11.9 — The Holocaust

At the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, fifteen senior officials of the German state met in a villa outside Berlin for about ninety minutes to coordinate the murder of the Jews of Europe.

The minutes survive. One copy of thirty escaped destruction and was found in 1947. They are written in bureaucratic euphemism — evacuation, the final solution of the Jewish question, appropriate treatment — and they contain a table listing the Jewish population of every European country, including Britain, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland, which Germany did not occupy.

Total: 11 million.

Most of the men in the room held doctorates.

That is the fact this chapter exists to explain. The Holocaust was not committed by a mob. It was administered by a modern state, using its civil service, its railways, its industry and its law, by educated people who went home in the evening.

The stages

It did not begin as extermination and the progression is the most important thing to understand.

Definition and exclusion, 1933–35. Boycott of Jewish businesses. Exclusion from the civil service, the professions, universities and cultural life. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 defined Jewishness by ancestry rather than by belief, stripped citizenship, and criminalised marriage and relations between Jews and other Germans.

Expropriation and violence, 1938–39. Kristallnacht, November 1938 — synagogues burned, businesses destroyed, around a hundred killed, tens of thousands sent to camps — followed by a collective fine imposed on the Jewish community for the damage. Emigration was encouraged and made financially ruinous, and other countries largely closed their doors: the Evian Conference of 1938 produced expressions of sympathy and almost no additional visas.

Ghettoisation, 1939–41. After the conquest of Poland, with its Jewish population of around three million, Jews were concentrated into sealed ghettos. The Warsaw ghetto held around 400,000 people in about 3.4 square kilometres. Rations were set at starvation level; around 80,000 people died there of hunger and disease before deportations began.

Mass shooting, from June 1941. The invasion of the Soviet Union was accompanied by Einsatzgruppen — mobile killing units following the army. They shot Jews, communists and Roma at the edges of towns, in pits, by the hundreds of thousands. Babi Yar, outside Kiev, in two days in September 1941: 33,771 people, a figure the killers recorded themselves.

Around 1.5 million people were murdered this way.

And the reason it changed is worth stating because it is not what people expect. The shooting was found to be a problem for the killers. Reports described alcoholism, breakdown and refusal among the men. Himmler witnessed a shooting and was visibly affected. The search was for a method that put distance between the person deciding and the person dying.

Industrial killing, from late 1941. Gas vans first, then fixed installations.

The Operation Reinhard camps — Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka — were not concentration camps. They were killing installations with no purpose other than murder, and almost nobody who entered them left. Treblinka killed around 900,000 people; its total survivor count is in the dozens.

Auschwitz-Birkenau combined a labour camp with a killing installation using Zyklon B, a pesticide, and had crematoria designed by a commercial firm that competed for the contract. Around 1.1 million people died there.

The numbers

Around six million Jews murdered — approximately two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe. Poland's Jewish community of over three million was reduced by about 90 percent.

And the other targeted groups, which belong in the count. Around 1.8 to 3 million non-Jewish Polish civilians. Around 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war deliberately starved (Chapter 11.7). Roma and Sinti, with estimates from 130,000 to 500,000. Around 250,000 disabled people murdered under the T4 programme — which began before the war and which developed the gassing technique and trained the personnel later used in the camps. Homosexual men, Jehovah's Witnesses, political prisoners, and Soviet and Polish forced labourers.

How it was administered

This is the section that matters most.

The railways. The Reichsbahn transported people to the camps and billed the SS at passenger rates — a reduced group rate for parties over 400, children under ten at half price, and under four free. Invoices survive. This was a commercial transaction conducted by an ordinary state enterprise.

Industry. IG Farben built a plant at Auschwitz and used camp labour. Its subsidiary produced Zyklon B. Topf and Sons designed and built the crematoria and corresponded about improving throughput. Firms competed for the contracts.

Data. The Nazi state used Hollerith punched-card machines, supplied through IBM's German subsidiary, for census and registration work that assisted in identifying Jewish populations. The extent of the American parent company's knowledge is disputed and the machines' use is not.

Property. A vast bureaucracy handled the confiscated assets — bank accounts, businesses, houses, furniture, clothing, gold from teeth. Insurance companies, banks and auction houses processed it.

And law. Every stage had a legal basis. Lawyers drafted the decrees, courts enforced them, and officials followed procedure.

