God, the individual, and human life were not part of Nazi ideology.
On April 29, 1945, the 45th Infantry Division of the U.S. Seventh Army liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, Germany, established a mere five weeks after Adolph Hitler took power in 1933. The condition of the prisoners was so appalling that U.S. soldiers took justice into their own hands and killed at least 30 of the remaining Nazi SS guards. What American soldiers witnessed was ordered to be filmed because it was thought that without such evidence, soldiers’ accounts of what they found would not be believed. American GIs who fought their way through Europe instantly got an understanding of the evil they were fighting.
The genesis of what became the Holocaust started years earlier. Shortly after taking power in 1933, Adolph Hitler set out to accomplish what he wrote in his autobiography. He wrote that Jews and other “inferior” races needed to be eradicated and lands to Germany’s east needed to be re-populated with Aryan people whom Hitler considered the “master race.” The result was over six million European Jews, Gypsies, Slavic people, and other perceived German enemies murdered by the Nazis.
Shortly, there will be no more survivors left to tell their stories. It becomes that much more important to tell this history to younger generations. Without an understanding of the great evils of history, it is impossible to discuss the present intelligently.
A Timeline of Horror
Shortly after taking power in 1933, Hitler established his “Euthanasia Program,” which targeted the most vulnerable members of German society. The mentally and physically disabled, the elderly, and other Germans with physical impairments were institutionalized and then killed by the Nazis. This was the ultimate fate of about 250,000 mostly German people.
The numbers grew substantially worse after the Germans attacked Poland in September 1939. Polish Jews were rounded up as prisoners and forced into areas of cities or towns surrounded by guards and barriers, known as ghettos. Shortly after, German Jews were sent to Poland and kept prisoner in the same ghettos. Anyone with Jewish heritage was required to wear the Star of David on their clothing in Nazi-occupied areas.
After invading the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Nazis penetrated deep into Ukraine on their way toward Moscow. Ukrainians, who had only years earlier survived the mass starvation of up to 5 million people by another of history’s monsters, Joseph Stalin, initially viewed the Germans as liberators. This quickly changed. After regular German army units passed through, units of the Nazi SS came in behind them. Their mission was clear: To kill. Jewish men, women, and children were rounded up, made to remove their clothes, and shot to death in pits.
Between September 19-30, 1941, more than 30,000 humans were killed in this manner at Babi Yar, near Kiev. This method of killing became the standard for the SS and was repeated frequently. Just a few months later, between November 30 – December 8, 1941, another 25,000 people were killed in the Rumbala Forest near Riga, Latvia.
Although the numbers are difficult to ascertain, it is believed that as many as 2 million Jews were murdered through execution by Nazi death squads. This became known as the “Hidden Holocaust” because, unlike the more bureaucratic killing of the gas chambers, the number of people murdered in this manner will never be completely known. Those killed remain in unmarked graves throughout Eastern Europe. These murders do not factor in the additional 2 to 3 million Soviet prisoners of war who died while in German custody during the war.
In January 1942, members of the Nazi SS and other representatives of the German government casually sat around a conference table at what became known as the Wannsee Conference in Berlin. The meeting was led by Reinhard Heydrich, the “chief of the Reich Security Main Office,” and Heydrich’s chief deputy Adolph Eichmann. The issue to be decided was what to do with the Jews of Europe, or in Nazi terminology, how to implement the “final solution” to the “Jewish question.”
While having drinks and gourmet food, fifteen men discussed various options, including forced sterilization. But it was clear that only one path was acceptable to these men. Jews, including Jews considered by the Nazis to be of mixed race, were to be “evacuated” east into specially constructed facilities – concentration camps. The method of killing would be something the Nazis had experimented with. Gas, or specifically a pesticide called Zyklon-B, would be used to kill human beings in gas chambers. The goal was to kill all 11 million Jews in Europe, including areas not yet occupied by the Nazis.
By July of 1942, the full horror of the Holocaust was being implemented. The Polish ghettos were cleared and all Jews in German-occupied areas were rounded up. They were sent to concentration camps, places like Dachau, Belzec, Buchenwald, Ohrdruf, Chelmno, Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor, Bergin-Belsen, and the most infamous of them all – Auschwitz-Birkenau.
