H9: The Holocaust

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Introduction

The Second World War (1939-1945) is a huge and immensely complex subject. In this chapter we concentrate only on what happened to European Jewry. Even this subject will only be dealt with in a small way. To attempt an overall comprehension is as impossible. We can, however, deal with a few issues, ideas and stories. At most we can begin to understand...

During the Nazi period, many of the bravest, wisest, most valuable and most innocent people of every kind in Europe were killed. By far the largest number deliberately exterminated were Jewish men, women and children. The Jews of Europe were among the most creative and gifted people in all the world: their contribution to human peace and culture has been as great as, or possibly greater than, that of any other comparable set of people. We can perhaps best honour their memory by becoming as aware as possible of how and why they died.

The War against the Jews

Between 1939 and 1945, six million unarmed and innocent Jewish civilians - men, women, children and babies - were murdered in Nazi-controlled Europe, as part of a deliberate policy to destroy all traces of Jewish life and culture. The Nazis called this the Endlosung, - the "final solution" of the Jewish problem. As many as two million of these people were killed in their own towns and villages, some falling into mass graves that they themselves had been ordered to dig. Some were confined in Ghettos where death by slow starvation was a deliberate Nazi policy. Others were taken to be shot at mass-murder sites near where they lived. The remaining four million Jews were forced from their homes and taken by train to distant concentration camps, where they were murdered by being worked, starved, or beaten to death. Many were shot or gassed to death in buildings which masqueraded as showers. Their valuables were taken and their bodies were burned. These places were nothing less than designer death camps and were operated by the Nazis right up to the very end of the war.

Estimated number of Jews killed in the Holocaust

Country	Estimated pre-war population	Estimated population killed	%
Poland	3,300,000	3,000,000	91
Baltic countries	253,000	228,000	90
Germany/Austria	240,000	210,000	88
Czechoslovakia	180,000	155,000	86
Greece	70,000	54,000	77
Holland	140,000	105,000	75
Hungary	650,000	450,000	69
SSR White Russia	375,000	245,000	65
Belgium	65,000	40,000	62
SSR Ukraine	1,500,000	900,000	60
Yugolsavia	43,000	26,000	60
Rumania	600,000	300,000	50
Norway	1,800	900	50
France	350,000	90,000	26
Bulgaria	64,000	14,000	22
Italy	40,000	8,000	20
Luxembourg	5,000	1,000	20
Russia (RSFSR)	975,000	107,000	11
Total	8,851,800	5,933,900	67

Not only Jews

Among the hundreds of thousands of non-Jews sent by the Nazis to concentration camps were anti-Nazis, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and the chronically sick. In addition, more than 250,000 gypsies were murdered, in an attempt to eliminate all gypsies as well as Jews from the map of Europe.

"Medical" experiments

In many of the concentration camps, so called "medical" experiments were carried out, without anaesthetics, solely to satisfy the curiosity and sadism of the doctors. Hundreds of otherwise healthy "patients" were tortured and murdered during these experiments.

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