The Holocaust

Many people believe that the war against Germany stopped Hitler's campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe. And that's true enough. After Germany had been defeated and Hitler had killed himself, the Allied troops liberated the extermination camps. Many of the soldiers wept uncontrollably at what they saw.

What these soldiers did not know was that, before the war and during it, many of the Allied countries did little or nothing to help save the Jews or other threatened peoples like the Gypsies. Before the war,

No country could be found willing to take substantial numbers of Jews; the British barred Palestine to them except in small numbers...: the Americans...require[d] certificates of birth which few German Jews possessed and none could ask for from a German official...; a Bill to permit 20,000 Jewish children to enter the United States was killed by a "patriotic" lobby in the Congress on the grounds that it offended against the sanctity of family ties.

Before the war, no country did very much to help. And the war didn't stop the Holocaust until six million Jews and millions of other peoples--gays, lesbians, Gypsies, Hitler's political opponents, and many others--had died in Nazi death camps.

In fact, after the war began, Hitler's campaign against "inferior" races actually grew more intense, even diverting resources from the war effort. The first concentration camp, at Dachau, had been set up in 1933 to hold not only Jews but Hitler's political opponents. The death camp at Auschwitz was set up in 1939, but it was not until well after the start of the war that the Nazis decided to go ahead with the "final solution." Historians have found no written order for the Holocaust, but it is likely that the decision was reached in January, 1941.

On August 8, 1942, Gerhart Riegner of the World Jewish Congress reported on Hitler's extermination plans to the United States government. At first American officials didn't believe the report. And even after it was confirmed, they didn't try to organize a rescue effort. One critic says,

As [Hitler] moved...toward the total destruction of the Jews, the government and the people of the United States remained bystanders. Oblivious to the evidence which poured from official and unofficial sources, Americans went about their business unmoved and unconcerned.

As the war went on, the death camps worked faster and faster.

What can we make of the Holocaust today? The war didn't prevent it. The war also didn't start it. If there had been no war, the Nazis might have killed or driven out millions of "inferior races" anyway. And Hitler's attempt at killing an entire people (now called genocide)--though it was the most terrible--was not the first. In the middle ages, Jews were often slaughtered, driven from their homes, and confined in ghettos. Between 1915 and 1918, the Turkish government massacred two million Armenians. And there have been other examples throughout history--including the Americas, where millions of Native Americans have died as a result of extermination campaigns.

One lesson of the Holocaust is that racial hatred is always dangerous. Anti-Semitism had been common in Germany and most of Europe for centuries before Hitler. Hitler wasn't that much different in his thinking from the anti-Semitic composer Johannes Brahms. But he acted ruthlessly on his convictions, and others followed his lead.

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