The Holocaust

The The systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. The Hebrew term "Shoah" (catastrophe) is often preferred, as "Holocaust" derives from a Greek word meaning "burnt offering," which implies a sacrificial purpose that did not exist. The Holocaust also encompassed the murder of Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war, political opponents, and others. It remains the defining genocide of the modern era. was not an eruption of chaos. It was organized. It was bureaucratic. It was carried out with filing systems and train schedules, with quotas and carbon copies, by men who clocked in and clocked out and went home to their families. This is the fact that makes it so difficult to face and so necessary to understand.

Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime and its collaborators murdered approximately six million Jews, roughly two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. They also murdered up to 500,000 Roma and Sinti in what the Roma call the Porajmos, "the Devouring," a genocide that has received far less attention and official recognition than the murder of the Jews, despite its scale. They murdered over 250,000 disabled people, millions of Soviet prisoners of war, thousands of homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, political dissidents, and others deemed enemies of the state. The killing took place in forests and ravines, in ghettos and labor camps, in gas chambers built for the purpose.

The disabled were killed first. Beginning in 1939, the Aktion T4 program, named after Tiergartenstrasse 4, the Berlin address where it was administered, gassed an estimated 70,000 people with physical and intellectual disabilities in six killing centers. Carbon monoxide. Falsified death certificates mailed to families. T4 was a rehearsal. The personnel, the methods, and the bureaucratic habit of euphemism all transferred directly to the extermination camps. Many of the men who operated the gas chambers at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec had learned their trade on disabled Germans.