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The Holocaust is the term generally used in English to describe the killing of approximately 6 million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler.

The word holocaust derives from the Greek word holokaustos, meaning a burnt offering, a sacrifice made to a god or gods by burning the sacrificial object. It is formed from two Greek words, holos (whole) and kaio (I burn), thus signifying something entirely burnt. Since the 17th century it has been used in a secular sense to refer to the violent death of a large number of people, particuarly by fire but also in other ways. Since the 1950s its use has been increasingly restricted, and is now mainly used to describe the Nazi Holocaust (and is now usually spelled with a capital H). It was brought into English in this sense as a translation of the Hebrew word Shoah (literally "Calamity"). The usual German term for the extermination of the Jews during the Nazi period was Endlösung der Judenfrage ("the Final Solution of the Jewish Question"). In English "the Final Solution" is a widely used alternative to Holocaust.

The word Holocaust is frequently used in a wider sense to describe other actions of the Nazi regime. These include:

• The killing of up to 800,000 Gypsies (now usually called Roma and Sinti)
• The death of several million Soviet prisoners of war in German hands
• The large-scale killings (apart from those of Jews) conducted by the Nazis in the countries of occupied Europe (particularly Poland, where the intelligentsia was systematically murdered)
• The deaths of people deported from the occupied countries to Germany as slave laborers
• The imprisonment and execution of German homosexual men
• The imprisonment and execution of political opponents of the Nazi regime such as Communists and socialists, and some religious groups such as Jehovah's Witnesses
• The Nazi regime's program of euthanasia of Germans with mental and physical disabilities

The use of the word Holocaust in this wider sense is objected to by most Jewish organizations, particularly those established to commemorate the Jewish Holocaust, and by some historians. Jewish organizations say that the word in its current sense was originally coined to describe the extermination of the Jews, and that the Jewish Holocaust was a crime on such a scale, and of such specificity as the culmination of the long history of European anti-Semitism, that it should not be subsumed into a general category with the other crimes of the Nazis.

Even more hotly disputed is the rhetorical extension of the word Holocaust to describe events which have no connection with World War II. It is used by Armenians to describe the Armenian genocide of World War I (this usage actually dates from the 1920s). The terms "Rwandan Holocaust" and "Cambodian Holocaust" are also used to refer to the Rwanda genocide of 1994 and the mass killings of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia respectively. Recently the term "Palestinian Holocaust" has been coined to draw a comparison between the Nazi Holocaust and alleged Israeli crimes against the Palestinians. Jewish organizations see this comparison as false and offensive.

Origins

The origins of the Holocaust are still a matter of intense controversy among historians. Since 1945 the balance of scholarly opinion has moved back and forth between those who hold the view that the Nazi leadership always intended to exterminate the Jews (the "intentionalist" school), and those who argue that there was no such plan and that the Holocaust arose from the pressure of circumstances after other options for "solving" the "Jewish question" had been closed off (the "functionalist" school). Beneath this debate lies the deeper question of why the Nazis, and many other Germans, believed there was a "Jewish question" at all, and why an inoffensive ethnic and religious minority came to be the object of such intense hatred that tens of thousands of Germans (aided by many collaborators from other countries) willingly participated in the mass murder of six million people.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, European culture had become imbued with a new form of anti-Semitism (hatred and fear of Jews). The older form of anti-Semitism, based on religious hostility to Jews as rejecters of Christianity and the supposed killers of Jesus Christ, was to an increasing extent replaced by "scientific" or racial anti-Semitism, which held that the Jews were a race, which was inherently hostile to the European or (so-called) Aryan race, which the Jews allegedly aimed to corrupt or contaminate in various ways. Anti-Semites came to believe that the Jews were involved in a conspiracy to take over the world. Although anti-Semitism existed all over Europe, it was stronger in Germany than in the other advanced western European countries, for reasons connected with Germany's distinctive history and culture.

Adolf Hitler, who grew up in a deeply Catholic area of Austria and absorbed the traditional form of anti-Semitism in his youth, encountered "modern" German racial anti-Semitism when he moved to Vienna in 1907, and was rapidly converted. To these general anti-Semitic ideas Hitler added beliefs peculiar to the circumstances of Germany after its defeat in World War I. The German Army, he said, had been "stabbed in the back" in November by Jewish conspirators (the "November criminals"), who then gained control of the Weimar Republic. The massive inflation of the postwar years, which ruined most of the German middle class, was the result of Jewish financial manipulation. The rise of communism in Germany was also the work of the Jews, who had seized control of Russia in 1917 and intended spreading "Jewish Bolshevism" across Europe. This belief that the Jews were behind both capitalism and revolutionary socialism had great appeal to many middle-class Germans, who combined financial insecurity with fear of communism and disorder, and who sought an explanation for Germany's unexpected defeat and the catastrophic decline in their own circumstances.

In his autobiography Mein Kampf (1925) Hitler was open about his hatred of Jews and gave ample warning of his intention to drive them from Germany's political, intellectual and cultural life. But he did not say that if he came to power he would attempt to exterminate the Jews. He was more explicit in private. As early as 1922 he told Major Josef Hell: "The annihilation (vernichtung) of the Jews will be my first and foremost task." He said that he would personally hang all the Jews of Munich. "Exactly the same thing will happen in the other cities until Germany is cleansed of its last Jew." Nevertheless, historians do not believe that Hitler had a definite plan to exterminate the Jews of Germany or other countries before he came to power.

Hitler's Nazi Party came to power in January 1933. Persecution of the Jews began almost immediately, causing the majority to leave the country within five years. But Germans did not anticipate that the Nazis intended to carry out a policy of exterminating the Jews, and the Nazis did not campaign on any such policy in the elections of the 1920s and '30s. Those who voted for the Nazi Party did so in the knowledge that the Nazis were an anti-Semitic party, but this was not in most cases the reason they cast their votes as they did. Most Germans who voted for Hitler did so because he offered "strong leadership" after a period of disorder, because he promised to restore Germany's power and status after the defeat of 1918 and the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, and because he offered simple solutions to Germany's economic and social problems.

Between 1933 and 1939 the legal, economic and social rights of Jews were steadily restricted, and many Jews, particularly political and intellectual leaders, were sent to concentration camps, where most of them were eventually killed or died. Before 1939, however, there was no systematic killing of Jews, either in Germany or in Austria and Czechoslovakia, which were absorbed into Germany in 1938-39. Most of the German and Austrian Jews were allowed to emigrate. When the Germans occupied Austria, the Jews were in fact forced to emigrate (minus their possessions) by the Nazi official in charge of Jewish emigration, Adolf Eichmann. At this time some Nazis supported Jewish settlement in Palestine, although this was never official Nazi policy, and Eichmann maintained contacts with Jewish Zionist organisations to facilitate this.

In 1935 Hitler introduced the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship and deprived them of all civil rights. In his speech introducing the laws, Hitler said that if they were "insufficient" in solving the "Jewish question," it would be necessary to pass a law "handing over the problem to the National Socialist Party for final solution (Endlösung). This expression later became the standard Nazi euphemism for the extermination of the Jews. It is unlikely, however, that it had the meaning in 1935 which it later acquired. In January 1939 he said in a public speech: "If international finance-Jewry should succeed once more in plunging the nations into yet another world war, the consequences will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe." This speech has frequently been interpreted as a specific threat to exterminate the Jews, and it may be that Hitler it as such, but there is still no evidence that Hitler had a definite plan to kill the Jews at this time.

Early measures

The question of the treatment of the Jews became an urgent one for the Nazis after September 1939, when they occupied the eastern half of Poland, home to about 2 million Jews. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and one of Hitler's closest associates, appointed Reinhard Heydrich to report on how to deal with the situation. Heydrich recommended concentrating all the Polish Jews in ghettoes in major cities, where they would be put to work for German war industry. This has been seen as the beginning of a conscious policy of extermination, but this was not the case. The main priority of the Germans in Poland in the period 1939-40 was to expel millions of Poles and Jews from the territories annexed by Germany (the Warthegau and other areas), which were intended for settlment by ethnic Germans. It was intended that all these people should be moved to the General-Government area of central Poland, but logistically this proved impossible, and it was vigorously opposed by German officials in the General-Government, led by Governor-General Hans Frank.

