Holocaust
Holocaust, originally, a religious rite in
which an offering was entirely
consumed by fire. In current usage, holocaust
refers to any widespread human
disaster, but as the term Holocaust it means
the almost complete destruction of
European Jews by Nazi Germany When the
Nazi regime came to power in Germany in
1933, it immediately began to
take systematic measures against Jews. The Nazi
Party, government
agencies, banks, and business enterprises made concerted
efforts to eliminate
Jews from economic life, and from German life in general.
In 1938,
following the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young
Jew,
all synagogues in Germany were set on fire, windows of Jewish shops
were
smashed, and thousands of Jews were arrested. This "Night of Broken
When
World War II began in 1939, the German army occupied the western
half of Poland,
bringing almost 2 million more Jews under Germany's control.
Polish Jews were
forced to move into ghettos surrounded by walls and barbed
wire. Unemployment,
malnutrition, and poverty were widespread; housing was
overcrowded; and typhus
was common. In June 1941 German armies invaded the
Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (USSR), and soldiers in special units
were dispatched to kill all
Soviet Jews on the spot. A month after
operations began in the USSR, Hermann Göring,
the second in command of Nazi
Germany, sent a directive to Reinhard Heydrich,
chief of the Reich Security
Main Office, charging him with the task of
organizing a "final solution to
the Jewish question" in all of
German-dominated Europe. Jews in Germany
were then forced to wear badges or
armbands marked with a yellow star. Soon
the Nazis deported tens of thousands to
ghettos in Poland and to occupied
Soviet cities. Death camps, or concentration
camps, equipped with gas
chambers were erected in occupied Poland. People were
deported from the
ghettos; although their destinations were not disclosed,
reports of mass
deaths eventually reached surviving Jews, as well as the
governments of the
United States and Britain. Wherever possible, the Germans
confiscated the
deportees' belongings and bank accounts. Auschwitz, near Kraków,
was the
largest concentration camp, with inmates from all over Europe.
Many
Jewish and non-Jewish inmates performed industrial labor. The Nazis
subjected
some prisoners to medical experiments and gassed Jews and Roma
(Gypsies). They
also shot thousands of inmates, while others died from
starvation or disease.
Large crematories were constructed to incinerate
bodies. By the end of the war
in 1945, millions of Jews—as well as Slavs,
Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah's
Witnesses, Communists, and others targeted
by the Nazis—had been killed or had
died in the Holocaust. The Museum of
Tolerance in Los Angeles and the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington, D.C., opened in 1993 to
commemorate the Holocaust.