Evidence for the Holocaust: How Legal Persecution and Social Condemnation Lead to the Deliberate Extermination of European Jews During World War II

The Holocaust refers to an atrocity that took place during World War II that led to the death of approximately 6 million Jewish individuals in Europe. Following the rise of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany in 1933, the Germans immediately took clear actions to enforce their ideology on racial purity and to remove the Jews from all areas of German society. The social removal of Jews from German society eventually evolved into a program of genocide that sought to completely remove the Jews from Europe. Though many might attempt to argue that the Holocaust was a fabricated event, the persecution of the Jews and the documented genocidal actions of the Germans make it clear that the systematic extermination of Jews and other groups did occur during World War II.

Legal Persecution of the Jews

Upon seizing power in 1933, the Nazi Party, led by Adolf Hitler, sought to remove Jewish Germans from all areas of society through legal actions. Between the years of 1933 and 1939, over 400 decrees and regulations were issued that restricted both public and private life for Jews living within Nazi-controlled Germany (Antisemitic Legislation 1933-1939). Compounding the problem, governments at the federal, state, and local levels all took autonomous acts to modify the laws in order to restrict the activities of German Jews (Antisemitic Legislation 1933-1939). Significant laws that targeted the Jews include an April 1933 restriction on Jewish students at schools and universities, the prohibition of reimbursing Jewish doctors with public funds, a 1934 ban on allowing Jewish actors to play on screen, and a 1939 program to “Aryanize” businesses by confiscating them from Jewish business owners and transferring them to Germans (Antisemetic Legislation 1933-1939). These laws demonstrate the full extent to which the Germans sought to legally remove the Jews from society during the period.

The Nuremberg Laws remain among the most significant anti-Semitic laws passed because they establish the regulatory environment under which Jews were subjected. Passed on September 15, 1935, the Nuremberg Laws consisted of the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and the Reich Citizenship Law (The Nuremberg Laws). The law set the legal definition of a Jewish person by establishing that an individual with three or more Jewish grandparents could be classified as fully Jewish, additionally, individuals with only two Jewish grandparents were considered Mischlings and were initially allowed to keep their German citizenship (The Nuremberg Laws). Overall, the Nuremberg Laws had the impact of taking citizenship away from full Jews and some groups of Mischlings, prohibiting Jews from flying the German flag, prohibiting the Jews from employing Germans as household servants, and banning sexual and romantic relationships between Germans and Jews (The Nuremberg Race Laws). The Nuremberg Laws served as just the basis for persecution at the federal level and were constantly amended to be even more restrictive between the years of 1935 to 1939 (The Nuremberg Race Laws). The impact of these laws is that they clearly signal the ill-intent that the Germans held toward the Jews even before their official plans of genocide.

The Nuremberg Laws are compelling evidence of the legal exclusion that led to the Holocaust because they were widely publicized. Other nations were kept informed on the racist laws that were to be drafted in Nazi Germany. As Greg Bradsher writes, the Nuremberg decrees of September 15, 1935 were so compelling that they were used as evidence against Nazi war criminals during the post-war Nuremberg Trials in order to demonstrate the intent held by the Nazis to eliminate the Jewish population from society (Bradsher). Following the passage of the laws, the Nazis held a large rally at Nuremberg, extolling the racial theories that were promoted in the laws (Bradsher). Additionally, on September 16, Ambassador Dodd received sent a message to the Secretary of State discussing the outcomes of the laws passed by the Germans (Bradsher). Earlier, the ambassador had received a transmission of the Reich Law Gazette, which included a copy of the laws that were enacted at Nuremberg (Bradsher). As Bradsher asserts, the international community was wrongly optimistic that in passing these laws, the Germans would be satisfied in their efforts to penalize their Jewish citizens (Bradsher). Yet, it is clear through historical evidence that simply revoking the citizenship of Jews was not the final goals of the Nazi regime.

Further laws document the increasingly aggressive approach that the Nazis took towards their persecution of German Jews. By 1939, all Jewish men and women who lacked traditional Jewish names were required to add the names “Israel” and “Sara” to their names as identifiers (Antisemitic Legislation 1933-1939). Further, they were required to carry identity cards that noted their status as Jews and have their passports stamped with a “J” (Antisemitic Legislation 1933-1939). By November 10, 1938, Jewish Germans were completely barred from public schools, universities, cinemas, theatres, and sporting facilities (Antisemitic Legislation 1933-1939). As the legislation passed by the Germans demonstrates, Ambassador Dodd was incorrect in his optimism that the persecution of the Jews would subside after the passage of the initial Nuremberg Laws on racial purity. The aggressive nature of the laws targeting the Jews also highlights the fervor that the Nazis possessed for continually harassing the Jewish population through official government actions. This is significant because it increases the propensity that the Nazi government expanded its atrocities to eventually include genocide. The Nuremberg Laws along with the anti-Semitic laws passed during the period only serves as concrete evidence that the Germans had the intention of identifying and alienating Jews while completely removing Jews from society.

