The Holocaust
The systematic murder of Europe's Jews began in the summer of 1941 and killed some six million people. The persecution had been running since 1933 in stages — exclusion from professions, the Nuremberg laws of 1935, the November pogrom of 1938, ghettoisation in occupied Poland from 1939 — and each stage had been accompanied by plans for expulsion rather than extermination. The invasion of the Soviet Union changed the method. Four Einsatzgruppen with some 3,000 men followed the army with lists and shot Jewish communities at the edge of their own towns: 33,771 people at Babi Yar outside Kiev over two days in September 1941, and around 1.5 million in total by shooting. The shooting was found to be slow and to damage the men doing it, and gassing followed — vans at Chełmno from December 1941, and then the camps built for the purpose in occupied Poland at Bełżec, Sobibor and Treblinka, which existed only to kill and which have almost no survivors. Auschwitz-Birkenau combined killing with slave labour and took transports from every occupied country. Wannsee in January 1942 coordinated the ministries rather than deciding it. The victims also included some 200,000 Roma, 250,000 disabled people killed under the euthanasia programme, Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses. Two-thirds of European Jewry was destroyed, and the Yiddish-speaking civilisation of eastern Europe ceased to exist. The scale of the bureaucratic participation is what the postwar trials established. Railway timetables, insurance policies, patent applications for crematoria, and the confiscation and resale of property required tens of thousands of ordinary officials to do their jobs, and almost all of them kept their positions afterwards.
- Year: 1941 CE
- Category: Political
