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 (https://www.coursera.org/learn/holocaust-introduction-1/home/welcome). 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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The Holocaust - An Introduction (II): The Final Solution
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À partir de la leçon
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
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 Northern 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 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,
with the landing in Normandy; D-day.
Nazi Germany's spheres of influence were shrinking,
and its final collapse seemed only a matter of time.
Yet the end of the war, and 1944 in particular, had more in it
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 led 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 prewar 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 sea-less 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.
And military labour 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 the summer of 1942, Jewish men were being drafted
into forced labour 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 defence.
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 labour
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 of this was an Olympic teammate
by the name of Colonel Kalman Cseh.
The story of Petschauer is the story of the forced labourers.
They were taken to perform labour for the Hungarian armed
forces on the Eastern Front, but this forced labour turned
murderous as time went on.
It 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 labour that normally wouldn't be deadly,
but because of their harassment it turned deadly.
The Jewish Hungarian forced labourers 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 labourers
fell as POWs to the Soviets, about 16,000 of them.
And there too, a quarter of them never returned home.
So there's the irony that their death rate was as great among
Hungarians as it was among the Soviets,
who theoretically were their saviours.
When we look at the story of the forced labourers,
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 neighbours have always risen up against neighbours.
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 of the forced labourers on the Eastern Front
that were persecuted and died at the hands of the Hungarians did
so before the German occupation of Hungary of 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 to the Eastern Front,
over 50,000 forced labourers 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 them
ended up in the Nazi camp system and then suffered very much.
So the story of the Hungarian Jewish forced labourers
is different from most of the 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 harbour.
This changed dramatically, on March 19, 1944,
with the German occupation of Hungary,
following Horthy's hesitation 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 organising 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 cooperation of the Hungarian bureaucracy.
Between May 15, and July 8, 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 deportations
pouring in from Hungary.
In October, 1944, Horthy was deposed by Nazi Germany,
for intending to leave the axis powers and join the Allies,
and Ferenc Szalasi, the Nationalist and gracious leader
of the vicious anti-Semitic Arrow Cross Party,
became Hungary's ruler.
In the next few weeks, about 100,000 Budapest Jews
were constrained in the ghetto.
Tens of thousands sent to concentration and labour 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 murderer effort
to be more intensified.
In July 1944, Kovna and Shavli remnant ghettos were destroyed.
In July and August, the remaining 70,000 Lodz ghetto
Jews were sent to Chelmno and or Auschwitz.
And on August 16, 1944, about 2,000 Jews
were brought to Auschwitz from the Greek Islands.
The boat, which assembled the Jews, of Rhodes and Kos,
stopped on the way at the tiny island of Leros,
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 was 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 Treblinka and Sobibor
extermination camps, Sonderaktion, Special Action
1005 established for this purpose,
was enacted and formed in Reinhard 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 the 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 SS 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 as the secret reports on German popular opinion,
analysed in the first part of our course,
reveal this despicable page of glory was very much known
in Germany.
Moreover, David Bankier has shown that the prevailing
knowledge was actually a clear policy, and interest,
of the Nazi regime.
As the war was turning on Germany,
its leaders 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 acts
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 greater Reich.
This deadly evacuation effort, which was ill-planned,
had apparently two main motivations:
the removal of human evidence of atrocities carried out
in the camps, and keeping the forced labour,
which some devoted Nazis still thought,
against all odds and against all German generals' evaluations,
could serve the not yet defeated Nazi Germany.
As Daniel Blatman showed in his detailed research, The Death
Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide,
this became one of the signs of the end
of the war and its chaos.
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 kilometres.
Some froze to death and some were
shot by the retreating guards.
Many starved to death in their new destinations,
which were not equipped at all to receive them.
Others were murdered by local German and Austrian populations
whose villages became routes for the evacuated inmates.
Not all prisoners in the Death Marches 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 their guards
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 staff
were sent to Auschwitz.
The last deportation from the Netherlands left to the East
on September the 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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