A Page providing information on the hatred and intolerance shown by the German people during World War II
- and the many Jews, Gypsies, and even German mentally & physically citizens were exterminated in the most inhumane and brutal ways
Extermination on the basis of race, culture and genetics, and sexual preference
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Holocaust (from the Greek holókauston from olon "completely" and kauston "burnt")., also known as Ha-Shoah (Hebrew: השואה), Khurbn (Yiddish: חורבן or Halokaust,
האלאקאוסט) is the name applied to describe the attempted genocide of Europe's Jewish population during World War II, as part of a program of ridding Europe of
"undesirables" by the National Socialist regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler. [1]
In addition to Jews, the Nazi regime persecuted and killed other groups, including 220,000 Sinti and Roma (see Porajmos), the disabled (see Action T4), homosexuals,
Jehovah's Witnesses, Soviet POWs, Polish citizens, and political prisoners. [2][3]
Many scholars do not include these groups in the definition of the Holocaust, defining it solely as the genocide of the Jews, or what the Nazis called the "Final Solution
of the Jewish Question" ("Die Endlösung der Judenfrage"). Taking into account all the victims of Nazi persecution, the death toll rises considerably; estimates generally place
the total number of victims at 9 to 18 million.[4]
Features of the Nazi Holocaust
The Nazi Holocaust had several characteristics that, taken together, distinguish it from other genocides in history.
Efficiency
Ghettos established in Europe in which Jews were confined, in ghettos and later in temporary concentration locations and later shipped to extermination camps. The
Holocaust was characterized by the efficient and systematic attempt on an industrial scale to assemble and kill as many people as possible, using all of the resources and
technology available to the Nazi state.[7] Germany was, at the time, one of the world's leading nations in terms of technology, industry, infrastructure, research, education,
bureaucratic efficiency, and many other fields.[8]
For example, detailed lists of potential victims were made and maintained using Dehomag statistical machinery, and meticulous records of the killings were produced. As
prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property to the Nazis, which was then precisely catalogued and tagged, and for which receipts
were issued.
In his book, Russia's War, British historian Richard Overy describes how the Nazis sought more efficient ways to kill people. In 1941, after occupying Belarus, they used
mental patients from Minsk asylums as guinea pigs. Initially, they tried shooting them by having them stand one behind the other, so that several people could be killed with
one bullet, but it was too slow. Then they tried dynamite, but few were killed and many were left wounded with hands and legs missing, so that the Germans had to finish
them off with machine guns. In October 1941, in Mogilev the Germans incorporated gassing as a technique for mass murder for the first time. Gas was poured into a
Gaswagen or "gas car". It took more than 30 minutes for people inside the Gaswagen to die. Later, the Germans used a larger truck exhaust, which only took only eight
minutes to kill all the people inside.[9]
The Nazis methodically tracked the progress of the Holocaust in thousands of reports and documents. Pictured is the Höfle Telegram sent to Adolf Eichmann in January,
1943, that reported that 1,274,166 Jews had been killed in the four Aktion Reinhard camps during 1942.In the spring of 1942, the Aktion Reinhard camps began operating.
Carbon monoxide was used in the gas chambers at Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, whereas Zyklon B,a cyanide-based insecticide, was employed at Majdanek and Auschwitz.
[10]
The disposal of large numbers of bodies presented a logistical problem as well. The Nazis were constantly studying ways to improve fuel efficiency, using a combination of
different fuels, such as coke, wood and body fat. According to surviving Sonderkommandos, multiple bodies were added to the furnaces to obtain optimal fuel efficiency and
speed, particularly when the demand was higher.[4]
Corporate involvement in the Holocaust has created significant controversy in recent years. Rudolf Höß, Auschwitz camp commandant, said that far from having
to advertise their slave labour services, the concentration camps were actually approached by various large German businesses, some of which are still in existence.[5]
Technology developed by IBM also played a role in the categorization of prisoners, through the use of punched card machines.[7][11]
Scale
The Holocaust was geographically widespread and systematically conducted in virtually all areas of Nazi-occupied territory, where victims were targeted in what are now 35
separate European countries, and sent to labor camps in some countries or extermination camps in others.[12] The mass killing was at its worst in Central and Eastern
Europe, which had more than 7 million Jews in 1939; about 5 million Jews were killed there, including 3 million in occupied Poland and over 1 million in the Soviet Union.
