The Second World War of 1939-1945 is noted by historians as the war that killed many civilians from each side. The war that have started with the German invasion of Poland kick-started German leader Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, as well as his vision in ridding the Jews in massive concentration camps and executions – the Final Solution or popularly known as the Holocaust. The Holocaust eliminated many innocent lives due to the Anti-Semitism in the European region, and a group’s desire to be claimed the superior race. The Holocaust paved the way for new methods of mass killing to be developed, but it has also paved the start of human rights protection and the creation of policies that would cater to refugees who fled from Nazi Germany’s clutches and the prevention of another racial genocide.
According to Crowe (2008) the term “Holocaust” was derived from the Greek word “holokauston”, meaning “burnt offering”. The term holocaust was used to refer to the on-going oppression of Jews around the globe. The first recorded use of the term Holocaust was in 1895 as a response to the Armenian massacre in Turkey. The most noted form of the Holocaust was the Nazi-led Final Solution programme in the Second World War. Jews have been scattered around the globe since time in memorial, especially in several European regions such as Germany as noted by Rossel (1992). However, despite their long history in these countries, Jews were considered outsiders for many natives due to their unique traditions and cultures such as the Torah and holidays. Their religion is also different from those practiced in the European regions as Jews tend to concentrate on Hebrew prayers rather than developing their religion to fit the changes happening in society. Jews also separated themselves from non-Jewish neighbours, preferring to group with each other. For Europeans, they found Jewish practices and traditions to be suspicious. Europeans also see that when their local laws contradicted with Jewish laws, the Jews would immediately side with their faith and move to another country. In the words of Rossel, “Jews were strangers living according to strange laws in strange lands”.
This deviance by the Jews made Europeans to be weary of Jewish communities, distrusting them and considering them as a threat. Eventually, this feeling of threat and distrust developed into suspicion, up to hatred. For the past two thousand years, Anti-Jewish groups and prejudice were present in the lives of Jewish people in the European region. Europeans also accused Jews of almost all the incidents happening in their country. Ironically, these same false accusations were applied against Christians in the early ages of its creation. Eventually, the Christians teamed up with other non-Jewish believers against the Jews, signifying the effect of superstition and hatred against the Jewish communities. Some Jewish communities tried to return to the Holy Land to escape the prejudice from the Europeans. However, they also felt the same prejudice from the groups that have taken over the Holy Land, no longer welcoming Jews openly in the country. A few Jews tried to convert to the majority religion to try escaping the prejudice; however, they soon found out that they could not be accepted completely .
Germany’s position over the Jews was not far from the European distrust with the Jews. From the fourteenth century up to the time of the Nazis, Germans have adopted state policies that forced Jewish into a corner and further in scrutiny. In fourteenth-century, the German government declared that all properties slain Jews own will become a public property controlled by the state. In Nuremberg, the government declared the law that if any Christian owed a debt to a Jew in any form, the state would be given the right to collect the debt and use it. In the seventeenth century, the state has forced Jews to mark their homes and scheduled their daily activities such as shopping and areas to visit.
Around the nineteenth century, Jews were required to have a passport that notifies officials of their Jewish heritage. The sentiments of Anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish stigma came into full spring in 1933 when Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, President Hindenburg hoped that Hitler would lead out Germany out of it political and economic crisis due to the passing wars. Adolf Hitler was the leader of the National Socialists German Workers Party or the Nazis, the strongest political party in Germany. However, Hitler had other plans over Germany as he overruled democracy and made himself the dictator of Germany. He utilized his cabinet to suspend all forms of human rights freedoms and ordered the Gestapo, Storm Troopers, and the SS to murder any possible opponents. With Hitler in power, the Nazis managed to put forward their racial position. The political party believed that that Germans were the “superior race” and there was a struggle to stay alive against those from the “inferior races”. For the Nazi, the “inferior races” were the Jews, Roma or Gypsies, and the handicapped, and they were deemed as a serious threat to the purity of the great “Aryan race”.
The Anti-Jewish policies applied in the Middle Ages were used by the Nazi Party, especially Adolf Hitler, upon their rise to power. The Reich Citizenship Law of 1943, for example, passed that properties and debts of Jews were considered property of the state if they die, or some owes the Jew. Nazi Germany also limited Jewish mobility around the country as identification cards were distributed to Jewish communities. In 1941, the Nazi government applied Jewish bans over certain public places and government institutions, and by 1942; they ordered that all Jewish apartments had to be marked, signifying Jewish residencies. The Reich Citizenship Law powered the policies, and for Jewish communities back in those periods, they were forced to hide form the German authorities or move away from the country .