By the spring of 1943, Auschwitz was operating as it would until the end of the war. Men, women, and children were sent there by rail in overcrowded and windowless cattle cars. When they arrived, men were sent into one line and women and children into another. Their belongings were stolen from them. Nazi “doctors” made split-second decisions about who would live or die. If the Nazis decided someone could work or had some other value to them, they were spared. This was rarely the case. Most were killed in the gas chambers in as few as 15 minutes after arrival.
In the spring and into the summer of 1944, about 300,000 died at Auschwitz, mostly Hungarian Jews. At its peak, as many as 12 thousand humans were murdered daily at Auschwitz. By the time the Russians liberated it in January of 1945, 1.3 million people had been sent there. Of that number, 1.1 million were killed, including an estimated 200,000 children.
The entirety of the Nazi concentration camp system killed millions more. Men, women, and children were gassed, shot, burned, worked to death as slave labor, died of disease or starvation while held prisoner, died of inhumane medical experiments, or otherwise died by whatever twisted method the Nazis could devise. Hell was brought to earth.
The infamous front gate of Auschwitz: “Work Sets You Free”
The Murderers
The Holocaust could not have happened without the participation of many people and even whole governments. One of the elements that made the Holocaust so shocking was how organized it was.
Although no document survives that directly links Adolph Hitler to giving the order to implement the Holocaust, the one surviving transcript of the Wannsee Conference makes it clear Heydrich was acting on Hitler’s authority. Hitler bears the ultimate responsibility. His Nazi underlings were all too happy to see Hitler’s vision become a reality. They spent their time figuring out new methods to most effectively kill other human beings on a mass scale.
All the top Nazis played some role in the Holocaust’s implementation. The head of the snake was the Reich Leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, a former chicken farmer turned rabid follower of Adolph Hitler. Second in command to only Hitler himself, Himmler was in charge of overseeing the Holocaust. He had plenty of help. To conduct the killing of so many, a large bureaucracy was created to implement it. There was a commandant at each concentration camp with SS guards at each. There were those in the administration at each country of origin, those who conducted the trains, etc. The Germans kept meticulous records.
At Auschwitz, the commandant Rudolf Hoss lived with his wife and children at the camp. A Nazi doctor named Joseph Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” conducted cruel and inhumane experiments on prisoners of Auschwitz, trying to advance Nazi theories of genetic engineering. His targets were mostly children, especially twins. Over 7,000 SS guards took a tour of duty at Auschwitz. Of that number, only 800 ever stood trial.
In another shameless chapter of the Holocaust not as widely known, the newly created country of Slovakia (within the boundaries of Nazi-acquired Czechoslovakia) made a deal with the Nazis to take its Jewish citizens. The country’s leaders agreed to turn over its Jewish citizens to the Nazis in exchange for workers to help its economy. Slovakia paid Germany a fixed amount for each Jew deported. Of the approximately 89,000 Jews in Slovakia, 60,000 were murdered by the Nazis.
How? Why?
So how did this happen? How could a first-world country, as Germany was at the time, commit genocide on such a scale? This goes far beyond just hate and prejudice.
Writing in England in 1944, an Austrian economist named Fredrich Hayek wrote his famous work The Road to Serfdom which gives some answers. Hayek explains that horror starts with the central planning of a country’s economy. Then socialists “will be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning their plans.” Hayek continues, “The unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society trending towards totalitarianism.”
The Nazis removed God and religion from German society, so those committing evil acts felt they had nobody to answer to. Those in charge faced no consequences for their actions. Once power is gained and there are no restraints, the police state is formed. Information is restricted and propaganda is used to get citizens to stop thinking and react as they are told to. Fear begins to take hold. The average citizen does not know what to do. Speaking out is met with severe punishment, so many who would ordinarily be against what the regime is doing begin to get behind the regime out of a feeling of safety. Nobody wants to get noticed by the government or even their fellow citizens, so they begin actively participating in the regime’s plans.
As Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi puts it, “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
What every police state has in common with the next is that the individual does not matter. When the individual does not matter, life does not matter. Hayek states, “Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarian regimes which horrify us follow by necessity.”
When a regime with a perverse racial vision of the world such as the Nazis gains power, the elements of the Holocaust are in place. Jews became dehumanized and then isolated. Murder quickly followed.
Tyranny comes as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It presents itself as something it is not. In Germany, the Nazis claimed they were “building a better world,” a “better Germany,” or a “Thousand-Year Reich.” It sounds great to many who never look at what is underneath it.
