5 paragraph essay about the holocaust

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The Holocaust

By: History.com Editors

Updated: August 7, 2024 | Original: October 14, 2009

Watch towers surrounded by high voltage fences at Auschwitz II-Birkenau which was built in March 1942. The camp was liberated by the Soviet army on January 27, 1945.

The Holocaust was the state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of millions of European Jews, Romani people, the intellectually disabled, political dissidents and homosexuals by the German Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. The word “holocaust,” from the Greek words “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burned), was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar.

After years of Nazi rule in Germany, dictator Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution”—now known as the Holocaust—came to fruition during World War II, with mass killing centers in concentration camps. About six million Jews and some five million others, targeted for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons, died in the Holocaust—more than one million of those who perished were children.

Historical Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler . Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust—even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine .

The Enlightenment , during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious tolerance, and in the 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Anti-Semitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.

Did you know? Even in the early 21st century, the legacy of the Holocaust endures. Swiss government and banking institutions have in recent years acknowledged their complicity with the Nazis and established funds to aid Holocaust survivors and other victims of human rights abuses, genocide or other catastrophes.

Hitler's Rise to Power

The roots of Adolf Hitler’s particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism are unclear. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I . Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the country’s defeat in 1918.

Soon after World War I ended, Hitler joined the National German Workers’ Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), known to English speakers as the Nazis. While imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract “ Mein Kampf ” (or “my struggle”), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in “the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.”

Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” and with the need for “Lebensraum,” or living space, for that race to expand. In the decade after he was released from prison, Hitler took advantage of the weakness of his rivals to enhance his party’s status and rise from obscurity to power.

On January 30, 1933, he was named chancellor of Germany. After the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler anointed himself Fuhrer , becoming Germany’s supreme ruler.

Concentration Camps

The twin goals of racial purity and territorial expansion were the core of Hitler’s worldview, and from 1933 onward they would combine to form the driving force behind his foreign and domestic policy.

At first, the Nazis reserved their harshest persecution for political opponents such as Communists or Social Democrats. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the first prisoners sent there were Communists.

Like the network of concentration camps that followed, becoming the killing grounds of the Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler , head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS) and later chief of the German police.

By July 1933, German concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) held some 27,000 people in “protective custody.” Huge Nazi rallies and symbolic acts such as the public burning of books by Jews, Communists, liberals and foreigners helped drive home the desired message of party strength and unity.

In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around 525,000—just one percent of the total German population. During the next six years, Nazis undertook an “Aryanization” of Germany, dismissing non-Aryans from civil service, liquidating Jewish-owned businesses and stripping Jewish lawyers and doctors of their clients.

Nuremberg Laws

Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge (half-breeds).

Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became routine targets for stigmatization and persecution. This culminated in Kristallnacht , or the “Night of Broken Glass” in November 1938, when German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish home and shops were smashed; some 100 Jews were killed and thousands more arrested.

From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany did, while those who remained lived in a constant state of uncertainty and fear.

Euthanasia Program

In September 1939, Germany invaded the western half of Poland , starting World War II . German police soon forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettoes, giving their confiscated properties to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside Germany who identified as German), Germans from the Reich or Polish gentiles.

Surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, the Jewish ghettoes in Poland functioned like captive city-states, governed by Jewish Councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overpopulation and poor sanitation made the ghettoes breeding grounds for disease such as typhus.

Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected around 70,000 Germans institutionalized for mental illness or physical disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

After prominent German religious leaders protested, Hitler put an end to the program in August 1941, though killings of the disabled continued in secrecy, and by 1945 some 275,000 people deemed handicapped from all over Europe had been killed. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust.

'Final Solution'

Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler’s empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Romani people, were transported to Polish ghettoes.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in warfare. Mobile killing units of Himmler’s SS called Einsatzgruppen would murder more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) over the course of the German occupation.

A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler’s top commander Hermann Goering to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (the security service of the SS), referred to the need for an Endlösung ( Final Solution ) to “the Jewish question.”

Yellow Stars

Beginning in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory was marked with a yellow, six-pointed star, making them open targets. Tens of thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR.

Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz , near Krakow, Poland. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust.

Holocaust Death Camps

Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young.

The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz.

