2. In what ways did the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews change from 1939 to 1945?
The period between 1939 and 1945 saw the systematic state-controlled persecution and genocide of the Jews in Europe by Nazi Germany. This is known as the Holocaust. The Jews of Europe became the victims of what the Nazis called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Problem". Early elements of the Holocaust included Kristallnacht, progressing to the later use of killing squads and extermination camps in a massive and organized style to exterminate every possible member of the Jewish populations.
At the start of the year 1939, there was not yet any evidence to suggest any organised mass destruction of the Jews under Nazi control; however, Hitler had already made threats and plans to do so. During the early months of 1939, Nazi SS leaders were ordered to speed up the emigration of Jews in Germany; and at the same time more laws were passed to try to take all possessions owned by the Jewish people e.g. forcing them to hand over all gold and silver items. Without any possessions or financial support, it was difficult for the Jewish population to move and settle in other countries. At the time, most countries had just recovered from the century’s worst economic recession and were not keen on accepting a great number of poor Jews into their country; they were afraid jobs would be taken. In May 1939, a ship crowded with 930 Jewish refugees, was turned away by Cuba, the United States and other countries and was forced to return to Europe. Incidences like this left a huge number of Jews in Germany with nowhere to go. This was when the Nazis realised that there needs to be another way of solving ‘the Jewish problem’. On the 30th April 1939, a laws was passed that refused Jews the rights as tenants and relocated them into Jewish houses; this was perhaps the start to the Nazi policy of ‘concentration’ of Jews.
The primary reason that the Nazi treatment of Jews changed from non-murderous persecution to genocide between 1939 and 1945 was the start of the Second World War. The war itself was started due to Germany's invasion of Poland, which brought a population of nearly 3 million Jews under Nazi control. Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe and with this great number of Jews, the Nazis were now clear that there has to be a way to get rid of them. Like said earlier, the ‘concentration’ of Jews had started. After the invasion of Poland, the Nazis issued labor decree for Polish Jews aged 14 to 60 and forced Jews over age 10 to wear yellow stars. Ghettos were built, where Jews were confined and kept in the worst conditions possible. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest, with 380,000 people. This policy of concentration meant that the Nazis could successfully isolate the entire Jewish population and gradually dim their existance, so that the later murders would create less impact on the outside world. Ghettos were established throughout 1940 and 1941, and were immediately turned into immensely crowded prisons; though the Warsaw Ghetto contained 30% of the population of Warsaw, it occupied only about 2.4% of city's area, averaging 9.2 people per room. From 1940 to 1942, disease, especially typhoid, and starvation killed hundreds of thousands of Jews confined in the ghettos.
However, the ghettos only served as a temporary living place for the Jews and things were about to get much worse; most ghettos were built close to railroads, which meant that later, it was convienent for the Nazis to ship the Jews to concentration centers, and eventualy to extermination camps. By 1939, six large concentration camps had been established. With the beginning of the Second World War, the concentration camps increasingly became places where Jews were either killed or forced to act as slave laborers, and kept undernourished and tortured. In July 1941, the head of the Department for Jewish Affairs, Adolf Eichmann, presented the Madagascar Plan, proposing to deport all European Jews to the island of Madagascar, off the coast of east Africa. However, this was made impossible due to the Second World War. Therefore the only solution left was to kill all Jews. The subsequent invasion of the Soviet Union by the Nazis in June 1941 brought even more Jews under Nazi control. Knowing this, Hitler sent in four units called Einsatzgruppen, who were deployed specifically to kill civilian Jewish populations. This marks the beginning of an open genocide program. The large massacres of Jews was starting to take place; by December 1941, Hitler decided to completely exterminate European Jews. By November 1941, the SS Einsatzgruppe had reported that 45,476 Jews were killed. In January 1942, during the Wannsee conference, several Nazi leaders discussed the details of the "Final Solution of the Jewish question". They began to systematically deport Jewish populations from the ghettos and all occupied territories to the seven camps designated as extermination camps: Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Maly Trostenets, Sobibór and Treblinka. Most Jews were told that they would be ‘resettled’ and were even given bread to go. The journey to the concentration camps lasted for days usually in the freezing cold or stifling heat, often withouth food, water, or toilet facilities. Many died beford reaching their final destination. On