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The Holocaust is the term generally used in English to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler.

Contents

[edit] Definition

Although the word "holocaust" has been widely used since the 17th century to refer to the violent death of a large number of people, since the 1950s its use has been increasingly restricted; it is now mainly used to describe the Nazi Holocaust, and is usually spelled with a capital H. It was brought into English in this sense as a translation of the Hebrew word Shoah (literally "Calamity"). The usual German term for the extermination of the Jews during the Nazi period was Endlösung der Judenfrage (the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question"). In both English and German, "Final Solution" is widely used as an alternative to Holocaust.

The word Holocaust is frequently used in a wider sense to describe other actions of the Nazi regime. These include:

  • The killing of up to 800,000 Gypsies (now usually called Roma and Sinti)
  • The death of several million Soviet prisoners of war in German hands
  • The large-scale killings (apart from those of Jews) conducted by the Nazis in the countries of occupied Europe (particularly Poland, where the intelligentsia was systematically murdered)
  • The deaths of people deported from the occupied countries to Germany as slave laborers
  • The imprisonment and execution of German homosexual men
  • The imprisonment and execution of political opponents of the Nazi regime such as Communists and socialists, and some religious groups such as Jehovah's Witnesses
  • The Nazi regime's program of euthanasia of Germans with mental and physical disabilities

The use of the word Holocaust in this wider sense is objected to by most Jewish organizations, particularly those established to commemorate the Jewish Holocaust, and by some historians. Jewish organizations say that the word in its current sense was originally coined to describe the extermination of the Jews, and that the Jewish Holocaust was a crime on such a scale, and of such specificity, as the culmination of the long history of European anti-Semitism, that it should not be subsumed into a general category with the other crimes of the Nazis.

Even more hotly disputed is the rhetorical extension of the word Holocaust to describe events which have no connection with World War II. It is used by Armenians to describe the Armenian genocide of World War I (this usage actually dates from the 1920s). The terms "Rwandan Holocaust" and "Cambodian Holocaust" are also used to refer to the Rwanda genocide of 1994 and the mass killings of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia respectively. Recently the term "Palestinian Holocaust" has been coined to draw a comparison between the Nazi Holocaust and alleged Israeli crimes against the Palestinians. Jewish organizations see this comparison as false and offensive.

[edit] Origins

The Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1933, and persecution of German Jews began almost immediately, causing about half of all German Jews to leave the country before 1939. During the 1930s the legal, economic and social rights of Jews were steadily restricted, and many Jews, particularly political and intellectual leaders, were sent to concentration camps, where most of them were eventually killed or died. Before 1939, however, there was no systematic killing of Jews either in Germany or in Austria. Most of the Austrian Jews, for example, were allowed to emigrate (minus their possessions) by the Nazi official in charge of Jewish emigration, Adolf Eichmann.

In his autobiography Mein Kampf (1925), Hitler was open about his hatred of Jews and gave ample warning of his intention to drive them from Germany's political, intellectual and cultural life. He did not actually say that if he came to power he would attempt to exterminate the Jews, but he was more explicit in private. As early as 1922 he told Major Josef Hell: "The annihilation (vernichtung) of the Jews will be my first and foremost task." He said that he would personally hang all the Jews of Munich. "Exactly the same thing will happen in the other cities until Germany is cleansed of its last Jew." [1]

In 1935 Hitler introduced the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship and deprived them of all civil rights. In his speech introducing the laws, Hitler said that if they were "insufficient" in solving the "Jewish question," it would be necessary to pass a law "handing over the problem to the National Socialist Party for final solution (Endlösung). This expression became the standard Nazi euphemism for the extermination of the Jews. In January 1939 he said in a public speech: "If international finance-Jewry should succeed once more in plunging the nations into yet another world war, the consequences will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe."

