The holocaust is one of the most studied events of the 20th Century. While genocide certainly happens over and over again in the course of human history, this is probably because it rarely ends up so industrialized. While we, as humans, are hardwired to treat the “other” as an enemy, never in the course of human history has it been done in such an organized and large scale manner. But it did not start out leading directly to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Sobibor, Majdanek, Chelmno, Treblinka and Belzec. Indeed, the evolution of the holocaust would lead to differentiation even in the way these camps were run and their particular purposes.
The first camps, such as Dachau and Sachsenhausen, were initially set up mainly for political enemies of Hitler. While some of these were Jews, they were not used nor set up for large-scale holding of Jews.
Early Nazi ideas of removing the Jewish population from the German, while still devious, did not call for mass executions and genocide (Browning 6). The idea at first was to make life in Germany (and later, the rest of the acquired territories, Austria in particular) as miserable as possible in order to encourage them to emigrate on their own. Adolph Eichmann, for example, later famous for his kidnapping from Argentina in the 1960s by the Israeli government, had formed and been in charge of the “Central Office for Jewish Immigration”. Even at the early stages where people were voluntarily emigrating, though, the confiscation, processing, and re-appropriation of Jewish property was still a very important part of the plan.
Forcing the Jews to immigrate on their own, though, proved to be going too slowly. A large part of the problem was that other countries did not want to offer them refuge, and certainly not permanently. Britain did not want them to gain in large numbers in Palestine because they did not want to destabilize the fragile balance already existing there between the Palestinians and the small numbers of Zionists they had previously allowed in. They did not want them in large numbers in other colonies, either; Australia in particular objected to taking on refugees. In England itself, a last-minute effort to organize large-scale evacuations of Jewish children, but only without their parents, underscores their position. Unfortunately, many of these children would lose their parents forever by the end of the war. The famous and tragic tale of the United States sending the ship M.S. St. Louis back to Nazi Germany full of refugees is also a tragic one, but underscores how nations balked from taking on large numbers of refugees.
Out of the inability to convince anyone to take the Jews, the Nazis began to look at the idea of a “reservation” somewhere. One place they liked in particular in the early days was Madagascar. They deemed it feasible before the outbreak of war to deport 4 million Jews a year to Madagascar. The actual feasibility will never be known, but on the surface, it would appear, like so many other big Nazi plans, not to have been viable. One particular problem was that France was unlikely to part with its colony for such a plan, particularly given the poor relations between France ever since World War I, the worsening of animosities after the Treaty of Versailles, and French desire to use military occupation of the Saarland and the Rhineland, both important parts of Germany (the Rhineland, in particular, being home to a massive proportion of the German people, especially in the Ruhr industrial area, and of key importance to the German economy). It is extremely doubtful the French could have been persuaded on this plan.
With the invasion of Poland on September 30th, 1939 and the outbreak of war, Germany gained vast amounts of territory in the east and began looking for a place for their reservation there. The Pripyat Marshes near Lublin became of significant interest to them. They developed a plan, called the Nisko plan, to deport Jews to live in these marshes, and did carry out deportations in the winter of 1939 and 1940. Labor camps were also set up near the reservation, to utilize the reservation’s population for slave labor. One project that was implemented, for instance, was the digging of an anti-tank ditch along the then-border with the Soviet Union. The swamp was chosen, according to Nazi Hans Frank, in particular to “cause [their] considerable decimation.” The area is and always has been more sparsely populated, at least rurally, because of its harsh environment.
There were many deaths due to the Nisko reservation, but at this point they were rarely due to direct Nazi intervention (at least, other than the intervention of forcing them to be there). There was a housing shortage, leading to many to have to seek shelter outdoors in an area known for its harsh winters. There was also no way to earn any sort of living to help themselves, and the Nazis refused to offer any sort of supplies. Many starved. Disease was also a huge factor. But it is interesting to note that the deaths at this point were actually due more to the Nazis not intervening. That would later change, as they grew more and more aware of their ability to use slave labor to prop up their wartime economy while also ensuring mass death. They were, for example, eventually fed for the most part regularly (but still far below subsistence levels) in the camps. This was largely not the case on the Nisko reservation.
The next stage of escalation was the setting up of ghettos in the East. Some, like the Lodz ghetto and the Warsaw ghetto, were very large and are relatively commonly known due to films and popular culture (the Krakow Ghetto, for example, is featured in key scenes of Schindler’s List, and the Warsaw Ghetto is depicted in The Pianist). There were also smaller ones in lesser-known places such as Zamosc or Kaunas. In any event, these were walled-off or otherwise secure areas of cities. Populations of Jews that were deported there were too large for sustainable or comfortable housing. There would often be a dozen people living in just one room. The level of violence in the Ghettos escalated as a whole as well; Nazis began to directly cause deaths, shooting people in the streets for minor transgressions. There was still an element of independence, though, with Judenrats being organized to administer government within the Ghettos with some degree of independence and with those with work passes allowed to come and go for work.
At the same time, though, there was another escalation that grew out of a Nazi desire to liquidate the ghettos. There were basically a few different ways this was done. Either Jews deemed able to work were sent to labor camps, such as the famous Plascow from Schindler’s list; mass groups of basically unsorted people were sent to the growing Auschwitz, to be either deemed fit for its sprawling labor camp or sent to the gas chambers; or deportations were sent to the new camps popping up in the General Gouvernment (the part of Poland that was expected to remain un-Germanized, at least a little). These new camps, Majdanek and Chelmno, for example, were hardly camps at all. They had no need for slave labor other than to find people to deal with their only task: killing. Some used gas, some used engines, some started out using engines and then switched later to other, more efficient kinds of asphyxiation; in any event, if your transport was bound for one of these camps, your likelihood of survival was basically non-existent.
One major problem, though, was rural Jews in the east who could not easily be transported by rail to these camps. This led to the formation of Police Battalion squads who actually went out and physically shot the people themselves. These executions were explored heavily in Christopher Browning’s infamous work Ordinary Men, where he examines the ability of these people to commit these kinds of crimes. He argues that, if put in a situation with enough peer pressure, people will indeed do very heinous things to other people. He draws parallels with the Milgram Experiment, in which people were willing to shock people (well, thought they were, at least) if they were pressured to do so by a person in a position of authority over them.
Perhaps it is the gradual expansion of genocidal activities in various different forms that allowed people, in ordinary positions and positions of power alike, to gradually become more and more accepting of the genocide. One particularly disturbing thing Browning notes, though, is that even though the killing in the gas chambers was massive, more Jews were killed in the Holocaust by direct and very personal execution in the roundups made as part of Operation Reinhard. This is perhaps directly why we remain so obsessed as a culture to this day. While popular culture depicts the camps alone usually, it was a long and winding road that led to them policy-wise. As more and more scholarship comes out on the path that led to the camp and it comes more and more to regular peoples’ attention due to the media controversies surrounding this work, people are beginning to see that there was a lot more to the holocaust than just the gas chambers and slave labor.
References:
Browning, Christopher R. The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final
Solution. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 1995.
Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Holocaust
in Poland. (New York, London: Harper Perennial Publishing). 1992.
Mills, Jan-Ruth. “The Holocaust in Austria”. Retrieved from
http://ecc.pima.edu/~gusen/History/AH.pdf on 2/26/2013.
Goldhagen, Daniel. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.
(New York: Vintage Books). 1996.
Rhodes, Richard. Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the
Holocaust. (New York: Vintage Books). 2002.
