Historian Eric J. Hobsbawm wrote that "one of the most tragic aspects of World War II is that humanity learnt to live in a world where mass murder, torture and exile were experienced everdyday". If some 15 million people were killed in World War I, an estimated 50 million died in WWII, 50% were civilians. The genocide perpetrated by the Nazi regime against the Jews of Europe represents the apex of violence on civilian populations.
The Nazi regime in Europe is associated with the extermination of some 6 million European Jews. This genocide is known as the Holocaust. It is also referred to as the Shoah, a Hebrew term which means “catastrophe”. The murder of European Jews represents the apogee of Hitler’s anti-Semitic behaviour. His anti-Jew policies started in 1935 with the laws of Nuremberg, which deprived German Jews of their civil and political rights.
On 1st September 1939 the German Reich invaded Poland and took control of a territory inhabited by some 2 million Jews. The Nazi plans for Poland consisted in colonising these new territories with German communities, and reducing the Slavic population to slavery. The Jewish intelligentsia were executed in the first few months of the Nazi occupation, while other Jews were gathered in ghettos.
After the conquest of France in May-June 1940, Hitler conceived a plan to deport all European Jews to the island of Madagascar. This Madagascar plan, also called “territorial solution to the Jewish question”, was abandoned because it was technically difficult to realize.
The invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 gave Nazi Germany the possibility to conduct an ethnic cleansing operation to enlarge their “living space”. It had been conceived as a war of extermination against Jews and communists.
The “final solution to the Jewish problem” was the deportation and murder of around 11 million Jews.
In the Soviet Union Jews were executed near the graves that they had been forces to dig, but this system was too slow, and the SS started to use gas. First, gas vans were used. Later, they were replaced by gas chambers built on the sites of concentration camps.
The first concentration camps were built to detain political opponents, dissidents and the so-called “asocial” people (mentally disabled and the homeless). The first large number of Jews was deported to concentration camps soon after the Crystal Night. In the first few months of 1942, numerous extermination camps were built in Poland: the most famous was the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp used gas chambers and crematoria to burn the corpses. At Auschwitz, the detainees were forced to work in extreme conditions, often exploited in German industries. Prisoners were stripped of all their valuables. Gold teeth were removed before the cremation of corpses. To this day, visitors of Auschwitz camp can still see the hair cut from the heads of women, which would have been sold to the textile industry.