From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Amid the deportations, disease and constant hunger, incarcerated people in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in armed revolt.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 19-May 16, 1943, ended in the death of 7,000 Jews, with 50,000 survivors sent to extermination camps. But the resistance fighters had held off the Nazis for almost a month, and their revolt inspired revolts at camps and ghettos across German-occupied Europe.

Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of the camps secret, the scale of the killing made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the mass slaughter.

This lack of action was likely mostly due to the Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but was also partly a result of the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was met and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be occurring on such a scale.

'Angel of Death'

At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were murdered in a process resembling a large-scale industrial operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp there; though only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease.

In 1943, eugenics advocate Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz to begin his infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners. His special area of focus was conducting medical experiments on twins , injecting them with everything from petrol to chloroform under the guise of giving them medical treatment. His actions earned him the nickname “the Angel of Death.”

The Horrifying Discovery of Dachau Concentration Camp—And Its Liberation by US Troops

The wrenching images and first‑hand testimonies of Dachau recorded by U.S. soldiers brought the horrors of the Holocaust home to America.

Horrors of Auschwitz: The Numbers Behind WWII’s Deadliest Concentration Camp

How many were killed, how many children were sent to the site and the numbers of people who attempted to escape are among the facts that reveal the scale of crimes committed at Auschwitz.

After WWII, Survivors of Nazi Horrors Found Community in Displaced‑Persons Camps

In the wake of the Holocaust, the Allies set up the camps throughout Europe to offer temporary homelands to traumatized populations.

Nazi Rule Ends

By the spring of 1945, German leadership was dissolving amid internal dissent, with Goering and Himmler both seeking to distance themselves from Hitler and take power.

In his last will and political testament, dictated in a German bunker that April 29, Hitler blamed the war on “International Jewry and its helpers” and urged the German leaders and people to follow “the strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples”—the Jews.

The following day, Hitler died by suicide . Germany’s formal surrender in World War II came barely 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 from the advancing enemy’s front line. These so-called “death marches” continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 people.

In his classic book Survival in Auschwitz , the Italian-Jewish author Primo Levi described his own state of mind, as well as that of his fellow inmates in Auschwitz on the day before Soviet troops liberated the camp in January 1945: “We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to conclusion by the Germans in defeat.”

Legacy of the Holocaust

The wounds of the Holocaust—known in Hebrew as “Shoah,” or catastrophe—were slow to heal. Survivors of the camps found it nearly impossible to return home, as in many cases they had lost their entire family and been denounced by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, the late 1940s saw an unprecedented number of refugees, POWs and other displaced populations moving across Europe.

In an effort to punish the villains of the Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, which brought Nazi atrocities to horrifying light. Increasing pressure on the Allied powers to create a homeland for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would lead to a mandate for the creation of Israel in 1948.

Over the decades that followed, ordinary Germans struggled with the Holocaust’s bitter legacy, as survivors and the families of victims sought restitution of wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years.

Beginning in 1953, the German government made payments to individual Jews and to the Jewish people as a way of acknowledging the German people’s responsibility for the crimes committed in their name.

The Holocaust. The National WWII Museum . What Was The Holocaust? Imperial War Museums . Introduction to the Holocaust. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . Holocaust Remembrance. Council of Europe . Outreach Programme on the Holocaust. United Nations .

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Holocaust summary

Learn about the rise of anti-semitism and the state-sponsored killing of jews in nazi germany during the holocaust.

Holocaust , Hebrew Shoʾah , Systematic state-sponsored killing of Jews and others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. Fueled by anti-Semitism , the Nazi persecution of Jews began soon after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933 with a boycott of Jewish businesses and the dismissal of Jewish civil servants. Under the Nürnberg Laws (1935), Jews lost their citizenship. About 7,500 Jewish businesses were gutted and some 1,000 synagogues burned or damaged in the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, and thereafter Jews were imprisoned in concentration camp s or forced into ghettos. German victories early in World War II (1939–45) brought most European Jews under the control of the Nazis and their satellites. As German armies moved into Poland, the Balkans, and the Soviet Union, special mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen , rounded up and killed Jews, Roma (Gypsies), communists, political leaders, and intellectuals. Other groups targeted by the Nazis included homosexuals and the mentally retarded, physically disabled, and emotionally disturbed. At the Wannsee Conference (1942), a “final solution” was formulated for the extermination of European Jewry, and thereafter Jews from all over Nazi-occupied Europe were systematically evacuated to concentration and extermination camps, where they were either killed or forced into slave labour. Underground resistance movements arose in several countries, and Jewish risings took place against overwhelming odds in the ghettos of Poland ( see Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ). Individuals such as Raoul Wallenberg saved thousands by their efforts; whether the Allied governments and the Vatican could have done more to aid Jews has long been a matter of controversy. By the end of the war, an estimated six million Jews and millions of others had been killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.