Although German culture was deeply imbued with anti-Semitism, most Germans, including most people who voted for the Nazi Party, would not have anticipated that the Nazis intended to carry out a policy of exterminating the Jews. They may have assumed the Jews would simply be expelled from Germany if the Nazis came to power. It seems likely that some Nazi leaders, however, thought in detail about a "final solution" to what they called "the Jewish question" during the pre-war years. There is no documentary evidence that Hitler ordered the preparation of a concrete plan for exterminating the Jews (although this does not prove that no such order was given). The most likely originator of such a plan was Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi paramilitary force (the SS), a fanatical anti-Semite and Hitler's most trusted lieutenant.

The question of the treatment of the Jews became an urgent one for the Nazis after September 1939, when they occupied the eastern half of Poland, home to about two million Jews. Himmler's right-hand man, Reinhard Heydrich, reported to Himmler on how to deal with the situation. He recommended concentrating all the Polish Jews in ghettos in major cities, where they would be put to work for the German war industry, but it was clear that this was only an interim measure. The ghettoes would be in cities located on railway junctions, so that, in Heydrich's words, "future measures can be accomplished more easily." At his trial in 1961, Adolf Eichmann testified that the expression "future measures" was understood to mean "physical extermination."

[edit] Early measures

Image:Ac.himmler-heydrich.jpg
Heinrich Himmler (left) and Reinhard Heydrich, principal architects of the Nazi Holocaust

In September 1939, Himmler appointed Heydrich head of the Reich Security Head Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA), a body overseeing the work of the SS, the Security Police (SD) and the Gestapo in occupied Poland and charged with carrying out the policy towards the Jews described in Heydrich's report. (This body should not be confused with the Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt or Race and Resettlement Main Office, RuSHA, which was involved in carrying out the deportation of Jews.) The Jews were herded into ghettos, mostly in the General Government area of central Poland, where they were put to work under the Reich Labor Office headed by Fritz Saukel. Here many thousands were killed in various ways, and many more died of disease, starvation and overwork, but there was still no program of systematic killing. There is no doubt, however, that the Nazis saw forced labor as a form of extermination. The expression Vernichtung durch Arbeit ("destruction through work") was frequently used.

When the Germans occupied Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium and France in 1940, and Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941, anti-Semitic measures were also introduced into these countries, although the pace and severity varied greatly from country to country according to local political circumstances. Jews were removed from economic and cultural life and were subject to various restrictive laws, but physical deportation did not occur in most places before 1942. 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 for the most part they did not comply until compelled to do so. Bulgaria and Finland introduced no anti-Jewish measures at all, and Hungary did so only after the country was occupied by Germany in 1944. The German puppet regime in Croatia, on the other hand, began actively persecuting Jews on its own initiative.

During 1940 and 1941 the killing of large numbers of Jews in Poland continued, and the deportation of Jews from Germany, Austria and the "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia" (today's Czech Republic) to Poland was undertaken. Eichmann was assigned the task of removing all Jews from these territories, although the deportation of Jews from Germany, particularly Berlin, was not officially completed until 1943. (Many Berlin Jews were able to survive in hiding — it is a paradox of the Holocaust that Berlin was one of the few places where this was possible.) By December 1939, 3.5 million Jews were crowded into the General Government area.

The Governor-General, Hans Frank, noted that this many people could not be simply shot. "We shall have to take steps, however, designed in some way to eliminate them." It was this dilemma which led the SS to experiment with large-scale killings using poison gas. This method had already been used during Hitler's campaign of euthanasia in Germany (known as "T4"). SS Obersturmführer Christian Wirth seems to have been the inventor of the gas chamber.

