What is the Holocaust in a nutshell. The Holocaust is a miserable lie of the Jewish Zionist elite

Every year on January 27, at the initiative of the United Nations, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the narrow sense of the word, the Holocaust refers to the persecution and destruction of the Jewish people by Nazi Germany during World War II. In the broad sense of the word Holocaust- This is the mass extermination by the Nazis of representatives of various ethnic and social groups during the Third Reich.

The term itself came into use due to the borrowing from the Greek biblical texts of the word forms holocaustum ("burnt offering", "burnt offering"), in the English version - holocaust.

In the Russian version, the word "Holocaust" can mean the genocide of any people (as, for example, the genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire), while using "Holocaust" with a capital letter, it means the events of the Second World War.

Chronology

May 10, 1933 - the burning of books by Jewish authors took place; by September, Jews were forbidden to participate in the cultural life of the country.

July 3, 1934 - a law was passed prohibiting the marriage of Aryans with representatives of a "different race".

September 15, 1935 - The Nuremberg Laws were adopted - two legislative acts providing for the deprivation of German citizenship of those who do not "possess German or related blood", close attention was paid to Jews and Gypsies.

October 5, 1938 - in the passports of Jews they begin to put down "J", which means "Jude" - a Jew.

November 1938 - the whole world was shocked by the events of the so-called "Kristallnacht", more than 1400 synagogues were destroyed, thousands of Jews suffered, tens of thousands were sent to concentration camps.

September 21, 1939 - an instruction appeared on the imprisonment of Polish Jews in the ghetto, a little later the Jews were ordered to wear the "Star of David" on their sleeves

June 22, 1941 - Germany attacked the USSR, mass extermination of Soviet Jews began in the occupied territories.

July 31 - The Germans began to prepare the "final solution to the Jewish question", opened a ghetto in Russia.

August 11 - more than 18 thousand Jews were shot near the Zmievskaya beam (Rostov-on-Don).

April 19 - an uprising began in the Warsaw ghetto, then during the year uprisings took place in the Bialystok ghetto and the Sobibor camp.

February - July 1944 - the Transnistrian ghetto and the Majdanek camp were liberated.

May 8, 1945 - Germany surrendered, in October, trials of war criminals began.

Figures and facts

6 million Jews in total died during the genocide, and about 4 million people were identified. This is about a third of the entire Jewish population of the world.

566 thousand Jews lived in Germany until 1933, of which 150 thousand emigrated, 170 thousand died.

350 thousand Hungarian, the same number of French and Romanian Jews died during the war.

3 million 350 thousand Jews lived in Poland, of which 350 thousand were saved.

1.2 million people - this is the number of dead Soviet Jews.

4 million (according to other estimates - 2-3 million) people were killed in the Auschwitz death camp, the "throughput" of the camp was increased to 20 thousand people a day. 870 thousand people died in the Treblinka camp, 600 thousand - in the Belzec camp.

200 thousand people were killed and about a million patients in German hospitals were tortured to death under the T-4 program (the program provided for the killing of disabled people, people with mental illnesses, children with neurological and somatic diseases, considered "biologically threatening the health of the country").

5-15 thousand people were kept in camps for homosexual activity, about 9 thousand of them died. Prisoners were required to wear an insignia on their clothing - a pink triangle.

23 thousand saviors of the Jewish population were awarded the honorary title of "Righteous Among the World", among them more than 6,000 from Poland, 5,000 from Holland and 3,000 from France. At the risk of their lives, they helped the Jewish population to escape from destruction by the Nazis.

Why did the Holocaust become possible?

Historians believe that as a result of a well-thought-out policy, the Germans managed not to miss information about their plans for quite a long time, so the Jews brought to the ghetto simply tried to survive and fulfill all the requirements of the invaders.

Resistance began when the motives of the Nazis became finally clear, but without the support of the local population outside the walls of the ghetto, the rebels died. Those who, at the risk of their lives, helped the refugees were later called the "Righteous of the World."

The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto (April 19, 1943) became a symbol of the resistance of the Jewish people. When the destruction of the ghetto began, its inhabitants resisted the much more equipped German troops for five weeks. However, on May 16, the "cleansing" of the ghetto was completed.

After the end of the war, points of view appeared that denied the historical fact Holocaust and anti-Semitic policy of the Third Reich. Professional historians and researchers consider this approach unscientific. In a number of countries, public denial of the Holocaust has become a criminal offense.

Day of Remembrance

The United Nations has devoted and is devoting a lot of time educational activities, not allowing the world to forget the events that took place during the Second World War. In 2005, the UN General Assembly adopted a program called "The Holocaust and the UN" to encourage the development educational programs on the topic of the Holocaust in order to tell people what exactly happened at that time.

At the same time, the International Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Holocaust was established (January 27, as already noted, is the day of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp), which meant various events in UN offices around the world. Thus, more than 2,000 people gathered at the ceremony in the General Assembly Hall in 2006, many people around the world watched TV and Internet broadcasts.