July 22, 1942, the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants began; in the next 52 days about 300,000 people were transported by train to the Treblinka extermination camp from Warsaw alone. Many other ghettos followed in the same fashion. As prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property to the Nazis, which was then precisely catalogued and tagged and even receipts were issued. In these extermination camps the murders began; As many as 1.6 million Jews were killed in open-air shootings by Nazis between 1941 and 1942. By the end of 1943, another 900,000 Jews were be killed in this manner, but the pace was not fast enough for the Nazi leaders. Shooting now seemed like an inefficient way of exterminating the entire Jewish population; it was slow and the bullets were much needed for the on going war with the Allies. During a visit to a concentration camp near Minsk, the leader of the SS - Heinrich Himmler, witnessed a shoot near an open grave. He was accidentally splattered with brains. He later reported that shooting was messy and may cause psycological damaged to the shooter. This caused the Nazis to try to discover a new and more efficient way of exterminating Jews.
Considerable effort was taken over the course of the Holocaust to find increasingly efficient means of killing more people. In 1941, after occupying Belarus, the Nazis used mental patients from Minsk asylums as guinea pigs for finding better ways to kill. Initially they tried dynamite, but few were killed and many were left wounded with hands and legs missing, so that the Germans had to finish them off with machine guns. In October 1941, in Mogilev, they tried the Gaswagen or "gas car". First they used a light military car, and it took more than 30 minutes for people to die. Then they used a larger truck exhaust and it took only eight minutes to kill all the people inside. This had proved that using gas was the most efficient and led to the installation of gassing facilities at the already existing Auschwitz concentration camp and the building of other extermination camps in Poland. The "Final Solution" had been decided and the majority of Jews under Nazi control ended up in these camps. The chaos of the war on the Eastern Front helped the Nazis to carry out their extermination programme in a relatively secret manner.
In December, 1941, the Nazis opened Celmno, the first of extermination camps using the gas carbon monoxide to kill. It was dedicated entirely to mass extermination on an industrial scale rather than the labor or concentration camps. Over three million Jews died in these extermination camps. Soon, the use of carbon monoxide poisoning was switched to the use of Zyklon B as it was much more efficient in pellet form. This started the most destructive phase of the Holocaust. The largest death camp built was Auschwit, which had both a labor camp and an extermination camp possessing four gas chambers and crematoria. This camp was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1,000,000 Jews, the gas chambers killed approximately eight thousand a day. Upon arrival in these camps, prisoners were divided into two groups: those too weak for work were immediately executed in gas chambers (which were disguised as showers) and their bodies burned, while others were first used for slave labor in factories or industrial enterprises located in the camp or nearby. The Nazis also forced some prisoners to work in the collection and disposal of corpses, and to mutilate them when required. Gold teeth were extracted from the corpses, and women's hair (shaved from the heads of victims before they entered the gas chambers) was recycled for use in products such as rugs and socks. Day to day life in the concentration camps was brutal, with the Nazis regularly carrying out beatings and acts of torture.The bodies of those killed were destroyed in crematoria, and the ashes buried or scattered.
Even as the Nazis weakened in the last years of the war, precious military resources such as fuel, transport, munitions, soldiers and industrial resources were still being heavily diverted away from the war and towards the death camps. As the armies of the Allies closed in on the Germany at the end of 1944, the Nazis decided to abandon the extermination camps, moving or destroying evidence of the atrocities they had committed there. The Nazis marched prisoners, already sick after months or years of violence and starvation, for tens of miles in the snow to train stations. They were then transported for days at a time without food or shelter in trains with open carriages; and forced to march again at the other end to the new camp. Prisoners who lagged behind or fell were shot. The largest and best known of the death marches took place in January 1945, when the Soviet army advanced on Poland. Nine days before the Soviets arrived at the death camp at Auschwitz, the Germans marched 60,000 prisoners out of the camp toward Wodzislaw, thirty-five miles away, where they were put on trains to other camps. Around 15,000 died on the way. The extermination continued in different parts of Nazi controlled territory until the end of the Second World War, it only completely ended when the Allies entered Germany itself and forced the Nazis to surrender in May 1945. Few weeks after the liberation of the extermination camps, thousands continued to die from disease or malnutrition.
