There have always been black pages in world history that I wanted to forget about.
And humanity does not want this to happen again, but expectations, for the most part, remain so, without turning into reality.
Throughout human history, there have been “events” during which the killing of people on the basis of their ethnicity was practiced at the state level. The peoples who have suffered from such events will not be forgotten and may never be forgiven. And the twentieth century was very rich in such sad events.
They exterminated for many reasons, and the reasons could be political, for example, the deportation of the peoples of the USSR. Religious moments could also be present, for example, the deportation and extermination of the Christian population in the Ottoman Empire. Someone managed to destroy people on the basis of the selection of more worthy and devoted representatives of the nation. And those who could not become a worthy representative were destroyed. And there are plenty of such black spots in the twentieth century.
But this tragedy, which will be discussed, is inhuman.
What is the Holocaust
Why did this happen anyway? But first you need to understand the political component.
History
On January 30, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. This did not mean that the NSDAP came to power and they had enemies, namely the Communist Party of Germany. But on February 27, a fire broke out in the Reichstag and it was clear that they would find “scapegoats, which turned out to be the communists. On March 5, the next elections to the Reichstag are held in Germany, in which the NSDAP received 43.9%, which allowed them to win.
And on March 21, a solemn ceremony is held, which went down in history under the name “Potsdam Day”. There were no representatives of either the Communist Party or the Social Democrats at this ceremony. Various sanctions began to be applied against them, including sending them to concentration camps.
On August 2, 1934, German President Paul von Hindenburg dies. After 17 days, as a result of a referendum, two posts are combined: president and head of government. Hitler becomes the leader, or in other words, the “Fuhrer”. Power finally came to the Nazis. The idea of racial superiority becomes one of the main components of the policy of the Third Reich. And for some nations, hard times are coming.
At first, these peoples were not subjected to physical destruction in the 1930s. But measures against them have already begun to apply. They burned the books of authors who were not pleasing to the regime, forbade the marriages of Aryans with representatives of a different race, deprived those who did not have “Germanic blood” citizenship, and many other measures. But for the success and triumph of the Aryans, full confidence in these ideas was not enough.
We are talking about the Reich Minister of Propaganda and Public Education, Joseph Goebbels, who received an ideal platform for relaying the ideas of the leadership of the Third Reich. It was he who organized meetings, rallies, which turned into grand processions and parades. Xenophobic slogans, which Goebbels himself invented, hung on the streets of Germany. Various propaganda films were shot about the superiority of the Aryan race over others. A vivid example is the film “The Eternal Jew”, where the Jews were put in the worst possible light.
And we can draw some conclusions, namely, at first the leadership of the Third Reich used administrative measures in its racist policy. The exception is Kristallnacht, during which 90 people were killed. In the 1930s, about 335,000 Jews fled from the territory of Austria and Germany. This escape can also be called a “brain drain”, since among the fugitives were famous figures of science and art, for example, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Alfred Adler and many others. Even the famous actress Marlene Dietrich, who had no Jewish roots, fled. It was a contradictory time, but then another stage comes.
World War II
On September 1, 1939, the Second World War begins in the early morning. With its beginning, new territories are captured in Central and Eastern Europe. In these regions there was a huge concentration of peoples who would suffer huge losses. The Jewish population was compactly located in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Belarus. And in the large cities of these captured states, special areas were created where the entire Jewish population was driven. These areas were called “ghettos”. Special systems of self-government were created in the ghetto. These are the Judenrats, who carried out the orders of the Nazis in relation to the Jews.
There were also cases when Jews served in police units. In the occupied countries, which became “puppets” of the Third Reich, collaborationism began to flourish, in other words, cooperation with the invaders. An ordinary person could cooperate with the Nazis and learn something from them in return if he told them where a Jewish family was. But there were also cases when the Jews could be helped. The most striking example of the saviors of the Jewish population is the industrialist Oscar Schindler, who saved 1,200 Jews by providing them with work in his factory.
