The Explainer: Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust
At the outset, let me tell you that I wrote this piece on Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust upon the request of a few readers of this blog; I have used pretty simple English to explain one of the most complex episodes in world history; I hope this helps you in learning about the Holocaust.
The end of the First World War (1914-18)
saw the emergence of Nazism in Germany. The movement took political colour in
1919, in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles, which imposed several humiliating terms on the defeated German nation.
The Nazi party’s official name was ‘National
Socialist Workers Party’; its followers came to be called Nazis. Though the
Nazi movement started small at a local level, it gained mass popularity across
all sections of the German society, including among the poor and unemployed as
well as the several small royal houses that dotted the German state.
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| Adolf Hitler |
Adolf Hitler, who joined the Nazi party
when it was still a marginal player in the German political space, turned into
one of the greatest mass movements in history.
The political philosophy of the Nazi party had
some basic features: It was anti-democracy, anti-communism, anti-peace, anti-Semite,
extreme form of nationalism, and pro-capitalism. Hitler believed that the Aryan
race, to which he and most of the Germans belonged, was the most supreme racial
group and was destined to rule over Europe. He believed that the Aryans were
the most intelligent people on the planet.
In this space, I will discuss the
anti-Semite, i.e., anti-Jew policy of the Nazi party. In a period of 13 years
(1933-45), Adolf Hitler and his Nazis killed over six million Jews. This
systematic, state-sponsored mass killing of Jews, carried out in different
parts of Germany and Occupied Territories, is called the Holocaust. ‘Holocaust’
is a word of Greek origin meaning ‘sacrifice by fire’. In
a larger picture, the Holocaust is an important part of the ‘Final Solution’
policy, which called for the elimination of the Jewish people.
It is not just the Jews who were singled out by
Hitler; other groups, deemed racially inferior to the German race, like Roma
Gypsies, Slavs (Russians and Poles) and ideological rivals, like communists and
socialists, were also targeted and killed in large numbers by the Nazi party. It
is believed that more than 2 lakh Gypsies were killed by the Nazi party.
Hitler blamed the Jews for all the ills
suffered by the German nation. He accused them of being hand in glove with the country’s
enemies, like France and Britain. He derided them as the scum of the earth and
treated them as sub-human.
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| Source: Martin Frost |
Jews, who at the time made up less than
one per cent of Germany’s population, had become leading members of the
professional classes and the cultural space. Hitler accused them of hoarding
the wealth and resources that belonged to the Germans.
In 1933, Hitler became the Chancellor of
Germany. As the most popular and powerful leader of the German nation, Hitler
put in place his anti-Semite policy, i.e., anti-Jew policy. A Jew was defined
as any person with “one Jewish grandparent”.
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| Jewish prisoners at a concentration camp. |
Jews were asked to move into special areas
marked for their settlements, i.e., they were ghettoized. They were required,
by law, to wear the yellow Star of David and were stripped of their German
citizenship. They were not allowed to display German national symbols, like the
national flag. They were not allowed to participate in arts, like music and
dance.
Jewish businesses were boycotted; Jews were
forbidden from holding any government/public office. Jewish professionals, including
teachers, doctors and lawyers, did not find any takers for their services.
The Nazi party explicitly banned marriage
between Jews and non-Jews; in fact, such marriages were denounced as “racial
pollution”. In many towns and villages, Jewish tenants were evicted and forced
to live outdoors.
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| Starving prisoners at concentration camp |
As the German State, under Nazi Party,
invaded and occupied large swathes of territory across Europe, including in
Poland, the discrimination against Jews became a pan-Europe phenomenon. Jews
across German-occupied territories were forced to group and live in particular
settlements.
The most sinister part of the anti-Semite policy of the Nazi regime was the
establishment of more than 300 Concentration Camps and Exterminations Camps. These camps were run by the SS (Schutzstaffel;
Protection Squadrons), set up by Adolf Hitler, in 1925 (yes, long before he became
the Chancellor of Germany).
Jews from across Occupied Territories were
taken to these camps. They were divided into two major groups: slave labour and
the group to be killed. To put in blunt terms, women, children, and the aged
were taken to Extermination Camps while the healthy males were turned into
human slaves.
Hundreds of thousands of Jewish women,
children and the aged were taken by trains to these Extermination camps, which
housed large warehouses. These warehouses were in fact gas chambers. They were
all herded into these air-tight chambers and killed through release of
poisonous gases.
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| Mass grave at Bergen-Belsen camp |
The Jewish men, turned into slave labour,
were used to build railway and help in the German war effort in the Second World
War. They were treated as sub-human, were fed poorly, denied medical attention,
worked in appalling conditions, and lived (and killed) at the whim and fancy of
the German Nazi officers.
Auschwitz is the most well-known of these
camps. After the suicide of Adolf Hitler and the eventual defeat of Germany in
the Second World War, the Nuremberg Trials were set up, which tried tens of
Nazi officials for their complicity in the Holocaust. Rudolf Hess, who was the
first commandant at the Auschwitz camp, testified that up to 3 million (30
lakh) people were killed at his camp. Of these 2.5 million were gassed while
the rest died from disease and starvation. He said that
the camp had four gas chambers, which during the height of deportations to the
camp, gassed up to 6,000 Jews each day.
In all, Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semite policy
led to the deaths of over six million (sixty lakh) Jews in different parts of
Europe. The number of the dead is staggering, given that in 1933 (the year
Hitler became the chancellor of Germany), there were just about 10 million Jews
in the whole of Europe.
A number of films have been made on the controversial
subject of the anti-Semite policy of the Nazi Party. I would recommend: The Great Dictator
(starring Charlie Chaplin), The Pianist, Inglorious Basterds, Schindler’s List,
The Reader, and Life is Beautiful (my personal favourite). In case of books, A Diary of Anne Frank is probably the most popular work that captures the suffering of the Jews through the eyes of a fourteen-year old Jewish girl.
Keep learning!
