A Basic Introduction to the Holocaust

Season 2 of our podcast, "Hidden History: An Odyssey Through Time" will cover victims & heroes of the Holocaust so I felt this was the best time to discuss what exactly the Holocaust was. This will just be a basic introduction to the Holocaust: to fully dive into this subject in the most accurate way possible would probably take up quite a few blog posts.

So, to start, the Holocaust (1933–1945) was the deliberate, calculated, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German regime, along with millions of others. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines the years of the Holocaust as 1933–1945. The Holocaust era began in January 1933 when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. It ended in May 1945, when the Allied Powers defeated Nazi Germany in World War II. The Holocaust is also sometimes referred to as “the Shoah,” the Hebrew word for “catastrophe.”

When they came to power in Germany, the Nazis did not immediately start to carry out mass murder. However, they quickly began using the government to target and exclude Jews from German society. They began a systematic campaign to strip Jews of their property and their jobs in academia, the judiciary, the military, and the civil service. The Nazi persecution of Jews became increasingly radical and reached its climax in a plan that Nazi leaders referred to as the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” The “Final Solution” was the organized and systematic mass murder of European Jews. The Nazi German regime carried out this genocide between 1941 and 1945.

“No salvation is possible until the bearer of disunion, the Jew, has been rendered powerless to harm.”

- Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany from 1933 until his cowardly suicide in 1945.

Now that we have a very basic understanding of what the Holocaust was, another major question I am often asked is: Why did the Nazis target Jews? The Nazis targeted Jews because the Nazis were radically antisemitic, which meant that they were prejudiced against and hated Jews. The Nazis falsely accused Jews of causing Germany’s social, economic, and political problems after Germany was defeated during  World War I (1914–1918).

On top of that, the instability of Germany under the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), the fear of communism, and the economic downfalls of the Great Depression also pushed many German citizens right in the open arms and ideals of the Nazis, including antisemitism.

The Nazis were also obsessed with a person's race. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum goes into further details about the Nazis and their race-based views:

"The Nazi Party promoted a particularly virulent form of racial antisemitism. It was central to the party’s race-based worldview. The Nazis believed that the world was divided into distinct races and that some of these races were superior to others. They considered Germans to be members of the supposedly superior “Aryan” race.

The Nazis also believed that the so-called “Jewish race” was the most inferior and dangerous of all. According to the Nazis, Jews were a threat that needed to be removed from German society. Otherwise, the Nazis insisted, the “Jewish race” would permanently corrupt and destroy the German people. The Nazis’ race-based definition of Jews included many persons who identified as Christians or did not practice Judaism."

By the time Hitler and Nazi Germany was finally defeated in 1945, millions of Jews & other innocent lives had been systematically wiped from this Earth. That's what the Holocaust was and that's why it's important, now more than ever, to be aware of the millions of murders carried out in pogroms & mass shootings; by a policy of extermination through labor in concentration camps; and in gas chambers and gas vans in German extermination camps.

The six extermination camps were: 

• Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek & Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Auschwitz & Majdanek also used extermination through labor in order to kill their prisoners.

Please, if you are interested in learning more about the Holocaust, don't stop with this post. Visit the links below to get access to a treasure trove of information about the crimes committed by Nazi Germany and the lives destroyed as a result:

The following photos were taken by the Hidden History team (March 2018)