In 2007, the UN General Assembly Resolution 61/255 was adopted, which urged all countries to reject any denial of the Holocaust and honor the memory of those who died at the hands of the Nazis.

Since then, the UN, with the support of UNESCO, the European Parliament and regional intergovernmental organizations, has been encouraging special events such as viewing documentaries or preparing informational materials to raise people's awareness of the dangers of a genocidal policy.

In memory of the Holocaust, many memorials were erected, museums were created in different countries world (Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC or the Documentation Center and Memorial in Paris).

In world practice, there are few examples of events during which the destruction of people on the basis of their ethnicity was practiced and even welcomed at the state level. Two became the most striking and memorable for modern people: the Armenian genocide on the territory of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War and the massacre of Jews during the Second World War. It is the second example that received the name Holocaust for its mass character and global character.

Much has been devoted to the study of this phenomenon of world history since the end of the war. scientific papers. In them, pundits tried to find the roots of this process and sum up its results, at least roughly counting the number of people who were exterminated. The testimonies of German war criminals given to the investigators of the International Tribunal, as well as archival documents of Nazi Germany from the period 1933-1945, were taken as the basis. And although there is still no exact number of Jews who died in this campaign, most researchers divide its process into 3 stages.

1. 1933-1940- the solution of the Jewish question on the territory of Germany, as well as the areas occupied by it by that time through discrimination and eviction.
2. 1940-early 1942- a period of concentration of Jews in compact areas of residence (as a rule, in the form of a ghetto).
3. 1942-1945 - the mass liquidation of the ghetto by deporting Jews to death camps, where people were killed.

The longest and "loyal" to the Jews was the first stage, during which the Nazis tried not to destroy, but to squeeze out the Jews from Germany, and then from the countries it occupied. This happened through the adoption of laws that discriminated against them, and various anti-Jewish actions. There is an opinion that at the initial stage, the Nazi leadership itself did not yet know what to do with the 600,000 Jews who lived at that time in Germany, so they managed with purely administrative measures.

The second stage began to be carried out after the capture of new territories by Germany: the states of Central and Western Europe who had their own Jewish population. Massively began to form Jewish districts in large cities, referred to as "ghettos" with the organization of self-government systems in them - Judenrats and police units from among the Jews themselves. The Judenrats were supposed to be engaged in the life support of the ghetto, while fulfilling all the orders of the German occupation administrations. Police formations kept order, and were also sometimes involved in escort service.

The third stage was marked by the mass extermination of the Jews. By this time, a complex of camps had already been put into operation, the task of which was to receive the Jews brought on their territory, to kill them as quickly as possible and to dispose of the bodies of the killed people. As a rule, some of the imprisoned Jews were used as laborers, sorting the clothes of the dead, transporting their bodies to crematoria for disposal and a number of other functions. In addition, a number of people were used for medical experiments. However, for most Jews, the end life path was this: death followed by burning in the nearest crematorium.

The mass extermination of Jews was put to an end by the offensive of the allied forces in 1944-1945, during which all concentration camps were liberated, and Nazi Germany ceased to exist. Thus, an end was put to the Holocaust, during which about 6 million European Jews were exterminated, and several hundred thousand more were forced to emigrate to other countries.

The chronology of the Holocaust has clear dates, representing a gradual pressure on the Jewish population. It began with the publication of Hitler's Mein Kampf in 1924. It was in it that the principles of the superiority of the German nation relative to other peoples were first formulated. In the future, the flywheel of repression spun more and more, in its essence somewhat reminiscent of a medieval garrote - an execution tool that slowly suffocated people. Here is such a chronology.

1. January 1933 Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany.
2. May 1933- mass actions to burn the books of Jewish authors.
3. September of the same year Jews are banned from participating in cultural events.
4. May 1934- speech by Reinhard Heydrich, in which he called for making Germany unpromising for the Jews, forcing them to emigrate.
5. July 1934 Jews are prohibited from intermarrying with Germans.
6. January 1935- the entry into force of a document according to which grassroots structures were supposed to simplify the exit of Jews from the country, while at the same time making it as difficult as possible to enter it for the purpose of long-term or permanent residence.
7. September 1935- the adoption of the Nuremberg racial laws, according to which all Jews and people with mixed blood were to be fired from state and law enforcement agencies by December 1, providing for sanctions up to deprivation of citizenship for these people. In addition, the Aryans were forbidden under the threat of imprisonment to enter into relations with the Jews.
8. October 1938- the beginning of putting down the letter "J" in the passports, meaning "Jude" - a Jew.
9. November 1938- a wave of Jewish pogroms, called "", in response to the provocative murder in Paris by the Polish Jew Herschel Grynszpan of the secretary of the German embassy Ernst von Rath. The authorities themselves pointedly distanced themselves from holding them, however, the security forces were unambiguously hinted not to interfere with the holding of actions, protecting only German citizens and their property. During the pogroms, dozens of Jews were killed and wounded, 20,000 people were sent to prison, and hundreds of synagogues and shops were destroyed.
10. September 1939- the appearance of an instruction on the organization of Jewish ghettos in the territory of occupied Poland and an instruction in the future for Jews to wear the sign "Star of David" on their sleeves.
11. May 1940- laying of the concentration camp "Auschwitz" near the Polish Auschwitz.

