Holocaust

***The Holocaust***

Kristallnacht, November 9-10, 1938 was the “official” beginning of the Holocaust; prior to this, Jews were already forced to wear the yellow/orange “Star of David” in public.
The Holocaust was not called the “Holocaust” until after it ended and the world, Jewish survivors, and historians termed the event… the Holocaust, or “Death by Fire.”
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer under Nazi control, first used and defined the term “genocide” in 1944.
Actually, the Jews commonly refer to the Holocaust in Hebrew as the “Shoah” (the Calamity/Catastrophe).
After WWII started on September 1, 1939, the Nazis “inherited” more Jews during their conquest of Europe…
The first strategy of the Nazis to “deal with” the “Jewish problem” was to place the Jews in sections of occupied cities and towns called Ghettos.
The ghettoization of the Jews in cities under Nazi control was sometimes different from where Jews lived in urban spaces formally known as the “Jewish Quarter.”

Once in the ghettos, the Nazis fenced them in, shut off power and water, no radios, no phones, no waste collection which only further immiserated and psychologically broke down the Jews.
This concentrated isolation of Jews in ghettos (and later in camps) also spread disease - in particular, typhus from body lice - and starvation.
Jewish possessions were also confiscated, often with promises that their personal items would be returned later - that never happened.
A thriving black market of smuggled goods evolved in many ghettos, often with Nazi guards who were bribed to look the other way.
The process of dehumanization manifested in many ways - loss of property, societal and communal standing, personal sense of identity, and separation from family.
After the Nazis conquered Poland, many Polish cities became the first sites of “strategic ghettoization”...
The Polish cities of Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, and Vilna had the biggest Jewish ghettos.
***The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest = est. 450,000 Jews by 1942!
The Warsaw Ghetto was later the site of the largest coordinated Jewish uprising against the Nazis from within their “empire.”

Judenrat

Nazis purposefully created a “Jewish Council” of highly respected Jews, Rabbis, etc. (often under the threat of death) for the sole purpose of compelling more Jews to do what they (Nazis) said and to “manage” the ghettos.
The Judenrat was like a “government” in the ghettos whose members were expected to carry-out Nazi orders and, in exchange, they often received favors for “loyalty” to the Nazis.
Jewish leaders in the Judanrat had mixed feelings about their roles and were deeply conflicted about their complicity in perpetuating the misery of ghetto life for fellow Jews.
Many Judenrat feared the shame of collaborating with the Nazis in exchange for “benefits and protection” for them and their families.

The Judenrat did manage to ameliorate some conditions for some people in the ghettos and camps, but if they were too obedient to the Nazis, they were ostracized and sometimes killed by other Jews… “Catch-22”
As the Nazis expanded their control over Europe during WWII, they used Jews as slaves in factories, mines, and the camps to contribute to the Nazi war effort… and the actual Holocaust itself.
Sometime in early/mid-1941, Hitler spoke with Himmler (head of the SS) and Heydrich (head of Nazi “Security Office”) about what “to do” about the Jews the Nazis “reacquired” as a result of the war.
Also in the room, and privy to the conversation, was Theodor Eicke, (SS, Prison Camp director at Dachau), who suggested a network of concentration camps would be necessary to control, manage, and isolate the Jews to prevent “contamination” with the non-Jewish population.
Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald in Germany became the first three infamous concentration camps early in the Holocaust; many other camps would follow.

The concentration camps were mostly built by Jewish slave labor under Nazi supervision - most were large, desolate, and deliberately remote.
In June 1941, the Nazis violated the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and invaded the USSR during “Operation Barbarossa.”
Three million Nazi soldiers invaded the USSR; nearly 5x the amount of soldiers Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Russia with in June 1812!
The invasion of the USSR was also accompanied by the most feared group of Nazi SS officers and troops - the Einsatzgruppen (basically mobile killing units/death squads) who went into villages to locate, round-up, and execute by gunfire any Jews, usually into mass graves.
Sometimes the Nazis just left the bodies to rot in the open, other times they forced the Jews to dig large pits for mass graves before killing them.
The Einsatzgruppen carried out what later was called the “Shoah by bullets” - nearly 2 million (of the 6 million Jews who died during the Holocaust), most in the Soviet Union, were shot by firing squads.

The Einsatzgruppen also enlisted Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Poles, and Russians, many of whom were also anti-Semetic, to help in the slaughter of Jews.
Members of the Einsatzgruppen were typically SS or Gestapo (police), selected for their particular commitment and willingness to kill Jews.
Still, many Einsatzgruppen drank a lot to dull the horror of what they were doing and many carried out the executions while drunk!?

