What is the Holocaust definition in history. What's happened
Etymologically, the word "Holocaust" goes back to the Greek components holos(whole) and kaustos(burnt) and was used to describe offerings that were burned on a sacrificial altar. But since 1914, it has acquired a different, more terrible meaning: the mass genocide of almost 6 million European Jews (and also representatives of other social groups, such as gypsies and homosexuals), committed by the Nazi regime.
For the anti-Semite and fascist leader Adolf Hitler, Jews were an inferior nation, an external threat to the purity of the German race. , throughout which the Jews were constantly persecuted, the final decision of the Fuhrer resulted in the event that we now call the Holocaust. Under the cover of war in occupied Poland there are mass death centers.
Before the Holocaust: Historical Anti-Semitism and Hitler's Rise to Power
European anti-Semitism did not begin with. The term first began to be used in the 1870s, and there is evidence of hostility towards Jews long before the Holocaust. According to ancient sources, even the Roman authorities, having destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, forced the Jews to leave Palestine.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Enlightenment tried to revive tolerance for religious diversity, and in the 19th century, the European monarchy in the person of Napoleon passed legislation that ended the persecution of Jews. Nevertheless, for the most part, anti-Semitic sentiments in society were of a racial rather than religious nature.
Even at the beginning of the 21st century, the world is feeling the consequences of the Holocaust. IN last years Swiss government and banking institutions acknowledged their involvement in Nazi activities and established funds to assist victims of the Holocaust and other victims of human rights violations, genocide or other disasters.
It is still difficult to determine the roots of Hitler's extremely violent anti-Semitism. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army. Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed Jews for the country's defeat in 1918.
Shortly after the end of the war, Hitler joined the national German Workers' Party, which later formed the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). Imprisoned as a state traitor for his direct participation in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Adolf wrote his famous memoirs and part-time propaganda tract, “ Mein Kampf"("My Struggle"), where he predicted a pan-European war, which should lead "to the complete destruction Jewish race on German territory."
The leader of the NSDAP was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan”, and the need for such a concept as “ Lebensraum” – living and territorial space for expanding the range of this race. After being released from prison for ten years, Hitler skillfully exploited the weaknesses and failures of his political rivals to raise the profile of his party from obscurity to power.
On January 20, 1933, he was appointed Chancellor of Germany. After the President's death in 1934, Hitler proclaimed himself "Führer" - the supreme ruler of Germany.
Nazi revolution in Germany 1933-1939
Two related goals are racial purity and spatial expansion ( Lebensraum) - became the basis of Hitler's worldview, and since 1933, having united, they were the driving force of both his foreign and domestic policies. One of the first to feel the wave of Nazi persecution was their direct political opponents - the communists (or social democrats).
The first official concentration camp was opened in March 1933 in Dachau (near Munich) and was ready to receive its first lambs to the slaughter - those undesirable to the new communist regime. Dachau was under the control of the head of the elite Schutzstaffel National Guard (SS), and then the chief of the German police.
By July 1933, German concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) contained about 27 thousand people. Crowded Nazi rallies and symbolic actions, such as the public burning of books by Jews, communists, liberals and foreigners, which were of a forced nature, helped convey the necessary messages from the party of power.
In 1933, there were about 525 thousand Jews in Germany, which was only 1% of the total German population. Over the next six years, the Nazis undertook the "Aryanization" of Germany: they "liberated" non-Aryans from government employment, liquidated Jewish-owned businesses, and deprived Jewish lawyers and doctors of all clients.
According to the Nuremberg Laws (adopted in 1935), every German citizen whose maternal and paternal grandparents were of Jewish descent was considered a Jew, and those who had Jewish grandparents on only one side were considered Jewish. meant humiliating Mischlinge, which meant "half-breed".
Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became ideal targets for stigmatization (unfairly given negative social labels) and further persecution. The culmination of this kind of attitude between society and political forces was Kristallnacht (“the night of breaking glass”): German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish shops were broken; about 100 Jews were killed and thousands more were arrested.
From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany alive were in constant fear and felt the uncertainty of not only their future, but also their present.
Beginning of the War 1939-1940
In September 1939, the German army occupied the western half of Poland. Shortly thereafter, German police forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews to leave their homes and settle in ghettos, giving confiscated property to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside Germany who identified as Germans), Reich Germans, or Polish non-Jews.
Jewish ghettos in Poland, surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, functioned as captive city-states governed by Jewish councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overcrowding made the ghetto a breeding ground for diseases such as typhoid.
