The Nazis in Europe, 1939-1945: Part Three

Hello readers. This post will be ex­amining the dark topic of the Holo­caust. I would like to preface this post with the following--history is full of uncomfortable topics, but I be­lieve that it's the uncomfortable topics that make us think on our morality and beliefs the most as human beings; I believe that if a historical topic makes you uncomfortable, it's one that should be covered in as much depth as pos­sible. As a historian, it's my duty to record the past and to share its importance with others, not to censor, limit, or "dumb down " what happened to protect the fragile constitutions of some of my readers. With that being said, let's dive into this topic.

The Holocaust is not an event that just happened overnight but happened because of apathy and complacency. The 1946 poem "First they came" by German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller describes some of the steps the Nazis took toward their "Final Solution". The poem states:

"First they came for the Com­munists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Social­ists and 9 did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists

and I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me

And there was no one left To speak out for me."

*Beginning of the War*

In September 1939, the German Army occupied the western half of Poland. German police forced thousands of Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettoes, and gave the confiscated property to ethnic Germans, Germans from the Reich, and Polish gentiles. The ghettos were surrounded by walls and barbed wire, functioning as a captive city-state. The ghettoes faced rampant overpopulation, unemployment, poverty, hunger, and disease.

Also in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials began the Euthanasia Program. In­itially, around 70, 000. Germans who were institutionalized for men­tal illness or disabilities were selected to be gassed to death during this program. Many prominent religious leaders spoke out against the Euthanasia Program, and Hitler put an end to the program in 1941, al th-ugh the killings continued in secret. By 1945, an estimated 275, 000 people deemed handicapped from all over Europe had been killed.

*Towards the Final Solution*

Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German Army expanded Hitler's Nazi empire conquering Den­mark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as European Gypsies, were trans­ported to the previously mentioned Polish ghettoes. In June 1941, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. Mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen murdered more than 500,000 Soviet Jews over the course of the German occupation.

In the late summer of 1941, top Nazi leaders called for a "final solution" to the "Jewish problem", as worded in a July 31, 1941 memorandum written by Hitler's top commander Hermann Goering. 

As part of this "final solution," beginning in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory had to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing, marking them as targets for discrimination and worse.

Beginning in June 1941, Nazi scien­tists had started experimenting with different methods of mass killing at the concentration camp of Ausch­witz, near Krakow, Poland. In August, Nazi officials gassed 500 Soviet prisoners of war with the pesticide Zyklon-B. With the successful use of the Zyklon-B gas, the German SS placed a huge or­der of the gas with a pest-control firm.

*Holocaust Death Camps*

Beginning in late 1941, the German Army began the mass transportation of Jews from the ghettoes to the concentration camps. The people trans­ported to the concentration camps first were people the Nazis saw as being the least useful--the very young, the old, and the infirm--the populations the Nazis deemed as the weakest.

The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, Poland, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built in occupied Poland--Chelmo, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. From 1942 to 1945, Jews and others the Nazis viewed as less than and not having a place in the Third Reich were deported to these camps where they were worked to death, experimented on, and killed in gas chambers; their bodies then being cremated or buried in mass graves. The heaviest of these deporta­tions took place during the summer and fall of 1942 where over 300,000 people were taken from the Warsaw Ghetto alone. Fed up with the deporta­tions and their forced living conditions, the people of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up against the Nazis in an armed revoIt. From April 19-May 16, 1943, the War­saw Ghetto Uprising took place; the uprising resulted in the death of 7,000 Jews with 50,000 survivors being sent to extermination camps. Because the resistence fighters were able to hold off the Nazis for nearly one month, people in other ghettos and camps in German-occupied territories were inspired to revolt as well.

The Nazis had attempted to keep the concentration camps a secret, but with the large scale mass killings that was impossible. Eyewitnesses had brought reports of the atrocities happening at these camps to the atten­tion of Allied governments. The Allies initially ignored these reports; they were focused on fighting the war at hand, and many people did not believe the reports because the reported atrocities seemed too unbelievable to be happening at such a large scale. At Auschwitz alone, more than two million people were murdered. Although only Jews were gassed, a large population of inmates worked at the forced labor camp there and suffered starva­tion and illness. In 1943, eugenicist Josef Mengele arrived at Auschwitz to begin his infamous experiments on the Jewish prisoners. Mengele is most well- known for his experiments on twins; in those experiments, he would inject them with vari­ous substances, such as chloroform and petrol, under the guise of giving them medical treatments. Mengele's experiments earned him the nickname "the Angel of Death."

*Nazi Rule Comes to an End, But the Holo­caust Continues*

In the spring of 1945, German leader- ship was crumbling as Hitler was hid­ing out in a bunker and his two top officials, Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Goering, both sought to take power. After writing his last will and political testament on April 29th in which he blamed the war on the Jews, Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945; and Germany's formal surrender in World War II came a week later, on May 8, 1945.

German forces had begun evacuating many of the death camps in the fall of 1944, sending inmates under guard to march further and further from the oncoming enemy's front line. These "death marches" continued all the way up to the German surrender and resulted in the deaths of 250,000- 375,000 people.

*Aftermath and Impact of the Holo­caust*

The wounds of the Holocaust cut deep, and the mid-to late-1940s saw an unprecedented number of refugees, POWs, and other displaced populations move across Europe. Survivors of the concentration camps found it difficult, even nearly impossible, to return home. Many survivors had lost their families and communities, and were denounced by their non-Jewish friends. As a re­sult, the Allied powers faced pressure to create a national homeland for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, and created the independent nation state of Israel in 1948.

In an effort to punish those responsible for the Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-1949. The Nuremberg Trials brought to light the Nazi atrocities dur­ing the war. The pump-se of the trials was to bring Nazi war criminals to jus­tice. The defendants (high ranking Nazi officials, military officers, indus­trialists, lawyers, and doctors) were in­dicted on various charges such as crimes against peace and crimes against hu­manity. The Nuremberg Trials established a precedent for how modern courts deal with instances of genocide and other crimes against humanity.

That wraps up the series of posts about the Nazis in Europe. Next time here on the blog, we'll be examining the Pacific Theatre of World War II.