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To say that the Holocaust of European Jewry (1933-1945) is an

unprecedented episode in the history of the Jewish nation is not
merely an understatement. It is an inaccuracy of the greatest
magnitude, for such an event is unmatched in any recorded
history. 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, the

Holocaust was characterized by its methodical, systematic,
efficient, almost scientific murder of Y
person with Jewish roots.
Assimilation or conversion offered no protection in this situation.c

At the core of the Holocaust we find modern anti-Semitism, the

current version of Jew Hatred - that same phenomenon which
appeared throughout the centuries, perhaps finding its most
blatant manifestation with the medieval Church. The modern
German anti-Semitism was based on racial ideology which stated
that the Jews were sub-human (÷  ) while the Aryan
race was ultimately superior. The Jew was systematically
portrayed as a low-life, as untouchable rot ( Y÷

÷ )
and as the main cause of Germany's problems.

Germany had major problems resulting from World War I. The

Weimar Republic, which was established on the ruins of the
defeated Germany, had relinquished land on almost all fronts, had
succumbed to military jurisdiction under the Allies, and was forced
to pay reparations beyond the prevalent economic capabilities.
The rocketing inflation and economic insecurity became even
worse with the advent of the Great Depression of 1929. By 1932,
unemployment in Germany peaked, and it was in this economic
and political climate that Adolf Hitler established the Nationalist-
Socialist Party (with 
Y as its manifesto). With Hitler's
rise to power in 1933 began the national policy of organized
persecution 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" Germany
of her Jewish population (÷
 
). By making the lives of the
Jewish citizenry intolerable, the Germans indirectly forced them to
emigrate. The Jewish citizens were excluded from public life,
were fired from public and professional positions, and were
ostracized from the arts, humanities, and sciences. The
discrimination was anchored in German anti-Jewish legislation
such as the Nurnburg Laws of 1935. At the end of 1938, the
government initiated a pogrom against the Jewish inhabitants on
a 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 (  ÷)
subjected the Jewish population there to the same fate as that in
Germany.

During this time, the Nazi policy took on a new dimension: The
option of emigration (which was anyway questionable because of
the lack of countries willing to accept Jewish refugees) was
brought to a halt. The Jew-hatred, which was an inseparable part
of Nazi policy, because even more extreme with the outbreak of
World War II. As the Nazis conquered more land in Europe, more
Jewish populations fell under their control: Jews of Poland,
Ukraine, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, etc. The Jews were
placed in concentration camps and compelled to do forced labor.
Ghettos were set up in Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states in
order to segregate the Jewish population. In the camps and
ghettos, 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 two
months after the Nazi rise to power. It became the most terrifying
and deadly weapon of the Nazi government, and was used for the
destruction of millions of Jews

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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. This
answer was called the ³Final Solution,´ a solution that started in
the summer of 1941 and was believed to answer the ³Jewish
Question´ and create an end to the Jews.

Hitler first explained and thought about his ³solution´ since 1919.
Hitler believed his race was pure, which was the Aryan race.
Wanting to protect racial purity, he then thought about getting rid
of all Jews throughout Europe, along with other races he believed
to be sub-human, including Slavs, Gypsies, Homosexuals, the
mentally ill and disabled people. Shortly after 1933, Hitler and his
Nazi party obtained power in Germany and tried to force Jewish
emigration. In 1938, the Nazis defended the Jewish Policy by
threatening and taking away some privileges hoping for them to
leave. 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. The
Nazis considered the ³Jewish Question´ no longer a German
issue, but a European issue.

It was decided. Hitler had to reason with the Jews one way or an
other. He had to carry out his idea of the ³Final Solution´ and
make 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 could

grab 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 the

Jews in their path. Some Jews were killed right there on the spot,
but most were sent to death camps built by Nazi¶s and still under
construction. They were going to be sent to Auschwitz, and other
death camps where mass murder would shortly begin. The ³Final
Solution´ was in progress, and the answer to solve the ³Jewish
Question´ had begun.

Having the ³Final Solution´ in progress, The Germans began to

kill Jews using simple methods at first. They fired at them with
guns and put the bodies in pits. This did not work well as planned,
it killed very few using too much time. By fall 1941, techniques
were developed. With amounts of death camps, the number of
Jews being assassinated greatly increased. They were sent to
camps by trainloads as if they were animals. Load by load, they
were all killed each day and it continued for quite a time. Many
Jews died from starvation or were often killed in concentration
camps. Unlike death camps, more than 6,000 died from Gas
Chambers alone, each day. Gas Chambers consisted of the
poisonous chemicals known as Zyclon B. After instant death, the
bodies were gathered and thrown into crematoriums where they
burned. Some bodies were even pushed by bulldozers into the
giant pits, many Jews also died by failing physical tests, checked
by SS doctors, known as selections. The weak and the ill often
died. 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, the
showerheads were fake. The doors were shut on them, and they
were poisoned by cyanide gas that poured from the showerheads.

