This article concerns an extremely upsetting and disturbing time in human history and may contain graphic photographs and images. Persons offended by such material are advised not to read it.

The Final Solution. The Holocaust. The Shoah. The period of twelve years from 1933 until 1945, that European Jews were hunted, persecuted, slaughtered, tortured and massacred by the German Nazi Party and by their various collaborators. This article charts the progress of Jewish persecution by the Nazis and their allies and collaborators from the rise of the Nazis in 1933 under Adolf Hitler, until the end of the Second World War in Europe on the 8th of May, 1945.

The Holocaust was, is and will forever be, one of the most shocking examples of human degradation ever to darken the face of the earth; up there with the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il and North Korea, Stalinist Russia and the Cold War. This article will show the progression of the Holocaust from a small, irritating little prickle, into the fiery hell that it escalated to in the early 1940s; from simple, anti-semitic beginnings to the popular, Hollywood and pop-culture image of it, as portrayed in films and on television.

Why the Jews?

Of all the peoples throughout history, few have been more chased, hunted and persecuted than those who follow the Jewish faith. Why?

Jews were persecuted for various reasons, but mostly due to their significantly different beliefs and customs to those who followed the Christian faith. Jews followed different customs and practiced different beliefs and traditions to Christians. Jews formed their own communities (ghettos) inside larger communities, a bit like Chinatowns or Little Italys. The Jews kept to themselves and mingled in and amongst themselves. This show of apparent isolationism bred contempt and suspicion from non-Jewish people who accused them of almost anything, when there was any accusing to be done. In the 14th Century, for example, when the Black Death ripped through Europe, frantic and horrified peasants, desperate for answers, lunged at rumors that Jews poisoned wells and that this poison spread the Plague. It wasn’t true, of course, but when mass-hysteria grabs hold, there’s very little to hold it back.

Such was the case with the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s.

The seeds of the Nazi Holocaust were sewn in the mid 1920s and the 1930s. Germany, crushed and humiliated after losing the Great War of 1914-1918, had been ripped to pieces. Its land had been cut up, its military forces had been ripped to shreds and all its finest ocean-liners were sold off to the Allies to pay for war-damages. Furious and downhearted, Germans found comfort in the belief that it was the Jews who “stabbed Germany in the back”. The stab-in-the-back theory of anti-semitism made Germans feel better about themselves, and this set the ball rolling for the Nazis, who were, in the 1920s, a small, insignificant political party. Anti-semitism grew in the second half of the 1920s and early 1930s with the German Hyperinflation Crisis of 1922. In order to pay off massive debts incurred by the First World War, thousands of German marks were printed. This influx of currency reduced the value of the Mark until it was literally worthless. The Depression that came less than ten years later, secured Hitler’s rise to power and the start of a systematic program of anti-Jewish measures.

Pre-War Persecution

To many people, the Holocaust and Jewish persecution started in 1939, with the declaration of war, by the United Kingdom and France, upon Germany. However, what people may not be aware of is the fact that German persecution of Jews started significantly earlier than that.

Anti-Jewish laws and regulations were brought into Germany along with the Nazis in 1933. At first, the laws and regulations started out small…here are a few…

1933

7th April…

– Jews barred from civil service in Germany.
– Jews barred from becoming practicing lawyers.

25th April…

– Jews barred from German universities.

1934

– Jews excluded from serving in the German military.

1935-1936

– ‘Mixed marriages’ between Aryans and Jews are forbidden.
– Jews lose the Vote.
– Jews lose German citizenship.
– Jews banned from entering or using public places (restaurants, swimming-pools, public parks).
– Jews no-longer allowed to own…bicycles, typewriters, records and phonographs.
– Jewish travel restrictions began.

It was around this time that many German Jews started trying to leave Germany. The smart ones took trains north or west, to England or France and boarded ocean-liners, either to the United Kingdom or across the Atlantic, to the United States. Firm anti-Jewish immigration laws, however, only allowed so many hundreds of Jews to immigrate to these places each year. Many just moved across the border to France, Poland or other neighbouring countries, which would soon be swallowed up by the Nazis.

