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This is the second half of the Holocaust article.

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Child inmates of the Buchenwald concentration camp at the time of its liberation in 1945

Contents

[edit] Numbers

Since 1945 the most commonly cited figure for the total number of Jews killed in the course of the Holocaust has been 6 million. Despite challenges from "revisionists" of various kinds, this figure has been vindicated by all serious researchers. The most important Holocaust commemoration centre, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, comments:

"There is no precise figure for the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. The figure commonly used is the 6 million quoted by Adolf Eichmann, a senior SS official. Most research confirms that the number of victims was between five and six million. Early calculations range from 5.1 million (Professor Raul Hilberg) to 5.95 million (Jacob Leschinsky). More recent research, by Professor Yisrael Gutman and Dr Robert Rozett in the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust, estimates the Jewish losses at 5.59 to 5.86 million, and a study headed by Dr Wolfgang Benz presents a range from 5.29 million to 6 million. The main sources for these statistics are comparisons of prewar censuses with postwar censuses and population estimates. Nazi documentation containing partial data on various deportations and murders is also used."

There were about 8 to 10 million Jews in the territories controlled directly or indirectly by the Nazis (the uncertainty arises from the lack of knowledge about how many Jews there were in the Soviet Union). The 6 million killed in the Holocaust thus represent 60 to 75 percent of these Jews. Of Poland's 3.3 million Jews, over 90 percent were killed. The same proportion were killed in Latvia and Lithuania, but most of Estonia's Jews were evacuated in time. In Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Netherlands and Yugoslavia, over 70 percent were killed. More than 50 percent were killed in Belgium, Hungary and Romania. It is likely that a similar proportion were killed in Belarus and Ukraine, but these figures are less certain. Countries with notably lower proportions of deaths include Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Italy and Norway. Finally, of the 750,000 Jews in Germany and Austria in 1933, only about a quarter survived. Although many German Jews emigrated before 1939, the majority of these fled to Czechoslovakia, France or the Netherlands, from where they were later deported to their deaths.

The number of people killed at the major extermination camps has been estimated as follows: Auschwitz: about 1 million; Belzec: 436,000; Chelmno: 340,000; Majdanek: 300,000 to 350,000; Maly Trostenets: at least 200,000, possibly over 500,000; Sobibór: 260,000; Treblinka: at least 700,000, possibly over 1 million. This gives a total of at least 3.2 million, and possibly 3.8 million. Of these, over 90% were Jews. These seven camps thus accounted for about half the total number of Jews killed in the entire Nazi Holocaust. Virtually the whole Jewish population of Poland died in these camps.

To this figure of 3.2 to 3.8 million must be added at least half a million Jews who died in other camps, including the major concentration camps in Germany. These were not extermination camps, but had large numbers of Jewish prisoners at various times, particularly in the last year of the war as the Nazis withdrew from Poland. About a million people died in these camps, and although the proportion of Jews is not known with certainty, it was probably more than 50 percent. The largest death tolls were at Mauthausen (195,000) Bergen-Belsen (170,000) and Sachsenhausen (100,100). Another 800,000 to 1 million Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet territories (an approximate figure, since the Einsatzgruppen killings were frequently undocumented). Many more died through execution or of disease and malnutrition in the ghettoes of Poland before they could be deported.

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German forces during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

[edit] Resistance

Many writers have asked why millions of European Jews went to their deaths with hardly a flicker of protest or resistance. Some Jewish commentators have expressed contempt for the passivity and fatalism of the Jewish communities of central Europe, which they blame on the "ghetto mentality." Ariel Sharon, now Prime Minister of Israel, said in a 1982 interview: "Listen, a people that gave itself up to be slaughtered, a people that let soap to be made of its children and lamp shades from the skin of its women, is a worse criminal than its murderers. Worse than the Nazis."

This contempt for the failure of prewar European Jewry to save itself from the Nazis, or even to try to do so, was a powerful factor fuelling militant Zionism in the postwar years, and since 1948 has stiffened Israel's determination to do whatever it thinks necessary to defend itself, even in the teeth of world opinion, as Sharon's own career illustrates. Jewish failure to resist the Holocaust has thus become a factor in current political controversy.

In fact, of course, there were some examples of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust, most notably the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of January 1943, when thousands of poorly-armed Jewish fighters held the SS at bay for four weeks and killed several hundred Germans before being crushed by overwhelmingly superior forces. This was followed by the rising in the Treblinka extermination camp in May 1943, when about 200 inmates succeeded in escaping from the camp after overpowering the guards. Two weeks later, there was a rising in the Bialystok ghetto. In September there was a short-lived rising in the Vilnius ghetto revolted. In October 600 Jewish and Russian prisoners attempted an escape at the Sobibór death camp. About 60 survived and joined the Soviet partisans. Most of the participants in these risings were killed, but some managed to escape and joined partisan units. There was also a rising at Auschwitz in October 1944, shortly before the camp was closed.

