HIST103: World History (1600–Present)

Efficiency

Michael Berenbaum writes that Germany became a "genocidal nation." Every arm of the country's sophisticated bureaucracy was involved in the killing process.

• Parish churches and the Interior Ministry supplied birth records showing who was Jewish;
• The Post Office delivered the deportation and de-naturalization orders;
• The Finance Ministry confiscated Jewish property;
• German firms fired Jewish workers and disenfranchised Jewish stockholders;
• Universities refused to admit Jews, denied degrees to those already studying, and fired Jewish academics;
• Government transport offices arranged the trains for deportation to the camps;
• German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners;
• Companies bid for the contracts to build the ovens;
• Detailed lists of victims were drawn up using the Dehomag company's punch card machines, producing meticulous records of the killings. 

As prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property, which was carefully cataloged and tagged before being sent to Germany to be reused or recycled. Berenbaum writes that the Final Solution of the Jewish question was "in the eyes of the perpetrators … Germany's greatest achievement". [2]

Considerable effort was expended over the course of the Holocaust to find increasingly efficient means of killing more people. Early mass murders by Nazi soldiers of thousands of Jews in Poland had caused widespread reports of discomfort and demoralization among Nazi troops.

Commanders had complained to their superiors that the face-to-face killings had a severely negative psychological impact on soldiers. Committed to destroying the Jewish population, Berlin decided to pursue more mechanical methods, beginning with experiments in explosives and poisons.

The Nazis methodically tracked the progress of the Holocaust in thousands of reports and documents. Pictured is the Höfle Telegram sent to Adolf Eichmann in January 1943, which reported that 1,274,166 Jews had been killed in the four Aktion Reinhard camps during 1942.

The death camps had previously switched from using carbon monoxide poisoning in the Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka to the use of Zyklon B at Majdanek and Auschwitz.

The disposal of large numbers of bodies presented a logistical problem as well. Incineration was at first considered unfeasible until it was discovered that furnaces could be kept at a high enough temperature to be sustained by the body fat of the bodies alone. With this technicality resolved, the Nazis implemented their plan of mass murder at its full-scale.

Alleged corporate involvement in the Holocaust has created significant controversy in recent years. Rudolf Hoess, the Auschwitz camp commandant, said that the concentration camps were actually approached by various large German businesses, some of which are still in existence. Technology developed by IBM also played a role in the categorization of prisoners through the use of index machines.

Scale

The Holocaust was geographically widespread and systematically conducted in virtually all areas of Nazi-occupied territory, where Jews and other victims were targeted in what are now 35 separate European nations and four North African nations, which were then European territories, and sent to labor camps in some nations or extermination camps in others.

The mass killing was at its worst in Central and Eastern Europe, which had more than seven million Jews in 1939; about five million Jews were killed there, including three million in Poland and over one million in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands also died in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Yugoslavia, and Greece.

Documented evidence suggests that the Nazis planned to carry out their "final solution" in other regions if they were conquered, such as the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. [3] Antisemitic persecution was enacted in nations such as Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia in North Africa, which were controlled by the Nazi ally, Vichy France, under Marshall Petain.

In Libya, under Italian control, thousands were sent to concentration camps, particularly the camp in Giado near Tripoli; Jews with foreign citizenship were sent to concentration camps in Europe. Pogroms took place in pro-German Iraq. [4]

The extermination continued in different parts of Nazi-controlled territory until the end of World War II, only completely ending when the Allies entered Germany itself and forced the Nazis to surrender in May 1945.

Cruelty

The Holocaust was carried out without any reprieve, even for children or babies, and victims were often tortured before being killed. Nazis carried out deadly medical experiments on prisoners, including children.

Dr. Josef Mengele, medical officer at Auschwitz and chief medical officer at Birkenau, was known as the "Angel of Death" for his medical and eugenical experiments, for example, trying to change people's eye color by injecting dye into their eyes. Aribert Heim, another doctor who worked at Mauthausen, was known as "Doctor Death."

The guards in the concentration camps carried out beatings and acts of torture on a daily basis. For example, some inmates were suspended from poles by ropes tied to their hands behind their backs so that their shoulder joints were pulled out of their sockets. Women were forced into brothels for the SS guards. Russian prisoners of war were used for experiments such as being immersed in ice water or being put into pressure chambers in which air was evacuated to see how long they would survive as a means to better protect German airmen.