The Nazis also slandered the Jewish communities by blaming them of Germany’s current condition especially after the First World War. They have also launched campaigns against the Jewish and minority properties and businesses, forcing them to sell cheaper. Around November 1938, the Nazis organized the Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, aimed to destroy synagogues, Jewish businesses, illegal arrests, vandalization of property, and murder Jews and minorities. Before the known German Holocaust, the massive killings of the Jews and minorities in Germany have already begun since 1933. The first victims of the Nazi holocausts were the political prisoners that were placed in concentration camps. Hitler and his colleagues did not stop from these murders, eventually; Hitler brought to life his ultimate goal of “purifying” Europe by launching the “Final Solution”, the eradication of the Jews and minorities in Germany and the rest of Europe.
When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the Nazis led by Hitler immediately carried out additional massacres of professors, artists, politicians and priests to give way to the living space of the German race. Hitler even ordered to kill handicapped patients. Those who are deemed incurable were brought to special gas chambers and kill them. According to Aronson (2004) the Polish invasion allowed Germany to understand how to enable the Final Solution to be flawless. Germans slowly felt the victory they have held in Poland, France and in the neighbouring countries, enabling them to feel that they are indeed from the Master race and learnt how to treat Ostjuden or the other inferior races. However, there were groups who did not like the treatment done to the Soviets and to the other races, leading them to protest against the action done by the Nazis. Despite the protests regarding these forced “euthanasia” programs in 1941, the Nazi continued it in secret by dozing the patient with a lethal injection or pills, or by force starvation.
As the Second World War progressed, Germany continued to launch their “euthanasia” program with the use of other mass murder strategies from training officers specializing in killing, using poisonous gasses, to secret assassinations. Once Germany managed to invade the Soviet Union in 1941, many Jews, Communists, Gypsies and other minorities were killed in massive shootings. The Einsatzgruppen was the assigned by the Nazi Party to eliminate these minorities around the Soviet Union, known for their Babi Yar murder of 33,000 people. 3 million Soviet prisoners were also killed, including handicapped and psychiatric patients when the Germans took over the Soviet Union. As the Soviet Jews and other minority races were killed, Hitler and his team believed it was time to release information about the Final Solution project.
Initially, the Final Solution came into form when Hitler agreed to launch Operation Barbarossa in July 1940 to attack the Soviet Union and slowly invade the other European countries. Many believed that the Operation Barbarossa would have been the method to get rid of the inferior races and ship them to Soviet Union. However, members of Hitler’s cabinet have slowly begun the preparations for the Final Solution. Reinhard Heydrich was given the position to create a disposition plan for the Jews and brought them into various concentration camps in Eastern and Western Europe. Heydrich submitted his official plans for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” to Hermann Goring in March 1941. Upon confirmation, Goring signed the order on July 31, 1941, declaring that Heydrich now has the authority to prepare the “Gesamtlosung/Final” solution of the Jewish question. As the preparation of the “Final Solution” continued, the Russian campaign of Germany was also concentrating itself in annihilating elite Jews and Bolsheviks. They still implied the same position with the Jews and perceived them as the enemy that must be killed or tortured to protect the Lebensraum. While the Germans controlled Russia, the Final Solution evolved into three waves of anti-Jewish action. The first wave enabled improvised executions in various locations in the region, including the entire male population that qualifies under the military service age. The second wave began in August 1941 that targeted families, including women and children. Some of them were shot, leaving half a million dead. The final wave put into action Germany’s original plans of conquest by utilizing ghettoization, and mass shootings. This now covered the entire occupied countries; however, continuous killings would be hard for the Nazi Security Police to execute given the numbers they have to eradicate.
