The Holocaust

The word holocaust comes from the Greek holo meaning whole and caustos meaning burned. It was originally a religious rite in which an offering was consumed by fire. Now it refers to any widespread human disaster, but when written with a capital H it specifically refers to the almost complete destruction of the Jews in Europe by Nazi Germany during World War Two.

The Nazi regime came to power in Germany on January 1933 and immediately took measures against the Jews that were supposedly to force mass emigration.

One early decree was a set definition of the term Jew. Anyone with three out of four Jewish grandparents was automatically a Jew regardless of whether or not they were members of the Jewish community.

Half Jews and people who had one Jewish grandparent were called Mischlinge, (half breeds), and along with Jews were considered to be non-Aryans and subject to the Nazi doctrine of discrimination. Intermarriages were also forbidden.

From 1933 to 1939 the Nazi party, agencies of the government and banks and business enterprises set about the Aryanisation of business. This was a systematic effort to eliminate Jewish people from economic life.

Non-Aryans were fired, businesses forced into liquidation. Professionals such as Doctors and lawyers lost Aryan clients and the proceeds from any sales were subjected to special property taxes.

In 1938 a young Jew killed a German diplomat in Paris. Reprisals followed swiftly and the Jewish communities were targeted. Shops had their windows smashed as did all the Synagogues and thousands of Jews were arrested. It was called Kristallnacht - night of broken glass and was a signal to the Jewish people in Germany and Austria to leave. Hundreds of thousands of people left for other countries, but a similar number stayed, many of them old and or poor.

The occupation of Poland gave the Germans power over another two million Jews (approximately), and the restrictions imposed were much harsher than in Germany. They included ghettos that were segregated with barbed wire and walls. Disease was common and people were housed six and seven to a room. Food was also scarce.

At about the same time, German forces moved on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the SS - the Reich Security Main Office, (an agency of the police and Nazi party guard), sent a special squad of men to the newly occupied USSR to kill all the Jews. There were in total 3,000 men separated into mobile units, Einsatzgruppen (action squads). It was not long before rumours of the mass murders reached many world capitals.

By September 1941 Jews were forced to wear identifying arm bands and badges with a yellow star on, it was part of the final solution originally ordered by Herman Goering.

In the following months tens of thousands of Jews were deported to the Polish ghettos and cities taken in the USSR. As this was happening, the idea to create the concentration camps was underway.

In Poland camps were built with the facility to gas people. Most were transported from nearby camps. At first it was women, children and old men that filled the trucks. Any Jews able to work were kept for shops and plants, but this was no guarantee for survival, every Jewish person was marked for death, the only question was whether it would be sooner or later.

It was in the summer and autumn of 1942 that the most deportations were carried out. News of the mass deaths eventually filtered through to the camps and the British and American governments.

In April 1943 the last 65, 000 Jews of the Warsaw camp tried resisting the German police who arrived for the final round up. The battle lasted three weeks.

Countries allied with Germany were involved in negotiations to deport Jews. In France - Vichy, the government began imprisoning them. The Italian Fascist government did not co-operate with Nazi Germany until after they were occupied in September 1943. It was the same way with Hungary until March 1944 when German troops entered the country.

The Romanian government surprisingly, refused to give up their Jewish citizens. It was surprising, as they had killed Jews on a large scale in occupied USSR.

Denmark, though occupied, did everything it could to save their Jewish citizens from death. Thousands were helped to escape to neutral Sweden using small boats.

Nazi Germany, not content with the death and expulsion of the Jews made sure they seized whatever assets they could. This happened not only in Germany, but occupied countries such as France, Holland and Belgium too. The German state even charged the police a fare for the Jews being transported by rail to the concentration camps with a cheap rate for groups over one thousand.

These rail journeys were slow and long and many people died before reaching the destination. Slavs, homosexuals, Gypsies, communists and Jehovah's Witnesses and others were also targets of Nazi Germany's Aryanisation.