Concurrent with the occupation, in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected nearly 70,000 native Germans from institutions such as mental hospitals and nursing homes to begin a so-called euthanasia program that involved gassing patients.
This program caused many protests from prominent religious figures in Germany, so Hitler officially closed it in August 1941. Nevertheless, the program continued to operate secretly, which led to catastrophic consequences: throughout Europe, 275 thousand people were killed, considered to be disabled of various degrees. Today, when we can look back through history, it becomes obvious that this euthanasia program was the first experimental experience on the road to the Holocaust.
Final Solution to the Jewish Question 1940 -1941
Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler's empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Gypsies, were transported to Polish ghettos.
The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in the war. Mobile assassination units called Einsatzgruppen( Einsatzgruppen), killed by shooting more than 500 thousand Soviet Jews and others objectionable to the regime during the German occupation.
One of the Fuhrer's commanders-in-chief sent Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (SS security service), a memorandum dated July 31, 1941, indicating the need Endlösung – « final decision Jewish question."
Beginning in September 1941, anyone identified as a Jew within Germany was marked with a yellow star (the "Star of David"), making them open targets for attack. Tens of thousands of German Jews were deported to Polish ghettos and captured Soviet cities.
Since June 1941, experiments began to be carried out in a concentration camp near Krakow to find ways massacres. In August, 500 Soviet prisoners of war were poisoned with the gas poison Zyklon-B. Then the SS men made a huge order for gas to a German company that specialized in producing pest control products.
Holocaust death camps 1941–1945
From the end of 1941, the Germans began to massively transport unwanted people from Polish ghettos to concentration camps, starting with those who were considered least useful for the implementation of Hitler's idea: the sick, the old, the weak and the very young. For the first time, mass gas poisoning was used in the Belzec camp ( Belzec), near Lublin, March 17, 1942.
Five more mass killing centers were built in camps in occupied Poland, including Chełmno ( Chelmno), Sobibor ( Sobibor), Treblinka ( Treblinka), Majdanek ( Majdanek) and the largest of them is Auschwitz-Birkenau ( Auschwitz-Birkenau).
From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory, as well as from other countries friendly to Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and autumn of 1942, when more than 300 thousand people were transported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.
Although the Nazis tried to keep the camps secret, the scale of the killing made this nearly impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi activities in Poland to the Allied governments, which were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond or for not releasing news of the massacres.
Most likely, this inactivity was caused by several factors. First, mainly by the Allies' focus on winning the war. Secondly, there was also a general misunderstanding of the news about the Holocaust, denial and disbelief that such atrocities could occur on such a scale.
At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were killed in a process reminiscent of a large-scale industrial operation. The labor camp employed a large number of Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners; although only Jews were gassed, thousands of other unfortunates died from starvation or disease.
End of fascist rule
In the spring of 1945, the German leadership was disintegrating amid internal disagreements, while Goering and Himmler, meanwhile, tried to distance themselves from their Fuhrer and seize power. In his last statement of will and political testament, dictated in a German bunker on April 29, Hitler blamed his defeat on "International Jewry and its accomplices" and called on German leaders and people to adhere to "strict observance of racial distinctions and to merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all nations" - Jews The next day he committed suicide. Germany's official surrender in World War II occurred just a week later, on May 8, 1945.
German troops began evacuating many of the death camps in the fall of 1944, placing prisoners under guard to get as far away from the advancing enemy's front lines as possible. These so-called “death marches” continued until the German surrender, resulting in the deaths, according to various sources, from 250 to 375 thousand people.
In his now classic book Surviving Auschwitz, Jewish Italian author Primo Levi described his own condition, as well as that of his fellow prisoners at Auschwitz on the eve of the arrival of Soviet troops at the camp in January 1945: “We are in a world of death and ghosts. . The last trace of civilization has disappeared all around us. The work of reducing people to bestial degradation, begun by the Germans at the zenith of their glory, was completed by the Germans, distraught from defeat.”
Consequences of the Holocaust
The wounds of the Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah ( Shoah), or catastrophe, healed slowly. The surviving prisoners from the camps were never able to return home, as in many cases they lost their families and were condemned by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, in the late 1940s, unprecedented numbers of refugees, prisoners of war, and other migrants were moving throughout Europe.
In an attempt to punish the perpetrators of the Holocaust, the Allies organized the Nuremberg Trials of 1945–1946, which brought to light the horrific atrocities of the Nazis. In 1948, increasing pressure on the Allied powers to create a sovereign homeland, a national home, for Jewish Holocaust survivors led to the mandate for the establishment of the State of Israel.