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Prisoners being
liberated
The bodies were later burned as well. The ³Final Solution´
appeared to be successful for Hitler and was continued
throughout 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 these
prisoners had survived forced marches into the interior of
Germany from camps in occupied Poland. These prisoners were
suffering from starvation and disease.
Soviet forces were the first to approach a major Nazi camp,
reaching Majdanek near Lublin, Poland, in July 1944. Surprised
by 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 murdered
prisoners, but in the hasty evacuation the gas chambers were left
standing. In the summer of 1944, the Soviets also overran the
sites of theBelzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers. The

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Germans had dismantled these camps in 1943, after most of the

Jews of Poland had already been killed.
The Soviets liberated Auschwitz, the largest extermination and
concentration camp, in January 1945. The Nazis had forced the
majority of Auschwitz prisoners to march westward (in what would
become known as "death marches"), and Soviet soldiers found
only several thousand emaciated prisoners alive when they
entered the camp. There was abundant evidence of mass murder
in Auschwitz. The retreating Germans had destroyed most of the
warehouses in the camp, but in the remaining ones the Soviets
found 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 human
hair.

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Prisoners being liberated.

In the following months, the Soviets liberated additional camps in

the Baltic states and in Poland. Shortly before Germany's
surrender, 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 Nazis
began evacuating the camp. On the day of liberation, an
underground prisoner resistance organization seized control of
Buchenwald to prevent atrocities by the retreating camp guards.
American forces liberated more than 20,000 prisoners at
Buchenwald. They also liberated Dora-
Mittelbau,Flossenbürg, 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 a
typhus epidemic, were found alive. More than 10,000 of them died
from 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 the
world. The small percentage of inmates who survived resembled
skeletons because of the demands of forced labor and the lack of
food, compounded by months and years of maltreatment. Many
were so weak that they could hardly move. Disease remained an
ever-present danger, and many of the camps had to be burned
down to prevent the spread of epidemics. Survivors of the camps
faced a long and difficult road to recovery.

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In late 1944, the tide of war had turned and Allied forces moved
across Europe in a series of offensives on Germany. The Nazis
decided to evacuate outlying concentration camps. In the final
months 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, and
many died literally at the front doors of townspeople. Many died
from starvation, disease, exhaustion, and cold, and thousands
more were shot along the way. It is estimated that 250,000
concentration camp prisoners were murdered or died in the
forced death marches that were conducted during the last 10
months of World War II.
Allied forces began to encounter and liberate concentration
camp prisoners in the late spring and early summer of 1945.
Many of the freed prisoners were so weak that they couldn't eat
or digest the food they were given and died shortly after
liberation.
The Third Reich collapsed in May 1945. SS guards fled and
many of the concentration camps were turned into displaced
person camps. Between 1948 and 1951, nearly 700,000 Jews
emigrated to the new state of Israel. Approximately 140,000
Holocaust 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 doctors
were accused of involvement in the horrors of human
experimentation. One such doctor was Karl Brandt, Hitler's
personal physician. He was sentenced to death, along with
dozens of other Nazi leaders.
Current estimates, based on Nazi war records and official
government documents from various countries, place the death

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Children in concentration camps.

Corpses of
prisoners at concentration camp after execution in gas chambers

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toll of the Holocaust at anywhere from 10 million (a conservative

figure) to 26 million people.
The sobering fact about the Holocaust is how close the Nazis
came to total victory. In such countries as Poland, which, before
World War II, still included parts of the Ukraine and Belarus, the
Jewish death toll surpassed 90 percent.
It is important to note, however, when looking at this atrocious
event in world history, that the Jews were by no means the only
victims of the Holocaust. Other ethnic groups suffered heavy
losses. For instance, there were nearly as many  

 Poles killed (approximately 3 million) as there were
Jewish Poles.
Many survivors have expressed disgust that the Holocaust
happened in full public view, and reached its awful results
because people were content to be bystanders and look the
other way. Although the full extent of what was happening in
German-controlled areas was not known until after the war, there
were many rumors and eye-witness accounts throughout Europe
that indicated that a great number of Jews were being killed.
The German Rail Company, which was used to transport
prisoners to various concentration camps, had more than 1
million employees, and had to be fully aware of the reality of life
in the camps. British historian Ian Kershaw has written: "The
road to Auschwitz was built by hate, and paved by indifference."
Some also have questioned why the prisoners didn't revolt, since
the inmates vastly outnumbered the soldiers stationed at the
camps. There were uprisings, but one has to remember that the
prisoners, for the most part, lacked any kind of organizational or
military experience. They came from various European countries
and therefore spoke different languages. Most importantly, they
were 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? The

