HIST103: World History (1600–Present)

Who was Directly Involved in the Killings?

A wide range of German soldiers, officials, and civilians were involved in the Holocaust, from clerks and officials in the government to units of the army, the police, and the SS. 

Many ministries, including those of armaments, interior, justice, railroads, and foreign affairs, had substantial roles in orchestrating the Holocaust; similarly, German physicians participated in medical experiments and the T-4 euthanasia program. And, though there was no single military unit in charge of the Holocaust, the Schutzstaffel under Himmler was the closest. From the SS came the Totenkopfverbände concentration camp guards, the Einsatzgruppen killing squads, and many of the administrative offices behind the Holocaust.

The Wehrmacht, or regular German army, participated less directly than the SS in the Holocaust (although it did directly massacre Jews in Russia, Serbia, Poland, and Greece). It supported the Einsatzgruppen, helped form the ghettos, ran prison camps, some were concentration camp guards, transported prisoners to camps, had experiments performed on prisoners, and used substantial slave labor. German police units also directly participated in the Holocaust; for example, Reserve Police Battalion 101, in just over a year, shot 38,000 Jews and deported 45,000 more to the extermination camps. [10]

European Collaborationist Countries

In addition to the direct involvement of Nazi forces, collaborationist European countries such as Austria, Italy, and Vichy France, Croatia, Hungary and Romania helped the Nazis in the Holocaust. In fact, Austrians had a disproportionately large role in the Holocaust. Not only were Hitler and Eichmann Austrians, but Austrians made up one-third of the personnel of SS extermination units, commanded four of the six main death camps, and killed almost half of the six million Jewish victims.

The Romanian government followed Hitler's anti-Jewish policy very closely. In October 1941, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews were burned to death in four large warehouses that had been doused with petrol and set alight. Collaboration also took the form of either rounding up the local Jews for deportation to the German extermination camps or direct participation in the killings.

For example, Klaus Barbie, "the Butcher of Lyon," captured and deported 44 Jewish children hidden in the village of Izieu, killed French Resistance leader Jean Moulin and was in total responsible for the deportation of 7,500 people, 4,342 murders, and the arrest and torture of 14,311 resistance fighters was in some way attributed to his actions or commands. Police in occupied Norway rounded up 750 Jews (73 percent).

Who Authorized the Killings?

Hitler authorized the mass killing of those labeled by the Nazis as "undesirables" in the T-4 Euthanasia Program. Hitler encouraged the killings of the Jews of Eastern Europe by the Einsatzgruppen death squads in a speech in July 1941, though he almost certainly approved the mass shootings earlier. 

A mass of evidence suggests that sometime in the fall of 1941, Himmler and Hitler agreed in principle on the complete mass extermination of the Jews of Europe by gassing, with Hitler explicitly ordering the "annihilation of the Jews" in a speech on December 12, 1941.

To make for smoother intra-governmental cooperation in the implementation of this "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Question," the Wannsee conference was held near Berlin on January 20, 1942, with the participation of fifteen senior officials, led by Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann, the records of which provide the best evidence of the central planning of the Holocaust. Just five weeks later, on February 22, Hitler was recorded saying, "We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew" to his closest associates.

Arguments that no documentation links Hitler to "the Holocaust" ignore the records of his speeches kept by Nazi leaders such as Joseph Goebbels and rely on artificially limiting the Holocaust to exclude what we do have documentation on, such as the T-4 Euthanasia Program and the Kristallnacht pogrom (November 9–10, 1938, when synagogues were set on fire in Austria and Germany, thousands of Jews were killed and 30,000 taken to the concentration camps).

Who Knew About the Killings?

Some claim that the full extent of what was happening in German-controlled areas was not known until after the war. However, numerous rumors and eyewitness accounts from escapees and others gave some indication that Jews were being killed in large numbers.

Since the early years of the war, the Polish government-in-exile published documents and organized meetings to spread the word about the fate of the Jews. By early 1941, the British had received information via an intercepted Chilean memo that Jews were being targeted, and by late 1941, they had intercepted information about a number of large massacres of Jews conducted by German police.

In the summer of 1942, a Jewish labor organization (the Bund) got word to London that 700,000 Polish Jews had already died, and the BBC took the story seriously, though the United States State Department did not. [11] By the end of 1942, however, the evidence of the Holocaust had become clear, and on December 17, 1942, the Allies issued a statement that the Jews were being transported to Poland and killed.

The U.S. State Department was aware of the use and the location of the gas chambers of extermination camps but refused pleas to bomb them out of operation. This was because it was believed that the speedy and total defeat of Hitler was the best way to help the Jews, and attacks on death camps would be a distraction.

On the other hand, anti-Semitism in the United States between 1938 and 1945 was so strong that very few Jewish refugees were admitted. [12] On May 12, 1943, Polish government-in-exile and Bund leader Szmul Zygielbojm committed suicide in London to protest the inaction of the world with regard to the Holocaust, stating in part in his suicide letter:

Debate continues on how much average Germans knew about the Holocaust. Recent historical work suggests that the majority of Germans knew that Jews were being indiscriminately killed and persecuted, even if they did not know of the specifics of the death camps.