In Poland and the occupied Soviet lands, thousands of Jews fled into the swamps and forests and joined the partisans, although the partisan movements did not always welcome them. In Lithuania and Belarus, an area with a heavy concentration of Jews and also an area which suited partisan operations, Jewish partisan groups operated, and saved thousands of Jews from extermination. No such opportunities, of course, existed for the Jewish populations of cities such as Amsterdam or Budapest. Joining the partisans was an option only for the young and the fit, who were willing moreover to abandon their families to their fate. The strong Jewish sense of family solidarity meant that this was not an option for most Jews, who prefered to die togther rather than be separated.

For the great majority of Jews resistance could take only the passive forms of delay, evasion, negotiation, bargaining and, where possible, bribery of German officials. The Nazis enouraged this by forcing the Jewish communities to police themselves, through bodies such as the Reich Association of Jews (Reichsvereinigung der Juden) in Germany and the Jewish Councils (Judenrate) in the Polish urban ghettos. They cunningly held out the promise of concessions in exchange for each surrender, enmeshing the Jewish leaderships so deeply in well-intentioned compromise that a decision to stand and fight was never possible. The Holocaust survivor Alexander Kimel wrote: "The youth in the ghettos dreamed about fighting. But many factors that inhibited our responses: the most important factors were isolation and historical conditioning to accepting martyrdom."

The "historical conditioning" of the Jewish communities of Europe to accept persecution and to avert disaster through compromise and negotiation was the most important factor in the failure to resist until the very end (the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising only took place when the Jewish population had been reduced from 500,000 to 100,000 and it was obvious that no further compromise was possible). Paul Johnson writes: "The Jews had been persecuted for a millennium and a half and had learned from long experience that resistance cost lives rather than saved them. Their history, their theology, their folklore, their social structure, even their vocabulary trained them to negotiate, to pay, to plead, to protest, not to fight." He also points out that the emigration of millions of Jews, mainly the young, energetic and ambitious, to America and to Palestine over the previous 50 years had left the Jewish communities composed mainly of the religious, the conservative and the resigned to their fate. In the Soviet areas, the Jewish leadership had already been exterminated by the Communist regime.

The Jewish communities were systematically deceived about German intentions, and also cut off from most sources of news about the outside world. The Germans always told the Jews that they were being deported to work camps in the east, and maintained this illusion through elaborate deceptions all the way to the gas chamber doors. As photographs testify, Jews disembarked at the railway stations at Auschwitz and other extermination camps carring sacks and suitcases, clearly having no idea of the fate that awaited them. Rumours of the reality of the extermination camps filtered back only slowly to the ghettos, and were usually not believed (just as they were not believed when courageous couriers such as Jan Karsky conveyed them to the western Allies). It is difficult to blame people in such desperate circumstances for clinging to whatever shreds of hope they were offered.

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Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler

[edit] Responsibility

[edit] Hitler

There can be little doubt that the ultimate responsibility for the Holocaust lies with Adolf Hitler. The revisionist historian David Irving, in his book Hitler's War (1977), devotes a great deal of effort to showing that there is no documentary evidence that Hitler ordered the killing of the Jews, or even that he knew of it. "Hitler was a pragmatist," he writes. "It would have been unlike him to sanction the use of scarce transport to millions of Jews east for no other purpose than liquidating them there; nor would he willingly destroy manpower." Few other historians or Hitler biographers share this view. Most take the view that Hitler was the very opposite of a pragmatist: his overriding obsession was hatred of the Jews, and he showed on a number of occasions that he was willing to risk losing the war to achieve their destruction.

It is true that there is no "smoking gun" in the form of a document which shows Hitler ordering the Final Solution. This is not surprising. Hitler did not have a bureaucratic mind and many of his most important instructions were given orally. This did not matter: in Nazi Germany his word was quite literally law. Irving cites several cases in which Himmler ordered written reports which refered directly to the killing of the Jews to be redrafted before showing them to Hitler. But this is not surprising either. It is quite understandabe that Himmler was careful not to allow the creation of a documentary record showing that he and Hitler were about to commit one of history's greatest crimes.

It is very hard to believe that Hitler did not know that the Jews were being exterminated. There is ample documentary evidence that he authorised the mass deportations of the Jews to the east beginning in October 1941. He cannot have imagined that these hundreds of thousands of Jews would be housed, clothed and fed by the authorities of the Government-General, and in fact Hans Frank frequently complained that he could not cope with the influx. Even Irving concedes that after Himmler's speech at Posen in October 1943 Hitler must have known what was happening.

