S02E23 Holocaust pt 1: Systematic Annihilation

This episode begins our first episode of the most horrific religiously motivated crime, I believe, of all time, the holocaust. This was the systematic and state-sponsored murder of 6 million Jews and around 5 million others who did not fit the standards of the Nazi regime's ideas of a pure and superior race. Today we look at the holocaust from its beginnings to the liberation of camps as the allied forces of the US, Great Britain, and the USSR marched into Western Europe sealing their victory over the Axis powers, and uncovering the atrocities that lay within.  How did it begin? Who was to blame? We'll tackle these questions and more on today's episode. 

video clips and source information can be found at:
ushmm.org 
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's website. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_05: 0:00

This is an Okidoki production.

SPEAKER_07: 0:02

The Iscariot Generation podcast may contain adult themes or adult language. It is not intended for children or those who are easily offended. Shalom Aleichem Malachi Yasharit Malachi Me melech malchei amlachim akatos paruchum

SPEAKER_01: 1:12

I think the important thing to understand about this cataclysmic event is that it happened in the heart of Europe. Germany was respected around the world for its leading scientists, its physicians, its theologians. It was a very civilized, advanced country. It was a young democracy, but it was a democracy. And yet it descended not only into social collapse, but world war and eventually mass murder.

SPEAKER_04: 1:48

A strong man came to power in Germany whose ideas were that Germany has to create a national community which would include only the Aryan race which he considered superior and all the people who did not belong to the Aryan race could be eliminated. with planning and propaganda. He was able to convince most of the German people to go along with him, insensitive to what happened to the Jews who had basically been their former neighbors. And he managed to build concentration camps and killing centers and finally gas chambers. to annihilate six million Jews, and at the same time also millions of others murdered in a systematic government-sponsored way.

SPEAKER_05: 2:51

And it's made up of so many people who participated in different ways, who made it possible.

SPEAKER_08: 3:08

People who follow orders without question. Bystanders who watch and do nothing. Ordinary men and women simply going with the flow.

SPEAKER_05: 3:28

The events and the results of the Holocaust were so devastating. It was an extreme that we can barely imagine.

SPEAKER_08: 3:41

So mind-boggling that the temptations to forget and to repress, to just put it out of line, are very real.

SPEAKER_05: 3:51

But we remember. We remember because it is an unthinkable scar on humanity. We need to understand what human beings are capable of.

SPEAKER_00: 5:16

Near the end of World War II, as Allied troops moved across Europe in a series of offensive against Nazi Germany, they began to encounter tens of thousands of concentration camp prisoners. Many of these prisoners had survived forced marches into the interior of Germany from camps in occupied Poland, and were suffering from starvation and disease. Soviet forces were the first to approach a major camp, reaching Majnik near Lublin, Poland in July of 1944. Surprised by the rapid Soviet advance, the Germans attempted to hide the evidence of mass murder by demolishing the camp. Camp staff set fire to the large crematorium used to burn bodies and murdered prisoners, but in the hasty evacuation, the gas chambers were left standing. In the summer of 1944, the Soviets also overran the sites of the Belchik, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers. The Germans had dismantled these camps in 1943 after most of the Jews of Poland had been killed. The Soviets liberated Auschwitz, the largest extermination and concentration camp, on January 27, 1941. 1945. The Nazis had forced the majority of Auschwitz prisoners to march westward in what would become known as death marches, and Soviet soldiers found only several thousand emaciated prisoners alive at the camp. There was abundant evidence of mass murder in Auschwitz. The retreating Germans had destroyed most of the warehouses, but in the remaining ones, the Soviets found personal belongings of the victims. They discovered, for example, hundreds of thousands of men's suits, more than 800,000 women's outfits, and more than 14,000 pounds of human hair. In the following months, the Soviets liberated additional camps in the Baltic states and in Poland. Shortly before Germany's surrender, Soviet forces liberated the Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück concentration camps. U.S. forces liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, on April 11, 1945, a few days after the Nazis had begun evacuating that camp. On the Day of Liberation, an underground prisoner resistance organization seized control of Buchenwald to prevent atrocities by the retreating camp guards. American forces liberated more than 20,000 prisoners at Buchenwald, and they also liberated Dürremittelbau, Flossenburg, Dachau, and Mauthausen. British forces liberated concentration camps in northern Germany, including Neuengam and Bergen-Belsen. They entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Selle in mid April 1945. Some 60,000 prisoners, most in critical condition because of a typhus epidemic, were found alive. More than 10,000 of them died from the effects of malnutrition or disease within just a few weeks of liberation. Liberators confronted unspeakable conditions in the Nazi camps where piles of corpses lay unburied. Only after the liberation of these camps was the full scope of Nazi horrors exposed to the world. The small percentage of inmates who survived resembled skeletons because of the demands of forced labor and the lack of food, compounded by months and years of maltreatment. Many were so weak that they could hardly move. Disease remained an ever-present danger and many of these camps had to be burned down to prevent the spread of epidemics. Survivors of the camps faced a long and difficult road to recovery. Today on the Iscariot Generation, we're going to discuss how it began, how it was allowed to go on for so many years, and the long-term ramifications of the horrors and atrocities of the Holocaust. We'll also discuss why it's so important to never forget what happened there to the more than 11 million victims who suffered these atrocities. Hey, have you ever listened to a podcast and thought, man, I'd love to do that? Well, you can, and the team at Buzzsprout is ready to help. Whether you're looking for a new marketing channel, have a message you want to share with the world, or just think it'd be fun to have your own talk show, the Buzzsprout team is passionate about helping you succeed. Buzzsprout is hands down the easiest way to launch, promote, and track your podcast. Your show can be online and listed in All the major podcast directories such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and more within minutes of finishing your recording. You'll also get a great looking podcast website, audio players that you can drop into other websites, detailed analytics to see how people are listening, tools to promote your episodes, and so much more. Just follow the link in the show notes so that Buzzsprout knows we sent you. By doing this, you'll not only help support our show, but you'll also get a$20 credit if If you sign up for a paid plan. Over 100,000 podcasters already use Buzzsprout to get their message out to the world. You can too. Buzzsprout, the easiest way to start a podcast.