real mystery is not why the Jews failed to resist, but how anyone
managed to survive at all.
There were about 8 to 10 million Jews in the territories controlled
directly or indirectly by the Nazis (the uncertainty arises from the
lack of knowledge about how many Jews there were in the Soviet
Union). The six million killed in the Holocaust thus represent 60 to
75 percent of these Jews. Of Poland's 3.3 million Jews, over 90
percent were killed. The same proportion were killed
in Latvia and Lithuania, but most of Estonia's Jews were
evacuated in time. Of the 750,000 Jews in Germany and Austria
in 1933, only about a quarter survived. Although many German
Jews emigrated before 1939, the majority of these fled
to Czechoslovakia, France or the Netherlands, from where they
were 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, and
Romania. It is likely that a similar proportion were killed
in Belarus and Ukraine, but these figures are less certain.
Countries with notably lower proportions of deaths
include Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Italy, and Norway. Albania
was the only country occupied by the Nazis that had a
significantly larger Jewish population in 1945 than in 1939. About
two hundred native Jews and over a thousand refugees were
provided with false documents, hidden when necessary, and
generally treated as honored guests in a country whose
population was roughly 60% Muslim. Additionally, Japan, as an
Axis member, had its own unique response to Nazi policies
regarding Jews. In addition to those who died in the above
extermination 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 and

bodies (below).

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people died in these camps, and although the proportion of Jews

is not known with certainty, it was estimated to be at least 50
percent.Another 800,000 to one million Jews were killed by
the ë
Y÷ in the occupied Soviet territories (an
approximate figure, since the ë
Y÷ killings were
frequently undocumented).[ Many more died through execution or
of disease and malnutrition in the ghettos of Poland before they
could be deported.
As most of the victims of the Holocaust were speakers of Yiddish,
the Holocaust had a profound and permanent effect on the fate
of Yiddish language and culture. On the eve of World War II, there
were 11 to 13 million Yiddish speakers in the world. The
Holocaust, however, led to a dramatic, sudden decline in the use
of Yiddish, as the extensive Jewish communities, both secular
and religious, that used Yiddish in their day-to-day life were
largely destroyed. Around 5 million, or 85%, of the victims of the
Holocaust, were speakers of Yiddish.

After liberation, many Jewish survivors feared to return to their

former homes because of the antisemitism (hatred of Jews) that
persisted 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 (violent
anti-Jewish riots). The largest of these occurred in the town
of Kielce in 1946 when Polish rioters killed at least 42 Jews and
beat 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 they
were housed in hundreds of refugee centers and displaced
persons(DP) camps such as Bergen-Belsen in Germany. The
United 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, and
France administered these camps.
A considerable number and variety of Jewish agencies worked to
assist the Jewish displaced persons. The American Jewish Joint
Distribution Committee provided Holocaust survivors with food
and clothing, while the Organization for Rehabilitation through
Training (ORT) offered vocational training. Refugees also formed
their own organizations, and many labored for the establishment
of 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 above
the existing quota restrictions were still limited. The British
restricted immigration to Palestine. Many borders in Europe were
also closed to these homeless people.
The Jewish Brigade Group (a Palestinian Jewish unit of the British
army) was formed in late 1944. Together with former partisan
fighters displaced in central Europe, the Jewish Brigade Group
created the Brihah(Hebrew for "flight" or "escape"), an
organization that aimed to facilitate the exodus of Jewish refugees
from Europe to Palestine. Jews already living in Palestine
organized "illegal" immigration by ship (also known as Aliyah Bet).
British authorities intercepted and turned back most of these
vessels, however. In 1947 the British forced the ship ë 
÷
, carrying 4,500 Holocaust survivors headed for Palestine, to
return to Germany. In most cases, the British detained Jewish
refugees denied entry into Palestine in detention camps on the
Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
With the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, Jewish
displaced persons and refugees began streaming into the new
sovereign state. Possibly as many as 170,000 Jewish displaced
persons and refugees had immigrated to Israel by 1953.

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In December 1945, President Harry Truman issued a directive

that loosened quota restrictions on immigration to the U.S. of
persons displaced by the Nazi regime. Under this directive, more
than 41,000 displaced persons immigrated to the United States;
approximately 28,000 were Jews. In 1948, the U.S. Congress
passed the Displaced Persons Act, which provided approximately
400,000 U.S. immigration visas for displaced persons between
January 1, 1949, and December 31, 1952. Of the 400,000
displaced persons who entered the U.S. under the DP Act,
approximately 68,000 were Jews.
Other Jewish refugees in Europe emigrated as displaced persons
or 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 million
Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborator.It will forever cast
aspersions on the nature of humanity and will forever be
remembered as among the most shameful and brutal episodes of
mankind¶s history.

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