Whether or not Hitler actually told Himmler to kill the Jews is in a sense immaterial. Hitler had created the Nazi movement, and the SS as its elite corps, and had imbued them with his own fanatic anti-Semitism. He had made it clear many times that he intended to destroy the Jewish people. Himmler did not need either written or spoken authorisation to translate his Führer's wishes into deeds. He acted in the belief that he was carrying out Hitler's will, and in that he was correct. Hitler thus carries the ultimate moral responsibility for the Holocaust.

[edit] Other Nazi leaders

The handful of men who actually carried out the extermination of 6 million people in three years included Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann, Kaltenbrunner, Heinrich Müller of the Gestapo and Oswald Pohl, head of the Economics and Main Administration Office (WVHA) of the SS. Sauckel, Frank, the Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and the Labor Minister Robert Ley also played key roles. Other top Nazi leaders such as Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, and probably Martin Bormann knew in broad terms what was happening, but had no direct role. Göring made some efforts to save the skilled Jewish workforce, but his motives were exclusively pragmatic and he did not press his objections.

The Nazi regime operated through vertical hierarchies. Officials carried out orders from above and did not ask questions about what was happening elsewhere. Only those at the very top had a broad view of what was going on across the German empire. But most senior SS officers and many officials of the various Reich ministries must have known in whole or in part what was happening. Millions of people were rounded up, bureaucratically processed and transported across Europe, an operation involving thousands of officials and a great deal of paperwork. This was co-ordinated by the Reich ministries, the police, and the national railways, as well as the SS and the Gestapo, all under the supervision of the Nazi Party. Most of the Party's regional leaders (Gauleiters) were present for Himmler's Posen speech. None of these people could plead ignorance after the event, although many did so.

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Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg

[edit] The German Army

The extent to which the officers of the regular German Army knew of the Final Solution has been much debated. Political imperatives in postwar Germany have led to the Army being generally absolved from responsibility, apart from the handful of "Nazi generals" such as Alfred Jodl and Wilhelm Keitel who were tried and hanged at Nuremberg. Many front-line officers went through the war without coming into direct contact with the machinery of extermination. Others chose to focus narrowly on their duties and not notice the wider context of the war. Relations between the Army and the SS were not friendly, and some officers refused to co-operate with Himmler's forces. General Johannes Blaskowitz was relieved of his command after officially protesting about SS atrocities in Poland. Others, such as Walther von Reichenau and Erich von Manstein, actively supported the work of the Einsatzgruppen.

It was nevertheless difficult for commanders on the eastern front to avoid knowing what was happening in the areas behind the front. Joachim Fest points out that one of the factors that led Claus von Stauffenberg and other German officers to plot the July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler was their growing awareness of the crimes that Hitler was committing in Germany's name. Stauffenberg argued that these crimes released German officers from the oath of loyalty they had taken to Hitler. If Stauffenberg and other officers in his circle were aware of the Holocaust, so must many others who did not act on that knowledge as Stauffenberg did, at the cost of his life.

[edit] The German people

The responsibility of the German people as a whole for the Holocaust has once again became a matter of heated debate since the publication of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners in 1996. Goldhagen argues that the great majority of Germans (and Austrians) knew and approved of the extermination of the Jews, and that most would have actively participated in it had they been asked to do so. He provides extensive documention of the depth, ubiquity and antiquity of anti-Semitic sentiment in Germany, and of the equanimity with which large numbers of ordinary Germans obeyed orders to kill defenceless civilians, or even volunteered to do so, and how few Germans protested against what was going on. Although critics have found many deficiencies in Goldhagen's book, his compilation of documentary evidence of widespread German responsibility for the Holocaust is hard to ignore.

Most historians are sceptical about Goldhagen's thesis that the majority of Germans subscribed to an "eliminationist" form of anti-Semitism and that they were not only aware of but in agreement with the extermination of the Jews. The most scathing attack on Goldhagen has been Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn's book A Nation on Trial. Finkelstein and Birn examined Goldhagen's references and concluded that Hitler's Willing Executioners was (in the words of one reviewer) "not worthy of being called an academic text."

Goldhagen's critics point out that the Nazi Party did not advocate killing the Jews before they came to power, and that therefore even the minority of Germans who voted for the Nazis in elections before 1933 were not voting for a holocaust of the Jews. They point out that the regime went to considerable lengths to conceal the truth about what was being done not only from world opinion but from the German public. The official line that the Jews were being "deported to work in the east" was always maintained, partly to deceive the Jews about the fate that awaited them, but partly also to mislead the German public.

