Concept in Definition ABC

The materialization of the anti-Semitic delusions of the Nazis and their sympathizers from 1933 until the end of the Second World War, has gone down in history with the explicit name of Holocaust, a term whose translation into Hebrew is Shoah.

As Shoah or Holocaust is known the massacre of more than six million Jews perpetrated in Europe by the Third Reich with the assistance of various allied states and thousands of anti-Semites from the countries busy.

The main tool in Nazi hands to commit this atrocity, and perhaps the best known, were the concentration and death camps, but it was not the only one.

It should also be noted that if the Jewish community was the main target of the Nazism in Europe to "clean" ethnically, and according to their beliefs, the territories they were conquering, was not the only one: gypsies, Slavs, but also other human groups discriminated against for various reasons, such as homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, or political rivals such as the communists. The list is long.

However, the word Holocaust in this context is mostly used to refer to the persecution and mass murder of the Jews, speaking of the other cases as "the gypsy holocaust", or "the homosexual holocaust" to refer to the same process suffered by said collectives.

The anti-Semitic tradition was widespread throughout the West at the time.

And it dated from the early days of the assumption of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman empire by Constantine, probably as a way to shake off the persecution to which Christianity was subjected in its early days. times, and look for a scapegoat in another community, towards which to channel the anger of society in times of tension for reasons various.

Thus, Jewish communities had already suffered persecution throughout the entire middle Ages, with periods of relative calm, but which did not quench the embers of persistent anti-Semitic hatred in Western society as a whole.

The pogroms that occurred in Eastern Europe, especially in Tsarist Russia and the Dreyfus Affair in France can be paradigmatic examples of this anti-Semitic hatred in societies established at both ends of the Europe.

The young Hitler imbued himself with pan-Germanic and anti-Semitic nationalist discourse, re-founding the DAP as the NSDAP and adding a strong anti-Semitic imprint to it.

He himself had already threatened the Jewish community in his work, Mein Kampf, and his coming to power in 1933 was only going to allow him to materialize all his hatred for this community. Furthermore, the rest of the Nazi Sherifaltes were also anti-Semitic.

The prohibitions and limitations began quickly, as did the abuses towards the Jewish community, which were seen as second-class citizens in National Socialist Germany and in Reich Territories like Austria when it was incorporated in 1938.

Until then, the Austrian Jewish community had lived fairly quietly, but as of Anschluss they saw how many of those who until then had been their kind neighbors, became their torturers.

The beginning of World War II saw an escalation in the martyrdom of the Jewish community.

Especially in the east, where the Nazis fought the Jews and Slavs entering blood and fire in many towns and cities, but also in the west, where they were pursued to deport them.

Notable is the case of Denmark, where when the obligation of the Jews to wear the yellow Star of David on their chest, the next day the whole population (even King Cristián X himself) wore it on their lapels and, “mysteriously”, the entire Jewish population of the country had disappeared... Of course, this mystery is understood when it is known that the Danish resistance was dedicated to passing the Jews on ships to Sweden to save them.

Nazi ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories began with the Einsatzgruppen, some SS commandos who immediately followed the vanguards of the Reich troops, and whose mission was to "clean" the place at the same time.

These commandos belonged to the SS, and their tactics to exterminate the populations of the occupied places are among the most atrocious ever seen, ranging from mass shootings, to the burning of buildings with people inside, to digging large pits where quicklime was used to chemically burn the poor alive victims.

Some of these methods caused mental problems in their perpetrators; Killing someone, even if you consider it "subhuman" as the Nazis considered other "races", should not be easy.

Thus, the method of Einsatzgruppen it was in decline, but also because the sign of the war changed and the Axis had to go through the defensive.

In both these and subsequent actions, the Nazi criminals sought to reassure those who were going to massacre, assuring them that they were going to be resettled.

They were made to leave their belongings, which would later be preyed upon by the National Socialist regime itself to pay for war expenses or for the personal profit of their leaders.

The same was done with the populations deported to the ghettos, where they crowded together expecting a worse fate (although they did not know it).

The ghettos were a way to concentrate the Jews before taking them to concentration camps, work and extermination.

Located in the cities, they reproduced a model known since the Middle Ages: closing a neighborhood or sector by means of walls, concentrating the Jewish population there.

They only left these ghettos to go to work in factories where Jews worked in slavery for the Nazis, many times in production destined for the Axis war effort.

In them, there was a council called Judenrat, which was the governing body of the ghetto, composed of by notable Jews, and a police force who often acted violently against their own fellow citizens. Many of these agents and members of the Judenrat can be considered as collaborators, who used the violence against their own to survive the situation.

Guilty? Let us ask ourselves, each of us, what we would do in an extreme situation up to this point. It is very easy to say that we would not collaborate, but... sitting comfortably on a couch, it's easy to say. It would be nice if no one can knowingly answer this question again, but it seems that humanity has learned nothing and we continue to murder each other.

Returning to the subject at hand, the ghettos were a way of concentrating the Jewish population awaiting their transfer to a concentration and / or extermination camp.

The gigantic railway network, conscientiously used by the Nazis, was in charge of moving the Jews from the ghettos (points where all the Jewish inhabitants of a region were concentrated) to the fields.

In the camps, Jews were dispossessed of what little property they still might have. Contrary to the usual simplification that we all do, not all the camps were extermination camps, but that there were concentration, work and extermination, or those that fulfilled several functions.

In the camps, brutality increased if possible, and the Jews were systematically exterminated.

Knowing that the atrocities they had committed were crimes and were going to be punished by the victors, the Nazis tried to remove physical evidence, burning documentation and even destroying concentration camps integers.

It was because of this that General Eisenhower, commander-in-chief of the Allied forces on the European Western Front, forced both the American soldiers as well as civilians from neighboring towns to see the horrors of the Ohrdruf camp, once this was released.

The American general sensed that one day there would be individuals who would deny the holocaust, so he wanted there to be witnesses and evidence.

After six million victims in which the Jewish holocaust is estimated, to which we must add gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals and prisoners of other ethnic groups or who were there for their political positions or for resisting the occupation, would perish, indeed, today there are those who seek to deny or minimize the crimes committed there, the holocaust, the shoah in Yes.

And despite the fact that humanity seemed to conspire in the postwar period so that such barbarism would not happen again, we have seen it again, and recently. The Balkans, the war in Syria, sub-Saharan migrants held in territory Libyan...

We continue without learn of our mistakes and committing the same atrocities.

Photo: Fotolia - Volha

Themes in Shoah