Municipal educational institution.
Secondary school №97
Scientific work
"The Holocaust is a tragedy X X century "
Completed: Student of grade 9 A
Shneidman Evgeniy
Leader: Tsilina M.A.
Nizhny Novgorod
"The Holocaust is a tragedy of the Jewish people"
I Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………………………
II "The Holocaust is a tragedy of the Jewish people."
1Anti-Jewish policy of Nazi Germany from 1931-1945 ... ....
2The beginning of World War II and the forced emigration of Jews from the Nazi Reich ………………………………………………………………………………………….
3 Implementation of the policy of genocide against the Jewish people during the Second World War
a Jewish ghetto …………………………………………………………………………………… ...
b Mass shootings and concentration camps ……………………………
4 The Jewish Resistance Movement at the time of the catastrophe ... ……… ..
a The uprising in the Warsaw and Bialystok ghettos ……………………………… ..
b Janusz Korczak - life for the sake of children ……………………………………………………… ..
5Soviet Jewry during the Holocaust ………………………………………… ..
6 The participation of the world community in the salvation of the Jewish people ..
a The Righteous Among the Nations …………………………………………………………………
b Raoul Wallenberg… ……………………………………………………………………………
III Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………………………….
IV Help desk ……………………………………………………………………………
V Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………………
V Applications
1 Glossary ……………………………………………………………… ...
2 Chronological table ………………………………………………………………… ..
INTRODUCTION
April 18 - Holocaust Remembrance Day - On this day in 1943, prisoners of the Warsaw ghetto rose up in an uprising against the Nazis. This was one of the many acts of tragedy of the Jewish people during the Second World War.
What does the word "Holocaust." Mean? Of Helen origin, it in short means a burnt offering, this is the name of the greatest tragedy of humanity in the 20th century. Without knowledge of the history of the Holocaust, the history of the 20th century as a whole cannot be understood. The writer Leonid Koval 1 said: "The Holocaust is the tip of the arrow of anti-Semitism, which has been carved over the centuries."
Why is it necessary to single out Jews among the victims - after all, Nazism killed many peoples? Elie Wiesel 2 very succinctly said about this: "Not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims of the Nazis." "Holocaust" is not the only insult in the historical series, trampling on the dignity and destruction of a person. But even in its not uniqueness, the phenomenon is exceptional. It was organized and planned with insane care, the destruction of the people carried out. Probably the only one on earth, the number of which cannot return to the 39-40 mark.
During the Holocaust of European Jewry, about 6 million Jews were exterminated. The extermination of the Jews was coded by the German bureaucracy as "the final solution to the Jewish question." European Jewry perished in ghettos, concentration camps, death marches and mass shootings.
Jews were not the only victims of extermination: more than 50 million people died during World War II. However, only Jews (as well as Gypsies) were killed just for their nationality. The extermination of Jews stemmed from the ideology of racial anti-Semitism. The Nazi regime attached such importance to the liquidation of Jews that it was ready to sacrifice military successes for this. More than 9 million Jews lived in Europe at the beginning of the war, of which three quarters - about half of world Jewry - were concentrated in Eastern Europe. Destroy them and Hitler set himself the goal.
My work is dedicated to the exploits of people who saved Jews during the years of the Nazi occupation, the courage of those who survived and the sufferings of the dead. The relevance of the topic is that now there is a revival of the swastika, representing the universe of the application, the threat of a catastrophe that ends a person within himself is again emerging.
The world of the Holocaust is also the world of Kampuchea, the world of Karabakh, the world of Saraev. The killing of man by man has regained a gigantic power that controls our existence, striving to turn the entire planet into its own field. Why Murder became at the end of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century the root point of all collisions - spiritual, moral, political, involving all other problems.
This topic is interesting to me also because the Holocaust is a tragedy of my people, a tragedy that was a closed topic for a long time, although the facts were known, but they were hidden for decades. It is necessary to bring this topic into conversation without fear of the acuteness of the questions that arise during its discussion.
Purpose of the work: To show on the example of the genocide of the Jewish people during the Second World War what national intolerance leads to. To reveal the events of the Holocaust, to show all the horrors of those days, to warn people before a big mistake that could happen again.
To expand on the topic, I use the following work tasks:
1 Organize material on the Holocaust.
2 Analyze the material on Jewish resistance.
3 Show the policy of genocide against the Jewish people carried out by the German Reich.
4 Show the lives of people in the ghetto.
When creating this work, I used various sources. The main sources for me were the Lechaim magazine, which periodically publishes information about the Holocaust (by various authors), sites on the Internet, they contain a large number of various information that helped me in my work on the abstract. I also used the book by Helena Cups, which provides detailed information about Auschwitz, and the book by Samuel Root, which contains information about the entire history of the Jewish people as a whole.
My work can be used in history lessons, electives, and Holocaust propaganda.
ANTI-JEWISH POLICY OF NAZI GERMANY
(1933-1939)
The Nazis came to power in Germany on January 30, 1933. Along with the very first measures to strengthen its power, the new regime launched an anti-Jewish campaign. It expressed itself, first of all, in the elimination of Jews from public posts, as well as in the persecution of Jews - teachers, writers, artists, musicians, journalists.
On April 1 of the same year, the Nazis boycotted Jewish shops and businesses. At the entrances to these places, there were positions of stormtroopers with placards in their hands: "Do not buy from the Jews!" The aim of the boycott is to "prove" to the German people that the Jews have mastered the German economy.
On the night of May 10, 1933, the Nazis organized a public burning in the city squares of the books of German writers of Jewish origin. Beautiful works of literature flew into the fire. And among these books were the works of Heinrich Heine, who said at one time that "those who begin with the burning of books will end up by burning people." The German press was overwhelmed by a stream of unbridled attacks against the Jews. The weekly "Sturmer" specialized in anti-Semitic slander.
In parallel, racial theory began to be introduced into school curricula.
Anti-Jewish laws were created. In early 1935, the German government began preparing comprehensive anti-Jewish legislation. On September 15, the so-called "Nuremberg Laws" were issued, depriving Jews of citizenship and relegating them to the status of subjects without political rights. On the same day, a law "on the protection of German blood and German honor" was passed, according to which marriages between "Aryans" and Jews were criminalized and extramarital intercourse between Jews and non-Jews was prohibited. As a result of the adoption of the Nuremberg Laws, race theory became an integral part of German law.
Until 1937, German Jews could still trade and own businesses. Many consoled themselves that although the Nazis deprived them of the equal rights won as a result of the struggle of many generations, a certain role in the economy still remained with them.
The aggravation of the persecution began at the end of 1936, along with preparations for the Second World War. The turning point was 1938. The Nazis began the systematic expropriation of Jewish property. Jewish organizations and institutions were deprived of any social status.
In the same year, 1938, the forced expulsion from Germany of Polish Jews, who had lived there for many years, began. Poland also did not accept them, and they were forced to wander homelessly in "no man's land" (that is, the border strip).
Among these exiles were the parents of the young man Gershl Grinshpan, who was studying in Paris at that time. Outraged by the inaction of the world community about the unprecedented expulsion of Polish Jews, he attempted the life of the adviser of the German embassy von Rath and fatally wounded him at the same time.
This shot served as a pretext for the mass Jewish pogrom of 1938 - a pogrom that took place on the night of November 10 and was known as "Kristallnacht" (due to the many fragments of glass that dotted the streets). That night, 92 Jews died, synagogues were set on fire throughout Germany, over seven thousand shops and stores were destroyed and looted. About 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, and Jews in general were fined a billion marks.
After Kristallnacht, most Jewish organizations and institutions in Germany were closed.
The surveillance of the Jews was placed in the hands of the Gestapo (secret police). The pressure on the Jews increased in order to force them to leave the country.
As a result of all these events, many of the German Jews came to the conclusion that there was no longer a place for them in Germany. A significant number of them applied to the embassies and consulates of various countries, but the closed door policy, which the United States and a number of other states resorted to, in many cases prevented their departure.
THE BEGINNING OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
On September 1, 1939, Germany attacked Poland. England and France responded by declaring war on Germany. As a result of the German "blitzkrieg" ("lightning war") Poland was defeated within three weeks and divided into three parts. The western part went to the Hitlerite Reich, the eastern part (with its large Jewish population) to the USSR, and the central part, with the cities of Warsaw, Lublin and Krakow, was turned into the German "general-governorship" (a special area under the "general control" of Germany). All this pushed people to emigrate.
During 1933, 37 thousand Jews left Germany - approximately 7.5% of the total Jewish population. They went mainly to France, Switzerland and Holland, where the economic crisis and unemployment also took place and the influence of Nazi propaganda was felt. Many Jews continued to maintain patriotic feelings towards Germany, and this was one of the reasons for the relatively low emigration.
In March 1938, Hitler's Reich carried out an "Anschluss", that is, the annexation of Austria to Germany. 200 thousand Austrian Jews were immediately subjected to all the restrictions from which their German brethren were already suffering. The Nazi Party entrusted Adolf Eichmann with the "emigration" of its Jewish population from Austria. The property of the Austrian Jews was quickly confiscated. A significant number of Jews left Austria as a result of pressure.
After the annexation of Austria, the Western European and American public became convinced that the problem of refugees, primarily Jewish refugees, would become more and more aggravated. A plan was drawn up, thanks to which it was possible to place about 7,500 Jewish children in England and 3,500 children in other Western European countries. A similar measure in the United States did not receive public support and was withdrawn from the thhkjhnmnklj agenda. It should be noted that great powers and small countries with the same indifference turned away from the persecuted Jews.
Since the Nazi occupation in Poland, a wave of arrests and pogroms began. Thousands of Jews were sent to forced labor, where they endured all kinds of torture and humiliation. The Jews were ordered to wear a white or yellow armband with the "shield of David" ("Magen-David"). Jewish shops and stores were closed, and ghetto residents were prohibited from walking the streets after curfew and from traveling on trains. Within a few weeks, Polish Jews found themselves in the same situation as the German Jews. Soon their situation became even worse. At the end of 1939, it was announced that all Polish Jews were obliged to go to the ghetto - the quarters designated for their forced settlement. The first ghetto was established in Lodz in February 1940; Warsaw Ghetto - November 1940; in 1941 ghettos were established in many other Polish cities. Most of them were surrounded by a blank wall. Initially, the Germans issued numerous permits to exit and enter the ghetto, but since October 1941, all Jews found in the city outside the ghetto were facing the death penalty under the law. At the end of the same year, the jurisdiction of the Jews to ordinary courts was abolished and they were left entirely to the mercy of the Gestapo. The Jews were effectively outlawed.
