Zionism and Israel - Encyclopedic Dictionary Holocaust

Holocaust Definition

Holocaust (Ha Shoah in Hebrew) The Holocaust (literally, a burnt offering consumed in whole by flame) - was the planned genocide of European, Soviet, Balkan and N. African Jewry, carried out by the Nazis under Adolf Hitler - before and during the Second World War. The term "holocaust" was first applied to the destruction of European Jews, apparently as early as 1942. It has since been applied as a description of mass murders of other minorities. "The Holocaust" refers specifically to murder of Jews by the Nazis and is capitalized.

The word "Shoah" in Hebrew  means catastrophe, abyss, disaster or destruction and is used in many contexts such as "Shoah ecologit" - ecological disaster or "Shoah Svivatit" - environmental disaster. "HaShoah" with the definite article refers to "The Disaster" or "The Holocaust."

Extent of the Holocaust

Holocaust Causes

The murder of the Jews was not due to any opposition the Jews offered to the German state, other than ghetto rebellions undertaken in desperation, but was rather the result of state policy.

Hitler had warned repeatedly of his antipathy to Jews, and had written about it in Mein Kampf. Persecution of Jews began shortly after the rise of the Nazis to power in 1933.  A boycott of Jewish businesses was initiated in April 1933, and the first laws against the Jews were enacted  April 7, 1933, in The Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service, which banned Jews from the service. Jews were progressively pushed out of German society, deprived of academic positions and lost their property. The Nuremberg Laws, passed in 1935, deprived Jews of German citizenship and forbade marriage or sexual contact between Jews and non-Jews. A person with 1-2 Jewish grandparents was classified as of "mixed race," while those with 3-4 Jewish grandparents were classified as Jews. The Nuremberg laws were passed by the Reichstag by majority vote, though Hitler could have passed them using the dictatorial powers granted him by the "Enabling Act. The Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) in November 1938, was a bloody pogrom. About 00 Jews were murdered and a "fine" was levied against the Jews in excess of 1 billion RM.

In a speech on January 30, 1939, Hitler warned.

"Wenn es dem internationalen Finanzjudentum in- und ausserhalb Europas gelingen sollte, die Völker noch einmal in einen Weltkrieg zu stürzen, dann wird das Ergebnis nicht der Sieg des Judentums sein, sondern die Vernichtung der jüdischen Rasse in Europa!"

In English:

If international finance Jewry in and outside Europe are able, yet one more time to plunge the nations into a world war, then the result will not be the victory of Jewry, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!

In 1942, he referred to the destruction of European Jewry as an accomplished fact:

Wir sind uns im klaren, daß dieser Krieg ja nur damit enden könnte, daß entweder die germanischen Völker ausgerottet werden, oder das Judentum aus Europa verschwindet. Ich habe am 1. September 1939 [sic] im Deutschen Reichstag es schon ausgesprochen. . . daß dieser Krieg nicht so ausgehen wird, wie die Juden sich es vorstellen, nämlich daß die europäischen arischen Völker ausgerottet werden, sondern daß das Ergebnis dieses Krieges die Vernichtung des Judentums ist. Zum erstenmal werden nicht andere allein verbluten, sondern zum erstenmal wird diesesmal das echt altjüdische Gesetz angewendet: Aug' um Aug', Zahn um Zahn!

In English:

We see clearly that this war could only end with the extermination of the Germanic peoples, or that Jewry must disappear from Europe. I already said it on September 1, 1939 [sic] in the German Reichstag...that this war will not end the way the Jews have foreseen it, namely that the European Aryan peoples will be exterminated; rather the result of this war will be the annihilation of Jewry. For once all the others will not bleed to death alone; for once the ancient Jewish law will come into play: an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth.