In September 1939 Himmler appointed Heydrich head of the Reich Security Head Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA), a body overseeing the work of the SS, the Security Police (SD) and the Gestapo in occupied Poland and charged with carrying out the policy towards the Jews described in Heydrich's report. (This body should not be confused with the Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt or Race and Resettlement Main Office, RuSHA, which was involved in carrying out the deportation of Jews.) The Jews were herded into ghettoes, where they were put to work under the Reich Labor Office headed by Fritz Sauckel. Here many thousands were killed in various ways, and many more died of disease, starvation and overwork, but there was still no program of systematic killing. There is no doubt, however, that the Nazis saw forced labor as a form of extermination. The expression Vernichtung durch Arbeit ("destruction through work") was frequently used.

When the Germans occupied Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium and France in 1940, and Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941, anti-Semitic measures were also introduced into these counries, although the pace and severity varied greatly from country to country according to local political circumstances. Jews were removed from economic and cultural life and were subject to various restrictive laws, but physical deportation did not occur in most places before 1942. The Vichy regime in occupied France actively collaborated in persecuting Jews. Germany's allies Italy, Finland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria were pressured to introduce anti-Jewish measures, but for the most part they did not comply until compelled to do so. Bulgaria and Finland introduced no anti-Jewish measures at all, and Hungary, while restricting the rights of Jews, did not allow their deportation until after the country was occupied by Germany in 1944. The German puppet regime in Croatia, on the other hand, began actively persecuting Jews on its own initiative.

The German defeat of France in May 1940 suggested to some Nazi officials the possibility of transporting all the Jews of Europe to a distant colonial "homeland." During 1940 and 1941 some senior figures, including Eichmann, actively promoted a plan to send the Jews to the French colony of Madagascar. This "Madagascar Plan" is sometimes described as a decoy designed to deceive either the Jews or the German public about an already-existing plan to exterminate the Jews, but this is clearly incorrect. Detailed planning for sending Jews to Magagascar was undertaken by Eichmann's office (Referent IVD4 of the SD), and the private correspondence of Nazi officials involved shows that the plan was genuine. It was not until it became clear in 1941 that Germany would not be able to defeat Britain and gain control of the sealanes to Madagascar that the plan was reluctantly abandoned.

During 1940 and 1941 the killing of large numbers of Jews in Poland continued, and the deportation of Jews from Germany, Austria and the "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia" (today's Czech Republic) to Poland was undertaken. Eichmann was assigned the task of removing all Jews from these territories, although the chaotic transportation system, opposition from other parts of the Nazi bureaucracy and the resistance of officials in the areas to which the Jews were to be sent meant that the deportations proceeded more slowly than intended. The removal of Jews from Germany was not authorised by Hitler until December 1941, and not officially completed until 1943.

By mid 1941 3.5 million Jews were crowded into the Government-General. Frank noted that this was unsustainable, but that this many people could not be simply shot. "We shall have to take steps designed in some way to eliminate them," he wrote. There was still no definite plan to exterminate these Jews. The planned invasion of the Soviet Union left open the possibility of deporting them to the east, poassibly beyond the Urals. But it is clear that during 1941 the Nazi hierarchy was discussing the adoption of a policy of killing all the Jews under German control. This policy had the support of the more fanatical anti-Semites in the regime, including Himmler, Heydrich and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, a highly influential confidant of Hitler. The extent to which Hitler was directly involved in these discussions is not known - Himmler was careful not to allow the creation of documentation which would establish responsibility for the extermination plan.

There were important centres of opposition to policy of extermination within the Nazi regime. The grounds for this opposition were mainly economic, not humanitarian. Hermann Göring, who had overall control of German war industry, and the German Army's Economics Department, representing the armaments industry, argued that the enormous Jewish labor force assembled in the Government-General (more than a million able-bodied workers) was an asset too valuable to waste while Germany was preparing to invade the Soviet Union. Some parts of the German Army, however, disapproved of atrocities against Jews on principle, and during this period there were frequent conflicts between the Army and the SS over policy in Poland. Ultimately, neither Göring nor the Army leadership was willing or able to challenge Himmler's authority, particularly since Himmler made it clear he had Hitler's support.

The Einsatzgruppen

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 opened a new phase in the Nazi regime's Jewish policy. The Soviet territories occupied by early 1942, including all of what are now Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova and Ukraine, and most Russian territory west of the line Leningrad-Moscow-Rostov, contained about 4 million Jews, including hundreds of thousands who had fled Poland in 1939. Despite the chaos of the Soviet retreat, some effort was made to evacuate Jews, and about a million succeeded in escaping further east. The remaining 3 million were left at the mercy of the Nazis.

In these territories there were fewer restraints on the killing of Jews than there were in countries like France or the Netherlands, with a long tradition of tolerance and the rule of law, or even Poland (where despite a strong tradition of anti-Semitism there was considerable resistance to Nazi persecution of Polish Jews). In the Baltic states, Belarus and Ukraine, native anti-Semitism was reinforced by hatred of Communist rule, which many people associated with the Jews. Thousands of people in these countries actively collaborated with the Nazis. Ukrainians and Latvians joined SS auxiliary forces in large numbers and did much of the dirty work in Nazi extermination camps.

Despite the subservience of the Army high command to Hitler, Himmler did not trust the Army to approve of, let alone carry out, the large-scale killings of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories. This task was assigned to SS formations called Einsatzgruppen ("task groups"), under the overall command of Heydrich. These had been used on a limited scale in Poland in 1939, but were now organised on a much larger scale. Einsatzgruppe A (commanded by SS-Brigadeführer Franz Stahlecker was assigned to the Baltic area, Einsatzgruppe B (SS-Brigadeführer Artur Nebe) to Belarus, Einsatzgruppe C (SS-Gruppenführer Otto Rasch) to north and central Ukraine, and Einsatzgruppe D (SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf) to Moldova, south Ukraine, the Crimea and (during 1942) the north Caucasus.

According to Ohlendorf at his trial, "the Einsatzgruppen had the mission to protect the rear of the troops by killing the Jews, gypsies, Communist functionaries, active Communists, and all persons who would endanger the security." In practice their victims were nearly all defenceless Jewish civilians (not a single Einsatzgruppe member was killed in action during these operations). By December 1941 the four Einsatzgruppen listed above had killed, respectively, 125,000, 45,000, 75,000 and 55,000 people (a total of 300,000 people), mainly by shooting or with hand grenades at mass killing sites outside the major towns.

The most notorious masasacre of Jews in the Soviet Union was at a ravine called Babi Yar outside Kiev, where at least 33,000 people were killed in a single operation in September 1941 (some estimates are much higher). This was not a regular Einsatzgruppe killing: it was carried out as a reprisal for an explosion in the city (carried out by the NKVD) which killed a number of German personnel. The killing of all the Jews in Kiev was decided on by the military governor (Major-General Friedrich Eberhardt) the Police Commander for Army Group South (SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln) and the Einsatzgruppe C Commander Otto Rasch. It was carried out by a mixture of SS, SD and Security Police, assisted by Ukrainian police.

In August 1941 Himmler travelled to Minsk where he personally witnessed 100 Jews being shot in a ditch outside the town, an event described by SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff in his diary. "Himmler's face was green. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his cheek where a piece of brain had squirted up on to it. Then he vomited." After recovering his composure, he lectured the SS men on the need to follow the "highest moral law of the Party" in carrying out their tasks.

The actions of the Einsatzgruppen do not seem to have met with any opposition within the Nazi regime: different standards applied to what could be done in the east compared to what was acceptable in Germany or in western Europe. It is thus clear that by mid 1941 the principle of killing very large numbers of Jews, with no attempt to concentrate them in ghettoes or put them to work, was accepted. It was thus not a long step to accepting the extermination of the enormous concentration of Jews in the General-Government, and then, logically, of the Jews remaining in Germany and Austria, and lastly of those in the occupied western European countries. But so long as the possibility of completely defeating the Soviet Union, and thus gaining access to the vast interior of Russia, remained open, no firm decision was made. Some Nazi officials, including Eichmann, still favoured deportation as an alternative to extermination if this was possible. It was only the military setbacks in the winter of 1941-42 that closed off this possibility and left extermination as the only "solution" to the "Jewish question" which the Nazis had created.