Although it was clear by 1941 that the SS hierarchy led by Himmler and Heydrich were determined to embark on a policy of killing all the Jews under German control, there were important centres of opposition to this policy within the Nazi regime. The grounds for this opposition were mainly economic, not humanitarian. Hermann Göring, who had overall control of the German war industry, and the German army's Economics Department, representing the armaments industry, argued that the enormous Jewish labor force assembled in the General-government area (more than a million able-bodied workers) was an asset too valuable to waste while Germany was preparing to invade the Soviet Union. Some parts of the German army, however, disapproved of atrocities against Jews on principle, and during this period there were frequent conflicts between the Army and the SS over policy in Poland. Ultimately, neither Göring nor the army leadership was willing or able to challenge Himmler's authority, particularly since Himmler made it clear he had Hitler's support.

[edit] The Einsatzgruppen

Image:Ac.deathpit.jpg
Members of a German Einsatzgruppe lead Jews, including a child, to a pit where they will be executed. The men in civilian clothes are believed to be members of the ethnic German communities who in some cases are known to have assisted the Einsatzgruppen. This photograph has been widely reproduced as an emblematic scene of the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. Its authenticity is not doubted, but where and when it was taken is unknown. The photograph is discussed in a January 2004 article in the Guardian. article

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 opened a new phase in the Nazi regime's Jewish policy. The Soviet territories occupied by early 1942, including all of Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova and Ukraine, and most Russian territory west of the line Leningrad-Moscow-Rostov, contained about four million Jews, including hundreds of thousands who had fled Poland in 1939. Despite the chaos of the Soviet retreat, some effort was made to evacuate Jews, and about a million succeeded in escaping further east. The remaining three million were left at the mercy of the Nazis.

In these territories, there were fewer restraints on the mass killing of Jews than there were in countries like France or the Netherlands, where there was a long tradition of tolerance and the rule of law, or even Poland where, despite a strong tradition of anti-Semitism, there was considerable resistance to Nazi persecution of Polish Jews. In the Baltic states, Belarus and Ukraine, native anti-Semitism was reinforced by hatred of Communist rule, which many people associated with the Jews. Thousands of people in these countries actively collaborated with the Nazis. Ukrainians and Latvians joined SS auxiliary forces in large numbers and did much of the dirty work in Nazi extermination camps.

Despite the subservience of the Army high command to Hitler, Himmler did not trust the Army to approve of, let alone carry out, the large-scale killings of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories. This task was assigned to SS formations called Einsatzgruppen ("task groups"), under the overall command of Heydrich. These had been used on a limited scale in Poland in 1939, but were now organised on a much larger scale. Einsatzgruppe A (commanded by SS-Brigadeführer Franz Stahlecker was assigned to the Baltic area, Einsatzgruppe B (SS-Brigadeführer Artur Nebe) to Belarus, Einsatzgruppe C (SS-Gruppenführer Otto Rasch) to north and central Ukraine, and Einsatzgruppe D (SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf) to Moldova, south Ukraine, the Crimea and (during 1942) the north Caucasus.

According to Ohlendorf at his trial, "the Einsatzgruppen had the mission to protect the rear of the troops by killing the Jews, gypsies, Communist functionaries, active Communists, and all persons who would endanger the security. In practice, their victims were nearly all defenceless Jewish civilians (not a single Einsatzgruppe member was killed in action during these operations). By December 1941, the four Einsatzgruppen listed above had killed, respectively, 125,000, 45,000, 75,000 and 55,000 people (a total of 300,000 people), mainly by shooting or with hand grenades at mass killing sites outside the major towns.

The most notorious masasacre of Jews in the Soviet Union was at a ravine called Babi Yar outside Kiev, where at least 33,000 people were killed in a single operation in September 1941 (some estimates are much higher). This was not a regular Einsatzgruppe killing: it was carried out as a reprisal for an explosion in the city (carried out by the NKVD) which killed a number of German personnel. The killing of all the Jews in Kiev was decided on by the military governor (Major-General Friedrich Eberhardt) the Police Commander for Army Group South (SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln) and the Einsatzgruppe C Commander Otto Rasch. It was carried out by a mixture of SS, SD and Security Police, assisted by Ukrainian police.

In August 1941 Himmler travelled to Minsk where he personally witnessed 100 Jews being shot in a ditch outside the town, an event described by SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff in his diary. "Himmler's face was green. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his cheek where a piece of brain had squirted up on to it. Then he vomited." After recovering his composure, he lectured the SS men on the need to follow the "highest moral law of the Party" in carrying out their tasks.

By the end of 1941, however, the Einsatzgruppen had killed only 15 percent of the Jews in the occupied Soviet territories, and it was apparent that these methods could not be used to kill all the Jews of Europe. Even before the invasion of the Soviet Union, experiments with killing Jews in the back of vans using gas from the van's exhaust had been carried out, and when this proved too slow, more lethal gasses were tried. For large-scale killing by gas, however, fixed sites would be needed, and it was decided — probably by Heydrich and Eichmann — that the Jews should be brought to camps specifically built for the purpose.

As early as March 1941, Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz-Birkenau labor camp 60km south of Krakow, was told to prepare a much larger camp to be used solely for killing by gas. Himmler told him: "The Fuhrer has ordered the final solution of the Jewish question. We, the SS, have to execute the order." The first gassings, using an industrial gas derived from prussic acid and known by the brand name Zyklon-B, were carried out at Auschwitz in September.

[edit] The extermination camps

By the end of 1941 Himmler and Heydrich were increasingly impatient with the progress of the Final Solution. Their main opponent was Göring, who had succeeded in exempting Jewish industrial workers from the orders to deport all Jews to the General-Government and who had allied himself with the Army commanders who were opposing the extermination of the Jews out of mixture of economic calculation, distaste for the SS and (in some cases) humanitarian sentiment. Although Göring's power had declined since the defeat of his Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, he still had privileged access to Hitler and had great obstructive power.

On January 20, 1942, therefore, Heydrich convened a conference at villa in the suburbs of Berlin (the Wannsee Conference) to finalize a plan for the extermination of the Jews which became known (after Heydrich) as Aktion Reinhard (Operation Reinhard). Those present included Heydrich, Eichmann, Heinrich Müller (head of the Gestapo), and representatives of the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, the Ministry for the Interior, the Four Year Plan Office, the Ministry of Justice, the General-Government, the Foreign Office and the Nazi Party. Also present was SS-Sturmbannführer Rudolf Lange, the SD commander in Riga, who had recently carried out the liquidation of the Riga ghetto. He seems to have been there to advise the officials on the practicalities of killing people on an industrial scale.

The Wannsee Conference was presented with a plan for killing all the Jews in Europe, although the minutes taken by Eichmann refer to this only through euphemisms. The officials were told there were 2.3 million Jews in the General-Government, 850,000 in Hungary, 1.1 million in the other occupied countries, and up to 5 million in the Soviet Union (although only 3 million of these were in areas under German occupation) - a total of about 6.5 million. These would all be transported by train to extermination camps in Poland, where those unfit for work would be gassed at once. In some camps, such as Auschwitz, those fit for work would be kept alive for a while, but eventually all would be killed. Göring's representative, Dr Erich Neumann, gained a limited exemption for some classes of industrial workers.

During 1942, in addition to Auschwitz, five other camps were designated as extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) for the carrying out of the Reinhard plan. Two of these, at Chelmno (also known as Kulmhof) and Majdanek were already functioning as labor camps: these now had extermination facilities added to them. Three new camps were built for the sole purpose of killing large numbers of Jews as quickly as possible, at Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka. A seventh camp, at Maly Trostenets in Belarus, was also used for this purpose.

In view of frequent statements to the contrary, it is necessary to stress that, although members of some other groups whom the Nazis wished to exterminate, such as Roma (Gypsies) and Soviet prisoners of war, were also killed in these camps, their purpose was to kill Jews, and the overwhelming majority of people killed in them were Jews. Because they camps were in Poland, they were sometimes used for convenience as places to kill Polish prisoners of various kinds, but this was incidental to their purpose. It was never part of the Nazis' plans to extend the Final Solution to the Poles as a race.