Holocaust Prologue

The Germans contemplated various solutions to the "Jewish Problem," including forced emigration and transfer to Madagascar. For a time, they allowed Jews to leave for Palestine and to take a limited amount of their property with them under the Hesder. However, the British closed Palestine to Jewish immigration in 1939 (see White Paper). The Germans also found that other countries did not want Jews. At the Evian les Bains conference held in July 1938, country after country declared that they could not accept Jewish immigrants. The Evian conference convinced the Germans that they would not be able to rid themselves of the Jews by forced emigration. To prove to the world that nobody wanted Jews, the Nazi government organized a boatload of such emigrants. In 1939, the German liner St. Louis, carrying a cargo of Jewish refugees, found it was unable to land them in Cuba, owing to extortionate demands of the Cuban government. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the U.S. Coast Guard to prevent the landing of the ship in the United States. The St. Louis ultimately disembarked its passengers in Europe, where most of them were subsequently killed in the Holocaust. Throughout the war, U.S. Consuls and those of other countries who were initially neutral played an active part in the massacre of European Jewry, by refusing emigration and transit visas to Jews. This policy continued even after it was known with certainty that the Jews were the victims of mass murder, and that refusal of visas meant certain death.

The Holocaust decision

The timing of the decision to murder the Jews of Europe is in question, and was most likely deliberately obscured by the Nazi regime. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Germany created special task forces, Einsatzgruppen (special task forces), whose job was to round up Jews with the eventual aim, apparently of killing them. They were under the supervision of SS Gruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Reich Main Security Office, who had previously been in charge of overseeing Jewish emigration from Germany: On September 21, 1939, a letter from Heydrich to the Chiefs of all Security Police Einsatzgruppen stated:

A distinction is to be made between,

1. The final aim (which will take some time), and

2. Sections of the carrying out of this aim (which ran be carried out within a short space of time).

The measures planned require the most thorough preparation both from the technical and the economic point of view.

It goes without saying that the tasks in this connection cannot be laid down in detail. The following instructions and directives simultaneously serve the purpose of urging the chiefs of the Einsatzgruppen to practical consideration.

The first necessity for the attaining of the final aim is the concentrating of the country Jews in the big towns. This is to be carried out immediately.

(Emphasis added. See http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/orgs/german/einsatzgruppen/esg/mt/lfh.html which has the full letter)

The above suggests that the Nazi regime had already decided on a "final aim" of murder, at least for the Jews of Eastern Europe, but was careful not to leave an incriminating paper trail. It was this order apparently, that was responsible for concentrating the Jews in ghettos. 

The Holocaust Begins

By 1941, Germany had begun murdering Jews in earnest. In preparation for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, Einsatzgruppen and special police units were created whose task it was to deprive Jews of their property and kill them in the conquered areas, particularly the Ukraine and Baltic states,  as the Wehrmacht advanced. About a million and a half Jews were killed in this way by shooting and other means in all. (see http://www.holocaust-history.org/intro-einsatz/#i ). These Einsatzgruppen were composed of SS, SD (SiecherheitsDienst - Security Service), Gestapo and police. In addition to the police and Einsatzgruppen, SS units were created from local Ukrainian and Latvian collaborators. 

It is probable that the decision in principle to murder all the Jews of Europe was made in mid 1941, according to Gord Mcfee. In July 31, 1941, Hermann Goering issued the following order to SS Gruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich was Chief of the Reich Main Security Office and was therefore in charge of both the Security Police (Gestapo) and the Security Service (SD). The order stated:

Complementing the task already assigned to you in the directive of January 24, 1939, to undertake, by emigration or evacuation, a solution to the Jewish question as advantageous as possible under the conditions at the time, I hereby charge you with making all necessary organizational, functional, and material preparations for a complete solution of the Jewish question [[Gesamtlösung der Judenfrage] in the German sphere of influence in Europe.

Insofar as the jurisdiction of other central agencies may be touched thereby, they are to be involved.