It eventually becomes difficult to hide the true nature of tyranny. Most Nazi concentration camps were located outside of Germany because the German government did not want the German people to know the full extent of their depravity. The demonization of Jews within Germany should have been all that was needed to oppose the Nazi Party. It was not.
Ultimately, the Holocaust and the Nazi Party can be described in many ways, but only one word is needed – Evil. Evil in its most pure form. Why evil exists is a much deeper question. History teaches us that evil has always existed, just as it does today. It requires brave men and women to stand against it.
The End of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany
While speculated about in books and movies, the idea of a German victory was all too real. If Hitler had developed the atomic bomb before the United States, the result would have been horrific. Germany had the scientific capability to build an atomic bomb but had to use its resources differently to sustain its war effort. If the world survived Germany with atomic weapons, a German victory would have been a world incomprehensible to those of us living today. One far crueler and certainly not free. The very thought should make all of us cherish liberty that much more.
By 1944, the scale of the killing was impossible to hide. The Polish Resistance had presented the United States government with a detailed layout of Auschwitz. While an American agency known as the War Refugee Board did save lives by getting Jews out of the way of retreating German armies and by other methods, the fate of the Jews of Europe was never the priority for President Franklin Roosevelt or the heads of other Allied governments. Winning the war was. History does not dispute more should have been done.
The Holocaust was ultimately ended because Nazi Germany was ended. Peace treaties were not enough. It took a monumental commitment of guns, tanks, planes, ships, and all the massive supplies needed to support our servicemen and servicewomen. The bravery of a generation of Americans and other Allied soldiers stopped the killing. Men who stormed beaches under machine-gun fire, who fought on land, in the sky, and in the sea eventually defeated the Nazis. There was no other way.
On April 30, 1945, with Russian forces surrounding him in Berlin and American and British forces closing in from the west, Adolph Hitler committed suicide before the Russians could take him prisoner. Joseph Goebbels did the same the next day. Hitler dictated one final letter in which he blamed the German people and “international Jewry” for Germany’s defeat. The monster was dead but at a catastrophic cost.
Germany formally surrendered on May 7, 1945. For American soldiers, the road was not yet over. They still had to defeat Japan in the Pacific. American soldiers who fought through Europe at great cost were being asked to re-deploy to the Pacific for the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands. This did not happen. After dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, the Japanese surrendered on August 14, 1945. World War II ended.
The Aftermath
Adolph Eichmann on trial in Israel in 1960.
On June 6, 1945, Heinrich Himmler was captured by the British. One day later, he used a cyanide pill he had hidden to end his life, never having to face justice for what he did. After Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in Prague in May 1942, Adolph Eichmann stepped in for his boss to ensure the Holocaust was administered according to plan. Eichmann escaped to Argentina after the war and only faced justice in 1960 after being captured by Israeli Mossad agents. He remains the only person put to death in Israel. The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoss, was captured and sentenced to death by a Polish tribunal in April 1947.
While many top Nazis faced justice after the war through trials conducted in Nuremberg, Germany, many others never got the justice they deserved. This includes Joseph Mengele, who escaped to South America and died there in 1979.
After the war, suffering did not stop in Europe. Nearly two-thirds of European Jews did not survive the war. Those who did returned to ruined lives. Their homes and possessions were gone, and in far too many cases, so were all of their family members. About 136,000 European Jews went to find new lives in the newly created country of Israel, where they believed they would be safe from persecution.
Reprisals against German nationals were severe and murders continued. Millions were displaced. Europe had to be rebuilt, and the country best positioned to make that happen was the United States. A long process began.
Ultimately, the Cold War with the Soviet Union started after victory in World War II. Germany was split into two countries, West and East Germany, and Berlin was divided into two cities. The competing spheres of influence over Germany between the United States and its allies on the one hand and the Communist Soviet Union on the other became one of the lasting symbols of the Cold War. Germany reunited as one country in 1990, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Out of all the horror of the Holocaust, individual acts of heroism and decency were also common. Many risked their lives to hide Jewish families from the Nazis throughout the war. One example of this was the story of Anne Frank, a Dutch teenager who wrote about her experience hiding from the Nazis with her family. While she ultimately became one of over six million victims of the Holocaust, she left the world with many wise words for someone so young.
I’ll leave you with this quote from Anne Frank:
“It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.”
Please Read:
Fighting the Third Reich: The Origins of Evil
Fighting the Third Reich: The Battle of the Bulge
Please Visit:
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The National World War II Museum: