User:Joel Mc/Holocaust section

Distinctive features

Efficiency and scale

The Holocaust can be distinguished from other genocides by the industrial nature of the killings.

Michael Berenbaum writes that Germany became a "genocidal nation." Every arm of the country's sophisticated bureaucracy was involved in the killing process. Parish churches and the Interior Ministry supplied birth records showing who was Jewish; the Post Office delivered the deportation and denaturalization orders; the Finance Ministry confiscated Jewish property; German firms fired Jewish workers and disenfranchised Jewish stockholders; the universities refused to admit Jews, denied degrees to those already studying, and fired Jewish academics; government transport offices arranged the trains for deportation to the camps; German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners; companies bid for the contracts to build the ovens; detailed lists of victims were drawn up using the Dehomag company's punch card machines, producing meticulous records of the killings. As prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property, which was carefully catalogued and tagged before being sent to Germany to be reused or recycled. Berenbaum writes that the Final Solution of the Jewish question was "in the eyes of the perpetrators ... Germany's greatest achievement."

In 1941, after occupying Belarus, the Nazis used mental patients from Minsk psychiatric hospitals to test the efficiency of their mass killing. Initially, they tried shooting them by having them stand one behind the other, so that several people could be killed with one bullet, but it was too slow. Then they tried dynamite, but few were killed and many were left wounded with hands and legs missing. In October 1941, in Mogilev, gas was poured into a Gaswagen or "gas car," developed by Walter Rauff; it took more than 30 minutes for the people inside to die. Later, a large truck exhaust was tried out, which killed everyone inside the Gaswagen in eight minutes. In the spring of 1942, the extermination camps began operating. Carbon monoxide was used in the gas chambers at Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, while Zyklon B, a cyanide-based insecticide, was employed at Majdanek and Auschwitz.

The disposal of large numbers of bodies presented a logistical problem. The Nazis studied how to improve fuel efficiency, using a combination of different fuels, such as coke, wood, and body fat. According to surviving Sonderkommandos, multiple bodies were added to the furnaces to obtain optimal fuel efficiency and speed, particularly when the demand was higher.

The mass killing was systematically conducted in virtually all areas of Nazi-occupied territory in what are now 35 separate European countries. The mass killing was at its worst in Central and Eastern Europe, which had more than seven million Jews in 1939; about five million Jews were killed there, including three million in occupied Poland and over one million in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands also died in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Yugoslavia, and Greece. The Wannsee Protocol makes clear that the Nazis also intended to carry out their "final solution of the Jewish question" in England and Ireland. The extermination continued in Nazi-controlled territory until the end of World War II, ending only when the Allies entered Germany itself and forced the Nazis to surrender in May 1945.

Condemnation by birth

All people with three or four Jewish grandparents were to be exterminated without exception. In other genocides, people could and did escape death by converting to another religion or in other ways assimilating themselves to those carrying out the genocide..

Intended totality

Unlike other genocides, Nazi policy intended to apply their policy universally. Thus, all Jews, everywhere were to be exterminated if and when German power was extended to other lands.

Dominance of abstract ideology

In other genocides, pragmatic considerations, i.e. control of territory, land, resources were central to the genocide policy. However, the basic motivation of Nazi policy was ideological. Yehuda Bauer writes,

“…the basic motivation was purely ideological, rooted in an illusionary world of Nazi imagination, where an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world was opposed to a parallel Aryan quest. Not genocide to date had been based so completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract, nonpragmatic ideology—which was then executed by very rational, pragmatic means.”.

Medical experiments

Further information: Doctors' Trial, Josef Mengele, Nazi human experimentation, and Miklós Nyiszli

Another distinctive feature was the use of human subjects in medical experiments. German physicians carried out such experiments at Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen and Natzweiler concentration camps.

The most notorious of these physicians was Dr. Josef Mengele, who worked in Auschwitz. His experiments included placing subjects in pressure chambers, testing drugs on them, freezing them, attempting to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, and various amputations and other brutal surgeries. The full extent of his work will never be known because the two truckloads of records he sent to Dr. Otmar von Verschuer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute were destroyed by von Verschuer. Subjects who survived Mengele's experiments were almost always killed and dissected after the experiments.

He seemed particularly keen on working with Romani children. He would bring them sweets and toys, and would personally take them to the gas chamber. They would call him "Onkel Mengele."

Vera Alexander was a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz who looked after 50 sets of Romani twins:

I remember one set of twins in particular: Guido and Ina, aged about four. One day, Mengele took them away. When they returned, they were in a terrible state: they had been sewn together, back to back, like Siamese twins. Their wounds were infected and oozing pus. They screamed day and night. Then their parents — I remember the mother's name was Stella — managed to get some morphine and they killed the children in order to end their suffering.