forever beremembered as among the most shameful and brutal episodes of

mankinds history.


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there are some things that must never be forgotten

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