Learn about the Holocaust

The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies and collaborators. Learn more in the Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia .

Learn more about why Nazi Germany and its collaborators targeted Jews and other victims of the Holocaust era.

Get an overview of the Holocaust told through historical photographs, maps, images of artifacts, and testimony clips.

Watch a 38-minute film exploring the Nazi rise to power and the path Nazis and their collaborators took to war and the murder of millions of people.

Holocaust Encyclopedia

This resource contains more than 850 articles about the Holocaust, antisemitism, and current-day mass atrocities in 19 languages, including:

An Introduction to the Holocaust

Nazi Propaganda

Antisemitism

Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution

Explore the online versions of current and past exhibitions, such as Americans and the Holocaust and Some Were Neighbors: Collaboration and Complicity in the Holocaust.

Listen to or read Holocaust survivors’ experiences, told in their own words through oral histories, written testimony, and public programs.

Learn about key events related to the Holocaust from before 1933 through 1945 and beyond.

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This Section

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Why did the Holocaust happen?

Antisemitism was one of the most fundamental causes of the Holocaust. The banner in this picture reads ‘Germany does not buy from Jews’. This photograph is taken from The Wiener Holocaust Library’s Motorcycle Album , a collection of photographs taken on a journey from the Dutch border to Berlin in 1935.

Courtesy of The Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.

The Holocaust was the culmination of a number of factors over a number of years.

Historic antisemitism , the rise of eugenics and nationalism , the aftermath of the First World War, the rise of the Nazis, the role of Adolf Hitler, the internal operation of the Nazi state, the Second World War and collaboration all played key roles in the timing and scale of the final catastrophe.

This section aims to explore how these individual factors contributed to the Holocaust.

Nationalism and the First World War

This leaflet was produced and distributed by the Deutsche Fichte-Bund , a nationalist organisation founded in Hamburg in 1914. The organisation spread nationalist and antisemitic propaganda in Germany and across the world.

German military personnel serving in the First World War pictured in Aisne, Northern France, in July 1915.

Following the Enlightenment (late seventeenth century – early nineteenth century), there was a growth in nationalism . The rise in nationalism intensified the rise in antisemitism, which had also been growing since the Enlightenment. The First World War (1914-1918) strengthened these feelings of nationalism across Europe, as nations were pitted against each other.

In 1918, Germany lost the First World War . Many people within Germany, including Adolf Hitler, found this loss very difficult and humiliating to process. Instead, many looked for scapegoats to blame.

This led to the Stab-in-the-Back Myth. The Stab-in-the-Back Myth was the belief that the German Army did not lose the First World War on the battlefield, but was instead betrayed by communists , socialists and Jews on the home front. This myth fostered the growth of extreme antisemitism , nationalism and anti-communism .

These feelings were exacerbated further by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The Treaty of Versailles forced Germany to admit complete responsibility for the war; pay large amounts of reparations (which undermined the Germany post-war economy); give up significant proportions of land, and limited the size of its army. The Treaty was extremely unpopular in Germany, where the public regarded it as a diktat (dictated peace). This led to a lack of faith in the Weimar Republic , the newly established regime of rule in Germany.

The unsettled conditions in Germany encouraged the popularity of nationalism and nostalgia for the country’s pre-war strength. Nationalism was a key factor in the rise in popularity of nationalist political parties such as the Nazis, and, in turn, ideas such as antisemitism.

Eugenics and antisemitism

An Ahnenpass or ancestry pass belonging to Rita Jarmes. Ancestry passes were used to demonstrate Aryan heritage in Nazi Germany. The Nazis often requested Ahnenpasses as proof for of eligibility for certain professions, or citizenship after 1935.

This poster, entitled ‘recreation, friends, health’, depicts an ‘ideal’ German child in accordance to the Nazis’ vision and beliefs in eugenics.

