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           The Jewish University in Cyberspace    12 Nov. 1996
             Student and Academics Department
                World Zionist Organization
         juice@wzo.org.il       birnbaum@wzo.org.il    
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Contemporary Jewish History
Robert Goldbert 

6/12      World War II and the Holocaust

     Well, we have come to the lecture that I have been dreading
since the beginning, the one that deals with the Holocaust.  For
me, this is the hardest lecture to give.  How does one describe the
suffering felt by those that went through the Holocaust?  How can
one explain how and why it happened?  How can one even begin to
comprehend such questions as Where Was G-d?  
     I hope that you, dear students, will forgive me for "ducking"
some of these larger questions regarding the Holocaust, which I
believe are beyond the scope to this course.  What I have done,
however, is divide the lecture into two parts.  This first lecture,
Lecture VI, will give a general overview of the Holocaust -- the
bare facts and a description of what happened where and when. 
After this historical review, the next lecture, Lecture VII, will
explore some of the more specific aspects of the Holocaust, such as
the issue of Jewish resistance (or lack thereof) and what the rest
of the world did (or didn't do) during the Holocaust.  Although
painful, the Holocaust and these questions emanating from it are
still haunting us today.  

I.  The Beginnings of the war

     The Second World War, which was all along Hitler's plan,
provided Hitler with an ideal setting for realizing his goals of
depopulating the lands on which the greater Germanic Reich was to
be constructed, enslaving the Slavs and other "inferior" groups,
and providing a "Final Solution" of the Jewish problem.  The war
necessitated complete control of communications and transportation,
which provided Hitler the needed cover of secrecy.  Total
mobilization of resources, including ruthless exploitation of what
was called "human material", provided the general economic
framework for Hitler's plans.  Finally, the expansion of the SS,
the 'Schutzstaffeln' guard troops that included the regular police
as well as the Gestapo (secret police) and later ran the
concentration camps, provided the instrument for carrying out the
extermination of the Jews of Europe.  
     In a similar vein, Hitler viewed the extermination of the Jews
as one of the strategic imperatives of the war -- that there had to
be an unequivocal solution to the Jewish problem so that no new
generation of Jews could arise in the future to threaten the Aryan
"New Order" being created by Hitler.  This meant that all the Jews,
both combatants and civilians, men, women and children had to be
killed.  In the words of Hitler's propaganda chief, Josef Goebbels:
"The Jews will destroy us if we do not ward them off.  It is a life
and death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish
bacillus...The hard decision has to be taken -- this people must
disappear from the face of the earth."
     Immediately after the war broke out with the German invasion
of Poland in September 1939, most of the Jewish leadership was
either arrested or shot.  At the same time, pogroms were organized
against the Jews.  At the end of the month all of Poland's Jews
were ordered to leave their villages and towns and concentrate
themselves in the cities.  In October Polish Jews were ordered to
wear a yellow badge with a Star of David on it to easily identify
them as Jews.  Any Jew caught without it or without a special
permit to be outside was executed on the spot.  In December all men
between the ages of fourteen and sixty were recruited for forced
labor "for two years, a period which may be extended if the
