The Holocaust - Historical Overview -
| To say that the Holocaust of European Jewry (1933-1945) is an unprecedented episode in the history of the Jewish nation is not merely an understatement. It is an inaccuracy of the greatest magnitude, for such an event is unmatched in any recorded history. Millions of Jewish people suffered for twelve years under the terror of Nazi rule, where anti-Jewish propaganda, segregation, and then murder were the norm.
Though there are other cases in history of Genocide, the Holocaust was characterized by its methodical, systematic, efficient, almost scientific murder of any person with Jewish roots. Assimilation or conversion offered no protection in this situation.
At the core of the Holocaust we find modern anti-Semitism, the current version of Jew Hatred - that same phenomenon which appeared throughout the centuries, perhaps finding its most blatant manifestation with the medieval Church. The modern German anti-Semitism was based on racial ideology which stated that the Jews were sub-human (untermensch) while the Aryan race was ultimately superior. The Jew was systematically portrayed as a low-life, as untouchable rot (faulniserscheinung) and as the main cause of Germany's problems.
Germany had major problems resulting from World War I. The Weimar Republic, which was established on the ruins of the defeated Germany, had relinquished land on almost all fronts, had succumbed to military jurisdiction under the Allies, and was forced to pay reparations beyond the prevalent economic capabilities. The rocketing inflation and economic insecurity became even worse with the advent of the Great Depression of 1929. By 1932, unemployment in Germany peaked, and it was in this economic and political climate that Adolf Hitler established the Nationalist-Socialist Party (with Mein Kampf as its manifesto). With Hitler's rise to power in 1933 began the national policy of organized persecution of the Jews.
The subsequent Holocaust of European Jewry can be divided into four periods of time:
1. 1933-1939: The aim of the Nazis during this time was to "cleanse" Germany of her Jewish population (Judenrein). By making the lives of the Jewish citizenry intolerable, the Germans indirectly forced them to emigrate. The Jewish citizens were excluded from public life, were fired from public and professional positions, and were ostracized from the arts, humanities, and sciences. The discrimination was anchored in German anti-Jewish legislation such as the Nurnburg Laws of 1935. At the end of 1938, the government initiated a pogrom against the Jewish inhabitants on a particular night which came to be known as Kristallnacht. This act legitimized the spilling of Jewish blood and the taking of Jewish property. The annexation of Austria in 1938 (Anschluss) subjected the Jewish population there to the same fate as that in Germany.
2. 1939-1941: During this time, the Nazi policy took on a new dimension: The option of emigration (which was anyway questionable because of the lack of countries willing to accept Jewish refugees) was brought to a halt. The Jew-hatred, which was an inseparable part of Nazi policy, because even more extreme with the outbreak of World War II. As the Nazis conquered more land in Europe, more Jewish populations fell under their control: Jews of Poland, Ukraine, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, etc. The Jews were placed in concentration camps and compelled to do forced labor. Ghettos were set up in Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states in order to segregate the Jewish population. In the camps and ghettos, great numbers of Jews perished because of impossible living conditions, hard labor, starvation, or disease.
Hitler's political police force, the Gestapo, had been founded two months after the Nazi rise to power. It became the most terrifying and deadly weapon of the Nazi government, and was used for the destruction of millions of Jews.
3. June 1941 - fall 1943: This was the time during which the Nazis began carrying out the Final Solution to the Jewish problem. Systematic genocide of the Jewish people became official Nazi policy as a result of the Wannsee Conference (Jan. 1942). Special task forces, known as Einsatzgruppen, would follow behind the German army and exterminate the Jewish population of newly conquered areas. In this manner, entire Jewish communities were wiped out. At this point, many concentration camps which had been set up shortly after the Nazi rise to power, became death camps used for the mass-murder of Jews in gas chambers. Some of the more well-known extermination camps were Auschwitz, Chelmno, Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Belzec.
4. 1943 - May 1945: The beginning of 1943 was a turning point in the war. This time saw the gradual collapse of the Third Reich until its ultimate surrender on May 7th, 1945. Despite the weakened position, the Nazis continued with their plan of destruction of the Jewish population in the ghettos and camps still under their control. As the Soviet army proceeded westward, the Nazis hastened the destruction of the Jews and then of their own facilities in order to cover the tracks of their crimes. In the fall of 1944, the Nazis began the evacuation of Auschwitz, and in January 1945, Himmler commanded to evacuate (by foot) all camps toward which the Allied forces were advancing. In this so-called "Death march", tens of thousands of more Jewish lives perished.