SPEAKER_06: 10:31

Okay, that song you were

SPEAKER_00: 10:54

just listening to was called Zognit Kynmo. The longer title would be, And that translates to, This song was written by Hirsch Glick of the Vilna Ghetto in 1943. This became a song of the resistance, Jewish partisans. And yes, there were partisans who were fighting against the things that were happening there. Listen to the words of this song. I'm going to read it to you in English here because the German would probably kill me. Don't ever say that you are on your final way. Those skies of lead obscure the sunny days. The hour we've waited for so long is drawing When our steps will thunder out, we are here. From lands of green palms to the lands all white with snow, we are coming with our pain and with our woe. And where our blood has spurted out upon the ground, up will sprout our might, our courage, all around. For the morning sun will warm us with its glow, and the night will disappear as will the foe. But if too late for us when comes the dawn once more, then pass the message of this song La Dor Vador, which basically roughly translates to From Generation to Generation. The song is written with our blood and not with lead. It's not the sweet song of a bird flying overhead, but t'was a people with walls falling all around who sang this song and held their guns and stood their ground. So yes, there were some Jews who managed to escape from ghettos and camps, and they formed these fighting units, which they called partisans. And they were mainly concentrated in densely wooded areas. And a large group of partisans in occupied Soviet territory hid in a forest near the Lithuanian capital of Vilna. And this is where... This song was written by Hirsch Glick. He was in the Vilna ghetto. And like I said, he wrote this in 1943. And these partisans were able to derail hundreds of trains and killed over 3,000 German soldiers. And they had a difficult life, these partisans. They had to move from place to place to avoid discovery. They survived by raiding farmers' food supplies so they could eat. And they built flimsy shelters from logs and branches to give them some kind of protection from the winter. In some places, partisans received assistance from local villagers, but more often they couldn't count on help, which was partly because of widespread anti-Semitism and partly because people were just afraid to help, fear of being punished. So the partisans lived in constant danger of local informers who might reveal where they are to the Germans. But yeah, there were some people who were able to stand up and try to fight back, and some were very successful. Some were able to last until... the end of the war, after the Allies came and liberated the camps and the ghettos and put an end to the Nazi reign that was happening there in Germany and most of Europe during that time. But that's where that song came from, and I wanted to point that out to you there. Okay, so I want to go back to kind of the beginning and just discuss what was the Holocaust. Well, the Holocaust was, it occurred between the years of 1933 to 1945, and this was the systematic state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German regime and its allies and collaborators. And there were also not only the six million Jews, but there were over five million other people who were murdered during this time for various other reasons. These would be people like Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma or Gypsies, the mentally handicapped, physically handicapped, homosexuals, political prisoners, and anyone else who didn't fit the ideas of this homicidal, psychotic dictator's search for the pure white race. And this would also include children that they felt were too young to work at concentration camps. This would include the elderly for the same reasons. It was just a horrible, horrible time in history. As a matter of fact, the word holocaust... is sometimes referred to as the Shoah, which is the Hebrew word for catastrophe. But this all began in January of 1933 when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. And it didn't end until May of 1945 when the Allied powers defeated the Nazis during World War II. So, when they came to power in Germany, the Nazis didn't immediately start to carry out mass murder. However, they quickly began using the government to target and exclude Jews from German society. Among other anti-Semitic measures, the Nazi German regime enacted discriminatory laws and organized violence targeting Germany's Jews. The Nazi persecution of Jews became increasingly radical between 1933 and 1945, and this radicalization culminated in a plan that Nazi leaders referred to as the final solution to the Jewish question. The final solution was the organized and systematic mass murder of European Jews. The Nazi German regime implemented this genocide between 1941 and 1945 when it became clear that they probably weren't going to win this war. This is when, you know, 1941, Pearl Harbor happened and the United States entered into World War II. And before long, the Allies began to come to Europe and to the parts of Europe where all these things were happening. The Nazis falsely accused Jews of causing Germany's social, economic, political, and cultural problems. In particular, they blamed them for Germany's defeat in World War I. Some Germans were receptive to these Nazi claims, and anger over the loss of the war and the economic and political crisis that followed is what contributed to increasing anti-Semitism in German society. The instability of Germany under the Weimar Republic, the fear of communism, and the economic shocks of the Great Depression and also made many Germans more open to Nazi ideas, which included antisemitism. However, the Nazis didn't invent antisemitism, and this is old and widespread, and it's taken many forms throughout history. In Europe, it dates back to ancient times. Remember in the Middle Ages, prejudices against Jews were primarily based in early Christian belief and thought, particularly the myth that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. Suspicion and discrimination rooted in religious prejudices continued in early modern Europe, and at that time, leaders in much of Christian Europe isolated Jews from most aspects of economic, social, and political life. This exclusion contributed to stereotypes of Jews as outsiders. As Europe became more secular, many places lifted most legal restrictions on Jews. This, however, did not mean the end of antisemitism. In addition to religious antisemitism, other types of antisemitism took hold in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. These new forms included economic, nationalist, and racial antisemitism. In the 19th century, anti-Semites falsely claimed that Jews were responsible for many social and political ills in modern industrial society. Theories of race, eugenics, and social Darwinism falsely justified these hatreds. Nazi prejudice against Jews drew upon all these elements, but especially racial anti-Semitism. Racial anti-Semitism is a discriminatory idea that Jews are a separate and inferior race. The Nazi party promoted a particularly virulent form of racial anti-Semitism. It was central to the party's race-based worldview. The Nazis