Neverthless, knowledge about at least some aspects of the Holocaust must have been very widespread among Germans. As Paul Johnson points out, the SS had 900,000 members in 1943, most of whom participated in one way or another in actions against the Jews, and the German national railways, the Reichsbahn, employed 1.2 million people, the majority of whom helped process the lines of cattle-cars packed with suffering Jews being transported eastwards, and the car-loads of clothes, shoes and other goods coming back. Many other elements of the sprawling German civil service, from the Reichsbank which received tonnes of gold from the melted dental work of dead Jews to the Ministry of Food and Agriculture which employed slave labour on German farms, participated in various ways in the pillage and killing of the Jews, and many thousands of middle and low-ranking bureaucrats must have had some awareness of what they were doing.

It is frequently argued that even if ordinary Germans were aware of the extermination of the Jews, there is nothing they could have done to protest or prevent the actions of one of the most ruthless dictatorships of modern times. Most writers have in general accepted this view. Goldhagen, however, raises some pertinent objections. He points out that it was not in fact impossible for German civil society to protest against actions of the Nazi regime. When the Nazis attempted to remove crucifixes from schools in Bavaria in 1936, and again in 1941, protests forced them to back down. Strikes by industrial workers on economic issues were common, at least in the prewar period, and were not seriously punished. The best known example of public protest was the campaign against the regime's programme of euthanasia of people with physical and intellectual disabilities, known as "T4," which had to be abandoned in 1941 due to protests led by the Catholic Church and some parts of the medical profession.

Even more notable, both for its success and its uniqueness, was the three-day protest in Berlin in February 1943, led by over a thousand non-Jewish German women against the arrest of their Jewish husbands (a category which had hitherto been exempt from deportation). Faced with public protests in the capital, the regime backed down and released 1,700 Jews from captivity, some of them actually being brought back from Auschwitz, and the protesting women suffered no reprisals. In the name of consistency the regime then released all Jewish men married to non-Jewish women, in France as well as Germany, some 6,000 in all. This was the only public protest against the persecution of the Jews during the entire 12-year period of Nazi rule.

[edit] Other nationalities

Although the Holocaust was planned and directed by Germans, the Nazi regime found many willing collaborators in other countries, both those allied to Germany and those under German occupation. The civil service and police of the Vichy regime in occupied France actively collaborated in persecuting French Jews. Germany's allies Italy, Finland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria were pressured to introduce anti-Jewish measures, but with the exception of Romania they did not comply until compelled to do so. Bulgaria and Finland refused to co-operate, and the 50,000 Bulgarian Jews survived almost unscathed. The Hungarian regime of Miklos Horthy also refused to co-operate, but after his fall and the German occupation of Hungary in 1944 over 500,000 Hungarian Jews were deported. The Romanian regime of Ion Antonescu enthusiastically collaborated, but its inefficiency meant that only a third of Romania's 600,000 Jews were deported. The German puppet regime in Croatia actively persecuted Jews on its own initiative.

Probably the most conspicuous collaborators in the Holocaust were the Romanians, whose army killed about 400,000 Jews during their occupation of Bessarabia (Moldova), Bukovina and parts of western Ukraine including Odessa. Otto Ollendorf testified at his trial that the behaviour of the Romanians assisting the Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine disgusted even the SS: they engaged in an orgy of rape and plunder, and killed most of their victims by herding them into barns and burning them alive.

The Nazis sought to enlist support for their programs in all the countries they occupied, although their recruitment methods differed in various countries according to Nazi racial theories. In the "Nordic" countries of Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands, they tried to recruit young men into the Waffen SS, with sufficient success to create the "Wiking" SS division on the eastern front, whose members fought for Germany with great fanaticism until the end of the war. In the Baltic states and Ukraine, on the other hand, they recruited large numbers of auxiliary troops into SS battalions which were used for anti-partisan work and guard duties at extermination and concentration camps. Most of these recruits were peasant boys who enlisted simply to gain a ration card, but the Germans were able in these countries to appeal to long traditions of local anti-Semitism.

In recent years the extent of local collaboration with the Nazis in eastern Europe has become more apparent. Lord Bullock writes: "The opening of the archives both in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe has produced incontrovertible evidence [of] ... collaboration on a much bigger scale than hitherto realized of Ukrainians and Lithuanians as well as Hungarians, Croats and Slovaks in the deportation and murder of Jews."

Defendants in the dock at the Nuremberg Trial of major Nazi war criminals. Front row: Göring, Hess, von Ribbentrop, Keitel. Second row: Dönitz, Raeder, Schirach, Sauckel.
Defendants in the dock at the Nuremberg Trial of major Nazi war criminals. Front row: Göring, Hess, von Ribbentrop, Keitel. Second row: Dönitz, Raeder, Schirach, Sauckel.

