HIST103: World History (1600–Present)

The victims of the Holocaust included:

• Jews, Serbs, Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Poles, Russians, Roma (also known as gypsies), some Africans, and many who could not be categorized as members of the Aryan race;
• Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, some Catholic and Protestant clergy, trade unionists, and homosexuals who were classed as ideologically opposed to the Nazi state;
• the mentally ill and the physically disabled, and psychiatric patients who were regarded as racially impure;
• intellectuals, political activists, common criminals, and people labeled as "enemies of the state." 
• Freemasons were categorized as conspirators against the state, and Hitler saw them as co-conspirators with the Jews, infiltrating the upper classes of society.

These victims all perished alongside one another in the camps, according to the extensive documentation left behind by the Nazis themselves (written and photographed), eyewitness testimony (by survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders), and the statistical records of the various countries under occupation. Jews were categorized as Jewish according to parentage (either parent) regardless of whether they practiced Judaism or were Christian. Christian Jews were also confined to the ghetto and compelled to wear the yellow star.

Hitler and the Jews

Heinrich Himmler, leader of the Schutzstaffel (SS), was responsible for rounding up Jews.

Anti-Semitism was common in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s (although its roots go back much further). Adolf Hitler's fanatical brand of racial anti-Semitism was laid out in his 1925 book, Mein Kampf, which, though largely ignored when it was first printed, became a bestseller in Germany once Hitler gained political power. Besides the usual elements from the Christian tradition of Jew-hatred and modern pseudo-scientific race theory, it contained new aspects.

For Hitler, anti-Semitism was a complete explanation of the world – a worldview – that was at the center of the Nazi program, as opposed to an optional, pragmatic policy. It explained all the problems that beset Germany, from its defeat in the First World War to its current social, economic, and cultural crises.

Nazi anti-Semitism was also blended with the traditional German fear of Russia by claiming that Bolshevism was part of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world as outlined in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Hitler also believed that through intermarriage, Jews were a biological threat, corrupting and polluting the pure Aryan race. In this way, Jews came to be regarded by the Nazis as vermin that ought to be exterminated.

In September 1935, two measures were announced at the annual National Socialist Party Rally in Nuremberg, becoming known as the Nuremberg Laws. Their purpose was to clarify who was Jewish and give a legal basis for discrimination against Jews. The first law, The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, [5] [6] stripped persons not considered of German blood of their German citizenship and introduced a new distinction between "Reich citizens" and "nationals."

General and later U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower inspecting prisoners' corpses at a liberated concentration camp in 1945.

In 1936, Jews were banned from all professional jobs, effectively preventing them from exerting any influence in education, politics, higher education, and industry. On November 15, 1938, Jewish children were banned from going to normal schools. By April 1939, nearly all Jewish companies had either collapsed under financial pressure and declining profits or had been forced to sell out to the Nazi-German government as part of the "Aryanization" policy inaugurated in 1937. Under such pressure between 1933 and 1939, about two-thirds of the Jewish population of Germany emigrated.

As the war started, large massacres of Jews took place, and by December 1941, Hitler decided to "make a clean sweep." [7] In January 1942, during the Wannsee conference, several Nazi leaders discussed the details of the "Final Solution of the Jewish question" (Endlösung der Judenfrage). Dr. Josef Bühler urged Reinhard Heydrich to proceed with the Final Solution in the General Government. They began to systematically deport Jewish populations from the ghettos and all occupied territories to the seven camps designated as Vernichtungslager, or extermination camps: Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Maly Trostenets, Sobibór, and Treblinka.

Even as the Nazi war machine faltered in the last years of the war, precious military resources such as fuel, transport, munitions, soldiers, and industrial resources were still being heavily diverted away from the war and towards the death camps.

Death Toll

By the end of the war, much of the Jewish population of Europe had been killed in the Holocaust. Lucy S. Dawidowicz used pre-war census figures to estimate that 5.934 million Jews died (see table below). [8] Additionally, smaller numbers of Jews were killed in European territories in North Africa (Vichy France, Tunisia (700), and Italian Libya (650).

There were about eight to ten million Jews in the territories controlled directly or indirectly by the Nazis. The six million killed in the Holocaust thus represent 60 to 75 percent of these Jews. Of Poland's 3.3 million Jews, over 90 percent were killed. The same proportion were killed in Latvia and Lithuania, but most of Estonia's Jews were evacuated in time. 

Of the 750,000 Jews in Germany and Austria in 1933, only about a quarter survived. Although many German Jews emigrated before 1939, the majority of these fled to Czechoslovakia, France, or the Netherlands, from where they were later deported to their deaths. In Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Netherlands, and Yugoslavia, over 70 percent were killed. More than 50 percent were killed in Belgium, Hungary, and Romania. It is likely that a similar proportion were killed in Belarus and Ukraine, but these figures are less certain. Countries with lower proportions of deaths, but still over 20 percent, include Bulgaria, France, Italy, Luxembourg, and Norway. [9]

Denmark was able to evacuate almost all of the Jews in their country to Sweden, which was neutral during the war. Using everything from fishing boats to private yachts, the Danes whisked the Danish Jews out of harm's way. The King of Denmark had earlier set a powerful example by wearing the yellow Star of David that the Germans had decreed all Jewish Danes must wear.

The following figures from Lucy Dawidowicz show the annihilation of the Jewish population of Europe by (pre-war) country: [8]

The exact number of people killed by the Nazi regime may never be known. Scholars, using a variety of methods of determining the death toll, have generally agreed upon a common range of the number of victims.