"The outcome of one man's beliefs": why the Holocaust happened

Such was indeed the Holocaust, visited not upon the Jews because of their religion, their culture or their social position, but because of their race. Even people who were half- Jewish or quarter-Jewish were targeted by the Nazis.

Hitler's beliefs

Dismayingly, there have been other genocides since the end of the Second World War. But the Jewish genocide had an extra dimension not shared by any other. Antisemitism was, and remains, fueled by a paranoid conspiracy theory, according to which Jews of every kind were driven by what Hitler called their “racial instinct” to engage in a ceaseless and unrelenting “drive to world domination”. The only way to stop this – in Hitler’s view – was to exterminate them wherever they were to be found.

Hitler conceived this bizarre theory as he searched for an answer to the question of why Germany had been defeated in the First World War. Serving as a soldier on the Western Front, an experience that gave meaning to a life hitherto marked by failure and frustration, he had proudly believed in the victory propaganda pumped out by the German High Command up to the final weeks of the conflict. As he lay recovering in hospital from a poison gas attack at the very end of the war, the only explanation he could grasp for was one held by a tiny minority of far-right German nationalists, according to which Jewish socialists had stabbed the army in the back by undermining morale, above all on the Home Front, and destroying the will to fight.

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Hitler devoted the rest of his life preparing to re-run the First World War, this time successfully, creating a militaristic dictatorship, building on the removal of what he saw as the Jewish threat at home, and preparing for the new European conflict through rearming and preparing the German people for the struggle.

When he came to power in 1933 he almost immediately implemented antisemitic measures. On 7 April he sacked all Jewish public employees except those who had fought for Germany in the First World War. By 1935, laws promulgated at the annual Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg banned Jews and non-Jews from marrying or having sexual relations and effectively reduced Jews to the status of second-class citizens. German Jews’ rights were further curtailed in the following years, as they were pushed out of the economy by the ‘Aryanization’ of their businesses and jobs.

Escalating violence

In November 1938, the Nazis mounted a nationwide pogrom – Kristallnacht – in which over a thousand synagogues were burned to the ground, 7,500 Jewish-owned shops were trashed, and 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up on Hitler’s personal orders and sent to concentration camps, from which they were released only on promising to emigrate.

Jews made up less than one per cent of the German population, and half of these had emigrated by the outbreak of the Second World War, leaving only about a quarter of a million behind. But the German conquest of Poland in 1919 brought 3.5 million Jews under German control, fully 10 per cent of the population.

While German Jews were highly acculturated into mainstream German society, most Polish Jews were not; they dressed differently and spoke Yiddish rather than Polish. They had to suffer considerable discrimination at the hands of the government and non-Jewish population. Seizing the opportunity to intensify his antisemitic actions, Hitler sent in death squads of the SS Security Service to round up and dispossess Jews and confine them to specially created ghettos in walled-off areas of cities such as Warsaw and Lodz, where they rapidly became malnourished and sick.

This process was conducted with considerable violence and brutality. Both the SS and regular German troops treated the Jews with a special degree of sadism, seeking to degrade and humiliate them in countless different ways.

Mass murder

The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 ratcheted the violence up a further level, as Hitler regarded Bolshevism as a Jewish creation, a view that lacked any foundation in reality. He sent in six armed and motorised SS Security Service death squads behind the army as it entered eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and the former Baltic states, their task to create more ghettos where Jews living in the area were to be confined and to kill Jewish political commissars.

At the same time, however, the death squads, aided by police auxiliaries and local, anti-Soviet and antisemitic militias, began killing Jewish men indiscriminately, moving on to slaughter Jewish women and children as well. Altogether 1.5 million Jews were shot into pits which they often had to dig for themselves. The violence and brutality were almost inconceivable.

The stress on the SS troops – many of whom had nervous breakdowns or began drinking heavily – prompted Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and leader of the murder operation, to take advantage of public disquiet in Germany regarding the gassing and murder of mentally ill and handicapped non-Jewish Germans. He transferred the gassing teams to the newly conquered East to set up their facilities, in a bid to make the killing process less directly personal.

The death camps

Over the autumn and winter of 1941, 42 camps were set up in the occupied East for the sole purpose of killing Jews. The first one, at Chelmno, began operating on 8 December 1941 by packing prisoners into sealed compartments in the back of vans into which the vehicle’s exhaust was pumped, causing death by asphyxiation. By the spring of 1942, other camps, at Treblinka, Sobibór and Belzec had been set up with stationary gas facilities using the same process. At the same time, a mass killing facility was established at the Auschwitz concentration camp, near Cracow, where hydrogen cyanide insecticide known as Zyklon-B was employed. Altogether 1.1 million victims died at Auschwitz, including more than 900,000 Jews.

Initially the gas chambers were used to kill inmates of the Jewish ghettos in the East. In the spring and summer of 1942, Jews in other parts of Europe under Nazi control – already subject to severe restrictions – were rounded up and deported to the East, usually in unheated cattle trucks. In the summer of 1944, when the Nazis took over Hungary, a further 440,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz, while the German takeover of Northern Italy following the country’s capitulation set off a further wave of deportations, including small communities of Jews living in Italian-ruled Greek islands such as Rhodes. The killing did not cease until the Allied victory over Germany in May 1945.

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This programme of mass murder owed its inspiration above all to Adolf Hitler, as we know from a variety of sources including his own writings; the diaries of his close confidant and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels; the appointments diary and phone log of SS chief Heinrich Himmler and many more. The co-ordination of the killings was achieved in particular by the Wannsee Conference – planned in November 1942, but not held until January 1942 – at which top representatives from a variety of German ministries and institutions agreed under the chairmanship of the head of the SS Security Service, Reinhard Heydrich, on an overall programme.

As German forces swept across Europe from 1939 to 1943, they put or confirmed in power antisemitic politicians and parties who in many cases pursued their own policies of discrimination and murder against the Jews under their control. The Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu was one of these; the killing of some 400,000 Romanian Jews was carried out with such brutality that even the SS killing squad operating in the vicinity was moved to protest. German client states, from Vichy France to Croatia and Slovakia, also engaged in mass murder, often accompanied by actions of sickening sadism.

But without the spectacular German military victories from 1939 onwards, which gave Hitler the confidence to implement his ‘final solution’, they would not have felt so emboldened to put their own murderous antisemitism into practice. Beyond this, hundreds of thousands of Germans, officials, generals, SS officers and many others, motivated by antisemitism or persuaded by the antisemitic conspiracy theories pumped out by Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry and its newspapers, films and documentaries, assisted in the mass murder in myriad ways, from drawing up railway timetables for the transport to organising the construction of gassing facilities. Few of them indeed were brought to justice after the war ended.