Hannah Arendt's phrase, from her report on Eichmann's trial, is the banality of evil, and it is frequently misunderstood. She was not saying the crime was banal or that Eichmann was a harmless functionary. She was arguing that he appeared to act not from monstrous hatred but from careerism, thoughtlessness and an inability to think from another person's position. Later scholarship, drawing on the Sassen interviews in which Eichmann spoke freely in Argentina, shows him as considerably more ideologically committed than Arendt allowed. The wider point — that enormous crimes are executed by ordinary people doing their jobs — has held up.

And the research on the perpetrators is specific. Christopher Browning's study of Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of middle-aged German policemen, found that when offered the explicit opportunity to opt out of shooting Jewish civilians, only a small minority did. The rest complied — from conformity, from unwillingness to appear weak to comrades, and from deference to authority. They were not selected for cruelty; they were ordinary men.

What was known

More than the post-war claim of ignorance allowed.

Deportations were public. People were removed from cities in daylight, and their apartments and businesses were reallocated to neighbours.

Soldiers wrote home. Letters and photographs from the Eastern Front described shootings.

The Allies knew. Polish underground courier Jan Karski was smuggled into a ghetto and into a transit camp and reported in person to the British foreign secretary and to President Roosevelt in 1942. A joint Allied declaration in December 1942 condemned the extermination explicitly.

And little was done. The proposal to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz was rejected on the grounds that resources were better used defeating Germany. The argument continues. What is documented is that the camps were photographed by reconnaissance aircraft and that immigration quotas in the United States, Britain and elsewhere were not raised.

The ship St Louis in 1939, carrying over 900 Jewish refugees, was turned away by Cuba, the United States and Canada and returned to Europe. A substantial number of its passengers were later murdered.

Resistance

It existed and the constraints on it were severe.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, April–May 1943. A few hundred fighters with pistols and improvised explosives held out against SS forces with tanks and artillery for about a month. They knew they would die and fought to choose how.

Revolts at Treblinka and Sobibor — at Sobibor in October 1943, prisoners killed guards and several hundred escaped, of whom around fifty survived the war. The camp was closed and demolished afterwards.

The Auschwitz Sonderkommando revolt in October 1944, in which a crematorium was destroyed with explosives smuggled by women working in a munitions factory. All were killed.

Partisans, including Jewish units in the forests of Belarus and Lithuania.

And rescue. Denmark evacuated almost its entire Jewish population to Sweden by boat in October 1943 after being warned of the deportation order. Bulgaria's parliament and church refused to deport its Jewish citizens. Individuals — Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest, Chiune Sugihara issuing transit visas in Lithuania against his government's instructions, Aristides de Sousa Mendes in Bordeaux, villagers in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon — saved thousands. Around 28,000 people have been recognised as Righteous Among the Nations.

The question of why people did not resist more should be asked with the conditions in view. Starved populations, families held hostage against escape, collective reprisals in which a village was destroyed for one act, no weapons, and — above all — a deception maintained to the last moment. People were told they were being resettled and were handed soap and towels at the door of the gas chamber.

Why it matters to understand the mechanism

This chapter has avoided dwelling on horror because horror does not teach anything.

What teaches is the sequence. Definition, exclusion, expropriation, concentration, deportation, murder. Each step made the next thinkable. A population that had accepted that Jews could not be civil servants had already accepted a principle; the later steps were extensions of it.

And what teaches is the ordinariness. The railway clerk issuing tickets, the accountant processing confiscated assets, the engineer improving the ovens, the policeman who did not want to look weak. Nobody in that chain had to be a monster. A modern state can do this with the people it has.

Chapter 11.6 gave the political warning signs. This chapter gives the administrative ones, and Chapter 16.4 states the general finding: the capacity for this exists in ordinary institutions and ordinary people, and what stops it is the refusal, at each step, of enough individuals to do their part.

Where this shows up in your life

The word genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, and the Genocide Convention was adopted in 1948. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted the same year. Both are direct responses.

"Never again" has not held (Chapter 11.11).

Denial and distortion are live problems. Denial is criminal in several European countries; the argument about whether prohibition is the right response is a genuine one about free expression. Distortion — minimising, relativising, or claiming national innocence — is more common than outright denial and is currently a political issue in several countries.

And the survivors are now almost all gone. The last people with direct memory are dying, and the transition from living testimony to history is happening now, which is why the recorded testimony projects — tens of thousands of interviews — matter more each year.

What the next page covers

Chapter 11.10 is the bomb — how it was built, what the decision to use it actually involved and what the alternatives were, what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the argument about whether it ended the war, and what the world did with the discovery that it could destroy itself.