The Causes and Consequences of World War II - The Holocaust

The Causes and Consequences of World War II HIST 1301 | History The Holocaust Since the Enlightenment, Jews have been extensively integrated into German society and culture. However, anti-Semitic sentiment has long lurked beneath the surface of European history, and with Germany's loss in World War I, anti-Semitic propaganda and scapegoating started to emerge. The Nazis' promotion of it in the 1920s and 1930s allowed it to persist. The architect of Nazi propaganda, Joseph Goebbels was tasked with persuading Germans that Jews posed an existential threat. All media started to beat a steady drum, convincing Germans of three ideas intended to ethically defend anti-Semitic acts. Jews were first and foremost an issue. Secondly, they resembled rodents (a dehumanising strategy). Third, the world and Germany would be better off without them. The Nazis had the chance to start the mass slaughter known as the Holocaust when the Wehrmacht advanced into Poland in 1939 and came upon the world's biggest Jewish population. The Einsatzgruppen, or "operational groups," were special death squads that killed adversaries and undesirables, mostly Jews, as they advanced with the German army. For greater control, Jews were confined to ghettos where they were made to work as slaves. The biggest was the ghetto in Warsaw, which held 441,000 residents by 1941. In the same year, railway lines were constructed expressly to convey captives to six large concentration camps. Prior to the war, Poland had seen antiJewish pogroms, or killings, and some Polish nationals had participated in the German extermination efforts. Consolidation camps served as both labour and execution camps at the same time. Leader of the German SS, an elite paramilitary group affiliated with the Nazi Party, Adolf Eichmann, observed in 1941 that the Jews would face difficulties over the next winter: "They can no longer be fed." It is important to give careful thought to the possibility that the most compassionate course of action would be to quickly prepare any Jews who are incapable of working for their own death. At the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, there was discussion on the ultimate solution to the "Jewish question." The German government resolved to eradicate the Jewish population of Europe by means of starvation, forced labour, or other means. They were sent to death camps or tormented where they were. The greatest of the extermination camps, Auschwitz was built in western Poland in 1940 to house Polish political prisoners. 1941 saw the execution of Polish and Soviet captives there, turning it into a death camp. Nearby, a new camp known as Auschwitz II or Birkenau was constructed in the same year. Its primary goal was to murder Jews who were transported from all over Europe aboard goods trains. There were additional camps in Auschwitz, such as labour camps where inmates were employed by the chemical corporation I.G. Farben. Before Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, ordered the camp to be liquidated and evacuated in January 1945 as the Soviet army was closing in, almost 1.3 million victims had been transferred to AuschwitzBirkenau. 1.1 million of these 1.3 million would perish there. Nearly one million, or the great majority, were Jewish. Most were killed with poisoned gas, generally as soon as they got there. Others perished from sickness, famine, or weariness brought on by prolonged labour, or they were shot or beaten to death. In 1942, further gas chambers were built at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Newly arrived inmates who were judged unfit for labour were typically taken almost immediately to the "showers," which are actually gas chambers. Tens of thousands of people from all over Europe had to work together to implement these policies in a systematic way. As a result, before the war was over, more than six million Jews and at least three million members of other minority groups, such as gay and Roma people, communists, socialists, and Jehovah's Witnesses, had been murdered. It's unclear how many people actually perished in the camps; historians can't agree upon a precise figure. There were several acts of resistance, including the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. But the Germans crushed this with such brutality that 13,000 Jews perished as a consequence. Three other concentration camps had unsuccessful uprisings; in Sobibor, one of these may have prevented some deaths by forcing the camp's closure. Irena Sendler was a Polish Underground Resistance activist who took part in the Great Action to smuggle out Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto starting in 1942. Before she was found, she is credited with rescuing almost 2,500 children. Thousands of lives were saved when Nazi Party member Oskar Schindler, who owned a factory in Poland, made an effort to protect his Jewish employees from the Nazis. The 275 Jewish residents of the Greek island of Zakynthos were spared because Loukas Karrer, the mayor, refused to give them up and instead chose to hide them. The deputy speaker of the National Assembly of Bulgaria, Dimitar Peshev, had backed anti-Semitic laws in the country, but he forced the government to reverse the decision after refusing to comply with Germany's request to deport 48,000 Jews. Nevertheless, millions of people were killed by the Nazis.