THE PATH TO GENOCIDE

STATE CRIME

Shoah* - The Holocaust

The Nazis and the Jews
* Hebrew term meaning calamity
calamity, used in preference to Holocaust derived from
the Greek, meaning completely burned
burned

Respectable
Respectable antianti-Semitism?
Martin Heidegger, academic and
philosopher, 18891889-1976

Genocide is not a recent phenomenon:

Armenia - the forgotten Holocaust

Martin Niemoeller, 1892-1984

U-boat ace of WWI

Theologian and pastor
Conservative
Early supporter of Hitler
Later opponent of the regime
over suppression of religious
freedom and imprisoned
Controversial postpost-war figure
Peace campaigner

AntiAnti-Semitic (specifically, antianti-Jewish) sentiment

dates back thousands of years.
Much of the Jewish Diaspora settled in Europe on
expulsion from Judea in & after the Roman Empire.
Persecution of - and violence against - the Jews was
a regular feature in different parts of Europe at
different points in time. In medieval times, Jews had
been brutally treated in England on occasions. Later,
in the nineteenth & early twentieth centuries, several
European regimes remained antianti-Semitic especially
Poland and Russia (and subsequently the USSR),
while in France, the Dreyfuss affair exposed official
antianti-Semitic behaviour.
PseudoPseudo-scientific methods were frequently used to
seek intellectual respectability for such views.

This would be a factor in why so many were so easily

exterminated in countries later occupied by Germany.
While terrible, persecution seldom led to pogroms
still less to anything more organised, systematic and
sustained such as a genocide.
In Germany and Austria, antianti-semitic feeling was also
established but, as in other countries, while often
distrusted in some quarters, Jews continued to play an
important in public and commercial life.
The National Socialist Workers Party of Germany
(the Nazi Party) was formed in the aftermath of
Germany
Germanys defeat in the First World War.
PrePre-existing antianti-semitic sentiments would be a factor
in why so many were so easily exterminated in
countries later occupied by Germany.

While terrible, persecution seldom led to pogroms

still less to anything more organised, systematic and
sustained such as a genocide.
In Germany and Austria, antianti-Semitic feeling was
also established but, as in other countries, while often
distrusted in some quarters, Jews continued to play an
important in public and commercial life.
The National Socialist Workers Party of Germany
(the Nazi Party) was formed in the aftermath of
Germany
Germanys defeat in the First World War.
Comprising a mix of disaffected individuals from
military, ultraultra- nationalists, racial theorists,
eugenicists, antianti-communists and others, the Nazis
were ideologically hostile to Jews seeing them as part
of a wider communist/ bolshevick conspiracy against
Germany and the German people.

In Mein Kampf (My Struggle), written during his

period in prison following the failed Munich Putsch
in 1923, Hitler, the leader of the Nazis, railed against
the enemies of Germany, including those who had
betrayed
betrayed the country the politics of the stab in the
back
back
Hitler reserved his greatest venom for the Jews.
Nazi party newspapers such as Der Sturmer and,
later, Volkischer Beobachter,
Beobachter, regularly carried the
most virulent antianti-Semitic propaganda.
The Weimar Republic, established in Germany after
1919, was a weak democracy which was widely
discredited in the eyes of many Germans, being
associated with the humiliating Versailles Treaty, the
great inflation of 1923, and the worsening depression
6 million unemployed.

Der Stuermer
Stuermer
Portrayals of Jews

Der St
Strmer
rmer
Portrayals of Jews

Portrayals of Jews, 1930

They fight and the Jew grins
grins

Portrayals of Jews, 1931

The Worm Where something is
rotten, the Jew is the cause
cause

Buy from the Jews, betray your people

people

Portrayals of Jews, 1933

Revenge
Revenge

Portrayals of Jews, 1933

Away with him
him

Der St
Strmer,
rmer, 1934
Jewish Murder Plan against Gentile
Humanity Revealed
Revealed

Portrayals of Jews, 1931

In General Elections in the late 1920s and 1930s, the

Nazis increased their share of the popular vote.
In the 1932 Election, although not an outright victor,
fearful of the Communist alternatives, and believing
that the Austrian corporal
corporal could be easily managed,
the Reich President, Field Marshall Hindenburg
invited Hitler to form a government. A number of
minor parties joined.
From January 1933, the new government moved to
ratchet up the hitherto sporadic antianti-Jewish activities
of Nazi party supporters, while the Reichstag fire of
April 1933 was blamed on Jews and used as
justification for punitive measures.
Hindenburg
Hindenburgs death in 1934 cleared the way, Reichs
Chancellor Hitler assumed total power, proclaiming
himself Fhrer (literally, the Leader).