I charge you furthermore with submitting to me in the near future an overall plan of the organizational, functional, and material measures to be taken in preparing for the implementation of the aspired final solution of the Jewish question [Endlösung der Judenfrage]

Holocaust: The Final Solution

This is apparently the first known appearance of the phrase "Endlösung der Judenfrage," However, the "final solution" had in fact already begun. By the end of 1941, the Einsatzgruppen had killed about half a million Jews in conquered areas of the USSR. Possibly influence by the entry of the US into the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. An entry in the diary of Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, dated December 12, 1941 reads:

Bezüglich der Judenfrage ist der Führer entschlossen, reinen Tisch zu machen. Er hat den Juden prophezeit, daß, wenn sie noch einmal einen Weltkrieg herbeiführen würden, sie dabei ihre Vernichtung erleben würden. Das ist keine Phrase gewesen. Der Weltkrieg ist da, die Vernichtung des Judentums muß die notwendige Folge sein.

With respect of the Jewish Question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if they again brought about a world war, they would live to see their annihilation in it. That wasn't just a catch-word. The world war is here, and the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. (Die Zeit, Jan. 9, 1998)

On January 20, 1942, a conference was held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, presided over by Heydrich. The Wannsee Conference  did not decide the fate of European Jewry, which had already been decided. It only established the supremacy of Heydrich and decided on a policy of transporting European Jews to the east for extermination, terminating the policy of forced emigration. This was apparently an outcome of the outbreak of the world war, which eliminated the possibility of extorting funds from American Jewish organizations to rescue Jews, and apparently also catalyzed Hitler's decision to implement the massacre of all of European Jews, which in July of 1941 had only been the "hoped for solution."

Though the Wannsee conference contemplated marching the Jews east on foot, it was eventually deemed more practical to load them on trains for transport. Jews in Holland were forced to buy round trip tickets from the German rail way authorities, though they would never use the return tickets. In the east, primarily in Poland, concentration camps were built where Jews were worked to death, gassed or killed in various "experiments." Some survived the war, working for the Germans as slave laborers either in the camps or in in factories owned by Krupp, Siemens, Messerschmidt and other German industrial firms.  Heydrich himself did not live to implement the final solution, as he was assassinated by Czech partisans who attacked his car in May of 1942. He died of his wounds in June. The massacre of European Jewry was codenamed Operation Reinhard.

Holocaust: Concentration and Death camps

Of the camps to which Jews were transported, seven were considered  Todeslager (death camps) or vernichtungslagers (annihilation camps). These were expressly set up for rapid extermination, and included gas chambers or other killing apparatus and crematoria  for killing people and disposing of the corpses. Other camps were variously concentration camps or labor camps, where prisoners generally died by attrition, from overwork, disease, starvation and in "experiments." Several of the death camps were built especially in the framework of operation Reinhard, while others included death camps, but were also concentration camps or labor camps.

Of the eight death camps, seven were intended for killing Jews. The eighth, Jasenovak, was a camp for killing Serbs, operated by the Croatian Ustase. At Sobibor, Russian prisoners of war were interned along with Jews. Revolts at Sobibor and Treblinka caused the Nazis to close the camps in 1943.   were:

In addition to the death camps there were many hundreds of concentration camps and labor camps and transit camps. Each such camp could have thousands of victims. There was even a camp on British soil in Alderney, a channel isle. It was called Aurigny, the French name for Alderney. Among the more infamous of the concentration and labor camps:

Bergen-Belsen - A "Collection Point" in Germany, where about 70,000 people were killed.

Buchenwald - A labor camp in Germany, where about 56,000 died.

Dachau - Established in Germany as the first concentration camp in 1933. About 130,000 political prisoners and Jews died here.

Flossenbürg - A German labor camp where about 30,000 were killed.

Mauthausen - Austrian labor camp; about 100,000 casualties.

Ravensbrück - German labor camp; about 100,000 casualties.

Theresienstadt - Labor and transit camp where at least 35,000 died.

The fact of the extermination and the existence of the camps was known to allied governments, who concealed it from the public. Allied soldiers were shocked and incredulous when they discovered the first camps and liberate the emaciated surviving inmates.

