THE

HOLOCAUST
Holocaust was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar.
However, since 1945, the world has acquired a horrible new meaning: the mass murdering
of 6 million European Jews (as well as some other persecuted groups, such as Gypsies or
homosexuals) by the Nazi regime during Second World War. Adolf Hitler justified this
murdering saying that Jews were a danger to German racial purity (Aryan race) and
community.

On 1934, when Hitler became the “Fuhrer”, Germany’s supreme leader, political opponents
(such as Communists or Social Democrats) were the ones most persecuted. The first official
concentration camp, Dachau (near Munich), was opened in March 1933 and at first the
majority of its prisoners were Communists. By July 1933, the concentration camp network
hosted 27,000 people in “protective custody”. This could be considered the beginning of the
Holocaust. Millions of Jews were exterminated from this year to 1945 (Germany surrender in
WW2). In the last months of Holocaust, German forces began evacuating death camps in
the so-called “death marches”, in which the prisoners advanced away under guard to move
away from the enemy’s front line. From 250,000 to 375,000 people died during this practice.
They didn’t stop until they got caught by Allies forces.

Holocaust affected to Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and political opponents ,as I’ve said in
the last paragraph, but they weren’t the only victims of this mass genocide. Ethnic Poles,
Slavs, Soviet prisoners of war, disabled, Jehovah's Witnesses, Serbs,..
We could divide the Holocaust into four stages:

1) The Nazi Revolution in Germany (1933-1939)

In this period, non-Aryans were dismissed from civil service, they liquidated Jewish-owned
businesses and stripped Jewish lawyers and doctors of their clients. From 1933 to 1939,
hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany did, while those who
remained lived in a constant state of uncertainty and fear.

2) The beginning of war (1939-1940)

In September 1939, the German army occupied the western half of Poland. German police
took Polish Jews homes and put them into ghettos, giving their confiscated properties to
ethnic Germans. That same year, Nazi officials selected around 70,000 Germans
institutionalized for mental illness or disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called
Euthanasia Program.

3) Holocaust death camps (1941-1945)

In September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in a territory conquered by Germany
was marked with a yellow star, making them open targets. Jews and Gypsies from all over
the continent were transported to the Polish ghettos and German-occupied cities in the
USSR. In the German invasion of the Soviet Union, mobile killing units murdered more than
500,000 Soviet Jews and others. The Germans began mass transports from the ghettos in
Poland to the concentration camps in late 1941. And from 1942 to 1945, Jews were
deported to the camps from all over Europe. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish
prisoners worked in the labor camp there. Only Jews were gassed but thousands of others
died of starvation or disease.

The popular term of "Final Solution" refers to the systematic genocide of the Jewish
population that took place during WW2. It was implemented in stages. After the Nazi party
came to power, organized racism from the state resulted in anti-Semitic legislation, boycotts,
"Aryanization", until finally reaching the pogroms of the "Night of broken glass", all activities
aimed at eliminating the Jews of the German society.

The purpose of the Holocaust was to exterminate the Jewish people.

While the Allied troops were advancing through Europe in a series of offensives against
Germany, they began to find prisoners from the concentration camps. Many of these
prisoners had survived the death marches to the interior of Germany. The Soviet forces in
July 1944 were the first to find an important Nazi camp, that of Majdanek near Lublin,
Poland. Surprised by the rapid advance of the Soviets, the Germans tried to hide the
evidence of mass extermination by destroying the camp.