History UsefulNotes / TheHolocaust

[[caption-width-right:314: ''"That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well."'' - '''Heinrich Heine'''[[note]]A line of dialogue from his play Almansor about the Spanish Inquisition, which was one of the many books burnt in 1933, since the author was Jewish[[note]]

[[caption-width-right:314: ''"That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well."'' - '''Heinrich Heine'''[[note]]A line of dialogue from his play Almansor about the Spanish Inquisition, which was one of the many books burnt in 1933, since the author was Jewish[[note]]]]

[[caption-width-right:314: ''"That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well."'' - '''Heinrich Heine'''[[note]]A line of dialogue from his play Almansor about the Spanish Inquisition, which was one of the many books burnt in 1933, since the author was Jewish[[note]]]]]]

[[caption-width-right:300: [[DeadlyEuphemism ''Work will set you free'']]

The Holocaust is the word used to describe the systemic genocide committed by Nazi Germany under the orders of UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler. It specifically targeted Jews, {{Romani}}, homosexuals, and political prisoners. The official body count is 11 million in total, with 6 million Jews in particular. These killings were committed in waves during the war years with significant resources from the Nazi machine devoted to maintaining the concentration camps. The scale of the atrocities often defies understanding but it is precisely the systemic and step-by-step nature of this act that makes it so distinctive among the many war crimes committed by humans.

[[folder:Origins Pre-World War II]]
The term Holocaust is widely used but its actually disliked by some Jews who call it ''Ha Shoah'' or ''Shoah'' where it means simply ''the catastrophe''. The Greek word ''holocaust'' actually refers to an animal sacrifice to the Gods, whose implications and usage in that light are naturally disturbing, though there was already a tradition to use it to describe massacres in histories and chronicles. The Nazis, when they committed their program, called it "The FinalSolution to the Jewish Question" (''Endlösung der Judenfrage'').

The origins of the Holocaust are complex. To state it simply, its the product of UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler's demonic policies and twisted vision. He was known for his anti-semitism in the 20s and 30s, had openly stated in ''Literature/MeinKampf'' that he would remove Jews from all social and political activity and had already stated that it was more cruel to tolerate the weak than it is to exterminate them. But again, that begs the question, if world leaders and the public had already known of Hitler's widespread anti-semitism in the 1920s and 1930s and he came to power despite the same, even earning praise from some liberal quarters for his economic development of Germany, why was the Holocaust not anticipated to begin with?

The answer lies, depressingly, in the fact that anti-semitism, far from the fringe and discredited notion that it is today, was distressingly common not only in Germany, but across Europe and even in America and it had been so for ''centuries''. The same applies to the other minorities targeted in the Holocaust, especially homosexuals. Anti-semitism was often encouraged by Christian Fundamentalism, from both Protestants and Catholics and references from it are included even among great artists like Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Richard Wagner and others. Indeed, after the war, people differentiated between "garden variety anti-semites" who would be racist without being murderous to the Nazi kind, who actually did mean and carry out the cruel things people took for granted under the JustJokingJustification. About the only positive outcome to the mess is the fact that it highlighted the consequences of long term bigotry and racism in addition to permanently discrediting anti-semitism (and bigotry in general) among polite society.

In Germany, anti-semitism is especially ironic because until the 1930s it was seen as a society where Jews managed to advance a great deal, breaking glass ceilings that were still in place elsewhere. Bigotry never entirely died. Indeed Creator/FriedrichNietzsche who was misappropriated by Nazis was a vociferous critic of the same, and famously wrote an analysis for why it took root:
-->"''The whole problem of the Jews exists only in nation states, for here their energy and higher intelligence, their accumulated capital of spirit and will, gathered from generation to generation through a long schooling in suffering, must become so preponderant as to arouse mass envy and hatred. In almost all contemporary nations, therefore - in direct proportion to the degree to which they act up nationalistically - the obscenity of leading the Jews to slaughter as scapegoats of every conceivable public and internal misfortune is spreading.''"

When the Nazis took power in 1933, some Jews, among them prominent artists and intellectuals, emigrated from Germany, however many others remained behind. Some because they could not afford to emigrate or could not get the papers, others found it hard to leave their homes while there were still others who believed that the Nazis would lose out in the next election(not knowing that there wouldn't be a next election). But there were already signs of things to come. One of the first concentration camps, and among the most notorious, Dachau was opened in 1933 itself and was initially used as a re-education camp for political enemies and undesirables, who would be "worked to death" (which was euphemistically alluded to by the notorious "''Arbeit macht frei''" ("Work will set you free") slogan placed above the gates of many concentration camps. including Auschwitz). Civil rights of Jews were steadily eroded during the 30s, starting from Nazi boycott of businesses, exclusion of Jews from significant positions in universities, courts and civil service, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which forbade sexual relations between Jews and "racially pure" Aryans.