Adolf Hitler, 18891889-1945

Reichskanzler and Fhrer

German Defend Yourselves! Don

Dont
buy from Jews!
Jews!, 1933

Nazism had clearly defined gender roles:

Men go to fight
Women tend Children

Appealing to Aryan youth the Master

Race
Race concept was a longlong-established
part of German culture and thinking

Portrayals of Jews, 1936 - Unfruitful

- She belongs to the church, she belongs to
Satan. Both lost to the German race
race

The Nuremburg Laws proclaimed in 1935 imposed

growing legal restrictions on nonnon-Aryans (mainly
Jews but also gypsies and others considered racially
inferior). New interinter-racial marriage and relationships
were prohibited. Discrimination in key jobs. Loss of
assets. Jews harassed, mocked, denounced, exiled.
Many German and Austrian Jews fled eg to Poland,
France, Holland or further afield to the UK and USA
though other countries applied tight restrictions. A
flight to the British mandate of Palestine also began.
In 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish activist,
assassinated a member of the German Embassy in
Paris. Within 24 hrs, 20000 Jews were arrested, 200
synagogues burnt in an act of collective punishment.
Public opinion still mattered however and persecution
was still haphazard and less than systematic.

Portrayal of Jews, 1936

The Decent Jew
Jew

The persecution intensifies, 1937

The Eternal Jew
Jew

Berlin
Berlins gutted synagogue following
Kristallnacht,
Kristallnacht, 9 November 1938

Portrayal of Jews, 1939 - The Land of

Freedom where one is ruled by Jews,
freedom is only an empty dream
dream.

Portrayal of Jews, 1943 - The mobilization of

the People
People. After the disaster at Stalingrad,
Goebbels announces Total War
War

Portrayal of Jews, September 1944 Vermin

Vermin

A foretaste of mass murder came with

Action T4
T4 the euthanasia programme

Eugenics movements across Europe and the USA but

Germany took to new depths
Downs, physically disabled, mentally enfeebled and
other undesirables
undesirables either sterilized or murdered at
official sanatoria such as Schloss Hartheim
Families told they had died of pneumonia then
cremated.
Actually killed by CO2 poisoning in mobile killing
vans, lethal injection,
Later presented as mercy
mercy killings and as part of
ensuring racial hygiene.
Methods used were later refined for use against the
Jews and others.

A foretaste of mass murder came with

Action T4
T4 the euthanasia programme

Internal dissent on Action T4

In August 1942, von Galen was even more outspoken

broadening his attack to include the Nazi persecution
of religious orders and the closing of Catholic
institutions, attributing the heavy allied bombing of
German cities as the wrath of God against Germany
for breaking His laws.
The censored German press did not report the
protests.
Surprisingly, despite requests for his arrest by local
Nazis, Galen remained free.
More than 400,000 people were sterilized and a
further 70,000 were killed in the Action T4.

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Invasion was part of a longlong-held plan of territorial

aggrandisement to create Lebensraum (living space
space)
for German people.
The divided Polish state was dissolved the Nazis
created the General Government
Government area in the former
Poland, added 3,000,000 more Jews.
Immediately, persecution of Jews intensified.
Wholesale expulsions and mass movement of
populations begun with Jews put into ghettos pending
a decision on further measures.
Other civilians were often badly treated but the worst
general treatment was reserved for the Jews.
Ethnic Germans living in the occupied zones were
moved into the emptied areas of Jews/Poles.

Church figures protested against the State

States actions.
The RC Bishop of Munster, Clemens August Graf
von Galen publicly denounced the T4 program in a
sermon, calling on "the F
Fhrer to defend the people
against the Gestapo. It is a terrible, unjust and
catastrophic thing when man opposes his will to the
will of God," Galen said. "We are talking about men
and women, our compatriots, our brothers and sisters.
Poor unproductive people if you wish, but does this
mean that they have lost their right to live?
This powerful, populist sermon was immediately
reproduced and distributed throughout Germany.
Galen's sermon probably had a greater impact than
any other statement in consolidating antianti-euthanasia'
sentiment
sentiment (Robert Lifton).

The prepre-War Reich (Germany, Austria and the Reich

protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia) possessed
c.350,000 Jews.
Hitler
Hitlers plan envisaged that most of eastern Europe
(beyond vassal states) would be a vast German
Colony. Slavs would be slaves and fewer in
number. So Aryan Germany in the middle,
surrounded by less important Aryans or even
subhuman untermensch Slavs. The course of the war
disrupted his ambitions.
1 September 1939, Germany attacked and conquered
Poland (the USSR attacking from the East).