The decision to exterminate the Jews

By the end of 1941 the Einsatzgruppen had killed only 15 percent of the Jews in the occupied Soviet territories, and it was apparent to senior Nazis that these methods could not be used to kill very large numbers. After witnessing a massacre of Jews firsthand, Himmler realised that even the SS could not be relied on to shoot hundreds of thousands of people, particularly women and children, in cold blood. He therefore sought a more "detached" method of killing. Even before the invasion of the Soviet Union, experiments with killing Jews in the back of vans using gas from the van's exhaust had been carried out, and when this proved too slow, more lethal gasses were tried. This method had already been used during Hitler's campaign of euthanasia in Germany (known as "T4"). SS-Obersturmführer Christian Wirth seems to have been the inventor of the gas chamber.

Until recently it has generally been believed that there is no documentary evidence for a decision by Hitler to authorise the extermination of the Jews. The revisionist historian David Irving, in his book Hitler's War (1977), devotes a great deal of effort to showing that there is no documentary evidence that Hitler ordered the killing of the Jews, or even that he knew of it. In response, other historians argued that whether or not Hitler issued such an explicit order was immaterial. Hitler had created the Nazi movement, and the SS as its elite corps, and had imbued them with his own fanatic anti-Semitism. He had made it clear many times that he intended to destroy the Jewish people. Himmler did not need either written or spoken authorisation to translate his Führer's wishes into deeds. He acted in the belief that he was carrying out Hitler's will, and in that he was correct.

Recently, however, new evidence has emerged suggesting that an explicit order was given. Hitler's most recent biographer, Ian Kershaw, found Himmler's desk diary in an archive in Moscow in 19xx. The entry for 18 December 1941 records a private meeting between Hitler and Himmler. After the meeting Himmler noted in his diary: "Jewish question - to be exterminated [auszurotten] as partisans." Kershaw believes this entry records a decision by Hitler that the Jews were to be exterminated, a decision which Himmler was entrusted to carry out. Several events appear to have come together in the formulation of this decision. One was the increased effect of Allied bombing of German cities during 1941. This increased Nazi anger against the Jews (whom they blamed for the war), and led local Gauleiters to lobby for the deportation of Jews "to the east" to make more housing available for Germans bombed out their homes. Another was the entry of the United States into the war, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. To Hitler, this meant that war had become global, and he saw the sinister influence of the American Jews behind this. Another was the German military setback at the Battle of Moscow, which reduced the likelihood that it would be possible to deport the Jews to a remote part of Russia.

The cumulative effects of these events seems to have led Hitler to change his mind both about the deportation of the German Jews and about what the ultimate fate of the Jews should be. Laurence Rees, author of the most recent history of the Auschwitz extermination camp, writes: "The Red Army's counterattack at the gates of Moscow [and] Pearl Harbor brought a murderous clarity to Hitler's thinking. All pretence amongst leading Nazis that the Jews would simply be deported and kept in camps in the East was dropped."

Himmler's main opponent was still Göring, who had succeeded in exempting Jewish industrial workers from the orders to deport all Jews to the General-Government and who had allied himself with the Army commanders who were opposing the extermination of the Jews out of mixture of economic calculation, distaste for the SS and (in some cases) humanitarian sentiment. Although Göring's power had declined since the defeat of his Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, he still had privileged access to Hitler and had great obstructive power. But after the beginning of 1942 Göring seems to have concentrated on preserving only very limited categories of skilled Jewish workers, and made no overall protests.

The extermination camps

Armed with Hitler's instructions (whether explicit or implicit) to exterminate the Jews, Himmler stepped up preparations to deport all the Jews to the camps in Poland and kill them. Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz-Birkenau labor camp 60km south of Krakow, was told to prepare a much larger camp to be used solely for killing by gas. Himmler told him: "The Fuhrer has ordered the final solution of the Jewish question. We, the SS, have to execute the order." The first gassings, using an industrial gas derived from prussic acid and known by the brand name Zyklon-B, were carried out at Auschwitz in September.

On January 20, 1942 Heydrich convened a conference at villa in the suburbs of Berlin (the Wannsee Conference) to finalize the plan for the extermination of the Jews which became known (after Heydrich) as Aktion Reinhard (Operation Reinhard). Those present included Heydrich, Eichmann, Heinrich Müller (head of the Gestapo), and representatives of the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, the Ministry for the Interior, the Four Year Plan Office, the Ministry of Justice, the General-Government, the Foreign Office and the Nazi Party. Also present was SS-Sturmbannführer Rudolf Lange, the SD commander in Riga, who had recently carried out the liquidation of the Riga ghetto. He seems to have been there to advise the officials on the practicalities of killing people on an industrial scale.

The Wannsee Conference was presented with a plan for killing all the Jews in Europe, although the minutes taken by Eichmann refer to this only through euphemisms (at his trial he said that the language actually used had been much more direct). The officials were told there were 2.3 million Jews in the General-Government, 850,000 in Hungary, 1.1 million in the other occupied countries, and up to 5 million in the Soviet Union (although only 3 million of these were in areas under German occupation) - a total of about 6.5 million. These would all be transported by train to extermination camps in Poland, where those unfit for work would be gassed at once. In some camps, such as Auschwitz, those fit for work would be kept alive for a while, but eventually all would be killed. Göring's representative, Dr Erich Neumann, gained a limited exemption for some classes of industrial workers.

During 1942, in addition to Auschwitz, five other camps were designated as extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) for the carrying out of the Reinhard plan. Two of these, at Chelmno (also known as Kulmhof) and Majdanek were already functioning as labor camps: these now had extermination facilities added to them. Three new camps were built for the sole purpose of killing large numbers of Jews as quickly as possible, at Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka. A seventh camp, at Maly Trostenets in Belarus, was also used for this purpose.

In view of frequent statements to the contrary, it is necessary to stress that, although members of some other groups whom the Nazis wished to exterminate, such as Roma (Gypsies) and Soviet prisoners of war, were also killed in these camps, their purpose was to kill Jews, and the overwhelming majority of people killed in them were Jews. Because they camps were in Poland, they were sometimes used for convenience as places to kill Polish prisoners of various kinds, but this was incidental to their purpose. It was never part of the Nazis' plans to extend the Final Solution to the Poles as a race.

Extermination camps are frequently confused with concentration camps such as Dachau and Belsen, which were mostly located in Germany and intended as places of incarceration and forced labor for a variety of enemies of the Nazi regime (such as Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, homosexuals and hostile intellectuals or Christians). They should also be distinguished from slave labor camps, dozens of which were set up in all German-occupied countries to exploit the labor of prisoners of various kinds, including prisoners of war. In all Nazi camps there were very high death rates as a result of starvation, disease and exhaustion, but only the extermination camps were designed specifically for mass killing.

The method of killing at these camps was by poison gas, usually in gas chambers, although many prisoners were killed in mass shootings and by other means. At the pure extermination camps, all the prisoners arrived by train, and were taken directly from the platforms to a reception area where all their clothes and other possessions were taken, and women had their heads shaved (the hair was used to make felt). They were then herded naked into the gas chambers: usually they were told these were showers or delousing chambers. Solid pellets of Zyklon-B were dropped into the chambers, releasing a toxic gas, and the prisoners died within minutes.

The gas was then pumped out, the bodies were removed, and any gold fillings in their teeth were extracted with pliers. The bodies of those killed were destroyed in crematoria (except at Sobibór where they were cremated on outdoor pyres), and the ashes buried or scattered. All this work was done by units of Jewish volunteers known as Sonderkommandos, who thus bought themselves better rations and a few extra months of life. The camps were run by SS officers, but most of the guards were Ukrainian or Baltic auxiliaries. Regular German soldiers were kept well away from these camps.

At Auschwitz and the other labor camps, prisoners were separated on arrival into those capable of work - that is, fit adults under 50 - and those judged unfit for work. The latter were immediately killed by the methods already described, although the survivors were generally unaware of this. Those kept alive as workers were housed in crowded barracks under conditions of extreme deprivation and harsh discipline. Most of them eventually died of disease, hunger and exhaustion, although many were executed for trivial breaches of discipline, or at the whim of the guards and officers. Few of these prisoners survived more than a year, although there are accounts by prisoners who survived the whole war as camp workers.

