The Holocaust was an inconceivable historical event, which forever robbed Western culture of its innocence. As civilized human beings, we fail to understand how events of such horror could have taken place, and how an idea so inhumanly warped could have spread like wildfire through an entire continent, instigating the systematic annihilation of millions of Jews. This free online course was produced jointly by Tel Aviv University and Yad Vashem – the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. This course is the second of the two courses and covers three themes in its three weeks: Week 1: The Final Solution We’ll look at the cultural and mental processes that paved the way to the comprehensive and systematic mass murder of Jews in Europe – that is, the Final Solution. As part of this hard lesson we will discuss the various characteristics of the murder sites and death camps, and reveal selected aspects of the horror that occurred in them. Week 2: Jewish and Non-Jewish Responses to the Holocaust We will try to explore questions regarding knowledge about the application of the Final Solution, as well as a variety of responses and annihilation of victims, local populations and perpetrators. Week 3: The End of the War We will dedicate this lesson to the events that occurred in the last years of the Holocaust, as well as questions of memory, commemoration and future research. We strongly recommend that you register for "The Holocaust - An Introduction (I): Nazi Germany: Ideology, The Jews and the World" as well. Taking both parts of the course would enable you to obtain a fuller and more comprehensive knowledge about The Holocaust. This online course is offered in an innovative, multi-level format, comprising: Comprehensive lectures by leading researchers from Tel Aviv University and Yad Vashem. A wealth of voices and viewpoints presented by guest lecturers Numerous documents, photos, testimonies and works of art from the time of the Holocaust. Novel learning experience: Crowdsourcing – involving the learners themselves in the act of collecting and shaping information, via unique, exciting online assignments.
The End: Year 1944
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En provenance du cours de Tel Aviv University
The Holocaust - An Introduction (II): The Final Solution
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The Free World, the last months, the Aftermath and the Implications
This lesson will describe the steps taken by Nazi Germany, with the Allied advance across Europe, to increase efforts to exterminate the Jews and to destroy all evidence of their crimes. We will deal with questions of memory and commemoration, examine the significance of the Holocaust for different audiences, and present the latest research in the field of Holocaust studies.
Rencontrer les enseignants
Professor Havi Dreifuss, PhDProfessor
Havi Dreifuss is a historian of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe; senior lecturer in the Department of Jewish History at TAU; heads the Center for Research of Holocaust History in Poland, Yad Vashem.
Dr Na'ama Bela Shik, PhDDirector, Educational Technology Department, The International School for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem
The International School for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem
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For almost three years, the German army occupied or
influenced a large part of Europe.
But towards the end of 1942, the picture started to change.
On November the 8th, 1942, the allied American, and
British forces landed in French, north of Africa, Operation Torch.
Though, it took a few more months until the Germans and
their allies were drawn completely from this region.
Nazi Germany's worldwide grasp started to be undermined.
Much more important for
our discussion, was the surrender of German forces in Stalingrad.
In February 1943, after more than six months of stubborn battles, and
against Hitler's explicit orders, the besieged German forces surrendered.
And the Red Army, the army of the Soviet Union,
started making its way to the west, in constant battle.
Despite Stalin's many requests, a second front was opened by the Western Allies,
only on the 6th of June, 1944, was the landing in Normandy, the D day.
Nazi Germany's spheres of influence were shrinking and
it's final collapse seemed only a matter of time.
Yet, the end of the war,
in 1944 in particular, had more meat than the coming victory.
On one hand the allied forces were advancing, and
parts of Europe were gradually liberated.
On the other hand, never was Nazi Germany's drive for
total annihilation of the Jews more apparent.
Hungary was one of Nazi Germany's first and foremost important allies.
And, as such, was rewarded generously with territories belonging, before the war,
to Czechoslovakia, 1938, Romania, 1940, and Yugoslavia, 1941.
This expansion also lead to a great rise in the number of the Jews
included in its territories.
To the about half a million Jews who lived in its pre-war borders,
more than 250,000 Jews were added.
During the long years of war, this Jewish concentration, one of the largest in
Europe, was not handed over to the Germans despite some requests.
And, served as an example of Hungary's independence in maintaining
interior affairs.
Yet, Miklos Horthy, the Hungarian theorist, admiral, and ruler,
promoted radical anti-semitic legislations as early as 1938.
While racist principles were adopted,
Hungarian Jewry was slowly deprived of civil rights.
A military labor service, in which tens of thousands of Jews died,
was imposed on its able-bodied men.
