The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust

Donald L. Niewyk, Francis R. Nicosia

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780231528788
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Holocaust History

Offering a multidimensional approach to one of the most important episodes of the twentieth century, The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust offers readers and researchers a general history of the Holocaust while delving into the core issues and debates in the study of the Holocaust today.

Each of the book's five distinct parts stands on its own as valuable research aids; together, they constitute an integrated whole. Part I provides a narrative overview of the Holocaust, placing it within the larger context of Nazi Germany and World War II. Part II examines eight critical issues or controversies in the study of the Holocaust, including the following questions: Were the Jews the sole targets of Nazi genocide, or must other groups, such as homosexuals, the handicapped, Gypsies, and political dissenters, also be included? What are the historical roots of the Holocaust? How and why did the "Final Solution" come about? Why did bystanders extend or withhold aid?

Part III consists of a concise chronology of major events and developments that took place surrounding the Holocaust, including the armistice ending World War I, the opening of the first major concentration camp at Dachau, Germany's invasion of Poland, the failed assassination attempt against Hitler, and the formation of Israel.

Part IV contains short descriptive articles on more than two hundred key people, places, terms, and institutions central to a thorough understanding of the Holocaust. Entries include Adolf Eichmann, Anne Frank, the Warsaw Ghetto, Aryanization, the SS, Kristallnacht, and the Catholic Church. Part V presents an annotated guide to the best print, video, electronic, and institutional resources in English for further study.

Armed with the tools contained in this volume, students or researchers investigating this vast and complicated topic will gain an informed understanding of one of the greatest tragedies in world history.

PART I

Historical Overview

Historical Overview

This brief summary of the Holocaust begins by outlining the stages in which Nazi racial policies evolved. During the 1930s Adolf Hitler sought to exclude Jews, Gypsies, and others he considered to be “racially inferior” from the German national community. During the first two years of World War II, the Nazi state turned to genocide, starting with the German handicapped, then the Soviet Jews, and finally all European Jews and Gypsies. From late 1941 to late 1944 the concentration, deportation, enslavement, and extermination of Jews and Gypsies were in full swing. At the same time millions of Soviet prisoners of war and Slavic civilians were killed in less organized ways. During the last months of the war the Germans stopped the gassings, but they continued to exploit their victims as slave workers and tried to use them as bargaining chips in ransom negotiations. Following the Nazi defeat victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, at different times and in different ways, came to terms with the immediate legacies of the Holocaust.

In addition to summarizing the evolution of the Holocaust, this overview describes the variety of camps and reactions of victims. It also shows why the Holocaust functioned differently in the various countries controlled by or allied with Nazi Germany. What emerges is a sense of the complexity of these events and the diversity of Holocaust experiences for all the groups involved.

EXCLUDING THE “RACIALLY INFERIOR,” 1933–1939

On March 21, 1933, the German Reichstag passed the “Enabling Act” that gave Adolf Hitler dictatorial powers, ending three years of political strife. At the time no one could be sure what he and his Nazi Party would do. Their numerous supporters (just over one-third of German voters; the Nazis never won a free nationwide election) expected bold moves to revive the economy and put the millions of unemployed back to work. Hitler’s army of brown-shirted SA (Sturmabteilung, or Storm Troopers) had smashed their political opponents in street battles, and many Germans anticipated equally militant action to end the depression. Members of the conservative establishment who had handed power to Hitler in a backstairs political deal hoped to be able to control him and his followers and use them to crush the threatening Communist movement. Hitler’s enemies put on a confident front and predicted his early failure. With all eyes fixed on the economic depression and political turmoil that surrounded the destruction of Germany’s democratic Weimar Republic, few Germans paid close attention to Hitler’s ideas about race.

In fact, race stood at the very heart of Nazi ideology. Hitler called his political philosophy National Socialism—the official name of his party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi for short—by which he meant to suggest that he had reconciled the two great competing political ideas of the nineteenth century, nationalism and socialism. What made it possible for him to bring the two together was his belief that racial thinking would lead to national greatness and social justice. During his formative years before World War I in Austria, Hitler had been deeply influenced by Social Darwinism. This now discredited offshoot of biological Darwinism taught that life was eternal struggle between individuals and groups, nature’s way of ensuring the survival of the fittest. Hitler saw a lot of struggle in prewar Vienna—between classes, nationalities, political parties, and business firms—and took it as the central law of history. As a confirmed pan-German nationalist, he concluded that only a ruthlessly united and racially purified Germany could survive in the brutal struggle with other races and nations.

