The Second World War (1939-1945)

Lessons

Senior 6 · History

The Second World War (1939-1945)

5 lessons

Lesson 3 of 5

The Holocaust

25 min

A witness who expected denial

On 12 April 1945 General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied forces in western Europe, visited Ohrdruf, a camp near Gotha in Germany that American troops had just reached. Three days later he wrote to General George C. Marshall, the head of the US Army. Read what he said about why he went. Then think about why a general in the middle of a war believed that one day people would try to deny what he had seen.

Important

Source: Eisenhower to Marshall, 15 April 1945 (extracts)

"The things I saw beggar description. […] the visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. […] I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda'."

General Dwight D. Eisenhower to General George C. Marshall, 15 April 1945, as quoted by the U.S. National Park Service, "Documenting History: Eisenhower and the Holocaust".

Eisenhower then had soldiers, journalists and members of the United States Congress brought to the camps to see for themselves. His letter shows that evidence of genocide must be gathered and preserved deliberately, because perpetrators destroy evidence and deniers attack it. Rwanda knows this well: denial of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi is a crime under Rwandan law, and memorials and archives preserve the evidence.

Definition

The Holocaust (in Hebrew, the Shoah): the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany, its allies and collaborators between 1933 and 1945.

Genocide: a word created in 1944 by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin for the destruction of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. The United Nations Genocide Convention (1948) made it a crime under international law.

Ghetto: a closed district of a city where the Nazis forced Jews to live, cut off from the rest of the population.

Killing centre (extermination camp): a camp built mainly to murder people on arrival, such as Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Collaborator: a person or government in an occupied country that helped the occupier.

How the Holocaust happened

The Holocaust did not begin with killing. It began with words and laws that marked Jews as outsiders (Unit 5), continued with segregation and theft of property, and only then turned to mass murder. In occupied eastern Europe from June 1941, German mobile killing units, police battalions and local collaborators shot Jews in their hundreds of thousands. At the Wannsee Conference in Berlin on 20 January 1942, senior officials met to coordinate the deportation of all Europe's Jews, which the Nazis called the "Final Solution". Jews were deported by rail from across Europe to killing centres in occupied Poland. Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest, was both a concentration camp and a killing centre.

The victims: what the evidence shows

Group	Estimated number murdered (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
European Jews	about 6 million, around two-thirds of the Jews of Europe
Soviet prisoners of war	around 3 million
Roma and Sinti	between 250,000 and 500,000
People with disabilities, in institutions	up to 250,000

Millions of Polish and Soviet civilians, political opponents, Jehovah's Witnesses and gay men were also persecuted, and many were killed. The figures are estimates built from German records, wartime and post-war population counts and survivors' testimony; they are given as ranges because the perpetrators tried to hide their crimes.

Responses: resistance, rescue and indifference

Resistance. Jews resisted in many ways: smuggling food, keeping schools and records, armed revolts such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April–May 1943) and uprisings at Treblinka and Sobibor (1943).
Rescue. Some people risked their lives to hide or save Jews: villagers in occupied Europe, diplomats who issued visas, and the people of Denmark, who ferried most Danish Jews to safety in Sweden in October 1943. Israel's Yad Vashem honours them as the "Righteous Among the Nations".
Collaboration and indifference. Many governments, police forces and individuals helped the deportations; Allied governments knew of mass killing by late 1942 but gave priority to winning the war.

Justice and memory

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1945–46) tried leading Nazis for crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. In 1948 the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention, built on Lemkin's work. Fifty years later, in 1998, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in the case of Jean-Paul Akayesu, delivered the first judgment by an international court convicting a person of genocide under that convention, for crimes committed during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. Unit 8 studies genocide prevention.

Warning

Use precise, respectful language. Say "murdered" and "killed", not "died", when people were killed; avoid the perpetrators' euphemisms ("Final Solution", "resettlement") unless you put them in quotation marks and explain them. Give victim numbers as estimates with their source. Never compare genocides to rank suffering; compare them to understand how they happen and how they can be prevented.

Tip

Explain the process, not only the outcome. Examiners reward answers that show how persecution escalated: definition (laws), segregation (ghettos), deportation, and murder, and that explain the roles of ideology, war, bureaucracy and ordinary people. The same framework helps you analyse other genocides, including the one Rwanda suffered in 1994.

Important

Discuss. Eisenhower wanted first-hand evidence in case people later called the crimes "propaganda". Why do perpetrators and their supporters deny genocide, and what can historians, courts, memorials and ordinary citizens do to protect the truth?

Note

Further viewing, with your teacher

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's film The Path to Nazi Genocide (38 minutes) tells this history from the end of the First World War to the Holocaust. It contains distressing archival footage, so watch it only with your teacher.

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Practice

Define the Holocaust and genocide, and say who created the word "genocide" and when.
Describe the five stages of the Holocaust in order.
What was decided at the Wannsee Conference?
Why are the numbers of victims given as estimates and ranges?
Give three forms of Jewish resistance and one example of rescue.
Explain the purpose of Eisenhower's visit to Ohrdruf, using the source.
"The Holocaust was the result of Hitler's ideology alone." Assess this view.

Show answersHide answers

The Holocaust: the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany, its allies and collaborators, 1933–45. Genocide: the destruction of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group; the word was created by Raphael Lemkin in 1944.
Persecution by law (1933–39); ghettos and occupation (1939–41); mass shootings in the east (from 1941); killing centres after Wannsee (1942–44); death marches and liberation (1944–45).
Officials coordinated the deportation and murder of all Europe's Jews (the "Final Solution") across government departments.
The perpetrators destroyed records and bodies, many victims were never registered, and historians must combine German documents, population counts and testimony.
Resistance: smuggling and education in ghettos, keeping records, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, revolts at Treblinka and Sobibor. Rescue: the Danish rescue of October 1943, or individuals who hid Jews.
He went deliberately to see the evidence himself so that he could testify if anyone later claimed the reports were "propaganda"; he expected denial and wanted to prevent it.
A balanced answer agrees that Nazi racial antisemitism, and Hitler's role, were essential, but adds the war (which gave cover and opportunity), the bureaucracy and the many agencies that competed to carry out policy, the collaboration of other governments and individuals, and the indifference of bystanders. A judgement might be that ideology was necessary but the genocide required the actions of many thousands of people.

Sources and credits

Extracts from Eisenhower's letter to Marshall, 15 April 1945, a work of the United States government, as quoted in Documenting History: Eisenhower and the Holocaust, U.S. National Park Service. Public domain.
Victim estimates from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia.
Photo: House of the Wannsee Conference, A. Savin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Video: The Path to Nazi Genocide, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, embedded from YouTube.

Written by Ganzaa: the analysis, the diagram, the tables, the definitions and the exercises.

This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.

1A witness who expected denial

2How the Holocaust happened

3The victims: what the evidence shows

4Responses: resistance, rescue and indifference

5Justice and memory

A witness who expected denial

How the Holocaust happened

The victims: what the evidence shows

Responses: resistance, rescue and indifference

Justice and memory