Catastrophe of Our People
Right. Jewish teenagers from the United States lit white candles in memory of those killed during the Holocaust. The teens, along with Jews from around the world, visited the former Auschwitz death camp in Oswiecim, Poland, on the eve of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. (Associated Press)
Tonight begins Yom HaShoah - a time to honor the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust.
By Eric Black, Star Tribune Staff Writer.
When he was a kid in the years just after World War II, Stephen Feinstein recalls that what we now call "the Holocaust" was generally referred to as "the recent catastrophe of our people in Europe."
"Our people" were the Jewish people. The "catastrophe" was the killing of 6 million European Jews by Nazi Germany under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.
Starting at sundown tonight, Jews around the world will observe Yom HaShoah - Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Holocaust is not really the right word for it, Feinstein said. It derives from a Greek word for a burnt offering. But the 6 million Jews and 1 million Gypsies killed by the Germans were not burned as offerings to God. They were killed - mostly with bullets and with poison gas - because their ethnicity collided with Hitler's theory of the master race.
Feinstein, who is now director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, said scholars, who have studied the Holocaust in minute detail, have never discovered any document in which Hitler specifically ordered the extermination of the Jews.
"It was organized by high-level officials who had gotten the message that this was what the Fuhrer wanted them to do," Feinstein said.
When Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, Feinstein said, 433,000 Jews lived in Germany. He soon began oppressing the German Jews with laws banning them from the civil service or practicing professions. The Nuremberg laws of 1935 officially classified Jews as second-class citizens, removed their basic civil rights and banned them from marrying non-Jews.
Some scholars consider the Holocaust to have begun with these oppressions, but Feinstein disagrees because few Jews were killed during the pre-war years, 1933¥39. Hitler's goal during this period was to drive the Jews out of Germany.
After 1939, as Germany conquered Poland, France, Ukraine, Belorussia. the Baltic republics and other countries, the Reich acquired the territories where most European Jews - including many who had fled Germany - lived.
But the Nazis lacked a clear idea of what to do with the Jews, Feinstein said. At first, they forced the Jews out of their villages and into urban ghettoes. The villages were destroyed and Jewish property was confiscated.
The slaughter began during this period but was done mostly by the SS (Hitler's elite guard) and regular army troops with guns. Feinstein said some leaders thought German soldiers might suffer psychological damage by such hands-on involvement in the mass murder of men, women and children.
After some experimentation and discussion, a group of high-level bureaucrats assembled at the lakeshore resort at Wannsee, outside Berlin, on Jan. 20, 1942. They formalized what they called "the Final Solution of the Jewish Question."
They would transport the Jews and Gypsies to death camps where they would be killed by poison gas and their bodies burned in large ovens for easy disposal.
The six main death camps - Auschwitz, Chelmno, Sobibor Treblinka, Maidanek and Belzec - were all in territory that had been in pre-war Poland, which also had contained by far the largest concentration of European Jews. About 3 million of the 6 million victims were Polish Jews. About 90 percent of Poland's pre-war Jewish population was killed. About 1.5 million of the total number of victims were children.
The Nazis killed large numbers of other groups Communists, other political opponents, gays, lesbians, the physically and mentally handicapped and Jehovah's Witnesses (because they refused to take an with of allegiance to Hitler).
But Feinstein said these killings are considered outside of the Holocaust because only the Jews and Gypsies were killed because of their ethnicity.
"It was the ultimate hatred," Feinstein said. German authorities worried that a Jew who converted could convert back. "It was aimed against every Jew who had ever lived, who was alive then or who would live in the future. That was why they called it the final solution."
- Eric Black is at eblack@startribune.com