[edit] Punishment

By the time the victorious Allies came to mete out justice to the leading officials of the Nazi regime, the inspirer of the Holocaust, Hitler, and its chief architects, Himmler and Heydrich, were dead. (Himmler was captured by British troops near Hamburg but committed suicide when recognised.) But the second-rank officials responsible for carrying out Himmler's plans - Eichmann, Frank, Frick, Kaltenbrunner, Ley, Pohl and Sauckel - were in Allied hands, as were most of the extermination camp commandants and Einsatzgruppe commanders who had carried out their orders. Of those with executive responsibility, only Müller of the Gestapo got away: he vanished with trace and his fate remains unknown. In January 1946, however, Eichmann escaped from an American internment camp. With the help of the Vatican he found refuge in Argentina.

[edit] The Nuremberg Trial

Faced the unprecedented task of deciding what to do with leading officials of a defeated enemy regime which had just carried out the largest mass murder in recorded history, the Allies created a special court, the International Military Tribunal, which tried twenty-four of the most important Nazi political and military leaders between November 1945 and October 1946 (see Nuremberg Trials). Seventeen of these were indicted for a new form of crime, crimes against humanity, which covered the extermination of the Jews as well as other crimes against civilian populations. (Robert Ley would also have been indicted, but killed himself before the trial began.) Sixteen were convicted (Rudolf Hess was acquitted), and ten were executed: Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Arthur Seyss-Inquart and Julius Streicher. Hermann Göring was sentenced to death, but killed himself before the sentence could be carried out. Martin Bormann was sentenced to death in absentia, but was in fact already dead.

Of those executed, Frank, Frick, Kaltenbrunner and Sauckel had been centrally involved in the Holocaust: Frank as Governor-General of Poland, Frick as Interior Minister, Kaltenbrunner as head of the RSHA after Heydrich's death and Sauckel as head of the forced labor system. Seyss-Inquart, as Reichskommissar for the Netherlands from 1940 to 1945, was responsible for deporting more than 100,000 Dutch Jews to their deaths. Rosenberg had been Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories and a leading Nazi "racial theorist," but had had little executive authority. Streicher was a violently anti-Semitic newspaper editor and Nazi Gauleiter, but had had no executive position. Jodl, Keitel and Ribbentrop had had no direct involvement with the Holocaust.

Four other defendants were convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to terms of imprisonment: Economics Minister Walther Funk, Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, Armaments Minister Albert Speer and Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath, who had preceded Heydrich as "Protector" of Bohemia and Moravia. Of these, only Speer had been directly involved in the Holocaust: he had employed hundreds of thousands of Jewish and other slave laborers in munitions and aircraft plants (particularly in the "Dora" plant near Buchenwald concentration camp), in the full knowledge that they were being worked to death. He had been present for Himmler's 1943 speech to the Gauleiters in Posen, so he was fully aware of the wider Holocaust. In the opinion of his most recent biographer Gitta Sereny, Speer would have been sentenced to death had the Tribunal known of the full extent of his complicity.

[edit] Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings

While these trials were still in progress, the United States occupation authorities established secondary courts, presided over by civilian judges, to conduct trials of second-rank defendants accused of war crimes, including participation in the Holocaust. Twelve trials, known as the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings, were held between December 1946 and April 1949, trying a total of 177 defendants. Each of the twelve cases dealt with a specific class of defendant. The most important cases from the point of view of responsibility for the Holocaust were the Einsatzgruppen Case, in which 24 defendants were charged with the murder of civilians in occupied countries, the Medical Case, in which 23 physicians were charged with conducting inhuman experiments on prisoners of war and civilians, mainly in the extermination and concentration camps, and the Pohl case, in which Oswald Pohl and seventeen other members of Economic and Administrative Office (WVHA) were charged with responsibility for Vernichtung durch Arbeit (annihilation through work) system in the extermination camps and also in the SS-run labor camps in Poland and elsewhere. In the course of these trials, 24 defenadants were sentenced to death, including 14 in the Einsarzgruppen Case, but only eleven were eventually executed.

More trials were carried out in the British Zone, before military tribunals. The best-known of these was the trial of Josef Kramer and 44 others accused of war crimes at Belsen and Auschwitz. Trials were also conducted by the French Permanent Military Tribunal in the French Occupation Zone of Germany. Some defendants, including Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and Amon Göth commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp near Krakow (where the film Schindler's List is set), were handed over to Poland and were tried before the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland. Trials were also held in Denmark, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, at which large numbers of civilian, military, police, and SS personnel were tried for crimes committed during the German occupation.