Escapes from the camps were few, but not unknown. Some deportees managed to hide in or under the trains during the chaos of unloading at the camps. Many tried to jump from the trains but were nearly always killed. Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz in April 1944, eventually reaching Slovakia from where they were able to make their way to the west, carrying the first eyewitness account of the extermination camps to a (generally unbelieving) world. Czeslaw Mordowicz escaped from Auschwitz in May 1944 and joined the Slovak partisans, but was captured and sent back to Auschwitz. He was not recognised as an escapee (in which case he would have been shot), and survived the war. Even if prisoners did succeed in escaping, however, they were sometimes betrayed by the Poles to the Germans.

Climax

Heydrich was assassinated in Prague in June 1942. He was succeeded as head as the RSHA by Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Kaltenbrunner and Eichmann, under Himmler's close supervision, oversaw the climax of the Final Solution. During 1943 and 1944, the extermination camps worked at a furious rate to kill the hundreds of thousands of people shipped to them by rail from almost every country within the German sphere of influence. At Auschwitz, 60,000 people were killed and incinerated every day.

Despite the high productivity of the war industries based in the Jewish ghettoes in the General-Government, during 1943 they were liquidated, and their populations shipped to the camps for extermination. The largest of these operations, the deportation of 100,000 people from the Warsaw Ghetto in early 1943, provoked the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which was suppressed with great brutality. At the same time, rail shipments arrived regularly from western and southern Europe. Few Jews were shipped east from the occupied Soviet territories to the camps: the killing of Jews in this zone was left in the hands of the SS, aided by locally-recruited auxiliaries. In any case by the end of 1943 the Germans had been driven from most Soviet territory.

Shipments of Jews to the camps had priority on the German railways, and continued even in the face of the increasingly dire military situation after the Battle of Stalingrad at the end of 1942 and the escalating Allied air attacks on German industry and transport. Army leaders and economic managers complained at this diversion of resources and at the killing of irreplaceable skilled Jewish workers. By 1944, moreover, it was evident to most Germans not blinded by Nazi fanaticism that Germany was losing the war. Many senior officials began to fear the retribution that might await Germany and them personally for the crimes being committed in their name. But the power of Himmler and the SS within the German Reich was too great to resist, and Himmler could always evoke Hitler's authority for his demands. Few people realised that for Hitler and Himmler killing the Jews was more important than winning the war.

In October 1943 Himmler gave a speech to senior Nazi Party officials gathered in Posen (Poznan in western Poland). Here he came closer than ever before to stating explicitly that he was intent on exterminating the Jews of Europe.

"I may here and this closest of circles allude to a question which you, my party comrades, have all taken for granted, but which has become for me the most difficult question of my life, the Jewish question... I ask of you that what I say in this circle you really only hear and never speak of... We come to the question: how is it with the women and children? I have resolved even here on a completely clear solution. I do not consider myself justified in eradicating the men - so to speak killing them or ordering them to be killed - and allowing the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up... The difficult decision had to be taken, to cause this people to disappear from the earth."

The audience for this speech included Admiral Karl Dönitz and Armaments Minister Albert Speer, both of whom successfully claimed at the Nuremberg trials that they had had no knowledge of the Final Solution. The text of this speech was not known at the time of their trials.

The scale of extermination slackened somewhat at the beginning of 1944 once the Polish ghettoes were emptied, but in March 1944 Hitler ordered the military occupation of Hungary, and Eichmann was dispatched to Budapest to supervise the deportation of Hungary's 800,000 Jews. More than half of them were shipped to Auschwitz in the course of the year. The commandant, Rudolf Höss, said at his trial that he killed 400,000 Hungarian Jews in three months. This operation met strong opposition within the Nazi hierarchy, and there were some suggestions that Hitler should offer the Allies a deal under which the Hungarian Jews would be spared in exchange for a favourable peace settlement. This was never a serious possibility, but Eichmann opened negotiations with the leaders of the Hungarian Jews and with Zionist organisations based in Palestine, and talks were held in Budpest and Istanbul. One suggested "deal" was that 100,000 Hungarian Jews would be allowed to leave for Palestine if Germany was allowed to acquire military equipment via neutral Turkey, for use only on the eastern front. But the British and U.S. governments, which were kept fully informed, were opposed to any suggestion of dealing with the Nazis behind the back of the Soviet Union, and the talks collapsed.

By mid 1944 the Final Solution had largely run its course. Those Jewish communities within easy reach of the Nazi regime had been largely exterminated, in proportions ranging from more than 90 percent in Poland to about 25 percent in France. In May Himmler claimed in a speech that "The Jewish question in Germany and the occupied countries has been solved," and this was broadly correct. During 1944, in any case, the task became steadily more difficult. German armies were evicted from the Soviet Union, the Balkans and Italy, and Germany's allies defected or were defeated. In June the western Allies landed in France. Allied air attacks and the operations of partisans made rail transport increasingly difficult, and the objections of the military to the diversion of rail transport for carrying Jews to Poland more urgent and harder to ignore.

At this time, as the Soviet armed forces approached, the camps in eastern Poland were closed down, any surviving inmates being shipped west to camps closer to Germany, first to Auschwitz and later to Gross Rosen in Silesia. Auschwitz itself was closed in October, as the Soviets advanced through Poland. Despite the desperate military situation, efforts were made to conceal evidence of what had happened in the camps. The gas chambers were dismantled, the crematoria dynamited, mass graves dug up and the corpses cremated, and Ukrainian or Polish farmers were induced to plant crops on the sites to give the impression that they had never existed. In October Himmler, who was trying to negotiate a secret deal with the Allies behind Hitler's back, ordered an end to the Final Solution. But the hatred of the Jews in the ranks of the SS was so strong that Himmler's order was generally ignored. Eichmann, for example, continued to deport Hungarian Jews until December 1944, and left Budapest only days before the city fell to the Soviets. Local commanders continued to kill Jews, and to shuttle them from camp to camp by forced "death marches," until the last weeks of the war.

Numbers

Since 1945 the most commonly cited figure for the total number of Jews killed in the course of the Holocaust has been 6 million. Despite challenges from "revisionists" of various kinds, this figure has been vindicated by all serious researchers. The most important Holocaust commemoration centre, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority at Yad Vashem in Israel, comments:

"There is no precise figure for the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. The figure commonly used is the 6 million quoted by Adolf Eichmann, a senior SS official. Most research confirms that the number of victims was between five and six million. Early calculations range from 5.1 million (Professor Raul Hilberg) to 5.95 million (Jacob Leschinsky). More recent research, by Professor Yisrael Gutman and Dr Robert Rozett in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, estimates the Jewish losses at 5.59 to 5.86 million, and a study headed by Dr Wolfgang Benz presents a range from 5.29 million to 6 million. The main sources for these statistics are comparisons of prewar censuses with postwar censuses and population estimates. Nazi documentation containing partial data on various deportations and murders is also used."

There were about 8 to 10 million Jews in the territories controlled directly or indirectly by the Nazis (the uncertainty arises from the lack of knowledge about how many Jews there were in the Soviet Union). The 6 million killed in the Holocaust thus represent 60 to 75 percent of these Jews. Of Poland's 3.3 million Jews, over 90 percent were killed. The same proportion were killed in Latvia and Lithuania, but most of Estonia's Jews were evacuated in time. In Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Netherlands and Yugoslavia, over 70 percent were killed. More than 50 percent were killed in Belgium, Hungary and Romania. It is likely that a similar proportion were killed in Belarus and Ukraine, but these figures are less certain. Countries with notably lower proportions of deaths include Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Italy and Norway. Finally, of the 750,000 Jews in Germany and Austria in 1933, only about a quarter survived. Although most German and Austrian Jews emigrated before 1939, the majority of these fled to Czechoslovakia, France or the Netherlands, from where they were later deported to their deaths.

The number of people killed at the major extermination camps has been estimated as follows: Auschwitz: about 1 million; Belzec: 436,000; Chelmno: 340,000; Majdanek: 300,000 to 350,000; Maly Trostenets: at least 200,000, possibly over 500,000; Sobibór: 260,000; Treblinka: at least 700,000, possibly over 1 million. This gives a total of at least 3.2 million, and possibly 3.8 million. Of these, over 90% were Jews. These seven camps thus accounted for about half the total number of Jews killed in the entire Nazi Holocaust. Virtually the whole Jewish population of Poland died in these camps.

