“A thousand years will pass and the guilt of Germany will not be erased.”
These words were supposedly the last words of the Governor General of Nazi-occupied Poland, Hans Frank, before he was hanged in Nuremberg. He, along with many of his associates, perpetrated one of the most incredible and ghastly atrocity against mankind which was an unprecedented event of its time, shocking and devastating people, the world over, when its facts came to light.
According to the famous Second World War journalist William L. Shirer in his book ‘The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich’, “It was Hitler’s boast that the Third Reich would last a thousand years, but instead, it lasted only twelve, but in its short life was packed the most cataclysmic series of events the western civilization had ever known.” To many historians and the people who saw themselves through the Second World War, the event which was the most cataclysmic and horrifying was The Holocaust, the mass murder of over 10 million people in Nazi Germany and Occupied Europe, which included over 6 million Jews. It was thought to have properly started by the commencement of Kristallnacht, or “The Night of the Broken Glass”, a series of organized attacks carried out throughout Nazi Germany and Austria in November 1938 by the Sturmabteilung (SA) paramilitary brigade and other non-Jewish civilians, where several synagogues and other Jewish institutions, houses and shops etc., belonging to Jewish citizens were wrecked and destroyed and hundreds of the people injured and killed.
When Hitler finally consolidated power over Germany in 1933, one of the first measures he took, among plans for the occupation of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, were a series of laws against Jews, Gypsies, Communists and many other people classified as politically and socially undesirable. The most marginalized by these laws however, were the Jews, from whom the laws snatched away almost all their rights ranging from acquiring government and civil service jobs to even frequenting public places and amenities like parks, railway and bus stations etc. And when finally Hitler sparked off the Second World War by invading Poland, he laid down the foundation of the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, along with his cronies Hermann Göring, Joseph Göbbels, Alfred Rosenberg and Hans Frank etc., to where thousands of Polish and German Jews were herded like cattle and were made to live in appalling conditions which would make even a street beggar cringe. And those who hoped that, that was the worst, Hitler brutally dashed them during the last years of the war with the implementation of the Endiösung, the euphemism for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem”.
the Nazi hatred of Jews was based on a false racial basis which was stated, according to them, that the Jews, among other ethnic groups like gypsies, and Slavic people, were racially inferior to the Aryans, which was the purest of the Nordic races and anyone other than Aryans had no right to enjoy the human and civil rights belonging to them.
This widespread hatred of Jews had not occurred for the first time in the world. There had been similar outrages and hatred spells against Jews in Europe since the Middle Ages on the grounds that the Jews were the killers of Christ, usurpers and practised unfair trade practices. But the Nazi hatred of Jews was based on a false racial basis which was stated, according to them, that the Jews, among other ethnic groups like gypsies, and Slavic people, were racially inferior to the Aryans, which was the purest of the Nordic races and anyone other than Aryans had no right to enjoy the human and civil rights belonging to them. Later, however, the very right to live for non-Aryans was put out of the question, an idea fuelled intensively by Heinrich Himmler, the supreme commander of the Schutzstaffel, or the SS as it was popularly known, the notorious secret military police of Nazi Germany responsible for the majority of the war crimes committed by the Axis forces during the Second World War, and his deputy Reinhardt Heydrich, whose reign of terror over Germany and the occupied territories soon turned into a silent and efficient carnage which few were lucky enough to survive.
At first, mainly during the 1930s, the Nazis were content to just expel Jews, gypsies and other racially inferior ethnic groups out of Greater Germany and its conquered territories, or by making them to live in designated places or ghettos (the largest was the Warsaw ghetto, but even then it started seeming impossible to accommodate all the Jews captured by the Nazis later), while lethal measures were taken only against dissidents and political opponents (such as the Polish intelligentsia, who were one of the first people to be taken to the concentration camps at the beginning of the Second World War). But later when the seemingly unstoppable German Wehrmacht, whose notoriously efficient blitzkrieg tactics had given them victories one after the another in France, Greece and the majority of Europe, started facing hard bumps in the manner of the failed attempt to invade Britain, the crushing defeat faced at the battle of Stalingrad (which is often remarked as the major turning point of the war) and many other turning points over the later stages of the world war, when the conflict was brought at the doorstep of Germany’s borders, the Nazi’s drive to wipe out their nation’s Jews and other undesirables assumed a horrifying proportion. Nevertheless the fact still remains that much of this would have remained unknown, had it not been for the swift and decisive campaign and advance because of which they were able to capture the secret Nazi records, archives etc., which contained most of the details regarding the war, the Nazi racial utopia and the steps taken to achieve it, as these were ordered to be destroyed by Hitler and the Axis High Command when defeat seemed imminent for them.
These documents reveal the shocking lengths the Nazi’s went to realize their dream of a racially and ethnically clean Germany, Hitler’s dream of a lebensraum, or a living space, for the German people, and what he was prepared to do, and what he and his functionaries did, to achieve this dream.
The main task of the Nazi’s was first to determine the number of Jews and other non-Aryan first in mainland Germany, as their conquest progressed, in the occupied territories. And based on this information, the rounding up and transfer to the newly constructed concentration camps (Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Treblinka, to name a few) was approved by Hitler’s deputy, Hermann Göring. This task was delegated to Heinrich Himmler and his SS brigade. A chicken farmer in his former life in the village of Waldtrudering, near Munich, Himmler took over the SS in 1929, which at that year numbered around 200 men and functioned mainly as a guard team for the Nazi party meetings and exercised no great influence on the German masses. When Hitler reached the zenith of his power in 1942, the SS dominated over Germany with over a million functionaries and struck terror into the hearts of all the people, Aryan and non-Aryan, who had started becoming acquainted with their methods of operation which, to put it extremely mildly, upsetting.