>> Attila Petschauer was a great Olympic champion in Hungary.
He was of Jewish origin, and he won medals in the sabre competition in the Olympics
in the 1920s and the 1930s, and in the European Championships.
In December of 1942,
Jewish men were being drafted into forced labor units as part of the Hungarian army.
And, 45,000 of them would eventually be sent to the eastern front.
Petschauer was exempted from the draft, because he was a champion.
It happened one day that he was in the Hungarian ministry of defense,
he encountered a colonel.
The colonel came up to him and said,
you stinking Jew, and Petschauer slapped him in the face.
That wasn't so good for Petschauer.
He found himself drafted, the next morning,
into the labor units, sent to the eastern front.
On the eastern front, he was hounded.
And, as far as we know, on the day before the Soviet attack
against the Hungarians at Voronezh in January of 1943.
He was stripped naked, tied to a tree, and
they poured water on him in minus 30 degrees Centigrade.
He froze to death.
The man who ordered all this was an Olympic teammate,
by the name of Colonel Kálmán Cseh.
The story of Petschauer is the story of the forced laborers.
They were taken from labor for
the Hungarian armed forces on the Eastern front.
But this force, they were turned murderous as time went on.
They turned murderous for a number of reasons.
One of them, was because of the brutality of the front.
But, in addition to that,
it was the treatment that was meted out to them by the Hungarian staff.
Many of them hassled them, harassed them, tortured them during their work.
Performing labor that normally wouldn't be deadly, but because of their harassment,
it turned deadly.
The Jewish Hungarian forced laborers on the Eastern Front suffered at the hands of
the Hungarians to the extent that 80% of them never returned home.
As part of this story,
a number of the forced laborers felt as POWs to the Soviets.
About 16,000 of them, and near to a quarter of them never returned home.
So, there's the irony that their death rate was as great
among the Hungarians as it was among the Soviets.
Who theoretically were their saviors.
When we look at the story of the forced laborers,
there's a great deal of intimacy in what happens here.
These men were persecuted by soldiers who knew them, who spent time with them.
This is very different from the way we normally understand the Holocaust.
Because, we tend to think of Auschwitz and the Einsatzgruppen,
with its anonymous murder.
But, the truth is that this intimacy of murder is a part of the story.
It's a part of the story from 1933 through 1945, throughout Europe and
all kinds of geographic locations.
And, it's part of the story of human history,
because neighbors have always risen up against neighbors.
Think about Cain and Abel, brother against brother.
It's as old as human history itself, and
it's one of the things that ties the Holocaust into human history.
Lastly, we have to also understand that most of the forced laborers on the eastern
front that were persecuted and died at the hands of the Hungarians,
did so before the German occupation of Hungry in 1944.
Which means, this was primarily the responsibility of the Hungarians and
not of anybody else.
And therefore, their role in the Holocaust also has to be understood,
at least in part, on this background.
In addition to the men sent on the eastern front, over 50,000 forced
laborers were in Hungary, and they were never sent to the eastern front.
But, at the end of the war, many were sent to the Austrian border and there, too,
they were treated badly.
And, many of them were then brought into Austria.
There were some massacres and most of the men ended up in the Nazi camp system, and
then suffered very much.
So, the story of the Hungarian Jewish forced laborers is different from most
other things we know about in the Holocaust because of its very specific
situation.
But, it is very much tied into the general history of the Holocaust.
>> Yet, until 1944, Jews were not murdered in their masses.
And, for tens of thousands of Jewish refugees, from Poland and
Slovakia, Hungary was a true harbor.
This changed dramatically on March 19,
1944 with the German occupation of Hungary following Hortice's
hesitations to continue supporting Hitler in light of Allied victories.
In less than a month, by April 14, 1944, the experienced SS officer
Adolf Eichmann started organizing the deportation of Hungarian Jewry.
And roundups, arrests, and
concentration of the Jews throughout the country started.
Having limited manpower,
Eichmann relied on the full collaboration of the Hungarian bureaucracy.
Between May 15th and July 8th, 1944, about 430,000 of Hungarian Jews,
mainly from countryside and the annexed territories,
were deported from hundreds of transit camps and ghettos to Auschwitz.
And, even this most modern and efficient death factory couldn't keep up
with the intensive pace of deportation pouring in from Hungary.
In October 1944, Horthy was deposed by Nazi Germany for
intending to leave the Axis power and join the allies and Ferenc Szalasi.