believed that the world was divided into distinct races and that some races were superior to others. They considered Germans to be members of the supposedly superior Aryan race, and they asserted that Aryans were locked in a struggle for existence with other inferior races. Further, the Nazis believed that the so-called Jewish race was the most inferior and the most dangerous of all. According to the Nazis, Jews were a threat that needed to be removed from German society. Otherwise the Nazis insisted the Jewish race would permanently corrupt and destroy the German people. The Nazis' race-based definition of Jews included many persons who identified as Christians or did not practice Judaism. Now, this all took place throughout German and Axis-controlled Europe. It affected nearly all of Europe's Jewish population, which in 1933 numbered 9 million people. The Holocaust began in Germany after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor. And once again, this happened in January of 1933. And almost immediately, the Nazi German regime, which called itself the Third Reich, excluded Jews from German economic, political, social, and cultural life. Throughout the 1930s, the regime increasingly pressured Jews to immigrate. But the Nazi persecution of Jews spread beyond Germany. Throughout the 1930s, Nazi Germany pursued an aggressive foreign policy, and this culminated in World War II, which began in Europe in 1939. Pre-war and wartime territorial expansion eventually brought millions more Jewish people under German control. Nazi Germany's territorial expansion began in 1938 going into 1939. During this time, Germany annexed neighboring Austria and occupied the Czech lands. On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany began World War II by attacking Poland. Over the next two years, Germany invaded and occupied much of Europe, which included western parts of the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany further extended its control by forming alliances with the governments of Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. It also created puppet states and slow and Croatia. Together, these countries made up the European members of the Axis Alliance, which also included Japan. By 1942, as a result of annexations, invasions, occupations, and alliances, Nazi Germany controlled most of Europe and parts of North Africa. Nazi control brought harsh policies and ultimately mass murder to Jewish civilians across Europe. The Nazis and their allies and collaborators murdered more than 6 million Jews, and as I said, 5 million other so-called undesirables. Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators implemented a wide range of anti-Jewish policies and measures, and these policies varied from place to place. Thus, not all Jews experienced the Holocaust in the same way, but in all instances, millions of people were persecuted simply because they were identified as Jewish. Throughout German-controlled and aligned territories, the persecution of Jews took a Some of them were legal discrimination in the form of anti-Semitic laws, which included the Nuremberg Race Laws and numerous other discriminatory laws. There were various forms of public identification and exclusion, which included anti-Semitic propaganda, boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses, public humiliation, and obligatory markings such as the Jewish star or badge, which was worn as an armband or on clothing. There was organized violence. The most notable example was Kristallnacht. We just had the anniversary of Kristallnacht. It occurred between November 9th and 10th, the night of November 9th going into November 10th, back in 1938. I'm going to stop for a minute. I just want to talk a little bit about Kristallnacht. and what that was. Kristallnacht owes its name to the broken glass from windows of synagogues, homes, and Jewish-owned businesses that were plundered and destroyed during this pogrom. Now, if you're wondering what a pogrom is, a pogrom is a violent attack against a particular group and characterized by killings and destruction. And these groups could be ethnic, religious, you know, like that. So that's what a pogrom is. So I'll probably use that word a lot because there were a lot of different pogroms that happened during this era. In its aftermath, German officials announced that Kristallnacht had erupted as a spontaneous outburst of public sentiments in response to the assassination of Ernst von Roth. Von Roth was a German embassy official who was stationed in Paris. A 17-year-old Polish Jew named Herschel Grinspahn had shot the diplomat on November 7, 1938. A few days earlier, German authorities had expelled thousands of Jews of Polish citizenship living in Germany from the Reich. Grinspahn had received news that his parents, who were residents in Germany since 1911, were among these people. Grinspahn's parents and other expelled Polish Jews were initially denied entry into their native Poland. They found themselves stranded in a refugee camp near the town of in the older region between Poland and Germany. Already living illegally in Paris himself, a desperate Grinspahn apparently sought revenge for his family's precarious circumstances, and he appeared at the German embassy and shot the diplomatic official assigned to assist him. Von Roth died on November 9, 1938, two days after he was shot. The Nazi Party leadership assembled in Munich for the commemoration of Birchhoff Putsch, which occurred on November 8 and 1923 when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party led a coalition group in an attempt to overthrow the German government. The plotters had hoped to march on Berlin and launch a national revolution, but the insurrection failed miserably. Units of the Munich police force clashed with Nazi stormtroopers as they marched into the city center and the police killed more than a dozen of Hitler's supporters. This attempt coup d'etat came to be known as the Beer Hall Putsch. So that's what that is. So the Nazi party leaders who was here in Munich commemorating that event, they chose to use the occasion as a pretext to launch a night of anti-Semitic excesses. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, a chief instigator of the Kristallnacht pogroms, suggested to the covenanted Nazi old guard that world Jewry had conspired to commit the assassination. He announced that the Fuhrer had decided that demonstrations should not be prepared or organized by the party, but insofar as they erupt spontaneously, they are not to be hampered. So, Goebbels... His words appeared to have been taken as a command for unleashing violence. And after his speech, the assembled regional party leaders issued instructions to their local offices. And violence began to erupt in various parts of the Reich throughout the late evening and early morning hours of November 9th through the 10th. So that was what had happened there. And I want you to listen to this passage. This testimony here, this is Johanna Gerechter-Neumann, and she was a child when this happened, but she remembers being in Hamburg on Kristallnacht, and she's going to talk a little bit about what she witnessed there and what happened with her family. So once again, her name is Johanna Gerechter-Neumann.