Only the smuggling of food in the ghetto saved many from starvation. Within the ghetto, the Jews created a semblance of communal life and, as far as possible, took care of providing those in need with work, food, housing and medical services. In certain forms, cultural life also existed in the ghetto.
German authorities organized councils of Jewish elders in the ghetto - "Judenrates". Through the Judenrat, the Germans transmitted their orders and instructions to the inhabitants of the ghetto. Members of the Judenrat often tried to make life easier for their fellow tribesmen in various ways. In the difficult conditions of the ghetto, their inhabitants decided to preserve their lives, at all costs, for they saw in this a great goal - to stay alive in order to preserve the existence of their people on earth. To calm the public, the German government created a special plan:
Perhaps Terezin is famous for few in the history of the Czech Republic, and he would not have entered the history of European Jews if it were not for the German fascists: in 1941 they chose him as a place for the implementation of one of the most sophisticated ideas in their cruelty. Theresienstadt, as they changed the Czech name into German, became one of the most tragic places in the history of the Holocaust. The Nazis set up a ghetto transit camp here, where they brought Jews from the Protectorate of Bohemia, Moravia and other European countries. Hitler's ideologists decided to create a "show" camp. And the Terezin ghetto was really unlike any other institution of this kind. At the direction of Eichmann, who personally supervised him, he was endowed with all the external attributes of a "free Jewish city." “Jewish self-government” (council of elders), Jewish and Christian worship, hospitals, post office, courts, libraries, banks, theaters, cabarets, lectures… Theater was especially important! It was necessary to professionally direct this "Jewish performance" in order to demonstrate to the whole world that the Fuhrer is a great humanist and cares about Jews. Especially for them, in a picturesque place 60 kilometers from Prague, so beloved and significant in the history of Jews, a city was created where they can not only work, study, pray to God, but also realize their talents! ..
By special order of Eichmann, prominent figures of art were brought to Terezin: artists, musicians, directors, actors, writers. With their help, the Germans shot propaganda films in which Jewish actors and especially children with contented faces sang songs, acted out scenes, created the appearance of the well-being that was able to convince the envoys of the International Red Cross: yes, Hitler cares about the Jews! ...
Those who refused to participate in the filming were immediately sent to Auschwitz.
Then the incredible happened in Terezin: love for art on the verge of death rallied the prisoners, accumulated in them enormous creative powers that were not subject to fear. People have lived in recent years, hours, days at the peak of creative excellence. In fact, they played their roles not so much in front of people as in the face of Heaven. And they did not cry, but laughed!
From the Terezin cabaret: “The defensive fortress was always ready to repulse the enemy, but no one encroached on it. Except for the Jews. They managed to take it by storm. But how can you get your troops out of here? .. "
Such a powerful creative Jewish life on a tiny piece of land has probably never been anywhere else. From 1941 to 1945, more than 600 performances were played, more than 100 musical works were written, thousands of drawings and paintings were created, hundreds of pages of children's illustrated magazines and adult humorous ones were published, 1000-page diaries were written, a chronicle of events and reflections, hundreds of articles, read more 2500 lectures .. People indulged in art so much that they forgot where they were. Some of the prisoners said:
“The theater replaced our real life, it became the measure of the highest freedom for which we could achieve” - Jan Fischer 3, actor in Terezin, director.
“If the actor did not come to the rehearsal, consider that he is no longer there. But everything that we did, we stubbornly connected with a certain happy future .. In Terezín it was impossible to write a tragic play and stage it.” - Ludek Eliash 4, actor Terezine, director.
Back in late March 1944, when thousands of Terezin prisoners had already been sent to the ovens of Auschwitz and Majdanek, Gogol's "The Marriage" was staged on the city's theater stage in his music cafe in the most talented, according to the recollections of the Terezin prisoners, staging by Gustav Shorsh.
Visitors to the Red Cross arrived in Terezin much later than expected (at the end of July 1944), and the Nazis “prepared well: tens of thousands of prisoners were sent to Auschwitz — the issue of overpopulation of the city was resolved.
Preparations for the meeting of the commission proceeded in accordance with all the rules of the totalitarian regime. The rehearsals for future meetings were worked out in the same way as it was done during the preparation of the trials in the USSR in 1937. That is, the details of the behavior of the "actors" and "extras" were carefully worked out to meet with the commission. In the spring of 1944, flower beds were laid out in the city, new cafes were opened - heavenly life!
Of course, with this preparation, it was not difficult to create an advertising film "A New Life for Jews under the Protection of the Third Reich." The spectators looked at smiling people - from children to old people, listened to music performed by wonderful musicians, saw exhibitions of children's drawings, posters of theatrical performances.
How could the spectators of the New Life of Jews, the inspectors of the Red Cross, know about the true rules of life in the Terezin ghetto? For example, that the Jews were forbidden to contact the SS guards, in general, the gendarmes for anything, an attempt to leave the camp territory, flight was punishable by execution on the spot. The prisoners were divided by sex: boys up to 12 years old lived with their mothers, after 12 they went to their fathers. Family life was out of the question. Men were sometimes allowed to enter the women's camp, but first they had to get a special permission from the commandant ... Just one point of the ghetto charter: "Free swimming is strictly prohibited." Not to mention walking from barracks to barracks. A small historical background.
In the 16th century, Terezín was a place of defensive significance: there was a fortress intended to protect the borders of the Habsburg Empire, and before the creation of a ghetto, there was no city on this place - only a fortress, on the territory of which there were many barracks. The fact that the city appeared here, history owes to the Nazis! ..
Foreseeing defeat and retaliation, in April-May 1945, the Nazis tried to cover their tracks. As in other camps, they killed prisoners and burned documents. Of the 150 thousand Jews of the Terezin ghetto, only a fifth survived. And from 620 performances played there - two and a half minutes of film.
OSVENTZIM.
Auschwitz was founded in the spring of 1940. There were at the same time from 25 to 30 thousand Jews from many European countries. There were eight cremation ovens in Auschwitz. But since 1944, this number was not enough. The SS men forced the prisoners to dig out collasal ditches, in which they set fire to brushwood drenched in gasoline. The corpses were thrown into these ditches, and if there was not enough gas to suffocate, people were burned alive. People were brought here continuously for four years. The first transport arrived in Auschwitz in March-April 1942 from Slovakia, then from France. So, from March 27, 1942 to September 11, 1944, 69 large and two smaller trains arrived from France alone, where there were about 69 thousand people, including 7.4 thousand children. But in those years there were compositions from other countries. On some days, 8-10 trains with prisoners arrived. All those who could not work, women, old people, children, the sick, were separated from healthy men and destroyed immediately. Here are some quotes on this topic from the book of the famous Polish researcher Helena Cups 7 “Children and Youth in the Auschwitz concentration camp: “The fate of children and youth in the Auschwitz concentration camp was especially tragic. Children were taken away from their mothers and killed in front of their eyes by the most insidious methods - a blow to the head, dumping into a burning pit. This sadism was accompanied by the terrible screams of the still living parents. " Those able to work were sent to separate barracks in the southern part of the camp. On both sides of the road, German soldiers stood up, beating everyone with whips and ramrods, often to death. In the barracks, prisoners were stripped, then they were gassed in special cells, and the corpses were burned in crematoria. The survivors were used as gratuitous labor in mines and synthetic fuel factories. The prisoners were fed very badly: once a day, water stew and 150-200 grams of bread. From overwork and hunger, people were weakened and died. Three times a week a doctor examined the prisoners, and those unable to work were sent to the gas chambers. In the past two years, male prisoners have also been killed. 90 percent of those killed in Auschwitz were Jews. Based on the total number of vehicles, the number of wagons in trains, it can be calculated that in Auschwitz alone, 1.3-1.5 million children died, brought from different European countries.
In total, about 3.5 million Jews were killed in the death camps during the war. "Operational detachments" shot about 1.5 million. About a million Jews died in ghettos, during deportations, in train cars and in transit camps (on the way to concentration camps) as a result of epidemics, hunger and all kinds of torture, as well as during non-stop "death marches" in the period before the end of the war. In addition to concentration camps, mass executions were organized.
After the German attack on the Soviet Union (June 22, 1941), the systematic and consistent extermination of the Jewish people began. The Nazis created four special groups ("Einsatzgruppen"), whose task was to exterminate "commissars, Jews and gypsies." The activities of these detachments were organized according to a certain template: upon entering any city or town, they immediately established with the help of local residents the names of the rabbis and the most famous members of the Jewish community and demanded that they collect the entire Jewish population for registration and sending to the "Jewish area ". Jews, unaware of the true designs of the Nazis, obeyed the orders of the occupiers. They were driven behind the barbed wire, the ghetto.
A document of those years, published in the small Ukrainian town of Bar, Vinnitsa region, gives an idea of what the Jews were going through then.
Decree No. 21
P. 1. Zhidovskoe population of the Barsky district from December 20 with. The city is located in isolated places (ghettos) in the cities of Bar and Yaltushkovo.
P. 2. The Zhidov population of these settlements must move to the ghetto by December 20.
P. 3. The Zhidov population of the city of Bar is located in the following parts of the city: ghetto No. 1 - former Sholem Aleichem street, the location of the former old synagogue; ghetto number 2 - former street 8 Marta, Komsomolskaya and Kooperativnaya; ghetto no. 3 is a part of the former 8 Marta street, which is adjacent to the stadium.
Note: Ghetto No. 3 is populated exclusively by artisans according to the list, which will be announced through the Jewish council.
P. 4. The ghetto for the Jewish population of the city of Yaltushkovo will be appointed by the village government of the city.
P. 5. The entire Jewish population in connection with the resettlement in the ghetto is prohibited from destroying their dwellings, which they leave.
P. 6. The Ukrainian population, who live in the places allocated for the ghetto, must vacate their premises, appear at the housing department of the district government to obtain other premises.
P. 7. I order the Housing Department to register all premises that will be vacated by the Jewish population.
Clause 8. The security organs of the city of Bar are responsible for organizing the above event ..