It should be clarified here that all the previous time the Nazi elite was looking for ways to quickly get rid of the excess number of Jews. The compulsion to emigrate to other countries did not give the desired effect, since even from Germany itself only about 2/3 of the Jews left. The victories in the battles of the Second World War added to Germany the territories in which their Jews lived. Simple executions in terms of finances and image were losing options, so a way was found to use poisonous gas in camps specially organized for this purpose. The laying of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp symbolized the technical readiness of the Nazis to carry out such work.

1. June 1941- the beginning of the war of Germany against the USSR, which was marked at its first stage by the seizure of significant territories.
2. July 1941- the signing of a document on the "final solution of the Jewish question", after which mass executions of Jews began in the occupied territories of the USSR with the involvement of special SS teams and local collaborators. The surviving Jews were concentrated in the ghetto.
3. March 1942- the beginning of the gas chambers of Auschwitz, followed by a series of ghetto closures, during which a series of uprisings of Jews took place, brutally suppressed by the invaders.
4. February 1944 - May 1945- the offensive of the allied forces from the west and east, accompanied by the gradual liberation of the territories occupied by the Nazis and the concentration camps located on them.
5. January 1945- liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
6. May 9, 1945- The capitulation of Germany and the end of the Holocaust.

The last stage of the Holocaust was marked by a monstrous extermination of Jews brought to the territory of death camps from all over Nazi-occupied Europe. Only the liberation of the territories occupied by the Nazis could stop this Moloch. It began with the counteroffensives of the Red Army, which at first slowly, and then with increasing speed, began its advance to the west. By the summer of 1944, she reached the borders of the USSR and entered the territory of Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and then moved on, freeing the lands of Yugoslavia, Hungary and Norway.

In turn, from the west and south, the combined troops of the coalition of the United States, Great Britain and France began their offensive, squeezing out the invaders from Western Europe. In 1945, as Germany's forces were depleted, the offensive of the Allied forces accelerated significantly. This made it possible to liberate hundreds of large and small concentration camps, in which millions of prisoners worked and expected to die in unbearably difficult conditions, among which Jews made up a significant part. The Holocaust machine slowed down sharply and finally stopped in May after the surrender of Germany.

The surviving witnesses of this terrible period in the history of the Jewish people subsequently became the main witnesses in the trials of war criminals. Most of the German leaders and their subordinates, who carried out criminal orders to destroy people, were punished, and the search for the most odious of them continued over the next decades. As a rule, the Israeli special services were engaged in this, performing this work quite successfully.

In addition to the Germans themselves and the traitors who collaborated with them in the field of murder, there were people who, at the risk of their lives, helped the Jews survive in that terrible situation. The statistics of such people, known in Israel as the Righteous Among the Nations, is maintained by the Yad Vashem Museum. The latest figure announced by the museum is 23,226 people, but it is constantly updated with new heroes, the work to establish them is ongoing.

Etymologically, the word "holocaust" goes back to the Greek components holos(integer) and kaustos(burnt) and was used as a description of the offering that was burned on the sacrificial altar. But since 1914, it has acquired a different, more terrible meaning: the mass genocide of almost 6 million European Jews (and also representatives of other social groups, such as gypsies and homosexuals), perpetrated by the Nazi regime.

For the anti-Semite and Fascist leader Adolf Hitler, the Jews were an inferior nation, an outside threat to the purity of the German race. , throughout which the Jews were constantly subjected to persecution, the final decision of the Fuhrer resulted in an event that we now call the Holocaust. Under the guise of a war in occupied Poland - mass death centers.

Before the Holocaust: Historical Anti-Semitism and Hitler's Rise to Power

European anti-Semitism began far from . The term was first used in the 1870s, and there is evidence of hostility towards Jews long before the Holocaust. According to ancient sources, even the Roman authorities, having destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, forced the Jews to leave Palestine.

In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Enlightenment tried to revive tolerance for religious diversity, and in the 19th century, the European monarchy, in the person of Napoleon, passed a law that put an end to the persecution of Jews. Nevertheless, for the most part, anti-Semitic sentiments in society were more racial than religious in nature.

Even at the beginning of the 21st century, the world is feeling the effects of the Holocaust. AT last years Swiss government and banking institutions acknowledged their involvement in the actions of the Nazis and established funds to help victims of the Holocaust and other victims of human rights violations, genocide or other catastrophes.

It is still difficult to pinpoint the roots of Hitler's extreme anti-Semitism. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German Army. Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the defeat of the country in 1918.

Shortly after the end of the war, Hitler joined the national German Workers' Party, which later formed into the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). While imprisoned as a traitor for his direct participation in the Beer Putsch of 1923, Adolf wrote his famous memoirs, and part-time propaganda tract, " Mein Kampf” (“My Struggle”), where he predicted a pan-European war, which should lead to “the complete annihilation of the Jewish race in Germany.”