SPEAKER_03: 27:59

This is not the era of television, radio, etc., etc., And as every other morning, I got ready to go to school. And the school was not all that far from our home. And I guess I had just sort of gained that little bit of independence of being allowed to go to school on my own rather than to be taken every day by my mother. I walked by our synagogue. Hordes of people were standing in front of it and throwing stones through the beautiful stained glass windows. I think that they had gone into the synagogue and ransacked it on the inside. They threw Torah scrolls into the streets. And as soon as I got into the school, teachers sat us down. And she said, something terrible has happened overnight, and your parents have been alerted to this, and they will come to pick you up. My mother came very shortly after we came to school, and she took me to my grandmother's home. My grandmother lived on the Grindelallee, which was closer to the school than Parkerlee, where we lived. And my father was there already. And my grandfather, as I had said before, had passed away. So it was only one of my aunts who was still in Germany. And that's to say an unmarried sister of my mother and my grandmother. And she had a very large apartment. And my father was there, and so were two other gentlemen. One was a friend of my aunt and uncle, a dentist, and the other gentleman, I don't know, he was a friend of the family. And the reason I said she has a very large apartment, it really ran from one side of the house to the next, and the bedrooms were in the back. And these three gentlemen were staying in that bedroom all the way in the back. We didn't quite know what was happening. My father always was a very courageous man, and you weren't going to tell him that he cannot walk on the streets of Germany. And he went downtown, and I remember him coming back quite shaken up. We went home. We did not make light in the apartment, and we went to bed immediately. And in the middle of the night, they came pounding on the front door. I remember that. And the fear that this instills in a child is a feeling of fear that never in your life can you forget. That feeling of fear is always there. And evidently, now we never came to know this for sure, a next door neighbor opened her door finally and said, why are you making so much noise people are sleeping and they said well we want these jews and so on she said they're not home so they left now did she know we were home and she really didn't want us to be arrested and and taken away or did she really think we weren't home and so on we never found that out but certainly her remark saved us from that. And then we went to my grandmother's house and stayed there for the remainder of the week, which was how long that program lasted. And my father was in the forest in Blankenese for that time. When we Jews talk about the Torah scrolls, this is the basis of our belief. This is the basis of our observance. This is the basis of our lives. This was thrown into the streets. It was torn up. It was desecrated. by hordes of people who had absolutely lost all respect of any other people's religion. It works itself right into the fact that you hate for the sake of hating, but you really don't know why you're hating.