The shootings began. The SS men took the Jews out of the city and killed them all - men, women and children. In some places, Jews were drowned in the sea or poisoned with poisonous gases in special vehicles (gas chambers).
Here are just some of the events of those terrible years:
One of the most shocking murders was committed in September 1941 at Babi Yar near the city of Kiev - more than 33,700 Jews were killed there by the Germans in one day. In total, over 250 thousand Jews were killed in Babi Yar during the years of occupation.
During the occupation in the Nikolaev region, executions were carried out in 19 settlements and a total of 94,500 people were killed.
In Donetsk, in the pit of the 4-4bis mine, 25,000 Jewish men, women and children who were shot here found their last refuge. In the city of Artemovsk, more than 3,000 Jews were immured alive in alabaster workings.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews were exterminated by the end of this year in Dnepropetrovsk, Riga, Vilnius, Minsk and other cities.
In Belarus, which lost a quarter of its population during the war, the Nazis killed more than 800 thousand Jews.
In March 1942, "death camps" began to operate, and the Nazis demanded that the Juden-rats allocate people to be sent to these camps. The Judenrat were forced to submit, although some of their members committed suicide in protest. Under the cruel supervision of German overseers, people doomed to death were herded to assembly points. The agony of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe imprisoned in the ghetto began.
The decision to exterminate all Jews was made by the Nazi leaders back in 1941. And on January 20, 1942, a meeting of a number of leaders of the Nazi party and members of the German government apparatus was held in Berlin, at which a detailed plan for the extermination of the Jews of Europe was developed, according to which the Nazis intended to exterminate 11 million Jews. This meeting is known in history as the "Wannsee Conference". Nazi leaders urged the SS * and the Gestapo to expedite the destruction.
The deportation of Jews from the Reich and the countries of Europe enslaved by Germany to the death camps began. The largest of them were located on the territory of Poland - Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Auschwitz.
The Nazi "final solution to the Jewish question" is an unprecedented phenomenon, unparalleled even in the darkest eras of world history.
RESISTANCE AND HEROISM OF JEWS DURING THE DISASTER.
Armed resistance to the Nazi authorities was
almost impossible. Firstly, the Jews did not have weapons, and secondly, any attempt to resist would lead to massacres and the most brutal reprisals.
Nevertheless, from the early days of the ghetto, various groups of Jewish youth made repeated attempts to create underground organizations to fight the police and the German authorities. The largest in the history of Jewish resistance during World War II was the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
Part 1
Uprising in the Warsaw and Bialystok ghetto .
In January 1943, of the 450,000 Jews driven into the Warsaw ghetto, about 55,000 remained. For several years, the unfortunates were sent from the ghetto to death camps - Treblinka, Majdanek, Auschwitz, where they were exterminated in gas chambers. At the end of 1942, at the height of the mass deportation of Jews, youth movements created a number of militant organizations in the ghetto. These organizations revolted in the Warsaw ghetto.
The first clash between Jews and Nazis occurred on January 18, 1943, when one of the groups to be expelled opened fire on the guards and attempted to flee. After that, the Germans made urgent searches, to which the Jews responded with armed resistance. At the same time, the Judenrat stopped cooperating with the Germans. Then the Germans decided to completely liquidate the ghetto.
The uprising broke out on April 19, 1943, when German soldiers entered the ghetto to send another batch of Jews to extermination. They were met by rifle and machine-gun fire. Not expecting a rebuff, the Germans rushed for cover. The battle lasted three days. On the fourth day of violent resistance, the Germans had to retreat. They could not understand where the Jews got their weapons? And it accumulated gradually: by cunning, bribery and outright theft. Weapons had to be bought in Warsaw for huge sums of money and brought into the ghetto at an incredible risk. The Warsaw ghetto became a system of fortified bunkers and underground shelters, prepared in advance for a number of months. There was kept a supply of food and water, medicine and weapons. The entire civilian population, sheltered in the bunkers, helped 750 Jewish rebels led by Mordechai Anilevich (1919-1943).
The suppression of the resistance of the Warsaw ghetto was entrusted to General Jurgen Strup, who even used artillery against the insurgents. The uprising lasted a month and a half. German artillery swept house after house, block by block. The ghetto was bombed from the air, attacked with tanks. But the Jews held on. Jewish guys threw themselves with Molotov cocktails under the tanks, men from the attics of the houses that had survived fired machine guns at the SS units that were storming the ghetto. But the forces were unequal. In vain the organizers of the uprising appealed for help to the Poles, no one helped them. And the ghetto fell ..
Almost all the defenders of the ghetto were killed in the fighting, many were burned in bunkers. Of the 55,000 inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto, about 5,000 survived after the uprising. None of the rebels had any hope of holding out in the besieged ghetto, but their feat acquired the deepest symbolic meaning for the surviving Polish Jews and for the Jewish people around the world.
The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, which lasted for about a month - from April 19 to May 16, 1943, is an amazing example of heroism. This uprising is distinguished by two features: the support given to the rebels by most of the inhabitants of the ghetto and the determination of the rebels themselves to fight to the last drop of blood. The ghetto defenders resisted longer than even some European countries.
During this period, uprisings and other acts of resistance took place in the ghettos of Bialystok, Vilna, Minsk and others.
By the time the occupation began, the Jewish population in the Bialystok region was 350,000 people, of which in Bialystok itself - about 50,000.
Immediately after the capture of the city, the Germans began to pursue a policy of terror and mass murder against the Jews. The second day of the occupation's stay in the city, June 28, 1941, it was Saturday, was marked by a pogrom in which about 2,000 Jews were killed, many of them burned to death in the old synagogue set on fire by the Germans. On Thursday, July 3, and the next Saturday, July 12, round-ups were carried out in the city; the Jews then captured were later shot in Petrash, on the outskirts of Bialystok. There were more than 5,000 of them. The wives whose husbands perished on those Sabbath days were also called "Sabbath widows."
On August 1, 1941, all the Jews of the city were herded into a ghetto, which was soon transformed into a huge labor colony. The evidence of impending doom was mingled with the hope of salvation so characteristic of people. Still alive, they continued to dream of a peaceful life, a warm home, bread. Meanwhile, the Nazis were preparing to destroy the ghetto.
In 1942, 28 young activists of the Zionist-socialist movements "Dror" and "Hashomer ha-Tsair" arrived in Bialystok from blood-drenched Vilnius to create a Jewish underground and a combat-ready organization. Mordechai Tenenbaum-Tamarov, a 25-year-old Jew from Warsaw, became the leader of the group. Mordechai arrived in Vilnius at the beginning of the war and became one of the leaders of the Dror and Ha-Halutz movements there.
A handful of activists have managed to create a large and strong Tel-Hai organization in the city.
An underground "Group for Combating the German Occupation" was created. She managed to get in touch with a partisan detachment operating in the forests.
The supply of weapons for the ghetto was organized. The main source of weapons was smuggling. Weapons were bought from peasants in the surrounding villages, and sometimes even from the Germans. Undercover girls disguised as peasants or female workers transported the purchased weapons in loaves of bread, baskets of food, pipes from stove-stoves. Through the courtyard of the weaving factory, adjacent to the "Aryan" part of the city, or through the gate on the street. Sheinkevich, they carried weapons into the ghetto, being exposed to mortal danger. Sometimes it was possible to accomplish the impossible: the connected ghettos in broad daylight in an area packed with guards robbed the Germans.
In July 1943, about a month before the start of the uprising, the process of uniting youth movements ended. The communists agreed to unite with the Zionists only in the ghetto, during the joint struggle. At the end of the uprising, in the forests, in partisan detachments, they preferred to act separately.
In preparing for the uprising, they adhered to strict secrecy, the commanders used codes and ciphers. The basis of the combat groups was made up of "fives" - five trained fighters led by a commander.
On August 15, 1943, at 4 a.m., the Germans hung a notice on the walls of the houses of the ghetto stating that its residents were obliged to appear on the street by 9 a.m. Jurovetsku, from where everyone will be evacuated to Lublin. At 8 o'clock, underground activists in the streets tried to convince people that the promised resettlement would result in the death of the entire ghetto. People refused to believe it. By 2 o'clock in the afternoon, many of the soldiers were killed in battle with the Germans. The ammunition was running out. 72 soldiers, a few of the survivors, took refuge in a bunker in the courtyard of house No. 7 on st. Hmilna. On August 19, the Germans discovered a bunker, and on August 20, another, the last shelter on the street. Chepla, 13. All the defenders of the ghetto, along with their commanders, were killed.
There are known cases of uprisings even in death camps. At the end of 1943, there were Jewish uprisings in Treblinka and Sobibor. After that, both camps were liquidated. In 1944, Jewish prisoners revolted at Birkenau and Auschwitz. Almost none of the rebels survived.
In the townships of Ukraine and Belarus, some of the Jews managed to escape from the ghetto and joined the partisans who fought against the Germans. About 30 thousand Jewish partisans fought in Soviet partisan detachments
Often people lived in a ghetto for 2-3 years. This was life despite the desire of the Nazis not only to physically destroy the Jews, but also to humiliate them. Nevertheless, the prisoners fought not only to prolong their days, but also for human dignity. Many kept diaries, wrote letters and poems, composed music…. The spiritual protest filled with nobility amazed even the executioners. Many Jews helped each other, who provided food, and some substituted for the orphans for their parents, and I will tell you about one of these people:
Part 2
YANUSH KORCHAK
He is known to the world as Janusz Korczak, although at birth in 1878 in Warsaw he was named Heinrich Goldschmidt. A doctor, writer and teacher, he became a teacher in a children's colony. His pets were able to learn the delights of living nature, to feel the unity with her. The Orphanage and Our Home were founded in Poland, where chauvinism flourished, but despite this, Korczak's children's republics existed for a quarter of a century during his lifetime.
War ... It rolled inexorably across Europe, swept over Poland
and, of course, the shelter of J. Korczak did not pass. The orphans' home was transferred to the ghetto. The devoted teachers and associates of the doctor stayed with the children.