1937-1938

– Jews excluded from cinemas, theatres, concert-performances, public beaches and holiday resorts.
– Jewish children are expelled from schools and forced to attend “Jewish schools” instead.
– Jews have their passports marked with a “J” (for ‘Jude’, the German for ‘Jew’), to identify them when they travel.

In 1939, with the invasion of Poland by the German Army, the Allies, who had sat back for long enough without doing anything, finally started waking up to the fact that Hitler would not stop wanting to grab more and more land. On the 3rd of September, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. For the Jews, now living in a country at war, life became even harder. Stricter and tighter rules were put in place. Amongst these, were…

– Jews could not own radios.
– Jews had to abide by a curfew.
– Jews could not own telephones.
– Jews were forcibly evicted from their houses without reason or notice (this was provide homes for Germans whose homes had been bombed by the Allies).
– Jews forbidden to leave the country.
– Jews forbidden pets.

And then, from 1941 onwards, the most famous of all Anti-Jewish measures was made law.

– All Jews over the age of six years old must wear a yellow Star of David, with ‘Jude’ written on it.

The YELLOW Star of David was not universal, however. In Poland, for example, the Star was blue with a white background. This is what they looked like…

A Polish blue & white Star of David armband

A German yellow-and-black Star of David badge, with ‘Jude’ written on it

The Polish armbands had to be worn on the right sleeve of the outermost garment that a person wore; the yellow badge had to be sewn onto the front of the person’s clothing, to clearly identify them as Jews.

Escaping the Nazis

Before the War, escaping persecution was tricky. Jews could only travel to certain countries, in certain numbers, at certain times of the year. However, when the Second World War started, escaping from Nazi tyranny became almost impossible. It wasn’t just a matter of getting in a car or on a train or hotfooting it across the countryside. Oh no. Jews had to pass checkpoints, border-patrols and Military Police. To do this safely, they required the necessary travel-documents, which were not easy to obtain. Many Jews were aided in their escapes by various resistence and underground groups and organisations, from the German Resistence, the French Resistence, Partisan groups and the Danish Resistence. Countries such as Sweden, Denmark and England were the most instrumental in helping Jews escape.

Due to Denmark’s importance to the German war-machine; providing ports, providing food and drink and other vital wartime necessities, the Germans more or less left Denmark to its own devices (so to speak) after the German Army came in and steamrollered everything. This made the Danish Resistence all the stronger to fight and better enabled them to help Jews, who they smuggled from Denmark to Sweden (and thence to England) by cargo-ships which sailed the North Sea regularly to deliver vital German war-supplies.

Going into Hiding

For those who could not contact Resistence Movements, for those who could not escape from the Nazis on their own, they had no choice but to either wait around and be arrested and rounded up and dragged off to God-knows-where…or they had to go into hiding.

To go into hiding was an ambitious and scary thing to do, as evidenced by the most famous example of this: The Frank Family in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Going into hiding wasn’t just a matter of pretending you weren’t home. It meant pretending you didn’t exist at all. You had to disappear competely from society. Many Jews were aided in their hidings by sympathetic (and incredibly brave!) non-Jewish friends, who sheltered them and provided them with food, drink, clothing and other necessities. Resistence-movements also aided Jews who went into hiding, or who joined the Resistence to fight back against the Nazis. The Official Guiness World Record for the longest time spent living in an attic was set by a Jew who went into hiding there in the 1940s to escape from the Nazis and stayed up there for over fifty years!

Entering the Ghetto

One method which the Germans used to keep an eye on Jews was the creation of ghettos, or as Wladyslaw Szpilman referred to them, “Jewish Districts” (the Nazis’ words, not his). The ghettos were walled-off areas of town where the Jews were forced to live in so that the Nazis and their collaborators could keep an eye on them. Famous cities with ghettos included Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow in Poland, which held tens of thousands of Jews between them.

At first glance, you’re probably thinking that all this was rather jolly. Your own section in town to do whatever you liked in with nobody to bother you…Sit down, shut up and wait for the Tommies to come charging in on their DD tanks.

Right?

Wrong.

Ghettos were far from comfortable and far from luxurious and far from home…in fact they were as far from being the friendly, community area that you might think they were.

