HOW The Holocaust happen in Plain Sight ?
Source : Nationalgeographic.com/history/article/holocaust-adolf-hitler-history-
genocide-denial
Six million Jews murdered. Millions more stripped of their livelihoods, their
communities, their families, even their names. The horrors of the Holocaust are often expressed
in numbers that convey the magnitude of Nazi Germany’s attempt to annihilate Europe’s Jews.
The Nazis and their collaborators killed millions of people whom they perceived as
inferior—including Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay men, people with disabilities, Slavic and Roma
people, and Communists. However, historians use the term “Holocaust”—also called the Shoah,
or “disaster” in Hebrew—to apply strictly to European Jews murdered by the Nazis between
1933 and 1945.
No single statistic can capture the true terror of the systematic killing of a group of
human beings—and given its enormity and brutality, the Holocaust is difficult to understand.
How did a democratically elected politician incite an entire nation to genocide? Why did people
allow it to happen in plain sight? And why do some still deny it ever happened?
European Jews before the Holocaust
By 1933, about nine million Jews lived across the continent and in every European
nation. Some countries guaranteed Jews equality under the law, which enabled them to become
part of the dominant culture. Others, especially in Eastern Europe, kept Jewish life strictly
separate.
Jewish life was flourishing, yet Europe’s Jews also faced a long legacy of discrimination
and scapegoating. Pogroms—violent riots in which Christians terrorized Jews—were common
throughout Eastern Europe. Christians blamed Jews for the death of Jesus, fomented myths of
a shadowy cabal that controlled world finances and politics, and claimed Jews brought disease
and crime to their communities.
The rise of Adolf Hitler
It would take one man, Adolf Hitler, to turn centuries of casual anti-Semitism into
genocide. Hitler rose to power as leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, also
known as the Nazi Party, in the 1920s.
Hitler harnessed a tide of discontent and unrest in Germany, which was slowly
rebuilding after losing the First World War. The nation had collapsed politically and
economically, and owed heavy sanctions under the Treaty of Versailles. The Nazi party blamed
Jews for Germany’s troubles and promised to restore the nation to its former glory.
(How the Treaty of Versailles ended WWI—and started WWII.)
Hitler was democratically elected to the German parliament in 1933, where he was soon
appointed as chancellor, the nation’s second-highest position. Less than a year later, Germany’s
president died, and Hitler seized absolute control of the country.
Born in Braunau am Inn, Austria, in 1889, Adolf Hitler
was a skilled speaker and rose to power in Germany
democratically. In the wake of its WWI loss, he blamed
the country's economic woes on Jewish people and
promised to restore Germany to glory.
The early Nazi regime
Immediately after coming to power, the Nazis promulgated a variety of laws aimed at
excluding Jews from German life—defining Judaism in racial rather than religious terms.
Beginning with an act barring Jews from civil service, they culminated in laws forbidding Jews
from German citizenship and intermarriage with non-Jews.
These were not just domestic affairs: Hitler wanted to expand his regime and, in 1939,
Germany invaded Poland. It marked the beginning of the Second World War—and the
expansion of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies.
German officials swiftly forced hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews into crowded
ghettoes, and with the help of locals and the German military, specially trained forces called
the Einsatzgruppen began systematically shooting Jews and other people the regime deemed
undesirable. In just nine months, these mobile murder units shot more than half a million
people in a “Holocaust by bullets” that would continue throughout the war.
But Hitler and his Nazi officials were not content with discriminatory laws or mass
shootings. By 1942, they agreed to pursue a “final solution” to the existence of European Jews:
They would send the continent’s remaining Jews east to death camps where they would be
forced into labor and ultimately killed.
Hitler dismisses U.S. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt's appeal for
peace in a speech before the
Reichstag, Nazi Germany's
parliament, on April 28, 1939.
Months later, Germany invaded
Poland.
Genocide in plain sight
By characterizing their actions as the “evacuation” of Jews from territories that rightfully
belonged to non-Jewish Germans, the Nazi operation took place in plain sight.
Though thousands of non-Jews rescued, hid, or otherwise helped those targeted by the
Holocaust, many others stood by indifferently or collaborated with the Nazis.
With the help of local officials and sympathetic civilians, the Nazis rounded up Jews,
stripped them of their personal possessions, and imprisoned them in more than 44,000
concentration camps and other incarceration sites across Europe. Non-Jews were encouraged
to betray their Jewish neighbors and move into the homes and businesses they left behind.