But the children lived as before, hoping for their protection by adults. And all the more difficult it was possible to hide the concern for the children, to maintain the usual routine of study, art, etc. It was difficult. There was no food in the ghetto. "The old doctor" got what he could and how he could, so that the children could exist. And he trusted only his diary with a clear understanding of the presentiment of the end: I just wanted to say - “choose your own way." crazy borders They encroached on the holy of holies - the life of children, encroached on the Future.
They tried to help Janusz Korczak. “They rented a room for him in Belyany, prepared documents,” says Korchak's employee Igor Neversh.5 Korczak looked at me so that I cringed. It was evident that he did not expect such an offer from me ... The meaning of the doctor's answer was this: you will not leave your child in misfortune, illness, danger. And then there are two hundred children. How do you leave them alone in the gas chamber? And can you survive all this? "
On August 5, 1942, by order of the Nazis, the Orphans' House was built on the street. Emanuel Ringelblum, later tortured by the Nazis, was in charge of the underground archives of the Warsaw ghetto. His story is preserved in the archives: “We were told that they are running a nursing school, pharmacies, Korczak's orphanage. The heat was terrible. I put the orphanage children at the very end of the square, against the wall. I hoped that today they will be able to be rescued ... Suddenly, an order came to withdraw the orphanage. No, I will never forget this sight! It was not an ordinary march to the carriages, it was an organized mute protest against banditry! .. A procession began, which has never happened before. Children lined up in fours. At the head - Korczak with eyes directed forward, holding two children by the hands. Even the auxiliary police stood at attention and saluted. When the Germans saw Korczak, they asked: "Who is this man?" I could not stand it any longer - tears gushed from my eyes, and I covered my face with my hands. "
There is a legend that the commandant, who was sending the death echelon to Treblinka, seeing on the unshlagplatz an orphanage built with a clear square with a banner and leadership at its head, asked the director if he had written a good book, known to him from childhood. Having received an affirmative answer, he said: "You can stay, doctor ..." J. Korczak refused. I do not believe in this legend. I don’t believe, first of all, because the person who read J. Korczak could not and cannot become a child killer, cannot help the Nazis. And that for murderers of this scale, the life of one, even from their point of view, an outstanding person! .. Janusz Korczak died in the terrible gas chambers of Treblinka along with his pets.
His books remained, pedagogical works remained. There remains a feat that has not been forgotten.
Vilnius, a city called the Lithuanian Jerusalem, for many decades before the outbreak of World War II was the focus of the glorious humanistic traditions of Jewish medicine.
During the occupation, a ghetto was created in the city.
As long as the ghetto existed, there was a continuous battle to preserve, albeit for a short time, the life and health of its inhabitants. The battle was fought by doctors and nurses - prisoners of the ghetto, themselves doomed to destruction.
Researchers now call this type of resistance "medical". What was the medical resistance in the Vilnius ghetto? The Jewish hospital continued to operate under incredibly difficult conditions. The ghetto doctors provided the patients with the greatest possible assistance. The main thing was that it was necessary to prevent the spread of mass diseases. The ghetto doctors were aware of this.
In addition to the occupants themselves, the most dangerous enemies of the inhabitants of the ghetto were the incredible overcrowding, dirt, hunger, poverty, and the threat of the spread of infections.
The ghetto prisoners themselves, risking every hour of becoming victims of yet another Nazi action, the ghetto doctors professionally and selflessly fought to preserve, or rather to save, the lives of Jews.
The sanitary-epidemiological service of the ghetto was organized. The diary of Dr. Mark Dvorzhetsky testifies to the main directions of the doctors' struggle to maintain the health of the inhabitants of the ghetto.
It was very important to provide people with good quality drinking water. For this, boiling water points (tea houses) were set up in various parts of the ghetto. Their importance can hardly be overestimated. The epidemiological situation in Vilnius was difficult. In late spring - early summer 1941, a large water epidemic of typhoid fever and dysentery spread in the city. It was possible to cope with it only by the fall. And the great merit of the ghetto doctors is that they reduced the number of infections to isolated cases.
The fight against hunger demanded constant attention. Bread, potatoes, cabbage were delivered to the ghetto in various ways, often at the risk of their lives in exchange for things, and horse meat was delivered with rare luck. Wild herbs served as a source of vitamin C. On the initiative of Dr. M. Gershovich, vitamin B was produced from the waste of brewer's yeast.
First of all, measures to combat malnutrition, alimentary dystrophy, and vitamin deficiency concerned children. Through the efforts of Dr. Rosa Shabad-Gavronskaya, a children's canteen was opened. Children received an extra piece of bread each, sweetened ersatz coffee, vegetable soups, sometimes with a piece of horse meat. Particular attention was paid to the most weakened people.
The result of the incredible overcrowding was the spread of the scabies ghetto. An anti-scab point was opened on Shpitalnaya Street, where a nurse, under the guidance of a dermatologist Liebe Holem, rubbed anti-scab agents that were obtained with great difficulty on patients. Patients' wearables and bedding were treated in a primitive disinfection chamber.
To raise the spirit, optimism of the inhabitants of the ghetto, to combat despondency and hopelessness, medical and nursing rounds were regularly undertaken. Doctors went from house to house, from apartment to apartment, from room to room, persuading exhausted, hungry people to keep clean, clean houses, courtyards, watch out for garbage cans, latrines in the yards.
Doctors turned out to be practically powerless in the fight against the growing cases of tuberculosis among adults and children. Overcoming incredible difficulties, an experienced phthisiatrician Vladimir Pochter created an anti-tuberculosis isolation ward, where he treated and consulted patients, and, if necessary, produced pneumothorax.
A common misfortune in the ghetto was lice. The threat of a typhus epidemic appeared, which meant a real possibility of liquidating the ghetto with all its inhabitants. With the utmost determination, professionalism and ingenuity, the ghetto doctors fought on this front. The fight against lice was led by epidemiologist Lazar Epstein. His faithful assistants were the doctors Goldburt, Bernstein, Gliksberg, Imenitova, Seidler, Kolodner, Kosechevsky, Smushkovich, Dvorzhetsky. They were assisted by nurses.
Having divided the territory of the ghetto into sections, the doctors during their rounds insisted that the population undergo sanitization. On Rudninku Street, thanks to the efforts of engineer Markus, a large sanitary checkpoint (a bathhouse and a dry-fire chamber) was built. In groups of 22 people, the residents of the ghetto washed themselves, and in the meantime, their clothes were disinfected. The complete sanitization procedure for one group lasted an hour. The item was valid until late in the evening.
It should be noted the ingenuity of the doctors, who created unusual forms of struggle for the sanitary welfare of the ghetto. Dr. Epstein and his colleagues organized an "open trial of lice." The streets of the ghetto were hung with posters announcing the holding of this peculiar event. In the large hall of the ghetto, filled to capacity, Dr. Epstein acted as the accuser of lice, which are carriers of the causative agent of typhus. The roles of experts who pose an epidemiological danger of lice to humans were performed by doctors Kolodner and Dvorzhetsky. Those gathered for the "trial" unanimously supported the verdict: "Lice in the ghetto must be destroyed in the death chamber." Thanks to the selfless work of the ufoz doctors, the epidemic of typhus was prevented.
The lectures of doctors on the prevention of infectious diseases were very popular among the residents of the ghetto. Through the efforts of Noemi Gordon and Abram Pinchuk, a laundry facility operating at the Jewish hospital was expanded. Now every inhabitant of the ghetto could use it.
For some time, three elementary schools, kindergartens, a gymnasium, religious schools, technical courses, and children's workshops worked. Children's health protection (within accessible limits), medical supervision over them was carried out by the school medical center under the leadership of Dr. Dvorzhetsky. At the beginning of the organization of the ghetto, there were about three thousand children under the supervision of the center. The center was able to organize several children's parties, where the children were treated to vitamin drinks. For the upcoming holidays, children prepared posters, drawings, and their own works. The ballet "Your friends - a towel, a toothbrush, soap, nail scissors" was even staged. Dr. Finkelstein, among other things, not without success was involved in the fight against the spread of children's struma.
The activity of doctors in the Vilnius ghetto was diverse. Over the years, one never ceases to be amazed at their high morale, generosity, and loyalty to the service of a doctor's duty in the harshest conditions of the ghetto.
They certainly deserve the right to remain in the tragic history of the Jewish people as heroes of medical resistance against the barbaric genocide carried out by the German occupiers.
The above material proves the courage and heroism of the Jews. And also tells about the exploits of people in relation to the Jewish people.
Chapter 5
SOVIET JEWISH IN THE YEARS OF THE DISASTER.
During the years of the Holocaust, enormous disasters caused a rise in national feelings among the Jews of the Soviet Union. The war brought about great changes in the life of Soviet Jewry. Some of the Soviet Jews fell under the rule of the Nazis and were almost completely exterminated. Another part fought in the Red Army. A significant number of Jews escaped death through evacuation and flight to unoccupied regions of the country.
Victory or death! For the Jews, this was not a propaganda slogan, but a constant internal incentive for hostilities. More than 500 thousand Jews fought on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War. 205 thousand did not return from the war, died in battle and from wounds. 160,772 Jewish soldiers were awarded orders and medals, 154 were awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. More than 55 thousand Jews - partisans - took part in the partisan movement alone, which waged an implacable struggle against the Nazis in the territories occupied by them.
Soviet military equipment became famous in the war: MIG, LAGG fighters, KV tanks, created by the creative genius of designers - Gurevich, S. Lavochkin, Zh.Kotik and others. Hundreds of thousands of Jews - men and women - under the motto "Everything for the front, everything for victory!" they worked selflessly in research institutes, in military factories, in societies for aid to the front, in hospitals and at various economic facilities. You can talk about this a lot and for a long time, but not within the limited space of a newspaper article. In conclusion, I want to note once again: World War II and its heroic component - the Great Patriotic War - is a grandiose chapter in the history of many peoples, including the Jewish people, who survived not only the Holocaust, but also smashed, together with all the anti-fascists, a hated enemy at all the fronts of the great battle.
The authorities of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the war began to encourage manifestations of Jewish solidarity, hoping that the Jews of the Western countries would support the USSR in its struggle against Germany. On April 7, 1942, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was formed, which included prominent representatives of the Jewish intelligentsia, headed by the world famous actor and director Solomon Mikhoels (1890-1948). The main task of this Committee was to organize aid to the Soviet Union from foreign Jews; however, by the very fact of its existence, it also became an organ of Jewish social activity within the country.
