The Destruction of the European
Jews,
1939-1945

• Mass murder of more than 5,000,000 Jews
• Holocaust: sacrificial offering burnt whole before the Lord
• Sho’ah: catastrophe
• Genocide: total physical annihilation
– Gypsies, mentally and physically handicapped, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish and Soviet citizens, political prisoners, religious dissenters, homosexuals

• History of prejudice in Christianity – claimed to be the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and the sole recipient of God’s
Covenant
• Pogroms, discriminatory laws, expulsions
• Eugenics: racial pseudo-science

• Excluding the racially inferior
• Creating the Gestapo
• The first concentration camps
• Nuremberg Laws – Sept 1935
• Crystal Night Pogrom – Nov 9-10 1938
• Evian Conference – July 1938

• Euthanasia (T4) Program
• Nazi racial policies in Poland
• Yellow badge in the West
• Attack on the USSR & mobile killing squads – “Einsatsgruppen”
• Volunteers – “Hiwi” – to help guard labor and extermination camps

• Wannsee Conference – Jan 1942 – authorized systematic deportation of
11,000,000 Jews

• Forced Labor camps
• Extermination camps:
4 of 6 devoted exclusively to mass murder
Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka
Extermination through work:
Majdanek, Auschwitz

• Intentionalists: pinpointing Hitler’s fixation
• Functionalists: No premeditated plan --
A “twisted road” to
Auschwitz
• Synthesizers: Before and after 1941

• SS and Police, German Army, German physicians, German civil servants, Non-
German volunteers (Hiwis), Non-
German Govt. officials
• Explanations for their behavior:
Indoctrination, superior orders, careerism, peer pressure, selfpreservation

• Accomodation – obeying the law
• Armed resistance
• Evasion
• Surviving camps

• Bystanders: apathy and indifference
• Rescuers: family background that emphasized justice and non-violent solutions. Less concerned about race, class, and nation

• Bombing?
• Negotiations?
• Pressure through Vatican and satellites?
• Publicized mass-murder to influence bystanders?
• Waited too long to establish WRB?
• Jewish committees of the free world?
• The Neutrals?

• Notion of linear progress and Reason shattered
• Studying the Holocaust to avoid other genocides
• The Shoah project – taped interviews
• “Blockbuster” interpretations of the Holocaust:
Schindler’s List – saving lives
• Primo Levi’s If this is a Man? – Survival at
Auschwitz
• Negationism