Auschwitz, (Oswiecim), was the biggest concentration camp, it was estimated that over one million Jewish people were killed there. At Belzec, 600,000 people were gassed with carbon monoxide and Sobibor's gas chambers claimed 250, 000 lives.

The list goes on, Kulmhof - 150, 000, Treblinka - 70, 000 to 800, 000, Lublin - 50, 000 shot or gassed.

By the end of the war millions of people had been murdered in the Holocaust. More than five million of the dead were Jewish.

Three years after the war ended the state of Israel was established as a permanent haven for the Jewish survivors.

Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party

Adolf Hitler was born in 1889 in Braunau-am-Inn Austria. His mother Klara Poelzla was 23 years younger than his father, Alois. The family was of German descent.

His obsession with a pure German race and the superiority of Germany began at school and with Wagner's operas.

Alois Hitler wanted his son to be a politician, but Adolf had other ideas. He wanted to paint, but failure dogged him and after his fathers death, when Hitler was thirteen years old, he studied watercolour painting, another failure.

When his mother died, Adolf was nineteen years old, he moved to Vienna where he scraped a living as a building labourer and by painting postcards. He had applied to the Academy of Arts, but was rejected.

His failures did nothing to help his discontent; he came to hate Austria for its mixed heritage and this glorified Germany even more in his mind. He was against minorities and especially the Jews, who he thought were spreading far too quickly.

He hated poverty too and started to study politics, he eventually left Austria for Munich in 1912 where he again drifted from job to job while spouting his political beliefs at every opportunity.

In 1914 when World War One started, he refused to fight for Austria and instead gave up citizenship to join the 16th Bavarian Infantry regiment.

He won the Iron Cross, as a dispatch runner and rose to the rank of Lance Corporal. The armistice came while Hitler lay in hospital suffering from shock and temporary blindness from mustard gas. He was agonised over Germanys defeat and blamed it on the Jews and Communists, the enemies within.

Still not a German citizen at the end of the war, Hitler stayed on in the army and became an informer assigned to report on subversive activity in Munich's political parties.

The spying soon brought him into contact with a small group called The German Workers Party. He joined and quickly became their leader.

A Reichswehr officer called Captain Ernest Roehm, decided that the party might be the means of over throwing the liberal Bavarian republic and assigned his tough Brown shirt army to help and Hitler became the mouth piece of this alliance.

Many officers were also building up volunteer armies at this time in defiance of the Versailles Treaty.

In 1920 the name of the party was changed to Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei - National Socialist German Workers Party, shortened to NAZI. The party was growing and attracted many men who were discontented.

Some German industrialists were persuaded to donate money to the party and Hitler assured them that they were only trying to combat Jewish international capital.

They bought a newspaper called Volkischer Beobachter - National Observer, to spread Nazi influence. The swastika, a hooked cross, was adopted as the party's symbol and they designed a red flag with a black swastika too. Hitler saluted supporters with a raised stiff arm and they greeted him with the word heil.

After a failed attempt to take over the government, Hitler was convicted of treason and sentenced to five years in prison, but he only served eight months. The Bavarian government commuted the sentence. He began his autobiography, Mein Kampf while in jail, helped by Rudolf Hess.

In 1924 when Hitler was released, the Nazi party had been banned and he lost interest for a while. A few members held things together and with the help of a new face, Joseph Paul Goebbels, they managed to revive his interest after a few months.

Germany prospered and Hitler was even banned from public speaking in Bavaria and Saxony. The Nazi party did not do well in these years, 1924 to 1928, but when financial prospects worsened the party gained votes once again and by 1930 Hitler had the support of lots of industrialists and was finally made a German citizen. In 1933 he became Chancellor, appointed by the president Paul von Hindenburgh.

Hitler made himself Personal Commander of the Army in 1941 and then Supreme War Lord in 1942. Propaganda portrayed him as a symbol of national virtue and glossed over his faults.

In 1944 there was a failed attempt by some officers to blow Hitler up, but he escaped relatively unscathed. He killed himself in 1945 in Reichschancellery, but wasn't officially declared dead until the October of 1956.