The catastrophe aroused national feelings even in the assimilated circles of Soviet Jewry. Many Jews, who lost all connection with the life of their people in the 1930s, re-felt their involvement in its fate.
Chapter 6
World community involvement in the salvation of the Jewish people
Part 1
The righteous among the peoples of the world
Jews, doomed to complete extermination in ghettos and death camps, were looking for a way to salvation.
Those who dared to flee needed reliable shelter and documents. Much depended on the local population. Most people were indifferent to the fate of their Jewish neighbors and took the position of outside observers. The motives for this attitude were different: fear of reprisals by the Nazis, anti-Semitism, etc. In the occupied territories of the USSR, there was no organized assistance to Jews from the anti-fascist underground. There was not a single official appeal to underground organizations or the local population with calls to provide assistance to Jewish Soviet citizens who became victims of total annihilation. Nevertheless, everywhere in the occupied territories there were people and families who, on their own initiative, devoted themselves to saving the Jews. They hid Jews who were hiding from extermination in themselves and their loved ones, provided them with documents, and provided all kinds of assistance. Many Jews were helped by the family of the priest Glagolev in Kiev, who hid Jewish families in their homes and villages with friends. Dozens of Jews were led out of the Riga ghetto and reliably sheltered by the loader Jan Lipke. In honor of such noble and selfless people, trees have been planted in the alleys of Yad Vashem, a memorial museum to the victims of the Holocaust in Jerusalem. The data on the saviors are very incomplete. In my work, I will talk about one of them.
Part 2
Feat of Raoul Wallenberg. His destiny.
The most famous person who helped Jews during the Holocaust was Raoul Wallenberg. He is credited with saving the lives of twenty to one hundred thousand Jews.
The Wallenbergs are one of the wealthiest families in Sweden, the "Rockefellers of Sweden". In July 1944, Wallenberg was sent to Hungary as a diplomat; he was entrusted with the mission of helping 200 thousand Jews who remained in Budapest; 437 thousand Jews had already been taken to Auschwitz by that time. Since Sweden was a neutral state, Wallenberg was allowed to travel almost all over the country (he had diplomatic immunity). Although Hungarian Jews who took refuge in the Swedish Embassy in Budapest could count on their refuge, only a small number of people could fit there. Therefore, Wallenberg began to acquire houses in Budapest, which he then declared inviolable Swedish property, protected by international law. In a short time, he created thirty-one such "refuge", granting Swedish citizenship to thousands of Jews.
The Nazis and their Hungarian henchmen did not know what to do: they did not want to spoil relations with Sweden and at first did not interfere with Wallenberg. He acted fearlessly, stopping trains heading to concentration camps, removed the Jews from there, declared them Swedish subjects under his diplomatic protection.
"Overworked," wrote Wallenberg's biographer John Biermann, 6 "and while caring about the fate of thousands of people, Wallenberg at the same time found time for concrete acts of kindness. All hospitals were closed for Jews. When Wallenberg heard that Tibor's wife Vandor , a young Jew who worked ... in a diplomatic mission on Tigris Street, about to give birth, he hastily sought out a doctor and brought him with a young married couple to his apartment on Ostrom Street. There he gave his bed to Agnes, his future mother, and settled down to sleep in the hallway. "
In the last days before the liberation of Budapest, Wallenberg, with the help of the Hungarians and the Jewish Council, managed to thwart the joint plan of the SS and the Hungarian Arrow Cross organization to blow up the ghetto before the impending surrender of Budapest. As a result of this act - the only one of its kind in the history of the Holocaust - about one hundred thousand Jews were saved, who were in two ghettos.
The threat to Wallenberg's life from angry Nazis grew steadily. But in the end he died at the hands of the communists. When control of Budapest passed into the hands of the Soviet authorities, the communist leaders decided that Wallenberg was an American spy (he did receive some money for his affairs from the United States War Refugee Office; this was the largest action to help save Jews from the Nazis, undertaken by America in end of the war). The Marxist worldview of the Soviet leadership did not allow one to imagine that a member of one of the richest Swedish families could risk his life to save Jews. In the entire history of mankind, hardly anyone has had to experience more injustice towards himself for his heroism than Wallenberg. He was arrested and sent to a Soviet prison. Until now, his fate is unknown. The Swedish government was shy in front of the Soviet government and did not actively discuss the fate of Wallenberg, so as not to spoil relations with its Soviet neighbor.
Initially, it was assumed that Wallenberg was killed several years after his arrest in one of the Stalinist camps. However, later, already in the 1960s-1970s, reports of a prisoner who had been released from the released Soviet political prisoners began to arrive, claiming that he was a former Swedish diplomat Wallenberg, who was involved in the rescue of Jews in Hungary. The likelihood that Wallenberg suffered in a Siberian camp for over 30 years is even more dire than the thought that soon after his arrest he was shot by Beria's executioners.
Wallenberg's most grateful adherents - the Jews he saved - were scattered all over the world after the end of the war, having neither the means nor the political influence to use them in his interests. Over time, more and more Jews occupied a prominent social position and began to actively demand clarification of Wallenberg's fate. When Tom Lantosh, one of the people saved by Wallenberg, was elected to the US House of Representatives from one of the California districts, he achieved the adoption of a bill by which Raoul Wallenberg - the only person after Winston Churchill - was granted honorary US citizenship. Lantosh hoped that the bill would give the US government more reason to actively pursue Wallenberg's fate.
Wallenberg is one of the greatest heroes of Jewish history, and his life serves as a compelling reminder that despite a long history of anti-Semitism, Jews had extraordinary friends in the gentile world.
CONCLUSION
The further from us the events of the Jewish Holocaust of 1933-1945, the more courage is required to remember the deaths of six million Jews and millions of other people killed for being gypsies or Slavs, dissidents or prisoners of war ...
Comprehending the Holocaust as a unique phenomenon, historians at the same time try to determine the role of the Jewish tragedy in the fate of mankind, to find out how such terrible atrocities could have been committed, what parallels can be seen with what happened in Germany in the middle of the twentieth century, and with what is happening today.
Comprehending the tragic experience of the past, one must return on the trail of evil, realizing that the roots of the phenomenon that led to the Jewish Holocaust have not yet been rooted out. In most countries of the world, the Holocaust is perceived not only as a tragedy for Jews who died as a result of a carefully designed and implemented plan of mass extermination, but also as a warning.
That is why in many countries of the world the day of the Warsaw ghetto uprising is celebrated as the Day of Remembrance of Jews - Victims of Nazism. That is why hundreds of centers for the study of the Holocaust have been created, museums are working.
In the civilized world, the theme of the Holocaust is universal: Jews are victims of a war, during which the Nazis and their accomplices acted as executioners. The international community is focusing on the universal human dimension in the Holocaust. Indeed, today it is especially clearly seen that in the place of the Jews any other people can turn out to be. And lessons must be learned from the total propaganda of the Nazis, under the influence of which civilized Germans turned into conductors (or silent accomplices) of misanthropic ideas. In other words, the history of the Holocaust makes people wonder about the consequences of manifestation of racism and xenophobia, because this is where the Nazis started.
Most of the victims of fascism, for example, in Germany, were not followers of Judaism at all. Assimilated for a long time, almost forgetting about their roots, or even not knowing them at all, Germans in culture and way of life, Catholics, Protestants and atheists were used as cannon fodder at the fronts and died in gas chambers only because at least a drop of Jewish blood.
All sane people understand that the "final solution to the Jewish question", the complete destruction of the Jews according to Hitler, leads to the eradication of the foundations of all religions "infected" with "Jewish" ideas, to the collapse of a civilization, incapable of progress without humanism.
Today, in many countries of the world, there are memorials, museums, research centers that set themselves the goal of perpetuating the memory of the victims of the Nazi genocide. A research center "Holocaust" has been established in our country, which is studying the history of the catastrophe that befell the Jewish people half a century ago.
In my work, I talked about the main points of the Holocaust (concentration camps, ghettos, about resistance, about people's courage). When creating a work, I opened for many new moments that I did not even know about before. While searching for material, I got the skill of working with literature, boarding school and with the media. I would like to continue working on this abstract and expand the main part a lot.
I would like my work to evoke sympathy for the affected people and respect for the people who managed to achieve this Great Victory.
REFERENCE DEVICE
1 Samuel Ruth "Along the Paths of Jewish History." Publishing Library-Aliya 1991 122s.
2 Vladimir Poznansky "Everyone Should Know About the Holocaust"
in the magazine "Lechaim" No. 1 2001 p.12
3 Website on the Internet www.HOLOKOST.ru
4 Website on the Internet www.HOLOKOST.ru p.45
6 Website on the Internet www.HOLOKOST.ru p.24
7 Helena Cup "Children and Youth in Auschwitz" on the website www.HOLOCOST.ru
BIBLIOGRAPHY
2 Velikovskaya Irina "Chronicle of the Bialystok ghetto" in the magazine "Lechaim"
3Vestermanis Marger "Motives of Jewish identity in the poetry of the Holocaust in Latvia" in the magazine "Lechaim" No. 5 May 2000
4Vladimir Poznansky "Everyone should know about the Holocaust" "in the magazine" Lechaim "No. 1 January 2001
7Zak Mikhail "Medical resistance of the Vilnius ghetto" in
9SM Lokshina "Dictionary of Foreign Words" "Soviet Encyclopedia" Moscow 1968
10 Ruth Samuels, Along the Paths of Jewish History, ed. Library - Aliya 1991
11 Website on the Internet www.HOLOKOST.ru
13 Helena Cups "Children and youth in the Auschwitz concentration camp" on the Internet site www.HOLOKOST.ru
TERMINOLOGICAL DICTIONARY:
Anti-semitism- one of the extreme forms of racial chauvinism, inciting hatred towards Jews.
Genocide- the destruction of certain groups of the population on racial, ethnic grounds - the gravest crime against humanity.
Ghetto- a quarter, a city area, set aside for the forced settlement of people of a certain race, nationality, religion, were most often created for Jews.
Gestapo- the secret state police in Nazi Germany, carried out mass terror, both in Germany itself and in the countries occupied by the Nazis.
Xenophobia- obsessive fear of an unfamiliar face.