Holocaust Resistance

In the Holocaust, about 6 million Jews were murdered in death camps, concentration camps, regional massacres and ghetto revolts, notably the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Vilna ghetto uprising. European and other countries were passive accomplices in that they did not offer refuge to Jews attempting to escape from Nazi occupied Europe. The Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin Al Husseini, lobbied neutral European countries to ensure that they would not grant visas to Jews attempting to leave German occupied areas.

The Zionist organization could really do very little to save the Jews of Europe. The gates of Palestine had been slammed shut by the British White Paper of 1939, organized  parachutists to drop behind enemy lines and help Jews and partisan groups, and  the illegal Aliya Bet immigration, and Palestinian Jews fought in the Jewish Brigade. After the war, Zionists organized the Beriha (escape) to bring survivors out of Europe.

The Holocaust and the Creation of Israel

Post-war survivors were not allowed to come to Israel in excess of the 15,000 allowed annually by the British Mandate, and were maintained in Displaced Persons camps. The United States and most European countries refused to admit these Jews. The Displaced Persons had no interest in returning to their native countries for the most part, as there was nothing left for them there. The Zionists in Europe, with help from Palestine and with the help of Zionist soldiers serving in the US and other allied armies, organized the Beriha - illegal escape of Jews from Europe to Palestine, despite the British ban on Jewish immigration.

Despite the Holocaust, the British continued to hunt down and turn away boatloads of illegal immigrants whenever they could.   The existence of these 250,000 displaced persons, survivors of the Holocaust, living in camps in Europe, created political pressure on Britain to allow Jewish immigration to Palestine, but, in the face of Arab pressure, the British government did not change its policy. This precipitated the armed revolt of the Jewish underground, which led in turn to the British announcement that they would give up the Palestine mandate. In this sense, the Holocaust was the proximate cause of the creation of the state of Israel.

Contrary to Arab and anti-Zionist propaganda, Israel was not created "because of the Holocaust." This claim is often followed by the claim that the Holocaust is a myth invented by Jews to justify creation of the state of Israel. The right of the Jewish people  to self determination was recognized in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine of 1922. Had there been no Holocaust, the Jewish National Home would have been populated in large part by the Jews of Europe. The Holocaust did make it easier to demonstrate the historical and social necessity of a Jewish state. 

The entire Danish underground and the Danish people refused to cooperate in the deportation orders, and made it possible for most of Denmark's Jews to escape to neutral Sweden. The case of Denmark proves that determined resistance could foil the German extermination efforts.

The people of Bulgaria also deserve special mention for gallantry and humanity, as they managed to save most of the 48,000 Jews of Bulgaria. At the insistence of the Germans,  the Bulgarian government ordered the deportation of all Jews from Bulgaria proper. Some had already been arrested. However, the deportation order led to a great outcry from the Bulgarian people, including many intellectuals and church leaders, forcing the government to rescind the order. The Jews already taken into custody were released. Jews were moved from the cities into safe hiding in the countryside. In northern Bulgaria, farmers threatened to lie down on the railway tracks to prevent passage of the deportation trains. King Boris III, of German lineage, was known to be opposed to anti-Semitism and apparently intervened defiantly on behalf of the Jews.

Jan and Meip Geis hid Anne Frank and her family in Holland, until they were denounced by a neighbor.

Varian Fry, a Harvard-educated American journalist, took it upon himself to rescue Jews in 1940. As the borders of Vichy France were closing he engineered the escape of over 1,500 Jews into Spain. Those rescued from the Holocaust included the author, Hannah Arendt, the sculptor, Marc Chagall, the Surrealists Max Ernst, Andre Breton and Andre Masson and Alma Mahler-Werfel. Fry is the only American to be honored with the "Righteous among the nations" award by Yad Vashem.

Sempo Sugihara, Japanese Consul in Lithuania, issued Japanese transit visas to nearly 6,000 Jews against the fierce objections of his government;

The French village of Le-Chambon-Sur-Lignon hid 5,000 Jews in homes in the towns and farms in the surrounding countryside from Nazi occupation forces.