To this figure of 3.2 to 3.8 million must be added at least half a million Jews who died in other camps, including the major concentration camps in Germany. These were not extermination camps, but had large numbers of Jewish prisoners at various times, particularly in the last year of the war as the Nazis withdrew from Poland. About a million people died in these camps, and although the proportion of Jews is not known with certainty, it was probably more than 50 percent. The largest death tolls were at Mauthausen (195,000) Bergen-Belsen (170,000) and Sachsenhausen (100,100). Another 800,000 to 1 million Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet territories (an approximate figure, since the Einsatzgruppen killings were frequently undocumented). Many more died through execution or of disease and malnutrition in the ghettoes of Poland before they could be deported.

Resistance

Many writers have asked why millions of European Jews went to their deaths with hardly a flicker of protest or resistance. Some Jewish commentators have expressed contempt for the passivity and fatalism of the Jewish communities of central Europe, which they blame on the "ghetto mentality." Ariel Sharon, later Prime Minister of Israel, said in a 1982 interview: "Listen, a people that gave itself up to be slaughtered, a people that let soap to be made of its children and lamp shades from the skin of its women, is a worse criminal than its murderers. Worse than the Nazis." [footnote: The belief that the Nazis made soap from the body fat of Holocaust victims is a myth. There was one experiment with making fertiliser from corpses, but the idea was abandoned. Ilse Koch, a guard at Buchenwald concentration camp, collected tattooed skin from corpses as souvenirs, but testimony at her trial that she made lamp shades from human skin was not corroborated.]

This contempt for the failure of prewar European Jewry to save itself from the Nazis, or even to try to do so, was a powerful factor fuelling militant Zionism in the postwar years, and since 1948 has stiffened Israel's determination to do whatever it thinks necessary to defend itself, even in the teeth of world opinion, as Sharon's own career illustrates. Jewish failure to resist the Holocaust has thus become a factor in current political controversy.

In fact there were some examples of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust, most notably the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of January 1943, when thousands of poorly-armed Jewish fighters held the SS at bay for four weeks and killed several hundred Germans before being crushed by overwhelmingly superior forces. This was followed by the rising in the Treblinka extermination camp in May 1943, when about 200 inmates succeeded in escaping from the camp after overpowering the guards. Two weeks later, there was a rising in the Bialystok ghetto. In September there was a short-lived rising in the Vilnius ghetto revolted. In October 600 Jewish and Russian prisoners attempted an escape at the Sobibór death camp. About 60 survived and joined the Soviet partisans. Most of the participants in these risings were killed, but some managed to escape and joined partisan units. There was also a rising at Auschwitz in October 1944, shortly before the camp was closed.

In Poland and the occupied Soviet lands, thousands of Jews fled into the swamps and forests and joined the partisans, although the partisan movements did not always welcome them. In Lithuania and Belarus, an area with a heavy concentration of Jews and also an area which suited partisan operations, Jewish partisan groups operated, and saved thousands of Jews from extermination. No such opportunities, of course, existed for the Jewish populations of cities such as Amsterdam or Budapest. Joining the partisans was an option only for the young and the fit, who were willing moreover to abandon their families to their fate. The strong Jewish sense of family solidarity meant that this was not an option for most Jews, who prefered to die togther rather than be separated.

For the great majority of Jews resistance could take only the passive forms of delay, evasion, negotiation, bargaining and, where possible, bribery of German officials. The Nazis enouraged this by forcing the Jewish communities to police themselves, through bodies such as the Reich Association of Jews (Reichsvereinigung der Juden) in Germany and the Jewish Councils (Judenrate) in the Polish urban ghettos. They cunningly held out the promise of concessions in exchange for each surrender, enmeshing the Jewish leaderships so deeply in well-intentioned compromise that a decision to stand and fight was never possible. The Holocaust survivor Alexander Kimel wrote: "The youth in the ghettos dreamed about fighting. But many factors that inhibited our responses: the most important factors were isolation and historical conditioning to accepting martyrdom."

The "historical conditioning" of the Jewish communities of Europe to accept persecution and to avert disaster through compromise and negotiation was the most important factor in the failure to resist until the very end (the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising only took place when the Jewish population had been reduced from 500,000 to 100,000 and it was obvious that no further compromise was possible). Paul Johnson writes: "The Jews had been persecuted for a millennium and a half and had learned from long experience that resistance cost lives rather than saved them. Their history, their theology, their folklore, their social structure, even their vocabulary trained them to negotiate, to pay, to plead, to protest, not to fight." He also points out that the emigration of millions of Jews, mainly the young, energetic and ambitious, to America and to Palestine over the previous 50 years had left the Jewish communities composed mainly of the religious and the conservative, who were more likely to be resigned to their fate. In the Soviet areas, the Jewish leadership had already been exterminated by the Communist regime during the purges of the 1930s.

Furthermore, the Jewish communities were systematically deceived about German intentions, and were cut off from most sources of news about the outside world. The Germans always told the Jews that they were being deported to work camps in the east, and maintained this illusion through elaborate deceptions all the way to the gas chamber doors. As photographs testify, Jews disembarked at the railway stations at Auschwitz and other extermination camps carring sacks and suitcases, clearly having no idea of the fate that awaited them. Rumours of the reality of the extermination camps filtered back only slowly to the ghettos, and were usually not believed (just as they were not believed when courageous couriers such as Jan Karsky conveyed them to the western Allies). It is difficult to blame people in such desperate circumstances for clinging to whatever shreds of hope they were offered.

Responsibility

Hitler

There can be little doubt that the ultimate responsibility for the Holocaust lies with Adolf Hitler. It is true that there is no "smoking gun" in the form of a document which shows Hitler ordering the Final Solution, although, as shown above, Himmler's desk diary for 18 December 1941 is circumstantial evidence for an explicit order being given by Hitler on that date. Hitler did not have a bureaucratic mind and many of his most important instructions were given orally. This did not matter: in Nazi Germany his word was quite literally law. Irving cites several cases in which Himmler ordered written reports which refered directly to the killing of the Jews to be redrafted before showing them to Hitler. But this is not surprising either. It is quite understandabe that Himmler was careful not to allow the creation of a documentary record showing that he and Hitler were about to commit one of history's greatest crimes.

It is very hard to believe that Hitler did not know that the Jews were being exterminated. There is ample documentary evidence that he authorised the mass deportations of the Jews to the east beginning in October 1941. He cannot have imagined that these hundreds of thousands of Jews would be housed, clothed and fed by the authorities of the Government-General, and in fact Hans Frank frequently complained that he could not cope with the influx. Even Irving concedes that after Himmler's speech at Posen in October 1943 Hitler must have known what was happening.

Whether or not Hitler actually told Himmler to kill the Jews is in a sense immaterial. Hitler had created the Nazi movement, and the SS as its elite corps, and had imbued them with his own fanatic anti-Semitism. He had made it clear many times that he intended to destroy the Jewish people. Himmler did not need either written or spoken authorisation to translate his Führer's wishes into deeds. He acted in the belief that he was carrying out Hitler's will, and in that he was correct. Hitler thus carries the ultimate moral responsibility for the Holocaust.

Other Nazi leaders

The handful of men who actually carried out the extermination of 6 million people in three years included Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann, Kaltenbrunner, Heinrich Müller of the Gestapo and Oswald Pohl, head of the Economics and Main Administration Office (WVHA) of the SS. Sauckel, Frank, the Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and the Labor Minister Robert Ley also played key roles. Other top Nazi leaders such as Goebbels, Göring, and probably Martin Bormann knew in broad terms what was happening, but had no direct role. Göring made some efforts to save the skilled Jewish workforce, but his motives were exclusively pragmatic and he did not press his objections.

The Nazi regime operated through vertical hierarchies. Officials carried out orders from above and did not ask questions about what was happening elsewhere. Only those at the very top had a broad view of what was going on across the German empire. But most senior SS officers and many officials of the various Reich ministries must have known in whole or in part what was happening. Millions of people were rounded up, bureaucratically processed and transported across Europe, an operation involving thousands of officials and a great deal of paperwork. This was co-ordinated by the Reich ministries, the police, and the national railways, as well as the SS and the Gestapo, all under the supervision of the Nazi Party. Most of the Party's regional leaders (Gauleiters) were present for Himmler's Posen speech. None of these people could plead ignorance after the event, although many did so.

