The Holocaust

References

• 📖 Why? Explaining the Holocaust – Peter Hayes
• 🔗 [US Holocaust Memorial Museu(https://ushmm.org)

Guiding Questions

• [] targets: why the Jews?](#Targets%20Why%20the%20Jews)
• [] attackers: why germans? / escalation: why murder?](#Attackers%20Escalation%20Why%20Germans%20and%20why%20murder%20Origins%20of%20Antisemitism)
• [] annihilation: why this swift and sweeping?](#Annihilation%20Why%20this%20swift%20and%20sweeping)
• [] victims: why didn’t the Jews fight back more?](#Victims%20Why%20didn’t%20Jews%20fight%20back)
• [] onlookers: why such limited help from outside?](#onlookers)
• aftermath: what legacies and lessons are there?

Targets: Why the Jews?

Definition

Antisemitism is a categorial impugning of Jews as collectively embodying distasteful, destructive, repellent and/or ruinous qualities that set them apart from non-Jews.

• only appeared in 1879
• popularisation of the word is attributed to Wilhelm Marr, a German agitator
  • he wanted it to mean something new and different than previous forms of hostility towards the Jews
  • Marr thought that the Jews had taken over German finance and industry
    • he believed that conflict between Germans and Jews could only be resolved with the death of one or the other
• antisemitism should not be used with a hyphen
  • semantically, ‘anti-semitism’ with a hyphen means you are against all Semitic languages
  • it’s inaccurate, because the term refers specifically to Jewish hate

Attackers / Escalation: Why Germans, and why murder? (Origins of Antisemitism)

• Judaism is the world’s oldest monotheistic religion
• ancient Greco-Roman times: Jews refused to acknowledge multiple gods or worship emperors as gods
  • they were then seen to be disloyal
• Roman empire: Christianity was the state religion
  • Jews lost many rights, were seen to be hostile and discriminated against
• Middle Ages:
  • Jews had to wear yellow badges
    • aided in segregating Jews into ghettos
  • whenever they couldn’t explain anything, they blamed it on the Jews as agents of Satan
    • e.g. in the Black Death (mid 14th century), half the population was wiped out
      • Jews were blamed for it, with rumours spreading that they poisoned the wells
  • Jews became prominent in trade ,banking and finance
    • this led to envy and jealousy from the general population
      • this envy was partially because back then, the poor really had nothing. The wealth gap was immense, as compared to today where most people have some things and aren’t so easily resentful of those who have more
• 16th century: Represented in literature
  • The Jew of Malta
    • depicted a welathy Jew with a desire for money and revenge
    • began depictions of the Jew moneylender archetype
  • The 📖 The Merchant of Venice
• 19th century
  • Oliver Twist – Fagin was referred to as “The Jew” in the early chapter
    • in the movie adaptation, Alec Guiness wore a prosthetic nose and heavy make-up to portray him
  • Panic of 1873: Jews were blamed as bringing on the disaster by being ‘stock manipulators’
  • 1879: a history professor in Berlin praised antisemitic agitation as a “natural reaction of the Germanic national consciousness against an alien element that has taken too much space in our life”
• 20th century:
  • 1912: 20% of millionarires in Prussia were Jews
    • in Germany, Jews made up 0.95% of the population but made up 315 of the wealthiest families
  • the ancient tradition of blaming Jews for disasters persisted, although it assumed different forms
    • it was deeply rooted in religious rivalry and superstition
  • Jews became more and more distinguished in trade and commerce
    • because there were so little of them, they were very well-connected and networked
    • German Jews were three times more likely than Germans to own businesses
    • by 1900, Jews owned 80% of Germany’s department stores, 70% of metal wholesalers, and 60-70% of ready-to-wear clothing stores
    • by 1910, Jews made up less than 1% of the national population
      • but they were 15% of all lawyers, 6% of doctors and dentists, 10% of law school students and 14% of medical students
  • WW: military commanders accused Jews of dodging the draft
  • 1923: post-TOV economic crisis resulted in Germans picking on the Jews as the scapegoat
  • 1925: Mein Kampf was published
    • antisemitism became common
    • the book became even more powerful after Hitler rose to power
  • WWII:
    • the Nazis originally wanted to reduce and limit the influence of Jews, not kill them
    • hostility towards Jews increased when WW2 started

Annihilation: Why this swift and sweeping?

