Definition of Holocaust: The Holocaust is generally considered to be the activity conducted by the German government from 1941-1945. The Nazis, the fascist government in power from 1933-1945 in Germany, systematically exterminated about 8 million people during these four years.
The Nazis had been killing Jews, other minorities, and political enemies since the early 1930’s. It wasn’t until an SS conference, chaired by Heinrick Heydrick, convened in 1941. At that conference it was decided that there should be a disciplined, systematic method to take care of the multitude of people accumulating in the concentration camps.
The Nazi jugernaught went to work to set up a “production line” procedure to dispose of these “enemies of the state”. This became what is known as the “Final Solution” of Jews in Germany and its occupied countries. For the sake of argument and not believe, I am going to take the stand that the Holocaust is “amoral”, and normal standards of morality do not apply. The period known as the Second World War is a period of the greatest upheaval known to mankind. Upwards to 70 million people died. It was a period of unheard worldwide chaos. Most of the world was in turmoil.
And to understand this circumstance one has to understand the history of why it happened. The end of the First World War (1914-1918) left the world in ashes, disorganized. The German Empire was broken-up, by the victors (the Allies), and new states were franchised. War reparations were demanded from the Germans and restrictions placed on their government and society. German society broke down and a period of depression,early 1920’s, ensued. It took a wheelbarrow full of marks, German curency, to buy a loaf of bread. Bands of veterans and storm troopers wandered the streets.
Varied politics were rife. It was in this scenario that a little known political group, called the National Socialist Democrats, later known as the “Nazis” came into being. At the same time long festering anti-Semitic feelings started to spiral out of control. As an example, Hitler in his book Mien Kamph wrote that in post war Vienna where he was an aspiring artist. Every thing evil that he saw, there was a Jew behind it. As this political and social chaos started to solidify, two main ideas became defined. Communism and Capitalism.
The Germans felt that communism was a Jewish plot to disrupt the world and take advantage of subsequent economies. Nickolai Lenin, and Leon Trotsky two of the three men(Stalin was the third) who brought about the Communist Revolution (1917), were Jewish. Including Karl Marx the author of the Communist Manifesto. All of the industrialized nations feared communism. There was an undercurrent feeling that the Jews were responsible for the communist plot to take over the world. Hitler and his party played on this to gain power and support. Anti-Semitism was not only in Germany, but it was prevalent in most of Europe.
It was a perceived concept that after the first World War, the Jews prospered while the rest of the population suffered. And, it was partially true. The European Jews were connected by origin and also by language. Yiddish (German root) was developed for exactly that reason, economics. They continued to do international banking and commerce and became quite well off. The Jews of Europe tended to isolate themselves from the country of their residence. The combination of these different conditions made the holocaust possible. What made it a fact is the democratic election of Adolf Hitler in 1933.
The persecution of the Jews in Germany started as soon as Hitler took power. They were used for a “scapegoat” for all the ills that the country had suffered. The Jews were methodically stripped of their rights and dignity. But the worst was still to come. Students were isolated and not allowed to the attend the best institutions. Beatings and harassment in the streets were common. The Brownshirts, Hitler’s storm troopers, acted in organized effort to persecute the Jews. Then came the “Night of the Broken Glass”. The German word for Jew, Jude, was put on store buildings and doors.
That night the Brownshirts and other students and citizens wandered the streets and smashed the windows and destroyed Jewish business and shops. Initially, Jews were rounded up and sent to prisons or concentration camps. They were usually charged with sedition or political crimes. But, with the annexation of Austria, the problem of cleansing the German Race of Jews became a priority. Execution became common, usually by shooting. But, the experimenting had begun. Prisoners would be but in vans and the exhaust would be pumped into the van to suffocate them.
This proved insufficient to kill enough people and then they (the Germans) were faced with the problem of body disposal. With the quick defeat of Poland in 1939, Germany was faced with the integration of what was going subservient Europe to greater Germany. Greater Germany (Austro-Hungary Empire) had been broken up (by the allies) and ceded to other countries after the Great War. Hitler was determined to reconstruct that empire. The Jews remained a serious problem in that re-construction. Hitler had even proposed a modern day “Palestine” in Russia. He, initially, wanted to re-locate all European Jewry from all of the proposed new Europe.
The “concentration camp” concept continued into 1941. The killings and executions continued. They were organized, but not in a mass production’ scale. It was not until the conference, chaired by Heydrick that the SS faced the growing problem with a systematic, business like discipline. A little back ground, the SS was formed by Heinrick Himmler. He had been a chicken farmer and became a right hand minion to Hitler. He formed the SS as a personal bodyguard for Hitler. They became known the Black Shirts’, as compared to the Brown Shirts’, the storm trooper used by the Nazis to gain power.
