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