Verbal Gestures of Hostility Towards the Jews

Along with passing anti-Semitic Laws, the Germans consistently signaled their intentions to harm the Jews during their political rule. Kristallnacht, serves as an example of the violence that the Nazi regime enabled to be perpetrated against German Jews. Known as the “Night of Broken Glass,” Kristallnacht was a large-scale pogrom that was launched by Nazi Party officials on November 7, 1938 in response to the assassination of German diplomat Ernsh vom Rath by a Jewish individual who was upset by the persecution his family had endured under the Nuremberg Laws (Bytwerk 86). The event resulted in the destruction of over 1,500 synagogues and thousands of Jewish-owned businesses across Germany (86). Further, dozens of individuals were killed during the event and thousands of individuals were arrested (86). The event was an early example of the regime’s willingness to tolerate violent actions taken against the Jews.

However, the rhetoric adopted by party officials during the event especially demonstrated the tolerance that Nazis had towards violent actions taken against Jews. Following the destruction of Kristallnacht, Julius Streicher, a Nazi official who published Der Sturmer between 1923 and 1945, delivered a revealing speech in front of over 100,000 Germans in Adolf Hitler square (86). Establishing the Jewish people as enemies of the Germans, Streicher stated:

Our hope is that the Jewish people will one day receive the penalty they deserve for all the sorrow, misery, and trouble they brought the peoples. We believe the supreme court is coming that will judge the Devil’s people. Then the world will breathe more easily, and there will be peace. And now I ask you to keep disciplined. No more demonstrations! We have made some progress, and we will leave the rest to the Fuhrer. We greet him with our Sieg Heil! (92)

The first significant point that Streicher makes in his speech following Kristallnacht is that the destruction and violence of that nights was not the maximum threshold for violence that the Nazis believed should be carried out against the Jews. As Streicher stated, he believed that even further suffering should be enacted upon the Jews. Further, it is revealing that Streicher asserts that the world would breath easier when corrective actions are taken against the Jewish population. Finally, Streicher asserts that while the destruction of Kristallnacht was “progress,” he anticipated that Hitler would take even more drastic measures against the Germans. As Streicher’s speech reveals, Nazi ideology held that the Germans had a responsibility not just to remove Jews from German society, but from the entire world. Further, it demonstrated the willingness of the Nazi regime to continue escalating the actions taken against the Jews.

Along with Streicher’s post-Kristallnacht comments, Hitler made direct comments that reveal his intention to kill the Jews. Citing an address delivered by Adolf Hitler on January 23, 1942, Wallace Greene posits that the dictator stated:

The Jew must clear out of Europe… When I think about it, I realize that I’m extraordinarily humane… I restrict myself to telling them they must go away. If they break their pipes on the journey, I can’t do anything about it. But if they refuse to go voluntarily, I see no other solution but extermination” (Greene 263)

While many individuals who dispute the Holocaust believe that this quote is proof that the Nazis had no intention to kill the Jews, a closer analysis reveals that this quote served as permission for genocide. As Greene notes, when the statement was made there were no opportunities for Jews to emigrate from Nazi-occupied areas because they were already restricted from immigrating by the international community (264). Further, as Hitler made this statement, the Nazis were already in the first stage of the “Final Solution” and committing mass murders against Eastern Jews (264). Thus, Hitler’s statement demonstrates his willingness to continue the killing of the Jewish people who were unable to escape persecution through immigration.