Poland ceases to exist

The Star of David to be worn by all

Jews, starting from 1939

Ghettos were invariably geographical small but

shockingly densely populated. Walls built around
them. Crossing was forbidden. Food and other
supplies deliberately severely restricted to encourage
death). Collaborators dealt with harshly. Reprisals
were swift, disproportionate , ruthless and arbitrary.
Ultimately, there could be no accommodation, no
no
chance for collaboration Jews had to die. Ethnic
Slavs were deemed slightly less obnoxious than Jews
but could be made to do forced labour - effective
enslavement.
Ghettos were established in many towns and cities
though the largest were in Warsaw and Lublin.
Propaganda Minister Goebbels and Hans Frank, the
Governor of the General Government, made films
which deliberately portrayed ghetto inhabitants as
vermin, needing to be cleansed ..

Goebbels on the Jews

A victim of a pogrom in Poland, 1940

"Wherever

rats turn up, they spread

annihilation throughout the land,
destroying property and food supplies.
This is how they disseminate disease.
Pestilence, leprosy, typhus, cholera,
dysentery. Just like the Jews among
mankind, rats represent the very essence
of malicious and subterranean
destruction."

A street scene in the Warsaw ghetto, 1941

Killing so many people was organizationally

challenging for the SS which was given the task.
The SS established 4 Einsatzgruppen (special action
squads) composed of men from the SS, Gestapo, and
selected others, each led by a senior officer, all of
whom were highly educated individuals.
The 4 Einsatzgruppen followed the Wehrmacht into
newly occupied conquested territory and begun
rounding up Jews (along with Communists, Gypsies
and other undesirables
undesirables).
Victims were invariably beaten, their possessions
stolen, stripped, lined up and then shot, their bodies to
fall into giant pits, row upon row. The bodies would
be covered in lime to help destroy them.
Later, as the Germans retreated, many mass graves
dug up and the putrescent remains hastily cremated.

Though wary of international reaction, and done in

secrecy, there was little real attempt to hide these
activities at a local level. Sympathisers
Sympathisers were
recruited whose bloodlust in pogroms against Jews
even surprised the Germans
Local police battalions and militias.
Shooting proved unhygienic
unhygienic and costly
(ammunition) while upsetting to the morale of the
units involved in the actions!
Alternative methods of disposal sought.
The Wannsee Conference, January 1942, saw leaders
of the Third Reich meet to discuss how to secure the
Final Solution of the Jewish question
question.

The historian Calvocoressi said:

The attempt to exterminate whole peoples as a
logical consequence of Nazi ideology and the degree
to which it succeeded was a result of military
conquests which placed millions of Jews within the
Nazi grasp and of the reiterated propaganda which so
transformed thousands of Germans that they were
able to perform the cruelest of obscenities. Many
thousands more witnessed them or were otherwise
aware of them
them.

Einsatzgruppen operations, 1942

When Germany conquered Northern and Western

Europe, whose populations were regarded as racially
closer to Aryan Germany, on the spot killings were
generally rare.
Puppet regimes or a Reich Commissioner appointed
as there was no real plan for their governance.
Jews were at first subject to the kind of restrictions
familiar in the Reich. Later, deportations commenced.
Assisted by local administrator and police and others.
Sent in cattle trucks for resettlement
resettlement in labour
and/or family camps in the East.
Rumours of shipment to reservations and Madagascar
among other wilder ideas circulating.

Dr Arthur Nebe,
Head of Einsatzgruppen B

President of Interpol
Evidence that he tried to
minimise the scale of the
atrocities but his
culpability is undenied.
Accused of being in the
July 44 bomb plot against
Hitler, he was tried in the
People
Peoples Court and
executed hanged by
piano wire, 1945.

Reinhard Heydrich
Head of the SD, Architect of the Final Solution

The Wannsee Conference, 2020-1-42

(Die Endl
Endlsung der Judenfrage)
Judenfrage)

The Final Solution

AuschwitzAuschwitz-Birkenau then and now

As result of Wannsee (though some evidence now

suggests the decision to exterminate the Jews was
confirmed before then), the Nazis moved to establish
a series of extermination camps in the occupied East.
Operation Reinhard
Reinhard forced deportations to death
camps at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka;
the most infamous was that of AuschwitzAuschwitz-Birkenau.
The extermination camps represented a level of
killing and human misery on an industrial scale.

Arbeit Macht Frei

Selection at AuschwitzAuschwitz-Birkenau, 1944.

