Hitler systematically murdered roughly two-thirds of Europe’s Jews:

Hitler systematically murdered roughly two-thirds of Europe’s Jews:

 about 6 million of the 9–10 million living in Europe before the war. The large and vibrant Jewish communities of Eastern Europe were wiped out. The profound evil and the tragedy of the Nazi death camps of WWII are the most widely known feature of the Holocaust; but, from the very moment they came to power, the Nazis began implementing their systematic program of terror and violence directed primarily towards Jews. This is an essential point to make, because it means their actions were not the unfortunate necessities of war, but were in fact a plan to eradicate an entire people.

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Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party, like other parties on the far right during the interwar period, saw attacks on Jews as a winning electoral strategy. But the Jews were always central to Adolf Hitler’s view of the world. He had picked up anti-Semitism in the nasty and polarized politics of Vienna before World War I. Afterward, he became leader of the new Nazi Party, and he returned to those ideas. Hitler saw the greatest threat to Germany, and the world, as Judeo-Bolshevism: communism controlled by Jews, drawing in what he viewed as subhuman populations from across Europe.

The fundamental Nazi appeal was to those who felt dispossessed and threatened by change. That meant that the heart of their support was the lower-middle class who feared economic change and whose savings had been destroyed by inflation after World War I. Jews proved a useful scapegoat for them. It was easier to blame Jews for their economic misery than to actually figure out what had gone wrong with the world economy.

Once Hitler and the Nazis came to power in 1933, there was an initial wave of violence against Jews and a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses. Under pressure from international opinion - and his own advisors, who feared foreign backlash - Hitler initially dialed back the mob violence to minimize destruction and foreign boycotts. At the same time, though, he wasted little time in implementing anti-Jewish laws.

Paradoxically, this made German Jews among the most likely of Europe’s Jews to survive the coming Holocaust. They had plenty of warning about Hitler’s intent and several years to get out of Germany to somewhere safer if they were able. Of course, this would often require leaving everything they owned behind. Outside of Germany, however, Jews often found themselves caught by war. And once under Nazi control, it was too late to run.

Within two months of coming to power, the Nazis passed a law banning Jews from the civil service. Taxpaying Jewish German citizens were thus expelled from the government bureaucracy. A single Jewish grandparent was enough to qualify as Jewish, with some limited protection for relatives of Jewish war veterans. Jews were also barred from work as teachers and professors.

Another law - again, within the first few months of the inception of the Nazi regime - barred Jews from university education. They were also banned from practicing medicine, and Jewish dentists soon followed. At the same time, incidentally, Hitler expelled women from the medical profession, except as midwives. A third of Jewish lawyers were disbarred. The next year, Jews were forbidden to work as stage or screen actors. German science took a hit as well. Twenty Nobel Prize winners left the country, including Albert Einstein. For the next two years, Jews were purged from German public life, including their representation in statues and street names.

With Hitler solidly in power by 1935, he felt confident in going further. The Nazi regime enacted the Nuremburg Laws, which systematically deprived Jews of their civil rights. They were stripped of German citizenship. Jews and non-Jews were forbidden to marry, and sex between Jews and non-Jews became a crime.

The exclamation point on this process came in November 1938. A Jewish student from Poland assassinated a German official in Paris. In response, Nazi forces destroyed several thousand Jewish businesses and synagogues. Some 30,000 Jews were imprisoned in camps, and a hundred were killed in the mass violence. This event became known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. It was a state-sanctioned pogrom.

By 1939, Jews had been systematically cut off from the German economy. Hitler publicly declared that if another war came, the result would be “the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.” Many German Jews didn’t need to be told and had already sought refuge abroad. Too few others took him seriously. Most other European states - and the United States - did not want refugees when, in the midst of the Great Depression, jobs were in short supply. By the start of the war, roughly 60 percent of Germany’s Jews had left the country. The luckiest reached safety somewhere outside of Nazi reach. The unlucky went only as far as France or other European countries where they were vulnerable to being caught by Hitler’s armies and proxies during the coming war. The worst off were those who stayed in Germany. Those Jews, about 200,000 of them, had only a one-in-five chance of making it to the end of the war alive.