Over the ensuing decades, ordinary Germans struggled with the bitter legacy of the Holocaust as survivors and victims' families sought to reclaim wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years.
Beginning in 1953, the German government made payments to individual Jews and the Jewish people as a way to acknowledge the German people's responsibility for crimes committed in their name.
A well-known fact, confirmed by many documents and testimonies, is that during the years of rule in Germany by the National Socialist Workers' Party, throughout the territory of this state and the lands occupied by it during the Second World War, a policy of targeted extermination of people based on nationality was carried out. The totality of actions used to achieve this goal was later called the Holocaust.
Morphology
In order to understand what the Holocaust is, it is necessary to understand the morphology of this term, its sacred sense. The ancient Jews had a custom of making a sacrifice to God, and the object of the offering to the higher mind was burned. Perhaps this religious rite had its name in Hebrew, but the Greek word for it is better known. Whole burning, complete incineration, reduction to dust by fire, this is the original meaning of the word “Holocaust.” History has seen several examples of entire peoples being persecuted simply because they were considered outsiders. Thus, Armenians were killed in the Ottoman Empire. There were cases of Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire, but they were not part of state policy, and their instigators were most often brought to justice. Similar incidents occurred in other European countries, but in almost all cases the government did not support, at least openly, anti-Semitic protests.
The racist ideology of the future Nazi Germany was generally developed and formulated in the programmatic work of Adolf Hitler, written by him while serving a prison sentence for the 1923 coup attempt in Bavaria. The answer to the question of what the Holocaust is can be partly found in this book. The main enemies of the German people and the Aryan race are named already in the first volume - these are the French and the Jews. But there is no need to look for a direct call for the mass extermination of people belonging to these nations in the book, they are not there. But a desire is expressed to help Russia get rid of Jewish oppression, under which it fell as a result of the October coup of 1917. The further development of events, the transition from theoretical research to practical action, fully revealed the author's intention.
Practice
Already in 1933, the Jewish population of Germany learned in general terms what the Holocaust was, although the term was not used then. But other words were heard: “profession ban”, “boycott”, “cleaning”, etc. Already on April 7, a decree was issued prohibiting Jews from holding positions in local governments, then in educational institutions, in the courts, in cinema, medicine, radio and newspapers. The range of possible occupations narrowed, and finally Jews were banned from trading. On the street, anyone could hit or beat them with complete impunity; the police “didn’t see anything.” But these were still flowers, and berries...
Legal side
In 1935, Hitler's nationalist theory was formalized into clear legal norms. The Law “On Race and Citizenship” was passed, according to which Jews were no longer considered full-fledged people, they were infringed upon in many rights, and their legal capacity was limited. A little less than a year later, compulsory registration with the police was introduced. Understanding what the wartime Holocaust is, it is enough to recall the internal laws of the Reich, adopted from 1935 to 1939. They began to operate in the occupied territories immediately after the arrival of the Germans. This was the case in Poland, France, Holland and other occupied countries. This happened in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. And in the pre-war period there was also Kristallnacht. Then, in 1938, not many Jews were killed by twentieth-century standards - 36 Jews. There was still more to come.
Court of Nations
Then there was something that humanity fully learned about only after the war. The trial of Nazi leaders exposed their crimes in sordid detail. Holocaust victims cried out to their executioners from photographs and directly from the audience. Giant death plants and concentration camps were deployed in vast areas occupied by the Nazis. They put the executioner business on an industrial basis. And it all started with a book written in a prison cell...
(English holocaust, from Greek holokaustos - burned whole) - the death of a significant part of the Jewish population of Europe (more than 6 million people, over 60%) during the systematic persecution and extermination of it by the Nazis and their accomplices in Germany and in the territories it captured in 1933 -1945
Excellent definition
Incomplete definition ↓
Holocaust
Holocaust), Nazi policy of genocide, the physical extermination of the Jewish population of Europe.
In the NSDAP program (“25 points”), adopted long before the Nazis came to power, paragraphs 4 and 5 declared the complete expulsion of Jews from the social and cultural life of Germany. In Mein Kampf, Hitler fiercely attacked the Jews as a race destroying civilization. “If on the eve of the 1st World War 12 or 15 thousand Jews, enemies of the people, had been gassed, ... then millions of victims would not have been required at the front,” Hitler wrote. Only a few in Germany understood then what was hidden behind these words.
