Defining the HolocaustThe Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. Approximately six million Jews were murdered between 1938 and 1945.
The term Holocaust comes from the Greek term "holokaustos," which is a translation of the Hebrew term "olah." The word is of Biblical origin and refers to a sacrifice that was wholly burnt. For this reason, many people are uncomfortable with the term Holocaust and prefer Shoah, which is Hebrew for catastrophe. After the Holocaust, many people were describing the Holocaust as a mass murder, but soon realized that the term was not sufficient to describe what happened. A new, general term was created to describe what had happened to the European Jews, as well as other groups of people throughout history: genocide. Genocide is the intentional and planned destruction, in part or in whole, of an ethnic, religious, racial, or national group of people. As you will see in other areas of this website, genocide has been perpetrated several times in history, particularly in the twentieth century. A brief overview of the HolocaustAntisemitism was part of European society for many centuries before The Holocaust. Jews were kept separate from their Christian counterparts, in many countries in ghettos (these ghettos were different from the Nazi imposed ghettos). After the onset of the Enlightenment, Jews were emancipated throughout Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth and even twentieth centuries. In Germany, Jews were granted rights of citizenship in 1871 with the unification of the German state.
Near the end of and after World War I, an antisemetic charge that Jews had caused Germany's loss of the war circulated throughout German society. The Nazi party and Adolf Hitler, who gained popularity in the 1920's, held Jew-hatred at the center of their ideologies. In 1933 the Nazis rose to power in Germany and they began persecution of the German Jews immediately. Though not entirely successful at first, by 1935 Jews lost citizenship rights when the government passed the Nuremberg Laws. In November 1938, the Nazis sponsored the Kristallnacht (German for "night of broken glass") in which people destroyed Jewish businesses, homes, and synagogues. In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland and started World War II. Nazis experimented with and perfected killing techniques. They constructed concentration and extermination camps to which Jews were deported all throughout the war. By 1945 when the Allies began liberating the concentration camps and ended the war, about six million Jews had been murdered by the Nazi Regime and its collaborators. |
These photographs have been made available to the public by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Instytut Pamieci Narodowej, Yad Vashem, and the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park.
"There is only one thing worse than Auschwitz itself...
and that is if the world forgets that there was such a place." -Henry Appel, Holocaust Survivor Why learn about the Holocaust?We study the Holocaust because it is a part of history, a part of recent history. By learning about the Holocaust, we preserve the memory of historical subjects. We study the Holocaust concurrently with other genocides so that we may prevent future genocides. The Holocaust, while having a history of its own, is a part of the larger histories of Germany, Europe, the Jewish people, and the world. We cannot understand ourselves today without understanding our history.
Historian Christopher Browning says that history is about knowing ourselves, knowing what we're capable of as human beings. "The Holocaust was not simply a sensational act of sadism by a few crazies in the Nazi regime. This was a bureaucratic, administrative process. It involved all facets of German society and German organizational life, and we couldn't understand the Nazis, we couldn't understand World War Two, we couldn't understand twentieth century European history if we didn't know about the Holocaust," he says in an interview at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. More importantly, he stresses that the Holocaust was not a natural disaster, and we must avoid looking at it from that perspective. "It was not an earthquake. The Holocaust was a man-made event. People made decisions, and people acted." |