This pamphlet, entitled Aryan Worldview , was published by Houston Stewart Chamberlain in Berlin in 1905. Chamberlain was an advocate of the racial superiority of ‘Aryans’. His ideas influenced Adolf Hitler and were used by the Nazis as justification for their racial policies.

Robert Ritter (1901-1951) was a German ‘racial scientist’ in the Nazi regime. Ritter’s research into the eugenics of Roma led to his appointment as head of the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit. Ritter’s work to classify Roma aided and justified the Nazis discrimination, persecution, and execution of Roma. Here, Ritter [right] is pictured doing research in 1936

Courtesy of Bundesarchiv (R 165 Bild-244-71 / CC-BY-SA 3.0) [Public Domain].

Once in power, the Nazis initiated extensive antisemitic legislation. This letter is a translation of a list of antisemitic measures issued by Göring on 28 December 1938.

A photograph showing an antisemitic street sign in Mainbernheim, central Germany, taken in September 1935. The sign reads ‘The Jew is our misfortune. He shall stay away from us’. This photograph is taken from The Wiener Holocaust Library’s Motorcycle Album , a collection of photographs taken on a journey from the Dutch border to Berlin in 1935.

In addition to the rise in nationalism, the modern age saw the rise of racist ideas such eugenics and antisemitism . Both of these ideas lay at the heart of Nazi ideology, and eventually informed their persecutory and genocidal policies.

Following the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, the study of eugenics became extremely popular. Eugenics is the science of regulating a population through controlled breeding. Eugenic scientists aimed to eliminate traits believed to be undesirable, and encourage those that were ‘desirable’ in order to ‘improve’ the human race. This idea was dangerous as it suggested that certain groups were superior to others. Eugenics quickly became misused by far-right groups.

Hitler and the Nazis later used the popularity of eugenics and the theory of Social Darwinists as a pseudo-scientific justification to support their idea that non-‘ Aryans ‘ were inferior races, and should therefore be exterminated.

Antisemitism

Antisemitism was one of the most fundamental causes of the Holocaust.

The rise of antisemitism over the course of the early twentieth century was extremely dangerous. It allowed an overtly antisemitic party such as the Nazis to come to power in 1933.

Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race of people, who set out to weaken other races and take over the world. Hitler believed that Jews were particularly destructive to the German ‘ Aryan ’ race, and did not have any place in Nazi Germany.

The Nazis’ implemented antisemitic laws, which persecuted and oppressed Jews, and eventually led to their deportation and mass murder.

Rise of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler

This poster was used to promote Hitler in the 1932 Reichspräsident elections, where he ran against Hindenburg for the presidency. Hitler lost the election, with 36.8% of the vote to Hindenburg’s 53%. Despite losing, the election put Hitler on the map as a credible politician. The poster states ’Hesse chooses Hitler!’

This poster, also used in the 1932 Reichspräsident elections was aimed specifically at women, emphasising Hitler’s proposed policies on family life.

The Nazis’ rise to power , and the role of Adolf Hitler himself, is one of the primary causes of the Holocaust. The Nazis initiated, organised and directed the genocide and their racist ideology underpinned it.

The Nazi rise to power

The Nazis’ ideology rested on several key ideas , such as nationalism, racial superiority, antisemitism, and anticommunism. These ideas were popular in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, as the economic and political situation fluctuated and then, following the Wall Street Crash in 1929, quickly deteriorated.

In these uncertain times, the Nazi Party appeared to offer hope, political stability and prosperity. In 1932, the Nazis became the biggest party in the Reichstag , with 37.3% of the vote.

Shortly afterwards, on 30 January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor. The Nazis quickly consolidated their power, taking advantage of the Reichstag Fire of February 1933 to begin their reign of terror. Whilst primarily aimed at political enemies, the infrastructure of camps and institutionalised torture used in these initial months provided the groundwork for the camp system which later facilitated mass murder. Although not the subject of mass arrests in the same way that many political prisoners were initially, Jews were quickly targeted by the Nazi regime.

The Nazis’ persecution of Jews started with exclusionary policies, eliminating Jews from certain professions and educational opportunities and encouraging them to emigrate. As their power became more secure, the Nazis quickly escalated to more direct persecution, such as the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which stripped Jews of their citizenship and Kristallnacht (an antisemitic pogrom ) in 1938. This escalation of oppression continued to intensify and radicalise until the outbreak of war, where it quickly became more lethal, and, eventually, genocidal.

