How the Holocaust Happened

1. Wait, how the WHAT happened???

The Holocaust. The intentional genocide of around 12 million human beings, including 6 million jews -- but obviously including many others. It’s something that gets joked about a lot online, but I suspect actual knowledge of how the holocaust unfolded is pretty limited. Yes, it’s a depressing topic but it’s important to know about it. So, to mark Holocaust Education Week (November 11-15), I’m going to brave the downvotes and see if I can get some enlightenment up in here.

WARNING: I’m going to try to tone down the imagery, but it’s going to be a rough ride.

2. 20th Century concept: racial hygiene

Nationalism is like a drug. It gives people a sense of belonging -- a sense of “us”. It has ended up influencing all kinds of things, like religion, science, culture, and politics. It’s important to remember two things about how people saw the world in the 1930s: first, they intermingled the concepts of “race” and “nation”; and second, they tended to see races as single living organisms that needed to be kept “healthy” by practicing the pseudoscience of Eugenics in order to keep out “impurities” (i.e. mixing with other races). Racist laws were widespread across the western world, so Nazi Germany didn’t come out of nowhere, it was built on a preexisting foundation -- though they took it to new extremes.

3. Hitler’s inspiration: the US of A

In the early 20th Century, the US led the world in enacting policies aimed at keeping the (white) race “healthy” with policies affecting immigration, forced sterilization, intermarriage and so on. Plus of course there was the legacy of exterminating the native peoples and taking their land. Adolf Hitler was familiar with all this, and while he mostly had contempt for American culture and society, he admired its racial policies and took them as inspiration for taking it to the next level (many more levels, really). He especially dreamed of doing to the Slavs of Eastern Europe what had been done to the American Indians.

4. Prelude: Propaganda & legalized discrimination

One of the first things the Nazis did on taking power in 1933 was to create a network of concentration camps. This was mostly intended, at first, to lock up political opponents, but right from the start the prisoners included Jews and other “undesirables.” They later introduced the Nuremburg Laws. This was a collection of legislation that banned intermarriage between Jews and non-Jewish Germans, as well as requiring Germans to certify their ethnicity in order to marry anyone. A country with intense national grievances (trauma of WWI, chaos of Great Depression, crippling of national pride) served as an eager audience

5. Prelude: Loosening military law

Before the Second World War, the Nazi regime methodically watered down the army’s code of justice. By the time German soldiers crossed the border into Poland in 1939, they didn’t have to worry about getting into trouble for beating, robbing, raping or murdering civilians. Plenty of soldiers and officers opposed this but they of course couldn’t stop it. The situation continued to escalate; by 1941, the Barbarossa Decree basically told the army to go nuts, and they sure did. Mass rape, brutal slaughter, rampant, casual destruction -- all of these were hallmarks of German military operations. It wasn't just the SS.

6. T4 program - dress rehearsal

Using the war as cover, indeed within weeks of the fighting getting underway, German doctors began to scour mental hospitals, special schools and just plain households, kidnapping people who were mentally ill, disabled, developmentally delayed, depressed, autism spectrum, basically anyone they deemed “defective,” and murdered them. It was mass involuntary euthanasia, carried out in secret, resulting in the deaths of perhaps a quarter million people.

7. T4 lesson learned: secrecy

The T4 program was illegal. It occurred because Hitler wrote a secret letter to his personal doctor, who contacted other doctors and organized the extermination program. This secrecy allowed it to continue mostly unhindered, because people didn’t know their loved ones were being sent to their deaths (though many had their suspicions).

T4 lesson learned: deception

German families (including lots of parents of small children almost all of whom were “aryan”) were told soothingly that a program had been created to give their loved ones special treatment in wonderful settings that would help them. At every stage of the process, the doctors used lies to keep everyone docile. At no point did anyone say “we’re killing people.” No, it was all couched in a cloak of professionalism. Later, “special treatment” would become the official term used to describe mass murder and genocide.

9. T4 lesson learned: mechanics of mass murder

It’s actually very difficult to kill vast numbers of people. It takes time and effort. The doctors in T4 experimented with different killing methods. Sometimes they simply starved patients to death, other times they were given lethal injections. They also experimented with poison gas. They were doctors. They were scientific and methodical, and provided useful data for later moves to escalate the murders.

10. The Hunger Plan (1941)

Nazi plans for a conquered Soviet Union were pretty simple. They would confiscate every ounce of food and send it to Germany, thereby starving the locals and depopulating the entire nation (apart from a tiny minority kept alive as slaves), killing tens of millions of people. Basically turn the vast territories of “the east” into a huge, empty wasteland they could colonize themselves. This plan was only partly implemented, but it clearly illustrates how the Nazis viewed non-Germans.