Oskar and Emilie Schindler saved hundreds of Jews, as documented in the film, Schindler's List.

Brazilian ambassador to France Luis Martins de Souza Dantas gave visas to hundreds of Jews against the express orders of his government.

British ambassador to Germany, Francis Foley, saved thousands of German Jews.

Dr. Jan Zabinsky, Director of the Warsaw Zoo,  together with his wife Antonina, helped dozens of Jews escape from the Warsaw Ghetto.

Johan Benders of Holland took his life rather than reveal the whereabouts of Jews he had rescued.

The N.V. group in Holland rescued about 200 Jewish children.

Jan Schep forged identity cards that were instrumental in saving the lives of Jews and others. He was arrested and died in a concentration camp.

Joop Westerweel saved about 300 to 400 young Zionists and German Jewish children, forming a rescue group that hid people and arranged for transportation. He was eventually caught and executed by the Nazis in1944.

Holocaust Denial

Anti-Zionists claim the Holocaust is a Zionist Hoax

The massacre of European Jewry is attested to by masses of confirming evidence. The Nazis maintained meticulous documentation of the numbers of Jews and other transported and killed. Unfortunately, until recently a lot of this documentation was classified and was not released to the public by the German government, apparently to protect the identity of war criminals. Nonetheless, detailed lists of those liquidated by Einzatsgruppen and general liquidation reports for various towns, ghettos and camps provided sufficient documentation to satisfy the most demanding requests for proof.

Escapees and survivors and diaries of some who did not survive, like Anna Frank, tell the same story. The story is confirmed again by the massive evidence of the Nurenberg War Crimes tribunals and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Allied soldiers who liberated the death camps in 1945 met the few survivors and heard detailed accounts of the murders from them. At least some of the concentration camps, gas chambers and crematoria have been preserved as museums. Families all can count their missing members. Nonetheless, out of wicked perversity and anti-Semitism,  Holocaust deniers question the historical truth of the Holocaust. They claim that the Zionists or the Jews invented the "Holocaust Myth." (see Holocaust Myth)

In addition to captured military documents, the Nazis kept meticulous records of the murder rolls, recording the deaths of about 6 million Jews and 11 million others. These records have been kept at Bad Arolsen and have recently been released for public scrutiny. However, it will be years before the extraordinary mass of paper is available for use and scrutiny by investigators.

Nonetheless, Holocaust denial has become an intellectual fashion among sections of both right-wing and left-wing extremists and anti-"Zionists."

For more information about Holocaust Denial see Holocaust Myth, Holocaust Denial.

Zionism and the Holocaust

For most non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews who lived through the Holocaust, the Holocaust was the final historical lesson that proved, in the most horrible and tragic way, the correctness of the Zionist view of history: Jews could not assimilate into modern European society. The future of Jews could only lie in their own homeland. The transformation is epitomized in the tragedy of the great German chemist, Fritz Haber. Haber had been head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Decorated and honored by the Kaiser for his services in World War I, he and other Jews were dismissed summarily from the institute in 1933. Haber fled to England and sought help and solace from Chaim Weizmann. Weizmann wrote:

‘The truth is that I could scarcely look him in the eye. I was ashamed for myself, ashamed for this cruel world, which allowed such things to happen, and ashamed for the error in which he had lived and worked throughout his life.’

Meeting Weizmann again in Basle in August, Haber said:

‘I was one of the mightiest men in Germany’ but ‘at the end of my life I find myself a bankrupt. When I am gone and forgotten...your work will stand, a shining monument, in the long history of our people.’

Haber's plans to start a new career in Palestine were cut short when he died in 1934.

Another faction of anti-Zionists, the Jewish Bund, had been particularly strong in Poland and the Baltic countries, where they had ridiculed Zionist immigration efforts. For the most part, they were physically liquidated, sometimes fighting side by side with Zionists in ghetto revolts. Reform Judaism, which had begun in Germany as a movement that asserted the negation of Jewish nationalism, was annihilated in its mother country. In the United States, Reform Jews adopted increasingly pro-Zionist platforms.