To start off with, food was far from plentiful. While transports of food, clothing and other necessities were allowed to be driven, carted or carried through the gates that led into the ghettos, there was never enough for everyone and throughout the years that the ghettos operated, there was a chronic shortage of essentials. And it wasn’t as easy as you might think, to get out of the ghetto to go and get more food. The walls that were built around all ghettos were topped with all kinds of nasty things, from barbed wire, sharp rocks and jagged pieces of smashed up glass, to cut up the hands of anyone brave or stupid enough to try and climb over them. But people still found ways. In the Warsaw Ghetto, for example, drainage-sluices had been made in the bottoms of some of the walls to allow rainwater to drain away so that the ghetto wouldn’t flood. The smallest of children used to slip through these holes and scurry off to find food in the dark of night.

Warsaw, Poland. August, 1940. Here, one of the walls is being built for the Warsaw Ghetto that would house the Jews living in, or coming to Warsaw

Apart from the shortages of food, there was also the constant threat of disease. The ghettos were ‘advertised’ as places of safety for the Jews where they could practice their Jewish ways and live their Jewish lives away from the pure-bred Aryans. But they were also there to prevent the spread of “Jewish diseases”, one of the most prominent of which was typhus.

Due to the significant lack of medical aid, medicine and surgeons and hospitals in the ghettos, epidemic diseases (such as typhus) were serious killers and hundreds of Jews died from outbreaks. Wladyslaw Szpilman, the Polish-Jewish pianist, wrote of how he used to go home from work each night in the ghetto. He had to be careful where he walked to prevent tripping over the corpses in the streets, which were there either from death from disease, starvation or rioting.

Life in the ghetto was far from easy. Raids by the Gestapo and military police were common and Jews could be dragged out of their houses and shot in the streets for absolutely no reason at all. And it wasn’t always the Gestapo who did it, either.

To maintain law and order in the ghettos, the Jewish Ghetto Police were created. They were there, on the surface, to protect the Jews and look after them…being Jews themselves. But being a ghetto policeman meant getting various priveliges such as more food, better clothes and more money. This could lead to serious corruption, and did, in many cases. Ghetto policemen aided the Gestapo in rounding up transports of Jews to be taken to the death-camps, with the provision that if they did so, their own families would not be hurt. Of course this was a load of bupkiss, the Germans didn’t give a damn either way. And there were stories of ghetto policemen being killed by fellow Jews in revenge on the train-rides to the extermination-camps.

Liquidation of ghettos started in about 1943 and every few days, more and more Jews were rounded up, driven to stations, dumped on trains and sent by rail to the various death-and-labour-camps around Poland and Germany. For many people, this would be the last train-ride they ever took.

Liquidation meant more than just carting people off to their doom, though. It also involved soldiers marching into the ghettos with machine-guns and flamethrowers to torch, shoot and destroy every single building and person that they could find. To protect themselves against this, many Jews went into hiding, even in the ghettos, creating hidey-holes and secret spaces where they could live. Other Jews managed to escape out of the ghetto and find help with sympathetic non-Jews, who helped them contact the various underground resistance-groups who housed them, hid them or recruited them into their anti-Nazi causes.

The Camps

One of the most enduring images of the Holocaust are the death camps. Names like Auschwitz I, Sobibor, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen and Mauthausen. And of course, the most famous camp of all…

Auschwitz-Birkenau

The camps were combination slave-labour and extermination camps and millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, POWs and political prisoners were sent through their gates to come out as ashes or as skeletons. Life in these camps was horrific at the very best of times, with chronic shortages of food, warm clothing, medical care and almost everything else necessary for survival. Families were separated on arrival and the elderly, infirm and children were gassed almost the moment that they got off the trains, in massive gas-chambers, where they would be told that they were having a shower.

Those left alive were worked to death. They were housed in cramped, freezing, overcrowded and filthy barracks, as many as three or four people to a bunk, with no fires to keep them warm. Epidemics of typhus, typhoid and dysentery killed thousands and bodies were burned or buried as fast as possible, which was never fast enough.