The role of Adolf Hitler

As leader of the Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler played a key role in the ideas behind, the events leading up to, and the unfolding of, the Holocaust.

Prior to their election, the Nazis shaped their propaganda to present Hitler as a strong leader that could return Germany from the uncertain circumstances of the time to its former glory. In the early years, Hitler was the driving force behind the Nazis, and made key changes to the party’s structure, branding and methods to turn it into a credible political force.

Once elected, Hitler rarely took part in direct actions against Jews or other internal enemies, instead directing his security forces, the SS , SA and SD , and their leader, Heinrich Himmler, to carry out this work. Whilst not physically involved, Hitler was involved in all major policy decisions, including persecutory policies and events. This is evidenced by his personal approval for the secret euthanasia programme of the disabled, T-4 , in Autumn 1939.

Hitler’s fanatic antisemitism , nationalism and anticommunism propelled Nazi ideology, and later, the Holocaust. Hitler’s expansionist policies, such as Lebensraum pushed Europe into the Second World War. This, alongside other factors, had severe ramifications for European Jews.

Radicalisation of the administration of the Nazi state

The Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung resulted in the expulsion of many Jews from their jobs. Prior to the Nazi rise to power Wilhelm Meno Simon (1885 – 1966) worked as an assistant judge and senior lawyer in Berlin. In 1933, following as the Nazis applied their policy of Gleichschaltung, Wilhelm was reduced to working as a notary. Here, Wilhelm is pictured with his son, Bernd.

In 1938, following Kristallnacht , Simon emigrated to Britain (where his wife, Gerty, and son, Bernard, were already living) to escape further Nazi persecution. This is a copy of his sponsorship document, which, by 1938, was needed in order to get a visa for Britain.

Shortly after being elected into power, the Nazis set about radicalising the infrastructure of government to suit their needs.

Gleichschaltung (Co-ordination)

Gleichschaltung was the process of the Nazi Party taking control over or reforming all aspects of government in Germany. It is otherwise known as coordination or Nazification.

One of the first institutions to be targeted for reform was the Civil Service . On 7 April 1933, the Nazis passed the Act for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service , legalising the removal of anyone of non-Aryan descent from the civil service. Amongst other things, this act removed any judges that were deemed non-compliant with Nazi laws or principles, and therefore paved the way for legalising future radical persecutory actions against the Jews and other enemies of the Nazis. Those that remained in the Civil Service quickly became aware of how enemies of the regime were treated by the SS, and having benefitted from the spaces left by their Jewish colleagues, were unlikely to speak out in their favour.

This process of co-ordination was repeated through almost all aspects of government policy, which helped to align existing institutions to be sympathetic (and obedient) to Nazi ideology. This, in turn, allowed the Nazis to continue to push the boundaries of, and slowly radicalise, persecution.

Cumulative radicalisation

In addition to taking over existing government departments, the Nazis also created new departments of their own. These frequently carried out similar functions to pre-existing departments, often resulting in overlap on policy. An example of this is the Office of the Four Year Plan (created in 1936) and the already existing Economics Ministry, which both had power over economic policy.

This internal duplication meant that many elements of the regime were forced to compete with each other for power. Each office took increasingly radical steps to solidify its favour with Hitler, and in turn, its authority. The process is often referred to as ‘working towards the Führer’: the idea that the Nazi state attempted to anticipate and develop policy in line with Hitler’s wishes, without him being directly involved. Goebbels’ organisation of Kristallnacht can be used as an example of ‘working towards the Führer’ – Hitler did not directly authorise the event, but it was carried out with his racist ideology and wishes in mind.

The competition and constant radicalisation meant that the administration and bureaucracy of the Nazi state was chaotic. This chaos increased over time because of a lack of clear lines of accountability. For example, even though, in theory, Himmler was answerable to Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, in reality he only ever received orders from Hitler himself.

As the Second World War progressed, the administration of the Nazi state became even further radicalised. New territories created new positions of power which further increased the radicalisation of ideological policy. The SS competed with senior party members and army officers for these positions and jurisdiction in the newly occupied areas. This internal competition in policy again pushed the radicalisation of policy as each organisation grappled for control, especially where there were ‘security concerns’ in the newly occupied areas.