Extermination camps are frequently confused with concentration camps such as Dachau and Belsen, which were mostly located in Germany and intended as places of incarceration and forced labor for a variety of enemies of the Nazi regime (such as Communists and homosexuals). They should also be distinguished from slave labor camps, which were set up in all German-occupied countries to exploit the labor of prisoners of various kinds, including prisoners of war. In all Nazi camps there were very high death rates as a result of starvation, disease and exhaustion, but only the extermination camps were designed specifically for mass killing.

The method of killing at these camps was by poison gas, usually in gas chambers, although many prisoners were killed in mass shootings and by other means. At the pure extermination camps, all the prisoners arrived by train, and were taken directly from the platforms to a reception area where all their clothes and other possessions were taken, and women had their heads shaved (the hair was used to make felt). They were then herded naked into the gas chambers: usually they were told these were showers or delousing chambers. Solid pellets of Zyklon-B were dropped into the chambers, releasing a toxic gas, and those within died within minutes.

The gas was then pumped out, the bodies were then removed, and any gold fillings in their teeth were extracted with pliers. The bodies of those killed were destroyed in crematoria (except at Sobibór where they were cremated on outdoor pyres), and the ashes buried or scattered. All this work was done by Jews known as Sonderkommandos, who thus bought themselves a few extra months of life. The camps were run by SS officers, but most of the guards were Ukrainian or Baltic auxiliaries. Regular German soldiers were kept well away from the camps.

At Auschwitz and the other labor camps, prisoners were separated on arrival into those capable of work - that is, fit adults under 50 - and those judged unfit for work. The latter were immediately killed by the methods already described, although the survivors were generally unaware of this. Those kept alive as workers were housed in crowded barracks under conditions of extreme deprivation and harsh discipline. Most of them eventually died of disease, hunger and exhaustion, although many were executed for trivial breaches of discipline, or at the whim of the guards and officers. Few of these prisoners survived more than a year, although there are accounts by prisoners who survived the war as camp workers.

Escapes from the camps were few, but not unknown. Some deportees managed to hide in or under the trains during the chaos of unloading at the camps. Many tried to jump from the trains but were nearly always killed. Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz in April 1944, eventually reaching Slovakia from where they were able to make their way to the west, carrying the first eyewitness account of the extermination camps to a (generally unbelieving) world. Czeslaw Mordowicz escaped from Auschwitz in May 1944 and joined the Slovak partisans, but was captured and sent back to Auschwitz. He was not recognised as an escapee (in which case he would have been shot), and survived the war. Even if prisoners did succeed in escaping, however, they were sometimes betrayed by the Poles to the Germans.

[edit] Climax

Heydrich was assassinated in Prague in June 1942. He was succeeded as head as the RSHA by Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Kaltenbrunner and Eichmann, under Himmler's close supervision, oversaw the climax of the Final Solution. During 1943 and 1944, the extermination camps worked at a furious rate to kill the hundreds of thousands of people shipped to them by rail from almost every country within the German sphere of influence. At Auschwitz, 60,000 people were killed and incinerated every day.

Despite the high productivity of the war industries based in the Jewish ghettoes in the General-Government, during 1943 they were liquidated, and their populations shipped to the camps for extermination. The largest of these operations, the deportation of 100,000 people from the Warsaw Ghetto in early 1943, provoked the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which was suppressed with great brutality. At the same time, rail shipments arrived regularly from western and southern Europe. Few Jews were shipped east from the occupied Soviet territories to the camps: the killing of Jews in this zone was left in the hands of the SS, aided by locally-recruited auxiliaries. In any case by the end of 1943 the Germans had been driven from most Soviet territory.