The persecution of Jews began almost immediately after the Nazis came to power. Under the pretext of responding to the anti-Hitler campaign launched abroad, allegedly inspired by Jews, a wide wave of anti-Semitism swept through Germany: in a matter of weeks (by Decree of April 7, 1933), representatives Jewish nationality. Jewish doctors were prohibited from conducting private practice and working in hospitals. The cultural life of the country was purged: Jews were prohibited from working in film production and the media; artists and musicians were banned from their professions. Jews were deprived of the right to engage in trade and production. Everyday anti-Semitism has acquired enormous proportions. The police made no effort to protect Jews from attacks on the streets. By the end of 1933, over 63 thousand Jews were forced to leave Germany.
The second wave of anti-Semitism began after the adoption in September 1935 of the Nuremberg laws on citizenship and race, according to which Jews were deprived of German citizenship, the right to vote, they were prohibited from marrying Germans, etc. On July 23, 1938, a decree was issued according to which every Jew was obliged to register with the police and receive a special certificate marked “J” (“Jew”) and present it at the first request of the authorities.
An order of August 17, 1938 obligated Jewish men to add the name Israel, and women - Sarah, to their real, non-Jewish name. On October 5, 1938, the mark “Jew” became mandatory in foreign passports, which caused a wave of indignation throughout the world. All these measures brought German Jews to the brink of starvation.
The anti-Jewish campaign reached its apogee in November 1938, when, in response to the murder of German Ambassador Ernst vom Rath in Paris by the Polish Jew Herschel Grünszpan, a wave of organized Jewish pogroms swept across Germany (see Kristallnacht). 36 people were killed, about 20 thousand Jews were arrested, 267 synagogues and hundreds of shops were destroyed and burned.
Hermann Goering announced a “final settlement with the Jews.” On January 30, 1939, on the sixth anniversary of his rise to power, Hitler made his first public threat to the physical extermination of the Jews in the Reichstag: “If, with international financial support, the Jews in Europe and beyond again succeed in plunging the peoples into a new world war, then the result will not be the establishment of Bolshevik world rule and Jewish triumph, but the extermination of Jews in Europe."
NSDAP order on the boycott of Jews dated April 1, 1933: “In every locality where there are branches of the NSDAP, executive committees must be formed to systematically carry out a boycott of Jewish shops, goods, doctors and lawyers. The committees are obliged to ensure that innocent citizens do not suffer , the attitude towards Jews should be as ruthless as possible.” The flywheel of Hitler’s plans for the physical extermination of Jews began to spin up in full force from the first days of World War II. In May 1940, the Auschwitz concentration camp was created on the territory of occupied Poland, which soon turned into a huge factory for the extermination of people. In May 1941, camp commandant Rudolf Franz Hess received orders personally from Himmler to equip the camp with gas chambers. On July 31, 1941, Goering sent the following order to SD leader Reinhard Heydrich: “I hereby order you to make all the necessary organizational, financial and military preparations for the complete solution of the Jewish question in the zone of German influence in Europe.” At the Wannsee meeting held on January 20, 1942, the so-called plan was approved. The "Final Solution", the responsibility for the implementation of which was assigned to Adolf Eichmann. Heydrich summed up the meeting: “Europe will be combed from west to east... Undoubtedly, a huge number of Jews will disappear due to natural loss. The rest who manage to survive should be treated accordingly, because... they may become the embryo of a new Jewish development. Don't forget the experience of history." The Gestapo and SD immediately got to work, constantly increasing the pace of sending millions of Jews to “death camps.” What looked like unbridled political propaganda in the pages of Mein Kampf now became a real, carefully organized process of mass extermination of people, the epicenter of which was the camps of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Belsen and Sobibor. In addition to the “death camps,” there were over 400 transshipment and transit camp centers that sent labor to the West. But Auschwitz remained the main center of the Holocaust. During the period of highest activity it could accommodate up to 100 thousand.
people, and up to 12 thousand prisoners passed through its gas chambers every day.
SS doctors met arriving transports, immediately selected those fit for work, and the rest, including women and children, were sent to gas chambers, each of which simultaneously accommodated 2 thousand people. At the Nuremberg trials, Rudolf Hess said: “In the extermination rooms we used Zyklon B, crystallized hydrocyanic acid, which was poured through a special small hole. It took from 3 to 15 minutes to kill people in the chamber, depending on the climatic conditions. We "We knew that people were dead when their screams stopped. We usually waited half an hour before opening the doors and pulled out the bodies. After that, a special team [Sonderkommandos, consisting of prisoners] removed rings and gold teeth from the corpses."