Concentration camp- created after the establishment of the dictatorship in Germany (1933) with the aim of isolating and suppressing opponents of the fascist regime. In 1938-39 the system of K.L. was distributed in the occupied territories and turned into an instrument of repression and genocide against Jews.
Nazism- German fascism
SS- "security detachments", one of the main pillars of the fascist regime. This organization has existed independently since 1934 and was the main conductor of mass terror in Germany and the occupied territories.
Totalitarian regime- based on an open terrorist dictatorship of the imperialists, fascist.
Fascism- the most reactionary political trend, expressing the interests of the most aggressive circles of the imperialist bourgeoisie, openly terrorist dictatorship of monopoly capital, for fascism, fascists - extreme chauvinism, racism, anti-communism, the destruction of democratic freedoms, the unleashing of wars of conquest are characteristic.
The holocaust(burnt offering) - the policy carried out by Germany in relation to the Jewish people in 1933-1945
Chauvinism- an extremely aggressive form of nationalism.
Bill- bill.
Chronology of events:
"Al Hayat" on Iraqi emigration
"Tageszeitung" on the problem of second wives of Muslim refugees
"Nezavisimaya gazeta" about genocide and Holocaust
"Rossiyskaya Gazeta" about foreign students in St. Petersburg
The Wall Street Journal on Endangered Languages
"Newspaper" about "untouchables" in Japan
"Rossiyskaya Gazeta" about foreign compatriots
"Literaturnaya gazeta" about compatriots and the law "On repatriation"
Izvestia on the ethnic composition of the population of Russia and Moscow
"Rossiyskaya Gazeta" about the census and the Cossacks
"Vremya novostei" about social reforms in Russia
Izvestia on the problem of poverty in Russia
Izvestia about male reproductive health
"Rossiyskaya Gazeta" about the health of Russian conscripts
"Rossiyskaya Gazeta" on drug crime and the fight against it
... about genocide and the Holocaust
The extermination of Jews by the Nazis and its interpretation played a special role in the shaping of the modern world
For many years, there has been debate over whether the Holocaust - the extermination of the Jewish people during World War II - can be viewed as a unique phenomenon that goes beyond the concept of "genocide", or whether the Holocaust fits into a number of other well-known genocides in history. The most detailed and productive discussion on this issue, called Historikerstreit ("dispute between historians"), unfolded among German scientists in the mid-1980s and played an important role in further research.
Although the main topic of discussion was the nature of Nazism itself, the problems of the Holocaust and Auschwitz, for obvious reasons, took a key place in it. In the course of the discussion, two directions emerged that defended opposite theses. Supporters of the "nationalist-conservative trend" ("nationalists") - Ernst Nolte and his followers such as Andreas Hilgruber and Klaus Hildebrand - believe that the Holocaust was not unique and can be placed on a par with other disasters of the 20th century. for example, the Armenian genocide of 1915-1916, the Vietnam War and even the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The "left-liberal trend" ("internationalists") was represented primarily by the famous German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. The latter argued that anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in German history and in the psychology of Germans, from where the special specificity of the Holocaust stems, closed on Nazism and only on him. Later, the American historian Charles Mayer formulated three main substantive characteristics of the Holocaust that were identified during the discussion and became the subject of a dispute between the parties: singularity, comparability, and identity. As a matter of fact, it was the characteristic of singularity (uniqueness, uniqueness) that became a stumbling block in the subsequent discussion.
The subjectivity of pain and the language of science
First of all, it should be noted that the topic of the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust is extremely delicate. The "painful center" of this topic lies in the fact that when considering it, the language of memory and evidence collides with the academic language, as defined by the French researcher Paul Zawadsky. Seen from the inside of Jewry, the experience of the Holocaust is an absolute tragedy: since all suffering is yours personally, it is absolutized, made unique and forms the identity of Jewry. “If I take off ... the 'sociologist's cap' in order to remain only a Jew, whose family was destroyed during the war, then there can be no talk of any relativism, - says Zavadsky. - ... The internal logic of the identification process pushes into side of emphasizing uniqueness ".
It is no coincidence that any other use of the word "Holocaust", for example, in the plural ("Holocaust") or in relation to another genocide, usually causes a painful reaction in the Jewish environment. Comparison of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia with the Holocaust, comparison of Milosevic with Hitler, extended interpretation of the charges in the Klaus Barbier case at the 1987 trial in France as "crimes against humanity", when the genocide of Jews was considered only one of the crimes, and not a unique crime , caused strong protests from the Jewish community. To this can be added the recent controversy over the seizure of the crosses at Auschwitz self-willedly erected by Polish nationalist Catholics, when the question was debated whether Auschwitz should be viewed solely as a place and symbol of Jewish suffering, although it also became the site of the death of hundreds of thousands of Poles and people of other nationalities.
In other words, any comparisons, invading the area of individual and collective memory of Jews, inevitably reduce the pathos of the exclusivity of Jewish suffering. At the same time, the Holocaust loses its specific content and is viewed as one of the many genocides, or it acquires a "universal" dimension. The logical development of the deconcretization of the Holocaust is to deprive it of even the signs of genocide itself, when the "Holocaust" is transformed into the most general model of oppression and social injustice. For example, the author of the play about Auschwitz, the German playwright Peter Weiss, declared: "I identify myself with the Jews no more than with the Vietnamese or South African blacks. I simply identify myself with the oppressed all over the world."
In the grip of contradictions
On the other hand, the Holocaust is a historical and social phenomenon, and as such it naturally claims to be analyzed in a broader context than just at the level of memory and testimony of the Jewish people, in particular at the academic level. The very need to study the Holocaust as a historical phenomenon just as inevitably forces us to operate in an academic language, and the logic of historical research pushes towards comparativeism. But it is immediately revealed that the very choice of comparative analysis as a tool of academic research ultimately undermines the idea of the Holocaust's "uniqueness" in its social and ethical significance.
Even a simple logical reasoning proceeding from the assumption of the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust, in fact, leads to the destruction of the current ideas about the historical role of the Holocaust for humanity. Indeed, the content of the historical lesson of the Holocaust has long gone beyond the historical fact of the Jewish genocide: it is no coincidence that in many countries of the world it is the study of the Holocaust that has been introduced into the school curriculum as an attempt to foster national and religious tolerance. The main conclusion from the Holocaust lesson is: "This (ie the Holocaust) must not happen again!" However, if the Holocaust is "unique", i.e. is single, unique, then there can be no talk of any repetition of it from the outset, and this important conclusion becomes meaningless: the Holocaust then cannot be a "lesson" by definition; or it is a "lesson", but then it is comparable with other events of the past and present. As a result, it remains either to reformulate the idea of "uniqueness", or to abandon it.
Thus, to a certain extent, the very formulation of the problem of the Holocaust's "uniqueness" at the academic level is provocative. But the development of this problem also leads to certain logical inconsistencies. Indeed, what are the implications of recognizing the Holocaust as "unique"? The most famous scientist defending the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust, professor from the United States Stephen Katz, formulated the answer to this question in one of his books: "The Holocaust highlights Nazism, and not vice versa." At first glance, the answer is convincing: Holocaust research reveals the essence of such a monstrous phenomenon as Nazism. However, you can pay attention to something else: the Holocaust turns out to be directly closed on Nazism. And then the question literally begs itself - is it possible at all to consider the Holocaust as an independent phenomenon outside the discussion of the essence of Nazism? In a slightly different form, such a question was asked to Katz, puzzling him: "What if a person is not interested in Nazism, Professor Katz?"
With all that has been said, we will nevertheless take the liberty of expressing some considerations regarding the uniqueness of the Holocaust, strictly within the framework of an academic approach.
Analogies are inevitable
So, one of the well-known theses of modern academic science dealing with the Holocaust research is that the tragedy of the Jews bears the common features of other genocides, but also has such characteristics that make this genocide not only special, but still unique. exceptional, one of a kind. The three main characteristics of the Holocaust that define its "uniqueness" are usually cited as follows:
1. Object and purpose. Unlike all other genocides, the goal of the Nazis was the total destruction of the Jewish people as an ethnos.
2. Scale. In four years, 6 million Jews were exterminated - a third of the entire Jewish people. Humanity has never known a genocide of this magnitude.
3. Means. For the first time in history, the mass extermination of Jews was carried out by industrial means, with the involvement of modern technologies.
These characteristics in their totality, according to a number of authors, determine the uniqueness of the Holocaust. But an impartial study of the comparative calculations, in our opinion, is not a convincing confirmation of the thesis about the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust.
So, let's consider all three characteristics in sequence:
a) Object and purpose of the Holocaust. According to Professor Katz, "The Holocaust is phenomenologically unique due to the fact that never before was the task, as a matter of deliberate principle and actualized policy, the physical destruction of every man, woman and child belonging to a particular nation".
The essence of this statement is as follows: before the Nazis, who sought to make the world Judenrein ("clean of Jews"), no one ever intended to deliberately destroy any nation entirely. The assertion seems dubious. Since ancient times, there has been a practice of complete elimination of national groups, in particular, during wars of conquest and inter-tribal clashes. This task was solved in different ways: for example, by violent assimilation, but also by the complete destruction of such a group - which was reflected already in the ancient biblical stories, in particular in the stories of the conquest of Canaan (Isa. Josh. 6:20; 7: 9; 10: 39-40).
Already in our time, in inter-tribal clashes one or another national group is cut out without exception, as, for example, in Burundi, when in the mid-90s of the twentieth century, up to half a million representatives of the Tutsi ethnic group were massacred in the course of the genocide. It is obvious that in any interethnic clashes they kill precisely because they belong to the people participating in such a clash.