These ideas came through clearly in Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, published in the 1920s. In it he wrote of Germany’s need to conquer Lebensraum (living space) at the expense of its Slavic neighbors in Eastern Europe and the necessity of racial conflict with Jews and others who stood in the way of German superiority. The future dictator linked the Jews with communism and identified them as Germany’s chief internal foe. “If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity…. Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”¹ Often ignored or dismissed as pseudo-intellectual posturing at the time, and later obscured by overriding political and economic concerns, the centrality of race in Hitler’s thinking became apparent only gradually.

Once firmly in power, Hitler and his followers moved quickly to satisfy Germans’ longings for jobs and an end to political conflict. The latter was achieved rapidly and brutally by outlawing all political organizations but the Nazi Party, creating a much feared Gestapo (Secret State Police), and sending leading anti-Nazis to newly created concentration camps such as Dachau, just outside Munich. By the time World War II began in 1939 there would be seven large concentration camps in various parts of Germany and the territories annexed to it, including Buchenwald near Weimar; Ravensbrück, the women’s concentration camp north of Berlin; and Mauthausen in Austria. They would also come to hold more than just political opponents of the Nazi Party. Jews, homosexuals, religious dissidents, and common criminals also entered these camps. Run by Hitler’s elite SS, the concentration camps imposed draconian discipline on the prisoners, many of whom were killed outright or worked to death. But these were not extermination camps. Sometimes prisoners were even released, but only after promising never to speak of camp conditions. Their existence, however, was known to all. Although the regime won the support of an increasingly large number of Germans, the terror served to intimidate political opponents.

Fixing the economy took longer, but the Nazis moved to end unemployment with characteristic determination. They bullied private employers to hire workers, spent vast sums on government building projects, and placed young men in a one-year compulsory national service program called the Arbeitsdienst (Labor Service). By the late 1930s, when Germany was rapidly rearming, unemployment disappeared. Naturally, all this cost a fortune, and Hitler had no idea how to pay off Germany’s massive debts, except perhaps by conquering and looting most of Europe. But he was not saying so openly, and few asked where the money was coming from. Nothing did more to enhance Hitler’s popularity than this spectacular economic recovery.

Hitler’s foreign-policy successes likewise impressed Germans. Loudly affirming his peaceful intentions while denouncing the iniquities of the Treaty of Versailles, which had been imposed on Germany at the end of World War I, Hitler set about burying the treaty one clause at a time. The democracies were preoccupied with their own problems and hoped that concessions would calm the dictator. Hence they stood by as Germany rearmed (March 1935), moved its armies into the demilitarized Rhineland (March 1936), seized Austria (March 1938), and annexed the German-speaking Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia (October 1938). Achieving all this without firing a shot, Hitler lifted the pride of a humiliated nation.

These political, economic, and foreign policy victories were the basis of Hitler’s great popularity in the 1930s. They also made the less attractive aspects of Nazism easier for ordinary Germans to swallow. The people might grumble about the obtrusiveness of party hacks in all areas of life and worry about being overheard expressing the “wrong” opinion, but this seemed an acceptable price to pay for national resurgence. As for the sufferings of political dissidents and those deemed racially unworthy, there was nothing one could do. As was true of people in other totalitarian regimes, Germans retreated into their private lives to find shelter from, and avoid offending, the omnipresent Nazi state.

In the case of the Jews, Hitler initially encouraged this attitude of popular indifference by gradually excluding them from the national community and encouraging them to emigrate. He may have been influenced to take this legalistic approach by the results of his first direct attack on the Jews after becoming dictator, the nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses set to begin on April 1, 1933. Hitler placed it under the direction of Julius Streicher, one of the early leaders of the Nazi Party, a vicious antisemite and the editor of the scurrilous weekly newspaper Der Stürmer. Although Streicher urged Germans not to buy goods in Jewish shops, and Storm Troopers sometimes physically intimidated people from doing so, many patronized them anyway. Foreign reactions were also negative, with Jewish groups and their sympathizers threatening to organize boycotts of German-made goods. The Nazis called off their boycott after the first day and opted instead for less confrontational policies.

These consisted of a series of laws and edicts designed to Aryanize German institutions and reverse Jewish emancipation and assimilation. The “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” of April 7, 1933, removed anti-Nazis and Jews from government jobs as judges, lawyers, teachers, and officials. Subsequent laws limited Jewish enrollment in schools and universities to 1.5 percent of the student body, barred Jewish dentists and physicians from public insurance programs, revoked the naturalization of Eastern European Jews, and specified that only Aryans could edit German newspapers. Simultaneously extralegal pressures on Jewish businessmen to sell their firms, often for only a fraction of their real value, began the gradual process of excluding Jews from the German economy. When local Nazi hotheads revived the practices of boycott and physical attacks aimed at Jews, Hitler firmly returned them to the legal path by promulgating the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935.

