THE HOLOCAUST

The Destruction of the European Jews,

1939-1945

DEFINING THE HOLOCAUST

• Mass murder of more than 5,000,000 Jews• Holocaust: sacrificial offering burnt whole before

the Lord• Sho’ah: catastrophe• Genocide: total physical annihilation

– Gypsies, mentally and physically handicapped, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish and Soviet citizens, political prisoners, religious dissenters, homosexuals

ROOTS

• History of prejudice in Christianity – claimed to be the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and the sole recipient of God’s Covenant

• Pogroms, discriminatory laws, expulsions

• Eugenics: racial pseudo-science

HOW THE FINAL SOLUTION CAME ABOUT – 1930s

• Excluding the racially inferior

• Creating the Gestapo

• The first concentration camps

• Nuremberg Laws – Sept 1935

• Crystal Night Pogrom – Nov 9-10 1938

• Evian Conference – July 1938

WAR

• Euthanasia (T4) Program

• Nazi racial policies in Poland

• Yellow badge in the West

• Attack on the USSR & mobile killing squads – “Einsatsgruppen”

• Volunteers – “Hiwi” – to help guard labor and extermination camps

FINAL SOLUTION

• Wannsee Conference – Jan 1942 – authorized systematic deportation of 11,000,000 Jews

CAMPS

• Forced Labor camps

• Extermination camps:4 of 6 devoted exclusively to mass murderChelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka

Extermination through work:Majdanek, Auschwitz

INTERPRETATIONS

• Intentionalists: pinpointing Hitler’s fixation

• Functionalists: No premeditated plan --

A “twisted road” to Auschwitz

• Synthesizers: Before and after 1941

WHO WERE THE PERPETRATORS?

• SS and Police, German Army, German physicians, German civil servants, Non-German volunteers (Hiwis), Non-German Govt. officials

• Explanations for their behavior:Indoctrination, superior orders,

careerism, peer pressure, self-preservation

HOW DID THE VICTIMS TRY TO SURVIVE?

• Accomodation – obeying the law

• Armed resistance

• Evasion

• Surviving camps

BYSTANDERS

• Bystanders: apathy and indifference

• Rescuers: family background that emphasized justice and non-violent solutions. Less concerned about race, class, and nation

THE ALLIED POWERS

• Bombing?• Negotiations?• Pressure through Vatican and satellites?• Publicized mass-murder to influence

bystanders?• Waited too long to establish WRB?• Jewish committees of the free world?• The Neutrals?

THE LASTING EFFECTS

• Notion of linear progress and Reason shattered• Studying the Holocaust to avoid other genocides• The Shoah project – taped interviews• “Blockbuster” interpretations of the Holocaust:

Schindler’s List – saving lives• Primo Levi’s If this is a Man? – Survival at

Auschwitz • Negationism