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Extermination
Shoah [Hebrew] - The planned genocide of
European Jewry perpetrated by the Nazis and based on the
racist doctrine
was one of the pillars of German fascism. This ideology
proclaimed the
need to remove Jews and other "lower" races from the German
Lebensraum.
The history of the Holocaust may be broken down into
three phases:
1933-39, 1939-41 and 1941-44. After Hitler came to power in
1933, the
Nuremberg laws were adopted, depriving Jews-and individuals
of Jewish
descent-of their civil rights. The laws also made it
possible to loot
Jewish property (in the name of economic "Aryanization"),
send Jews to
concentration camps and strip them of their citizenship. The
implementation of this legislation was accompanied by a
campaign of
terror, which culminated in an enormous pogrom in 1938 that
came to be
known as Krystallnacht. The Nuremberg laws were also
introduced in
Austria and the Czech lands, which had been annexed to the
Reich, and
later also in other conquered countries.
The second phase began when German troops entered Polish
territory,
and is described by the expression "policy of annihilation".
The special
Einsatzgruppen detachments that followed the Wehrmacht
formations were
the first to carry out this policy. The Einsatzgruppen
arrested
political activists and members of the intelligentsia,
executed Jews,
set fire to synagogues and exacted contributions.
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In October 1939, the Germans began implementing
their plan to separate Jews from the rest of the population.
Deportations began and Jews began to be concentrated in
ghettos, where
they fell victim to hunger, disease and systematically
applied terror.
After the invasion of the Soviet Union, in late 1941 and
early 1942,
almost all of European Jewry found itself under German
control. At that
time, the final phase of the Holocaust was launched-direct
extermination, preceded by massacres of Lithuanian,
Belarusian and
Ukrainian Jews carried out by the Einsatzgruppen. By late
1941, almost
half a million Jews had been killed.
From mid-1941, the Nazis began developing a faster
method of killing
people that could be applied on a mass scale. Beginning in
December, a
"gassing truck" was tested in the Chelmno camp: Jews brought
from
ghettos in central Poland were killed with exhaust fumes
directed into
closed trucks. The details of how the Endlösung was to be
carried out
were decided on at the Wannsee conference on January 20,
1942.
Construction of new death camps began, most of which were
located on
Polish territory. Their location in Poland was because of
the large
population of Jews in Poland, as well as from a need to hide
the
genocide from the rest of the world. An industrial killing
machine was
established, using Zyklon B gas, gas chambers and
crematoria. The
victims, under the pretext of being resettled in the eastern
territories, were sent to the death camps. After they
arrived, the Jews
were taken to the "baths" - which were disguised gas
chambers. This gave
an illusory hope of surviving and eliminated the urge to
resist.
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The corpses, stripped of their valuables, were
cremated. The victims' belongings, including jewelry and
money, were
appropriated by the SS. Jews in the Generalgouvernement were
the first
to be killed: in the spring of 1942, residents from the
ghettos in the
Lublin region, eastern Malopolska and the Krakow are
deported to death
camps. In summer, deportations began to be sent from the
Warsaw ghetto.
During that time, about one million Jews perished. In the
autumn of
1942, "remant" ghettos remained in most of the larger
cities; their
residents became forced laborers.
After the Warsaw and Bialystok ghetto uprisings were
suppressed
(resistance in the ghettos and camps), by the autumn of
1943, virtually
all Polish Jews had been killed. Death camps did not cease
their
operations, however-Jewish citizens of German-occupied
countries were
sent there, including those from France, Belgium, Holland,
Denmark,
Hungary and the Czech lands. The concentration camps and
labor camps
were also an instrument of extermination; the death marches
comprised
the last act of the Holocaust. The exact number of those
killed is not
known, though it is estimated that from five to six million
Jews were
killed, which was half their prewar population in Europe.
The losses in
Poland were even greater, and amounted to 90% of the prewar
Jewish
population there.
(G.Z./CM)
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