• 1941 June to 1943 February: 3/4s of 6 million jews were killed within twenty months
• at the peak of the Holocaust in 1942-1943, more than 10,000 people were killed in a day
  • 400 people were killed per hour
  • 1 person died every 10 seconds
• initially, execution was by bullets
  • but it was deemed a waste of resources on shooting and burying the bodies
  • Nazi soldiers were also psychologically effected by the shooting
• some Jews helped Nazis carry out the bodies, put them into the furnaces or bury them and with administrative tasks
• Nazis also explored injecting poison directly into the heart

Timeline of Holocaust murder methods

• 1940: small gas chambers made more efficient with carbon monoxide
• 1941: use of Zyklon, a powerful pesticide, began
  • the cheapest of all methods, at less than 1 US cent per prisoner
  • it was tested on Soviet prisoners
• 1942 January: Final Solution began
  • many logistics were put in place even before all this began
    • death camps, transit camps and labour camps were built
    • operating costs to run the camps were kept low

Victims: Why didn’t Jews fight back?

• there are some incidents of rebellion and resistance recorded
  • examples included:
    • small bomb explosions
    • inmate killed German staff
    • trying to free prisoners from the train
  • they were easily contained and were very insignificant. Consequences of these rebellions were limited
• generally, the Jewish response was to comply with German demands and orders for self-preservation and in hopes that it wouldn’t get worse

Potential factors for Jewish compliance

1. the Nazis camouflaged what they were doing
   • they tricked people into thinking that people were going to work (instead of the camps)
     • some people even paid to get onto the train to ‘work’
   • the Nazis also sent postcards back to points of departure, reassuring those left behind
2. the Nazis mixed ‘carrot-and-stick’ tactics
   • they told potential deportees that they could have privileges like soup, bread and jam if they complied
   • others were threatened to be killed if they didn’t comply
3. the Jewish Councils were assigned the ‘dirty jobs’ of informing and assembling the deportees
   • one head of Jewish police, Leon Rosenblatt, admitted to knowing but staying at his post anyway to try and help prevent selection of critical professions and vulnerable groups like pregnant women
4. ghetto conditions were terrible. People who lived there struggled to survive
   • 200 calories per day
     • they only had bread. There was no meat, egg or vegetables
   • hunger, disease, cold, filth, overcrowding and fatigue were rampant
   • thus the Jews in the ghetto had no desire or energy to fight back

Onlookers

Why didn’t other countries help?

• a combination of antisemitism, economic and political interests restricted the admission of Jews to other countries throughout the Holocaust and prevented and further action to try and help them
• countries decided that they had higher priorities than helping or defending Jews
  • so did the League of Nations, most NGOs like the International Olympic Committee, International Red Cross Committee and the Catholic Church

Why did people participate?

• as for onlookers, there are two schools of thought
  • people killed because they had to
  • people killed because they chose to/wanted to
• people acted out of solidarity to each other
• people might have killed not because they hated their victims, but rather hated their victims because they knew/thought they had to kill them eventually

Examples: People, Places, Processes

People	Places	Processes
Nazi inner circle	Concentration camps	Final Solution
Nazi officials	Forced labour camps	Euthanasia (T4)
Prisoners of war	Transit camps	Sterilisation
Jews and other races and groups	Prisoner-of-war camps	Selection and classification
Prison guards	Killing centres	Experiments
Doctors		Transportation
Sonderkommandos (Jews assigned to help dispose of bodies)		Housing
Survivors		Conditions
People with disabilities		Resistance
Roma (g-slur)		Post-Holocaust
African-Germans
Twins