The Physical Extermination of the Jews

Often, individuals who deny the occurrence of the Holocaust assert that there is little documentation of explicit plans to murder the Jewish population in Europe. However, the genocidal activities of the Nazi government demonstrate that the regime had a commitment to eliminating “undesirables” through mass extermination. As scholar Henry Friedlander noted, the Germans began the act of killing undesired individuals when Hitler authorized the murder of handicapped infants in 1938 (Friedlander 67). Further, in 1939, Hitler authorized the expansion of these killings to include handicapped adults, and authorized a program, called operation T4, which called for the systemic “destruction of unworthy life” (67). The program operated “at peak efficiency” between the years of 1939 and August 1941, claiming the lives of over 70,000 handicapped German individuals (67). Further, the existence of T4 is indisputable because the public became widely aware of the program’s existence (67). In fact, backlash from the public caused the operations to eventually be abandoned (67). However, operation T4 demonstrates that the Nazi government was willing to murder individuals that it deemed to be inferior in an aggressive manner long before the government’s focus was placed upon eliminating Jews from Europe.

As scholars also note, the explicit order to kill the Jews throughout Nazi controlled territories was unnecessary because it was an extension of the precedent set by operation T4. As Friedlander posits, the Holocaust was understood by Nazi officials to be merely an extension of the regimes commitment to exterminating “life unworthy of living” (68). Thus because Hitler had already expressed his approval of killing undesired populations, there was no need of officials to obtain explicit permission to exterminate Jews, Gypsies, or other populations that were under attack by the regime (68). These populations were simply included under the category of unworthy populations, and thus the authorization for their extermination was already established through precedent. Discussing his reluctance to explicitly reference the killing of Jews, Himmler delivered the following statement in an October 4, 1943 speech to SS officers:

I want to make reference before you here, in complete candor, to a really grave matter. Among ourselves, this once shall be uttered quite frankly; but in public we will never speak of it… I am referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the annihilation of the Jewish people. (264)

As Himmler’s statement demonstrates, the implicit understanding that the Jews were a part of the undesirable category that Hitler authorized to be exterminated along with a conscious stigma on verbalizing genocide contributed to the lack of explicit references to extermination by Nazi officials.

However, while few documents make explicit reference to the killings there is still significant documentation to reveal the extent of the genocide that took place. First, the act of deporting Jews from Germany and German conquered territories for forced labor resulted in the established deaths of millions of Jews. As Peter Longerich notes, in 1941, Nazi officials established the practice of exterminating Jews through work as a solution to the “Jewish question” (Longerich 314). Following 1941, the Nazi government constructed many work camps where mass deaths resulted from work regimens that physically exhausted the prisoners (315). The work allotted at the prisons exceeded the physical capacities of the prisoners, food barely met the daily caloric needs of the prisoners, and medical care was inadequate to meet the conditions faced by the prisoners (315). Further, the death rates were accelerated by the practice of selecting prisoners who were unfit for work for extermination (315). Compounding the problem, in March 1942 officials proposed for the “economization” of concentration camps in order to increase efficiency after it was determined that the performance of concentration camp prisoners was only 50 percent that of German workers (316). In addition to being worked to death, camp inmates were routinely shot for violating minor camp regulations or shot arbitrarily (319). For example, an examination of 84 camp shooting cases revealed that these total shooting incidents resulted in the death of as many as 25,000 Jewish inmates (319). In order to increase production at the camps, the number of prisoners deported to the camps increased dramatically.

Nazi records of deportations demonstrate how many Jews were exposed to deadly camp conditions. As early as 1939, Nazi officials had arranged for 13,000 men, 7,000 women, and 1,000 girls from the controlled territory of Slovakia to be transported to regional concentration camps (325). In a 1942 meeting with representatives at Gestapo headquarters, Party official Adolf Eichmann announced that he would deport 55,000 Jews from Nazi-controlled territories to the concentration camps (321). This included an evacuation of 20,000 individuals from Prague and 18,000 individuals from Vienna (321). In a subsequent round of deportations, an additional 55,000 Jews were removed from Nazi-controlled territories and sent to concentration camps on 43 transports (321). According to a 1942 briefing by Himmler, 100,000 male Jews and 50,000 female Jews were deported to concentration camps in a four-year period (317). This large influx of prisoners to accommodate the labor needs demonstrates the capability of the concentration camps to become the sites of large death tolls of prisoners who were exposed to malnourishment, exhaustion, and disease.