By the end of the war, much of the Jewish population of Europe had been killed in the Holocaust. Poland, home of the largest Jewish community in the world before the war, had had over 90% of its Jewish population, or about 3,000,000 Jews, killed. Greece, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Lithuania, Bohemia, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and Latvia each had over 70% of their Jewish population destroyed. Belgium, Romania, Luxembourg, Norway, and Estonia lost around half of their Jewish population, the Soviet Union over one third of its Jews, and even countries such as France and Italy had each seen around a quarter of their Jewish population killed.
It is not clear whether the Nazis had intended to exterminate this huge number of Jews before the start of the war. Initially, the anti-Semitism caused the Jewish people to emigrate. However, the start of the Second World War and many Nazi policies made this very difficult. The increasing Jewish population under the Nazi control escalated. This caused the Nazis’ policy of the “final solution”, which was to kill all of the Jewish population, resulting in the Holocaust.
3. Why was opposition to Nazi persecution of minorities so unsuccessful in the years 1933-45?
Since the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933, Germany had been turned into an oppressive police state. German Nazism strongly emphasized racial superiority of the Aryan race (the German) and inferiority of other minority races such as the Jews, Gypsies and black people. The major part of the Nazi belief was that only the strong and healthy deserved to live, this resulted in thousands of mentally or physically disabled people under the Nazi control being persecuted and killed. Homosexuals and others labeled ‘anti-social’ were also sent to concentration camps. Thousands of political and religious opponents, such as communists, socialist trade unionists and politicians, and Jehovah’s Witnesses were persecuted for their beliefs. Many of those sent to the camps were killed. During the years of persecution, resistance to the Nazi ideas was unsuccessful as the majority of people enjoyed the stability the Nazis brought to Germany; also leading politicians, government officials, and writers and teachers were killed to remove potential resistance leaders and to intimidate the population. By using a combination of methods, the Nazis had achieved the maximum damage to resistance groups who tried to stop the persecution.
From the start of the Nazi regime, most potential sources of opposition were removed. This included political parties and the trade union movement. In Feburary 1933, the German parliament building, the Reichstag, was burnt down by a young communist, Marinus van der Lubbe; taking this opportunity, the Nazis immediately declared that this was a communist plot to overthrow democracy. Following the incident, the Nazis were given a decree which allowed them to ban the entire opposition press. Soon after the Reichstage fire, the communist (KPDs) were completely banned by Hitler using the Enabling Act, which allowed him to creat law without voting in the parliament. In July 1933, other parties were also banned and, Hilter passed a ‘Law Against the Formation of Parties’; This meant that Germany was now an one-party state. The Leaders of the opposition parties were arrested and half of the communists in Germany were sent to concentration camps later on. Trade unions were also banned as it had always been associated with left-wing parties such as communism. All political organizations were either banned or under the control of the Nazis. Except for the occasional referendum, all elections, local and national, were abolished. Hitler had cleverly erased any legal oppostion from politics so there would be very little people who would disagree with his policies on persecution.