The German Army

The extent to which the officers of the regular German Army knew of the Final Solution has been much debated. Political imperatives in postwar Germany have led to the Army being generally absolved from responsibility, apart from the handful of "Nazi generals" such as Alfred Jodl and Wilhelm Keitel who were tried and hanged at Nuremberg. Many front-line officers went through the war without coming into direct contact with the machinery of extermination. Others chose to focus narrowly on their duties and not notice the wider context of the war. Relations between the Army and the SS were not friendly, and some officers refused to co-operate with Himmler's forces. General Johannes Blaskowitz, for example, was relieved of his command after officially protesting about SS atrocities in Poland. Others, however, such as Walther von Reichenau and Erich von Manstein, actively supported the work of the Einsatzgruppen.

It was nevertheless difficult for commanders on the eastern front to avoid knowing what was happening in the areas behind the front. Joachim Fest points out that one of the factors that led Claus von Stauffenberg and other German officers to plot the July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler was their growing awareness of the crimes that Hitler was committing in Germany's name. Stauffenberg argued that these crimes released German officers from the oath of loyalty they had taken to Hitler. If Stauffenberg and other officers in his circle were aware of the Holocaust, so must many others who did not act on that knowledge as Stauffenberg did, at the cost of his life.

The German people

The responsibility of the German people as a whole for the Holocaust has once again became a matter of heated debate since the publication of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners in 1996. Goldhagen argues that the great majority of Germans and Austrians knew and approved of the extermination of the Jews, and that most would have actively participated in it had they been asked to do so. He provides extensive documention of the depth, ubiquity and antiquity of anti-Semitic sentiment in Germany, and of the equanimity with which large numbers of ordinary Germans obeyed orders to kill defenceless civilians, or even volunteered to do so, and how few Germans protested against what was going on. Although critics have found many deficiencies in Goldhagen's book, his compilation of documentary evidence of widespread German responsibility for the Holocaust is hard to ignore.

Most historians are sceptical about Goldhagen's thesis that the majority of Germans subscribed to an "eliminationist" form of anti-Semitism and that they were not only aware of but in agreement with the extermination of the Jews. The most scathing attack on Goldhagen has been Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn's book A Nation on Trial. Finkelstein and Birn examined Goldhagen's references and concluded that Hitler's Willing Executioners was (in the words of one reviewer) "not worthy of being called an academic text."

Goldhagen's critics point out that the Nazi Party did not advocate killing the Jews before they came to power, and that therefore even the minority of Germans who voted for the Nazis in elections before 1933 were not voting for a holocaust of the Jews. They point out that the regime went to considerable lengths to conceal the truth about what was being done not only from world opinion but from the German public. The official line that the Jews were being "deported to work in the east" was always maintained, partly to deceive the Jews about the fate that awaited them, but partly also to mislead the German public.

Neverthless, knowledge about at least some aspects of the Holocaust must have been very widespread among Germans. As Paul Johnson points out, the SS had 900,000 members in 1943, most of whom participated in one way or another in actions against the Jews, and the German national railways, the Reichsbahn, employed 1.2 million people, the majority of whom helped process the lines of cattle-cars packed with suffering Jews being transported eastwards, and the car-loads of clothes, shoes and other goods coming back. Many other elements of the sprawling German civil service, from the Reichsbank which received tonnes of gold from the melted dental work of dead Jews, to the Ministry of Food and Agriculture which employed slave labour on German farms, participated in various ways in the pillage and killing of the Jews, and many thousands of middle and low-ranking bureaucrats must have had some awareness of what they were doing. Recent survey work by Eric Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband has found many elderly Germans willing to acknowledge, usually for the first time, that they had a fair idea of what was happening.

It is frequently argued that even if ordinary Germans were aware of the extermination of the Jews, there is nothing they could have done to protest or prevent the actions of one of the most ruthless dictatorships of modern times. Most writers have in general accepted this view. Goldhagen, however, raises some pertinent objections. He points out that it was not in fact impossible for German civil society to protest against actions of the Nazi regime. When the Nazis attempted to remove crucifixes from schools in Bavaria in 1936, and again in 1941, protests forced them to back down. Strikes by industrial workers on economic issues were common, at least in the prewar period, and were not seriously punished. The best known example of public protest was the campaign against the regime's programme of euthanasia of people with physical and intellectual disabilities, known as "T4," which had to be abandoned in 1941 due to protests led by the Catholic Church and some parts of the medical profession.

Even more notable, both for its success and its uniqueness, was the three-day protest in Berlin in February 1943, led by over a thousand non-Jewish German women against the arrest of their Jewish husbands (a category which had hitherto been exempt from deportation). Faced with public protests in the capital, the regime backed down and released 1,700 Jews from captivity, some of them actually being brought back from Auschwitz, and the protesting women suffered no reprisals. In the name of consistency the regime then released all Jewish men married to non-Jewish women, in France as well as Germany, some 6,000 in all. This was the only public protest against the persecution of the Jews during the entire 12-year period of Nazi rule.

Other nationalities

Although the Holocaust was planned and directed by Germans, the Nazi regime found many willing collaborators in other countries, both those allied to Germany and those under German occupation. The civil service and police of the Vichy regime in occupied France actively collaborated in persecuting French Jews, although it should be pointed out that the majority of Jews who were born in France and were French citizens survived the war: the full weight of the deportations was reserved for naturalised, immigrant and refugee Jews. Civil servants and police also aided in the deportations of Jews in the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway, although there was also official resistance and obstructionism in these countries. Only in Denmark, which had the advantages of a very small Jewish population and an easy escape route to Sweden, did local authorities succeed in thwarting the Germans. In Greece the collaborationist government tried to avoid co-operation, but most Greek Jews lived in Thessaloniki, which was under the direct German occupation, and could be deported without Greek assistance. In Yugoslavia, which was dismembered in 1941 and parcelled out among various neighbouring countries and local collaborationists, the Jews were without protection and mostly perished.

Germany's allies Italy, Finland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria were pressured to introduce anti-Jewish measures, but with the exception of Romania they did not comply until compelled to do so. Bulgaria and Finland refused to co-operate, and the 50,000 Jews who were Bulgarian citizens survived almost unscathed, although those living in the parts of Greece and Yugoslavia under Bulgarian occupation were deported without Bulgarian opposition. The Hungarian regime of Miklos Horthy passed much anti-Jewish legislation, but refused to allow Hungarian Jews to be deported. After Horthy's fall and the German occupation of Hungary in 1944 over 500,000 Hungarian Jews were deported, with the eager participation of the Hungarian fascist movement the Arrow Cross. The Romanian regime of Ion Antonescu enthusiastically collaborated, but its inefficiency meant that only a third of Romania's 600,000 Jews were deported. The German puppet regime in Croatia actively persecuted Jews on its own initiative.

Probably the most conspicuous collaborators in the Holocaust were the Romanians, whose army killed about 400,000 Jews during their occupation of Bessarabia (Moldova), Bukovina and parts of western Ukraine including Odessa. Otto Ollendorf testified at his trial that the behaviour of the Romanians assisting the Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine disgusted even the SS: they engaged in an orgy of rape and plunder, and killed most of their victims by herding them into barns and burning them alive.

The Nazis sought to enlist support for their programs in all the countries they occupied, although their recruitment methods differed in various countries according to Nazi racial theories. In the "Nordic" countries of Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands, they tried to recruit young men into the Waffen SS, with sufficient success to create the Wiking SS division on the eastern front, whose members fought for Germany with great fanaticism until the end of the war. In the Baltic states and Ukraine, on the other hand, they recruited large numbers of auxiliary troops into SS battalions (known as Hiwis) which were used for anti-partisan work and guard duties at extermination and concentration camps. Most of these recruits were peasant boys who enlisted simply to gain a ration card, but the Germans were able in these countries to appeal to long traditions of local anti-Semitism.

In recent years the extent of local collaboration with the Nazis in eastern Europe has become more apparent. Lord Bullock writes: "The opening of the archives both in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe has produced incontrovertible evidence [of] ... collaboration on a much bigger scale than hitherto realized of Ukrainians and Lithuanians as well as Hungarians, Croats and Slovaks in the deportation and murder of Jews."

