The Second World War
Senior 3 · History and Citizenship
The Second World War
Lesson 4 of 5
25 min
The Holocaust was carried out by guns and gas, but it was prepared with laws, lists and meetings. Read these two documents, written six years apart. Both survive in English translations made for the Nuremberg war-crimes trials after the war.
Source A. The Reich Citizenship Law, one of the two "Nuremberg Laws", 15 September 1935, Article 2:
1. A citizen of the Reich is only that subject, who is of German- or kindred blood and who, through his conduct, shows that he is both desirous and fit to serve faithfully the German people and Reich. [...] 3. Only the citizen of the Reich enjoys full political rights in accordance with the provision of the laws.
Source B. The minutes of a meeting of senior Nazi officials held at Wannsee, near Berlin, on 20 January 1942:
Another possible solution of the problem has now taken the place of emigration, i.e. the evacuation of the Jews to the East [...] Approximately 11 million Jews will be involved in the final solution of the European Jewish question.
Sources A and B: English translations prepared for the Nuremberg trials, from the Avalon Project, Yale Law School.
Analysing the sources. Source A does not mention Jews at all, yet its purpose was to take away their citizenship: it divided Germans by "blood" and gave political rights only to some. Source B uses calm office language. "Final solution" and "evacuation to the East" were code words: historians agree, from the documents and from what happened next, that they meant the murder of all the Jews of Europe, counted country by country, including Jews in countries Germany did not control. The distance between A and B shows that the Holocaust was a process: each step made the next one thinkable.
Definition
The Holocaust (in Hebrew, Shoah): the persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German state and its allies and collaborators, from 1933 to 1945.
Antisemitism: hatred of, or prejudice against, Jews.
Ghetto: a closed district of a city where the Nazis forced Jews to live, cut off from everyone else.
Concentration camp: a camp where people were imprisoned without trial and forced to work in brutal conditions. Killing centre (or extermination camp): a camp built mainly to murder people on arrival.
Euphemism: a mild word used to hide something harsh, such as "evacuation" for deportation to murder.
Bystander: a person who sees wrongdoing and does nothing. Rescuer: a person who risks their own safety to save others.
| Stage | When | What the Nazi state did |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Exclusion in Germany | 1933 to 1939 | A boycott of Jewish shops (1 April 1933); Jews removed from government jobs; the Nuremberg Laws (15 September 1935, Source A); a red "J" stamped in Jewish passports (October 1938); the violence of Kristallnacht (9 to 10 November 1938) |
| 2. Ghettos | From late 1939 | In occupied Poland, Jews were forced into sealed districts of cities. The Warsaw ghetto, closed in November 1940, held as many as 460,000 people in about 3.4 square kilometres, with too little food |
| 3. Mass shootings | From June 1941 | Behind the German armies invading the Soviet Union, SS and police units, with local collaborators, shot Jews in more than 1,500 cities, towns and villages |
| 4. Killing centres | From December 1941, organised at Wannsee in January 1942 | Jews from all over occupied Europe were deported by train to killing centres in occupied Poland, among them Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau |
| 5. Death marches and liberation | 1944 to 1945 | As Allied armies advanced, prisoners were forced to march to camps further west. Soviet troops reached Auschwitz on 27 January 1945; British and American troops freed camps in Germany in April 1945 |
Table 1. From exclusion to murder. Dates and figures: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Wikipedia articles in the credits.
Figure 1. The Holocaust in numbers. Almost half of the victims were murdered at killing centres; most of the rest were shot or died in ghettos and camps.
About six million Jews were murdered: nearly two out of every three Jews in Europe, in the words of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. As many as 1.5 million of them were children. The Nazis and their allies also persecuted and murdered millions of other people, for who they were or what they believed (Table 2).
| Group persecuted and murdered by Nazi Germany and its allies | Estimated number of victims |
|---|---|
| Soviet prisoners of war | around 3.3 million |
| Non-Jewish Polish civilians | around 1.8 million |
| Roma (called "Gypsies" by their persecutors) | at least 250,000, possibly as many as 500,000 |
| People with disabilities living in institutions | 250,000 to 300,000 |
| Political opponents in Germany | tens of thousands |
| Jehovah's Witnesses | about 1,700 |
Table 2. Other victims of Nazi persecution (selected groups). Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution".
Victims were not only passive. Jews resisted by keeping schools and diaries in the ghettos, by escaping, and sometimes by fighting. In the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, from 19 April to 16 May 1943, a few hundred poorly armed young Jews held off German troops for almost a month; it was the largest Jewish revolt of the war. Prisoners also rose up at Treblinka and Sobibor in 1943.
A few outsiders chose to help. In October 1943, after a German diplomat warned that the Jews of Denmark were to be arrested, Danish citizens and the resistance carried about 7,500 of the country's 8,000 Jews by boat to neutral Sweden. The Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, in Lithuania in 1940, issued transit visas that helped thousands of Jews escape. Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, honours such people as "Righteous Among the Nations". They were few: most people in occupied Europe were bystanders.
Historians who compare genocides find the same path in more than one place. In both the Holocaust and the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, a state turned neighbours into enemies through years of propaganda; it used official documents that recorded who belonged to the targeted group, such as the "J" in German passports and, in Rwanda, the identity cards introduced under Belgian rule in the 1930s (Unit 6); it planned the killing in advance; and the world did not stop it in time. The word "genocide" itself was invented in 1944 to describe the Nazi crimes. Learning how the Holocaust happened is a way of learning how to recognise the warning signs, and why "Never again" has to be acted on, not just said.
Worked example: using sources to explain a process
Question: Using Sources A and B and your own knowledge, explain how Nazi policy towards the Jews changed between 1935 and 1942. (6 marks)
Step 1. 1935, exclusion by law. Source A limited full citizenship to people of "German or kindred blood", so Jews lost their political rights and became outsiders in their own country.
Step 2. 1938 to 1941, rising violence and separation. Kristallnacht in November 1938 brought open violence; after 1939 Jews in Poland were locked into ghettos; from June 1941 mobile units shot Jews in the occupied Soviet Union.
Step 3. 1942, organised murder. Source B shows senior officials planning a "final solution" for about 11 million Jews across Europe; in practice this meant deportation to killing centres.
Conclusion. Policy moved from taking away rights, to separation, to mass murder organised by the state.
Tip
Five steps, five dates: 1935 laws, 1938 Kristallnacht, 1940 ghettos, 1941 shootings, 1942 Wannsee and the killing centres. If you can explain the link between each step and the next, you understand the Holocaust as a process.
Warning
Use exact words and careful numbers. A concentration camp and a killing centre were not the same thing. Say "about six million Jews" and give the source (the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum); do not inflate or round figures for effect. And do not write that "Hitler killed the Jews" as if he acted alone: the Holocaust needed officials, soldiers, police, railway workers and collaborators in many countries.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: "The Path to Nazi Genocide", Chapter 3, "From Citizens to Outcasts, 1933 to 1938". Watch for the laws and events that turned German Jews into outcasts before the war, and match them to Table 1. It uses historical film; teachers should preview it before class.
Look again at the passers-by in Source C. Why do you think so many ordinary people stood by while their neighbours were persecuted? What made the Danish rescuers different? Where, in your own school or community, can one person choose to act rather than look away?
Practice
Sources and credits
This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
