The worst crime is taking the life of an innocent person. Hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, and children, lost their lives at the hands of a tyrannical ruler in Germany. The word comes from the Greek words ‘holos” and “kaustos”, and it meant sacrificial offerings to the Greek gods.
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After 1945, the word is used to describe the ideological and state-sponsored systematic persecution of millions of Jews by the German Nazi government from 1933 till 1945. Adolf Hitler, the anti-Semitic Nazi leader, viewed Judaistic folks as an inferior race and considered them a threat to the racial purity of Germany.
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After years of persecution under the horrendous Nazi rule, millions of Semitics were killed in concentration areas under the cover of World War II. Let’s see what were the things that led to such a brutal, dehumanizing event.
Anti-Semitic Sentiments
The Anti-Semitic feelings and sentiments in Europe didn’t start with Hitler. The evidence of hostility towards the Semitics has existed long before the Carnage, even as far as in the ancient world. At that time, Roman authorities desecrated a Judaistic temple in Jerusalem and the Semitics were forced to leave their homeland.
Later, the situation was better in the Enlightenment period where religious toleration was emphasized. Napoleon along with other European rulers made laws that ended various restrictions on Semitics. However, the anti-Semitic feeling still endured in that part of the world.
Hitler was born in 1889 and served in the German army in WW I. Like many other anti-Semites, Hitler blamed the Semitics for Germany’s defeat. Once the WWI ended he joined the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party, commonly known as Nazis.
No single book on the holocaust memorial or essay about holocaust denial and related topics can shed enough light on the extermination of Semitics that took place. When he was imprisoned for treason in 1923, he wrote a memoir in which he wrote about a European Fight in the future that would exterminate the Judaistic race in Germany.
He was obsessed with the idea of purifying the German race. Once he was released from prison, he enhanced his part’s status and then he started to rise from obscurity to the heights of power. In 1933 he was named as the Chancellor of Germany. Once President Paul von Hindenburg died in 1934, he anointed himself the supreme ruler of Germany.
After that, there were no hopes for justice for the Non Germans and Jews in Eastern Europe, as is narrated by the famous Historian Timothy Snyder.
Nazi Revolution 1933 – 1939
At the core of Hitler’s worldview were two goals – spatial expansion and racial purity. In the beginning, the harshest punishments were restricted to only the political opponents. The very first concentration camp was opened in March 1933 near Munich and various Communists were imprisoned there.
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By July 1933, over 27,000 people were held in protective custody in various concentration areas. At that time, the Semitics in Germany were around 1% of the population only – around 525,000 in number. In the next 6 years, Nazis started the “Aryanization” of the country.
They dismissed non-Aryans from the civil service, stripped Judaistic doctors and lawyers of their clients, liquidated Judaistic businesses, etc. As per the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, a person with 3 or 4 Jewish grandparents was a Jew while a person with 2 Jewish grandparents was termed as ‘Mischlinge”.
After this Semitics were targeted, stigmatized, and persecuted. All of this culminated in November 1938, when several synagogues were burned and hundreds of Judaistic shops were broken into. Over 100 Jews were killed that night and many more were arrested.
From 1933 to 1939, Jews kept leaving the country. Those who couldn’t leave lived in a state of constant fear and uncertainty. There are various stories about the Holocaust that you shuld read to know more details and uncover the hard facts.
Beginning of WWII 1939 to 1940
The western half of Poland was occupied by the German Army in September 1939. The German police forced thousands of Polish Jews into ghettos and confiscated their properties. The Judaistic Ghettos functioned like captive city-states. Unemployment, hunger, and poverty reigned in those places and they became breeding grounds for various diseases.
In 1939, Nazis selected over 70,000 people who were institutionalized based on disability or mental illness to be gassed in the “Euthanasia Program. When many religious leaders protested, Hitler stopped the program but it kept on going in secrecy.
The Final Solution 1940-1941
As the German army kept expanding Hitler’s empire, Jews from all over the continent were transported to the ghettos in Poland. Once Germany invaded the USSR, they murdered over 500,000 Russian Jews. In September 1941, all the Jews in the German-held territories were given Yellow Stars, which made them open targets.
The experiments with methods of mass killing had been going on in the concentration areas. In Aug 1941, 500 Soviet prisoners of wars were gassed to death using a pesticide. In late 1941, people from the ghettos were transported to the concentration camps.
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In the beginning, the weakest people, that is the old, sick, and young were transported. On March 17, 1942, near Lublin, the first mass gassings began. 5 mass killing centers were established where hundreds of thousands of people were killed.
Fed up with this, the people of the Warsaw Ghetto revolted against the Germans and this uprising resulted in the death of 7,000 Jews while 50,000 survivors from the camp were sent to concentration camps.
Even though the Nazis tried to keep this a secret and denied that the killings, it didn’t work. eyewitnesses reported these atrocities to Allied governments who refused to believe that such atrocious acts were being done.
All this came to an end when Germany was finally defeated in WW II and Hitler committed suicide.