The nationalist and racist leader of the vicious,
anti-semite Arrow Cross Party, became Hungary's ruler.
In the next few weeks,
about 100,000 Budapest Jews were constrained in a ghetto.
Tens of thousands sent to concentration and
labor camps, and thousands of Jewish men, women, and children
were murdered in the streets of Budapest, or thrown and drowned in the Danube.
Well over half a million Hungarian Jews were murdered
by the end of 1944 by Nazi Germany.
With extensive collaboration and
assistance of the Hungarian regime and its forces.
And actually, in other spheres of Nazi German influence, the advancing
allied forces only caused the Nazi murder of Fort to be more intensified.
In July 1944, Covenine, Schavely remnant ghettos were destroyed.
In July and August,
the remaining 750,000 Cluj ghetto Jews were sent to Chelmno and Auschwitz.
And on August 16,
1944 about 2,000 Jews were brought to Auschwitz from the Greek islands.
The boat, which assembled the Jews off Wadsen Coast,
stopped on the way in the tiny island of Lesvos and picked up Daniel Rahamim,
the only Jew who lived there.
With the decline of the Third Reich,
Nazi Germany's desire to murder all European Jews only intensified.
And became, for many, the most important front,
which could still be marked as his victory.
At the same time, Nazi Germany did much to destroy evidence of its crimes.
Since the end of 1943, and especially after the Jewish uprising in the Blinke
and Sobibor extermination camps, Sonderaktion, Special Action 1005,
established for this purpose, was an acting informer not high and helped
operation camps as well as in numerous killing sites all over Eastern Europe.
Jewish prisoners were forced to open mass graves,
burn what was left of buried bodies, and
to crush the remaining bones, in order to leave no signs of their atrocities.
This was an expression of Nazi Germany's tension
between the pride of murdering the Jewish people, and thus,
solving the Jewish question, and the desire to hide it.
Since even Germans understood that mass murder of millions of innocents
could not serve as a source of pride.
An example for this two-faced position can be taken from Himmler's famous speech
before senior S.S. Officers in Poznan on October the 4th, 1943.
I also want to speak to you here, in complete frankness,
of a really grave chapter.
Amongst ourselves, for once, it shall be said quite openly, but
all the same we will never speak about it in public.
I am referring here to the evacuation of the Jews,
the extermination of the Jewish People.
This is an unwritten and
never-to-be-written page of glory in our history.
Yet a secret report on German popular opinion analyzed in the first part of
the course revealed this despicable page of glory was very much known in Germany.
Moreover, David von Kiel has shown that the prevailing knowledge was
actually a clear policy in interest of the Nazi regime.
The war was turning on Germany.
Its leader made it clear that all bridges to humanity were burned
by Germany's genocidal acts.
And, that none of the Germans will be spared by the Allies.
Especially by the powerful and merciless Red Army.
This, too, contributed to the murderous act of the final stage of the war,
as well as the deadly results of the death marches, Todesmarsche.
Nazi Germany's effort to evacuate concentration camp prisoners
into the shrinking great array.
This deadly evacuation effort, which was ill planed,
had currently two main motivations.
The removal of human evidence of atrocities carried out in the camps, and
keeping the forced labor.
With some devoted Nazis still thought against all odds, and against all German
general evaluation, could serve the not-yet-defeated Nazi Germany.
As Daniel Blatman showed in his dental research,
The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide,
this became one of the signs of the end of the war, and its kills.
About 300,000 of the 700,000 prisoners held in Nazi camps in January 1945,
the height of the winter, died while being marched by foot or
transferred in open and closed cattle cars, hundreds of kilometers.
Some froze to death, and some were shot by the retreating guards.
Many starved to death in the new destinations which were not equipped
at all to receive them.
Others were murdered by local German and
Austrian population whose villages became routes for the evacuated inmates.
Not all prisoners in the Death March were Jews, yet,
as in other occasions, Jews were preferred victims.
Above their preliminary dire physical and psychological condition, many times,
they were more easily beaten to death, shot, or drowned.
And, allowing their liberation was just not grasped as possible for
the grounds, or for the population within they were marched.
Nazi Germany's drive to murder all the Jews had no limits.
And, continued even when the liberating armies were within reach.
Four weeks prior to the liberation of France, 300 Jewish children, and
their stuff, were sent to Auschwitz.
The last deportation from the Netherlands left to the east on September 3rd,
1944 with more than 1,000 Jews.
And, some of the most deadly death marches were still on the move in May 1945,
days before the Second World War in Europe ended.
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