The PointOfNoReturn is generally regarded as 1938, ''Kristallnacht''. Its beginnings are tragic. Hershel Grynszpan was a Polish Orthodox Jew who was born in Germany but was residing in France for several years. As a result of German anti-semitic laws as well as Polish bureaucratic chicanery, he was rendered stateless. The racist laws made it difficult for him to contact his family or access his money in German banks. Eventually, he marched up to the Germany Embassy in Paris and assassinated Ernst vom Rath. He immediately turned himself in for arrest and vom Rath was given a state funeral where Hitler and Ribbentrop stated that the action was a declaration of hatred from Jews to Germans. The result was a state-directed series of pogroms were Jewish shops were smashed (hence the term, Reichskristallnacht means "The Night of the Broken Glass") and 1200 synagogues across Germany (which was 2/3rds of the total) were smashed or destroyed. The official death count was stated to be 91 but is believed to have been much higher. 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps, their property was taken from them, many were forced to emigrate, and the ones who weren't forced really did emigrate seeing the writing on the wall.

So far, Nazi policy towards the Jews as distressing and repellent as it is, does not differ greatly from pogroms in Europe and indeed in medieval times, where Jews were segregated into ghettos (the word itself originates from a pejorative insult directed to the Jewish quarter in Venice in Renaissance Italy), were often expelled at various times from Spain, France and even England between the Crusades and the EnglishCivilWar. Pogroms were common in Russia and parts of Eastern Europe as well. The point of the Holocaust was that it was called the FinalSolution precisely because the Nazis felt all the old bullying was useless and meaningless. And they were thinking of ways to solve the problem once for all.

[[folder:Outbreak of War 1939–1942]]
The Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, marking the official start of the Second World War. Poland was home to 3 Million Jews at the time. When the Nazis took over, Reinhard Heydrich ordered the construction of ghettoes to segregate Jews in different Polish cities. Several policies and coordinated killings were already conducted and some Jews were forced into labour where they were deliberately worked to death, the policy called Vernichtung durch Arbeit ("destruction through work"). Others were used as regular labour to serve the German war effort, serving as chattel slaves in all but fact. Some of them worked in the production of V-2 rockets at Mittelbau-Dora, and various armaments around the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex, the V2 Rocket camps were directly under the purview of Wernher von Braun who after the war was controversially de-Nazified as part of Operation Paperclip. Around 15,000 camps and sub-camps were established for this effect.

As the Germans expanded across Europe, anti-Semitic laws were placed in every nation they conquered, and information about Jews was collated and stored, ghettos and concentration camps were built for purposes of incarceration, although already the death rate and living conditions were appalling and horrific even at the time. Within the ghettos, the Nazis established Jewish Councils, a committee of elders who they selected and tasked with the daily running of the ghettos. They even asked these councils to furnish a list of names to be killed. Any councils who refused were shot, in one ghetto, they committed mass suicide rather than go ahead with it, while others tried their best to save as many lives as possible within these conditions. At the same time, the Germans established special task forces, most famously the Einsatzgruppen, rowing death squads who shot Jews and Gypsies alongside the Army.

The Germans had already used poison gas in the Action T4 program, where Hitler allowed the forced euthanasia of the mentally ill and the disabled, as well as children born of deformities. Poison gas was also used by the Einsatzgruppen in gas vans and in the Chelmno concentration camp. But already, there were complaints that there were too many Jews to simply kill by shooting and furthermore Nazi commanders pointed out that it was demoralizing to soldiers to shoot unarmed defenseless people repeatedly and there needed to be an efficient means of killing [[AMillionIsAStatistic without potentially troubling moral and trauma to deal with]].

At this point, the main plan to deal with the Jews was to deport all of them to Madagascar, where a massive famine would have resulted in millions of deaths. Because the Kriegsmarine didn't have very many ships to transport so many people, it was expected that the Royal Navy would replace or enlarge the naval forces enough for this to be implemented once England had been conquered. However, Operation Sea Lion was postponed and soon cancelled, causing Hitler to focus his attention on the east. In addition, it's unlikely the British would have allowed their ships to fall into German hands, as they sank the fairly sizable French navy in port before they could be captured. With nowhere to send the Jewish population, and with the war in Russia taking longer than expected, high-ranking Nazis looked for an alternative.