SPEAKER_00: 32:20

Okay, and just a little aftermath on Johanna and her family. They escaped to Albania in 1939 and they remained there throughout the war. And then in 1945, Albania was liberated by the Allies and Johanna and her family spent a year in a displaced persons camp in Italy. Then she and her mother came to the U.S. in 1946 and Johanna's father joined them in 1947. And you heard her there talking about how the crowds came into the synagogues and were trying to destroy the Torahs and the looting these businesses and everything. According to an article on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where they're speaking of Kristallnacht, it says,"...the rioters destroyed hundreds of synagogues and Jewish institutions throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland." I hope I'm saying that right. Many synagogues burned throughout the night in full view of the public and of local firefighters who had received orders to intervene only to prevent flames from spreading to nearby buildings. The SA and Hitler Youth members across the country shattered the shop windows of an estimated 7,500 Jewish-owned commercial establishments and looted their wares. Jewish cemeteries also became a particular object of desecration in many regions. The pogrom proved especially destructive in Berlin and Vienna. home to the two largest Jewish communities in the German Reich. Mobs of SA men roamed the streets, attacking Jews in their houses and forcing Jews they encountered to perform acts of public humiliation. Although murder did not figure into the central directives, Kristallnacht claimed many Jewish lives between 9 and 10 November. The official figure for Jewish deaths released by German officials was 91, but recent scholarships suggest that there were hundreds of deaths, especially if one counts those who died of their injury in the days and weeks that followed the pogrom. Police records of the period also document a high number of rapes and suicides in the aftermath of the violence. As this pogrom spread, units of the SS and Gestapo, following Heydrich's instructions, arrested up to 30,000 Jewish men and transferred most of them from local prisons to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and other concentration camps. Significantly, Kristallnacht marks the first instance So, this definitely spurred the emigration of Jews from Germany in the months to come. In the immediate aftermath of the pogrom, many German leaders like Hermann Göring criticized the extensive material losses produced by the anti-Semitic riots, pointing out that if nothing were done to intervene, German insurance companies, not Jewish-owned businesses, would have to bear the costs of the damages. Nevertheless, Göring and other top party leaders decided to use the opportunity to introduce measures to eliminate Jews and perceived Jewish influence from the German economic sphere. The German government made an immediate pronouncement that the Jews themselves were to blame for the pogrom and imposed a fine of one billion Reichsmark, which is about 400 million U.S. dollars at 1938 rates, on the German Jewish community. The Reich government confiscated all insurance payouts to Jews whose businesses and homes were looted or destroyed, which left the Jewish owners personally responsible for the cost of all repairs. In the weeks that followed, the German government promulgated dozens of laws and decrees designed to deprive Jews of their property and of their means of livelihood. Many of these laws enforced Aryanization policy, which was the transfer of Jewish-owned enterprises and property to Aryan ownership, usually for a fraction of their true value. Ensuing legislation barred Jews already ineligible for employment in the public sector from practicing most professions in the private sector. The legislation made further strides in removing Jews from public life. German education officials expelled Jewish children still attending German schools. German Jews lost their right to hold a driver's license or own an automobile. legislation restricted access to public transport, and Jews could no longer gain admittance to German theaters, movie cinemas, or concert halls. The events of Kristallnacht represented one of the most important turning points in National Socialist anti-Semitic policy. Historians have noted that after the pogrom, anti-Jewish policy was concentrated more and more concretely into the hands of the SS. Moreover, the passivity with which most German civilians responded to the violence signaled to the Nazi regime that the German public was prepared for more radical measures. The Nazi regime expanded and radicalized measures aimed at removing Jews entirely from German economic and social life in the forthcoming years. The regime moved eventually toward policies of forced immigration and finally toward the realization of a Germany free of Jews, or Judenrein, by deportation of the Jewish population to the east. Thus, Kristallnacht figured as an essential turning point in Nazi Germany's persecution of Jews and this culminated in the attempt to annihilate the European Jews and we're going to talk more about some of these laws and things that happened after Kristallnacht when we return from this brief break so stick around and we'll be right back. Hey it's Phil from the Iscariot Generation if you're enjoying this podcast would you please help me out with something if you listen on iTunes could you please take a minute and leave me a five star rating it really does help us out a lot Also, I wanted you to know that if you would like to contact me, you can leave a comment if you use CastBox, or you can email me at IscariotGeneration at Yahoo.com. Once again, that's all lowercase, all one word, IscariotGeneration at Yahoo.com. And don't forget to check out Skeptic vs. Pagan. This is a channel I do with my wife, Aidy, where we look at myths, legends, curses, conspiracy theories, urban legends, Thanks so much, and I can't wait to hear from you. Now let's get back to the show. Now that song that you were just listening to was called Unser Steitel Brent. In English, it means, Our Town is Burning. And it was written by a man named Mordecai Gobertig, who was from Krakow, Poland. And he wrote this in 1936, following a pogrom in the Polish town of Przysztyk. During the war, the song became popular in the Krakow ghetto and inspired young people to take up arms against the Nazis. It became a kind of anthem for the Jewish partisans that came out of the Krakow ghetto. Now... He was a very famous songwriter and poet in the early 20th century and he lived in this ghetto there in Krakow and he died when the Germans came in and they were going to deport the residents of the ghetto to a concentration camp. He tried to escape and was shot by the SS and passed away there. So he was a victim of the Holocaust. And as I said, his song went on to become an anthem for the Jewish partisans that came out of that ghetto as well as other ghettos. The song has been translated into several languages and has been sang in commemoration of The things that happened there at different days of remembrance services over the years. So definitely a very important song to what we're discussing here today. And with that, I want to get into the ghettos and what was happening there. Now the ghettos were areas of cities or towns where German occupiers forced Jews to live in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. The authorities often enclosed these areas by building walls or other barriers. Guards prevented Jews from leaving without permission, and some ghettos existed for years, but others only existed for months, weeks, or even days as holding sites prior to deportation or murder, like we were just discussing about Krakow. uh... German officials first created these ghettos in 1939 and through 1940 in German-occupied Poland. The two largest were located in the occupied Polish cities of Warsaw and Lodz. Beginning in June 1941, German officials also established them in newly conquered territories in Eastern Europe following the German attack on the Soviet Union. German authorities and their allies and collaborators also established ghettos in other parts of Europe. Notably, in 1944, German and Hungarian authorities created temporary ghettos to centralize and control Jews prior to their deportation from Hungary. Now the German authorities originally established the ghettos to isolate and control the large local Jewish populations in occupied Eastern Europe. Initially they concentrated Jewish residents from within a city and the surrounding area or region. However beginning in 1941 German officials also deported Jews from other parts of Europe including Germany to some of these ghettos. Jewish forced labor became a central feature of life in many ghettos. In theory, it was supposed to help pay for the administration of the ghetto as well as support the German war effort. Sometimes factories and workshops were established nearby in order to exploit the imprisoned Jews for forced labor. The labor was often manual and grueling. And I want you to listen to Charlene Schiff. She's a Holocaust survivor, and I want you to listen to her describe conditions in the Holocaust ghetto.

