WAR - The Holocaust (Lesson)
The Holocaust
The use of nuclear weaponry was not the only thing coming out of World War II to rock the world. As Allied troops pushed into Germany, they traveled through and liberated areas that provided evidence of the mass extermination of people. Technically, the term holocaust means "destruction or slaughter on a mass scale." World War II did not provide the world's first holocaust (nor its last,) but it was the period of the Holocaust. When capitalized, the Holocaust refers to the mass murder of six million Jews living in Europe during the period of Hitler's reign over Germany. The Holocaust was systematic and based on Adolph Hitler's Mein Kampf which transparently explained his racial beliefs regarding the Jewish population (along with his beliefs on homosexuals, gypsies, communists, and Slavs—other social categories that Hitler abhorred (to regard with hate and disgust) and targeted during the Holocaust) and his plans for their future. When Hitler took over Germany, he started his work on his "Final Solution."
Although Germany's history was relatively short as a nation when World War II began, its history as a people was fairly long—and it was marked, as all of the European histories (and most other continents as well) were—with periods of violence against any minority ethnic population, but especially against the Jewish population (also fairly universal in Europe.) When Hitler rose to power and started implementing Anti-Semitic laws, many probably felt that it was yet another example of history repeating itself. But a good portion of German Jews packed their bags and left Germany, mostly for neighboring European nations. Prior to the outbreak of World War II, a number of events occurred within Germany to step up the emigration rates.
- April 1, 1933: Hitler's government enacted a nation-wide boycott of Jewish-owned businesses and professionals. Nazi storm troopers painted the Star of David (a Jewish symbol) on the front doors and windows of Jewish shops and businesses. The boycott was accompanied by much destruction of these businesses.
- April 7, 1933: Passage of the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" that banned Jews from working in civil service jobs. This marked the beginning of years of laws—local and national—that banned Jews from certain professions—from education to the military—and from freely practicing their religious rites.
- September 1935: Passage of the Nuremberg Laws that started by defining exactly who was a Jew (anyone with three out of four ethnically Jewish grandparents, even if they did not practice the religion.) The Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of their citizenship, of their right to vote, of their right to marry non-Jews—it officially segregated them within the German population. Eventually, these laws included other ethnic groups and races that Hitler didn't like.
- 1936: Before and during the international Summer Olympics games in Berlin, the German government was a bit more relaxed in their attacks on Jews (in Berlin, at least, Hitler encouraged Germans to not do anything that might result in the removal of the games from Germany or in bad international press.)
- 1937-1938: An increasing number of laws aimed at stripping away the livelihoods of Jews passed. (Jewish lawyers lost their licenses, Jewish doctors were banned from treating non-Jews, non-Jews were supported by the government to buy Jewish businesses at a fraction of their worth, non-Jews were encouraged to fire Jewish employees...)
November 9-10, 1938: A government-encouraged pogrom (an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group) occurred conducted against Jews in Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland that included the destruction of hundreds of synagogues, of several thousand Jewish-owned businesses, and of Jewish cemeteries. The violence of Kristallnacht (or "Night of Broken Glass" as it is known) focused primarily on structures rather than people. But Jews were physically attacked as well as forced to endure public humiliation.
- By 1939, Germany's neighbors (and other nations—the United States included) were cutting back on the numbers of Jewish refugees they would accept from German-occupied territories. But many had already left. By the end of 1939, approximately just over 200,000 of Germany's 1933 Jewish population of roughly 523,000 were still living within Germany.
- Unfortunately, the majority of the Jewish emigration from Germany stayed on the European continent. When Germany overran most of the continent during the first year of the war, these people found themselves under the thumb of the German government anyway as "puppet governments" in conquered nations followed the German rules. And when the German government ordered the conquered "puppet governments" to ship their Jewish populations back to Germany, they did.
Escalation of German Policies Leading to the "Final Solution"
Nazi Germany's first two steps leading to the Holocaust—the legalization of social discrimination and the concentration of Jewish communities into ghettos—were not historically isolated in Europe. European Jews were often forced to live in ethnically-Jewish neighborhoods that were segregated from the rest of the population. However, following the invasion of Poland, Nazi Germany increased its crackdown on Jewish segregation and Jewish neighborhoods became more like prisons as walls were built to contain them within these ghettos. In 1939, Germany mandated that all Jews over the age of ten wear the Star of David on their clothing to distinguish them among the population. Starting in 1941, Germany started transporting Western European Jews to Eastern and Central European ghettos that led to extreme overcrowding and deadly sanitation conditions.
Eventually the Nazi government started moving Jews out of the ghettos and into concentration camps. Not all concentration camps were extermination camps—but life within all was brutal. One of the first concentration camps to open was Dachau. Located a few miles from Munich in Germany, it first served as a location to house political dissidents. But following Germany's annexation of Austria, the camp started holding Jews and others marked by the Nazis as "socially deviant." Once Germany invaded Poland, the Nazis stepped up their pace of building and filling up concentration camps. There, prisoners provided forced-labor for the German military as well as human "guinea pigs" for Nazi scientists. From the time of Dachau's construction (1933 CE) to the end of the war (1945,) Germany built tens of thousands of incarceration centers, concentration and extermination camps.
But while survival in a concentration camp was difficult, it was possible. Therefore, in December 1941, Germany opened the doors of its first extermination camp—Chelmno. The Germans built their exterminations camps in Poland—a nation with a large Jewish population—and in remote areas. In January 1942, Nazi government officials met at the Wannsee Conference to approve plans on a "Final Solution" for exterminating all of Europe's nine to eleven million Jews. Introduced by Heinrich Himmler and carried out by Adolf Eichmann, the Final Solution was the strategic outline that listed the steps and guided the construction for the extermination of Jews in Europe.