[[folder:The Wannsee Conference 1942–1944]]
A conference in the Wannsee suburb of Berlin in 1942 was convened under the leadership of Reinhard Heydrich and 15 other Nazi officials, including Adolf Eichmann. They formed a comprehensive plan for the fate of all Jews, who were to be exterminated by a combination of mass murder and forced labour. They made estimates of the population of Jews in different countries, including the USA and the UK and instituted a systemic plan. Jews from various countries were to be deported via train to concentration camps where they were to be worked to death and murdered en masse via gas chambers and other methods of execution. Special camps were selected for Extermination only, while others were allotted for Concentration and Forced Labour, though the latter was not especially better than the former, and the former was horrific.

The Extermination Camps became words of horror - Treblinka, Sobibor, Bełżec, Chełmno and the biggest camp, and the one responsible for killing one million in death toll alone, Auschwitz–Birkenau. It was at Auschwitz that Zyklon-B was used in gas chambers, a pesticide manufactured by the IG Farben chemical conglomerate which openly collaborated with Nazi Germany. Once unleashed, it could kill groups of people in 20 minutes, with one Nazi operator stating that one-third died immediately upon exposure depending how close they were to the gas vents. Each extermination camp had gas chambers and a crematoria in place to dispose of bodies. Before disposing bodies, hair was removed and gold teeth if any was collected and stored.

After Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated, the running of the concentration camps fell into the hands of Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Adolf Eichmann and between 1942 and 1944, the killings continued unperturbed. In Spring 1944, 8,000 Jews were gassed every day in Auschwitz. Already Nazi officials were complaining about significant wartime resources directed to the killing program, while Heinrich Himmler wanted to speed up the killings as much as possible, but the scales of the war were shifting and it was getting impractical.

[[folder:Endgame and Liberation 1944–1945]]
By 1944, Jewish communities across Europe felt the effects of the Holocaust, varying from 25% in France to 90% in Poland. Evidence and news of Nazi atrocities were steadily leaking out to the Allied High Command. By this point, the war had shifted to indicate that German defeat was merely a matter of time. The Soviet Army was steadily closing in and the Western Allies began their long-awaited liberation of France. The Nazis, realizing the consequences of defeat, also became aware that their actions were war crimes by any written and unwritten code of conduct. As such they took to destroying evidence, gas chambers were dismantled, corpses were dug up, farmers were asked to plant crops over the fields, and the survivors were forced on death marches, called so because it involving marching half-starved, physically drained prisoners who were murdered if they fell or stopped on the way.

The first camps were liberated by the Soviets (Majdanek, Chelmno and Auschwitz) by January 1945. Buchenwald was liberated by the Americans in April, Bergen Belsen by the British. The Nazis managed to destroy three camps before its liberation (Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec). Upon discovering the horrific conditions at the Dachau concentration camp, Colonel William Quinn remarked,

The Holocaust, as we can see, did not develop as a result of conquest a la GenghisKhan, acts of war. or mob violence, which is not to say that those killings are better or any more justified, far from it. But rather, the methodical and industrial approach to killing and mass murder made it something nobody had expected. Far from an act of barbarism, the Holocaust was a war crime that mobilized all the techniques of modern industry and technology. The technology of Gas Chambers came from Siemens corporations, the gas came from IG Farben, and likewise, the records for the killings were conducted on the Tabulating Equipment of Punched Cards used by Dehomag, a former subsidy of IBM.

More importantly was the way the psychology of it, which partly stemmed from Nazi ideology, but mostly related to a sense of inertia that made mass murder a daily occurrence, it was possible to kill scores of people in a single day's duty, and then [[PunchClockVillain punch clock on the machine]] and transfer your shift. Then there was the scale of it, which meant that the killings were more or less an open secret among average Germans and others. The Nazi officers who were later captured at Nuremberg justified their actions by stating that they were JustFollowingOrders, now called the "Nuremberg defense", while philosopher Hannah Arendt would later propose a controversial thesis that the likes of Adolf Eichmann weren't especially murderous, but average men, basic garden-variety anti-semites who embodied what she famously described as the "Banality of Evil". Before the widespread. public exposure of the Holocaust, the image of the Nazis had been [[ThoseWackyNazis silly fanatics in strange costumes]] prominent in wartime films and cartoons, but the actual evidence of Nazi brutality challenged that conception and, at least in Europe, where the Nazis were never exactly a joke, people realized that the scale of the evil couldn't be restricted to a single man like Hitler or Heydrich and others, but also the mass psychology of an inhuman system that dehumanized people.

The Holocaust, in the wake of World War II, became the touchstone for increasing prominence to human rights abuses. The scale of the atrocities is still being documented and all professional historians admit that the numbers killed likely exceed the official figures greatly.

