Holocaust

Holocaust

Holocaust

Introduction

Winston Churchill described the mass murder of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its allies as “a crime without a name.” The perpetrators, the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany called it Die Endlösung der Judenfrage (the Final Solution of the Jewish Question). The number of Jewish victims is generally regarded to be between 5.8 and 6 million. Later, this extermination policy became known as the Holocaust, or “Shoah” in Hebrew. In a more generic and legalistic formula, the Holocaust was an example of genocide, a word invented by Raphael Lemkin in 1943. The word holocaust is derived from the Greek holokaustos, meaning a “burnt offering,” as used in a religious sacrifice.

Discussion

Since the end of World War II and the development of more critical studies of this event, other racial, religious, asocial and political groups have been identified and included as victims of the Holocaust. These include the Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), victims of the T-4 program (killings carried out because of genetic disorders), Jehovah's Witnesses, political prisoners, Poles, and homosexuals. The use of the word “Shoah” tends to limit the issue to Jews only, as is the case with the commemorative day on the Jewish calendar, the 27th day of the month of Nisan. In 2006, the United Nations adopted January 27 (the date on which the Auschwitz death camp was liberated in 1945 by troops of the Soviet Army) as an International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. (Sereny

2003)

While race was the defining issue in the Holocaust, other factors were also present, including economic motivations that involved German medical doctors, lawyers, and businesses getting rid of their Jewish competitors in order to improve wage conditions; the seizure or sale of property during a process called “Aryanization,” in which the Jewish owners received only a small percentage of the property value; the seizure and sale in other countries of “degenerate art” from museum collections, and, later, the massive pilfering of private Jewish art collections. Aryanization and the subsequent ethnic cleansing of Jews in occupied countries made it easy to justify property transfers from Jews to members of the local nation, such as Poles, Slovaks, Croatians, and Hungarians. The seizure of property was all done with legal decrees. Hence, a long paper trail was left by the German bureaucracy, which later provided the basis for material claims against the postwar German government. In parts of Eastern Europe, especially those states created after 1918, local individuals saw the Germans and Jews as controlling industry. This was especially true in those sections of Poland that were formerly part of the German Empire. The historian Raul Hilberg has also pointed out that once the Holocaust commenced, there was no authorized budget for it. It was, therefore, the sale of Jewish assets that paid for the killing.

All of these factors pointed to the Jew as “other” or “stranger,” despite long residencies in the countries where the Holocaust would play itself ...