English Task | Adolf Hitler's "The Holocaust Massacre"

(ADOLF HITLER THE HOLOCAUST MASSACRE, 2020)

ADOLF HITLER

                          THE HOLOCAUST MASSACRE

The Holocaust was one of the most unforgettable moments in history. The word “Holocaust” came from the Greek word holos, which means whole, and kaustos, which means burned. This word was used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar. However, since 1945, the word has been used to describe the ideological and systematic state-sponsored prosecution and the murder of 6 million European Jews by the Nazi regime from 1933 until 1945. The slaughter and the mass murder were done systematically and professionally by the Nazi regime. Because the Jews were a threat to the Germans racial community and were inferior to the Germans in Adolf Hitler’s point of view generally back then, the Holocaust occurred in the land of Poland with the existence of the concentration camp. 

Caused by Hitler’s goal of racial purity and structural expansion throughout the territory in his command, in March 1933 the first concentration camp was opened near Munich in an area called Dachau, which was under the control of the elite Nazi guard, Schutzstaffel (SS), led by Heinrich Himmler. In the first place, the concentration camp was built for the opponents in Hitler’s political aspect, for instance, Communists or Social Democrats, with the majority of the prisoners back then were Communists.

In 1933, there were 525,000 Jews in Germany, which means that there were only 1% Jewish people of the total German population. From 1933 to 1939, the Nazis attempted the “Aryanization”. This was a movement where the Nazis rejected the non-Aryans from the civil service, liquidated the Jewish-owned businesses, and deprived Jewish doctors and lawyers from their clients. Based on the law called Nuremberg Laws, which was made in 1935, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered as a Jew, and those with two grandparents were considered as Mischlinge or halfbreeds. Under the Nuremberg Laws, stigmatization and persecution were targetted at the European Jews. 

In November 1938, the stigmatization and the persecution climaxed in Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass. This is when the German synagogues, the Jewish house of worship, were destroyed in fire and the windows of the shops owned by the Jewish were wrecked. Throughout six years, about hundreds of Jews were killed and thousands were dismissed. From 1933 to 1939, some of the Jews were able to escape Germany, while the rest that stayed remained in a state of uncertainty and fear

Afterwards, in September 1939 the German army conquered the western half of the whole territory of Poland hence why the concentration camp was allowed to be built. The German police forced thousands of the Poland Jews to move from their homes into the ghettoes, an isolated area occupied by the minority community. The ghettoes is a perfect place for a disease, such as typhus, to grow because of the widespread poverty and hunger. 

Meanwhile, at the beginning of the fall of 1939, the Nazi officials held the Euthanasia Program, which killed 70,000 Germans with mental illness or disabilities by a deadly gas. Hitler ended the program in August 1941 because of protests from the German religious leaders. But then, the program continued in secrecy. Until 1945, 275,000 people from all over Europe had been killed in the program. It was clear that the Euthanasia Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust. 

Moving a little bit closer to the Holocaust, throughout the summer and the spring of 1940, territorial expansion by the German army began in several regions in Europe, such as Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. In June 1941, the German used a mobile killing unit to invade German. The mobile killing unit, nicknamed Einsatzgruppenwould, conducted murder more than 500.000 Soviet Jews and others by shooting them. From the whole continent, all the Jews and the European Gypsies were transported to the Polish ghettoes.

Furthermore, on July 31, 1941, a memorandum was sent from the top commander, Hermann Goering to the Chief of the SD, the security service of the SS, named Reinhard Heydrich referred to the needs for an Endlosung or the Final Solution to the Jewish. From September 1941, every Jews in German territory were marked by a yellow star for the purpose of making them an open target. 

Since then, ongoing experiments with mass killings methods took place at the concentration camp near Krakow named Auschwitz, such as the killings of 500 Soviet POWs by gassing them with Zyklon-B pesticide. The SS soon made a huge order of the gas to the German pest-control firm. 

The Holocaust death camp started in late 1941. The Germans started to transport the Jews in the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camp, starting with the “least useful”: the sick, the old, the weak, and the very young. On March 17, 1942, the first mass murder with gas was held at the camp of Belzec, nearby Lublin. Then, five more mass murder centers were built in the occupied Poland territory: Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of all. From 1942 until 1945, the Jews were transferred to all of the camps all over German, including the territory of the country that had alliances with German. 

The biggest transfer was the transfer of more than 300,000 people from the Warsaw ghetto. Because of the hunger and the disease they had, they rose up in an armed uprising. The uprising lasted from April 19, 1943, until May 16, 1943. It ended up with the death of 7,000 Jews and 50,000 survivors transferred to the extermination camp. 

At Auschwitz, all the Jewish and non-Jewish convicts worked together in the labor camp. However, only the Jewish were gassed. The rest died of starvation or disease. And in 1943, a eugenicist, Josef Mengele, went to Auschwitz to attempt an experiment called Medical Experiment on Twins, where he injected them with everything, from petrol to chloroform, under the disguise of giving them medical treatment. He was nicknamed “ The Angel of Death”. 

In spring 1945, the German leadership broke up in the middle of the internal conflict. Goering and Himmler were trying to create a fall for Hitler and take his power. In his last political testament, which was dictated in a German bunker on April 29, Hitler blamed the war on “International Jewry and its helper” and urged the social leaders and the society to follow “The strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all people”. The next day, Hitler committed suicide. The formal surrender of German in World War II came almost a week after, on May 8, 1945. 

The Germans started to evacuate many death camps in autumn 1944, sending convicts under guard to move further from the enemy’s front line that kept moving forward. These “death marches” went on until the surrender of German. This resulted in 250,000 to 375,000 deaths. 

Shoah, or the wounds of the Holocaust in Hebrew, were slow to heal. The people who survived from the camp were impossible to go home because most of them had lost their families. As a result, in the late 1940, there were a large number of refugees, POWs, and prisoners. In order to punish the Holocaust villains, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-1946. Increasing the power of the Allies to generate a homeland for the Jewish survivors would lead to a mandate to create Israel in 1948. Starting in 1953, the German government paid the Jewish people as their responsibility for the crimes they have committed.