Phases of the Holocaust

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Raul Hilberg, a well-known historian of the Holocaust, identified four distinct Phases of the Holocaust.

[edit] Identification and definition

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 employed a pseudo-scientific basis for racial discrimination against Jews. People with four German grandparents (white circles) were of "German blood," while people were classified as Jews if they were descended from three or more Jewish grandparents (black circles in top row right). Having one or more Jewish grandparents made someone "mixed blood." In the absence of discernible external differences, the Nazis used the religious observence of a person's grandparents to determine their "race." (1935 Chart from Nazi Germany used to explain the Nuremberg Laws)

Before the Nazis could actually make laws that discriminated against Jews, the law needed to identify the range of persons to be targeted by those measures. This was especially hard, since the Nazi ideology, in contradiction to science, saw the Jews as a race, and not as a nation or a religious or ethnic community.

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 identified someone with three or more Jewish grandparents as a 'full Jew', some with two Jewish grandparents as a '1st degree hybrid', and someone with one Jewish grandparent as a '2nd degree hybrid'. The actual religious practice of the person was irrelevant, and so many converted Jews were now declared to be Jews by the state. However, Aryans who had converted to Judaism were classified by the Nazis as Jews despite their non-Jewish racial background. '2nd degree hybrids' and Jews married to Aryans were sometimes exempted from extermination.

After defining the term Jew in law, the Jews were discriminated by such measures as requiring them to add "Israel" (for Jewish males) or "Sarah" (for Jewish females) to their names, and a large letter "J" was imprinted on their passports, among others.

[edit] Economic Discrimination and Separation

After defining who was a Jew, economic discrimination and separation from the rest of society continued the process of the Holocaust. Jewish doctors, lawyers, and even housemaids were no more allowed to work for Germans, and Jews no longer were allowed to employ Germans. Neither were they allowed to be on the boards of firms or to hold shares of a firm. Firms, houses, etc. in Jewish possession were 'aryanized', sold to "Aryan" Germans. Usually there was blackmail involved, and the German state and the involved Aryans made huge profits in these transactions, while Jewish business people were forced to agree to the transactions.

[edit] Concentration

After the Jews were segregated by definition from the rest of the people, and their economic ties with the rest of the society were mostly cut or restricted, the Jews were physically separated from the rest of the society. Either by forcing them to move to special houses or to ghettos, Jews had to live in often desperate conditions.

By concentrating the Jews into ghettos, concentration camps or forced-labor camps, the Jews were completely cut off from the rest of society, completely under the control of the Nazis. The Nazis controlled the amount of food that entered the ghetto and used the population for slave labor.

Isolated from society, without money, and under the control of the Nazis, the Jews were now defenceless.

[edit] Extermination

In 1942, after the Wannsee conference, the Nazis began to murder the Jews in large numbers. Extermination squads were already conducting mass shootings of Jews in the areas of the occupied Soviet territories since 1941, and now Jews were either deported to then-empty ghettos like that of Riga to be shot later, or to the death camps of Operation Reinhard: Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibór . Polish Jews living in the formerly Polish territories then integrated into Germany were killed in Chelmno (Kulmhof) in mobile gas chambers. Later on starting 1943 Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most well-known death camp.

[edit] Bibliography

• Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Yale University Press, 2003, revised hardcover edition, ISBN 0-300-09557-0

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