By the winter of 1944, the extermination camps were under threat of being captured by Soviet troops. As it became more and more difficult to accommodate the huge masses of prisoners, Himmler and his SS subordinates made some deviations from the original program, hoping to hide the true extent of their crimes. In March-April 1945, Himmler, who conducted separate negotiations with the allies behind Hitler’s back, attempted, through the mediation of the International Red Cross, to evacuate some of the Jewish prisoners to Switzerland. However, the monstrous consequences of the Holocaust have already become known to the world community.
The whole world was shocked by the published facts of countless Nazi atrocities against the civilian population of Europe.
The Holocaust was the most monstrous manifestation of barbarism in the entire existence of civilization. Attempts by historians, psychologists, sociologists and psychiatrists to find rational explanation This tragic historical phenomenon has not yet been successful.
Excellent definition
Incomplete definition ↓
The history of mankind, perhaps, does not remember a more brutal crime than the Holocaust. WITH Greek language This term translates as "burnt offering" and became widespread only after the 1950s. The history of the victims of the Holocaust is a terrible catastrophe for European Jewry that began in 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and established the absolute dictatorship of the National Socialists. The new government was guided by pseudoscientific racial theories and a thirst for cleansing the German nation of those considered objectionable. The Jews suffered the most crushing blow then, and even children became victims of the Holocaust.
- Why were Jews the victims of the Holocaust?
- History of dislike for Jews
- What do the experts say?
- Number of victims of the Holocaust
- International Holocaust Remembrance Day
- Holocaust museums
Why were Jews the victims of the Holocaust?
History of dislike for Jews
To the question of why Jews became victims of the Holocaust, scientists and historians have several well-founded answers, and they all go back centuries.
Historically, Jews lived outside their homeland for many centuries. Living on the territory of other peoples, they preserved their language and religion. In appearance, clothing and traditions, they differed from Europeans. When Christianity arose, Judeophobic ideas about Jews began to form. The Catholic Church accused them of killing Jesus Christ.
In the 5th century, Augustine the Blessed formulated the “correct” Christian attitude to people of Jewish origin: you cannot kill Jews, but you can and should humiliate them. Thus, religious consciousness perceived the image of a Jew as something negative and unclean. As a result, Jews had to live in separate quarters, and the authorities limited their birth rate and freedom of movement. They were expelled from various states, including Russia. The connection between religious Judeophobia and state phobia was very close.
Video about the history of the victims of the Holocaust:
The concept of "anti-Semitism" first appeared in the 19th century. Anti-Semitic sentiments were especially popular in Germany. Hitler, who came to power, unified them into the Nazi ideology and sentenced the Jews to complete destruction. Nazi ideology assumed that the guilt of Jews lay in the very fact of their birth.
In addition, the list of victims of the Holocaust included all “subhumans” and “inferiors,” which were considered all Slavic peoples, homosexuals, gypsies, and the mentally ill.
The Nazis set themselves the goal of eradicating Jews from the face of the earth as a species, making the Holocaust their official policy.
What do the experts say?
Experts express different opinions about the reasons for such a large-scale and unprecedented destruction of people. It is especially unclear why millions of ordinary German citizens participated in this process.
- Daniel Goldhagen considers the main cause of the Holocaust to be anti-Semitism (national intolerance), which at that time massively captured the German consciousness.
- Leading Holocaust expert Yehuda Bauer has a similar opinion on this matter.
- The German historian and journalist Götz Ali suggested that the Nazis supported the policy of genocide because of the property taken from the victims and appropriated by ordinary Germans.
- According to the German psychologist Erich Fromm, the cause of the Holocaust lies in the malignant destructiveness that is inherent in the entire biological human race.
Number of victims of the Holocaust
The number of victims of the Holocaust is horrific: during World War II, the Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews. However, many researchers now argue that in fact there were much more Nazi camps than was commonly believed just a few years ago. Accordingly, the number of victims also increases.
Historians have discovered about 42,000 institutions in which the Nazis isolated, punished and exterminated both Jewish and other groups of the population considered inferior. They pursued this policy over vast territories - from France to the USSR. But the largest number of repressive institutions were located in Poland and Germany.