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The outbreak of war in 1939 fundamentally changed the status of Jews in Europe. Because the war closed borders, Jews who found themselves under Nazi control had less ability to leave. More crucially, Hitler’s conquest of Poland put a huge number of Jews under German rule.

Prewar Poland had 3 million Jews, and even though many ended up on the Soviet side of the line when Poland was split, that was still a large number for Hitler’s regime to manage. These Polish Jews lacked even the partial protection of German citizenship or German friends and family. To deal with them, the Nazis created a new territorial unit in central Poland, the General Government. The General Government became a dumping ground for Jews. The Jewish population of Poland was herded into extremely crowded ghettos in central Polish cities.

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In 1941, the remaining German Jews were shipped to central Poland. Hans Frank, the Nazi brute in charge of the General Government, began to refuse to take additional population on top of the 3.5 million Jews the Nazi regime had stuffed into the General Government. The Nazis were being faced with a growing problem: They had many Jews on their hands and nowhere to put them.

Although the Jews of the General Government had been concentrated into ghettos, the fact that there was a relatively skilled and captive labor force there proved appealing to some German businessmen. Jewish labor was available for hire. Oskar Schindler, who later ended up heroically saving 1,200 Jews from death at Nazi hands, became involved with Jews as a strictly business venture: cheap labor with which to operate factories in occupied Poland.

Even as some Jews proved economically useful to the Nazis, that raised the question about what to do about those who weren’t so useful: children, the sick, and the elderly. A number of Nazis took Hitler at his word and began to talk about whether it might make sense to take the Jews who weren’t economically useful and simply eliminate them. Countless innocent souls were snuffed out by these thugs.

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By the spring of 1941, Hitler was fully into his preparations to attack the Soviet Union. He saw the communist Soviet Union as the heartland of Judeo-Bolshevism, and talked in the most brutal terms about what he intended to do there. Between 2 and 3 million Jews lived in the Soviet Union’s western borderlands, and Hitler used his subordinates to make careful preparations for mass murder.

Hitler’s short-term aim was to systematically mass murder Soviet Jews as the German army passed through. To achieve this, the chief of Hitler’s SS private army, Reinhard Heydrich, created four Einsatzgruppen - paramilitary death squads - to follow right behind the German army as it moved into the Soviet Union. Their purpose to was liquidate all communist officials and commissars plus all Jews who were serving the Soviet state. The Einsatzgruppen also often enjoyed the cooperation of the local non-Jewish population, who assisted in the murder of Jews.

After a couple of months, the shooting escalated to the systematic murder of all Jews: men, women, and children. Hitler seems to have given a verbal order at this point to execute every Jew. In the course of two days at the end of September, almost 34,000 Jews were shot at the Babi Yar ravine outside of Kiev and dumped into mass graves.

The Soviet Union was also part of a long-term plan for Jewish people. The German plan involved the systematic ethnic cleansing of huge swathes of territory, leaving only slave labor to be employed in service of German farming colonies. However, the plan did not work. The Einsatzgruppen found their job of mass murder to be draining. Their men killed a million people, one bullet at a time. That took a psychological toll, though I am absolutely not suggesting pity is appropriate for them. The process was also slow and inefficient. German leadership began to believe they needed to find some other way.

In late fall 1941, Nazi leadership coalesced around the idea of the systematic mass murder of the Jews of Europe. Instead of bringing death to the Jews, in the form of mobile killing squads, the idea arose of conveying the Jews to extermination camps. Those extermination camps could be set up where millions of Jews were already confined: the center of Poland. . .

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Book Sources:

    - “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” by William L. Shirer

    - “Hitler” by Ian Kershaw

    - “To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949” by Ian Kershaw

    - “The Second World War” by Antony Beevor

Pictures:

 - Pedestrians viewing a Jewish store in Berlin damaged during Kristallnacht, November 10, 1938. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland)

 - German troops executing a group of Poles. (Dokumentationsarchiv des Oesterreichischen Widerstandes, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives)

 - A member of the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazis' special mobile killing units, preparing to shoot a Ukrainian Jew kneeling on the edge of a mass grave. (Library of Congress/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)