[edit] Later trials

After 1949, when German sovereignty was re-established, war crimes trials were conducted by German courts. Between 1949 and 1983, according to the German government, 88,000 war crimes cases were opened in the Federal Republic of (West) Germany, for a variety of crimes committed under the Nazi regime, including crimes related to the Holocaust. One of the best known of these was the 1970 trial of Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp. After about 1950, however, German courts were increasingly reluctant to convict defendants unless it could be proved that they had personally committed crimes such as murder or torture. The great majority of defendants who were charged only with administrative responsibility for crimes were acquitted. According to German government figures, 6,500 people were convicted of war crimes by German courts. During the period 1949 to 1992, German courts convicted and punished only 472 defendants for involvement in the persecution and killing of Jews.

In May 1960 Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped in Argentina by Israeli agents. He was tried by an Israeli court from February to December 1961, charged with crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people, and membership of an outlawed organisation. The Israeli government ensured maximum publicity for the trial by allowing it to be televised. Eichmann could not deny the facts of his central role in the Holocaust, but insisted that he was only following orders. Convicted on all counts, he was sentenced to death and hanged in June 1962.

The trial was extraordinary in that Eichmann, a German citizen, was tried in a country whose courts had no jurisdiction over him, and which had not existed at the time his crimes were committed. By accepting the legitimacy of the trial, the international community (including Germany) recognised Israel's role as the representative of the European Jews killed in the Holocaust. The trial also served to highlight the role that anonymous bureaucrats such as Eichmann had played in the Holocaust, and reinforced the principle, already established at Nuremberg, that "following orders" was not a defence in cases of this kind.

Since the 1960s the Israeli government, and Nazi hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal and Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, have continued to pursue Nazis who escaped justice. Some of these, like Eichmann, found refuge in South America, where the right-wing regimes of Juan Peron in Argentina and Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, countries with large German communities, welcomed them. The Auschwitz camp doctor Josef Mengele, for example, lived in Argentina and Paraguay and died undetected in 1979.

For reasons which have never been fully explained, the Vatican helped some of these fugitives by providing them with passports and other documents. Others went to Arab countries such as Egypt and Syria, where they were employed as military advisors. Some war criminals were also protected by elements of British and U.S. intelligence agencies because of their usefulness in the context of the Cold War. Others were allowed to settle in countries such as Australia.

In 1983 the former SS chief in Lyon, Klaus Barbie, was deported from Bolivia and put on trial in France. This was the first major war crimes trial in Europe for more than a decade and marked a new willingness on the part of European governments, and particularly France, to pursue the remaining Nazi war criminals. Barbie was setenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, specifically including crimes against French Jews, and died in prison.

France was less willing to prosecute former officials of the Vichy regime for their role in the deportation of the French Jews. President François Mitterrand, himself a Vichy civil servant, blocked such investigations throughout his presidency. In 1997, however, French authorities successfully prosecuted Maurice Papon, a former police official, for crimes against French Jews. Papon, now aged 95, is still in prison. Another Vichy official, Paul Touvier, was convicted in 1994 (having been sheltered for years by the Catholic Church), and died in prison.

John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born U.S. citizen , was accused in 1986 of having been "Ivan the Terrible," a notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka extermination camp. Demjanjuk denied this, but was deported to Israel, where in April 1988 he was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death, mainly on the basis of eye-witness testimony by five Holocaust survivors. Documents then emerged proving that while Demjanjuk had been a camp guard, he was not at Treblinka, and the conviction was overturned.

The Demjanjuk trial demonstrated the unreliablity of eye-witness testimony to events which by 1988 were 45 years in the past. With the passage of time it becomes increasingly unlikely that any more Nazi war criminals will be detected. Even if they are it is unlikely that any court will now rule that they can be given a fair trial, 60 years after the events in question.

[edit] Consequences

Adolf Hitler did not succeed in his ambition of exterminating the Jews of Europe. But the Holocaust had a profound effect on Jewish life both demographically and politically, and had many other consequences which are still being felt. Demographically, the Holocaust killed 55 percent of the 11 million Jews in Europe (including the Soviet Union) in 1939, and 35 percent of the 17 million Jews in the world. The heart of the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazic Jewry of central and eastern Europe was destroyed, bringing to an end 300 years of Jewish history and culture in the region. Yiddish culture and the Yiddish language received blows from which they have never recovered. Although Yiddish has defied predictions that it would soon become extinct, English and Hebrew are today the dominant languages of world Jewry.

One consequence of the destruction of the European Jewish communities was that the centre of gravity of world Jewry shifted from eastern Europe to the United States, which in 1945 became, and has remained, the largest Jewish community in the world. The second-largest Jewish community, that of the Soviet Union, remained under Communist rule until 1991 and was unable to exercise any independent political role, leaving the dominance of American Jewry unchallenged. Since the American Jewish community is also wealthy, highly educated and thoroughly integrated into the mainstream of American life, and since the United States has risen since 1945 to a position of world hegemony, this has given American Jews a position of influence unparalleled in world history.