educational objectives have not been achieved."  The Jews of both
Germany and Poland were prohibited from being out in public without
permits and were expelled from schools and universities.  Their
social rights as workers were revoked and even their own shops and
businesses were confiscated.  
     In late 1939 it as announced that all Jews were obliged to
move into ghettos, special quarters within the cities.  The first
ghetto was set up in Lodz in Poland in February 1940 (for a
horrifying account of the transfer of the Jews to Lodz ghetto, read
J. Kurtz's description in "The Eyewitness Book"). The Warsaw ghetto
was established in November.  By 1941 there were ghettos all over
Poland, in most cases surrounded by a wall.  In October 1941 the
death penalty was imposed on any Jew found outside the walls of the
ghetto without a permit.  At the same time, persecution of the
Jews, in the form of cutting off their beards and sidecurls,
harnessing them to carts, beatings and even murder, was encouraged
by the Nazi authorities.  
     Jewish councils, called the Judenrat, were established to run
internal affairs in the ghettos, under the strict supervision of
the SS.  The members of the Judenrat had to serve their community
while at the same time carry out the orders of the SS, therefore
they were often looked at by their fellow Jews as traitors who
collaborated with the Nazis.  Later on, when the Judenrat were
ordered to help with the deportations from the ghettos to the death
camps, their members were faced with a terrible moral dilemma:
Should they cooperate with the Nazis and hand over the Jews
demanded of them when non-cooperation would cause the murder of
even more Jews?  Some Judenrat members escaped this dilemma by
committing suicide.  Others decided to go with the Jews on their
way to extermination.  Some made superhuman efforts to postpone the
selection for a time, to warn their brethren of the danger and hide
others.  Still others saw no choice but to give in and provide the
Jews demanded for transport.  (Written accounts by members of the
Judenrat from different ghettos can be found.  Especially powerful
is one by Jacob Gens, head of the Vilna ghetto, who wrote: "If I am
asked to supply a thousand Jews I do it because if we Jews do not
supply them, the Germans will come and violently take not one
thousand but thousands of thousands.  With hundreds I rescue
thousands, with a thousand I rescue ten thousand...I have to lead
Jews to death in order to save many others.")  
     Jewish suffering became more acute as the Germans captured
Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland and France between April and June
1940.  The occupation of Western Europe brought another half a
million Jews into German hands.  The Jews of France were ordered to
register with the police and get special stamps on their identity
papers.  By the end of 1940, 40,000 'alien' French Jews were
imprisoned in detention camps, the great majority of which were
German citizens who had fled from the Nazis.  In Holland the
confiscation of Jewish property commenced in October 1940.  In
November, Jews were dismissed from government service, and at the
beginning of 1941 their papers were marked with a special stamp. 
However, the activities of the Germans and their Dutch
collaborators aroused the anger of many Dutchmen.  When the Nazis
attacked the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam in the beginning of
February 1941, taking Jews hostage and torturing and murdering
them, many Dutch workers came to the aid of the Jews.  They
organized a workers strike in solidarity with the Jews that
developed gradually into a general strike which had to be
suppressed by military force.  This, unfortunately, was one of the
few examples of public readiness to take risks on behalf of the
Jews in occupied Europe.  