When Hitler was elected prime minister of Germany in 1933, he faced the problem of controlling the Werhmarct the main German army. This army had great respect from the people and still had the most power of any entity in the country. But, they refused to accept Hitler while he had his own private army, the Brown Shirts. On the Night of the Long of the Long Knives’ the SS, on Hitler’s orders, went to the headquarters of the SA and executed the commander (General Roehm) and his officer hierarchy. That effectively disbanded the SA. And, made way for the proliferation of the SS and Himmler.
Himmler, with Hitler’s blessing developed and forged the SS into the most powerful force in Germany. It was divided into different branches. Basically, it split into the Waffen SS and the SD. The Waffen SS was a formidable and dreaded fighting force. The SD was a political branch and was responsible for internal control. A part of the SD was the Gestapo, which operated in Germany and other countries. But, the major part of the SD was in charge of the occupied countries. They set up the governments and ran the prison and extermination camps. It was this part of the SS that Heydrick was in charge of and ran extremely efficiently.
He was the actual architect of the Holocaust. I believe that all the extermination camps were outside of Germany proper. The big ones were Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka and Buchenwald. There other minor ones. The Germans still maintained other concentration camps in occupied countries and Germany proper. The SS organized a highly sophisticated transportation and “processing” procedure. The most famous of the captured hierarchy was Adolf Eiechman. He was captured in Argentina by the Mossad (Israeli intelligence) and tried and executed in Israel.
He was the mastermind behind the transportation and scheduling. He organized round-up of the Jews, the marshalling of transportation assets and the scheduling and timing of delivery. It was a highly efficient system and without him and that system it would have been difficult to dispose of 6 million Jews. The Germans developed the use of “Zyclon B”. That was the poisonous gas used to kill the prisoners. When the trains arrived at the camps. The people would be separated as to whether they could be useful as labor or not. The ones that were not were led to the “showers” where they would be gassed.
It would take about 15 minutes to be sure that all the occupants of the chamber were dead. A tablet of Zyclon B would be dropped into the chamber through the ceiling. Trustees (Jew that were spared so that they could work) would take the bodies out with grappling hooks and load them on to carts and deliver them to the ovens. This process went on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The camps were run by the SS SD. The commandant and high ranking officers were usually German. The lower rank and file were made up of SS inductees from the occupied countries. The actual running of the camps was done by the inmates.
Jews, that brutally carried out the commands to run the camp. The camps were so efficient that they utilized everything. Hair was used to make mattresses, jewelery, gold from tooth fillings was processed and converted for the war effort. All clothes were used and sent the Russian front for the soldiers fighting there. It was war. Killing in war is considered by the Church to be amoral. The Jews were considered the enemy. They were used as slave labor and then disposed of. The German officals were basically at a loss of what to do with the millions of Jews that they were rounding up and confining.
Disease was rampant and out of control. There was a real possibility of it spreading and becoming a plague and moving into the general population. The decision was made to take the most expedient way out and that was to kill and burn the population. And, to take advantage of the resources that was provided. Germany was at war for it’s national survival. It was all or nothing. The Allies had demanded “unconditional surrender”. They were losing millions of soldiers on the Eastern Front and they were losing the war. For the Germans, it was the practical thing to do.
The Jews were considered subversive and enemies and the Germans felt that their extermination was necessary if they (the Germans as a race) were to survive. Himmler and others knew that he and others would go down in history as monsters for the heinous acts that they had committed. But, he also accepted that. He felt that it had to be done to win the war and rid the world of Jews. People that he considered the vermin of the world’ and people that were responsible for the war (communists) and all other evils. The annihilation of the Jew once and for all was good for all mankind and necessary to survive.
The Final Solution was part of the war and once started it had to be finished. Just like the war. There was no surrender. It is easy for us to separate The Final Solution from the actual fighting in the war. But, at the time, it was interwoven with the war effort and once it started, it had to finished. If war CAN be considered amoral then it can be rationalized, the Holocaust can be considered amoral also. Think of what the Germans were facing. The Jews in this country put forth a plan that was considered by President Roosevelt to be enacted after the war.
It was to castrate all German males and dismantle all German industry and ship it out of the country and reduce Germany to an agrarian economy. When the German Propaganda Minister heard about it, he used it to press the people to fight even harder. It cost countless lives. The Germans knew what they were facing if they lost. Another little known fact is that at the end of the war there was about 1 million German prisoners that were starved to death in camps. The justification was that food was needed to feed the liberated Europeans or they would starve to death.