SPEAKER_02: 44:09

When we were thrown into that ghetto, we were assigned one room. It was a large building. Actually, as far as I recall, it was a three-story building. It was in the poorest section of town, and it was in great disrepair. We were assigned this one and there were three other families with us to share that one room. The entire house had one bathroom and one kitchen, and the running water was almost, I mean, there was very little water. There was no warm water, only cold water. If you wanted hot water, you had to heat it on a wooden stove, and there was no wood. there was not enough room to sleep everyone on the floor in our room. And so the women, and there were two boys in that group, found some wood and they built bunks, I guess, so that we slept like in threes, because there was not enough room for all of us. Most of the people in our room were people who went to work. There were only, I think, three, four of us who were not quite 14 years of age, and we are the ones who were left at home in the house to fend for ourselves in the very beginning. The people who did not go to work did not receive any rations. The rations were very meager. I am not quite sure the weights, but it was like maybe two slices of bread, some oleo, a little bit of sugar, and I think some vegetables, I don't think there was any meat at all. And these rations, first they were given daily, then when the Judenrat organized everything, it was done once a week. And usually by the second or third day, everything was gone. My mother and sister shared their rations with me. It was very difficult and in the beginning there was an awful lot of chaos. The kids like myself and younger were really left with nothing to do. We were very hungry, we were dirty, we were unsupervised and it was very difficult to comprehend what really went on. We ate only at night when our parents or whoever took care of us came home. And all day there was nothing to do. Consequently, the kids, like myself, decided that we had to go outside and try and get some food. It was an unbelievable feeling to be hungry. It's a hunger that is very difficult to describe, for a child to be hungry, and there was nothing to eat. And when I was asked many times, what did we play, what did we do, we pretended, and what we played about, mostly, is about food. We talked about food, we pretended about... I mean, everything centered around food.