II.  The Final Solution

     The German attack on Soviet Russia in June 1941 changed the
whole course of the war and brought with it a worsening in the
situation of the Jews.  While planning the Russian campaign, the
German General Staff had discussed the murder of those political
commissars who would be taken prisoner, and, apparently, also of
Jews.  As early as May the SS had created the "Einsatzgruppen"
(Action Groups), who were sent to murder Jews, Soviet officials and
gypsies behind the German lines in the east.  They moved from place
to place rounding up Jews for "resettlement" and marched them
outside the city or town where they were forced to dig trenches or
pits.  The Jews were then stripped naked, gunned down and buried in
the pits they had dug.  One of the largest of these "actions"
occurred at Babi Yar outside Kiev towards on Yom Kippur 1941, when
at least 34,000 Jews were massacred in this manner (some sources
put the figure as several times larger).  It is estimated that
between one and a half to two million Jewish men, women and
children were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen in occupied Russia in
1941-42.  
     The idea of a systematic extermination of the Jews had existed
as part of the Nazi plan for some time.  Experiments had taken
place in which victims were asphyxiated in special vans which
emitted poison gas while in motion.  During the summer of 1941
orders were given for the construction of death camps that utilized
poison gas.  But it seems that the practical decision to actually
put into effect a plan for the systematic extermination of all the
Jews of Europe was undertaken on January 20, 1942 at a Nazi
conference held on Wannsee St. in Berlin.  At the Wannsee
Conference the plans for the extermination of the Jewish people,
the "Final Solution to the Jewish Problem", was discussed in
detail.  It was decided that the Jewish subjects of the German
Empire would be "evacuated to the east", with Poland to be used as
the center for the extermination of the Jews.  The Jews would be
"resettled" to the Polish ghettos and then sent to concentration
camps where they would be either immediately executed or slowly
worked to death.  At the time of the Wannsee Conference, a camp
that carried out extermination by the poison gas vans was already
operating at Chelmno, near Lodz, Poland where some 150,000-340,000
Polish Jews, gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war were killed
between December 1941 and spring 1943.  
     From the beginning of 1942 onward, the transfer of the Jews
throughout the Reich to the ghettos of Poland became a systematic
operation.  From there, the Jews were dispatched to the
extermination camps that were being built all over Poland.  After
Chelmno, the next death camp to be put into operation was Belzec,
near Lvov where 600,000 Jews were killed by carbon monoxide
poisoning between March 1942 and spring 1943.  Sobibor, near
Lublin, was used from may 1942 to October 1943 to kill about
250,000 Jews.  The Majdanek concentration and extermination camp on
the outskirts of Lublin was the scene of the murder of at least
125,000 Jews in 1942-43, and 800,000 Jews were gassed at the
Treblinka camp near Warsaw between July 1942 and October 1943.  
     But the largest and most infamous camp was at the Polish town
of Auschwitz, where one to two million Jews were killed by hydrogen
cyanide (Zyklon B) gas between January 1942 and November 1944.  The
five gas chambers at Auschwitz could murder over 60,000 people
every 24 hours.  To Auschwitz were sent Jews from all over occupied
Europe: France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Austria, Slovakia,
Croatia, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece and Hungary.  Auschwitz and
Treblinka also served as forced labor camps.  When the "transports"
arrived, the strongest and most physically fit of the victims were
selected to be worked to death in chemical and other factories
built nearby.  The vast majority of the men, women and children,
those deemed too weak to provide any useful labor to the Germans,
were sent directly to the gas chambers.  First their possessions
were taken away from them and the gold fillings taken from their
teeth.  Then they were stripped naked and all of their bodily hair
was shaved off to be used for mattresses and pillows.  Finally,
they were rushed with whips, dogs and gunshots to the "shower
rooms", where poison gas came out of the showerheads instead of
water.  The bodies were then cremated or buried in nearby woods. 
The ashes were utilized for fertilizer, and in some instances
attempts were made to use the fat from the bodies in the production
of soap.  Much of the work was carried out by Jewish prisoners who
were later killed.  
     I think that the full extent of the Nazi hatred of the Jews
and their determination in exterminating them is illustrated by the
fact that a full two-thirds of the extermination was carried out
after 1942, after the eventual defeat of Germany was already
certain and the resources being used for the Final Solution could
have been devoted to delaying such an event.  Thus the urgency of
completing the Holocaust were given priority even over the war
effort itself, reflecting Hitler's resolve that, whatever the
outcome of the war, the Jews of Europe would not survive it.  By
March 1943 their were no Jews left in the Cracow ghetto, and some
fifty ghettos were emptied in April 1943.  The last of the Jews in
the ghettos of Bialystok, Minsk, Riga and Vilna were sent to the
death camps between July and September 1943.  By 1944, the only
ghettos that had any Jews left were Lodz and Kovno.  For many
months in 1942, 1943 and 1944, the Nazis were killing over 100,000
Jews a week.  When the Soviet army began to advance at the
beginning of 1944, the Germans began to expel the camp inmates to
the west, forcing them to march on foot under bitter wintry
conditions.  Very few survived these death marches.  