Hitler’s popularity amongst the German people was one of the main reasons for the lack of support for the oppositions of persecution. During the difficult years of the post-war period, Nazism offered new hopes. The Nazis promised everything to everybody. To the landowner and the industrialists, Hitler promised to destroy Communism, who would, otherwise take away their properties and assets. To the middle classes, he promised to abolish the Treaty of Versailles and relieve them of the burden of reparations payment. To the workers, he promised them work. To the army, he promised military glory. Hitler's economic policy solved the problem of unemployment; it dropped from 6 millions in 1932 to less than 1 million in 1936. Stopping the reparation payments had reduced the hardship on Germany’s economy and restored popularity amongst the people. According to the National Labour Law of 20th January, 1934, the state would exert direct influence and control over all business employing more than twenty people and the employees were forbidden to strike. All labour unions were abolished by a decree on 14th July, 1933; Hitler’s policies had benefited both employers and employees. Many Germans were conscripted into the army or found jobs in the huge public work projects, Hitler Youth, concentration camps and the Nazi party, creating more job opportunities. Jews and married women were forced out of public service as far as possible, and so created many vacancies; this had decreased the unemployment rate in Germany, making Hitler popular. Hitler was also a gifted orator. His speeches could always make successful appeals to the masses. Moreover, the Nazi Party, with its huge mass meetings, parades and formation of S.A. and S.S. troops were attractive to the younger generation. As a result, many middle class young men were recruited into the S.S. and S.A. Unlike the many opposing parties, Hitler was able to rule the country confidently in times of crisis. So most of the Germans believed that Hitler was a great leader who could deliver them from fear and starvation. With these basic problems solved, people bestowed great trust in Hitler and were willing to obey him on anything, even in the case of persecution of minorities.
As Nazism had created a totalitarian state, control of mass media and all other means of communication were monopolized by the government. This meant that the Nazi ideas and believes about race and treatment of minorities could be spread easily. All information that people in Germany received was selected and organized to support these beliefs. As Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels kept a close check on the information provided by newspapers, magazines, books, radio broadcasts, plays and films. The press and the cinema had to show pictures glorifying the Nazi movements and distort the image of other inferior race such as portraying the Jews as the greedy, scheming and evil villain in films. The weekly newspaper, ‘Der Sturmer’ preached hatred of Jews through crude cartoons and articles. In using the media, Hitler had achieved indoctrinating regular German civilians into accepting these racist ideas; he argued in getting rid of the minorties would give Germany better economy and more living space for pure breed Germans. The mentally or physically disabled would create a lot of pressure for society to support them, they were considered ‘unworthy of living’. Gradually the persecution of the minorities had become a well-justified action. This had decrease the amount of support in the resistence. Adolf Hitler was also fully aware that schools posed a potential threat to the dominant Nazi ideology; so he took full control of this as well. Education from nursery to university was a way for indoctrinating the young. Boys (10-18 years old) were sent to the Hitler Youth, girls (10-18 years old) to the Hitler Maidens. School textbooks were re-written along Nazi ideas, which emphasized racial study greatly. University professors were required to wear swastika and take an oath of allegiance to Hitler. Teachers who were critical of Hitler's Germany were sacked and the rest were sent away to be trained to become good Nazis. Members of the Nazi youth organizations such as the Hitler Youth, were also asked to report teachers who questioned Nazi beliefs. Through education, Hitler had manipulated the thoughts and ideas of the younger generation and the future work force. With the idea of eliminating all Nazi oppposition and the ‘racially inferior’ imposed onto young Germans at a very early stage, most people did not think it was wrong to persecute the minorities.
During the difficult times of the Second World War, many people were not fully aware of or believe the persecution that was taking place in Germany and other Nazi-controlled areas. With the great shortages of supplies during the war, most German civilians concentrated on staying alive and finding food. Their trust in Hitler and the Nazis made them believe that the party would not do anything wrong; and even the persecution of minorities was for the good of the German nation on the whole. Hitler had convinced most people of the superiority of the Aryan race and how important it is to get rid of others ‘unworthy of living’. On the other hand, there seemed to be very little opposition coming from the Allied forces in the Second World War, preventing or trying to stop the brutal persecution. Historical documents have shown that the Allied governments were informed of the Nazi extermination policy. As early as November 1941 coded reports sent to Berlin on the mass murders by the Einsatzgruppen in Russia were intercepted and decoded by British intelligence. In August 1942 reports on the deportation and extermination of Jews in countries occupied by the Nazis were sent from Jewish organizations in Switzerland to top government officials in Britain and the United States. People who had escaped from the concentration camps such as Auschwitz gave accounts of the systematic extermination. However, many Allied military leaders did not act upon rescuing the prisoners in these camps, as they did not believe these accounts were true since they were so horrendous. Also, all countries were concentrating in winning the war; limited resources meant that they could not divert it to stop the mass persecution. After the war, British government officials explained that they had not wanted to reveal that their agents were successfully decoding German communications. However, some actions were taken as the Allies bombed factories at Auschwitz, though they failed to target the gas chambers.
