Holocaust (beginning c. 1941)

The Holocaust refers to the mass killing of between 5 million and 6 million Jews that occurred during the Second World War. Jews were specifically targeted by the Nazi regime as the enemies of the Aryan race, whose destruction was considered necessary to German success. Jews not the only victims of Nazi mass killings, with Nazis also killing around half of the Romani (Gypsy) population, but they were the most prominent. The Holocaust began in late 1941 in the occupied regions of the USSR, with SS detachments shooting Jews. The vast majority of Jews in the Holocaust were killed in eastern Europe in this manner. Later on, the Holocaust was expanded beyond the Eastern Front by the deportation of Jews from western Europe to death camps, where they were killed by gas inhalation.

Hitler believed that the natural state of humanity was Darwinian warfare over limited resources between different biological racial groups. The strongest of those races was the Aryans, of which Germans were the leading members. Races were not constantly engaged in Darwinian warfare because a number of nonracial ideologies existed and convinced mankind to focus on differences besides race. All of these nonracial ideologies, of which the most influential were Communism, Capitalism, and Christianity, had been created by Jews. Jews created these ideologies because they were weak and would die out first in a Darwinian struggle, meaning it benefited Jews to avoid racial warfare. As the strongest race, the situation of racial warfare was most advantageous to the Aryans. This meant that the perpetuation of nonracial ideology was harmful to the interests of the Aryan race. To best advance the interests of the Aryan race, a situation of racial warfare needed to be restored. This could only be done by destroying the nonracial ideologies created by Jews. These ideologies were advanced by Jews, who benefited the most from them, and could be destroyed by killing the Jews. Thus, the extinction of the Jews was necessary to advance the interests of the Aryan race.

Originally, Hitler and the other leading Nazis did not intend to kill the Jews. The assumption was that Jews could be deported far away from civilization, Madagascar and Siberia were both proposed locations, and would die of natural causes because, as the weakest race, they would be unable to survive without a stronger race to feed off parasitically. This was the Nazi plan for the Jews well into 1941. The Nazis only decided on the Holocaust as the ‘Final Solution to the ‘Jewish Question’ sometime in the Winter of 1941/42.

The Holocaust began in the occupied parts of the USSR following the German invasion. Germany had set up special units, the Einsatzgruppen, charged with carrying out counterinsurgency operations behind the frontlines and killing anyone thought to be a potential leader of a partisan organization. These Einsatzgruppen, largely composed of the SS, interpreted their orders as implying the murder of Jews in these occupied regions, as Jews were thought to be the creators of Communism and, thus, the most likely sources of partisan activity.

Hitler had previously expressed reservations about the mass killing of Jews, which he believed many Germans would be unwilling to perform and was not necessary because of the deportation plans, but the willingness of the Einsatzgruppen to carry out mass killings changed his mind about the feasibility of the plan. In late 1941, the Nazi leadership endorsed the mass killing of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen and made it part of their orders. Since the Einsatzgruppen only operated in the occupied USSR, another plan was created for the rest of Europe in 1942, whereby Jews would be deported to a number of death camps and killed there. The killing of Jews intensified throughout all of Axis Europe as German victory in the war seemed less likely, as the Nazis blamed German failures on Jewish sabotage.

The killing of between 5 million and 6 million Jews in the Holocaust represented the loss of around 2/3rds of Europe’s Jewish population or 1/3rd of the global Jewish population. The Holocaust, alongside the Nazi mass killings of Romani, is one of the most prominent legacies of the Second World War. Although other genocides had been committed in the 19th and 20th Centuries, the Holocaust directly contributed to the modern understanding of genocide and remains the largest genocide ever committed.