Prisoners at Buchenwald concentration
camp, near Weimar, Germany, in April
1945, the year it was liberated. In the
eight years Buchenwald was in
operation, it housed between 239,000
and 250,000 prisoners, who were
subjected to medical experiments and
grueling forced labor.
Dachau, which opened near Munich in 1933, was the first concentration camp. Five
others—Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka—were designated as
killing centers, where most Jews were immediately murdered upon arrival.
The killings took place in assembly-line fashion: Mass transports of Jews were unloaded from
train cars and “selected” into groups based on sex, age, and perceived fitness. Those selected for
murder were taken to holding areas where they were told to set aside their possessions and
undress for “disinfection” or showers.
In reality, they were herded into specially designed killing chambers into which officials pumped
lethal carbon monoxide gas or a hydrogen cyanide pesticide called Zyklon B that poisoned its
victims within minutes.
The earliest Holocaust victims were buried in mass graves. Later, in a bid to keep the killings a
secret, corpses were burned in large crematoria. Some Jews were forced to participate in the
killings, and then were themselves executed to maintain secrecy. The victims’ clothing, tooth
fillings, possessions, and even hair was stolen by the Nazis.
As Allied troops advanced near the end of
the war, Germany sent prisoners on death
marches from the western front to
Dachau, near Munich. When the camp
was liberated in April 1945, pictured
here, U.S. troops encountered piles of
dead bodies and survivors on the brink of
death.
Life in the camps
Those not chosen for death were ritually humiliated and forced to live in squalid conditions.
Many were tattooed with identification numbers and shorn of their hair. Starvation,
overcrowding, overwork, and a lack of sanitation led to rampant disease and mass death in these
facilities. Torture tactics and brutal medical experiments made the camps a horror beyond
description.
“It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor
could it conceivably be so,” wrote Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi in his 1947 memoir. “Nothing
belongs to us any more…if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not
understand. They will even take away our name.”
But despite almost inconceivable hardships, some managed to resist. “Our aim was to defy
Hitler, to do everything we [could] to live,” recalled Majdanek and Auschwitz survivor Helen K.
in a 1985 oral history. “He [wanted] us to die, and we didn’t want to oblige him.”
Jews resisted the Holocaust in a variety of ways, from going into hiding to sabotaging camp
operations or participating in armed uprisings in ghettoes and concentration camps. Other
forms of resistance were quieter, like stealing food, conducting forbidden religious services, or
simply attempting to maintain a sense of dignity.
The aftermath of the Holocaust
As World War II drew to a close in 1944 and 1945, the Nazis attempted to cover up their crimes,
burning documents, dismantling death camp sites, and forcing their remaining prisoners on
brutal death marches to escape the advancing Allies.
They didn’t succeed: As they liberated swaths of Europe, Allied troops entered camps piled high
with corpses and filled, in some cases, with starving, sick victims. The evidence collected in these
camps would become the basis of the Nuremberg Trials, the first-ever international war crimes
tribunal.
In the war’s aftermath, the toll of the Holocaust slowly became clear. Just one out of every three
European Jews survived, and though estimates vary, historians believe at least six million Jews
were murdered. Among them were an estimated 1.3 million massacred by the Einsatzgruppen;
approximately a million were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone.
Many survivors had nowhere to go. Poland had Europe’s largest Jewish population before the
war, but lost 93 percent of that population in just five years. Entire villages and communities
were wiped out and families scattered across Europe. Labeled “displaced persons,” survivors
attempted to rebuild their lives. Many left Europe for good, emigrating to Israel, the United
States, or elsewhere.
Holocaust denial
Despite the enormity of evidence, some people sowed misinformation about the Holocaust,
while others denied it happened at all. Holocaust denial persists to this day, even though it is
considered a form of antisemitism and is banned in a variety of countries.
How to counter the hate? “Educating about the history of the genocide of the Jewish people and
other Nazi crimes offers a robust defence against denial and distortion,” concluded the authors
a of a 2021 United Nations report on Holocaust denial.
Though the number of Holocaust survivors has dwindled, their testimonies offer crucial
evidence of the Holocaust’s horrors.
“The voices of the victims—their lack of understanding, their despair, their powerful eloquence
or their helpless clumsiness—these can shake our well-protected representation of events,” said
Saul Friedländer, a historian who survived the Holocaust and whose parents were murdered at
Auschwitz, in a 2007 interview with Dissent Magazine. “They can stop us in our tracks. They
can restore our initial sense of disbelief, before knowledge rushes in to smother it.”
