The Holocaust

Ibrahim Yasser Sweileh

Mr. Abdullah AlAhmad

Apr 29, 2024

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The Holocaust

The Holocaust, a word that encompasses all humankind's evil, numbing numbers become

meaningless when faced with the sheer enormity of death and suffering during World War II.

The most commonly cited estimate is that 6 million Jews were exterminated in concentration

camps, with approximately 11 million more people killed across Europe. At the same time,

another 5 million Soviet prisoners of war died in German custody. But, of course, the exact

numbers have been debated, and historians aren't sure just how many people died. For example,

there were no accurate death counts for Poland at war's end, but 3 million is widely accepted.

Beginning of War, 1939-1940

The German army conquered the western part of Poland in September 1939. As a result,

thousands of Polish Jews were displaced from their homes and put into ghettos by German

authorities. They stole their property and gave it to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside Germany

who identified as German), Germans from the Reich, or Polish gentiles. The Jewish ghettoes in

Poland, surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, functioned as prisoner city-states ruled by

Jewish Councils. Overcrowding rendered the ghettoes fertile grounds for illness like typhus and

rampant unemployment, poverty, and hunger.

Meanwhile, starting in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials chose around 70,000 Germans hospitalized

for mental illness or disability to be gassed to death as part of the so-called Euthanasia Program.

Following protests from influential German religious leaders, Hitler ended the program in

August 1941. Still, executions of the disabled continued in secret, and by 1945, 275,000 persons
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judged handicapped from around Europe had been slaughtered. In hindsight, the Euthanasia

Program served as a testbed for the Holocaust.

Holocaust Death Camps, 1941-1945

Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transportation from Poland's ghettos to

concentration camps, beginning with the persons deemed to be the least useful: the ill, elderly,

and feeble, as well as the very young. On March 17, 1942, the first mass gassings took place in

the Belzec camp near Lublin. Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau

were among the five additional mass killing sites erected in Poland, including Chelmno and

Sobibor Treblinka, Majdanek, and the biggest of them, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Between 1942 and

1945, Jews were transported to concentration camps throughout Europe, including German-

controlled territories and allies. The worst deportations occurred in the summer and fall of 1942

when more than 300,000 people were deported out of the warsaw ghetto alone.

The occupants of the Warsaw Ghetto rose in violent resistance, fed up with deportations,

sickness, and continuous starvation. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which took place from April

19 to May 16, 1943, resulted in the deaths of 7,000 Jews and the deportation of 50,000 survivors

to extermination camps. However, the resistance fighters had fought off the Nazis for about a

month. Their uprising sparked rebellions in camps and ghettos throughout German-occupied

Europe.

More than 2 million people were slaughtered in Auschwitz alone in a procedure that resembled a

large-scale industrial operation. A considerable number of Jewish and non-Jewish detainees

labored; though only Jews were gassed, many more perished of famine or disease. Josef

Mengele, a eugenicist, arrived in Auschwitz in 1943 to begin his notorious experiments on

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Jewish captives. His specialty was doing medical experiments on twins, injecting them with

gasoline to chloroform under the pretense of providing medical care. His deeds earned him the

title "Angel of Death."

Nazi Rule Comes to an End, as Holocaust Continues to Claim Lives, 1945

German leadership was unraveling by the spring of 1945 due to internal friction, with Goering

and Himmler wanting to separate themselves from Hitler and seize control. Hitler blamed the

war on “International Jewry and its Helpers” in his last will and political testament, dictated in a

German bunker on April 29. Hitler urged German leaders and people to follow “the strict

observance of the racial laws and merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all

peoples”–the Jews. Hitler committed suicide the next day. Only a week later, on May 8, 1945,

Germany formally surrendered in World War II.

In the fall of 1944, German forces began evacuating several of the extermination camps, sending

inmates under escort to march further away from the approaching enemy's front line. These so-

called "death marches" lasted until the German capitulation, claiming the lives of between

250,000 and 375,000 individuals. Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish novelist, described his own and

his fellow inmates' mental states at Auschwitz on the day before Soviet soldiers arrived in

January 1945 in his famous book "Survival at Auschwitz": "We lay in a universe of death and

phantoms." Around and inside us, the final traces of civilization had fled. The task of bestial

degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, was completed by the defeated Germans.”

Aftermath & Lasting Impact of the Holocaust

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The Holocaust's scars, known in Hebrew as Shoah, or disaster, took long to heal. Survivors of

the camps found it virtually hard to return home, as they had lost their family and been shunned

by their non-Jewish neighbors in many cases. As a result, an unprecedented number of refugees,

POWs, and other displaced people flooded Europe in the late 1940s.

To punish the perpetrators of the Holocaust, the Allies staged the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-46,

which exposed Nazi crimes. Increasing pressure on the Allies to create a nation for Holocaust

survivors would result in a mandate for the creation of Israel in 1948.

Ordinary Germans battled with the Holocaust's harsh legacy for decades, as survivors and

victims' families sought restoration of riches and property during the Nazi years. Then, beginning

in 1953, the German government started making payments to individuals and groups of Jews to

acknowledge the German people's accountability for the crimes done in their name.
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Resources

● History.com Editors. “The Holocaust.” HISTORY. HISTORY, 14 Oct. 2009. Web. 27

April. 2024.

● “Holocaust | Definition, Concentration Camps, History, & Facts | Britannica.”

Encyclopædia Britannica 2022. Web. 27 April. 2022.

● “The Holocaust | the National WWII Museum | New Orleans.” The National WWII

Museum | New Orleans. N.p., 2017. Web. 1 Mar. 2022

● “The Holocaust.” College of Liberal Arts. N.p., 2022. Web. 1 Mar. 2022.

● “Holocaust Memorial Day Trust | the Holocaust.” Hmd.org.uk. N.p., 2022. Web. 1 Mar.

2022.