Auschwitz Selection Ramp

Enemies of the Reich

AuschwitzAuschwitz-Birkenau
prisoner accommodation
accommodation

Zyklon B gas canisters and human hair

Remains of the crematoria

Inside the prison huts

10

The ovens

Sonderkommando burning bodies at

AuschwitzAuschwitz-Birkenau, 1944

The crematoria at AuschwitzAuschwitz-Birkenau

Meanwhile, offoff-duty, SS staff at

Auschwitz find time to relax

Victims of Ebensee KZ medical

experiments killed up to 2000 a week

Liberated survivors, Ebensee KZ

11

Mass grave for unknown victims,

BergenBergen-Belsen, 1945

Disposing of thousands of victims

Richard Dimbleby
Dimblebys comments on
Belsen Concentration Camp, 1945

The annual tally of death

Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You
could not see which was which ... The living lay with their
heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful,
ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing
to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your
way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them ... Babies
Babies
had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live ...
A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her
milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then
ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the
baby had been dead for days.

Death toll among Europes Jews

Year
1933
19331940

Jews Killed
under 100,000

1941

1,100,000

1942

2,700,000

1943

500,000

1944

600,000

1945

100,000

More of the Nazis crimes

Victims
Jews
Soviet POWs
Ethnic Poles
Romani
Disabled
Freemasons
Homosexuals
Jehovah's
Witnesses

Killed
5.9 million
23 million
1.8
1.82 million
220,000
220,0001,500,000
200,000
200,000250,000
80,000
80,000200,000
5,000
5,00015,000
2,500
2,5005,000

12

Churchill
Churchills Reaction to news of the
mass murders at Auschwitz, 1944

ASSIGNING GUILT / PUNISHMENT

Despite the slaughter of millions of people, relatively

few of those responsible were brought to justice
Nazi Leaders were killed in battle, committed suicide,
fled into exile, melted away into the background.
The Allies vowed that they would pursue 'the ranks of
the guilty to the uttermost ends of the earth' and
would deliver them to their accusers 'in order that
justice may be done'. Did they?
Even when caught, the number of executions and life
sentences was relatively few though the Nuremburg
trials were an early showcase of international justice.
Questions were also asked of whether the Allied
powers were culpable eg. why didn
didnt they bomb the
railway tracks to the camps or take in more migrants.

There is no doubt this is the most horrible crime ever

committed in the whole history of the world, and it
has been done by scientific machinery by nominally
civilised men in the name of a great State and one of
the leading races of Europe. It is quite clear that all
concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands,
including the people who only obeyed orders by
carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death
after their association with the murders has been
proved.
proved.

Victor
Victors Justice or Retribution?
The Nuremburg trials, 1946

Josef Kramer the beast of Belsen

Belsen
"I had no feelings in carrying out these
things because I had received an order."

Irma Grese the beautiful beast

beast

The Nazi leadership

Youngest woman to be
executed under English law
in 2th century in 1945.
Had a sadistic mother who
committed suicide.
Had low educational
attainment and bullied
Her father disapproved of
her Hitler Youth role in
League of German girls.
Shouted Schnell
Schnell to her
executioner!

13

Heinrich Himmler, 19001900-1945

Head of the SS, Gestapo and police

Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering, 18931893-1946

Head of the Luftwaffe,
Luftwaffe, PM of Prussia

Goring

Adolf Eichmann learned to hate and to

hate in a controlled & impersonal way
way

Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither

in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that
matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all,
it is the leaders of the country who determine the
policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the
people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist
dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist
dictatorship. ...voice or no voice, the people can
always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That
is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are
being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of
patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It
works the same way in any country.

OTHER CONSEQUENCES

The UN Convention on Genocide 1948 created but

the notion of meaningful international justice has
been difficult to achieve given little willingness to
enforce it by the world
worlds major powers.
Surviving Jews fled in large numbers to Palestine,
then a League of Nations British mandate, demanding
a Jewish homeland
homeland Israel created, 1948.
Holocaust denial remains evident.
NeoNeo-Nazi activity continues in many countries with
periods of upsurge, especially during times of
economic stress, racial and religious tension.
Other genocides have occurred since the Shoah.

A bureaucrat, following orders?

Psychopath? AntiAnti-Semite? All 3?
The Banality of Evil
Evil (Arendt)
abdicating moral choice or exercise
of personal autonomy.
Abducted from Argentina by
Israeli
Israelis Mossad (causing an
international dispute over the
legality of this act)
Following conviction was the only
person executed in Israel, 1961.

Punishing the Germans ethnic

Germans expelled at the end of WW2

14

Stalin
Stalins Deportations before, during
and after WWII millions died

Israel The Jewish State, 1948

Holocaust deniers
David Irvine
Richard Williamson

The rise of the neoneo-Nazi right

history set to repeat itself?

Genocide and crimes against

humanity continue .

Cambodia (1970s)
Bosnia (former Yugoslavia) (1990s)
Iraq/Kurdistan (1980s(1980s-90s)
Rwanda (1990s)
Darfur (2000s)

15