The Holocaust is the word used to describe the systemic genocide committed by Nazi Germany under the orders of UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler. It specifically targeted Jews, {{Romani}}, homosexuals, and political prisoners, with the body count, that is ''official'' body count being 11 million in total, with 6 million Jews in particular. These killings were committed in waves during the war years with significant resources from the Nazi machine devoted to maintaining the concentration camps. The scale of the atrocities often defies understanding but it is precisely the systemic and step-by-step nature of this act that makes it so distinctive among the many war crimes committed by humans.

The Holocaust is the word used to describe the systemic genocide committed by Nazi Germany under the orders of UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler. It specifically targeted Jews, {{Romani}}, homosexuals, and political prisoners, with the body count, that is ''official'' body count being 11 million in total, with 6 Million Jews in particular. These killings were committed in waves during the war years with significant resources from the Nazi machine devoted to maintaining the concentration camps. The scale of the atrocities often defies understanding but it is precisely the systemic and step-by-step nature of this act that makes it so distinctive among the many war crimes committed by humans.

The Holocaust is the word used to describe the systemic genocide committed by Nazi Germany under the orders of UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler. It specifically targeted Jews, Romani, Gypsies, Homosexuals and Political Prisoners, with the body count, that is ''official'' body count being 11 million in total, with 6 Million Jews in particular. These killings were committed in waves during the war years with significant resources from the Nazi machine devoted to maintaining the concentration camps. The scale of the atrocities often defies understanding but it is precisely the systemic and step-by-step nature of this act that makes it so distinctive among the many war crimes committed by humans.

By 1944, Jewish communities across Europe felt the effects of the Holocaust, varying from 25% in France to 90% in Poland. Evidence and news of Nazi atrocities were steadily leaking out to the Allied High Command. By this point, the war had decisively turned against Germany. The Soviet Army was steadily closing in and the Western Allies begin their long-awaited liberation of France. The Nazis, realizing the consequences of defeat, also became aware that their actions were war crimes by any written and unwritten code of conduct. As such they took to destroying evidence, gas chambers were dismantled, corpses were dug up, farmers were asked to plant crops over the fields, and the survivors were forced on death marches, called so because it involving marching half-starved, physically drained prisoners who were murdered if they fell or stopped on the way.

By 1944, Jewish communities across Europe felt the effects of the Holocaust, varying from 25% in France to 90% in Poland. Evidence and news of Nazi atrocities were steadily leaking out to the Allied High Command. The Soviet Army was steadily closing in. The Nazis, realizing the consequences of defeat, also became aware that their actions were war crimes by any written and unwritten code of conduct. As such they took to destroying evidence, gas chambers were dismantled, corpses were dug up, farmers were asked to plant crops over the fields, and the survivors were forced on death marches, called so because it involving marching half-starved, physically drained prisoners who were murdered if they fell or stopped on the way.

The Holocaust is the word used to describe the systemic genocide committed by Nazi Germany under the orders of AdolfHitler. It specifically targeted Jews, Romani, Gypsies, Homosexuals and Political Prisoners, with the body count, that is ''official'' body count being 11 million in total, with 6 Million Jews in particular. These killings were committed in waves during the war years with significant resources from the Nazi machine devoted to maintaining the concentration camps. The scale of the atrocities often defies understanding but it is precisely the systemic and step-by-step nature of this act that makes it so distinctive among the many war crimes committed by humans.

The term Holocaust is widely used but its actually disliked by some Jews who call it ''Ha Shoah'' or ''Shoah'' where it means simply ''the catastrophe''. The Greek word ''holocaust'' actually refers to an animal sacrifice to the Gods, whose implications and usage in that light are naturally disturbing, though there was already a tradition to use it to describe massacres in histories and chronicles. The Nazis when they committed their program called it, ''The FinalSolution to the Jewish Question'' (Endlösung der Judenfrage).

The origins of the Holocaust are complex. To state it simply, its the product of AdolfHitler's demonic policies and twisted vision. He was known for his anti-semitism in the 20s and 30s, had openly stated in Mein Kampf that he would remove Jews from all social and political activity and had already stated that it was more cruel to tolerate the weak than it is to exterminate them. But again, that begs the question, if world leaders and the public had already known of Hitler's widespread anti-semitism in the 1920s and 1930s and he came to power despite the same, even earning praise from some liberal quarters for his economic development of Germany, why was the Holocaust not anticipated to begin with?