So, in 2000, a project was launched, the goal of which was to search for death camps, forced labor camps, medical centers where pregnant women had abortions, prisoner of war camps and brothels whose inmates served the German military under duress. In total, more than 400 scientists took part in the project, taking into account the real facts and memories of Holocaust victims.
After the work, American researchers released new figures indicating how many victims of the Holocaust there actually were: about 20 million people.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is celebrated on January 27th. This day was approved by the UN General Assembly in 2005, calling on all member countries to develop and educate programs aimed at ensuring that the lessons of the Holocaust are retained in the memory of all future generations. People around the world must remember these terrible events to be able to prevent future acts of genocide. Many countries around the world have created memorials and museums that commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. Every year on January 27, mourning ceremonies, memorial events and events are held there.
Such events on this day are also held in the Auschwitz memorial camp - a complex of Nazi concentration and death camps where Slavs and Jews - victims of the Holocaust - died en masse in 1940-1945.
According to many scientists, it is very difficult for the human mind to fully comprehend genocide that originated in a state rich in spiritual traditions and developed culture. These monstrous events took place in civilized Europe almost before the eyes of the whole world. To ensure that a similar Holocaust will never happen again, people must strive to understand its origins and consequences.
English holocaust from Greek holokaustos burnt offering, sacrifice by fire)
the most common term for the persecution and extermination of Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators after Hitler came to power in Germany and until the end of World War II in Europe (1933-45). Used in Russian along with the terms Shoah (from Hebrew Shoah - Catastrophe) and Catastrophe. First used in American journalism in the 1960s. as a symbol of the crematoria of the Auschwitz death camp. Gained worldwide fame since the mid-1970s. after the release of the Hollywood feature film Holocaust.
Excellent definition
Incomplete definition ↓
HOLOCAUST
from English holocaust), Shoah (from Hebrew - disaster, catastrophe), Catastrophe - concepts widely used to characterize the tragedy when, as a result of the Nazi policy of genocide during the Second World War, millions of Jews were killed.
The ideology of National Socialism, based on the racial doctrine of the superiority of the Aryan, Nordic race, justified the enslavement and physical destruction of entire peoples, who were declared inferior, “inferior” races, “subhumans” (Untermenschen) - for example, Slavs or Gypsies. But it was precisely in relation to Jews that the genocide in the “Third Reich” and in the occupied territories acquired a large-scale, massive character and led to the almost complete destruction of Ashkenazi Jews - Eastern European Jewry.
The anti-Semitism of the Nazis grew out of old nationalist prejudices that had existed in Europe for centuries. But in the 20th century. it acquired a qualitatively new character. The traditional Jewish community existed autonomously in European states within the ghetto for many centuries, as a result of profound changes in the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries. ceased to exist. With its collapse, the active integration of Jews into the economic, political, and cultural life of their countries of residence began.
The Jewish national movement became a significant factor in international life. Former inhabitants of the ghetto began to play an important, and often leading role in the political life of many states. The leadership of the Bolshevik Party, which seized power in Russia in October 1917 (see October Revolution), consisted mainly of Jews. The Nazis always used this circumstance in their propaganda, identifying Bolshevism and Jewry, and justifying monstrous atrocities against the latter by the need for salvation European civilization from communist barbarism.
The influence of Jewish financial capital was great on the formation of the foreign and domestic policies of the United States, which had become by the beginning of the twentieth century. to the center of world Jewry (and remains so to this day). In defeated Germany, key positions in the economy, politics, and culture were also captured by Jews. The Weimar Republic was often called even Judenrepublik. It is not surprising that post-war economic difficulties, devastation, poverty, coupled with a feeling of national humiliation, soon led to the fact that ordinary Germans began to see Jews as the main culprits of all their troubles.
Hitler skillfully used these spontaneous moods. The Nazis accused Jews of undermining German national traditions, the German state, and the foundations of economic life. International connections of Jewish capital and politicians of Jewish nationality with the financial and political circles of the USA, Great Britain, France - recent enemies of the Reich - were presented by Hitler's propaganda as evidence of a worldwide “Jewish-Masonic conspiracy”, the purpose of which is to establish Jewish domination on the planet. And only the “Aryan race” can prevent this.
From the moment their party emerged, the Nazis aimed not just at isolating Jews, pushing them out of political and economic life, but at the complete physical extermination of all Jews, the “final solution to the problem.” Back in 1922, Hitler stated that if he came to power, “the extermination of the Jews will be my first and main task... If hatred is properly stirred up and a fight is launched against them, then their resistance will inevitably be broken. They will not be able to defend themselves, and no one will be their defender.” And after coming to power in 1933, he consistently began to implement this program, skillfully combining the spontaneous anti-Semitism of the streets, pogroms of stormtroopers with systematic state violence, the role of which increased as the fascist regime strengthened.