Anti-Zionism and the Holocaust

Over half a century later, various anti-Zionist Jewish and non-Jewish ideologies are flourishing once again. For them, the Holocaust is an embarrassment. At best, they wish to present the thesis that the Holocaust is just another example of Man's inhumanity to his fellows, similar to other genocides that have taken place in the twentieth century as well as previously, such as the genocide committed against Armenians by the Turks in World War I, the Rwandan genocide and the Cambodian genocide. They also claim that Hitler did not single out the Jews in particular, pointing out that the Nazis also persecuted Gypsies, Communists, dissidents and homosexuals. However, objective non-Zionist historians have noted the massive evidence that Hitler and the Nazis were obsessed with the Jews. Moreover, of all segments of Europeans society, the Jews were the only ones for whom no political lobby was available to elicit sympathy. The euthanasia program was stopped by protests from Christian groups, and portions of the gypsies were spared as well. No nonpolitical group of loyal German citizens was singled out for hatred as consistently as the Jews, or persecuted as relentlessly. Anti-Zionists also claim that  interest in preserving the memory of Holocaust victims and teaching of the history of the Holocaust is a Zionist "Holocaust Industry" that is promulgated to justify Zionism.  However, in view of the increasing ignorance of large numbers of people regarding the Holocaust, as shown in surveys in Europe, and the alarming persistence of Holocaust denial, the educational effort appears, if anything, to be inadequate.

An especially perverse claim of anti-Zionists is that the Zionists aided in the Holocaust or were Nazis. This is based on the Zionist agreement with the Nazi government to rescue Jews in the Hesder scheme, on negotiations carried out in World War II by the Zionist organization for the rescue of Jews, and on a fantastic proposal that was allegedly made by the extremist LEHI group, which offered to set up a Nazi state in Palestine. All of these efforts, as well as those of American Jewish charity groups must be understood in the light of the stark reality of the Holocaust. The Zionist organization and other groups were confronted with the reality of the massacre of European Jewry. The gates of Palestine were shut. The Nazis held the entire Jewish population of Europe as hostages, and it was felt that any effort and any means at all were justified if they could rescue even a few Jews. About 60,000 were rescued in the Hesder. In Hungary, Rudolf Kastner, himself a hostage of the Nazis, negotiated the release of 1,685 Jews for a ransom of $1,000 apiece. Kastner later emigrated to Israel. It was alleged that he had specially chosen Zionists and friends to be included among those rescued. This claim would appear to be unlikely, as the group included the anti-Zionist Satmar rabbi Joel Teitelbaum and some of his followers. It was also alleged by an Israeli Zionist Holocaust survivor that Kastner had testified falsely on behalf of Nazi war criminal Kurt Becher. The charges were not proven, but Kastner was assassinated. Since the accused and the accusers were all Zionists, and the Zionist organization had little control over events inside Hungary,  Kastner's real or alleged misdeeds did not necessarily reflect on the Zionist movement.

More recently, anti-Zionists like Rabbi David Weiss have been active in Holocaust denial along with ex-Klan Wizard David Duke and other reactionaries, sometimes lumped with "liberal" anti-"Zionists."

Holocaust: Detailed tally of deaths according to one estimate

Following the war, the Anglo-American committee on Palestine documented, in part, the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust as shown in the tables below, showing the prewar Jewish population and the number of surviving Jews. The tables probably considerably underestimate the numbers of Jews killed in the Holocaust. They do not take into account natural increase that should have occurred in the Holocaust  years, or persons who were not counted as Jews in prewar years, but who were Jewish according to Nazi criteria because they had Jewish ancestry. The table gives the prewar Jewish population of USSR as "13,560,000." Since the overall total is only 9,946,200, we have to assume the intended figure was 3,560,000. This may be an underestimate of Soviet Jewish population. The Germans had estimated that there were 5 million Jews in the USSR.

Source: Anglo American Commission Report, Appendix III

Holocaust Statistics