The leader of the NSDAP was obsessed with the idea of ​​the superiority of the "pure" German race, which he called "Aryan", and the need for such a thing as " Lebensraum”- living and territorial space for expanding the range of this race. After being released from prison for ten years, Hitler skillfully exploited the weaknesses and failures of his political rivals to raise his party's profile from obscurity to power.

On January 20, 1933, he was appointed Chancellor of Germany. After the death of the President in 1934, Hitler proclaimed himself "Fuhrer" - the supreme ruler of Germany.

Nazi Revolution in Germany 1933-1939

Two related goals - racial purity and spatial expansion ( Lebensraum) - became the basis of Hitler's worldview, and since 1933, having united, were driving force both its foreign and domestic policy. One of the first to feel the wave of Nazi persecution was their direct political opponents, the Communists (or Social Democrats).

The first official concentration camp was opened in March 1933 in Dachau (near Munich) and was ready to accept its first lambs for slaughter - objectionable to the new communist regime. Dachau was under the control of the head of the elite national guard of the Schutzstaffel (SS), and then the chief of the German police.

By July 1933 the German concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) contained about 27 thousand people. Crowded Nazi rallies and symbolic actions, such as public book burnings by Jews, communists, liberals and foreigners, which were coercive, helped to convey the right messages from the power party to the people.

In 1933, there were about 525 thousand Jews in Germany, which was only 1% of the total population of Germany. Over the next six years, the Nazis undertook the "Aryanization" of Germany: they "liberated" non-Aryans from public service, liquidated Jewish-owned businesses, and deprived Jewish lawyers and doctors of all clients.

According to the Nuremberg Laws (adopted in 1935), every German citizen whose maternal and paternal grandparents were of Jewish origin was considered a Jew, and those who had Jewish grandparents on only one side, labeled humiliating Mischlinge which means "half-breed".

Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became ideal targets for stigmatization (unfair negative social labeling) and further persecution. The culmination of this kind of relationship between society and political forces was "Kristallnacht" ("night of breaking glass"): German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish shops were broken; about 100 Jews were killed and thousands more were arrested.

From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews who nevertheless managed to leave Germany alive were in constant fear and felt the uncertainty not only of their future, but also of the present.

Start of the War 1939-1940

In September 1939, the German army occupied the western half of Poland. Shortly thereafter, German police forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews to leave their homes and settle in ghettos, giving confiscated property to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside of Germany who identified as Germans), Germans from the Reich, or Polish non-Jews.

Jewish ghettos in Poland, surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, functioned as captive city-states ruled by Jewish councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overcrowding made the ghetto a breeding ground for diseases such as typhus.

Simultaneously with the occupation in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected nearly 70,000 native Germans in specialized institutions such as psychiatric hospitals and hospitals for the care of the disabled to begin the so-called euthanasia program, which consisted of gassing patients.

This program caused a lot of protests from prominent religious figures in Germany, so Hitler officially closed it in August 1941. Yet the program continued to operate in secret, with catastrophic consequences: across Europe, 275,000 people who were considered disabled of various degrees were killed. Today, when we can look back along the historical vector, it becomes obvious that this euthanasia program was the first experimental experience on the road to the Holocaust.

The final solution of the Jewish question 1940-1941

Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler's empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European gypsies, were transported to Polish ghettos.

German invasion of Soviet Union June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in the war. Mobile assassination units called Einsatzgruppen( Einsatzgruppen), killed by execution more than 500 thousand Soviet Jews and others objectionable to the regime during the German occupation.

One of the Fuhrer's commanders-in-chief sent Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (SS security service), a memorandum dated July 31, 1941, indicating the need Endlosung“The final solution to the Jewish question.”

Beginning in September 1941, every person identified as a Jew in Germany was marked with a yellow star ("Star of David"), making them open targets for attack. Tens of thousands of German Jews were deported to Polish ghettos and captured Soviet cities.

Since June 1941, experiments began to be carried out in a concentration camp near Krakow to find methods of mass murder. In August, 500 Soviet prisoners of war were poisoned with Cyclone-B gas poison. The SS then made a huge order for gas to a German firm that specialized in the production of pesticides.

Holocaust death camps 1941–1945

From the end of 1941, the Germans began to massively transport objectionable people from Polish ghettos to concentration camps, starting with those who were considered the least useful for the implementation of Hitler's idea: the sick, the old, the weak and the very young. For the first time, mass gassings were used in the Belzec camp ( Belzec), near Lublin, March 17, 1942.

Five more mass killing centers were built in camps in occupied Poland, including Chełmno ( Chelmno), Sobibor ( Sobibor), Treblinka ( Treblinka), Maidanek ( Majdanek) and the largest of them - Auschwitz-Birkenau ( Auschwitz-Birkenau).

From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory, as well as from other countries friendly to Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer-autumn of 1942, when more than 300 thousand people were transported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.