In the Holocaust, approximately 6 million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered.
It is important to note that the success of the Nazi machine could not have been so great were it not for the cooperation of the local populations of the conquered territories such as Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states, and even western countries such as France. On the other hand, there were cases of governments and individuals who did their best at risk to their own lives to save the Jews. One such example was the organized evacuation from Denmark of the Jewish population to Sweden.
Following the war, many have asked why the Jews succumbed to the Nazis like "sheep to the slaughter." One cannot ignore the many shows of resistance among the Jews to their fate: The Jewish Partisans who fought in the forests of Eastern Europe, the Jews who joined forces with the local underground resistance, and the uprisings in ghettos and in concentration camps.
There is no doubt that the Holocaust accelerated the establishment of the State of Israel. As a result of the great catastrophe which occurred to the Jewish people, many nations realized that establishing a state was a necessary step for the protection of and the expiation for the Jewish people.
With the end of the war and unconditional surrender of Germany, international military courts were set up for the quick trials and sentencing of the Nazis for their war crimes against the Jewish people and against all humanity. (One of the better known is the Nurnberg Trials.) In 1960, the Israeli Mossad captured one of the greatest war criminals, Adolf Eichmann, in Argentina. He was brought to Jerusalem where he was tried and sentenced to death.
In 1951, the Knesset declared that the 27th day of Nissan is to be Holocaust Day, a day of commemoration of the Jews who perished and for those who showed resistance and heroism. In 1959, the Knesset passed the law of Holocaust Day.
Every year, since 1989, the Knesset (in cooperation with "Yad Vashem") performs the ceremony of "Everyone Has a Name" in which the names of all of the holocaust victims are read out loud. http://www.knesset.gov.il/shoah/eng/ehashoah.htm |
Yom HaShoah
Holocaust Remembrance
The plots to destroy the Jews hatched by Pharaoh, Haman, Antiochus, and others in history was almost realized in recent times by Hitler’s “final solution”, the plan for complete destruction of the Jewish people. “Shoa” means calamity, which barely comes close to describing what happened to so many of our people at the hands of a so called “civilized”, “Christian” nation. While mass murders seem to be all too commonplace in history, never before had any state, with all the authority of responsible leaders, decided and announced it’s intention to kill off a particular group of humans, including the old, women, children and babies as completely as possible, using every resource available, with great zeal. While not all victims were Jews, every Jew was a victim. Why were Jews the main target? The answer to this goes back to the book of Genesis:
Genesis 12:2-3 "I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great,and you will be a blessing. [3] I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse;and all peoples on earthwill be blessed through you."
Genesis 17:6-7 I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you. [7] I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.
Blessings to the whole world were promised through the descendants of Abraham, the most famous of which is Yeshua. The devil, father of lies, is always looking for ways to prove God a liar...destroying the Jewish people would prevent them from fulfilling God’s promise, and also show that God does not keep His covenants. In Satan’s attempt to do this he enlisted men with wicked hearts to carry out his deeds...
Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?
The calling of the Jews to be holy and set apart for God often led to their being singled out for discrimination, as we learned in Esther:
Esther 3:8-9
Then Haman said to King Xerxes, "There is a certain people dispersed and scattered among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom whose customs are different from those of all other people and who do not obey the king's laws; it is not in the king's best interest to tolerate them. [9] If it pleases the king, let a decree be issued to destroy them, and I will put ten thousand talents of silver into the royal treasury for the men who carry out this business."
Often the Church was silent about persecution of Jews, or in some cases even encouraged it. Seeds of hate were planted by early church fathers such as John Chrysostom: (4th century) “The synagogue is a place of meeting for the assassins of Christ, the domicile of the devil. Indeed, Jews worship the devil...their rites are criminal and impure. Their religion is a disease. Jews are the most miserable of all men.” His sermons had great influence, and were followed by others with similar misguided ideas. Martin Luther (1500’s) wrote: “Concerning the Jews and their lies, Jews are poisoners, ritual murderers, usurers, parasites on Christian society. They are worse than devils, doomed to Hell. Their synagogues should be set on fire, their homes should likewise be broken down and destroyed. Let us drive them out of the country for all time.”