Punishment

After the German surrender in May 1945 the victorious Allies set out to mete out justice to the leading officials of the Nazi regime. The inspirer of the Holocaust, Hitler, and its chief architects, Himmler and Heydrich, were dead. (Himmler was captured by British troops near Hamburg but committed suicide when recognised.) But the second-rank officials responsible for carrying out Himmler's plans - Eichmann, Frank, Frick, Kaltenbrunner, Ley, Polh and Sauckel - were in Allied hands, as were most of the extermination camp commandants and Einsatzgruppe commanders who had carried out their orders. Of those with executive responsibility, only Müller of the Gestapo got away: he vanished with trace and his fate remains unknown. In January 1946, however, Eichmann, who had not been recognised, escaped from an American internment camp. With the help of a pro-Nazi network in the Catholic Church organised by Bishop Aloïs Hudal, he found refuge in Argentina.

The Nuremberg Trial

Faced the unprecedented task of deciding what to do with leading officials of a defeated enemy regime which had just carried out the largest mass murder in recorded history, the Allies created a special court, the International Military Tribunal, which tried twenty-four of the most important Nazi political and military leaders between November 1945 and October 1946 (see Nuremberg Trials). Seventeen of these were indicted for a new form of crime, crimes against humanity, which covered the extermination of the Jews as well as other crimes against civilian populations. (Robert Ley would also have been indicted, but killed himself before the trial began.) Sixteen were convicted (Rudolf Hess was acquitted), and ten were executed: Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Arthur Seyss-Inquart and Julius Streicher. Hermann Göring was sentenced to death, but killed himself before the sentence could be carried out. Martin Bormann was sentenced to death in absentia, but was in fact already dead.

Of those executed, Frank, Frick, Kaltenbrunner and Saukel had been centrally involved in the Holocaust: Frank as Governor-General of Poland, Frick as Interior Minister, Kaltenbrunner as head of the RSHA after Heydrich's death and Saukel as head of the forced labor system. Seyss-Inquart, as Reichskommissar for the Netherlands from 1940 to 1945, was responsible for deporting more than 100,000 Dutch Jews to their deaths. Rosenberg had been Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories and a leading Nazi "racial theorist," but had had little executive authority. Streicher was a violently anti-Semitic newspaper editor and Nazi Gauleiter, but had had no executive position. Jodl, Keitel and Ribbentrop had had no direct involvement with the Holocaust.

Four other defendants were convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to terms of imprisonment: Economics Minister Walther Funk, Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, Armaments Minister Albert Speer and Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath, who had preceded Heydrich as "Protector" of Bohemia and Moravia. Of these, only Speer had been directly involved in the Holocaust: he had employed hundreds of thousands of Jewish and other slave laborers in munitions and aircraft plants (particularly in the "Dora" plant near Buchenwald concentration camp), in the full knowledge that they were being worked to death. He had been present for Himmler's 1943 speech to the Gauleiters in Posen, so he was fully aware of the wider Holocaust. In the opinion of his most recent biographer Gitta Sereny, Speer's reputation as "the good Nazi" is undeserved and he would have been sentenced to death had the Tribunal known of the full extent of his complicity.

Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings

While these trials were still in progress, the United States occupation authorities established secondary courts, presided over by civilian judges, to conduct trials of second-rank defendants accused of war crimes, including participation in the Holocaust. Twelve trials, known as the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings, were held between December 1946 and April 1949, trying a total of 177 defendants. Each of the twelve cases dealt with a specific class of defendant. The most important cases from the point of view of responsibility for the Holocaust were the Einsatzgruppen Case, in which 24 defendants were charged with the murder of civilians in occupied countries, the Medical Case, in which 23 physicians were charged with conducting inhuman experiments on prisoners of war and civilians, mainly in the extermination and concentration camps, and the Pohl case, in which Oswald Pohl and seventeen other members of Economic and Administrative Office (WVHA) were charged with responsibility for Vernichtung durch Arbeit (annihilation through work) system in the extermination camps and also in the SS-run labor camps in Poland and elsewhere. In the course of these trials, 24 defendants were sentenced to death, including 14 in the Einsarzgruppen Case, but only eleven were eventually executed.

More trials were carried out in the British Zone, before military tribunals. The best-known of these was the trial of Josef Kramer and 44 others accused of war crimes at Belsen and Auschwitz. Trials were also conducted by the French Permanent Military Tribunal in the French Occupation Zone of Germany. Some defendants, including Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and Amon Göth commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp near Krakow (where the film Schindler's List is set), were handed over to Poland and were tried before the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland. Trials were also held in Denmark, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, at which large numbers of civilian, military, police, and SS personnel were tried for crimes committed during the German occupation.

Later trials

After 1949, when German sovereignty was re-established, war crimes trials were conducted by German courts. Between 1949 and 1983, according to the German government, 88,000 war crimes cases were opened in the Federal Republic of (West) Germany, for a variety of crimes committed under the Nazi regime, including crimes related to the Holocaust. One of the best known of these was the 1970 trial of Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp. After about 1950, however, German courts were increasingly reluctant to convict defendants unless it could be proved that they had personally committed crimes such as murder or torture. The great majority of defendants who were charged only with administrative responsibility for crimes were acquitted. According to German government figures, 6,500 people were convicted of war crimes by German courts. During the period 1949 to 1992, German courts convicted and punished only 472 defendants for involvement in the persecution and killing of Jews.

In May 1960 Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped in Argentina by Israeli agents. He was tried by an Israeli court from February to December 1961, charged with crimes against humanity and crimes against the Jewish people. The Israeli government ensured maximum publicity for the trial by allowing it to be televised, and it served the intended purpose of greatly raising awareness of the Holocaust. But the trial was marred by a political decision of the Israeli government to contend that there had been a plan to exterminate the Jews all along, and that Eichmann had been a leading architect of that plan. Neither of these contentions was correct, and it may be argued that Eichmann was unfairly convicted in that respect. But Eichmann could not deny the facts of his central role in the administration of the Holocaust, particularly in Hungary. His defence that he was only following orders was rejected, and he was convicted on all counts, sentenced to death and hanged in June 1962.

The trial was extraordinary in that Eichmann, a German citizen, was tried in a country whose courts had no jurisdiction over him, and which had not existed at the time his crimes were committed. By accepting the legitimacy of the trial, the international community (including Germany) recognised Israel's role as the representative of the European Jews killed in the Holocaust. The trial also served to highlight the role that anonymous bureaucrats such as Eichmann had played in the Holocaust, and reinforced the principle, already established at Nuremberg, that "following orders" was not a defence in cases of this kind.

Since the 1960s the Israeli government, and Nazi hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal and Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, have continued to pursue Nazis who escaped justice. Some of these, like Eichmann, found refuge in South America, where the right-wing regimes of Juan Peron in Argentina and Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, countries with large German communities, welcomed them. The Auschwitz camp doctor Josef Mengele, for example, lived in Argentina and Paraguay and died undetected in 1979.

For reasons which have never been fully explained, some senior officials of the Vatican helped some of these fugitives by providing them with passports and other documents. Since the relevant archives in the Vatican have still not been opened to inspection by historians, it is impossible to know whether these officials acted with the approval of Pope Pius XII or not. Other fugitives went to Arab countries such as Egypt and Syria, where they were employed as military advisors. Some war criminals were also protected by elements of British and U.S. intelligence agencies because of their usefulness in the context of the Cold War. Others were allowed to settle in countries such as Australia.

In 1983 the former SS chief in Lyon, Klaus Barbie, was deported from Bolivia and put on trial in France. This was the first major war crimes trial in Europe for more than a decade and marked a new willingness on the part of European governments, and particularly France, to pursue the remaining Nazi war criminals. Barbie was setenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, specifically including crimes against French Jews, and died in prison.

France was less willing to prosecute former officials of the Vichy regime for their role in the deportation of the French Jews. President François Mitterrand, himself a Vichy civil servant, blocked such investigations throughout his presidency. In 1997, however, French authorities successfully prosecuted Maurice Papon, a former police official, for crimes against French Jews. Papon, now aged 95, is still in prison. Another Vichy official, Paul Touvier, was convicted in 1994 (having been sheltered for years by the Catholic Church), and died in prison.

John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born U.S. citizen , was accused in 1986 of having been "Ivan the Terrible," a notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka extermination camp. Demjanjuk denied this, but was deported to Israel, where in April 1988 he was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death, mainly on the basis of eye-witness testimony by Holocaust survivors. In 1991 documents located by Gita Sereny in newly opened archives in Moscow proved that while Demjanjuk had been a camp guard, he was not at Treblinka, and the conviction was overturned.

