Hi I’m John Green and this is Crash Course
European History.
Today, we’re going to talk about the Holocaust,
which was an integral part of Nazism in World
War II.
The genocide of the Holocaust--millions of
Jewish people were systematically murdered--shows
humanity at its most depraved.
And we’ve thought a lot about how much footage
to show from the camps where so many millions
were condemned to death, and we’ve decided
not to have a Thought Bubble in today’s
episode.
But we will be showing some archival footage,
not least because anti-semitic disinformation
campaigns throughout the last seventy years
have sought to minimize or outright deny that
the Holocaust happened.
Maybe there’s no countering such conspiracy
theories--the evidence of the Holocaust is
vast, including hundreds of thousands of witness
accounts, testimony from war crimes trials,
and extensive documentation by the Nazis themselves
of their attempts to systematically elminate
Jewish people from the world--and also others
deemed inferior, including disabled people,
Roma people, many Slavs, Communists, and LGBT
people.
But we think it is important to try to tell
the truth, both in what we say and in what
we show.
Some maintain that the Holocaust is incomprehensible--an
outsized phenomenon beyond ordinary concepts
of good and evil.
And in some ways that’s true, but it ignores
the centuries of anti-Semitism that laid the
groundwork for the dehumanization of Jewish
people that intensified in the 20th century.
It is critical that we remember the horrors
of the holocaust.
History is, in the broadest sense, collective
memory, and as Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel
has written, “Without memory, there would
be no civilization, no society, no future.”
And so let us try to remember.
[Intro]
The beginning of the mass murder occurred
late in the 1930s, when doctors mobilized
to murder some 200,000 disabled people in
the T4 project, which aimed to save the purported
purity of the German race.
In Permission for the Destruction of Worthless
Life (1920), a noted jurist and a psychiatrist
argued that people deemed “without value”
should be eliminated.
T4 murderers used carbon monoxide gas to kill
their victims, including in mobile gas chambers.
Many of these victims were taken from institutions
without the knowledge of their families.
The list of dangerous people or people without
value resulted from multiple hatreds: of disabled
people, but also of Jewish people, and Sinti
and Roma people, and certain groups of Slavs
such as Poles, Czechs, and Russians, also
homosexuals, black people, and Jehovah’s
Witnesses—to name just a few.
In the 1930s, political opponents and these
marginalized people comprised those in early
concentration camps, which were more like
large-scale prisons, albeit ones where murder
was common, as distinct from the extermination
camps that were set up later in the war, and
which functioned primarily as places to systematically
murder people.
In 1939, as German soldiers moved through
Poland they murdered many Poles including
Polish Jews, especially going after the most
literate citizens, like political leaders,
teachers and professors.
And as Nazi forces moved eastward, Christian
citizens joined in this murderous rampage
against Jewish people, as a supposedly righteous
crusade against those who had killed Jesus.
Jesus, for the record, was Jewish, and he
was killed by Roman authorities not Jewish
ones, but none of this hatred was fact-based.
Special Nazi forces called the Einzatzgruppen
took the lead but they were joined by civilians
and policing officials.
Hitler had always aspired to rid Germany of
Jews, initially by means like forced migration
or the creation of such dire living conditions
that Jewish people would die at a rapid rate.
And the creation of the Warsaw ghetto embodied
this hope for ethnic cleansing: some thirty
percent of the city’s population was jammed
into two percent of its space to live on drastically
reduced rations and necessities such as coal
and medical supplies.
“The more that die, the better,” enthused
Hans Frank, Governor of German occupied Poland.
And then, in the early years of the war, the
plan for what became the Holocaust took shape,
in part because it was felt that Poles were
not being converted into slave labor fast
enough and also because it was felt that Jewish
people were not dying quickly enough.
As the Nazi invasion of the USSR (Operation
Barbarossa) began to fail by the end of 1941,
Nazi officials set in motion a system of industrial
killing modeled on the T4 program, including
plans for transport of Jewish and other victims
to extermination camps.
They then communicated these plans to those
responsible for carrying them out at the Wannsee
Conference outside Berlin in January 1942.
Jewish leaders were tasked with selecting
members of their conquered communities supposedly
to be resettled to the east.
But these “resettlements” were not resettlements--instead,
they entailed being transported to the new
extermination camps and gassed on arrival
(as was the case for most children and women)
or worked to death (as was the case for boys
and men and some women).
Some camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau were
both labor and extermination camps, while
others such as Chelmno were solely to murder
captives.
And it should also be noted that mass killings
continued around captured cities and towns,
not just in extermination camps.
Nazi soldiers who objected, and there were
some, were simply given other assignments.
It was possible, the record shows, to just
say no.
But many soldiers and other authorities believed
in the so-called “Final Solution” of killing
all Jewish people.
Soliders and other authorities were often
white supremacists--although historians have
differing judgements about the weight of other
motivations, such as obedience to authority,
the normalization of mass murder, or greed
and opportunities to steal from victims--just
to name a few of the possible motivations.
Eventually, people were able to begin reporting
not just the brutality of forced deportations
but also their lethal outcome.
This was called the “Jewish mouth-radio.”
But resistance was incredibly difficult for
people who were weakened by starvation, and
lack of medical care, and a range of other
physical and mental abuse.
Still, in 1943 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto used
guns provided by the Polish resistance to
rise up against their Nazi occupiers.
The Germans slaughtered most of the ghetto
inhabitants, with a few escapees joining other
resistance groups in Poland.
