[Text: Historical Reflections: Introduction to the Holocaust]
[Text: Dr. Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Assistant Professor of Modern Germany at Simon Fraser University]
[somber music]
The story of the Holocaust is impossible to tell without acknowledging the role played by Adolf Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany. Hitler came to power in 1933, and one year later was virtually dictator of that country. And Hitler and the Nazis had long believed that returning Germany to a position of dominance in Europe was imperative. He would achieve this by getting rid of all threats to Germans and Germans civilization. And he and the Nazis identified consistently from the very beginning that the number one threat to Germany was the Jews.
[Text: Rise of Nazism & Antisemitism]
[somber music]
This was a scapegoating of the Jewish community, and it was not the first time in Europe that this had happened. There is in fact a long, sad history of antisemitism across Europe where Jews were targeted by their Christian neighbours and blamed for a variety of evils that had nothing to do with those Jewish communities.
Initially, this hostility was based largely in religious difference. Christians and Jews, unable to get along and live in peace because Christians felt threatened. But in the nineteenth century, this religious based hostility took on a harder edge and borrowed pseudo-scientific language that identified Jews not as a religious group but as a racial group, their identity determined by blood something immutable that could not be changed. And it was this definition that Hitler and the Nazis used as they proceeded with their anti-Jewish campaign. And he spoke openly and consistently about the Jewish threat to German civilization from before 1933 all the way to the end of the war in 1945.
[Text: Anti-Jewish Laws & Measures]
[somber music]
And so, the regime enacted a series of laws and policies designed to make life for Jews in Germany as uncomfortable as possible. Forcing them away from their non-Jewish neighbours and hopefully forcing them to immigrate completely according to the Nazi mindset. These laws and policies included the boycott of businesses. Eventually, these Jewish businesses would be sold at much reduced prices to Germans. It included the Nuremberg Laws passed in 1935, which stripped German citizenship of all Jews in Germany because you had to be of German blood in order to qualify for citizenship. And it included various other restrictions on Jewish life in public, making it uncomfortable for them to leave their own homes, or to engage in business practices, or to go to school, or to live a normal life.
[Text: Victims of Nazi Persecution]
[somber music]
Nazism did target others as well as "undesirable" or "inferior" to the rejuvenated German nation that was coming. While Jews were always at the top of this list, other groups on the list included: the Roma and Sinti communities living in Germany and across Europe, the physically and mentally handicapped of Germany, those who refused to swear loyalty to the regime, so political opponents and dissidents, and a vague category, "asocials," that included a variety of people, including beggars, prostitutes, the homeless, and the habitually unemployed. It included a final group, Slavs or Slavic speaking peoples, such as the Poles and the Russians who were inhabiting territory in Poland and the Soviet Union that the Nazis felt the rejuvenated German nation would need in order to thrive. And so came the war and wartime victories, and all of a sudden, the Nazis were in charge of literally millions of Jewish lives.
[Text: Ghettoization]
[somber music]
The existence of war made continued forced immigration, all but impossible. And so other solutions to use the Nazi term had to be found. They adopted the practice of collecting and assembling Jews and identified small walled in areas of a given city. These were ghettos, another practice that the Nazis adopted from earlier times since ghettos had existed in different parts of Europe since the sixteenth century. The Nazi ghettos though were qualitatively different. Jews were not given a choice. They were forced to build the walls of the ghettos with their own hands, brick and barbed wire. They were packed in like sardines, sometimes living up to twelve in a single room, and they were forbidden to leave. And the walls were patrolled by German police and German soldiers armed with guns and allowed to shoot anyone trying to leave on site. The vast majority of these ghettos were built in occupied Poland. But the Germans didn't stop there, in mid 1941, the war took a fateful turn for Hitler and Nazi Germany as the German military marched across the border into the Soviet Union. And all of a sudden, the Germans were dealing with an influx of hundreds of thousands of additional Jewish lives. The ghettos were already over full, cramped, squalid conditions meant that the lethal conditions could not possibly manage another influx of Jews. And so another "solution" had to be found, again, to use Nazi terminology.
[Text: Holocaust by Bullets]
[somber music]
What began as spontaneous quickly became a plan for action as mass shootings took place across the eastern front wherever the German army went. Initially targeting battle age male Jews eventually sweeping up all Jews wherever they could be found, men and women, young and old. And yet even this solution was not deemed to be feasible as German soldiers sometimes ran out of bullets and some refused to shoot or had trouble committing the act. And so the "Final Solution," what the Germans termed, was turned to and this involved the use of the camp system.
[Text: Mass Murder]
[somber music]
Germans had been using concentration camps as alternative to jails since 1933, largely to house political dissidents. Beginning in 1941, these camps, which had spread to wherever the German armies occupied, began to be used as collection points for Jews. And after the mass shootings proved unfeasible, the Nazis developed a different kind of camp, an extermination centre, a death camp. Existing camps became hybrid camps fulfilling multiple functions, one of these was Auschwitz, and it had an extensive extermination facility built including gas chambers and crematoria. The additional camps were constructed at this time for the sole purpose of killing as many Jews as possible. These camps, we now call the death camps. Between the end of 1941 and 1944, these death camps were responsible for the murder of millions of Jews from across Europe.
[Text: Collaboration & Resistance]
[somber music]
It is impossible to speak of a single Jewish experience of the Holocaust. There are instead diverse experiences but they are all united by one thing. They were all identified as Jews and as such targeted for physical destruction. But beyond that, we should acknowledge the diversity of experience. Some Jews, their families, even their communities, went along with the commands given to them by the Nazis, cooperating with those orders because they thought, perhaps, things could not possibly get any worse. Jewish communities had been persecuted before and survived. They simply had to hang on and do the same. Other Jews refused from the get go to collaborate in any way, shape, or form with the orders given to them by the German occupiers, and they resisted. And so wherever we look, wherever the German armies marched, wherever the Nazis set up camp, we find Jewish resistance. In the ghettos, including the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, and the death camps themselves, including Treblinka and Auschwitz, where an entire crematorium, was destroyed by Jewish resistors.
[Text: Hiding & Escape]
[somber music]
Some Jews fled and went into hiding. They had considerable help, often from their non-Jewish neighbours who were often paid very well for their help. And these non-Jewish neighbours always took considerable risk on themselves in helping Jews, they could themselves be killed if they were caught. Other Jewish parents chose to hide their children among non-Jewish neighbours or communities thinking that they had a better chance of surviving this way. Still, others fled into forests or mountains or other remote areas. And if they could, joined partisan groups. The most well-known Jewish partisan group was active in the forests of Belarus taking on armed German units in combat. A very few, very lucky Jews managed to trek across borders into neutral countries where they would then apply to go overseas if they had the right connections and enough money. But these were very, very few, as most European Jews did not have the kinds of connections needed prior to the outbreak of the war.
[Text: The Extent of the Genocide]
[somber music]
By the end of the war, Germany was defeated, Nazism lay in ruins and Hitler had committed suicide. Between five and six million Jews in Europe had been murdered because they were Jews. And countless millions more had also been swept up in the Nazi machinery destruction because they had been categorized as undesirable.
[somber music]