The next consequence was the emigration of most of the surviving central European Jews to other countries. In 1945 there were still 400,000 Jews in Romania, 300,000 in Poland, 100,000 in Hungary and several hundred thousand in other parts of the region. Most of these had been rendered homeless, and up to a million were living in "Displaced Persons" camps scattered across Europe. The rapid imposition of Communist rule in east-central Europe, and the upsurge of anti-Semitic sentiment in parts of the region (particularly Poland), led most Jews to the conclusion that there was no future for them in Europe. Over the next decade hundreds of thousands of Jews emigrated to the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia and other countries, establishing centres of Jewish life with a strong core of Holocaust survivors, whose influence has continued to be felt to the present day.

The most important consequence of the Holocaust for the Jews was of course the powerful impetus it gave to Zionism, the belief that the Jews could only live in security and freedom in a state of their own. Before 1933 Zionism had been a minority viewpoint among Jews, and even many of those who supported Zionism as an idea had little faith in the prospect of a Jewish state actually being created. Zionism was rejected both by liberals, who believed that Jews should integrate themselves into the countries where they lived, and by socialists, who believed that Jews should seek the revolutionary transformation of the countries where they lived. The Holocaust appeared to prove the falsity of all such hopes.

The state of Israel came into existence as a result of the unique set of circumstances which prevailed between 1945 and 1948. The 600,000 Jews in Palestine were armed and militant, although not the majority of the population there. Their resolution was stiffened by the arrival of a phalanx of battle-hardened Holocaust survivors from Europe, of whom Menachem Begin was a typical example. There were hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees languishing in camps in Europe, many of them clamouring to be allowed to emigrate to Palestine. Britain, which had held Palestine under a League of Nations Mandate since 1922, was bankrupt and exhausted, and desperate to extricate itself. The United States had become the dominant world power, and under the notably philo-Semitic President Harry S. Truman lent its powerful support to Zionist ambitions in Palestine.

The experiences of the Holocaust gave the Zionist movement qualities of intransigence and militancy born of grief and anger, which led to a determination to prevail over the British, the Arab population of Palestine and the Arab states in the creation and subsequent defence of the Jewish state. These qualities influenced the Israeli national character which evolved after 1948, leading to Israel's reputation for ruthlessness and inflexibility and to its willingness to defy world opinion - particularly European opinion, which Israelis continue to hold in contempt. Ariel Sharon summed up this attitude in a 1982 interview: "Call Israel by any name you like... I am not after the admiration of the gentiles. I don't need their love. I have to live, and I intend to ensure that my children will live as well. I will destroy anyone who will raise a hand against my children, I will destroy him and his children... History teaches us that he who won't kill will be killed by others. That is an iron law."

Ironically, Israel found another powerful ally in the Federal Republic of Germany, which recovered its sovereignty in 1949. In 1952 Germany agreed to provide Israel with more than US$800 million in reparations, as well as to pay direct reparations to 275,000 Israeli Holocaust survivors, payments which continue to the present. For a small country, this infusion of several billion dollars provided an enormous economic boost. (Israel also received large amounts of economic and military aid from the United States.) Germany also became a consistent diplomatic ally of Israel, at least until the 1990s, when the passing of the generation with adult experience of the wartime years reduced the sense of obligation felt by most postwar German politicians.

[edit] Controversies

For twenty years after the creation of Israel, the memory of the Holocaust, and the consequent sense of obligation towards the Jews, helped to generate and maintain world sympathy and support for the Jewish state. But after the Six Day War of 1967, the tide of world opinion began to turn, and sympathy grew for the Palestinians who had been expelled from their homeland so that the Jews could establish one for themselves. The fading of memories of the Holocaust has been parallelled almost exactly by the fading of sympathy for Israel, particularly since Israel has for the most part continued to be governed by politicians of the wartime and immediate postwar generations such as Begin and Sharon, whose defiant rhetoric no longer arouses the admiration it did before 1967.

By the 1990s, in fact, the belief had arisen that Israel and the Jewish communities worldwide were deliberately exploiting the memory of the Holocaust to maintain support for Israel. This accusation found its most provocative expression in Norman Finkelstein's 2000 book The Holocaust Industry, subtitled "Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering." Finkelstein alleged that "The Holocaust," (which he distinguishes from the actual events of the Holocaust) has become an "ideological weapon" in the hands of Israel, the Zionist movement and American Jewish organisations such as the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League.