SPEAKER_00: 47:45

Okay, and I'll let you know the... what happened to Charlene and her family. Before they went to the ghetto, Charlene's father was a teacher. And when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941, they arrested her father after they occupied the town, and they never saw him again. Charlene and her mother and sister were forced into a ghetto the Germans established there in Horkov that she was just describing the conditions. And in 1942, Charlene and her mother fled from the ghetto after hearing rumors that the Germans were about to destroy it. Her sister attempted to hide separately but was never seen again. Charlene and her mother hid in an underbrush at the river's edge and avoided discovery by submerging themselves in the water for part of the time. They hid for several days, and then one day Charlene awoke to find that her mother had disappeared. And Charlene survived by herself in the forest near Hordakov and was liberated by Soviet troops. Eventually, she was able to emigrate to the United States, but she had lost her entire family in... in this horror that had happened around her. But I just wanted you to know the rest of her story. And I'm going to get back into some of the other things that were happening at this time and uh... we're going to start with the liquidation of the ghettos which occurred uh... between nineteen forty one and forty two the germans and their allies and collaborators began to murder ghetto residents in mass and dissolved ghetto administrative structures And this was part of their final solution that we spoke of earlier to the Jewish question. The majority of Jews in the ghettos were murdered either in mass shootings at nearby killing sites or after being deported to killing centers. Most of the killing centers were deliberately located near the large ghettos of German-occupied Poland or on easily accessible railway routes. Now earlier we were talking about some of the various forms that Jewish persecution had taken throughout this German controlled and allied territories. And we spoke of the legal discrimination, the various forms of public identification and exclusion, and the organized violence, which Kristallnacht was a part of that, and we had stopped there to speak about Kristallnacht. But some other forms of this persecution included physical displacement, where perpetrators used forced immigration, resettlement, expulsion, deportation, and as we just spoke of, the ghettoization to physically displace Jewish individuals and communities. There was also internment, where perpetrators interned Jews in overcrowded ghettos There was concentration camps, forced labor camps, and in these places many died from starvation, disease, and other inhumane conditions. There was also widespread theft and plunder. The confiscation of Jews' property, personal belongings, and valuables was a key part of the Holocaust. and forced labor, where the Jews had to perform forced labor in service of the Axis war effort, or for the enrichment of Nazi organizations, the military, or private businesses. Many Jews died as a result of all these policies, but before 1941, the systematic mass murder of all Jews was not Nazi policy. Beginning in 1941, however, Nazi leaders decided to implement the mass murder of Europe's Jews, and they referred to this plan as the final solution to the Jewish question. Now, The final solution was the deliberate and systematic mass murder of all European Jews, and it was the last stage of the Holocaust, and this took place from 1941 to 1945. Though many Jews were killed before the final solution began, the vast majority of Jewish victims were murdered during this period. So as part of the final solution, Nazi Germany committed these mass murders, and there were two main methods of killing. One method was mass shooting, and German units would carry out mass shootings on the outskirts of villages, towns, and cities throughout Eastern Europe. And the other was asphyxiation with poison gas. Gassing operations were conducted at killing centers and also with mobile gas vans. The Nazi German regime perpetrated mass shootings of civilians on a scale never seen before. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, German units began to carry out mass shootings of local Jews. At first, these units targeted Jewish men of military age, but by August of 1941, they had started massacring entire Jewish communities, and these massacres were often conducted in broad daylight and in full view and earshot of local residents. Mass shooting operations took place in more than 1,500 cities, towns, and villages across Eastern Europe. German units tasked with murdering the local Jewish population moved throughout the region, committing horrific massacres. Typically, these units would enter a town and round up the Jewish civilians, and then they would take the Jewish residents to the outskirts of the town. Next, they would force them to dig a mass grave or take them to mass graves that had been prepared in advance. Finally, the German forces or the local auxiliary units would shoot all of the men, women, and children and had them fall into these pits. Sometimes these massacres involved the use of specially designed mobile gas vans. Perpetrators would use these vans to suffocate victims with carbon monoxide exhaust. Germans also carried out mass shootings at killing sites in occupied Eastern Europe. Typically, these were located near large cities. These sites included Fort 9 in Kovno, the Rumbula and Bikerniki forests in Riga, and Mele Trostnets near Minsk. At these killing sites, Germans and local collaborators murdered tens of thousands of Jews from the Kovno, Riga, and Minsk ghettos. They also shot tens of thousands of German, Austrian, and Czech Jews at these killing sites. At Meili Trostnitz, thousands of victims were also murdered in gas vans. The German units that perpetrated the mass shootings in Eastern Europe included the special task forces of the SS and the police. also included order police battalions and Waffen SS units. The German military provided logistical support and manpower, and some Wehrmacht units also carried out massacres. In many places, local auxiliary units working with the SS and police participated in the mass shootings. These auxiliary units were made up of local civilian, military, and police officials. As many as 2 million Jews were murdered in mass shootings or gas vans in territories seized from Soviet forces. In late 1941, the Nazi regime began building specifically designed stationary killing centers in German-occupied Poland. In English, killing centers are sometimes called extermination camps or death camps. In Nazi Germany, there were five killing centers that operated. They were Chelmno, Belchik, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. They built these killing centers for the sole purpose of efficiently murdering Jews on a mass scale. The primary means of murder at the killing centers was poisonous gas released into sealed gas chambers or vans. German authorities, with the help of their allies and collaborators, transported Jews from across Europe to these killing centers. They disguised their intentions by calling the transports to the killing centers resettlement actions or evacuation transports. In English, they are often referred to as deportations. Most of these deportations took place by train. In order to efficiently transport Jews to the killing centers, German authorities used the extensive European railroad system as well as other means of transportation. In many cases, the rail cars on the trains were freight cars. In other instances, they were passenger cars. The conditions on deportation transports were horrific. German and collaborating local authorities forced Jews of all ages into overcrowded rail cars. They often had to stand, sometimes for days, until the train reached its destination. The perpetrators deprived them of food, water, bathrooms, heat, and medical care. Jews frequently died en route from the inhumane conditions. The vast majority of Jews deported to killing centers were gassed almost immediately after their arrival. Some Jews whom German officials believed to be healthy and strong enough were selected for forced labor. At all five killing centers, German officials forced some Jewish prisoners to assist in the killing process. Among other tasks, these prisoners had to sort through victims' belongings and remove victims' bodies from the gas chambers. Special units disposed of the millions of corpses through mass burial in burning pits or by burning them in large, specifically designed crematoria. Nearly 2.7 million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered at these five killing centers. Now, when we ask who was exactly responsible for carrying out this final solution and the Holocaust in general, well, there were many. At the highest level, of course, you had Adolf Hitler, who inspired, ordered, approved, and supported the genocide of Europe's Jews. However, Hitler did not act alone, nor did he lay out an exact plan for the implementation of the final solution. Other Nazi leaders were the ones who directly coordinated, planned, and implemented these mass murders. Among them were Hermann Goring, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Adolf Eichmann. However, millions