Another important circumstance, which is often referred to by the defenders of the "uniqueness of the Holocaust," is that the Nazi policy of physically exterminating all Jews was essentially devoid of a rational basis and was reduced to the religiously motivated total murder of Jews. One could agree with this point of view, if not for one serious "but": modern historians have to argue about facts that clearly do not fit into the concept. It is well known, for example, that when big money came in, they interrupted the Nazis' passion for murder. Quite a large number of wealthy Jews were able to escape from Nazi Germany before the outbreak of the war. At the end of the war, part of the Nazi elite was actively looking for contacts with the Western allies for their own salvation, and the Jews became an object of bargaining, and all religious fervor faded into the background. When Goebbels' party associates called him to account for the multimillion-dollar bribes, thanks to which the rich Jewish Bernheimer family was released from the concentration camp, the Reich propaganda minister, in the presence of Hitler, uttered his famous and quite cynical phrase: "Wer Jude ist, bestimme nur ich!" ("Who is a Jew, only I can determine!") The dissertation of the American Jew Brian Rigg caused a lively controversy. they were held in high positions. And although a number of such facts were known to the high command of the Wehrmacht, for various reasons it was hidden. Finally, the striking fact of the participation of 350 Finnish Jewish officers in the war with the USSR as part of the Finnish army - Hitler's ally, when three Jewish officers were awarded the Iron Cross (and refused to receive it), and a military field synagogue was operating on the Finnish side of the front (! ). All these facts do not diminish the enormity of the Nazi regime, but they make the picture not so unequivocally irrational.
b) The scale of the Holocaust. The number of Jewish victims of Nazism is truly amazing. Although the exact death toll is still a matter of debate, the historical science has established a figure close to 6 million people, i.e. a third of the entire Jewish population of the world and about half of European Jewry perished. However, in a historical retrospective, one can find events that are quite comparable to the Holocaust in terms of the scale of the victims. So, Professor Katz himself cites figures according to which during the colonization of North America by the middle of the 16th century, 7/8 of 80-112 million American Indians died, i.e. 70 to 88 million Katz admits: "If only numbers constitute uniqueness, then the Jewish experience under Hitler was not unique."
The genocide of the Armenians, considered the first genocide of the twentieth century, is similar to the Holocaust in scale. According to the British Encyclopedia, from 1915 to 1923, from 600 thousand to 1250 thousand Armenians died, i.e. from one third to almost 3/4 of the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, which by 1915 amounted to 1,750,000 people. Estimates of the number of victims among Roma during the Nazi period range from 250 thousand to half a million people, and such a respectable source as the French encyclopedia Universalis considers the figure of half a million to be the most modest. In this case, we can talk about the death of up to half of the Roma population of Europe.
Moreover, in fact, in Jewish history, there have been events that, in terms of the scale of the victims, are quite close to the Holocaust. Unfortunately, any figures related to the pogroms of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the New Age, in particular to the Jewish pogroms perpetrated by the Khmelnitsky Cossacks, are extremely approximate and are often considered overstated. However, even according to modern estimates, in the years 1648-1658, from a quarter to a third of Polish Jews, at that time the largest Jewish community in the world, could have perished.
c) "Manufacturability" of the Jewish genocide. Such a characteristic can only be determined by specific historical conditions. For example, in the battle of Ypres in the spring of 1915, Germany first used chemical weapons and the Anglo-French troops suffered heavy losses. Can we say that in this case, for the beginning of the 20th century, weapons of destruction were less technologically advanced than gas chambers? Of course, the difference here lies in the fact that in one case they destroyed the enemy on the battlefield, and in the other - defenseless people. But in both cases, people were "technologically" destroyed, and in the battle of Ypres, the weapons of mass destruction used for the first time also made the enemy defenseless. And during the Middle Ages, several thousand "witches", before being burned at the stake on charges of witchcraft, were tortured using the most advanced technological methods of that time, and many died during these tortures. Anyone who has visited the Museum of Torture in Amsterdam can appreciate the monstrous sophistication and technological sophistication of the executioners in complete peace. How, in fact, are these torture machines inferior to gas chambers? But the idea of creating a neutron and genetic weapon that kills a huge number of people with a minimum of other destruction is still being discussed. Let's imagine for a second that this weapon (God forbid) will ever be used. Then the "manufacturability" of the murder will be recognized even higher than during the Nazi period. As a result, in practice, this criterion also turns out to be quite artificial.
Civilization after Auschwitz
So, each of the arguments taken separately turns out to be not very convincing. Therefore, as evidence, they speak of the uniqueness of the listed factors of the Holocaust in their totality (when, according to Katz, "how" and "what" is balanced by "why"). To some extent, this approach is fair, since it creates a more voluminous vision, but nevertheless, we can talk here more about the amazing atrocities of the Nazis than about the radical difference between the Holocaust and other genocides.
Nevertheless, we are convinced that the Holocaust has a special and truly unique, in the full sense of the word, meaning in world history. Only the characteristics of this uniqueness should be sought in other circumstances, which are no longer categories of purpose, instrumentation and magnitude (scale). A detailed analysis of these characteristics deserves a separate study, so we will only briefly formulate them:
1. The Holocaust became the final event, the apotheosis, the logical culmination of a series of persecutions and catastrophes throughout the history of the Jewish people. No other nation has known such ongoing persecution for almost 2 thousand years. In other words, all other, non-Jewish, genocides were of a separate nature, in contrast to the Holocaust as a successive phenomenon.
2. The genocide of the Jewish people was carried out by a civilization that to a certain extent grew on Jewish ethical and religious values and, to one degree or another, recognized these values as their own ("Judeo-Christian civilization", according to the traditional definition). In other words, the fact of self-destruction of the foundations of civilization is evident. And here, as the destroyer appears not so much the Hitlerite Reich itself with its racist-semi-pagan-semi-Christian religious ideology (after all, Hitlerite Germany never renounced its Christian identity, albeit a special, "Aryan" sense), as the Christian world in in general, the centuries-old anti-Judaism of which greatly contributed to the emergence of Nazism. All other genocides in history did not have such a self-destructive character for civilization.
3. The Holocaust to a large extent turned the consciousness of civilization and determined its further development path, in which persecution on racial and religious grounds is declared unacceptable. For all the complex and sometimes tragic picture of the modern world, the intolerance of civilized states towards manifestations of chauvinism and racism was largely due to the understanding of the results of the Holocaust.
Thus, the uniqueness of the Holocaust phenomenon is determined not by the characteristic features of the Hitlerite genocide as such, but by the place and role of the Holocaust in the world historical and spiritual process.
For many years, there has been debate over whether the extermination of the Jewish people during World War II can be regarded as a special phenomenon, going beyond the concept of "genocide", or whether the Holocaust fits into a number of other well-known genocides in history. The most productive discussion on this issue took place among German scientists in the mid-1980s. She played an important role in further research.
Although the main topic of discussion was the nature of Nazism itself, the problems of the Holocaust and Auschwitz, for obvious reasons, took a key place in it. In the course of the discussion, two directions emerged that defended opposite theses. Supporters of the "nationalist-conservative direction" ("nationalists") believe that the Holocaust was not a "unique" phenomenon and can be placed on a par with other disasters of the 20th century, for example, the Armenian genocide of 1915-1916, the Vietnam War and even the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Representatives of the "left-liberal direction" argue that anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in German history and in the psychology of Germans, from which comes the special specificity of the Holocaust, closed on Nazism and only on it. As a matter of fact, it was the characteristic of singularity (“uniqueness”), uniqueness that became a stumbling block in the subsequent discussion.
THE SUBJECTIVITY OF PAIN AND THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE
First of all, it should be noted that the topic of the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust is extremely delicate. Viewed from the inside of Jewry, the experience of the Holocaust is an absolute tragedy, since all suffering is yours personally, it is absolutized, made unique and forms the identity of Jewry. It is no accident that any other use of the word "Holocaust", for example, in the plural ("Holocaust") or in relation to another genocide, usually causes a painful reaction in the Jewish environment. Comparison of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia with the Holocaust, comparison of Milosevic with Hitler, extended interpretation of the accusation in the Lyon butcher Klaus Barbier at the 1987 trial in France as a “crime against humanity”, when the genocide of the Jews was considered only one of the crimes, and not as a crime unparalleled, they provoked strong protests from the Jewish community. To this can be added the recent controversy over the seizure of the crosses at Auschwitz self-willedly erected by Polish nationalist Catholics, when the question was debated whether Auschwitz should be viewed solely as a place and symbol of Jewish suffering, although it also became the site of the death of hundreds of thousands of Poles and people of other nationalities.
In other words, any comparisons, invading the area of individual and collective memory of Jews, inevitably reduce the pathos of the exclusivity of Jewish suffering. At the same time, the Holocaust loses its specific content and is viewed as one of many genocides, or it acquires a “universal” dimension. The logical development of the deconcretization of the Holocaust is to deprive it of even the signs of genocide itself, when the “Holocaust” is transformed into the most general model of oppression and social injustice.
IN THE VISE OF CONTRADICTIONS
On the other hand, the Holocaust is a historical and social phenomenon, and as such it naturally claims to be analyzed in a broader context than just at the level of memory and testimony of the Jewish people - in particular, at the academic level. The very need to study the Holocaust as a historical phenomenon just as inevitably forces us to operate in an academic language, and the logic of historical research pushes towards comparativeism. But it is immediately revealed that the very choice of comparative analysis as a tool of academic research ultimately undermines the idea of the Holocaust's “uniqueness” in its social and ethical significance.
Even a simple logical reasoning proceeding from the assumption of the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust, in fact, leads to the destruction of the current ideas about its historical role for all mankind. Indeed, the content of the historical lesson of the Holocaust has long gone beyond the historical fact of the Jewish genocide: it is no coincidence that in many countries of the world it is the study of the Holocaust that has been introduced into the school curriculum as an attempt to foster national and religious tolerance. The main conclusion from the lesson of the Holocaust is: "This (ie the Holocaust) must not happen again!" However, if the Holocaust is "unique", i.e. is single, unique, then there can be no talk of any repetition of it initially, and this important conclusion becomes meaningless: the Holocaust then cannot be a "lesson" by definition; or it is a "lesson" - but then it can be compared with other events of the past and present. As a result, it remains either to reformulate the idea of "uniqueness", or to abandon it.
Thus, the very posing of the problem of the Holocaust's “uniqueness” at the academic level is provocative to a certain extent. But the development of this problem also leads to certain logical inconsistencies. Indeed, what are the implications of recognizing the Holocaust as “unique”? The most famous scientist who defends the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust, professor from the United States Stephen Katz formulated the answer to this question in one of his books: "The Holocaust highlights Nazism, and not vice versa." At first glance, the answer is convincing: Holocaust research reveals the essence of such a monstrous phenomenon as Nazism. However, you can pay attention to something else: the Holocaust, thus, turns out to be directly closed on Nazism. And then the question literally begs itself - is it possible at all to consider the Holocaust as an independent phenomenon outside the discussion of the essence of Nazism?