Finkelstein also accuses American Jewish organisations of "extortion" in bringing what he calls excessive and dishonest claims for compensation from Swiss banks and European governments, who in recent years have paid out billions in dollars in compensation at a time when the number of living Holocaust survivors is rapidly declining. These Jewish organisations, he said, claim to be acting on behalf of elderly Holocaust survivors, while much of the money gained in the process does not reach them but is used by Jewish organisations for political lobbying on behalf of Israel, exorbitant salaries and large fees for lawyers. He also says that the distortion of facts and emotional manipulation involved in these cases foment anti-Semitism.

Not surprisingly, Finkelstein's book has received savage criticism from members and supporters of the organisations he attacks in his book, and from most Jewish commentators. "This is not research; it isn't even political literature," said Professor Israel Guttman, former chief historian of Yad Vashem. "This is a lampoon, which takes a serious subject and distorts it for improper purposes. I don't even think it should be reviewed or critiqued as a legitimate book. We should consider it nothing more than an anti-Semitic lampoon." German historian Professor Hans Mommsen called it "a most trivial book, which appeals to easily aroused anti-Semitic prejudices."

The net effect of this controversy and others like it (and particularly the controversy over Israel's continued occupation of the Palestinian Territories) has been to weaken the sense of obligation towards Jews in general and Israel in particular that was almost universal in the western world for the 30 years after World War II. This is true even in Germany, a country where until recently criticism of Jews has been strictly taboo. A poll in 2001 showed that 15 percent of Germans "completely agreed" with Finkelstein's allegations, 50 percent "partially agreed" with them, and only 24 percent considered them untrue.

In the wake of the renewed conflict between Israel and the Palestinians after 2000, there was an upsurge of anti-Semitic rhetoric and actions in most European countries, particularly France. Some Jewish commentators claimed to see in this a revival of the anti-Semitism of the pre-war years, and a warning to Jews that a renewed Holocaust was not impossible. Israeli Prime Minister Sharon angered French opinion by urging France's 700,000 Jews to move to Israel. In fact, most of the violence in Europe was the work of Arab-Islamic immigrants, rather than of traditional European anti-Semites, and was generated almost entirely by hostility to Israel rather than to Jews as such. In 2004, as the last generation of eye-witnesses to the Holocaust moved into old age, its long term consequences were thus continuing to be felt in world politics.

[edit] Bibliography

Historical studies

  • Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed., 2003
  • Deborah Dwork, Robert Jan Van Pelt, Holocaust: A History
  • Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, 1982
  • Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933-1939, 1990
  • Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945, 1992
  • Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews : Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, 1998
  • Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution, Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1997 (reprint)
  • Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, 1994
  • Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania : The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944
  • Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair : Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule
  • Deborah Dwork, Robert Jan Van Pelt, Auschwitz
  • Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942, 2004

Selected survivor accounts

  • Primo Levi, If This Is A Man and The Truce (published separately in the U.S. as Survival At Auschwitz and The Reawakening)
  • Primo Levi, The Drowned and The Saved
  • Miklos Nyiszli Auschwitz : A Doctor's Eyewitness Account
  • Filip Muller, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers
  • Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys
  • Jean Amery, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities
  • Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning
  • Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness
  • Sara Nomberg-Przuytyk, Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land
  • Yitzhak Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
  • Israel Gutman, Resistance : The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
  • Victor Klemperer, I Shall Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years (2 vols., also published as I Will Bear Witness in the U.S.)

Selected semi-autobiographical fiction by survivors

Other documentation

  • Martin Gilbert, Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War
  • Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle: 1939-1945
  • Lucjan Dobroszycki (editor), The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941-1944
  • Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps
  • Israel Gutman, Michael Berenbaum (editors), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp
  • Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941-44
  • Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial
  • Deborah Oppenheimer, Mark Jonathan Harris (editors), Into the Arms of Strangers : Stories of the Kindertransport
  • Karola Fings, Donald Kenrick (editors), The Gypsies During the Second World War (2 vols.)
  • Firpo W. Carr, Germany's Black Holocaust, 1890-1945
  • Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men, 1998 (reprint)

Hypotheses and historiography

  • Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History
  • Donald L. Niewyk, Holocaust: Problems & Perspective of Interpretation
  • Alan S. Rosenbaum (editor), Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide
  • Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, New York: Knopf, 1996
  • Norman G. Finkelstein, Ruth Bettina Birn, A nation on trial: the Goldhagen thesis and historical truth, 1998. Criticizes Goldhagen's methods and theses.
  • Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, 1994
  • Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust : From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold
  • Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life
  • Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
  • John V. H. Dippel, Bound Upon a Wheel of Fire: Why so many German Jews made the tragic decision to remain in Nazi Germany, 1996
  • John Weiss, Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany, 1997
  • Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive

Selected filmography

[edit] External links

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