of Germans and other Europeans participated in the Holocaust, and without their involvement, the genocide of the Jewish people in Europe would not have been possible. Nazi leaders relied upon German institutions and organizations, other Axis powers, local bureaucracies and institutions, and individuals. Members of the SD, the Gestapo, and the criminal police, and the order police, played particularly active and deadly roles in the mass murder of Europe's Jews. Other German institutions involved in carrying out the Final Solution included the German military, the German National Railway, and healthcare systems. It also included the German civil service and criminal justice systems, and German businesses, insurance companies, and banks. As members of these institutions, countless German soldiers, policemen, civil servants, lawyers, judges businessmen, engineers, and doctors and nurses chose to implement the regime's policies. Ordinary Germans also participated in the Holocaust in a variety of ways. Some Germans cheered as Jews were beaten or humiliated. Others denounced Jews for disobeying racist laws and regulations. Many Germans bought, took, or looted their Jewish neighbors' belongings and property. These Germans' participation in the Holocaust was motivated by enthusiasm, careerism, fear, greed, self-interest, anti-Semitism. and political ideas among other factors. Throughout Europe, individuals who had no government or institutional affiliation and did not directly participate in murdering Jews also contributed to the Holocaust. One of the deadliest things that neighbors, acquaintances, colleagues, and even friends could do was denounce Jews to Nazi German authorities. An unknown number chose to do so. They revealed Jews' hiding places, unmasked false Christian identities, and otherwise identified Jews to Nazi officials. In doing so, they brought about their deaths. These individuals' motivations were wide-ranging, from fear, self-interest, greed, as we talked about earlier, revenge, anti-Semitism, and political and ideological beliefs. Individuals also profited from the Holocaust. Non-Jews sometimes moved into Jews' homes, took over their businesses, stole their possessions and valuables, and this was all part of the widespread theft and plunder that accompanied this genocide. Most often, individuals contributed to the Holocaust through inaction and indifference to the plight of their Jewish neighbors. And sometimes these individuals are called bystanders. Now when we talk about the Holocaust, of course we talk about the six million Jews who were murdered and persecuted during that time. But there were also millions of other victims of Nazi persecution and murder. In the 1930s, the regime targeted a variety of alleged domestic enemies within German society. As the Nazis extended their reach during World War II, millions of other Europeans were also subjected to this Nazi brutality. The Nazis classified Jews as the priority enemy. However, they also targeted other groups as threats to the health, unity, and security of the German people. Of course, the first group targeted by the Nazi regime consisted of political opponents. These included officials and members of other political parties and trade union activists. Political opponents also included people simply suspected of opposing or criticizing the Nazi regime. Political enemies were the first to be incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps. Jehovah's Witnesses were also incarcerated in these prisons and concentration camps because they refused to swear loyalty to the government or service. The Nazi regime also targeted Germans whose activities were deemed harmful to German society. This included men who were accused of homosexuality, persons accused of being professional or habitual criminals, and so-called asocials, which is people who would be identified as vagabonds or beggars, prostitutes, pimps, or even alcoholics. Tens of thousands of these victims were incarcerated in prisons and concentration camps. The regime also forcibly sterilized and persecuted Afro-Germans, black Germans. People with disabilities were also victimized by the Nazi regime. And before World War II, Germans considered to have supposedly unhealthy hereditary conditions were forcibly sterilized. Once the war began, Nazi policy radicalized. People with disabilities, especially those living in institutions, were considered both a genetic and a financial burden on Germany. These people were targeted for murder in the so-called euthanasia program. The Nazi regime employed extreme measures against groups considered to be racial, civilizational, or ideological enemies. This included Romas, sometimes derogatorily known as gypsies, Poles, especially the Polish intelligence Now, in May of 1945, the Holocaust ended, and this was when the major Allied powers, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, defeated Nazi Germany in World War II. As we talked about earlier, as the Allied forces moved across Europe in a series of offensives, they overran concentration camps and liberated the surviving prisoners, many of whom were Jews. The Allies also encountered and liberated the survivors of some of these death marches. These forced marches consisted of groups of Jewish and non-Jewish concentration camp inmates who had been evacuated on foot from camps under SS guard. But liberation did not bring closure. Many Holocaust survivors faced ongoing threats of violent anti-Semitism and displacement as they sought to build new lives. Many had lost family members, while others searched for years to locate missing parents, children, and siblings. Despite Nazi Germany's efforts to murder all the Jews of Europe, some Jews survived the Holocaust. And this survival took a variety of forms, but in every case, survival was only possible because of an extraordinary confluence of circumstances, choices, and help from others, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and sheer luck. Some Jews survived the Holocaust by escaping German-controlled Europe. Before World War II began, hundreds of thousands of Jews immigrated from Nazi Germany, despite significant immigration barriers. Those who immigrated to the United States, Great Britain, and other areas that remained beyond German control were safe from Nazi violence. Even after World War II began, some Jews managed to escape controlled Europe. For example, approximately 200,000 Polish Jews fled the German occupation of Poland. These Jews survived the war under harsh conditions after Soviet authorities deported them further east into the interior of the Soviet Union. A smaller group of Jews survived inside German-controlled Europe, and they often did so with the help of rescuers. Rescue efforts ranged from the isolated actions of individuals to organized networks both small and large. Throughout Europe, there were non-Jews who took grave risks to help their Jewish neighbors, friends, and strangers to survive. For example, they found hiding places for Jews, procured false papers that offered protective Christian identities, or provided them with food, and supplies. Other Jews survived as members of partisan resistance movements, as we spoke of earlier. Finally, some Jews managed against enormous odds to survive in prisonment in concentration camps, ghettos, and even killing centers. While the Holocaust ended with the war, the legacy of terror and genocide did not. By the end of World War II, 6 million Jews and around 5 million others were dead. Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators had devastated or completely destroyed thousands of Jewish communities across Europe. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, those Jews who survived were often confronted with the traumatic reality of having lost their entire families and communities, just as Charlene Schiff, who we spoke of earlier. Some were able to go home and chose to rebuild their lives in Europe. Many others were afraid to do so because of post-war violence and anti-Semitism. In the immediate post-war period, those who could not or would not return home often found themselves living in displaced persons camps. There, many had to wait years before they were able to immigrate to new homes. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the world has struggled to come to terms with the horrors of the genocide, to remember the victims, and to hold perpetrators responsible. These important efforts remain ongoing. Now, next week on the program, we're going to talk about the aftermath. We're going to get more into it. We're going to talk about the Nuremberg trials. We're going to talk about Simon Wiesenthal and his efforts to capture and bring to trial certain Nazi leaders who had escaped. And we're going to talk about... lessons that came from this. And we're going to ask the question, did genocide stop with the Holocaust? And of course we know it did not. All we have to do is look at Darfur or Rwanda as two examples of that. And we're also going to Amen. Amen. some evidence of that as well next week when we look not only at these this aftermath but we're going to look at a few rescue stories as well so join us for that and until then take care of yourself and I will talk to you next week

SPEAKER_08: 1:10:46

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