The Holocaust 

The Killing Machine 

Autumn 1941 - Nazis took the decision of annihilating the European Jews.
December 1941 - The selective gassing of the Jews began at Chelmno. 
-> Gassing was chosen because it spared Himmler’s SS men the
‘unpleasantness’ involved in shooting Jews in the back of their heads and
throwing their bodies into mass graves. 
-> Pioneering murders of the mentally and physically disabled people was
already carried out by Professor Victor Brack as part of Hitler’s euthanasia
programme (along with gypsies and homosexuals). 

The death camps

27 March 1942 - Goebbels wrote in his diary ‘not much will remain of the
Jews’.
-> This reflected the confidence of the Nazi leadership that its new death
camps would provide the measn for the extermination of the European Jewry.
-> These new camps became operational in 1942. These were all in Poland -
 Belzec in February.
 Sobibor and Auschwitz in March.
 Majdanek and Treblinka by early summer.
-> The first party of Jewish victims from Slovakia were sent to Auschwitz in
March.

The Nazis had identified theri most efficient chemical killing agent - Zyklon B
gas. 
Autumn 1941 - This had been tried on Soviet prisoners of war (because USSR
had not signed the Geneva convention which regulated the treatment of
prisoners).

Summer of 1942 - the system was operating smoothly and Auschwitz became
the main killing centre. 

The everyday reality of the death camp

The first question one asks after reading about the Holocaust is how could
human beings be capable of treating their fellow men, women and children
and such a callous and murderous way? And secondly, How could anyone
have survived such treatment and what strategies did the jews evolve to deal
with the  everyday horrors that they face?

The Nazi mass murders were well documted. Rudolf Hoess boasted about
improvements made to the camp - 
-> The prisoners would be marched by the doctors. Those who were fit to
work were sent into the camp and others were sent to the extermination camp.
-> Children were exterminated since they were too young to work. Women
tried hiding their children under clothes but they were found and
exterminated. 
People who were fit to work were sent to labour camps where they had to
work in wretched conditions.

Hoess made it clear that people living in the neighboring areas were aware of
the exterminations due to the stench. 
-> Daniel Goldhagen argued that all Germans, regardless of their direct
involvement in it, shared a collective German guilt for the Holocaust.

1971 - Franz Stangl (commander at Treblinka) boasted to a journalist about

how he had built a fake railway station at camp with signs that pointed to
places like ‘Warsaw’ and ‘Bialystok’ which created a sense of normalcy among
the Jewish victims so that the mass killing could take place in an atmosphere
of the greatest possible calm. 

The survivors’ experience

The day to day life in the camps were both banal and terrible.
-> In Auschwitz, the crematoria was surrounded by well kept lawns and music
was played as people were taken to their deaths. Catchy tunes were played
as the nazis selected their victims for the gas chambers. 
-> There were fleas and rats that fed off the prisoners' skeletal frames. 
-> Food rations were kept to a minimum.
 Victor Frankl recorded that people looked like skeletons covered only by
skin and rags.
 The alternative to immediate gassing was a slow lingering death.
-> The latrines were repulsive and inadequate, serving up to 300 people at
one sitting.
The normality of death in the camp caused death to lose its terror.

After victims were gassed, their gold teeth were extracted and hair was cut off
(The SS did not want to lose anything that might be of use for the Reich’s war
effort)

A Jewish child in a Warsaw ghettos wrote - I am hungry, I am cold; when I

grow up I want to a German, and then I shall no longer be hungry and no
longer be cold.’

The problem of resistance 

One of the apparent puzzles associated with the holocaust is why there
weren’t more resistance. 

Jewish resistance groups 

The Germans manipulated the Judenrate (the Jewish council) in the ghettos in
order to control the Jews and to select those people who were going to the
camps.
-> In hindsight, it is easy to be critical of the elders of the Jewish community
but in reality they had no choice: a refusal to cooperate would have resulted in
a worsening of the already appalling conditions in the ghettos or death for the
council members. 
-> By adopting the view that resistance to the Nazis was dangerous and
pointless, they represented the traditional view of the Jewish leaders who saw
it as their task to preserve their people in the face of anti-semtiic
persecutions. 
-> Younger Jews regarded the murders of their people as a manifestation of
the fascist evil against which they were struggling in Europe. 
Such believes led to tensions in the ghettos between the younger and older
generations. 

The Warsaw uprising 

1943 - The most dramatic example of Jewish resistance to the Nazi regime
took place in Warsaw. 
February 1943 - Himmler decided that the Warsaw ghetto should be
destroyed. 
This caused an uprising which lasted from 19 April to 15 May.
-> The desperate Jewish defenders took refuge in the sewerers before they
finally had to surrender. 
-> Some Jews managed to escape the ghetto and join the Polish resistance. 
-> During the inter war period, the anti-semitism was strong in Poland and
many Poles were hostilite towards Jews (they were even willing to collaborate
with the Nazis in their persecution).

Jewish culture
The Jewish culture and language were preserved in the ghettos. They set up
a special ghetto school in which Yiddish was taught, along with Jewish history,
Hebrew and other subjects.
1940 - 41 - These courses attracted 4000 students in the Warsaw ghetto.
-> Lucy Davidowicz writes that such ghetto schools provide the children with
shelter, physical warmth, medical and sanitary care, food and emotional
security. When the Jews were in the clutched of the killing machine, it proved
impossible to continue the educational activities.
-> One of the most searing testimonies to the experience of the Jewish
children in the Holocaust are displayed in a museum attached to the Jewish
cemetery in Prague which displays the children’s drawing of the
Theresienstadt camp (who were gassed days or weeks after). 
 The Theresienstadt camp was seen as a model camp (the only one
where foreign observers were allowed).

The Hungarian Jews

March 1944 - the last phase of the holocause began with the effective
occupation of Hungary by German forces. 
Miklos Horthy, the hungarian dictator, resisted the German demands for the
transportation of 400,000 Hungarian Jews to the camps. 
-> The job of organising the Jews’ mass murder fell to Himmler’s effective
Henchman, Eichmann, who was assisted by the local fascist organsiation - the
Arrow Cross Party. 
-> Many Jews died on the way to Auschwitz.

Conclusion
It is difficult for the historians to properly portray the true horror of the
Holocaust.
Between 1939 and 1945 - 6 million Jews died in the camps or elsewhere.