The answer lies, depressingly, in the fact that anti-semitism far from the fringe and discredited notion that it is today, was distressingly common not only in Germany, but across Europe and even in America and it had been so for ''centuries''. The same applies to the other minorities targeted in the Holocaust, especially homosexuals. Anti-semitism was often encouraged by Christian Fundamentalism, from both Protestants and Catholics and references from it are included even among great artists like Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Richard Wagner and others. Indeed, after the war, people differentiated between "garden variety anti-semites" who would be racist without being murderous to the Nazi kind, who actually did mean and carry out the cruel things people took for granted under the JustJokingJustification. About the only positive outcome to the mess is the fact that it highlighted the consequences of long term bigotry and racism in addition to permanently discrediting anti-semitism (and bigotry in general) among polite society.

--> ''"The whole problem of the Jews exists only in nation states, for here their energy and higher intelligence, their accumulated capital of spirit and will, gathered from generation to generation through a long schooling in suffering, must become so preponderant as to arouse mass envy and hatred. In almost all contemporary nations, therefore - in direct proportion to the degree to which they act up nationalistically - the obscenity of leading the Jews to slaughter as scapegoats of every conceivable public and internal misfortune is spreading."''

When the Nazis took power in 1933, some Jews, among them prominent artists and intellectuals, emigrated from Germany, however many others remained behind. Some because they could not afford to emigrate or could not get the papers, others found it hard to leave their homes while there were still others who believed that the Nazis would lose out in the next election(not knowing that there wouldn't be a next election). But there were already signs of things to come. One of the first concentration camps, and among the most notorious, Dachau was opened in 1933 itself and was initially used as a re-education camp for political enemies and undesirables, who would be "worked to death" (which was euphemistically alluded to by the notorious "Arbeit macht frei"(Work will set you free) slogan placed above the gates of many concentration camps. including Auschwitz). Civil rights of Jews were steadily eroded during the 30s, starting from Nazi boycott of businesses, exclusion of Jews from significant positions in universities, courts and civil service, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which forbade sexual relations between Jews and "racially pure" Aryans.

The PointOfNoReturn is generally regarded as 1938, ''Kristallnacht''. Its beginnings are tragic. Hershel Grynszpan was a Polish Orthodox Jew who was born in Germany but was residing in France for several years. As a result of German anti-semitic laws as well as Polish bureaucratic chicanery, he was rendered stateless. The racist laws made it difficult for him to contact his family or access his money in German banks. Eventually, he marched up to the Germany Embassy in Paris and assassinated Ernst vom Rath. He immediately turned himself in for arrest and vom Rath was given a state funeral where Hitler and Ribbentrop stated that the action was a declaration of hatred from Jews to Germans. The result was a state-directed series of pogroms were Jewish shops were smashed (hence the term, Reichskristallnacht means "The Night of the Broken Glass") and 1200 synagogues across Germany (which was 2/3rds of the total) were smashed or destroyed. The official death count was stated to be 91 but is believed to have been much higher. 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps, their property was taken from them, many were forced to emigrate, and the ones who weren't forced really did emigrate seeing the writing on the wall.

So far, Nazi policy towards the Jews as distressing and repellent as it is, does not differ greatly from pogroms in Europe and indeed in medieval times, where Jews were segregated into ghettos (the word itself originates from a pejorative insult directed to the Jewish quarter in Venice in Renaissance Italy), were often expelled at various times from Spain, France and even England between the Crusades and the EnglishCivilWar. Pogroms were common in Russia and parts of Eastern Europe as well. The point of the Holocaust was that it was called the FinalSolution precisely because the Nazis felt all the old bullying was useless and meaningless. And they were thinking of ways to solve the problem once for all.

[[folder:Outbreak of War 1939-1942]]

The Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, marking the official start of the Second World War. Poland was home to 3 Million Jews at the time. When the Nazis took over, Reinhard Heydrich ordered the construction of ghettoes to segregate Jews in different Polish cities. Several policies and co-ordinated killings were already conducted and some Jews were forced into labour where they were deliberately worked to death, the policy called Vernichtung durch Arbeit ("destruction through work"). Others were used as regular labour to serve the German war effort, serving as chattel slaves in all but fact. Some of them worked in the production of V-2 rockets at Mittelbau-Dora, and various armaments around the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex, the V2 Rocket camps were directly under the purview of Wernher von Braun who after the war was controversially de-Nazified as part of Operation Paperclip. Around 15,000 camps and sub-camps were established for this effect.