Although many people supported the Nazi ideology and voted for them, it was clear that a substantial number of Germans did not support them. In dealing with these people, the Nazis developed the policy of intimidation. They used the fear factor to silence the people who did not support Hitler. The wrong comment overheard by a Nazi official could have very serious consequences. Many who did not obey orders or showed any slight sign of aversion to Nazi treatments were dealt severely, to show as an example to others. The individuals had no freedom to protest in Hitler's Germany. This was probably the most important factor limiting the amount of opposition against the persecution. In Nazi Germany, the police were allowed to arrest people on suspicion that they were about to do wrong. This gave the police huge powers. All local police units had to draw up a list of people in their locality who might be suspected of being "Enemies of the State". The Nazis had set up a secret police service known as the Gestapo. It was allowed to use any methods, including torture to stop any resistence. The Gestapo also arrested beggars, prostitutes, homosexuals, alcoholics and anyone who was incapable of working. Those arrested by the Gestapo were sent to concentration camps, where brutal violence was often used on prisoners, flogging was common. Although some inmates were tortured, the only people killed during this period were prisoners who tried to escape and those classed as "incurably insane".The concentration camps were deliberately made barbaric; food and drink were scarce and fatal beatings and hard labour were force upon the prisoners. Before 1939, deaths in them occurred but they were not common. The idea was that anybody who had been in one, once released, would ‘advertise’ the fact that they were not places where people wanted to go. This was a way of ensuring that people kept their ideas to themselves.
Hitler also made use of the S. S. (Hitler's elite body-guard) to execute many of his political opponents and put them into the concentration camps. During the Second World War there were 45,000 members of the Gestapo. However, it is estimated they also employed 160,000 agents and informers. They were responsible for rounding up communists, partisans and Jews and others who were considered to be a threat to German rule. The Gestapo quickly developed a reputation for using brutal interrogation methods in order to obtain confessions. During the Second World War the SS Death's Head Units were put in charge of Germany's Concentration Camps. The SS also followed the German Army into the Soviet Union where they had the responsibility of murdering Jews, gypsies, communists and partisans. The smallest acts of discordance could meet with the severest punishments. Resisters faced the threat of incarceration, torture, and death.
Before committing full-scale persecution of groups, Hitler tried to cleverly weaken them, so at the end, they have very little ability to oppose. From April 1933, the Jews were dismissed from the public service, the universities and other professions. In September 1935, the famous Nuremberg Laws were issued. The Laws in effect deprived Jews of German citizenship and forbade them to marry 'Aryans'. Jews were excluded from participation in the German political and cultural life. This meant that if the Jews had opposed the persecution, they would not be very efficient as they would not get any political support. Severe hardships were also inflicted on Jews in their daily life (e.g. the need to sit in a separate part of the bus). They had their property confiscated. All these laws made the Jews’ lives more and more difficult, so that they would be left with nothing at the end to fight with.