11. Battlefields: SS Einsatzgruppen

In Poland and the USSR, as the regular troops advanced across conquered territory, Einsatzgruppen followed close behind. These were SS death squads. At first their job was to find and murder anyone who could potentially lead a resistance movement or indeed embody the conquered nation: intellectuals, artists, politicians, leaders. Soon however they broadened their remit, slaughtering vast numbers of civilians, especially Jews. They did this with the full cooperation and support (and frequent participation) of the regular army.

12. Einsatzgruppen in Soviet territory

Sometimes they might roll through a village, round up everyone, lock them in a barn, light it on fire, and shoot anyone who clawed their way out. Sometimes they’d make groups dig their own mass graves before shooting them all. Whatever their methods, they raged like a bloody comet across the territory occupied by the German invasion of the Soviet Union. In one massacre alone (Babi Yar), over 33,000 men, women and children were killed in a single day. The men of the Einsatzgruppen were unhappy and demoralized, though. All this shooting hurt their shoulders. It was dirty, exhausting work. Morale plummeted. A new approach was needed.

13. Extermination of Soviet prisoners of war

Starting in the summer and fall of 1941, German forces captured staggering numbers of Soviet prisoners -- literally millions of them. In that first year, 1941/1942, the Nazis had a very simple approach for dealing with those prisoners. They’d pen them up in big fields surrounded by barbed wire and leave them there without food, shelter or medical care, letting them die of starvation, disease or exposure. Prisoners died in staggering numbers, often resorting to cannibalism before the end. It’s estimated that over 3,000,000 prisoners died in Nazi hands, first in these nightmare pens and then in the death camp system.

14. SS Experiments: Gas vans

In order to ease the work of the Einsatzgruppen, SS engineers came up with a simple expedient: gas vans. They took a cargo van, made it airtight, then routed the engine exhaust into the cargo area. They’d load it with people -- again, not telling them they were about to die -- and just drive around until everyone was dead (or near dead). They were able to murder thousands of people this way, but while it was easier than shooting, it still wasn’t great. It was slow, with people taking up to 20 minutes to die, and noisy, as the drivers had to listen to their victims screaming and scratching to escape. More improvement was necessary. Despite their challenges, the Einsatzgruppen still murdered an estimated 1.4 million human beings.

15. Jewish Ghettos

Immediately after conquering Poland and the western part of the Soviet Union, the German authorities, in addition to carrying out the mass murder described above, began rounding up Jews and forcing them to live in urban ghettos. These were vastly overcrowded walled neighbourhoods that were chronically short of food and health care and were rife with disease. The idea was to round up the Jews in order to more easily murder them. The Jews were of course not told this -- instead it was promoted as an administrative move designed to use them as a workforce.

16. Nazi slave labour

In all warring nations, the need for manpower in the armed forces created severe labour shortages. Among the Allied nations, the answer was to employ huge numbers of women. The Nazis, however, hated the idea of empowering women in this way so they employed slave labour instead. Workers were brought in from across Europe -- around half were from Poland and the USSR, while about 20% were prisoners of war and around 10% camp inmates. They were, of course, subject to horrific treatment and abuse, and died in staggering numbers. Around 12,000,000 slaves were used.

January 20, 1942: the Wannsee Conference

Wannsee is a pretty suburb of Berlin. In a very nice house owned by the security forces, a secret meeting was held by top members of the SS and the Nazi government. Tired of the haphazard and improvised extermination of Jews and other “undesirables,” Hitler had issued an order: finish them off once and for all. This meeting was held, therefore, to turn that order into action. A strategy and administrative framework was laid down that would lead to the deaths of millions of human beings.

18. Who was targeted?

The Nazis had a long list of people they considered “undesirable,” and all of them suffered in the holocaust. This included the Roma people (gypsies), communists, socialists, Poles, Russians, LGBTQ+ … but by far Jews were the priority target. Jews represented not just a group of disliked people, but had come to be seen by Nazis as the ones responsible for pretty much everything evil in the world. Jews were the largest group to be murdered, which is why it’s widely viewed as Jewish phenomenon — but they were far from alone.

1942: Dawn of the death camps

By mid-1942, the dark galaxy of concentration camps and ghettos were joined by six new camps that had a new purpose: not imprisonment but outright extermination. The camps were: Auschwitz–Birkenau, Treblinka, Bełżec, Chełmno, Sobibór, and Majdanek. Put together, over 3,000,000 people died in these locations. In these camps all the lessons learned from earlier massacres were put into action: deception of prisoners; secrecy despite the vast scale of the operation; and above all mass murder on an industrial scale.

20. Transportation: key to the holocaust

Nazi logistics were disastrously bad in the war, with front-line troops constantly short of food, weapons, ammunition and fuel. However there were always enough trucks, trains and troops to keep victims flowing from across Europe into the camps. It was a staggering effort that undoubtedly hurt the German war effort. Yet no matter how bad the military situation became, Hitler and his followers never considered pausing the slaughter; indeed they kept it going to the last possible moment.

