What Was the Holocaust?

During WWII, the Nazi regime, headed by Adolf Hitler, set out to exterminate every living Jew. They murdered 6 million. Why did they do it? How did they do it? And why do so many young people know so little about it?

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The Holocaust is widely regarded as the greatest evil ever carried out by any government in history. Given the magnitude of this crime, it’s disturbing that so many people, especially those under 40, know little or nothing about it. According to a recent study, young people have a “worrying lack of basic Holocaust knowledge.”

So here are some facts everyone should know.

The Holocaust was a relatively recent event. It took place between 1939—when Germany invaded Poland, sparking World War II—and 1945 when Germany surrendered. During those years, the Nazi regime, headed by Adolf Hitler, set out to murder every Jew in the world, starting with every Jew in Europe.

One of the things that made Nazi antisemitism different from other forms of ethnic hatred was that Hitler drew no distinctions among Jews: He regarded every Jew as an enemy worthy of death: Jewish children no less than Jewish adults.

The SS, the Nazis’ elite troops, would line up Jewish children next to parents and grandparents, and have firing squads shoot them all. When the Nazis decided that murdering Jews by gunfire was too slow, they opened death camps in which they installed gas chambers.

The Nazi SS would force hundreds of Jews into these chambers and pipe in poisonous gas. After about fifteen minutes of hell, all the people inside would be dead—suffocated.

The Nazis then forced other Jews to extract the bodies from the gas chambers and, as a final indignity, examine the dead Jews’ mouths to pull out gold teeth. They would examine hands as well. When rings were too tight, they would simply cut off fingers. They would also cut off the victims’ hair which German businesses used for mattress stuffing. Nothing was wasted.

What explains the Nazis murderous obsession with the Jews? After all, the Jews were a very small portion of Germany’s population as well as of the world’s population. In 1938, just prior to World War II, there were about 17 million Jews, less than one percent of the world’s population of two billion. The Nazis murdered six million Jews—two thirds of Europe’s Jews and one third of all the Jews in the world.

Why?

The most commonly offered explanation is racism: the Nazis were racists and hated Jews and all other non-Aryans.

Was Hitler a racist? Yes.

Did he speak in derogatory terms of people other than Aryans? Yes.

Is that why he murdered the Jews? No.

It’s easily proven that racism alone wasn’t the primary reason for Nazi Jew-hatred.

Throughout World War II, the Nazis allied themselves with the non-Aryan Japanese. The Nazis also allied themselves with the non-Aryan Arabs, whose antisemitism made them natural allies of the Nazis. And while the Nazis certainly denigrated black people, they made no effort to persecute, let alone exterminate, them.

So, though Nazi antisemitism was racist, it wasn’t solely, or even primarily, the product of racism. There was something much deeper behind this hatred.

What infuriated Hitler and the Nazis about the Jews was their influence—moral, intellectual, and economic. If Aryans were the superior race, how could Jews be so influential? Hitler believed that the greatest battle on Earth was between the Aryan and the Jew. Therefore, Aryans could prevail only if the Jews were destroyed.

The Nazis blamed the Jews for creating everything they hated: communism and capitalism, Judaism and Christianity, which he regarded as a Jewish creation: Jesus was a Jew, the apostles were Jews, and two-thirds of the Christian Bible is the Jews’ Bible. Hitler yearned for Germany to return to its pre-Christian pagan roots. Tragically, however, while Hitler hated Christianity, most of Germany’s Christians didn’t hate Hitler.

Nazi Jew-hatred was so all-consuming that killing Jews was ultimately more important to Hitler than winning the war. Even while the Nazis were losing the critical battle of Stalingrad, trains that could have been used to aid German troops were diverted to transport Jews to the death camps.

For Hitler and the Nazis, it wasn’t enough to murder the Jews of Europe; they also had to be tortured and humiliated. Jews were beaten and starved to death, burned and frozen to death, made the subjects of hideous medical experiments with no anesthesia; and nearly all the six million were stripped naked prior to being killed.

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