The Nuremberg Laws enabled the state to limit the rights of Jews as German citizens and banned marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Germans. Legal codicils later defined Jews as persons having more than two Jewish grandparents. Those with two Jewish grandparents were defined as Mischlinge (mixed breeds), and they were grouped with the Jews only if they were married to Jews or belonged to Jewish congregations. Persons with one Jewish grandparent were also considered Mischlinge but normally were not grouped with the Jews. Later, in 1938, Hitler decided to create a special category of “privileged mixed marriages” for interracial couples that had married before the Nuremberg Laws went into force. Jewish women married to German men were exempted from anti-Jewish measures. The same was true for Jewish men married to German women if they had children. In making these exceptions Hitler showed that he wanted to minimize the number of Germans who would be hurt by his campaign against the Jews.

Hitler’s preference for legal methods of isolating the Jews reflected his sensitivity to public opinion both at home and abroad. As Germany prepared to host the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, the Nazis wanted nothing to stain their law-and-order image. This had the unintended result of sending mixed signals to the Jews. Nazi antisemitic policies were designed to demoralize the Jews and induce them to emigrate. In fact, emigration was the original Nazi solution to the “Jewish problem,” and it remained in force until 1941. Economically and psychologically devastated, some Jews had left the country already or else planned to go soon. And yet most Jews still hoped that conditions would not get worse and that they could ride out the storm. Moreover, departing was never easy. Quite apart from the mental anguish involved in leaving home, it was hard to find a country willing to accept refugees in a time of world economic depression. Further complicating matters was the German emigration tax, which confiscated a considerable portion of an emigrant’s wealth. Hence only about 105,000 of the approximately 600,000 German Jews emigrated in the first four years of the Third Reich.

In 1937, as Hitler entered the fifth year of his dictatorship, he felt increasingly confident of his power and less dependent on conservatives at home or popular opinion abroad. In that year the dictator informed his generals of his plans for a war of conquest in the near future. To prepare for war he wanted to cleanse Germany by speeding the Jews on their way. Pressures to Aryanize Jewish businesses increased, as did random acts of anti-Jewish violence. Such acts were conspicuous accompaniments to Germany’s forcible Anschluss (union) with Austria in March 1938. Also in 1938 foreign Jews and Gypsies were expelled from the Reich. Radical pressures culminated in the Crystal Night pogroms of November 9–10, 1938, in which Nazi Storm Troopers, following orders from Berlin, vandalized Jewish shops and homes and burned 267 synagogues. Twenty thousand Jews were sent to concentration camps, and at least ninety-one were actually murdered. The American consul in Leipzig, David Buffum, described the pogroms as the carefully organized work of Nazi fanatics: “Having demolished dwellings and hurled most of the movable effects onto the streets, the insatiably sadistic perpetrators threw many of the trembling inmates into a small stream that flows through the Zoological Park, commanding horrified spectators to spit at them, defile them with mud and jeer at their plight…. The slightest manifestation of sympathy evoked a positive fury on the part of the perpetrators, and the crowd was powerless to do anything but turn horror-stricken eyes from the scene of abuse, or leave the vicinity.”² Soon thereafter Jews were excluded by law from every conceivable area of German life, including schools, universities, and business activities. The Aryanization of Germany’s culture and economy was complete.

Although relatively few ordinary Germans joined in the Crystal Night carnage, it was now abundantly clear to the Jews that the Nazi leaders wanted them out. As always, the problem was where to go. Most countries, including the United States and Western European nations such as France and Great Britain, restricted entry to those least likely to swell the welfare rolls—and immigrants, it was widely assumed, were sure to become wards of the state. The British limited Jewish immigration to Palestine in response to protests from the Arab majority there. The Evian Conference, held in July 1938 at the suggestion of American president Franklin D. Roosevelt with the goal of finding new homes for German Jewish refugees through intergovernmental cooperation, had been a conspicuous failure. The refugees’ plight was dramatized in May 1939 when 930 German Jews left Germany aboard the German luxury liner St. Louis, believing they would be admitted to Cuba. Refused permission to debark there, they sailed to the coast of the United States but were again rebuffed and forced to sail back to Europe.

To break through these obstacles, the German leaders in January 1939 established a Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Security Police and the Security Service of the SS. This office coordinated and streamlined everything involved in promoting Jewish emigration both legally and illegally. Whenever sufficient visas could not be obtained, the Germans simply chased groups of Jews across unguarded sections of Germany’s borders. All of these procedures were modeled on a smaller Central Office for Jewish Emigration established the previous year in Vienna by Adolf Eichmann, the SS specialist in Jewish affairs. Throughout this SS takeover of Jewish emigration, Eichmann continued to distinguish himself by his diligence. By 1939 the Jews were leaving at the rate of nearly 70,000 yearly, and only about 185,000 Jews were left in Germany proper...