Essays on Holocaust

Holocaust was the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this “the final solution to the Jewish question.”

Even before the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they had made no secret of their anti-Semitism. In Mein Kampf, Hitler further developed the idea of the Jews as an evil race struggling for world domination. Nazi anti-Semitism was rooted in religious anti-Semitism and enhanced by political anti-Semitism. Jews were targeted for total annihilation, and their elimination was central to Hitler’s vision of the “New Germany.”

Fueled by anti-Semitism, the Nazi persecution of Jews began soon after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933 with a boycott of Jewish businesses and the dismissal of Jewish civil servants. Under the Nürnberg Laws (1935), Jews lost their citizenship. About 7,500 Jewish businesses were gutted and some 1,000 synagogues burned or damaged in the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, and thereafter Jews were imprisoned in concentration camps or forced into ghettos.

German victories early in World War II (1939–45) brought most European Jews under the control of the Nazis and their satellites. At the Wannsee Conference (1942), a “final solution” was formulated for the extermination of European Jewry, and thereafter Jews from all over Nazi-occupied Europe were systematically evacuated to concentration and extermination camps, where they were either killed or forced into slave labour.

The Nazi Holocaust has had continuing and widely reverberating consequences not only for the Jewish survivors but for the world in general. Today the Holocaust is viewed as the emblematic manifestation of absolute evil. Its revelation of the depths of human nature and the power of malevolent social and governmental structures has made it an essential topic of ethical discourse in fields as diverse as law, medicine, religion, government, and the military.

1933 - 1945

German Reich and German-occupied Europe

Anne Frank, Hermann Göring, Adolf Hitler, Edith Stein, Elie Wiesel

Holocaust was the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this “the final solution to the Jewish question.”

Even before the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they had made no secret of their anti-Semitism. In Mein Kampf, Hitler further developed the idea of the Jews as an evil race struggling for world domination. Nazi anti-Semitism was rooted in religious anti-Semitism and enhanced by political anti-Semitism. Jews were targeted for total annihilation, and their elimination was central to Hitler’s vision of the “New Germany.”

Fueled by anti-Semitism, the Nazi persecution of Jews began soon after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933 with a boycott of Jewish businesses and the dismissal of Jewish civil servants. Under the Nürnberg Laws (1935), Jews lost their citizenship. About 7,500 Jewish businesses were gutted and some 1,000 synagogues burned or damaged in the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, and thereafter Jews were imprisoned in concentration camps or forced into ghettos.

German victories early in World War II (1939–45) brought most European Jews under the control of the Nazis and their satellites. At the Wannsee Conference (1942), a “final solution” was formulated for the extermination of European Jewry, and thereafter Jews from all over Nazi-occupied Europe were systematically evacuated to concentration and extermination camps, where they were either killed or forced into slave labour.

The Nazi Holocaust has had continuing and widely reverberating consequences not only for the Jewish survivors but for the world in general. Today the Holocaust is viewed as the emblematic manifestation of absolute evil. Its revelation of the depths of human nature and the power of malevolent social and governmental structures has made it an essential topic of ethical discourse in fields as diverse as law, medicine, religion, government, and the military.