The effect of the Second World War

The Second World War resulted in an extensive radicalisation of the Nazis’ antisemitic policy.

The first major radicalising action that resulted from the war was the creation of ghettos following the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. This resulted in three million Jews coming under German control. In order to contain the Jewish population, the Nazis forcibly segregated these Jews from the local population and placed them into ghettos. This was a large escalation of the Nazis’ previous antisemitic policy.

As the war continued it became clear that both the Magagascar Plan and the Generalplan Ost were infeasible, and it would not be possible to forcibly deport and resettle the Jewish population of Europe.

The invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 further escalated lethal actions towards Jews. In the lead up to the invasion, Joseph Goebbels ’ propaganda against Jews and, specifically OstJuden (eastern Jews), became even more vicious. This propaganda not only gave justification for the invasion of the Soviet Union, but directly linked the invasion to Jews.

As the historian Donald Bloxham wrote, ‘The very decision to go to war presupposed a racial mindset…everything that happened in war was liable to be interpreted in that light: frustrations were the cause for ‘revenge’; successes provided opportunities to create facts on the ground’ [Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution A Genocide , (United States: Oxford University Press, 2009), p.174].

Following behind the Germany Army throughout the invasion and subsequent partial occupation, the Einsatzgruppen conducted mass shootings of communists , Jews and any others thought to be enemies of the Nazi state. As the invasion of the Soviet Union slowed and the tide of war turned against the Nazis, actions against the Jews were further intensified. They were once again used as scapegoats for Germany’s military failures.

These actions culminated in the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 , which coordinated the Nazis genocidal policy towards the Jews and resulted in the establishment of six extermination camps.

The Second World War played a vital role in radicalising the Nazis’ antisemitic policy into genocide. The Nazis reacted to some events in the war by escalating their actions against Jews. One example of this is the murder of Reinhard Heydrich and the subsequent mass killings of civilians and the liquidation of the village of Lidice.

Collaboration

This testimony, given by Oscar Michelson in 1948 as part o f The Wiener Holocaust Library’s eyewitness testimony project , discusses the actions of the Nazis and Lithuanian officials in 1940 in Kovno, Lithuania.

German Army soldiers film the massacre of Jews in the Lvov Pogroms of July 1941, carried out by the Einsatzgruppe C and the Ukrainian National Militia.

This excerpt is taken from a situation report sent to the Chief of the Security Police and SD Reinhard Heydrich on 30 June 1941. The report details the involvement and collaboration of local Lithuanians in Kovno.

This document is a translation used in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.

The Nazis did not carry out the Holocaust alone. Their descent into genocide was assisted and carried out by collaborators: individuals, groups and governments that helped the Nazis to persecute and murder their victims. Without the aid of these collaborators, the Nazis would not have been able to carry out the Holocaust to the same extent or at the same pace.

Collaboration took many forms.

On the home front in Germany, some civilians actively collaborated with the Nazis to implement their antisemitic persecutory polices, such as denunciating Jewish neighbours or colleagues, or helping to implement antisemitic laws.

This form of collaboration reinforced antisemitic laws and obedience to the regime, which allowed the Nazis to slowly push and escalate the boundaries of acceptable levels of persecution.

Occupied countries

The most active, direct and deadly collaboration took place in the countries occupied by, or aligned with, the Nazis across Europe.

In the Seventh Fort, a concentration camp in Lithuania, Lithuanian police and militia acted as guards and participated in daily mass rapes, tortures, and murders. In Lvov, which is now part of modern-day Ukraine, pogroms organised by the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian National Militia resulted in the deaths and torture of thousands of Jews in June and July 1941. In Romania, the Antonescu regime widely collaborated with the Nazis to murder their Jewish inhabitants. Approximately 270,000 Romanian Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

These are just three examples of widespread collaboration with the Nazis.

The motivations behind these acts of collaboration are complex. Some acted in accordance with historic antisemitic views, others were motivated by potentials for economic gain, others did so out of fear.

Whatever their motivation, the effects of widespread collaboration for the Jewish population in the occupied countries of Europe were lethal. The participation of countries occupied by or aligned with Nazi Germany greatly extended the Nazis’ reach and speed at which the Holocaust unfolded, with fatal consequences.