Centuries later these ideas were carried out in the mostly Protestant Germany. In November of 1938 one of the first large scale pogroms was established by the Nazis in honor of Luther’s birthday. The seeds of hatred for the Jews were especially evident in pre-W.W.II Germany. 1873 saw the first use of the term “anti-Semitism” by Wilhelm Marr. Before this the Jews were considered evil for what they believed. Now they were thought of as separate race, fundamentally different from “Aryans”, a fictitious super-race invented by the Nazis. In 1920 the book Protocols of the Elders of Zion was translated into German and sold 120,000 copies the first year. Even when it was shown to be a forgery and totally bogus it grew in popularity, with lectures and classes given on the “international Jewish conspiracy” posed by this book.
Later in the 1920’s the worst inflation hit Germany. This was partly caused by Germany’s huge reparation bill from W.W.I. Germany’s loss was ironically blamed on the Jews, even though 100,000 fought in it, and 12,000 died for Germany. The money became worthless, unemployment was huge, there were food riots...and someone had to be blamed. Since the middle ages Jews were prohibited from many trades except for debt collection as a service to landowners. This tradition in finance led to them being targeted for all Germany’s financial woes, even though they were only 1% of the population. Paradoxically, while Jews were accused of being too successful as capitalists, they were also accused of being Communists, and thus enemies of Germany. Hitler’s Nazis rose to power on this platform...”the Jews are our misfortune!” Hitler’s cause of Jew hatred became intertwined with German nationalism to the level of a religion, with Hitler as god. The Nazi said: “In fighting off the Jew, I am fighting for the Lord’s work.” This new Nazi “religion” had its roots in the occult, which Hitler and his associates practiced.
Under the guise of “protection” for Germany, laws and policies were established that slowly but persistently disenfranchised the Jews. Soon they were no longer citizens and had no rights. Many were expelled or were driven out. Towns would proudly boast to be “Judenrein”, cleansed of Jews. November 9, 1938, the “crystalnact”, night of broken glass, left no doubt about Germany’s attitude toward Jews: 190 synagogues were destroyed, along with 800 Jewish owned shops, 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps, and thousands were murdered. As a “bonus” for this treatment Jews were fined one billion reichmarks, about $400 million.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939 persecution of the Jews escalated. Warsaw, the center of European Jewry, was turned into a ghetto where up to 5,000 people a month died of disease, starvation and attacks by both the Germans and their eager accomplices. In 1941 Reinhard Heydrich organized the “final solution” to the “Jewish problem”; Jews were deported from all over Europe to death camps. In all, over 6 million Jews were murdered...a figure that cannot describe the toll in human suffering it represents.
Although there are accounts of “righteous Gentiles” who came to the aid of our people, most of the world was silent or even in agreement with this destruction. Jews who sought to escape certain death were given the cold shoulder. The US and UK limited Jewish emigration with laws and quotas. Anti-Semitic papers, magazines, and radio shows reflected an attitude that perhaps the Jews deserved their fate. At the Evian Conference of western powers in 1938 the response to the plight of the Jews was represented by Australia: “As we have no real racial problem here, we are not desirous of importing one.” Britain would not even let Jews emigrate to Palestine...refugee boats were refused entry and turned back from every port with no solution but to return to the Nazi gas chambers. This only encouraged Hitler that they had the unstated approval of their method of dealing with the Jews. Well before the end of the war there was evidence of the Holocaust. Our military felt that all efforts had to be spent on winning the war without any consideration for a “side issue” such as this. God sees it differently:
Proverbs 24:11-12
Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter.[12] If you say, "But we knew nothing about this," does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who guards your life know it? Will he not repay each person according to what he has done?
When the war ended the full horror of the “final solution” was revealed to the world. Holocaust comes from the Greek “holo”, whole, and “caustos”, burned; meaning entirely consumed by fire. Out of this fire God faithfully preserved a remnant of His people.
Isaiah 49:14-15
But Zion said, "The LORD has forsaken me, the Lord has forgotten me." [15] "Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!.
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