While the Nazi government instituted extermination through labor, it also engaged in direct killing of populations deemed unfit to live. Critics also provide a similar critique that the explicit killing of the Jews was never documented by the Nazis. However, an evaluation of the evidence demonstrates that explicit murders accompanied the indirect killing of Jews through forced labor. As Greene notes, Nazi officials engaged is “verbal camouflage” in order to conceal the nature of the killings in official documents. For example, the “East” was referred to regions where concentration and death camps were located (Greene 264). Thus, if a victim was to be sent to an work camp, it would often be stated that they are being sent “east” (265). Yet, if the victim was to be exterminated, the euphemism of sending the individual or groups “far east” was often used by officials (265). Further, death camps were simply referred to as labor or concentration camps, and the killing sites in Auschwitz were merely referenced as POW camps (264). Further, the crematorium where dead bodies were disposed of through incineration were referred to as “special installation” or “bath houses” (264). The proliferation of euphemistic expressions used throughout Nazi documents can obscure the nature of the atrocities that took place at death camps.

However, a careful analysis of Nazi records uncovers the paper trail that officials left that expose the nature of their activities. As Greene notes, gas chambers required extensive consideration before they could be implemented and had to undergo formal processes of approval and be constantly inspected to meet legal standards (Greene 266). During the 1930s, Interior Minister Goring and Himmler were both charged with setting up the first concentration camps and further documented their activities through their correspondences with other Party officials (266). For example when the first death camp, Chelmo, was established in 1941, officials produced land transfer documents, construction records, gas production documents, maintenance records, and financial statements that all documented the use of gas chambers and the construction of facilities that were specifically intended for mass murder (267). In 1941, official Rudolf Hoss further created a paper trail when he received orders from Himmler to build Auschwitz and he introduced Zyklon B as an alternative method for killing a large number of people (267). From Hoss’s own testimony on his activities, he documents how inmates were gassed using Zyklon B and reports the number of individuals who died from starvation and disease in the camps (269). Further, as Eichmann reported in an estimate to Himmler, he assessed that 4 million Jews were killed in the concentration camps while a remaining number of Jews were exterminated by mobile units (271). Thus, while casual documentation might omit the nature of the activities that took place in the concentration camps, a closer analysis of records combined with the testimony of leading Nazi officials makes it clear that extermination on a wide scale was being conducted at death camps throughout Europe.

Analysis and Conclusion

According to Holocaust skeptics, there is little evidence that links the anti-Semitic viewpoints of the Nazis to the mass killings that led to the death of 6 million Jews. However, the systemic nature of the Holocaust is thoroughly documented by historical sources. The Holocaust was initiated when the Nazis utilized legal methods to extricate Jews from German society and entered its final stages when the Nazis began to physically remove Jews from German-occupied territories and confine them to concentration and extermination camps. The Nuremberg Laws indicate the beginning of the legal persecution of Jews and highlight the desire of the Germans to completely eliminate the Jews from civil society. The restrictive nature of the laws barred Jews from possessing citizenship or participating socially or economically in Germany. Further, Nazi officials made several statements preceding and during the implementation of the Final Solution that demonstrated their desire to exterminate the Jewish population in Germany.

However, along with legal and verbal signals of intention, the Nazis took direct action that evidenced their willingness to commit genocide. The implementation of operation T4 demonstrated that it was within the capabilities of Nazi officials to systemically murder any individual they deemed to be unfit for life. Further, because T4 was widely known about by the public, it the propensity of Nazi officials to exterminate individuals cannot be disputed. Further, the policy of extermination through starvation led to the death of millions of Jews who came into contact with the Nazi concentration camp system. The records of officials demonstrates that transports were highly efficient and extracted millions of Jews across Europe to concentration camps where they were exposed to lethal conditions. Finally, records and explicit statements made by Nazi officials demonstrate that the Nazis planned for and operated facilities that were used to murder Jews. Considering this evidence in totality, it is indisputable that the Holocaust was a devised plan conducted by the Nazi government to continue the removal of Jews from Europe through direct and indirect means of extermination.

Works Cited

“Antisemetic legislation 1933-1939.” Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 10 Jun. 2013. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.

Bradsher, Greg. “The Nuremberg Laws.” Prologue Magazine 42.4 (2012): n.p. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.

Bytwerk, Randall L. Landmark Speeches of National Socialism. College Station, TX: Texas A& University Press, 2008. Print.

Friedlander, Henry. “Step By Step: Expansion of Murder 1939-1941.” Reading in Holocaust: Origins, Implementation and Aftermath. Ed. Omer Bartov. London: Routledge, 2000. 63-76. Print.

Greene, Wallace. "The Holocaust Hoax: A Rejoinder." Jewish Social Studies 46.3 (1984): 263. ProQuest. Web. 11 Nov. 2013.

“The Nuremberg Race Laws.” Rice University. n.d. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.

Longerich, Peter. Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Print.