Although the Nazis tried to keep the camps secret, the scale of the killing made this almost impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of fascist activities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were heavily criticized after the war for not reacting or for not publicizing the news of the massacres.

Most likely, such inactivity was caused by several factors. First, mainly by the focus of the allies on winning the war. Secondly, there was a general misunderstanding of the news about the Holocaust, denial and disbelief that such atrocities could occur on such a scale.

At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were killed in a process that resembled a large-scale industrial operation. The labor camp employed a large number of imprisoned Jews and non-Jews; although only the Jews were gassed, thousands of other unfortunates died of starvation or disease.

End of fascist rule

In the spring of 1945, the German leadership was disintegrating amid internal divisions, while Goering and Himmler, meanwhile, tried to distance themselves from their Fuhrer and seize power. In his final will and political testament, dictated in a German bunker on April 29, Hitler blamed his defeat on "International Jewry and its collaborators" and called on the German leaders and people to follow "strict observance of racial distinctions and ruthless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples" - Jews. The next day he committed suicide. The official surrender of Germany in World War II took place just a week later, on May 8, 1945.

German troops began evacuating many of the death camps in the fall of 1944, placing prisoners under guard to move as far as possible from the front lines of the advancing enemy. These so-called "death marches" continued until the German surrender, as a result of which, according to various sources, from 250 to 375 thousand people died.

In his now classic book Survival at Auschwitz, the Italian author Jewish origin Primo Levi described his own condition, as well as that of his fellow prisoners in Auschwitz, on the eve of the arrival of Soviet troops in the camp in January 1945: “We are in a world of death and ghosts. The last trace of civilization has disappeared around us as well. The work of bringing people to bestial degradation, begun by the Germans at the zenith of their glory, was carried to the end by the Germans, distraught from defeat.

Consequences of the Holocaust

The wounds of the Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah ( Shoah), or disaster, healed slowly. The surviving prisoners from the camps were never able to return home, as in many cases they lost their families and were condemned by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, an unprecedented number of refugees, prisoners of war and other migrants moved throughout Europe in the late 1940s.

In an attempt to punish the perpetrators of the Holocaust, the Allies organized the Nuremberg trials of 1945-1946, which brought to light all the horrific atrocities of the Nazis. In 1948, increasing pressure on the Allied Powers to establish a sovereign homeland, a national home, for Jewish Holocaust survivors led to a mandate to establish the State of Israel.

Over the following decades, ordinary Germans grappled with the bitter legacy of the Holocaust as survivors and victims' families tried to reclaim wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years.

Beginning in 1953, the German government made payments to individual Jews and the Jewish people as a way to acknowledge the responsibility of the German people for crimes committed on their behalf.

On the evening of July 31, 1941, a black Mercedes drove up to a luxurious baroque mansion in the Schorfheide forest in northern Berlin.

In a briefcase on the lap of a single passenger lay one of the most terrible documents in history.

The guards saluted, the gates swung open, the owner welcomed the guest at the entrance.

The castle "Karinhall" belonged to Hermann Goering - "Nazi No. 2", Reichsmarschall, successor to the Fuhrer, holder of seven government posts, including the Commissioner General for the Jewish Question.

The arrival was Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, First Deputy of the Reichsführer SS, who oversaw Müller's Gestapo, Schellenberg's political intelligence and criminal police, whom the insiders called "Himmler's head" and "the most dangerous man in the Reich."
Obese, vociferous, dressed in an exotic blue uniform, Goering boasted for a long time about paintings and statues, a marble hammam and a menagerie with a lion named Caesar. Always busy, Heydrich waited patiently.

But in an office decorated with carved wooden panels, the matter was finished quickly. Everything was agreed in advance.

Goering signed the paper: “Supplementing the order of January 24, 1939, in which you were obliged to resolve the Jewish question in the most advantageous way at that time, by emigration or evacuation, I instruct you to carry out, taking into account the current conditions, all the necessary work for the final solution of the Jewish question on territories under German control.

It was a death sentence for millions.

On January 31, 1942, the commanding staff of the secret services and the police of the Third Reich received detailed instructions regarding the removal of Jews from Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic to the extermination camps created by that time in Poland. An organized genocide began.

in documents and public speaking the words "murder", "destruction" or "liquidation" were not used. The Nazis reportedly borrowed the euphemism “final solution” from Talaat Bey, the Minister of the Interior of the Ottoman Empire, who used it in 1915 in relation to Turkish Armenians.

Two versions

Until the summer of 1941, the official doctrine of the Nazis was not to exterminate the Jews, but to squeeze them out of Europe.

The pressure increased every year, but for the time being it did not reach massacres.

It was reminiscent of a garrote - a medieval tool for slow strangulation. After July 31, 1941, the Nazis took up the ax.
The discussion continues between the two schools of historians: "intentionalists", confident that the Führer and his associates planned the "final solution" since at least the publication of "Mein Kampf" in 1924, and only for the time being partly reckoned with world public opinion , and "functionalists" who believe that Berlin in 1941 did change its position.