However, upon September to October 1941, the Nazis began the construction of various concentration camps in Poland that would become killing camps operated by euthanasia experts from the East . This now led to the finalization of the Final Solution against the Jews and minor races. As the concentration camps were built, the imprisoned Jews and other races were placed in sealed ghettos that caused many to perish due to starvation, lack of protection from the cold, and infection of contagious diseases. Some died from maltreatment, especially from the German guards. By 1942, these ghettos were evacuated as the prisoners were now brought to extermination camps in Poland. At the same time, German senior officials were now told that the implementation of the Final Solution would be done to eliminate the Jewish question, sending the Jews to these killing centres. Six sites were chosen due to its closeness to rail tracks and highways, as well as its isolation. The six areas were Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Camps had their own unique style of killing the prisoners, depending on the officials handling the camp, such as Chelmno’s gas execution through mobile gas vans and Belzec’s gas chamber executions. Prisoners were segregated, emptied of their belongings and were forced naked into gas chambers, styled like shower rooms. Some were forced to do harsh labor.
Ofer and Weitzman (1998) noted that women were sheared to degrade women’s pride as a woman by Nazi soldiers. Menstruation added up to the vulnerability of women as they had to stand feeling the blood through their legs since they were not provided with hygienic items, and the taunts of being unclean. Rape and prostitution were also done by Nazi soldiers against women to break their spirits. Women who were unable to stand the humiliation and broke their will had killed themselves; some were able to withstand the pressure and survived by becoming prostitutes to the Nazi soldiers . All six camps, prior to the end of the War, managed to kill almost a million Jews and minorities - Sobibor managed to kill 250,000 prisoners upon its opening in 1942 Treblinka managed to kill 750,000. Auschwitz-Birkenau’s kills reached up to 440,000 as many prisoners died from gassing, illness and malnutrition. Majdanek also had the same number of victims as it also became a concentration camp .
The end of the Second World War opened up the eyes of the Allied victors to the casualties the Final Solution took. Many of the surviving officials denied any such rumor of the Holocaust even in their trials. Many survivors left the European region, due to the lingering anti-Semitism sentiments of other countries and due to the memories left to them by the Holocaust. The Allies had to create special laws like the Displaced Persons Act, to cater to the refugees that came from Germany’s former territories and enacted human rights laws to protect the minorities. Some of the displaced survivors were also returned back to their hometowns should they wish to return to their place of birth. Eventually, Hitler’s Final Solution became the foundation in the usage of the term “genocide” in referring to mass killings. Many of the Allied powers, as well as the public, now realize the importance of human rights and vowed to strive for peace and equality.
Annotated Bibliography
Aronson, S. (2004). Hitler, the Allies, and the Jews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This book details Hitler's position over the Jewish Question and how he and his team formed a solution to the Jewish Question. This book also details how the en masse elimination of the Jews started from the initial phases of the Final Solution programme to the aftermath of the programme.
Crowe, D. (2008). The Holocaust: roots, history, and aftermath. Philadelphia: Westview Press.
This book discusses the start of the whole anti-Semitism belief in the European region, from the Turkish massacre up to the end of the Nazi-led Holocaust or the Final Solution. This book also discusses the history of the Holocaust not just in Germany but also in certain regions where Jews were present.
Ofer, D., & Weitzman, L. (1998). Women in the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Both authors wrote in this book the experiences of Women in the Second World War, in the hands of the Nazi Party. The book details women's condition in the secluded ghettos before the launch of the extermination camps to how they were brutally tortured and humiliated in these camps. Some parts of the book also include how survivors managed to live from the death camps and their lives after the Holocaust.
Rossel, S. (1992). The Holocaust: the world and the Jews, 1933-1945. Springfield: Behrman House, Inc.
Rossel narrates in this book how Jews were treated since the early periods of civilization and why Europeans such as Germany loathe their presence in the countries they migrate into. The book explains how they were persecuted and why many Jews were killed and humiliated by non-Jews.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (n.d.). History of the Holocaust: An Overview. Retrieved April 3, 2012, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org/education/foreducators/resource/pdf/history.pdf
The overview provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum summarizes the history of the German Holocaust and nature as to how it came to form. It explained the Nazi ideology and how Adolf Hitler enacted the Final Solution through his men. The overview also cites how the aftermath of the Second World War led to the increased number of displaced persons and the prohibition of genocides and mass racial killings.
Aronson, S. (2004). Hitler, the Allies, and the Jews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Crowe, D. (2008). The Holocaust: roots, history, and aftermath. Philadelphia: Westview Press.
Ofer, D., & Weitzman, L. (1998). Women in the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Rossel, S. (1992). The Holocaust: the world and the Jews, 1933-1945. Springfield: Behrman House, Inc.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (n.d.). History of the Holocaust: An Overview. Retrieved April 3, 2012, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org/education/foreducators/resource/pdf/history.pdf