Hitler was also aware of the power of the Church over ordinary German people so he wanted to bring both the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church under his control. In July 1933, Hitler signed a Concordat with the Vatican in which he promised not to interfere in religion if the Catholic Church agreed not to become involved in politics in Germany. Despite this fact, a significant amount of the Church's leadership did protest the Nazi regime's programs. Some Catholics, like Father Litchenberg, publicly spoke out against Nazi policies. He frequently ended each Mass with prayers for the Jews. However he was eventually arrested, and served 2 years in confinement. He was arrested a second time, but died on his way to Dachau concentration camp. The Nazis had also tried to alter many of the Protestant Church’s teachings by appointing a Nazi supporter as the church’s Bishop – Pastor Ludwig Muller. Muller altered Christian teachings to fit with Nazi ideas. Many thousands of Protestants who did not follow the new Christian teaching were sent to the concentration camps. The new Christian ideas pervented non-aryans and Jewish converts from participating in the church. However, there were some church officials who opposed this as they thought that exclusion of Jews from the church community was in direct violation of Christian teaching. These church officials later formed the ‘Confessing Church’ and later helped approximately 2000 Jews escape to freedom. They also assisted political dissidents and fellow Christians persecuted by the regime. However, most who spoke out against the brutal persecutions, were severely punished or killed.
Rare incidences of Jewish resistance to the Nazis did occur during the Second World War. Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were completely disarmed, and the Nazis went to great lengths to convince people that they were merely being deported to work camps. Resistance by Jews was made more difficult because most of the local population did not support or help them; this was perhaps because of anti-Semitism or fear of the Nazis. Usually resistance movements in countries occupied by Nazis received supplies and instructions from the Allies and countries that were fighting against Germany, e.g. the French resistance. However, the Jews had no government in exile, and the Allies did nothing to support them. Despite this, there were still many examples of Jewish armed resistance. In the ghettos of Eastern Europe, Jewish fighting groups were formed. Jews who managed to escape from the ghettos joined the partisans (the anti-Nazi resistance movement) in the forests. About 30,000 Jews from Eastern Europe fought in the ranks of Soviet partisans. Even in the death camps of Sobibór, Treblinka, and Auschwitz revolts broke out. In the occupied countries of Western Europe, Jews joined all the national resistance organizations. They concentrated their efforts on hiding Jewish children and smuggling Jews across borders to find refuge in neutral countries such as Switzerland and Spain. Armed uprisings broke out in several ghettos, e.g. in the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943. Unfortunately the majority of the combatants in the Warsaw ghetto uprising died fighting.
Though the discontentment with the oppressive Nazi regime had caused many opposition groups to be formed during the war, little success was made from them. This was because the simplest forms of dissent within Nazi Germany could cost them their lives; this is most clearly demonstrated by the executions of Hans and Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst, and other members of the White Rose organization. The "White Rose" was an organization of university students in Munich, who disseminated anti Nazi pamphlets. The group's members drew attention to the atrocities being committed by Nazis and soldiers on the Eastern front. The organization was led by Hans Scholl, a 25-year-old soldier and student. While performing military service in the East, Hans witnessed the brutal military policy of Nazi Germany. Together with his sister, Sophie, and several fellow students, he began distributing a series of anti Nazi pamphlets. They spread copies of the leaflets throughout Hamburg and Munich. Hans and Sophie were caught on 18th February, 1943. They and several other members of the White Rose were subsequently executed. Similar groups included the Edelweiss Pirates, who acted in similar fashion of small acts of resistence. However, many were later caught and executed following their attacks on the chief of the Gestapo in Cologne.
During the time of the oppressive Nazi regime, some brave people tried hard to help the persecuted, they include Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who issued 4,500 protection passports to save Jews in Hungary, and German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who protected Jews working for him in Poland. However, a relatively small number of men and women risked their lives to help persecuted minority. From 1933 to 1941 opposition was limited because of both Nazi success and popularity but also because of the brutal intimidation of organised opposition e.g. banning of other political parties and trades unions May-June 1933, concentration camps, state police and party control. But most significant opposition occurred during the war years, though people of the opposition were dealt with severely e.g. the Edelweiss Pirates and White Rose group. The little result and success from these groups was probably because they did not work together so they were relatively weak. Moreover, even during the war most people supported the Nazis, fear of being caught opposing the Nazis was significant and also patriotic loyalty to the Fatherland in time of war was also a main factor.