Heydrich's successor Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the "Jewish" department of the Gestapo Adolf Eichmann, his closest collaborator Günther Wisliceny, commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Höss held to the second version in post-war testimony, although their veracity, of course, does not inspire unconditional confidence.

"The origins of the Führer's order to exterminate all Jews, not just Russian and Polish Jews, go back to early times," intentionalist Gerald Reitlinger argued in The Final Solution.
The historian points out that the idea of ​​gas chambers probably originated from Hitler's fascination with euthanasia, and they were originally tried on the seriously ill and insane.

The functionalist Raul Hilberg, on the contrary, believed that "the Germans at first did not imagine what they would do."

"It was as if they were driving a train down a path of ever-increasing violence against the Jews, not knowing exactly where the train would eventually end up," he wrote.

Pushing out of the country

“Already from January 30, 1933 [the day Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor], the Jews turned into second-class citizens; but for the most part not through terror, but due to the more than obvious alienation of those around them,” Austrian historian Hannah Arendt noted in the book The Banality of Evil. .

“The Jews should be deprived of their livelihood. Germany should become a country without a future for them. If the older generation can still be allowed to rest here in peace, then young people should not, they should be encouraged to emigrate,” Heydrich suggested in May 1934.

On August 27, 1933, the Reich Ministry of Economics allowed Jews leaving the country to export capital if the funds were invested in German export goods. The scheme operated until 1939, with about 100 million marks transferred under it.

On January 28, 1935, the Bavarian Gestapo sent a circular to the grass-roots units: "Emigration-oriented organizations should not be treated with the same rigor that is necessary when dealing with assimilationist Jewish organizations."

On September 15, 1935, the Nuremberg Racial Laws were adopted, prescribing before December 1 to dismiss Jews - state officials and officers and forbidding Aryans to have relations with Jewish women, and Jews with German women. For men, violation was punishable by prison, but women were not prosecuted. Heydrich in 1937 corrected this "oversight" by circulating an unspoken instruction to arrest the partner as well.

After the Anschluss in March 1938, in addition to 600,000 German Jews, 150,000 Austrian Jews ended up in the hands of the Nazis. Then, for the first time, Adolf Eichmann, Ober-Sturmführer (in the army, Ober-Lieutenant) of the Jewish Affairs Department of the Berlin Gestapo, showed himself to be sent to Vienna.

After 22 years, at a trial in Israel, he will declare that he was given the task of speeding up the process of issuing exit documents as much as possible, while stretching out as much as possible from those leaving. more money. The Central Bureau of Jewish Emigration was located not just anywhere, but in the Viennese mansion of the Rothschilds confiscated by the Nazis.

Robbery and discrimination

By the middle of 1938, 213,000 Jews left Germany (in total, about 400,000 people managed to leave before the start of the massacres).

On November 7, 1938, the 17-year-old Polish Jew Herschel Grynszpan, who lived in Paris, severely wounded the secretary of the German embassy, ​​Ernst von Rath, with five shots, who died two days later.

Ironically, the diplomat was "under the hood" of the Gestapo as a covert anti-fascist.
On November 9, about three thousand people gathered in the huge hall of the Burgerbraukeller, a cult for the Nazis in Munich, where the "beer putsch" began in 1923, loudly demanding retribution.

"The National Socialist Party will not stoop to organizing protests against the Jews. But if a wave of popular indignation falls on the enemies of the Reich, then neither the police nor the army will interfere," Goebbels said.

At 00:20 Heydrich sent instructions to all local police and Gestapo departments regarding "spontaneous demonstrations": do not interfere with the pogromists, making sure that the lives and property of the Germans are not endangered, and arrest as many Jews as the prisons can accommodate, while take only healthy men, preferably rich.

About 20,000 people were arrested, 815 shops, 171 residential buildings, 195 synagogues were destroyed, 35 people were killed and 36 seriously injured, according to authorities. Other sources speak of 91 dead.

According to the German historian Hans Mommsen, the main goal of Kristallnacht was the seizure of property.

On November 11, Goering held a meeting at which he uttered the famous phrase: "I would not like to be a Jew in Germany today" and demanded "completely remove the Jews from the economic sphere."

Physical destruction has yet to be discussed. It was decided to cover the losses from the pogroms (25 million marks, including five million for broken shop windows) by confiscating property from the Jews, establishing an identification mark for them in the form of a yellow star on their clothes, forbidding them to study in public schools and universities, to be treated in public hospitals, visit beaches and resorts.

On the other hand, they rejected the idea of ​​giving them special railway wagons: what if, at rush hour, the Germans would have to crowd, and the Jews would settle down comfortably in their wagons?

They also refused to create a ghetto, on the grounds that the Jews would be left without the supervision of their German neighbors. In the occupied countries of Western Europe, on the contrary, ghettos were created everywhere - apparently, the Nazis doubted the readiness of the inhabitants there to inform.

Warsaw and Madagascar

The war with Poland had not yet ended, and on September 21, 1939, Heydrich had already held a meeting on the topic "The Jewish Question in the Occupied Territories," where it was decided to create ghettos and Judenrats from "rabbis and other persons who have influence in the area."