Hundreds of thousands also died in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Yugoslavia, and Greece.
Documented evidence suggests that the Nazis planned to carry out their "final solution" in other regions if they were conquered, such as the United Kingdom and the
Republic of Ireland.[13] The extermination continued in different parts of Nazi-controlled territory until the end of World War II, only completely ending when the Allies
entered Germany itself and forced the Nazis to surrender in May 1945.
Cruelty
The Holocaust was carried out without any reprieve even for children or babies, and victims were often tortured before being killed. Nazis carried out deadly medical
experiments on prisoners, including children. Dr. Josef Mengele, medical officer at Auschwitz and chief medical officer at Birkenau, was known as the "Angel of Death" for
his medical and eugenical experiments, e.g., trying to change people's eye color by injecting dye into their eyes.[14] Aribert Heim, another doctor who worked
at Mauthausen, was known as "Doctor Death".
The Nazi concentration camp in Nordhausen.The guards in the concentration camps carried out beatings and acts of torture on a daily basis. Some women (usually convicted
prostitutes) worked in brothels for the guards and privileged prisoners. It has been argued that some were forced to do so.[15]. Russian prisoners of war were used for
experiments, such as being immersed in ice water or being put into pressure chambers in which air was evacuated to see how long they would survive as a means to better
protect German airmen.
Homosexual men suffered unusually cruel treatment in the concentration camps.[16] They faced persecution not only from German soldiers but also from other prisoners,
and many homosexual men were beaten to death.[17] Additionally, homosexuals in forced labor camps routinely received more grueling and dangerous work assignments than
other non-Jewish inmates, under the policy of "Extermination Through Work".[18] German soldiers also were known to use homosexuals for target practice, aiming their
weapons at the pink triangles their human targets were forced to wear.[19]
Children
During the selection process, children were divided into two groups: those who were fit for work, and those who were not. Those who were deemed healthy enough to work
had their prisoner ID tattooed on them, and were given a uniform. The children who were sent to work, most often in munitions factories,[20] were not anticipated
to survive for much longer than a few weeks. This was due to the workload placed on them by the Nazis and due to the lack of food and unhygienic conditions within the
camp.
Those children deemed unfit for work were immediately taken to the gas chambers.[21] These children were often very dependant on their mothers. However, some children,
particularly twins, were kept by the camp "doctor" for medical experimentation. [22]
Experiments
Main article: Nazi human experimentation
At the Auschwitz concentration camp, Dr. Josef Mengele was infamous for carrying out medical experiments on human subjects. These included placing subjects in pressure
chambers, testing various drugs on them, freezing them to death, and various other usually fatal traumas. Of particular interest to Mengele were twins, Gypsies, dwarves and
infants.[23] Beginning in 1943, twins were selected and placed in special barracks.[24]
Almost all of Mengele's experiments were of little scientific value, including attempts to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, various amputations and
other brutal surgeries, and in at least one case attempting to surgically transform normal twins into Siamese twins.[25]
The full extent of Mengele's work will never be known because the two truckloads of records he sent to Dr. Otmar von Verschuer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute were
destroyed by the latter. Subjects who survived Mengele's experiments were almost always killed after the experiments for dissection.
While Mengele's experiments were the most notorious, his behavior was not an isolated aberration. Other Nazi physicians also engaged in human experimentation at several
concentration camps, including Dachau[26], Buchenwald[27], Ravensbrück[28], Sachsenhausen[29], and Natzweiler concentration camps.[30]
Victims
A pile of corpses of Jewish prisoners from the Auschwitz concentration campMain article: Holocaust victims
While the victims of the Holocaust were primarily Jews, the Nazis also persecuted and slaughtered the members of other groups they considered inferior, undesirable or
dangerous, including Poles and other Slavic peoples such as Russians, Belarusians and Serbs, Bosniaks[31], Roma & Sinti (also known as Gypsies), and some Africans,
Asians and others who did not belong to the "Aryan race"; the mentally ill and the physically disabled; homosexuals; and political opponents and religious dissidents such as
communists, trade unionists, Freemasons and Jehovah's Witnesses.[32]
The victims of the Holocaust were generally described by the Nazis as "undesirables," "enemies of the state", "asocial elements," and "moral degenerates," labels that went
hand-in-hand with their term Untermensch ("sub-human").
