The Nazi war machine was responsible for
one of the darkest chapters in human history
The Holocaust refers to Nazi persecutions of European Jews and other minorities
that began in Germany in February 1933 and was expanded throughout Europe until
the Allied liberation in May 1945. During this period, an estimated six million
Jews and six million other "undesirables" were systematically murdered at the
hands of the Nazi war machine and its police arm, the SS (Schutzstaffel).
Victims of the exterminations included Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, POWs, the
handicapped, the mentally infirm and others regarded by the Nazi regime as
unsuitable human material for the establishment of a racially pure continent
inhabited by a "master race".
Sadly, there have arisen fringe groups that preach that the horrors of the
Holocaust are a fabrication. Attempts to deny the Holocaust ever happened - the
pseudohistory of men and women whose writings are routinely embraced and promoted
by the most rabidly anti-Semitic quarters of society - speak more to the guilt
of the perpetrators and the hatred that festers in some modern hearts. A look at
the documented undeniable acts of the Nazi war machine shows the Holocaust deniers
as not only sorely misguided but blind.
The Truth of the Terrors
The Holocaust's initial phase was marked by Adolf HItler's campaign against
German Jewry, which began gradually but was stepped up with increasingly
ferocity. Jews were expelled from public posts and driven from professional life.
Jewish-owned businesses were boycotted and vandalized. In 1935, the Nuremberg
Laws deprived Jews of German citizenship and forbade their marriage with other
Germans. Jews lost property and wealth through confiscation and punitive fines.
Then, on November 9 - 10, 1938, the Nazi-incited riots of Kristallnacht
("the night of broken glass") destroyed German synagogues and Jewish insitutions.
When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, they launched a new
policy towards the Jews - the systematic destruction of Jewish communities. Under
the cover of war conditions, the Nazis began deporting Jews to the death camps.
Until that time, the Jews in German-occupied lands had been deprived of their
human rights and herded into ghettos. (In Poland, the Germans confined more than
half a million people in the Warsaw ghetto, where thousands perished from
starvation and disease.)
Five days after the Germans entered the USSR, they besieged the city of Bialystok,
Poland, home to about 56,000 Jews. Early that morning the Germans surrounded the
town square by the Great Synagogue and forced residents from their homes into
the street. Some were shoved up against building walls and shot dead. Others -
some 800 men, women and children - were locked in the synagogue, which was
subsequently set on fire and where they burned to death. The German onslaught
continued with the grenading of numerous homes and further shootings. As the
flames from the synagogue spread and merged with the grenade fires, the entire
square was engulfed. On that day - June 27, 1941 - some 2,000 Jews lost their
lives at Bialystok. The next day, many more of the city's Jews were murdered.
About 1,600 Jews lived in the POlish village of Jedwabne. On July 10, some three
weeks after the German invasion, many were burned alive in a barn. A week later,
10,000 Jews were liquidated in Kishinev over a two-week period. In fact,
according to eminent Holocaust scholar Martin Gilbert, during the first five
weeks of the German invasion of the USSR, more Jews were killed than during the
eight years since the Nazis had come to power.
Despite the enormous number of Jews the Germans were able to eliminate during
this short period. Heinrich Himmler and other Nazi leaders were dissatisfied,
and so began to search for a less clumsy method for solving the "Jewish problem".
(Himmler headed the secret police, or Gestapo, and in the last years of WWII was
the virtual dictator of German domestic affairs.) The first step toward
streamlining the genocide was the use of trains to transport Jews from central
Germany to ghettos, being set up in the east. These trains, which became
emblematic of Nazi atrocities, were first used on October 16, 1941.
Passageways to Death
The trains heralded the beginning of the end for European Jewry. What had been a
frenetic campaign of decentralized violence became a highly efficient killing
apparatus aimed at nothing less than the destruction of Europe's non-Aryan
population. And while the legacy the trains left in their tracks is partly
symbolic - as a passageway to death - they are equally notorious for their
inhuman conditions. Large cattle cars, packed well beyond capacity with human
cargo, were so insufferably hot, so devoid of sufficient oxygen, and so intensely
unclean that they became caskets for thousands of Jews who did not live long
enough to die by the Nazi's appointed method: gas.
The trains were only the first step in the Nazi selection process: Those who did
not survive the trains were clearly unfit for labor and would have been executed
in ay case. Once detrained, the remaining passengers were split into two groups.
The old, the young, the sick, and the infirm were sent immediately to be killed,
initially in gassing vans and later in the gas chambers. The rest were to put to
work, frequently in the harshest conditions imaginable. The work often included
the burial of victims in massive, unidentified pits.
At arrival and departure points, or wherever the trains passed through towns,
local populations were made aware of the fate that awaited the miserable
passengers. The Nazis pursued the policy of extermination so diligently that
troops and arms were sometimes were forced to wait while the "relocation"
transports passed through. Children who saw the trains watched with fascinated
horror, and, sometimes at the instigation of their parents (or at least with
their tacit approval) taunted the condemned by shouting their fate at them as
they passed.
The Wannsee Protocol
So thorough was the Nazi program of extermination that a special conference of
top Nazi officials were called by Reinhard Heydrich to sort out the logistical
problems involved in carrying out the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. The
conference was held at Grossen-Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, on January 20, 1942;
its subject was how to handle the great number of Jews that had suddenly come
under German control with the invasion of Poland and Russia. The Wannsee Protocol
that was issued from that conference (authored by its secretary, Adolf Eichmann)
was nothing less than a blueprint for the systematic genocide of all of Europe's
Jews.
More than 50 years after this dark chapter, the Holocaust continues to haunt and
disquiet the collective consciousness of the Western world. International efforts
to end racial killing in Yugoslavia, to stem the development of weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq and Iran, and to prevent a xenophobic politician from
attaining power in Austria are all manifestations of the hard-learned lessons of
the Holocaust.
Despite the propaganda of the Holocaust deniers, the odor that filled the air
for miles around the concentration camps where the crematoria incinerated the
victims was unmistakable. There was no doubt in any of those many cities and
towns, or in the farmhouses that dotted the countryside, what that stench was
and what was happening in the camps. The Holocaust will eternally serve as a
reminder of what people are capable of doing, and the consequences of waiting
too long to intercede.