Irena Sendler, a Polish resistance activist, rescued some 2,500 children from the massive Warsaw Ghetto. Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who disobeyed orders to send Jews to death camps, saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews by issuing Swedish passports. Thanks to these passports, Jews could be sent to Sweden, which was neutral during the Second World War. The people who saved the lives of Jews received the honorary title of Righteous Among the Nations. Thus, this stage was a kind of transition point from warning to destruction. Life in the ghetto was unbearable. Famine, disease and death flourished there. The ghetto made it easier to physically exterminate the Jewish population. The destruction took place in certain places, no longer resembling a ghetto. And these places were called “death camps”.
Death camps
Already since 1941, 4 death camps were created in the Third Reich: Chelmno, Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. And the concentration camps Majdanek, Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, as well as the first women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück. Some buildings were built near the settlements of the same name (Treblinka, Auschwitz, Belzec). These camps were built according to special projects. Jews, Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, members of the Resistance movement, as well as some groups of people dangerous to Aryan society were destroyed in them. Also in the camps used special devices for massacres.
In Majdanek and Auschwitz there was such a sequence: first you need to arrive at these camps in wagons, where it was very crowded and from such conditions people died of thirst, suffocation, then there was a selection for extermination, and often they were exterminated in gas chambers. Killed in gas chambers, mainly children, women, the elderly and disabled citizens. Those who escaped such a fate received tattoos of the number, and then hard labor awaited them, and if someone weakens, they are sent to the gas chamber.
The cyanide-based pesticide Zyklon B was used as a poisonous agent. But not only gas was used as an extermination, sometimes people themselves did inhuman acts. The dead people could be burned in crematoria, and soap could be made from the ashes. Over living people arranged medical experiments and experiments.
However, despite the fact that a huge number of people were killed, not everything was lost for the prisoners of the concentration camps, since the Third Reich could no longer fight on several fronts and they began to suffer defeat. Yes, and in the camps themselves there were uprisings and escapes of prisoners who were exhausted, but not defeated and not broken in spirit. A striking example of the triumph of prisoners over camp evil was the escape from Sobibor. 420 people, led by officer Alexander Pechersky, managed to raise an uprising, seize weapons, kill the SS guards and escape.
About 80 people died during the escape. The next day, the remaining prisoners were killed and the next two weeks were a search for escaped prisoners. During these weeks, 170 escapees were found and executed. The other part was either found by the Nazis or killed by collaborators. Only 53 people survived until the end of the war. But this example of courage is, perhaps, one of the few successful attempts at a camp uprising.
Consequences
The Nazis failed to accomplish the “final solution of the Jewish question”, since since 1943 they began to suffer tangible defeats from the anti-Hitler coalition. The liberation of the territories also meant the release of concentration camp prisoners. The Nazis tried to take out the surviving prisoners to other camps, but not everything worked out for them. On July 22, 1944, the Majdanek death camp was liquidated by Soviet troops. On January 27, the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated. Some death camps existed until May 9, 1945. The catastrophe of European Jewry (Shoah) is over.
And as a result of this catastrophe, about 6 million Jews died. The genocide of the Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Serbs, etc.) was also carried out, during which about 23 million people died. Roma losses are about 220 thousand people. Also killed were people with mental disorders, the disabled, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, representatives of sexual minorities and black residents of the Third Reich.
On September 2, 1945, World War II ends. The world has changed again. The economy of the USSR and European countries was destroyed like millions of lives during the Second World War. The Nazi elite, who lived out their last days in a bunker in April-May 1945, gradually went crazy. Some of them committed suicide, others tried to escape, and some succeeded. However, there were still those who were caught. They had to answer for their crimes at the Nuremberg International Tribunal, as well as at 12 small tribunals. The criminals were punished with various preventive measures, Nazism was crushed as a dangerous ideology and it exists only in the underground on illegal grounds.
Collaborators were also in trouble. Namely, censure and bullying. something changed his name, place of residence, and in the future, the former Nazis diligently concealed the facts from their past. On the site of concentration camps and death camps are now museums, the most famous of which is Auschwitz. And West Germany (FRG) will pay reparations to Israel and those who survived during the Holocaust.