As the Germans expanded across Europe, anti-Semitic laws were placed in every nation they conquered, and information about Jews was collated and stored, ghettos and concentration camps were built for purposes of incarceration, although already the death rate and living conditions were appalling and horrific even at the time. Within the ghettos, the Nazis established Jewish Councils, a committee of elders who they selected and tasked with the daily running of the ghettos. They even asked these councils to furnish a list of names to be killed. Any councils who refused were shot, in one ghetto, they committed mass suicide rather than go ahead with it, while others tried their best to save as many lives as possible within these conditions. At the same time, the Germans established special task forces, most famously the Einsatzgruppen, rowing death squads who shot Jews and Gypsies alongside the Army.

The Germans had already used poison gas in the Action T4 program, where Hitler allowed the forced euthanasia of the mentally ill and the disabled, as well as children born of deformities. Poison gas was also used by the Einsatzgruppen in gas vans and in the Chelmno concentration camp. But already, there were complaints that there were too many Jews to simply kill by shooting and furthermore Nazi commanders pointed out that it was demoralizing to soldiers to shoot unarmed defenseless people repeatedly and there needed to be an efficient means of killing [[AMillionIsAStatistic without potentially troubling moral and trauma to deal with]].

[[folder: The Wannsee Conference 1942-1944]]

A conference in the Wannsee suburb of Berlin in 1942 was convened under the leadership of Reinhard Heydrich and 15 other Nazi officials, including Adolf Eichmann. They formed a comprehensive plan for the fate of all Jews, who were to be exterminated by a combination of mass murder and forced labour. They made estimates of the population of Jews in different countries, including the USA and the UK and instituted a systemic plan. Jews from various countries were to be deported via train to concentration camps where they were to be worked to death and murdered en masse via gas chambers and other methods of execution. Special camps were selected for Extermination only, while others were allotted for Concentration and Forced Labour, though the latter was not especially better than the former, and the former was horrific.

The Extermination Camps became words of horror - Treblinka, Sobibor, Bełżec, Chełmno and the biggest camp, and the one responsible for killing one million in death toll alone, Auschwitz–Birkenau. It was at Auschwitz that Zyklon-B was used in gas chambers, a pesticide manufactured by the IG Farben chemical conglomerate which openly collaborated with Nazi Germany. Once unleashed, it could kill groups of people in 20 minutes, with one Nazi operator stating that one-third died immediately upon exposure depending how close they were to the gas vents. Each extermination camp had gas chambers and a crematoria in place to dispose of bodies. Before disposing bodies, hair was removed and gold teeth if any was collected and stored.

After Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated, the running of the concentration camps fell into the hands of Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Adolf Eichmann and between 1942 and 1944, the killings continued unperturbed. In Spring 1944, 8000 Jews were gassed every day in Auschwitz. Already Nazi officials were complaining about significant wartime resources directed to the killing program, while Heinrich Himmler wanted to speed up the killings as much as possible, but the scales of the war were shifting and it was getting impractical.

[[folder: Endgame and Liberation 1944-1945]]

By 1944, Jewish communities across Europe felt the effects of the Holocaust, varying from 25% in France to 90% in Poland. Evidence and news of Nazi atrocities were steadily leaking out to the Allied High Command. The Soviet Army was steadily closing in. The Nazis, realizing the consequences of defeat, also became aware that their actions were war crimes by any written and unwritten code of conduct. As such they took to destroying evidence, gas chambers were dismantled, corpses were dug up, farmers were asked to plant crops over the fields, and the survivors were forced on death marches, called so because it involving marching half-starved, physically drained prisoners who were murdered if they fell or stopped on the way.

The first camps were liberated by the Soviets - Majdanek, Chelmno and Auschwitz by January 1945. Buchenwald was liberated by the Americans in April, Bergen Belsen by the English. The Nazis managed to destroy three camps before its liberation - Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec. Upon discovering the horrific conditions at the Dachau concentration camp, Colonel William Quinn remarked,
--> ''"There our troops found sights, sounds, and stenches horrible beyond belief, cruelties so enormous as to be incomprehensible to the normal mind."''

[[folder: Aftermath]]

The Holocaust as we can see did not develop as a result of conquest a la Genghis Khan, acts of war or mob violence, which is not to say that those killings are better or any more justified, far from it. But rather, the methodical and industrial approach to killing and mass murder made it something nobody had expected. Far from an act of barbarism, the Holocaust was a war crime that mobilized all the techniques of modern industry and technology. The technology of Gas Chambers came from Siemens corporations, the gas came from IG Farben, and likewise the records for the killings were conducted on the Tabulating Equipment of Punched Cards used by Dehomag, a former subsidy of IBM.

