8.9 The Holocaust

Nazi ideology combined old religious hostility toward Jews with modern racial anti-Semitism, Social Darwinism and eugenics (7.4). It claimed that Germans belonged to a superior “Aryan” race locked in a struggle for survival, that Jews were a racial enemy rather than a religious group, and that Germany needed “living space” in eastern Europe at the expense of Slavic peoples. The goal was a new racial order in Europe.

• 1933: a boycott of Jewish shops, and a law removing Jews from the civil service.
• 1935: the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of German citizenship and banned marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. Jewish identity was defined by ancestry, not religious practice.
• 1938: in the Kristallnacht pogrom (November 9–10), Nazis burned hundreds of synagogues, smashed thousands of Jewish shops, killed at least 91 people and sent about 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps.
• Emigration: many Jews tried to leave, but most countries limited refugees, as the Évian Conference (1938) showed. Britain's Kindertransport rescued about 10,000 Jewish children.
• From 1939, about 70,000 disabled people were murdered in the so-called T4 “euthanasia” program by August 1941, testing methods, including gas, later used in the death camps.

After conquering Poland, the Nazis forced Jews into overcrowded, starving ghettos such as Warsaw and Łódź. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen, aided by police, soldiers and local collaborators, shot Jewish men, women and children in mass executions; at Babi Yar near Kyiv, more than 33,000 Jews were murdered in two days in September 1941.

At the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, senior officials led by Reinhard Heydrich coordinated the “Final Solution,” the plan to murder all of Europe's Jews. Jews were deported by train from across Europe to killing centers in occupied Poland: Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau, where about 1.1 million people, about a million of them Jews, were murdered. Germany's allies and collaborators took part: Vichy French police rounded up Jews for deportation, and in 1944 Hungarian authorities helped deport about 430,000 Hungarian Jews, most of whom were murdered at Auschwitz.

The Nazis murdered an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 Roma, about 1.8 million non-Jewish Polish civilians and about 3 million Soviet prisoners of war, who were deliberately starved. Gay men were arrested, and between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps, where many died. Political opponents and Jehovah's Witnesses were also imprisoned and killed.

Jews resisted where they could, most famously in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April–May 1943), and through revolts at Treblinka and Sobibór. Some non-Jews risked their lives to help: in October 1943 the Danish resistance ferried most of Denmark's roughly 7,000 Jews to safety in Sweden, and diplomats such as Raoul Wallenberg protected Jews in Budapest. Most people, however, were bystanders.

The Nuremberg trials (1945–1946) prosecuted Nazi leaders for crimes against humanity. The lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1944, and the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention in 1948. Historians have debated how the Holocaust came about: intentionalists stress Hitler's long-held goal of destroying the Jews, while functionalists stress how competing Nazi agencies and wartime conditions pushed policy step by step toward mass murder. Most historians now combine both views.