21. Step 1: Arrest & Deportation

In some occupied countries, finding Jews was relatively easy, but in others it took more effort. The Danish resistance movement, for instance, shipped their Jewish population to Sweden, out of Nazi reach (God bless their Danish hearts). In other cases, rampant anti-Semitism and preexisting registration made it a much smoother operation. The average inmate would be shuttled from transit camp to transit camp, as trains were moved around Europe to keep feeding victims into the death camps. Conditions on the trains were horrific; many thousands died during the journey.

22. Step 2: Arrival at the camps

Upon arrival at a death camp, prisoners were lined up beside the trains. They were subject to elaborate deception, made to believe it was just another transit camp, complete with a fake train station and SS soldiers dressed as train porters and ticket agents. Doctors made their way along the prisoners, selecting anyone who seemed strong enough to work as a slave. These slaves, always a small minority of arrivals, were taken away. Everyone else, the vast majority, was brought into the camp.

23. Step 3: "Showering"

Told to disrobe, prisoners were told they would have to take a shower in order to prevent disease from entering the camp. Sometimes they figured out what was happening and resisted, but mostly they didn’t know what was about to happen. Ushered, naked, into a group shower, the doors, secretly airtight, were sealed. A canister of poison gas was dropped in from the ceiling (although some camps continued to use carbon monoxide from engine exhaust), and the guards waited for the screaming to stop. It was highly unscientific -- these gas chambers could take as long as 40 minutes to kill their occupants, and there were frequently dazed survivors (including kids). They did not die easy.

24. Step 4: Disposal

Once the screaming stopped, slave labourers were brought in to remove the bodies. It wasn’t unusual for some people to still be alive in the heap of flesh. No matter. The bodies were mined for anything useful, from dental implants to jewelry to women’s hair. Everything left over was thrown into industrial-scale ovens to burn their bodies into ash. Anything that didn’t burn was ground up by big mortars and pestles. All told, a typical death camp was capable of murdering over 4,000 people per day in this manner. Basically, around three times the deaths aboard the Titanic. Per camp. Per day.

25. The profit of death

Industrial-scale genocide was expensive. To pay for it, the Nazis despoiled their victims of anything valuable, as mentioned above. They also located huge industrial zones near the camps, to take advantage of slave labour (companies leased slaves from the SS). All this economic activity made the SS a state within the state, with its own vast economic and industrial infrastructure. Corruption was immense, with a lot of those guys getting incredibly rich, often by accepting bribes to spare the lives of inmates only to kill them anyway. Germany’s central bank was employed to handle the cash and valuables taken from the victims. No one had clean hands.

26. Camp uprisings

Contrary to the popular image of meek, sheep-like victims marching to their deaths, uprisings were not uncommon. New arrivals sometimes attacked their guards to keep out of the gas chambers, while longer-term camp residents formed secret organizations and launched their own uprisings. Two major uprisings took place at the camps of Treblinka and Sobibor, and while most of the rebels were killed, the damage they caused (and fear they stoked in the Germans) slowed down the pace of extermination, so they saved a lot of lives.

27. Children in the Holocaust
Of the 1,500,000 children murdered in the Holocaust, almost all were of Jewish origin. Children presented an easy target for the Nazis, especially once they were separated from their families. They were subject to brutal abuse at every stage of the process, and almost instant murder on arrival at the camps. Plus they were often picked for horrific medical experiments, while also being susceptible to disease and malnutrition. Of the few kids who survived the war, many were so traumatized they lost the ability to speak.

28. Sisak: The children’s camp (former Yugoslavia)

In Croatia during the war, a Nazi-style regime called Ustaše operated its own holocaust, targeting Jews, gypsies and, especially, ethnic Serbs. In one truly insane development, women with children were brought to a camp where they were separated. Yes, a separate camp existed with only kids. These kids, often just toddlers or even babies, were beaten, abused, tortured, starved, and left to die of hunger and disease. Their mothers were on the other side of a brick wall right next door and were able to hear the suffering, wailing and dying of their children. An estimated 1,000-2,000 kids died at Sisak before a Red Cross staffer managed to convince the camp commandant to close it down.

29. Rape and the Holocaust
Much is made of the atrocious behaviour of Soviet troops as they entered German territory at the end of World War II, but little is said, or even known, about German-perpetrated rape in the war. Holocaust researchers devoted little to know effort in finding information, focusing instead on violence. It is almost certain, however, that sexual assault was practically universal, with victims numbering in the millions. Sexual slavery was common, and there was a concentration camp called Ravensbrück that was exclusively for women.

