(4) HOLOCAUST (1933-1945)

 

Probably the best known and most disturbing “war” within the Second World War.

Of course, war might seem an entirely misplaced or sanitized term given how one-sided it was for Germany and her allies or collaborators – and how far it was removed from anything we normally accept as the field of battle, even including war crimes, hence the charge of crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg Trials.

It did, however, involve objectives, organization, personnel, logistics, and of course targets or intended casualties on the scale of a war – so much so that it might be argued to have cut across the war (or wars) Germany fought against actual enemy combatants, probably to the detriment of the latter, as cold-blooded or macabre as such historical analysis or study might seem.

The primary target was of course the Jewish population in Germany and the European countries controlled by or subordinate to it through its military victories – definitively so to the extent that the Holocaust is often defined in terms exclusive to that population, although that would be more accurate by its Hebrew name of Shoah.

However, it was much wider than that, including millions of non-Jewish Soviet civilians or prisoners of war (in addition to about 2 million Soviet Jews), close to 2 million non-Jewish Polish civilians (to add to about 3 million Polish Jews), and various other groups of people. Indeed, depending on how or whether you tally wider civilian casualties as part of the Holocaust, the Holocaust may extend upwards to the range of 11-17 million people, of which about half to a third were Jewish (in turn about one third of the world Jewish population or two thirds of the European Jewish population).

Nevertheless, Germany’s regime primarily identified it – and for that matter the world war itself – as, to borrow the title of the book by Lucy Dawidowicz, the war against the Jews. And as such, it was a war Germany largely won, given how one-sided it was.

It was, however, not entirely one-sided – there was some resistance, both passive and active, by some within the European Jewish population as well as by others coming to their aid. The primary passive resistance was of course hiding, fleeing or escaping from it – arguably the most effective form of any resistance in terms of numbers saved.

There was also active resistance by fighting against it, even with some uprisings in the camps themselves. The most famous revolt or uprising was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from 19 April to 16 May 1943, “the largest single revolt by Jews during World War II” and the closest it ever came to a war fought between two sides, however unevenly matched. The Uprising was fought desperately and tenaciously from block to block, even into the sewers, by people who knew “victory was impossible and survival unlikely”, fighting so as “not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths”. I always remember reading somewhere that their resistance brought some grudging respect, if not mercy, in their opposing SS commanders that such “subhuman scum” could fight so well.

Sadly, such resistance when it occurred, passive or active, was tiny compared to the scale of forces and resources arrayed against it – and this war was largely fought through to its grim conclusion. That this grim conclusion left some surviving population is due in some small part to the resistance against it, overwhelmingly the passive resistance of hiding or flight from it, but more to Germany’s defeat in the wider war against enemy combatants – and also the extent to which it was at cross-purposes within itself or the wider war.

The largest cross-purpose perhaps reflected the extent to which the Holocaust cut across the wider war as an attempt to offset that extent – its use of industrial slave labor for war production. That also reflected the ambitions of Himmler to build the SS as effectively his own private empire within the German state and economy, something which was a strikingly recurring feature withing the inner circle of the regime – as indeed it was also for him and others raising what were effectively private armies within the Wehrmacht, of which SS combat units were one. As the tide of war turned against Germany, Himmler and others added a further cross-purpose to the use of industrial slave labor – the use of their prisoners as hostages for negotiations with or leniency from the Allies.

Some may query 1933 as the year of commencement but that reflects the history of its origins extending back at least to the rise of power of the Nazi regime in 1933, and arguably a prehistory well before that. Essentially, 1941 marks the commencement of it as a literal shooting war against Jewish and other civilian populations – with the invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, albeit predominantly behind the lines, particularly as the Germans regarded communist and Jewish as synonymous. The Germans effectively had a policy of summary execution for both – in the colorful words of the War Nerd, they had a “pretty flexible definition” for either “and when in doubt, they killed”.

In the key event of that war, that remains surprisingly not well known, despite ultimately looming larger in casualties than any battle in the wider war – the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, named for the Berlin suburb in which it was held – Germany extended that war throughout occupied Europe, literally under the official title of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.

Of course, I say extended because it was a war that was not formally declared as such, indeed kept shrouded in euphemism or secret as much as possible, albeit that possibility was limited by Allied intelligence as well as its sheer scale and the number of people involved in it. Ultimately however it was to be the war that defined Nazi Germany the most.

 

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (DEVIL-TIER)