Arrival at one of the many extermination camps was a death sentence. But really, just the journey to one of the camps could easily result in death through deadly conditions (where food, fresh air and hygiene were denied in route) or through intentional murders (stemming from shooting operations to train wagons designed to release a deadly gas to its passengers.) Arrival at an extermination camp meant that one waited one's turn to die by the systematic means constructed to murder more people in less time. The gas chambers—rooms that filled with poison and killed all inside—were designed for this purpose and could each end the lives of thousands in a single day.
Again, this was not the first holocaust in history—nor was it even the first use of concentration camps—and, again, it would not be the last of either. However, other examples of holocausts and concentration camps involved a political reason—perhaps, the perpetrator engaged in these activities to eliminate opponents (still, not an acceptable excuse for murder)—the difference between the Holocaust (capital "H") of World War II and other genocides is not in the level of suffering experienced individually or collectively, but in the motivation behind and the efficiency of the killing carried out by a nation that was supposedly "evolved" according to the principles of its imperialistic neighbors. Those targeted for extermination had no political power and had not risen up against their government.
Therefore, when international understanding of the atrocities that marked the Holocaust became widespread (and those nations that had earlier refused refugees understood what happened to those they sent back)—there occurred an international acceptance toward Zionists' goals.
Creation of Israel
When Great Britain took over Palestine as a mandate at the close of World War I, it took over a region that had a history of conflicts and a wealth of holy sites. Prior to the Babylonian conquering of the region in the 6th Century BCE, kings by the famous Israelite names of Saul, David and Solomon ruled there. When the Babylonians took over, they exiled the Israelites from the region and destroyed their Temple, scattering them around the Middle East in what was called "the Diaspora." The Israelites were allowed to return to Palestine hundreds of years later when they again returned to power and ruled the region until the Romans conquered the land in 63 BCE. The Jews were allowed to continue living there and to practice their religion until an uprising caused the Romans to, once again, exile the Jews from the region and destroy their Temple. From that point forward, Jews no longer had a nation that they could call their own. Instead, they lived throughout Europe, Africa and Asia as a minority ethnic group within other nations.
As a minority ethnic group, Jews around the world found their rights and opportunities limited by many of the governments that they lived under. Nowhere was this truer than in Eastern Europe. During the 1800s CE, a movement emerged to allow the Jews to create their own nation. This movement was called Zionism. Zionists believed that the Jews of the world would only be truly safe if they were allowed to develop a homeland and pushed for the right to settle in Palestine. At the time, Palestine was still a part of the Ottoman Empire and Jewish immigration there was limited. After World War I ended and Palestine became a British mandate, Jewish immigration there increased. By the end of Great Britain's mandate, one out of every three people living in Palestine was Jewish. Still, Great Britain considered Palestine to be an Arab country that allowed and protected the rights of its Jewish minority.
The Holocaust led to an increase in Jewish immigration to Palestine as well as a push to make the region an independent Jewish nation-state. Arabs living in Palestine found themselves in a rather unusual predicament. For the first time ever, it seemed that the world supported a Jewish state emerging in the exact place Arab Palestinians called home and had lived for thousands of years. The Arab Palestinians pushed against this decision. In 1947, Great Britain threw its hands up in frustration as to how to handle Palestine—should it become a Jewish state in order to ensure that nothing like the Holocaust could happen again OR should the Arab Palestinians continue their rule over the region as long as they protected the rights of the Jews living there. (Remember—Palestine was the home of significant holy sites within Islam as well.) Great Britain handed the problem of "one land- two people" over to the newly-formed United Nations. In the end, the United Nations decided to divide Palestine with 56% of the territory designated as a Jewish state and the rest of the land designated as an Arab state while the city of Jerusalem would be ruled by the United Nations itself.
In 1947, 60% of Palestine's population was Arab and only 40% was Jewish. Therefore, in making this division, the United Nations gave the majority of Palestine to the minority of people living there. The moment the British troops and government left Palestine, Arab armies marched. After all, they had never agreed to the United Nations' decision and were determined to end the creation of a Jewish state where they lived.
In 1948, the first Arab-Israeli conflict erupted into war. During that conflict 700,000 to 800,000 Arab Palestinians fled the new nation of Israel that emerged victorious after seven months of fighting. From that time on though, the issue of ridding the Middle East of Israel became a unifying factor for the diverse Arabs. Disputes over Israel's borders and the return of the Arab Palestinian refugees led to further conflicts between Israel and its neighbors that will be addressed in the next module.
Creation of the United Nations
During World War II, representatives of the United Kingdom (Great Britain,) the USSR, the United States and China agreed that a better international organization was needed to replace the League of Nations. Starting before the war officially ended in the Spring of 1945, representatives of these nations (plus other Allied nations) met in the United States to draft the framework for this organization. The charter they created went into effect on November 24, 1945 when the United Nations officially opened for business.
You might wonder why, if the League of Nations already existed, there was a need to form the United Nations. The start of World War II was proof to the international community that the League of Nations was not up to its stated purpose to maintain international peace and confidence in the League waned. Rather than fix what was broken, the international community decided on a do-over using the lessons from the League's failures as a guide.
As the United Nations' reputation grew, more and more nations joined its ranks...
Recap Section
Watch the video below to review what you've learned.
RESOURCES IN THIS MODULE ARE OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES (OER) OR CREATED BY GAVS UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED. SOME IMAGES USED UNDER SUBSCRIPTION.