Shipments of Jews to the camps had priority on the German railways, and continued even in the face of the increasingly dire military situation after the Battle of Stalingrad at the end of 1942 and the escalating Allied air attacks on German industry and transport. Army leaders and economic managers complained at this diversion of resources and at the killing of irreplaceable skilled Jewish workers. By 1944, moreover, it was evident to most Germans not blinded by Nazi fanaticism that Germany was losing the war. Many senior officials began to fear the retribution that might await Germany and them personally for the crimes being committed in their name. But the power of Himmler and the SS within the German Reich was too great to resist, and Himmler could always evoke Hitler's authority for his demands. Few people realised that for Hitler and Himmler killing the Jews was more important than winning the war.

In October 1943 Himmler gave a speech to senior Nazi Party officials gathered in Posen (Poznan in western Poland). Here he came closer than ever before to stating explicitly that he was intent on exterminating the Jews of Europe.

"I may here and this closest of circles allude to a question which you, my party comrades, have all taken for granted, but which has become for me the most difficult question of my life, the Jewish question... I ask of you that what I say in this circle you really only hear and never speak of... We come to the question: how is it with the women and children? I have resolved even here on a completely clear solution. I do not consider myself justified in eradicating the men - so to speak killing them or ordering them to be killed - and allowing the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up... The difficult decision had to be taken, to cause this people to disappear from the earth."

The audience for this speech included Admiral Karl Dönitz and Armaments Minister Albert Speer, both of whom successfully claimed at the Nuremberg trials that they had had no knowledge of the Final Solution. The text of this speech was not known at the time of their trials.

The scale of extermination slackened somewhat at the beginning of 1944 once the Polish ghettoes were emptied, but in March 1944 Hitler ordered the military occupation of Hungary, and Eichmann was dispatched to Budapest to supervise the deportation of Hungary's 800,000 Jews. More than half of them were shipped to Auschwitz in the course of the year. The commandant, Rudolf Höss, said at his trial that he killed 400,000 Hungarian Jews in three months. This operation met strong opposition within the Nazi hierarchy, and there were some suggestions that Hitler should offer the Allies a deal under which the Hungarian Jews would be spared in exchange for a favourable peace settlement. There were unofficial negotiations in Istanbul between Himmler's agents, British agents and representatives of international Jewish organisations, but there was no real possibility of such a deal being struck.

By mid 1944 the Final Solution had largely run its course. Those Jewish communities within easy reach of the Nazi regime had been largely exterminated, in proportions ranging from more than 90 percent in Poland to about 25 percent in France. In May Himmler claimed in a speech that "The Jewish question in Germany and the occupied countries has been solved," and this was broadly correct. During 1944, in any case, the task became steadily more difficult. German armies were evicted from the Soviet Union, the Balkans and Italy, and Germany's allies defected or were defeated. In June the western Allies landed in France. Allied air attacks and the operations of partisans made rail transport increasingly difficult, and the objections of the military to the diversion of rail transport for carrying Jews to Poland more urgent and harder to ignore.

At this time, as the Soviet armed forces approached, the camps in eastern Poland were closed down, any surviving inmates being shipped west to camps closer to Germany, first to Auschwitz and later to Gross Rosen in Silesia. Auschwitz itself was closed in October, as the Soviets advanced through Poland. Despite the desperate military situation, great efforts were made to conceal evidence of what had happened in the camps. The gas chambers were dismantled, the crematoria dynamited, mass graves dug up and the corpses cremated, and Polish farmers were induced to plant crops on the sites to give the impression that they had never existed. In October Himmler, who was trying to negotiate a secret deal with the Allies behind Hitler's back, ordered an end to the Final Solution. But the hatred of the Jews in the ranks of the SS was so strong that Himmler's order was generally ignored. Local commanders continued to kill Jews, and to shuttle them from camp to camp by forced "death marches," until the last weeks of the war.

Bibliography added here for ease of reference while editing. See User:SlimVirgin/draft2 for the second half of the article.

[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