As head of the "Jewish" section of the Gestapo B4 in September 1939, Eichmann proposed that all the Jews of Europe be deported to Madagascar. The implementation of the plan was postponed until the victory over England and the neutralization of the British fleet.

The "directive on commissars" dated June 6, 1941, signed on the eve of the attack on the USSR by Field Marshal Keitel, dealt with "functionaries of the Communist Party", "propagandists and saboteurs" and "Jews in party and state institutions."
"The time has not yet come to talk openly about the extermination of the Jews just because they were born Jews," says French researcher Laurent Binet.

Revenge and paranoia

As Eichmann testified at a trial in Jerusalem in 1961, in early August 1941 Heydrich summoned him, showed him a document signed by Göring, and said: "The Fuehrer has given the order for the physical extermination of the Jews."

According to Eichmann, this came as a complete surprise to him.

True, he was a performer in the rank of Obersturmbannfuehrer (lieutenant colonel). An employee of Hitler's personal office, Viktor Brak, said at the Nuremberg trials that the decision had matured in Hitler's head around March 1941, and from that time on, it was no secret to representatives of the highest power echelon.
Historians suggest that after the victory over France, Hitler hoped that "democratically corrupted" Britain would soon sue for peace, that in America the isolationist Wendell Willkie would win the 1940 presidential election, and that Stalin would join the "Pact of Three" as a junior partner.

When Germany was involved in a war of annihilation with virtually the entire world (the position of the United States was no longer in doubt), he probably felt that he had nothing to lose.

Hitler famously said on January 30, 1939, at the celebration of the sixth anniversary of his coming to power: "If international Jewish financiers, outside and outside Europe, succeed once again in drawing the European nations into war, then its result will be the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe ".

It is not known what was more here: attempts to blackmail the world with the lives of innocent people, or sincere conviction that without "Jewish financiers" nothing is done in the world.

On August 21, 1939, 10 days before the start of World War II, the XXI Congress of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, through the mouth of its head and future first President of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, declared itself at war with Germany.
After the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht, there were enough reasons for this.

Of course, the "declaration of war" by a public organization could not be anything other than a propaganda act, like the "crusade against the Bolsheviks" proclaimed in 1930 by Pope Pius XI. However, the thesis: "The Jews unleashed the war" was widely used by Goebbels' propaganda.

Obsessed with paranoia and conspiracy theories, Hitler may well have believed that were it not for the Jews, the world would have recognized his hegemonic claims, and viewed the Holocaust as revenge.

Wannsee Conference

On January 20, 1942, a conference on the "final solution of the Jewish question" was held at the Villa Marlier on the shores of Lake Wannsee in Berlin. 15 secretaries of state (first deputy ministers) of interested departments were present. The main one and a half hour report was made by Heydrich, Eichmann took minutes.
Some historians tend to exaggerate the role of the Wannsee Conference, considering it the starting point of the Holocaust. However, by that time the main decisions had already been made, the discussion was reduced mainly to who is considered a Jew.

Heydrich handed out to the participants a list of European countries, indicating the number of people in each of them who should have been subjected to "forced evacuation." It included the not yet captured USSR, Britain, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden and Turkey, as well as Albania, where, according to the Gestapo, there were only 200 Jews.

Most of those present were non-partisan bureaucrats, more than half had doctorates, but all took what they heard for granted.

Hecatombs of victims

The "Wansee List" condemned to death about 11 million Jews in Europe.

Fortunately, the Nazis did not get to everyone.

“I will go to my grave laughing, because the fact that the death of five million Jews is on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction,” said Eichmann (though not under the gallows, but in Argentina, as he thought, safe).

The most well-known canonical figure is "6 million Holocaust victims", quoted in the documents of the UN and the Nuremberg Tribunal.
A number of scientists consider it rounded upwards. The data appeared in the first post-war years by comparing the Jewish population of European countries before the establishment of Hitler's domination and after the liberation, without taking into account the fact that some people managed to escape.
There is no complete list of names of the victims.

The Yad Vashem National Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem holds documents on some 4 million victims. The Jewish Documentation Center in Paris says 4.5 million.

The most accurate figure, based on his research, was given by Gerald Reitlinger: 4 million 192 thousand 200 people. Rudolf Rummel wrote about 4 million 204 thousand, Raul Hilberg about 5.1 million people.

Executioners and heroes

On May 27, 1942, Heydrich was killed in Prague by Czechoslovak patriots who collaborated with British intelligence.