Death toll
General (later US President) Dwight Eisenhower inspecting prisoners' corpses at a liberated concentration camp, 1945The exact number of people killed by the Nazi regime
may never be known, but scholars, using a variety of methods, including documentation from the Nazis of determining the death toll, have generally agreed upon common
range of the number of victims. Recently declassified British and Soviet documents have indicated the total may be somewhat higher than previously believed.[33] The
following estimates provide a range of the number of victims:
An estimated 5 to 6 million Jews,[34] including 3 million Polish Jews
1.8 – 1.9 million Christian Poles and other (non-Jewish) Poles (estimate includes civilians killed as a result of Nazi aggression and occupation but does not include
the military casualties of Nazi aggression or the victims of the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland and of deportations to Central Asia and Siberia)[35]
200,000–800,000 Roma & Sinti (Gypsies)
200,000–300,000 people with disabilities
80,000-200,000 European Freemasons [36]
100,000 communists
10,000–25,000 homosexual men
2,500–5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses[37]
Raul Hilberg, in the third edition of his ground-breaking three-volume work, The Destruction of the European Jews, estimates that 5.1 million Jews died during the
Holocaust. This figure includes "over 800,000" who died from "Ghettoization and general privation"; 1,400,000 who were killed in "Open-air shootings"; and "up to
2,900,000" who perished in camps. Hilberg estimates the death toll in Poland at "up to 3,000,000".[38] Hilberg's numbers are generally considered to be a conservative
estimate, as they generally include only those deaths for which some records are available, avoiding statistical adjustment.[39] British historian Martin Gilbert used a similar
approach in his Atlas of the Holocaust, but arrived at a number of 5.75 million Jewish victims, since he estimated higher numbers of Jews killed in Russia and other locations.
[40]
Map titled "Jewish Executions Carried Out by Einsatzgruppe A" from the December 1941 Jäger Report by the commander of a Nazi death squad. Marked "Secret Reich
Matter," the map shows the number of Jews shot in the Baltic region, and reads at the bottom: "the estimated number of Jews still on hand is 128,000". Estonia is marked as
judenfrei ("free of Jews").Lucy S. Dawidowicz used pre-war census figures to estimate that 5.934 million Jews died. Using official census counts may cause
an underestimate since many births and deaths were not recorded in small towns and villages. Another reason some consider her estimate too low is that many records were
destroyed during the war. Her listing of deaths by country of origin is available in the article about her book, The War Against the Jews.[41]
One of the most authoritative German scholars of the Holocaust, Prof. Wolfgang Benz of the Technical University of Berlin, cites between 5.3 and 6.2 million Jews killed in
Dimension des Volksmords (1991), while Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett estimate between 5.59 and 5.86 million Jewish victims in the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust
(1990).[42]
The following groups of people were also killed by the Nazi regime, but there is little evidence[citation needed] that the Nazis planned to systematically target them for
genocide as was the case for the groups above.
3.5–6 million other Slavic civilians
2.5–4 million Soviet POWs
1–1.5 million political dissidents
Additionally, the Ustaša regime, the Nazis' allies in Croatia, conducted its own campaign of mass extermination against the Serbs in the areas which it controlled, resulting in
the deaths of 500,000–1.2 million Serbs.
The summary of various sources' estimates on the number of Nazi regime victims is given in Matthew White's online atlas of 20th century history.
Searching for records of victims
Initially after World War II, there were millions of members of families broken up by the war or the Holocaust searching for some record of the fate and/or whereabouts of
their missing friends and relatives. These efforts became much less intense as the years went by. More recently, however, there has a been a resurgence of interest by
descendants of Holocaust survivors in researching the fates of their lost relatives. Yad Vashem provides a searchable database of three million names, about half of the known
direct Jewish victims. Yad Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victims Names is searchable over the Internet at yadvashem.org or in person at the Yad Vashem complex in
Israel.
Other databases and lists of victims' names, some searchable over the Web, are listed in Holocaust (resources).