More importantly was the way the psychology of it, which partly stemmed from Nazi Ideology but mostly related to a sense of inertia that made mass murder a daily occurrence, it was possible to kill scores of people in a single day's duty, and then [[PunchClockVillain punch clock on the machine]] and transfer your shift. Then there was the scale of it which meant that the killings were more or less an open secret among average Germans and others. The Nazi officers who were later captured at Nuremberg justified their actions by stating that they were JustFollowingOrders, now called the "Nuremberg defense" while philosopher Hannah Arendt would later propose a controversial thesis that the likes of Adolf Eichmann weren't especially murderous but average men, basic garden variety anti-semites who embodied what she famously described as the "Banality of Evil". Before the widespread public exposure of the Holocaust, the image of the Nazis had been [[ThoseWackyNazis silly fanatics in strange costumes]] prominent in wartime films and cartoons, but the actual evidence of Nazi brutality challenged that conception and, at least in Europe, where the Nazis were never exactly a joke, people realized that the scale of the evil couldn't be restricted to a single man like Hitler or Heydrich and others, but also the mass psychology of an inhuman system that dehumanized people.

The Holocaust in the wake of the Second World War, became the touchstone for increasing prominence to human rights abuses. The scale of the atrocities is still being documented and all professional historians admit that the numbers killed likely exceed the official figures greatly.
[[/folder]]

The answer lies, depressingly, in the fact that anti-semitism far from the fringe and discredited notion that it is today, was distressingly common not only in Germany, but across Europe and even in America and it had been so for ''centuries''. The same applies to the other minorities targeted in the Holocaust, especially homosexuals. Anti-semitism was often encouraged by Christian Fundamentalism, from both Protestants and Catholics and references from it are included even among great artists like Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Richard Wagner and others. Indeed, after the war, people differentiated between "garden variety anti-semites" who would be racist without being murderous to the Nazi kind, who actually did mean and carry out the cruel things people took for granted under the JustJoking justification. About the only positive outcome to the mess is the fact that it highlighted the consequences of long term bigotry and racism in addition to permanently discrediting anti-semitism (and bigotry in general) among polite society.

When the Nazis took power in 1933, some Jews, among them prominent artists and intellectuals, emigrated from Germany, however many others remained behind. Some because they could not afford to emigrate or could not get the papers, others found it hard to leave their homes while there were still others who believed that since Hitler got voted Chancellor it would be possible to depose him in the next election. But there were already signs of things to come. One of the first concentration camps, and among the most notorious, Dachau was opened in 1933 itself and was initially used as a re-education camp for political enemies and undesirables, who would be "worked to death" (which was euphemistically alluded to by the notorious "Arbeit macht frei"(Work will set you free) slogan placed above the gates of many concentration camps. including Auschwitz). Civil rights of Jews were steadily eroded during the 30s, starting from Nazi boycott of businesses, exclusion of Jews from significant positions in universities, courts and civil service, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which forbade sexual relations between Jews and "racially pure" Aryans.

The origins of the Holocaust are complex. To state it simply, its the product of AdolfHitler's demonic policies and twisted vision. He was known for his anti-semitism in the 20s and 30s, had openly stated in Mein Kampf that he would remove Jews from all social and political activity and had already stated that it was more cruel to tolerate the weak than it is to exterminate them. But again, that begs the question, if world leaders and the public had already known of Hitler's widespread anti-semitism in the 1920s and 1930s and he got elected despite the same, even earning praise from some liberal quarters for his economic development of Germany, why was the Holocaust not anticipated to begin with?

The answer lies, depressingly, in the fact that anti-semitism far from the fringe and discredited notion that it is today, was distressingly common not only in Germany, but across Europe and even in America and it had been so for ''centuries''. The same applies to the other minorities targeted in the Holocaust, especially homosexuals. Anti-semitism was often encouraged by Christian Fundamentalism, from both Protestants and Catholics and references from it are included even among great artists like Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Richard Wagner and others. Indeed, after the war, people differentiated between "garden variety anti-semites" who would be racist without being murderous to the Nazi kind, who actually did mean and carry out the cruel things people took for granted under the JustJoking justification. About the only positive outcome to the mess is the fact that it highlighted the consequences of long term bigotry and racism in addition to permanently discrediting anti-semitism among polite society.

The first camps were liberated by the Soviets - Majdanek, Chelmno and Auschwitz by January 1945. Buchenwald was liberated by the Americans in April, Bergen Belsen by the English. The Nazis managed to destroy three camps before its liberation - Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec. Upon discovering the horrific conditions at the Dachau concentration camp, Colonel William Quinn remarked, /

The Germans had already used poison gas in the Action T4 program, where Hitler allowed the forced euthanasia of the mentally ill and the disabled, as well as children born of deformities. Poison gas was also used by the Einsatzgruppen in gas vans and in the Chelmno concentration camp. But already, there were complains that there were too many Jews to simply kill by shooting and furthermore Nazi commanders pointed out that it was demoralizing to soldiers to shoot unarmed defenseless people repeatedly and there needed to be an efficient means of killing [[AMillionIsAStatistic without potentially troubling moral and trauma to deal with]].