Eichmann fled to Argentina, in 1960 he was found by Israeli intelligence "Mossad", taken to Jerusalem, tried and hanged (the only death penalty in the history of the Jewish state). klonik69 in

The history of the Second World War is not only “pages of valor and glory”, but also a tragic tale of the suffering of millions of people. The story about the Holocaust helps schoolchildren to imagine the picture of war and genocide carried out by the Nazis in a more three-dimensional way.
The purpose of the manual is to help the teacher introduce the theme of the Holocaust into the narrative of the causes and events of the war.
Of course, this is not easy. Many teachers prefer not to touch on this topic because of its versatility and complexity.
First of all, the teacher does not have enough hours to talk about a person in war and during war, about his suffering, about how war breaks people's lives and destinies, about how difficult it is to save oneself in extreme situations.
The papers are grouped under five headings. All of them can become the basis of an elective.
Some teachers find it possible to time the story of the Holocaust with memorials. calendar dates, for example, on the anniversaries of the Wannsee Conference, the shooting at Babi Yar, the liberation of Auschwitz.
There is another option. It seems possible to talk about the Holocaust in the context of topics included in existing programs. Information about the events of the Catastrophe can form an organic whole with a presentation of other events of the war.
The main place should be occupied by the organization of students' work on documents, their analysis under the guidance of a teacher or independently - in the classroom or at home. This form of training will make it possible to comprehend the document as a historical source and monument of the era, to teach how to work with it.
The most productive form of studying documents is group work.
In this case, all students should be provided with texts. To do this, it is enough to have 4-5 copies of the documents collected in the manual.
If the history room has the appropriate equipment (epiprojector, graph projector), you can project the document onto the screen, which will help students concentrate and create favorable conditions for teamwork. Placement of documents on the stand or on the wall is possible. The materials placed on the stand are used by the teacher and students during the lesson at all its stages.
Here's what a paperwork diagram might look like in a lesson on the topic "The rise of the Nazis to power in Germany."
The teacher's task is to help students get an idea of ​​how the country gradually turned into a totalitarian state. Students will inevitably come across new and difficult theoretical positions, concepts that are not explained at all in most modern history textbooks.
Methods for introducing documents into the fabric of the lesson can be different. Working with texts, the teacher writes on the blackboard (or introduces with the help of banners for a graph projector, computer display) key concepts: racism, national discrimination, anti-Semitism, human rights, genocide. Students are invited to reveal one of these concepts, based on documents (orally or in a short written message).
Another example is the study of the topic “Nazi occupation regime on the territory of the USSR” (course “History of Russia”, XI grade).
When studying this topic, we are talking about the goals of the invaders in the occupied territories, about economic exploitation, about the attitude towards the population, about the destruction of "hostile elements" in the conquered zones (the Nazis included Jews among such "elements"). The documents included in the manual allow you to talk about the last two thematic stories. In the general scenario of the disclosure of the topic, these plots are important because they provide an opportunity to show how the Nazis suppressed the human dignity of those living in the occupied territory, how the terror regime was established and implemented.
To organize work on questions for documents, the teacher distributes students into groups (4-5 students in each).
The lesson can start with a short introduction by the teacher, in which he talks about the huge number of victims, not only on the battlefield, but also in the occupied territory. The papers are then distributed to the students. One group of schoolchildren receives a document “From the protocol of the interrogation of SS Gruppenfuehrer Ohlendorf”, the other gets acquainted with excerpts from the diary of Olga Shargorodskaya, a resident of Yalta. The third group of students reads an excerpt from the diary of a student from Mariupol, Sarah Gleich. Another group of schoolchildren receive a photo document “Prisoners of the Ghetto in Smolensk” and excerpts from a diary kept by 16-year-old Kremenets schoolboy Roman Kravchenko.
Collectively prepare answers to the proposed questions. The teacher leads the discussion by involving students in the discussion of problems.
Another topic related to the Holocaust is the "Resistance Movement". When studying it, it is possible to emphasize the general humanistic motives of this movement - the nobility of goals, the heroism and self-sacrifice of its participants, the solidarity of representatives different peoples who participated in this movement.
It is appropriate to note the participation of the Jewish population in this struggle. The teacher can bring to the attention of schoolchildren calls for an uprising in the Vilnius ghetto, documents about the actions of an underground detachment of children, about the actions of underground workers in Minsk (all these texts are reproduced in the manual).
The schemes of conducting lessons discussed above can also be used in the optional (special course) classes on the history of the Holocaust. Some of his classes should be devoted to watching and discussing fragments of documentaries and feature films related to the events of World War II, meetings with ghetto prisoners and members of the Resistance.
Documents about the Holocaust collected in the manual can also serve as material for a teacher-student conversation. elementary school. In this context, we should mention the story of an underground detachment of children in the ghetto, the memoirs of 12-year-old ghetto prisoner Roman Levin about his desire to survive, stories about the righteous people of the world.
Sheets of a package of documentary materials can become the basis of expositions that students, under the guidance of a teacher, prepare after school hours. In this case, publications of newspapers and magazines are also used. Such stands can be dedicated to memorable dates from the history of the Holocaust - the anniversaries of Kristallnacht or the Wannsee Conference, the Nuremberg trials or the execution in Babi Yar, the release of prisoners of death camps. Similar stands can be hung in the history room or in the recreation area adjacent to the room.
Documents that have the power of emotional impact that evoke empathy (for example, diary entries, photographs, etc.) can be the starting point for research work, for participation in essay competitions, etc.