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In the late twentieth century, the term Holocaust has come to refer to the extermination (or genocide) of an estimated six million Jews and the mass murder of about five million other civilians by Nazi Germany and other Axis powers in the years leading up to and during World War II. Among the others murdered were homosexuals, communists, and ethnic Roma, Russians, Poles and other Slavs.

Never before in the history of humanity has there been such a large logistic and systematic effort for the sole purpose of extermination of human life. Meticulous notes were kept. One of the main 'coordinators' of the mass deportations was Adolf Eichmann, who managed to escape to Argentina after the war but was later kidnapped by the Israeli Secret Service and sentenced to death in Israel.

Genocide of the Jews

Anti-Semitism was common in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s (though its history extends far back throughout many centuries during the course of Judaism). Hitler's fanatical anti-semitism was laid out in his 1925 book Mein Kampf, which became popular in Germany once he acquired political power.

In many cities throughout Europe, Jews had been living in concentrated areas. During the first years of World War II, the Nazis formalized the borders of these areas and restricted movement, creating ghettos to which Jews were confined. The ghettos were in effect prisons, in which many Jews died from hunger and disease; others were executed by the Nazis and their collaborators. Concentration camps for Jews and political opponents also existed in Germany itself, and while not specifically designed for systematic extermination, many concentration camp prisoners died because of harsh conditions or were executed. During the invasion of the Soviet Union over 3,000 special killing units (Einsatzgruppen) followed the Armed Forces and conducted mass killings of the Jewish population that lived on Soviet territory. Entire communities were wiped out by being rounded up, robbed of their possessions and clothing, and shot at the edges of ditches.

In January of 1942, during the Wannsee conference, Nazi leaders agreed on what Nazi ideologists called the "final solution of the Jewish question" (Endlösung der Judenfrage). They began to systematically deport the Jewish populations of the ghettos and from all occupied territories to extermination camps, such as Auschwitz and Treblinka II. The transport was often carried out under horrifing conditions using freight cars.

Some camps, such as Auschwitz, combined slave labor with systematic extermination. Upon arrival in these camps, prisoners were divided into two groups: those too weak for work were immediately murdered in gas chambers (which were sometimes disguised as "showers") and their bodies burned, while others were first used for slave labor in factories or industrial enterprises located in the camp or nearby. The Nazis also forced some prisoners to work in the removal of the corpses and to harvest elements of the bodies. Gold teeth were extracted from the corpses and women's hair (shaved from the heads of victims before they entered the gas chambers) was recycled for use in products such as rugs and socks.

Some camps, such as Treblinka II, were exclusively used for extermination. Only a small number of prisoners were kept alive to work at the task of disposing of the bodies of people murdered in the gas chambers.

Homosexuals

Prior to the Third Reich, Berlin was considered a liberal city, with many gay bars, nightclubs and cabarets. There were even many drag bars where tourists straight and gay would enjoy female impersonation acts. And there had been a fairly significant gay rights movement under Magnus Hirschfeld around the turn of the century.

In some ways the Nazis seemed conflicted on the subject of homosexuality. Nazi ideology was that homosexuality was incompatible with National Socialism because homosexuals did not reproduce and perpetuate the Master Race. But while the stereotype they propogated of the limp-wristed pansy was incompatible with their image of the ideal Aryan, the Chief of Staff of the SA, Ernst Rohm was homosexual. Hitler seemed quite willing to overlook homosexuality where it suited him.

When Hitler decided the SA had to be disbanded, Hitler ordered Rohm and several other SA chiefs killed, along with hundreds of others in a purge known as the Night of the Long Knives (June 30, 1934). Rohm's murder was undoubtedly based on political motivations and not his sexual orientation, but his orientation was given as justification.

Also in 1934, shortly after the purge, a special division of the Gestapo was instituted to compile lists of known homosexuals. In 1936, Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the SS, created the "Reich Central Office for the Combatting of Homosexuality and Abortion".

