The Holocaust (the Shoah)

Jews call it the Shoah, Hebrew for “catastrophe”. When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933, about 500,000 Jews lived there, less than 1% of the population, and about nine million in Europe as a whole. Nazi ideology cast Jews not as a religion but as a “race” responsible for all of Germany’s misfortunes.^•

Persecution came in stages. Jews were driven from the civil service, professions and schools; the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped them of citizenship and banned marriage with “Aryans”. On the night of 9–10 November 1938, Kristallnacht, mobs burned synagogues and smashed Jewish shops across Germany and Austria; at least 91 Jews were killed and some 30,000 men were sent to concentration camps. By 1939 more than half of Germany’s Jews had emigrated, often leaving almost everything behind, but escape grew ever harder: at the Évian conference of 1938 almost every nation declined to take more refugees, and Britain’s 1939 White Paper sharply limited entry to Palestine.^•

War from September 1939 put millions more Jews under German control. In occupied Poland they were forced into sealed ghettos such as Warsaw and Łódź, where hunger and disease killed tens of thousands. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, with police battalions, soldiers and local collaborators, shot Jews by the hundreds of thousands at pits and ravines; at Babyn Yar outside Kyiv, 33,771 were killed in two days. On 20 January 1942 senior officials met at Wannsee to coordinate the “Final Solution”. Jews from across Europe were deported by train to killing centres in occupied Poland: Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau, where about 1.1 million people, roughly a million of them Jews, were murdered, most in gas chambers on arrival.^•

By 1945 about six million Jews had been murdered, around two-thirds of Europe’s Jews, among them roughly 1.5 million children. Poland’s Jewish community of over three million was almost wiped out, and the Yiddish-speaking civilisation of Eastern Europe was destroyed. The Nazis also murdered an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 Roma and Sinti (the Porajmos), around 250,000 disabled people in “euthanasia” programmes, and millions of Soviet prisoners of war and Polish civilians, but the aim to kill every Jew, everywhere, set the Holocaust apart.^•

The killing needed railway workers, clerks, police and doctors, and deportations happened in plain sight; historians agree that a great many Germans knew or suspected that Jews were being killed. Jews resisted where they could: through smuggling, schooling and prayer in the ghettos, partisan units in the forests, and armed revolt, most famously the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 and revolts at Treblinka and Sobibór. Some non-Jews risked their lives to hide them; Yad Vashem has honoured more than 28,000 as “Righteous Among the Nations”. Many more looked away or joined in.^•

Survivors emerged into a world that often did not want to listen. Some who returned to Poland were met with violence, as in the Kielce pogrom of 1946, and about a quarter of a million lived for years in displaced-persons camps. Zionists organised illegal immigration to Palestine; Britain intercepted ships such as the Exodus 1947 and held refugees in Cyprus. Their plight helped win support for partition, and survivors fought in the 1948 war.^•

Facing the past took decades. In early Israel, survivors were sometimes scorned for going “like sheep to the slaughter”, and the 1952 reparations deal with West Germany provoked riots; the 1961 Eichmann trial, where survivors testified to a listening nation, made the Holocaust central to Israeli identity.^•

For Jews, the Holocaust is not ancient history. Survivors are still alive, their children and grandchildren carry the stories, and many Jews quietly ask a question their grandparents learned to ask: “Would they hide me?”^•

Why it matters today