Chances of survival were few in Auschwitz. In Poland, where winters sent temperatures plummeting solidly into the negative digits, many people died from hypothermia. One of the few places where one could be safe was in getting a job in the camp, either as a sonderkommando (who was a Jew assigned to help with the gas-chamber process, to remove bodies from the chambers after they were used) or to work in “Kanada”.

“Kanada” was the sorting-area of Auschwitz. Here, all the suitcases, steamer-trunks, gladstone-bags and handbags were sent and dumped, to be sorted through by the Jews (mostly women) who worked there. Working in Kanada was probably the safest job in Auschwitz: It meant better food, access to warm clothing, being kept indoors, away from rain and snow and it meant that you could keep (if you were crafty) any little trinkets that you found, and use them to bribe guards. One story tells of a woman who learned of her sister and her children arriving at Auschwitz. She begged a guard to bring them to Kanada. The guard intervened in the gas-chamber process and brought the woman’s sister to work with her in Kanada, ensuring their safety throughout their time there. The children, however, useless in Kanada or anywhere else in the camp, were sent to the gas-chambers. Later on, the woman spoke out in favour at the guard’s war-crimes trial to get him a lesser sentence.

The famous slogan on the gates of Auschwitz I; “Arbeit Macht Frei”, translated from German to English (literally) as: “Work Makes Free”, or more fluidly, “Work Makes You Free/Work Liberates”, is another symbol of the death-camps and the Holocaust which has never gone away. Even today, people still remember it…even if they don’t always remember what its significance is, such as the unfortunate Italian politician Tommaso Colleti .

People Associated with the Holocaust

The Holocaust brought out the best and worst in everyone. Some people became famous because they survived, some became famous for what they did, or what they did not do. Some became famous for providing incredible records of an amazing period in human history. Here are just a few of the more famous people associated with the Holocaust…

The Bielski Brothers (Tuvia, Asael, Alexander, Aron).

Four Jewish-Polish brothers who, after the deaths of their parents and other siblings at the hands of Nazi collaborators, formed the Bielski Otriad, a partisan group which lived in the forests of Belarus, hiding, housing and recruiting Jews and protecting them in camps made in the midst of the forests. They conducted geurilla raids on Nazi sympathisers, collaborators and military police, using stolen firearms, ranging from simple revolvers to shotguns and rifles. They lived in the forests from 1941 until liberation, saving 1,200 Jews. Tuvia and Alexander moved to the USA after the War and died in 1987 and 1994 respectively.

Their struggle was turned into a film (“Defiance”) starring Daniel Craig.

The Frank Family (Otto, Edith, Margot, Anne).

The Frank Family and four other people went into hiding in Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 1942 to 1944. They were discovered in August of ’44 and sent to the camps. Of the eight people in the Secret Annex at the back of the building where they were hiding, only Otto survived. He published his daughter Anne’s diary and was instrumental in creating the world-famous Anne Frank museum. He died in 1980, aged 91.

Capt. Wilhelm Hosenfeld

A German army-officer who protected and aided Polish Jews (most notably, Wladyslaw Szpilman, the pianist). His private diary showed his disgust for the Holocaust and records his personal attempts to aid persecuted Jews. He was captured by the Red Army when the German Army retreated in 1944 and was held in a Prisoner of War camp. Despite efforts by all the people whom he rescued and protected, the Russians refused to release him and he died in the camp in 1952.

Oskar Schindler

A German industrialist and a member of the Nazi Party, Oskar Schindler is famous for saving over 1,000 of his Jewish factory-workers by writing up the now world-famous ‘Schindler’s List’. This list allowed hundreds of Jews to survive the war by being “essential workers” which were keeping the German war-effort going. Oskar Schindler died in 1974 at the age of 66. The Jews he saved are officially known as the Schindlerjuden (Schindler’s Jews). A film of his efforts, (“Schindler’s List”) was directed by Stephen Spielberg.

Wladyslaw Szpilman

A Polish-Jewish pianist who died in 2000 at the age of 88. He is famous for surviving the Warsaw Ghetto and for writing his memoir “The Pianist”, which was turned into a film by Roman Polanski. He was portrayed by Adrien Brody in the film.