In the camps themselves, resistance was even
less plausible for people living on two hundred
calories a day and constantly monitored by
heavily armed guards.
From the beginning, the Nazis, though proudly
committed to, in Hitler’s words, “the
destruction of the Jewish race in Europe,”
did a lot to hide their mass murder.
Death camps had ornate entry gates adorned
with cheering messages.
Those to be murdered were greeted by bands
playing merry tunes.
So imagine the shock as new inmates were stripped
of their illusions of safety in the camps:
“You see those flames?” one newly arrived
wife and mother was asked by a seasoned prisoner.
“That’s the crematory over there.
. . Call it by the name we use: the bakery.
Perhaps it is your family that is being burned
at the moment.”
Some miraculously survived.
Women, raised to be guardians of tradition,
often celebrated Jewish holidays, and the
birthdays of their fellow inmates, and cared
for one another when possible.
And they were strengthened by these deeds.
One chronicler of the death camps, Italian
chemist Primo Levi, credited his survival
to another prisoner who shared his bread ration
and did favors.
Thanks to these acts, Levi wrote, “I managed
not to forget that I myself was a man.”
Serving in a camp where overworked and starved
prisoners were to be immediately murdered,
Levi described how the Nazi regime drained
away the “divine spark” so that prisoners
came to feel like “non-men.”
He went on: “If I could enclose the evil
of our time in one image, I would choose this
image which is familiar to me: a faceless
man, with head dropped and shoulders curved,
on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace
of thought is to be seen.”
Given that, “One hesitates to call them
living; one hesitates to call their death
death.
. . .”
But people also kept their humanity and hope
in spite of the odds against them.
In 1943 hundreds of captives rose up at the
Treblinka Extermination Camp, killing Ukrainian
guards.
Although most of the rebels were killed, some
successfully fled to join resistance forces.
A year later at Auschwitz, women prisoners
smuggled in explosives that men used to blow
up a crematorium and assassinate guards.
But none of the resisters survived.
Overall, deaths from the deliberately planned
and executed extermination of Jewish—the
Holocaust, or Shoah as it is known in Hebrew—are
estimated at six million people not to mention
the abuse and torture of those who survived
to the liberation of the camps in 1944 and
1945.
It’s tempting to focus on those stories
of survival, because we have records and accounts
of the experiences of people like Primo Levi
and Elie Wiesel, but we have to remember that
most people did not have miraculous escape
stories.
Most people were simply murdered for who they
were.
Of course, combatants in World War II also
unleashed additional mass murder beyond the
Holocaust itself.
In 1943, German forces uncovered victims of
the 1940 Soviet execution of some 22,000 Polish
military officers and professionals—engineers,
professors, and lawyers, for example.
Just like Nazi executions of the intelligentsia,
the goal was to deprive a conquered people
of their leadership.
But Soviet executions did not primarily aim
to bolster “Russian blood” or a “Russian
race,” although with the outbreak of war
non-Russians were often driven out of businesses
and some professions.
But the Holocaust was very different because
it was a systematic attempt to eliminate a
people from the world via mass murder.
It was genocide.
Now, as we’ve mentioned, Jewish people were
not the only victims of Nazi mass murder:
Millions of non-Jewish Poles were also killed.
In the Nazi’s so called “racial science,”
Slavs were not seen as all the same: Slovaks
and Croats were seen as superior to Poles
and Czechs for example.
And Russians were seen as among the lowest
Slavs because they were seen as “Judeo-Bolsheviks”—a
term that combined anti-Semitism with the
hatred of Soviet communism.
Obviously, although some Bolsheviks were Jewish,
many were not—Lenin and Stalin to name just
two of the most notable examples.
But German soldiers murdered freely, motivated
by the propaganda and speechifying filled
with hatred for these twin demonized entities.
Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Belarusians,
and others also joined in the slaughter because
they too had been taught to hate Jewish people
and had age-old animosities toward Russian
might in the region and newer animosities
toward Bolshevik ambitions for conquest in
eastern Europe.
Often individuals didn’t need encouragement
by the Germans for murder and even murdered
in advance of their arrival because they wanted
to help the Nazis out and also take the possessions
of their murdered neighbors.
One notorious case occurred in Jedwabne, Poland
where townspeople rounded up their Jewish
neighbors, raped and beat to death many of
them and burned the rest alive in a barn.
Then, following the Nazi example, they took
their neighbors’ possessions for themselves.
So by the end of World War II, had people
taken a lesson from all this?
I don’t know.
Racism and jingoistic nationalism remained
powerful forces in European life, and in human
life--as indeed they are today.
In some towns, surviving Jewish people who
returned to claim their property were driven
out or even murdered;
And the diverse group of refugees who sought
safety and shelter after the war often found
none, as indeed Jewish trying to escape Europe
in the 1930s and early 1940s had been denied
refuge around the world.
After the war ended, many survivors of the
camps gathered in port cities of the Mediterranean
waiting for ships to take them anywhere that
would accept them.
In the U.S., where anti-Semitism remained
high, only five thousand Jewish people were
allowed entry.
And that’s very important to understand:
Anti-Semitism was not only a destructive force
in Europe, then or now.
And that consistent, long-term imagining of
Jewish people as evil or inferior or inhuman
allowed the horrors of the Holocaust to happen
unchecked, and kept Jewish people from the
safe harbor they might otherwise have found.
And that is something to remember not only
about history but also about our world today.
As the Israeli holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer
has written, “Thou shalt not be a victime,
thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above
all, thou shalt not be a bystander.”
Thanks for watching.
I’ll see you next week.
