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Holocaust

Introduction

The word holocaust is derived from the Greek holokaustos, meaning a “burnt offering,” as used in a religious sacrifice. Winston Churchill described the mass murder of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its allies as “a crime without a name.” The perpetrators, the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany called it Die Endlösung der Judenfrage (the Final Solution of the Jewish Question). The number of Jewish victims is generally regarded to be between 5.8 and 6 million. Later, this extermination policy became known as the Holocaust, or “Shoah” in Hebrew. In a more generic and legalistic formula, the Holocaust was an example of genocide, a word invented by Raphael Lemkin in 1943 (Altman, p. 15). In the next section, we will examine why people were sent to death camps.

Discussion & Analysis

Ghettos, Internment Camps, and Mass Killing

Many cases of genocide include internment of the victims in ghettos, concentration camps, or forced labor colonies. Ghettoization means the disruption of normal family life, the seizure of victims' property, and, in some cases, the separation of children from their mothers and fathers. For example, during the Holocaust, the children and the elderly were the first people deported to death camps from ghettos like Lodz and Warsaw, leaving only the young, able-bodied adults to labor in Nazi factories. Conditions in ghettos and camps were horrendous, and genocide victims often died of starvation, disease, and execution. Other forms of displacement included forced collectivization on farms and imprisonment during the Cambodian genocide, death marches and concentration camps during the Armenian genocide and mass exile into refugee camps and camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) during the Rwandan and Darfur genocides (Des Pres, pp. 12-15).

Most cases of genocide are defined by mass killing of civilians, including execution by mobile killing squads, massacres at checkpoints or killing fields, and death camps. The murder of women and children in these mass killings is often considered a defining feature of genocide. During the mass shootings of Jews and eastern Europeans by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen units, mothers were often shot with their babies, or watched their children die before they, themselves, were killed. In the six Nazi death camps Chelmno, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor pregnant women, children, and mothers with young children were gassed to death immediately upon arrival. Pregnant women and children were also the victims of torture at the hands of Nazi doctors, who used them for medical experimentation in the camps. Women who survived internment in concentration camps and death camps reported secret abortions, births, and cases of infanticide to protect pregnant women and new mothers from execution. Most mothers who managed to survive the Holocaust lost their children to the genocide (Frank, p. 98)

Victims of Holocaust

Since the end of World War II and the development of more critical studies of this event, other racial, religious, social and political groups have been identified and included as victims of the Holocaust. These include the Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), victims of the T-4 program (killings carried ...