[[folder: The Wannsee Conference - 1942]]

[[folder: Endgame 1944-1945]]

A conference in the Wannsee suburb of Berlin in 1942 was convened under the leadership of Reinhard Heydrich and 15 other Nazi officials, including Adolf Eichmann. They formed a comprehensive plan for the fate of all Jews, who were to be exterminated by a combination of mass murder and forced labour. They made estimates of the population of Jews in different countries, including the USA and the UK and instituted a systemic plan. Jews from various countries were to be deported via train to concentration camps where they were to be worked to death and murdered en masse via gas chambers and other methods of execution. Special camps were selected for Extermination only, while others were alloted for Concentration and Forced Labour.

So far, Nazi policy towards the Jews as distressing and repellent as it is, does not differ greatly from pogroms in Russia and indeed in medieval times, where Jews were segregated into ghettos (the word itself originates from pejorative statements directed to the Jewish quarter in Venice in Renaissance Italy), were often expelled at various times from Spain, France and even England between the Crusades and the EnglishCivilWar. Pogroms were common in Russia and parts of Eastern Europe as well. The point of the Holocaust was that it was called the FinalSolution precisely because the Nazis felt all the old bullying was useless and meaningless. And they were thinking of ways to solve the problem once for all.

[[folder:Invasion of Poland - The War Begins]]

The Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, marking the official start of the Second World War. Poland was home to 3 Million Jews at the time. When the Nazis took over, Reinhard Heydrich ordered the construction of ghettoes to segregate Jews in different Polish cities. Several policies and co-ordinated killings were already conducted and some Jews were forced into labour where they were deliberately worked to death, the policy called Vernichtung durch Arbeit ("destruction through work").

[[/folder]]

[[folder:Invasion of Poland - The War Begins]

[[folder:Outbreak of World War II]]

The Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, marking the official start of the Second World War. Poland was home to 3 Million Jews at the time. When the Nazis took over, Reinhard Heydrich ordered the construction of ghettoes to segregate Jews in different Polish cities. Several policies and co-ordinated killings were already conducted and some Jews were forced into labour where they were deliberately worked to death, the policy called Vernichtung durch Arbeit ("destruction through work").

So far, Nazi policy towards the Jews as distressing and repellent as it is, does not differ greatly from pogroms in Russia and indeed in medieval times, where Jews were segregated into ghettos (the word itself originates from pejorative statements directed to the Jewish quarter in Venice in Renaissance Italy), were often expelled at various times from Spain, France and even England between the Crusades and the EnglishCivilWar. Pogroms were common in Russia and parts of Eastern Europe as well. The point of the Holocaust was that it was called the FinalSolution precisely because the Nazis felt all the old bullying was useless and meaningless. The one way to solve the Jewish Question was really to KillEmAll and massacres were shown to be inefficient.
[[/folder]]

So far, Nazi policy towards the Jews as distressing and repellent as it is, does not differ greatly from pogroms in Russia and indeed in medieval times, where Jews were segregated into ghettos (the word itself originates from pejorative statements directed to the Jewish quarter in Venice in Renaissance Italy), were often expelled at various times from Spain, France and even England between the Crusades and the EnglishCivilWar. Pogroms were common in Russia and parts of Eastern Europe as well. The point of the Holocaust was that it was called the FinalSolution precisely because the Nazis felt all the old bullying was useless and meaningless. The one way to solve the Jewish Question was really to KillEmAll and massacres were shown to be inefficient

The PointOfNoReturn is generally regarded as 1938, ''Kristallnacht''.

The origins of the Holocaust are complex. Simply put, its the product of AdolfHitler's demonic policies and twisted vision. He was known for his anti-semitism in the 20s and 30s, had openly stated in Mein Kampf that he would remove Jews from all social and political activity and had already stated that it was more cruel to tolerate the weak than it is to exterminate them. But again, that begs the question, if world leaders and the public had already known of Hitler's widespread anti-semitism in the 1920s and 1930s and he got elected by the same, even earning praise from some liberal quarters for his economic development of Germany, why was the Holocaust not expected to start with, and why was it such a shocking incident. The answer lies, depressingly, in the fact that anti-semitism far from the fringe and discredited notion that it is today, was distressingly common not only in Germany, but across Europe and even in America and it had been so for years.