With the outbreak of World War II, violence against Jews became widespread, and pogroms within the country turned into genocide on a European scale. According to some estimates, about 9 million Jews lived in the Nazi-controlled states of the continent. To implement their monstrous plans (the physical liquidation of such a significant number of people), “ordinary” methods were not enough. And then the Nazis created a system of concentration camps - “death factories”, where during the years of the “Third Reich” millions of people, mostly civilians, were exterminated.
In total, the Nazis created 1,634 concentration camps and over 900 “labor” camps. All of them, in essence, were “death camps”, where both Jews and representatives of other “inferior” peoples died in the thousands. In Germany itself, back in 1939, such large camps as Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Flossenburg began to operate. And in occupied Poland, stationary centers appeared, specially designed (or converted) for mass murder on an industrial scale: in the territories included in the Reich - Auschwitz and Chelmno, in the “General Government” - Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec. This is no coincidence - it was in Poland, as well as in Belarus and Ukraine, that the bulk of Eastern European Jewry lived.
Death camps were built near transport arteries. In the General Government, which Hitler called the "huge Polish camp", the ghettos were concentrated near the railways. Without their network (Rusbahn employed about 1.5 million people), the Holocaust would have been simply impossible.
Even during the Battle of Stalingrad, when it was urgently necessary to transfer new military formations and equipment to the Eastern Front, the train schedule was drawn up in such a way that priority was given to those trains that were transporting Jews to concentration camps.
Most Germans knew about the purpose of these trains, which rumbled in the dark. Some even said: “Damned Jews, they don’t even let you sleep at night!”
The Germans benefited from the massacres. Items confiscated from the unfortunates, from watches and pens to underwear, were distributed among the armed forces and among the civilian population. There is a known case when on the “Internal Front”, i.e. in Germany itself, 222 thousand were distributed in just 6 weeks. men's suits and sets of underwear, 192 thousand sets of women's clothing and 100 thousand children's clothing. All this was confiscated from people sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. And the recipients knew this very well.
There were, of course, many cases when the Germans, risking their lives, saved Jews from inevitable death. But in general we have to admit: the German people knew about the genocide and contributed to it.
Mobile teams - SS Einsatzgruppen - were also involved in mass extermination. Four of them were created - one for the group of armies that invaded the USSR. Of the 4 million Jews living in Soviet territories occupied by the Germans in 1941–42, 2.5 million managed to evacuate before the Nazis arrived. The remaining 90% were concentrated in cities, which greatly simplified the task of destroying them for the Einstzatzgruppen.
Executions were carried out both by mass executions and using mobile gas chambers. In a short time, small groups of executioners (each punitive battalion numbered from 500 to 900 soldiers) managed to exterminate a huge number of civilians, mostly Jewish. Thus, in Riga, 22 SS men killed 10,600 Jews.
In just a month and a half, starting in mid-October 1941, Einsatzkommandos A, B, C and D killed 125, 45, 75 and 55 thousand Jews in occupied Soviet territory, respectively. In 1942, 900 thousand of them were exterminated on the territory of Ukraine and Belarus.
Genocide against this people was carried out both in the occupied territories and in the countries of the fascist bloc, although in different ways everywhere. The Austrians, who after the war began to be portrayed as “the first victims of Nazism,” in fact warmly welcomed the Anschluss and participated in the Holocaust even more eagerly than the Germans.
Not only Hitler, but also the main executioners Eichmann and Kaltenbrunner were Austrians. Immigrants from Austria, Seyss-Inquart and Rauter led the mass extermination of Jews in Holland. Austrians made up one third personnel SS extermination battalions, they commanded four of the six "death factories". According to some estimates, Austrians accounted for half of all Jews exterminated during the Holocaust.
Responsibility for the monstrous catastrophe also lies with Romania, where 757 thousand Jews lived before the war. The pro-fascist Antonescu regime pursued anti-Semitic policies at the state level within the country. And in occupied Bessarabia, Romanian soldiers killed 200 thousand Jews. Together with Einsatzkommando D, they exterminated 218 thousand Jews in Transnistria alone. The cruelty of the Romanians amazed even the SS executioners.
