Twentieth-Century Europe by Michael D. Richards & Paul R. Waibel

Author:Michael D. Richards & Paul R. Waibel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-01-30T05:00:00+00:00

The Holocaust

While some Germans had been involved in one capacity or another in the resistance, many more had been active in planning an unprecedented program of genocide. Anti-Semitism had long been a major point in the Nazi program. In the 1930s, this had been expressed mostly through quasilegal measures designed to exclude German Jews (less than 1 percent of the population) from public life and force them to emigrate. With Kristallnacht (“the Night of Broken Glass”), November 9, 1938, the regime seemed to head in a more violent direction. The SA used the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Polish Jew as a pretext for a night that included beatings, rapes, killings, the torching of synagogues, and the breaking of Jewish shop windows (hence the “Night of Broken Glass”). The event is often seen as marking the beginning of the Holocaust. Once the war began, the Nazis gained control over millions of Jews. They also realized that actions could be taken in wartime that would be publicized and criticized in times of peace.

At first, emigration, perhaps to some far-off place such as the French colony of Madagascar or, after the defeat of the Soviet Union, some corner of Siberia, was suggested. Large numbers of Jews were placed in ghettos. In the meantime, the euthanasia campaign in Germany in the 1930s, designed to eliminate mentally and physically disabled people, so-called worthless life, provided the occasion for some experiments in killing people efficiently.

The turning point in Nazi efforts to deal with what they termed “The Jewish Problem” came with preparations for the campaign against the Soviet Union. First, the SS created task forces, the Einsatzgruppen, which followed the German army as it moved across the Soviet Union. The task forces were instructed to round up communist officials and Jews and to kill them. Thousands of people were forced to dig their own graves and then killed by machine guns. The best-known example of this campaign of slaughter is Babi Yar, near Kiev, where, in September 1941, over a period of two days, an estimated 35,000 Jews were killed. Although more than a million Jews were killed in this fashion, it was an inefficient process and difficult for some of the perpetrators to stomach. Late in 1941, plans began to be made for a more organized and coordinated process of slaughter. The Wannsee Conference in January 1942, held in a suburb of Berlin, was partly an effort to resolve remaining logistical problems and other issues, but more importantly it was meant to establish collective responsibility. The decision to eliminate European Jews had already been made. No direct order from Hitler reflects this decision, but it is highly unlikely that he did not know and approve of the plans. Himmler took the lead in carrying out what he described as the Führer’s wishes. The actual paper trail to Hitler only goes as high as a memorandum from Goering authorizing Reinhard Heydrich (1904–1942), an official in the SS, to take steps

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