III.  The Fate of Europe's Jewish Communities

     The Jews of Western and Central Europe who were not first sent
to the ghettos of Poland were sent directly to the death camps. 
The dimensions of the Holocaust were not uniform in all countries
and for all communities, but there was no Jewish community within
Nazi-held territory that escaped the German killing machine.  
     The largest Jewish community in the world at the outbreak of
the second world war was Poland, with a population of about
3,325,000.  Of this, only about 120,000 Polish Jews survived and
only a few thousand were to be found in Poland after the war. 
Thus, over 90% of Polish Jewry was destroyed in the Holocaust.
     The Jews of Germany began to be sent to the ghettos in Poland
in March 1942.  At the beginning of 1943, the SS began house to
house searches in Berlin searching for any remaining Jews, and any
Jews found were sent directly to Auschwitz.  In 1933, the German
Jewish population had been about 500,000 but by the end of the war
only a few hundred were left.    
     The Jews of France began to be sent to Auschwitz in June 1942. 
In July 1943 a large-scale manhunt was held in Paris and some
13,000 Jews, including 4,000 children, were arrested and sent to
Auschwitz.  All in all, about a quarter of French Jewry was
exterminated during the Holocaust.  
     The transport of Holland's Jews to Auschwitz commenced in June
1942 and later the Dutch Jews were sent to Sobibor.  By April 1944
the extermination of Dutch Jewry was completed, with the successful
elimination of the vast majority of Holland's Jewish community
(from a pre-war population of 150,000 to just 30,000 in 1946).  In
August, 1942 the Jews of Belgium began to be sent to Auschwitz, and
by September 1943 about one-third of that community had been
destroyed.  By the end of the war, the Jewish population of Belgium
had fallen form 100,000 to just 30,000.  
     The large Jewish community of Salonika, where most of Greece's
Jews were located, was exterminated at Auschwitz in 1943 and 1944. 
Most of the few Jews of Athens succeeded in escaping death,
however, all in all some 65,000 Greek Jews were murdered (out of a
total of 75,000 at the beginning of the war).
     In Slovakia and Croatia, the satellite states established by
Hitler, the Jews suffered a similar fate.  In March 1942 Slovakia's
President, Father Tisso, agreed to the expulsion of the Jews and
soon afterwards a massive manhunt was conducted.  Some 35,000 Jews
were sent "eastwards" to the ghettos in Poland and were then
murdered at Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka.  Some 15,000
additional Jews, relatives of those murdered, were expelled in May
and June 1942.  All in all, the number of Slovakian Jews sent to
the death camps in 1942 reached 58,000.  After the Slovakian
uprising the transports were renewed again in September 1944 and
another 13,000 Jews were expelled, about two-thirds of whom
perished.  The Jews of Croatia were put into labor camps in October
1941 and in 1942-43 were sent to "resettlement in the east"; that
is, to the ghettos and extermination camps in Poland.  By late 1944
only a few Jews remained in the Croatian labor camps.  
     In Rumania and Hungary, two allies of Hitler, the Jews
suffered a different fate.  In 1941-42 the Rumanians expelled about
150,000 Jews, only one third of whom survived.  Another 150,000
Jews were killed by the German and Rumanian armies.  Although most
of Rumania's Jews survived these attacks, the Jewish population of
Rumania had dropped from a population of 850,000 in 1933 to just
300,000 in 1946.  On August 23 1944, the day of Rumania's surrender
to Russia, Adolf Eichmann (the Nazi official in charge of "Jewish
Affairs and Evacuation Affairs"), was still making every effort to
transfer the remainder of Rumanian Jewry to the death camps.  
     Due to Hungary's collaboration with the Germans, Hungary was
not invaded by Germany until March 1944 and a Fascist government
was set up.  Eichmann himself was brought in to oversee the
extermination of Hungary's Jewish population, and in April and May
1944 some 200,000 Jews were arrested.  Transport directly to
Auschwitz immediately commenced, and by the end of June over
380,000 Hungarian Jews had been sent there, 300,000 of whom were
killed immediately.  Even at the end of the war, with the Soviet
Army standing at the gates of Budapest, the Germans arrested some
40,000 Jews and sent them on a death-march to Austria.  Very few
survived.      
     The Jews of Austria began to be transported to the ghettos in
the Lublin area of Poland in March 1942, and by the end of the war
Austria's Jewish population had dropped from 200,000 to just 3,000. 
The Jewish population of Norway dropped to half its pre-war level,
and the Soviet Union lost over a million Jews during the war.  
     All told, the Holocaust destroyed European Jewry, which had
been the largest concentration of Jews in the world up to World War
Two.  Although precise statistics are not available because the
Germans destroyed most of the documents relating to the Final
Solution, we know that in 1945 only 3.1 million Jews were left in
Europe out of a pre-war population of 9.2, a loss of over six
million people and two-thirds of the European Jewish community. 
Jews represent a sixth of all Europeans killed in the war, and
almost all the Jews killed were civilians.  Of the vast Jewish
communities of Europe, only small remnants remained.  
     Although the numbers remain sketchy, one thing is certain: the
Nazi "Final Solution" was a phenomenon unparalleled in the annals
of human brutality.  Even the suffering to the peoples of Europe
caused by the war was incomparable to the Jewish Holocaust.  No
other nation experienced such torture, humiliation and vicious
forms of murder; no other nation witnessed such mass extermination
of women, elderly people, children and infants and no other nation
lost one-third of its people.  Most importantly, no other nation
was singled out to be totally exterminated as a people.  Although
other minority groups, such as the gypsies, were also persecuted by
the Nazis and killed in the death camps, the camps were expressly
built for the purpose of carrying out the "Final Solution" of the
Jewish people and it was only the Jews who were subjected to a
deliberate plan of genocide that was designed not to allow even one
member to escape with his life.