The Demjanjuk trial demonstrated the unreliablity of eye-witness testimony to events which by 1988 were 45 years in the past. With the passage of time it becomes increasingly unlikely that any more Nazi war criminals will be detected. Even if they are it is unlikely that any court will now rule that they can be given a fair trial, 60 years after the events in question.

Consequences

Adolf Hitler did not succeed in his ambition of exterminating the Jews of Europe. But the Holocaust had a profound effect on Jewish life both demographically and politically, and had many other consequences which are still being felt. Demographically, the Holocaust killed 55 percent of the 11 million Jews in Europe (including the Soviet Union) in 1939, and 35 percent of the 17 million Jews in the world. The heart of the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazic Jewry of central and eastern Europe was destroyed, bringing to an end centuries of Jewish history and culture in the region. Yiddish culture and the Yiddish language received blows from which they have only partly recovered. Although Yiddish has defied predictions that it would soon become extinct, English and Hebrew are today the dominant languages of world Jewry.

One consequence of the destruction of the European Jewish communities was that the centre of gravity of world Jewry shifted from eastern Europe to the United States, which in 1945 became, and has remained, the largest Jewish community in the world. The second-largest Jewish community, that of the Soviet Union, remained under Communist rule until 1991 and was unable to exercise any independent political role, leaving the dominance of American Jewry unchallenged. Since the American Jewish community is also wealthy, highly educated and thoroughly integrated into the mainstream of American life, and since the United States has risen since 1945 to a position of world hegemony, this has given American Jews a position of influence unparalleled in world history.

The next consequence was the emigration of most of the surviving central European Jews to other countries. In 1945 there were still 400,000 Jews in Romania, 300,000 in Poland, 100,000 in Hungary and several hundred thousand in other parts of the region. Most of these had been rendered homeless, and up to a million were living in "Displaced Persons" camps scattered across Europe. The rapid imposition of Communist rule in east-central Europe, and the upsurge of anti-Semitic sentiment in parts of the region (particularly Poland), led most Jews to the conclusion that there was no future for them in Europe. Over the next decade hundreds of thousands of Jews emigrated to the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia and other countries, establishing centres of Jewish life with a strong core of Holocaust survivors, whose influence has continued to be felt to the present day.

The most important consequence of the Holocaust for the Jews, however, was the powerful impetus it gave to Zionism, the belief that the Jews could only live in security and freedom in a state of their own. Before 1933 Zionism had been a minority viewpoint among Jews, and even many of those who supported Zionism as an idea had little faith in the prospect of a Jewish state actually being created. Zionism was rejected both by liberals, who believed that Jews should integrate themselves into the countries where they lived, and by socialists, who believed that Jews should seek the revolutionary transformation of the countries where they lived. The Holocaust appeared to prove the falsity of all such hopes.

The state of Israel came into existence as a result of the unique set of circumstances which prevailed between 1945 and 1948. The 600,000 Jews in Palestine were armed and militant, although not the majority of the population there. Their resolution was stiffened by the arrival of a phalanx of desperate Holocaust survivors from Europe, of whom Menachem Begin was a typical example. There were hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees languishing in camps in Europe, many of them clamouring to be allowed to emigrate to Palestine. Britain, which had held Palestine under a League of Nations Mandate since 1922, was bankrupt and exhausted, and keen to extricate itself. The United States had become the dominant world power, and under the notably philo-Semitic President Harry S. Truman lent its powerful support to Zionist ambitions in Palestine.

The experiences of the Holocaust gave the Zionist movement qualities of intransigence and militancy born of grief and anger, which led to a determination to prevail over the British, the Arab population of Palestine and the Arab states in the creation and subsequent defence of the Jewish state. These qualities influenced the Israeli national character which evolved after 1948, leading to Israel's reputation for ruthlessness and inflexibility and to its willingness to defy world opinion - particularly European opinion, which Israelis continue to hold in contempt. Ariel Sharon summed up this attitude in a 1982 interview: "Call Israel by any name you like... I am not after the admiration of the gentiles. I don't need their love. I have to live, and I intend to ensure that my children will live as well. I will destroy anyone who will raise a hand against my children, I will destroy him and his children... History teaches us that he who won't kill will be killed by others. That is an iron law."

Ironically, Israel found another powerful ally in the Federal Republic of Germany, which recovered its sovereignty in 1949. In 1952 Germany agreed to provide Israel with more than US$800 million in reparations, as well as to pay direct reparations to 275,000 Israeli Holocaust survivors, payments which continue to the present. For a small country, this infusion of several billion dollars provided an enormous economic boost. (Israel also received large amounts of economic and military aid from the United States.) Germany also became a consistent diplomatic ally of Israel, at least until the 1990s, when the passing of the generation with adult experience of the wartime years reduced the sense of obligation felt by most postwar German politicians.

Controversies

For twenty years after the creation of Israel, the memory of the Holocaust, and the consequent sense of obligation towards the Jews, helped to generate and maintain world sympathy and support for the Jewish state. But after the Six Day War of 1967, the tide of world opinion began to turn, and sympathy grew for the Palestinians who had lost their homeland so that the Jews could establish one for themselves. The fading of memories of the Holocaust has been parallelled almost exactly by the fading of sympathy for Israel, particularly since Israel has for the most part continued to be governed by politicians of the wartime and immediate postwar generations such as Begin and Sharon, whose defiant rhetoric no longer arouses the admiration it did before 1967.

By the 1990s, in fact, the belief had arisen that Israel and the Jewish communities worldwide were deliberately exploiting the memory of the Holocaust to maintain support for Israel. This accusation found its most provocative expression in Norman Finkelstein's 2000 book The Holocaust Industry, subtitled "Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering." Finkelstein alleged that "The Holocaust," (which he distinguishes from the actual events of the Holocaust) has become an "ideological weapon" in the hands of Israel, the Zionist movement and American Jewish organisations such as the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League.

Finkelstein also accuses American Jewish organisations of "extortion" in bringing what he calls excessive and dishonest claims for compensation from Swiss banks and European governments, who in recent years have paid out billions in dollars in compensation at a time when the number of living Holocaust survivors is rapidly declining. These Jewish organisations, he said, claim to be acting on behalf of elderly Holocaust survivors, while much of the money gained in the process does not reach them but is used by Jewish organisations for political lobbying on behalf of Israel, exorbitant salaries and large fees for lawyers. He also says that the distortion of facts and emotional manipulation involved in these cases foment anti-Semitism.

Not surprisingly, Finkelstein's book has received savage criticism from members and supporters of the organisations he attacks in his book, and from most Jewish commentators. "This is not research; it isn't even political literature," said Professor Israel Guttman, former chief historian of Yad Vashem. "This is a lampoon, which takes a serious subject and distorts it for improper purposes. I don't even think it should be reviewed or critiqued as a legitimate book. We should consider it nothing more than an anti-Semitic lampoon." German historian Professor Hans Mommsen called it "a most trivial book, which appeals to easily aroused anti-Semitic prejudices."

The net effect of this controversy and others like it (and particularly the controversy over Israel's continued occupation of the Palestinian Territories) has been to weaken the sense of obligation towards Jews in general and Israel in particular that was almost universal in the western world for the 30 years after World War II. This is true even in Germany, a country where until recently criticism of Jews has been strictly taboo. A poll in 2001 showed that 15 percent of Germans "completely agreed" with Finkelstein's allegations, 50 percent "partially agreed" with them, and only 24 percent considered them untrue.

In the wake of the renewed conflict between Israel and the Palestinians after 2000, there was an upsurge of anti-Semitic rhetoric and actions in most European countries, particularly France. Some Jewish commentators claimed to see in this a revival of the anti-Semitism of the pre-war years, and a warning to Jews that a renewed Holocaust was not impossible. Sharon angered French opinion by urging France's 700,000 Jews to move to Israel. In fact, most of the violence in Europe was the work of Arab-Islamic immigrants, rather than of traditional European anti-Semites, and was generated almost entirely by hostility to Israel rather than to Jews as such. In 2004, as the last generation of eye-witnesses to the Holocaust moved into old age, its long term consequences were thus continuing to be felt in world politics.