Tens of thousands of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and many other racial groups were rounded up by the SS and other volunteer organizations affiliated to it from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Occupied Russia, loaded into goods trains and cattle cars in filthy unsanitary conditions and sent into concentration camps. When this disturbing trend had begun, very few people knew what went on with these people behind the barbed wire, which, when became known, was almost too diabolical for a sane human mind to comprehend, or even believe.
The most infamous of these concentration camps was, according to many authorities on the Holocaust, without a doubt Auschwitz, which was a network of extermination camps including the original camp located in the Auschwitz province of Upper Silesia, and two satellite camps, located in Birkenau and Monowitz in the same province. It could house about 20,000 inmates but it rarely reached their number, given the fact that it also housed 5 crematoriums where around 2000 people were killed in half an hour. Given this rate, around 1.1 million people were killed in Auschwitz alone during its entire existence from its founding in May 1940 to its decommissioning in January 1945 when the advancing Soviet troops liberated it. Other camps known for their notoriety were Buchenwald, Treblinka, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück etc. All these camps functioned night and day in trying to put Hitler and his party’s maniacal dream of a racially and ethnically clean German lebensraum, in ways the horror of which cannot be perceived and the efficiency of which cannot be comprehended or matched.
All the activities regarding the Holocaust were carried out with utmost secrecy and efficiency so that the world could be kept in the dark about the various war crimes committed by the Nazi’s during the bloody course of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
According to the captured Nazi documents, captured SS members of the extermination camps and the own eye-witness accounts of the survivors of the camps, the killings were done in gas chambers specially designed as large bathing areas, effectively disguising the fact that they were actually gas chambers large enough to accommodate around 200 people effectively. The prisoners were told they were to go on a bath, some of them were even also handed towels so they could not see through the ruse. It worked towards the beginning but when the killings started to become common, the prisoners had no more doubts what this meant. Absolutely no one was spared. Men, women children ranging from the stillborn to adolescents were made to march together to the gas chambers. And then instead of water, the SS turned on the gas, which was actually a powerful pesticide known as Zyklon-B, manufactured by the I.G. Farben chemical company (decommissioned in 1945). “It took only four to five minutes,” recounted an SS camp guard in the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, “for the entire group to be killed. The cruelty was not only limited to killing but the dead bodies were disposed off with utter disrespect.” This grisly business was carried out by the Sonderkommando, a specialized group of camp inmates to whom the task of disposing of the bodies was delegated. The Sonderkommando were housed in slightly better conditions than the other inmates, but even then they quite often committed suicide because of what they were made to do, or the SS executed them to prevent them from telling tales as and when a new batch of inmates arrived out of which new Sonderkommando could be chosen.
The manner in which the inmates were chosen was disturbingly simple and practical. All arriving inmates were subjected to a medical examination. Comparatively young and strong inmates were chosen to work in the German installations like munitions factories where the SS worked them to death or were executed after a stipulated period of time if they were alive, or were chosen as Sonderkommandos. Rest all were sentenced to be gassed or designated to be human guinea pigs for the diabolical medical experiments the Nazi doctors, together in cahoots with Heinrich Himmler, designed and implemented.
But the concentration and extermination camps were not the only bodies functioning in the mass murder of the non-Aryans. The Einsatzgruppen, or mobile death squads, was the main paramilitary force responsible for mass executions in Poland and Occupied Russia, when it was logistically impossible for the Nazi’s to procure transports for the transfer to the concentration camps. The Einsatzgruppen were murderously efficient in their work, and though under the formal command of the army, were under the tutelage of and received orders directly from Heinrich Himmler and his lieutenant Reinhardt Heydrich. There were seven Einsatzgruppen battalions which operated in Poland, of which each of them were divided into seven companies. The Einsatzgruppen’s most despicable acts were the massacre at Babi Yar in Ukraine, and the Rumbula massacre in Latvia.
All the activities regarding the Holocaust were carried out with utmost secrecy and efficiency so that the world could be kept in the dark about the various war crimes committed by the Nazi’s during the bloody course of the Second World War and the Holocaust. It was only because of the swift and decisive actions of the Allies and the scrupulousness and reluctance of the few Nazis to follow Hitler’s “Scorched Earth” order to destroy Nazi installations and all the same, documents, during the last years of the war. These were extensively used as vital evidence during the trial of the various Nazis connected to and responsible for the war crimes in the International Military Tribunal specially setup by the Allies for this very purpose at Nuremberg in the province of Bavaria. It opened the entire picture of the Holocaust for the whole world to see, which was deeply shocked and devastated at this, and rued itself for not believing the reports that had previously trickled out of Germany about the atrocities of the Nazis and the SS. Of the 22 major defendants in the trials, 11 were given death penalty, which included Himmler, Göring and almost all having a hand at the Holocaust, 3 were acquitted, 3 were given life imprisonment, and 4 were given prison terms ranging 10 to 20 years.
The Holocaust has and will continue to be one of the most tragic and lamentable incidents to have happened in all time and will continue to serve as a reminder of the atrocities that man is willing to commit in times of a world war when the longevity of his nation and/or his life is at stake. That it could not last long was pure luck and it shudders one to think of the scale of horror if the Third Reich had lasted longer. Incidents like these, coupled with the other atrocities and brutalities around the world against humanity today, make it extremely imperative to achieve world peace otherwise we will not find humanity on earth, but charred remains of a destroyed planet.