30. Clearing of the ghettos

One by one the ghettos were emptied as the holocaust progressed. People were rounded up and shipped off to the camps. In some cases the military was sent in to exterminate everyone. In some cases, notably in Warsaw (Poland), the inmates put up a desperate resistance, determined to go out fighting. It was quite hopeless, of course; even by 1944, a doomed Germany was still far more powerful than half-starved inmates.

31. Closing & destroying the death camps (1944)

As the Soviets advanced towards Germany, they approached the death camps (located in what is now Poland). The Germans, not wanting the prisoners to be liberated, kept the killing going right up to the last minute, then ordered the destruction of the camps in an effort to cover up their crimes. Even still, the Soviets found plenty of evidence of genocide, especially the economic aspect (in the form of mountains of salvaged children’s shoes, women’s hair, gold teeth, old eyeglasses, etc). The Soviets told the world, but it didn’t really made a splash in the west at first -- only when the Allies reached the concentration camps in western Germany (like Belsen and Flossenbürg) did people really begin to comprehend the scale of the Holocaust.

32. Death marches (1945)

By 1945, the war was almost over and everybody knew it (including the Germans). However the holocaust did not end. Survivors of the camps were marched away in long columns. Anyone who faltered was murdered. Many simply collapsed and died. And of course they were still subject to massacres and untold atrocities and abuse. Only at the very end of the war did their guards throw down their guns and run away. In the meantime, tens of thousands died in these marches.

33. Immediate aftermath: dying continues

Just because the gas chambers had shut down, didn’t mean the dying stopped. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners had survived the genocide but only barely -- they were in environments riddled with disease, plus their bodies were severely weakened due to abuse and malnourishment. The dying, therefore, continued. The Allies provided whatever care they could, but the suffering caused deaths for years afterward -- and recent genetic studies have found that psychological trauma caused by the holocaust caused damage on the genetic level, which has been passed down to the descendants of survivors.

34. After the war: returning home

Many survivors tried returning to their homes after the war. It was not unusual for them to be lynched by their former neighbours, who blamed the Jews for their wartime suffering. This was especially the case in Poland, where non-Jewish Poles suffered horrendously under the Nazis and, I guess, needed someone to blame. An estimated 1,500 Jews were murdered in this manner.

35. Could the allies have stopped the Holocaust?

Honestly? No. The allies had some intel about the Holocaust, but it was spotty and incomplete. It might have been possible to bomb the gas chambers, but they would have been rebuilt immediately. The only way to stop the holocaust was to do what they did: win the war. It is interesting to note that it was decided at the highest levels (i.e. FDR and Churchill) not to reveal what they knew about the holocaust, because they wanted to make the war about saving the world from totalitarianism rather than saving the Jews.

36. Who was complicit?

Well, obviously the Nazi leadership was complicit. And the SS, including the Waffen SS, their military arm. The armed forces in general provided invaluable support for (and participation in) the Holocaust. Local police helped round people up. The central bank; the logistical sector of the economy; large parts of the industrial sector, which made massive use of slave labour; the judicial system; the medical profession; the media; the police; countless bureaucrats … hopefully you’re understanding why Germans still emphasize collective guilt, as horrifying as it must be, instead of “just a few bad apples” approach. I celebrate them for this.

37. What if Germany had won the war?

As mentioned, the Nazis planned to depopulate the Soviet Union and colonize it. However that was by no means the end of their genocidal aspirations. Himmler boasted of plans to exterminate the people of every non-allied nation in Europe, including France. If Germany had won the war, what we now call the EU would instead have become a continental Greater Germany chock full of the ghosts of tens of millions of murdered human beings. How far would they have gone? Well, keep in mind those guys had global aspirations.

Thanks for reading

I know this is rough reading, and I don’t expect a lot of upvotes for it, but I hope it was educational. I think it’s important to remember that the holocaust wasn’t simply a vague tale from history but a huge, complex industrial operation that required the efforts of millions of people focused on a single goal: to exterminate vast numbers of human beings.

Death toll:

6 million Jews (⅔ of all European Jews) - 80%-90% of all death camp victims were Jewish
6 million Soviet civilians
3 million Soviet prisoners
~2 million Poles
Approx. 250,000 Roma
1,200 Jehova’s witnesses
Unknown number of LGBT+ people (hundreds or thousands)
Unknown number of political opponents

Plus:
10-12 million forced to work as slaves (death toll unknown but certainly high)

Official total for Holocaust is 12,000,000 dead, but true number of victims is clearly far higher.

Further Reading:

A glorious Pole who infiltrated Auschwitz: https://imgur.com/gallery/UhPv4nQ

The story of a particularly vicious SS officer: https://imgur.com/gallery/mVsq5

An Imgur biography of Adolf Hitler: https://imgur.com/gallery/czcJJ

(note: edited and reposted to remove graphic image & add content)