**The most infamous single day mass killing was in Babi(n) Yar, Ukraine where approximately 35,000 Jews were killed in a little over a day - September 29-30, 1941!? >:(
In late 1941, Nazi military advances into the Soviet Union further increased the number of Jews under Nazi control, and with that, came the decision to start killing Jews en masse in a more systematic way.
On December 8, 1941, the first extermination/death camp (death camp) began operations in Chelmno, Poland killing most older, infirmed, and disabled Jews, but also children…

Chelmno was the first, deliberate death camp - initially, trucks as death chambers were used to poison Jews with carbon monoxide.
But, gas/fuel was necessary for the Nazi war effort and simply too expensive to maintain on the scale of mass murder the Nazis hoped to achieve.

Wannsee Conference

January 20, 1942
Held in a chateau (a nice house formerly owned by someone Jewish) in Wannsee, southwest of Berlin.
18 High Ranking Nazis, that included Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann, met to discuss a resolution, a “Final Solution,” to the “Jewish Problem.”
Over lunch, they talked about how law and process could be streamlined to begin eliminating Jews…
Although all concentration camps were, in essence, death camps - a few camps were constructed to maximize the range and scope of logistics of mass death.

The “Final Solution” required answers to these questions:

The locations of the death camps
How to identify “half-Jews”/percentages ⅛ Jews, ¼ Jews, etc.
Cheapest form of transportation
Cheapest form of means of death -

Zyklon B - pesticide

Who was responsible for managing the camps and how?

During the day, the Nazi participants drank fine wine, ate good food, listened to classical German music, and planned to exterminate an entire population of human beings, and others… >:(

Auschwitz-Birkenau

It was at the Wannsee Conference that the construction of a large camp in Poland that would be used to eliminate between 12,000-20,000 Jews per day at peak capacity!?!
The Nazis never achieved that mark, but did succeed in achieving nearly 8,000 a day at Auschwitz throughout 1943-44! >:(
Just for Auschwitz, 39 other smaller processing/holding camps operated within 50 miles of Auschwitz!
Auschwitz was actually three camps in one, with a fourth camp never completed:

Auschwitz I = holding barracks for Jews and mostly others that would eventually be gassed.
Auschwitz II = the immediate death camp
Auschwitz III = slave labor camp

Heinrich Himmler (Leader of the SS) personally chose the spot of Auschwitz because it was a close nexus of rail lines and was
(at that time) fairly remote.
To get the Jews to the camps, they were loaded onto trains, in cattle cars, without food or water, stripped of their possessions, all ages, forced to stand - many actually died on the trains en route to the camps.
The trains were purposefully overcrowded for this reason.
Most of the camps had the sign “Arbeit Macht Frei” - sarcastically meaning “Work will set you free” at the entrance.
Trains arrived, predominantly at night, which added to the terror.

Those who arrived at the camps would see guard towers, rows of barbed wire fences, SS guards, and dogs (German Shepherds, Doberman Pinschers, Rottweilers).
People arrived exhausted, hungry - and were sorted into several lines by SS guards and camp “doctors.”
They were also separated by sex, children usually went with their mothers (some got on a different line).
Those selected for immediate death would be led to the gas chambers usually within minutes of arrival, stripped of their clothes, their heads hastily shaved and entered a “shower.”
Those selected for work as slaves were head shaved, tattooed, forced to live in unsanitary conditions, and intentionally starved to reduce their capacity to fight back.
Some Jews were also selected by Nazi officers for two horrific roles in the camps:

Sonderkommandos

Assigned to remove the dead bodies from the gas chambers, straighten out the bodies, and load them into the crematoria (ovens).
At times, they disposed of bodies in “bone grinding” machines, depending on the camp.
Most worked in this capacity for 3-4 months before they were forced to enter the gas chambers.

Kapos

Similar to the Judenrat in the ghettos, Kapos were Jewish camp “guards” who helped the Nazis with operations in the camp.
They were especially violent toward fellow Jews so as to please their Nazi overseers and “buy” themselves time.
Like the Judenrat, other Jews in the camps hated them.

-***Besides Auschwitz, other major death camps included:

In Poland: Chelmno, Treblinka, Majdanek,

Sobibor, Belzec

In Germany: Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbruck

(exclusively a women’s camp), Buchenwald,

Sachsenhausen, and Dachau.

In Austria: Mauthausen

***All in all, there were roughly 44,000 camps in total, of various sizes and roles, built during the Holocaust! >:(