Some of the French, both those who lived in the northern part occupied by the Nazis and subjects of the puppet Vichy regime of Pétain, supported Hitler’s “final solution”. The collaborators helped the Germans deport 75 thousand French Jews, of whom only 2.5 thousand survived.
In other European countries - Italy, Holland, Greece, the Nazis did not find such support from the population. Even Mussolini was hesitant about implementing the Final Solution. The genocide of Jews in these states was carried out mainly by the SS.
The number of victims of the Holocaust would have been an order of magnitude lower if not for the wait-and-see policy of the United States and Great Britain. The Allies could well have taken in more refugees from Germany and occupied Europe (and thereby saved them from certain death) than was done.
During the entire war, the United States allowed only 21 thousand emigrants into the country - 10% of the number provided for by the quota law. Anti-Semitic sentiments were strong in America, where the bulk of citizens refused to believe even in the very fact of the Holocaust, despite the numerous testimonies of those who were lucky enough to survive. President Roosevelt, who was a resolute opponent of the mass emigration of Jews from Europe to America, took a passive position.
The British were also opposed to the mass reception of refugees; the Foreign Office even rejected individual requests. Goebbels wrote in his diary on December 13, 1942: “I think both the British and the Americans are happy that we are energetically exterminating the Jews.”
The USA and England assured the world community that the most effective method saving the Jews - the quick and final defeat of Hitler. But the second front in Europe was opened only on June 6, 1944, when the Red Army was rapidly advancing to the west, liberating the countries of Europe and saving the civilian population, including Jews, from destruction.
The Allies' delay in opening a second front cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews. In this sense, the military-political leadership of the United States and Great Britain also bears responsibility for the Holocaust.
Why did it become possible? Why were the Jews themselves unable to offer serious resistance to the executioners, as other, less numerous peoples did? The reasons lie in the historical experience of the Jews, who over many centuries have become accustomed to adapting to reality rather than fighting. In addition, the most businesslike of the Ashkenazis emigrated to America even before the war, and the energetic and militant ones emigrated to Palestine. Those who remained, mostly religious Jews, were not capable of organized resistance. The Nazis took these features of Jewish social psychology into account, reducing the very idea of resistance among victims to a minimum.
The Jews believed that the terrible punishment sent down on them, the instrument of which was Hitler, was the work of God and at the same time proof that God had chosen them. The understanding of the Holocaust as sacrifice, suffering, redemption, followed by rebirth, is still relevant for most Jews to this day. Shoah, Catastrophe is for the Jewish consciousness central event The Second World War, which was started allegedly only because Hitler was pathologically seeking to destroy the Jews.
But in 1939–45. participants in the war solved various problems based on their understanding of national interests (albeit a false one, which led their own people to disaster, as in the case of Hitler), and did not fight solely to destroy or save the “chosen people.”
Taking the events of the Holocaust out of the context of the world war leads to mythologization historical process. Sacralization of the Catastrophe, its transformation in the public consciousness from historical fact in the version of the Biblical Scriptures (Ketubim), an event only in Jewish history, does not allow other, “non-Talmudic” interpretations. Even the figure of Holocaust victims has been declared unchanged and final - 6 million people. Those who doubt are subject to harsh judgment, and at the highest international level.
In fact, the religious and metaphysical perception of the Holocaust by Jews is prescribed to the rest of the world as a norm of international law, and a different point of view on the history of mass genocide against Jews is unacceptable.
In some countries, Holocaust denial is a criminal offense. However, there is a "revisionist" literature that attempts to look at the events of World War II and the Holocaust through other than Jewish eyes (see, for example, Jürgen Graf).
According to the “revisionists,” the number of victims of the Holocaust is greatly overestimated, many nations suffered no less losses in the war, and on this basis it is wrong to make Jewish people the main subject (and object) of the Second World War, its main victim. The most radical authors generally use the figure of all Jewish losses as 300 thousand people, and not 6 million. Quite serious arguments confirm the figure of about 4 million people. (V. Kozhinov). There is also a point of view that there was no Holocaust - it is widespread in the Arab and Muslim world, and the myth of the Holocaust was inflated by the Jewish press to make the whole world feel guilty.
Christian orthodox publicists, without denying the extermination of Jews, oppose the use of the word “Holocaust”, because it had the meaning of a sacred sacrifice - “burnt offering”, and to extend this word to the fact of genocide is blasphemous.
In general, the genocide of Jews in the 20th century. will remain a subject of interest to historians for a long time and a fact that determines the international political climate.
Excellent definition
Incomplete definition ↓