Himmler had initially been a supporter of Rohm, arguing that the charges against him were manufactured by Jews. But after the purge, Himmler became very active in the suppression of homosexuality. He exclaimed, "We must exterminate these people root and branch... the homosexual must be eliminated" (Plant, 1986, p. 99).

Estimates vary wildly as to the number of homosexuals murdered. They range from as low as 100,000 to as high as 600,000. One reason for the wide variance is whether the researcher counted people who were both Jewish and homosexual.

Others

Please complete information about the way the campaigns against the other groups were carried out. They were each unique in some ways.

The Triangles

To identify prisoners in the camps according to their "offense", they were required to wear colored triangles on their clothing. The colors were:

• Yellow: Jews -- two overlaid to form a Star of David, with the word "Jew" inscribed
• Red: political dissidents, including communists
• Green: ordinary criminals
• Purple: Jehovah's Witnesses
• Blue: Emigrants
• Brown: Roma, i.e., "Gypsies"
• Black: Lesbians and "anti-socials"
• Pink: Gay men

Interpretations

A major issue in contemporary Holocaust studies is the question of functionalism versus intentionalism. Intentionalists argue that the Holocaust was planned by Hitler from the very beginning. Functionalists hold that the Holocaust was started in 1942 as a result of the failure of the Nazi deportation policy and the impending military losses in Russia. They claim that extermination fantasies outlined in Hitler's Mein Kampf and other Nazi literature were mere propaganda and did not constitute concrete plans.

Another controversy was started by the historian Daniel Goldhagen, who argues that ordinary Germans were knowing and willing participants in the Holocaust, which has its roots in a deep eliminative German anti-semitism. Others claim that while anti-semitism undeniably existed in Germany, the extermination was unknown to many and had to be enforced by the dictatorial Nazi apparatus.

Revisionism and criticism

Some Neo-Nazi groups, and others, have sought to deny that the Holocaust ever occurred, or to sanitize it. Due to the extremely rapid collapse of the Nazi forces at the end of the war, however, they were unsuccessful for the most part in destroying their documents. After their defeat, many tons of documents were recovered, and many thousands of bodies were found not yet completely decomposed, in mass graves near many concentration camps. The physical evidence and the documentary proof, which included records of train shipments of Jews to the camps, orders for tons of cyanide and other poisons, and other explicit details of how the genocide was pursued. Therefore, these revisionist views are rejected by all serious historians of the period. See Holocaust revisionism for details.

Recently the term Holocaust industry has been used to imply that Jewish leaders support remembrance of the Holocaust in order to further financial and political interests.

Origin and use of the term

The word 'Holocaust', from the Greek word holokauston meaning a burnt sacrifice offered to God, originally referred to a sacrifice Jews were required to make by the Torah, and later to large scale catastrophes or massacres. While nowadays the term 'Holocaust' usually refers to the above-mentioned large-scale genocide of Jews, it may also refer to the murder of other groups carried out by Nazis in their extermination camps, for instance Roma and Sinti, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, communists and various Slavic races.

The term 'Holocaust' is also sometimes used to refer to other occurences of genocide, especially the Armenian Holocaust, the murder of over a million Armenians by the Young Turk government in 1915.

Many Jewish scholars prefer the term Shoah, a Hebrew word meaning "Desolation", as the preferred term for the Jewish genocide as they feel that "Holocaust" has lost much of its significance through overuse.

See also:

• Auschwitz
• Historical revisionism
• Anti-Semitism
• Genocide

Further reading:

• Raul Hilbert, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945, HarperCollins Publishers, 1992
• John V. H. Dippel, Bound Upon a Wheel of Fire: Why so many German Jews made the tragic decision to remain in Nazi Germany, Basic Books, 1996.
• Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, New York: Knopf, 1996
• Norman G. Finkelstein, Ruth Bettina Birn, A nation on trial: the Goldhagen thesis and historical truth, Owl books, 1998. Criticizes Goldhagen's methods and theses.
• Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, Henry Holt and Company, 1982. A devastating account of how the Allies responded to the news of Hitler's mass-murder.
• Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933-1939. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1990. An argument for functionalism.
• Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Plume (The Penguin Group), 1994.

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