In view of the above, I will take the liberty of expressing some considerations regarding the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust, strictly within the framework of an academic approach.
ANALOGIES ARE INEVITABLE
So, one of the well-known theses of modern academic science dealing with the Holocaust research is that the tragedy of the Jews carries common signs of other genocides and possesses such characteristics that make this genocide not just special, but unique, exclusive, unique in its kind. The three main characteristics of the Holocaust that determine its "uniqueness" are usually cited as follows:
1. Object and purpose. Unlike all other genocides, the goal of the Nazis was the total destruction of the Jewish people as an ethnos.
2. Scale. In four years, 6 million Jews were exterminated - two-thirds of the entire Jewish people. Humanity has never known a genocide of this magnitude.
3. Means. For the first time in history, the mass extermination of Jews was carried out by industrial means, with the involvement of modern technologies.
These characteristics taken together, according to a number of authors, determine the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust. But an impartial study of the comparative calculations, in our opinion, is not a convincing confirmation of the thesis about the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust.
So, let's consider all three characteristics in sequence:
a) Object and purpose of the Holocaust. According to Professor Katz, "The Holocaust is" unique "due to the fact that never before was the task - as a matter of deliberate principle and actualized policy - the physical destruction of every man, woman and child belonging to a particular people."
The essence of this statement is as follows: before the Nazis, who sought to make the world "clean of Jews", no one ever intended to deliberately destroy any nation entirely. The assertion seems dubious. Since ancient times, there has been a practice of complete elimination of national groups, in particular, during wars of conquest and inter-tribal clashes. This task was solved in different ways: for example, by violent assimilation, but also by the complete destruction of such a group - which was reflected already in the ancient biblical stories, in particular, in the stories of the conquest of Canaan (Isa. Josh. 6:20; 7: 9; 10 : 39-40).
Another important circumstance often referred to by the defenders of the "uniqueness of the Holocaust" is that the Nazi policy aimed at the physical extermination of all Jews was essentially devoid of a rational basis and boiled down to the religiously motivated total murder of Jews. One could agree with this point of view, if not for one serious "but". It is well known, for example, that when big money came in, it stifled the Nazis' passion for murder. Quite a large number of wealthy Jews were able to escape from Nazi Germany before the outbreak of the war. At the end of the war, part of the Nazi elite was actively looking for contacts with the Western allies for their own salvation, and the Jews became an object of bargaining, and all religious fervor faded into the background. These facts do not in any way diminish the enormity of the Nazi regime, but they make the picture less unequivocally irrational.
b) The scale of the Holocaust. The number of Jewish victims of Nazism is truly amazing. Although the exact death toll is still a matter of debate, the historical science has established a figure close to 6 million people, i.e. about two-thirds of European Jewry. However, in a historical retrospective, one can find events that are quite comparable to the Holocaust in terms of the scale of the victims. Thus, Professor Katz himself cites figures according to which during the colonization of North America by the middle of the 16th century, 7/8 of 80-110 million American Indians died, i.e. 70 to 88 million. Stephen Katz admits: "If only numbers constitute uniqueness, then the Jewish experience under Hitler was not unique."
The genocide of the Armenians, considered the first genocide of the 20th century, is similar to the Holocaust in scale. According to the British Encyclopedia, from 1915 to 1923, from 600 thousand to 1.250 thousand Armenians died, i.e. from one third to almost 3/4 of the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, which by 1915 amounted to 1 million 750 thousand people.
c) "Manufacturability" of the Jewish genocide. Such a characteristic can only be determined by specific historical conditions. For example, in the battle of Ypres in the spring of 1915, Germany first used chemical weapons, and the Anglo-French troops suffered heavy losses. Can we say that in this case, for the beginning of the 20th century, weapons of destruction were less technologically advanced than gas chambers? Of course, the difference here lies in the fact that in one case they destroyed the enemy on the battlefield, and in the other - defenseless people. But in both cases, people were “technologically” destroyed, and in the battle of Ypres, the weapons of mass destruction used for the first time also made the enemy defenseless. As a result, in practice, this criterion also turns out to be quite artificial.
CIVILIZATION AFTER AUSTRALIA
So, each of the arguments taken separately turns out to be not very convincing. Therefore, as evidence, they speak of the uniqueness of the listed factors of the Holocaust in their totality (when, according to Katz, “how” and “what” are balanced by the “why”). To some extent, this approach is fair, since it creates a more voluminous vision, but nevertheless, we can talk here more about the amazing atrocities of the Nazis than about the radical difference between the Holocaust and other genocides.
But, nevertheless, the Holocaust has a special and truly unique, in the full sense of the word, meaning in world history. Only the characteristics of this uniqueness should be sought in other circumstances, which are no longer categories of purpose, instrumentation and magnitude (scale).
A detailed analysis of these characteristics deserves a separate study, so we will only briefly formulate them.
1. The Holocaust became the final event, the apotheosis, the logical culmination of a series of persecutions and catastrophes throughout the history of the Jewish people. No other nation has known such ongoing persecution for nearly 2,000 years. In other words, all other, non-Jewish, genocides were of a separate nature, in contrast to the Holocaust as a successive phenomenon.
2. The genocide of the Jewish people was carried out by a civilization that, to a certain extent, grew on Jewish ethical and religious values and, to one degree or another, recognized these values as its own ("Judeo-Christian civilization", according to the traditional definition). In other words, the fact of self-destruction of the foundations of civilization is evident. And here the destroyer is not so much the Hitlerite Reich itself with its racist semi-pagan-semi-Christian religious ideology (after all, Hitlerite Germany never renounced its Christian identity, albeit a special, "Aryan" sense), as the Christian world as a whole , whose centuries-old anti-Judaism greatly contributed to the emergence of Nazism. All other genocides in history did not have such a self-destructive character for civilization.
3. The Holocaust to a large extent turned the consciousness of civilization and determined its further development path, in which persecution on racial and religious grounds is declared unacceptable. Despite the complex and sometimes tragic picture of the modern world, the intolerance of civilized states towards manifestations of chauvinism and racism was largely due to the understanding of the results of the Holocaust.
Thus, the uniqueness of the Holocaust phenomenon is determined not by the characteristic features of the Hitlerite genocide as such, but by the place and role of the Holocaust in the world historical and spiritual process.
Yuri Tabak - historian, translator, publicist
Abbreviated
News of the Week, Israel
When 193,000 of the Holocaust survivors survived in Israel, out of the half million who returned to the country after World War II, their grandchildren decided to start this custom, the goal of which is to prevent the greatest catastrophe in human history from being forgotten. Some also supported another custom - with the help of tattoos they imprinted numbers on their hands that were assigned to their relatives in Auschwitz.
Yesterday, on the day of commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust, we went into several houses in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and saw tears in the eyes of people. But we also happened to hear several stories that brought a smile to the faces of the storytellers.
Gaby Hartman found the war in Budapest as a small child. He told how he hid in a wardrobe for many months, and said that the strongest memories for him were not the deportation of his family to Auschwitz, but hunger: “It was terrible, he did not let me sleep, did not let me breathe. And so now I can't even hear about diets. " Hugging his wife, Eve, he adds: “I never let her keep the refrigerator empty. This is my mania now. "
Gabi and Eve met after the war and decided never to part and start a new life in Israel. Their stories are similar to the stories of many couples who survived the Shoah hell and lost their loved ones in its fire. Their love was born on a land that Eve said was drenched in tears, and here, without ceremony, celebration or rabbis, they began a new life.
In another Jerusalem house, 94-year-old Gerta Natovich and her 95-year-old husband, Moses, opened the doors for us. They told us that they had met before the war in Poland, but in the summer of 1942 their families were sent to different concentration camps. “I was sent to Auschwitz, and Moses was sent to forced labor in Dresden,” Herta continues. She survived the war and entered the university in Krakow. “But I decided to interrupt my studies and leave for Israel. I left Nice on the same ship with illegal immigrants. I knew that Moses' sister was living in Jerusalem. " After the war, Moses returned to Krakow and the first thing he did was to look for Hertha, but learned that she had left for Israel. “And I did what she did: I got on the ship. But I was less fortunate: the British did not allow us to reach the country and dropped us off in Cyprus. " During the eight months that he stayed in Cyprus, they wrote one hundred love letters to each other. Finally, in the spring of 1947, he returned to Jerusalem. “And we got married right away,” they say with one voice.
North of Tel Aviv, in the city of Kfar Sava, we met 92-year-old Yehuda and his wife, Judith. They met in childhood in the Czechoslovak town of Samorin. Brother Judith was the best friend of Yehuda and his brother. At the beginning of the war, Yehuda was sent to a Hungarian labor camp, but his family did not yet realize the full danger of the situation. Yehuda's mother once said to Judith: "I know that you will become my daughter-in-law, but I do not know which of my sons you will marry." Yehuda escaped from the camp and hid in the forests until the liberation of Czechoslovakia. At the end of the war, he returned to his hometown, began looking for his family, and realized that he was left alone. Judith, who ended up in Auschwitz at the age of 17, saw with her own eyes how the Nazis took her parents and one of her brothers to the gas chamber. She was the only surviving member of her family who ended up in the camp. “I was returning home in search of some distant relative in a cart pulled by horses. And suddenly I saw my brother and his friend - Yehuda ... and then a new story began. We never parted again, we have one heart and one soul for two. " “Mom didn't get to see it, but her prediction came true,” adds Yehuda in a sad voice.
Holocaust (eng. Holocaust) is a term by which the Zionist propaganda understands the systematic extermination according to a pre-developed plan by Germany and its allies during the Second World War of all Jews just because they are Jews. The Holocaust theory claims that a total of 6,000,000 Jews were exterminated, moreover, most of them (over 3/4) - in stationary (diesel) and mobile gas chambers, followed by cremation in camp crematoria or by burning on fires (mainly in pits ). The term "Holocaust" also has other, semantically unrelated names: Shoah (Hebrew השואה from Hebrew "natural disaster") and "Catastrophe". At the official level, the Holocaust is considered to be the greatest crime known in world history and has no precedent.
Etymology
The English word "holocaust" is borrowed from the Ancient Greek Bible (where holocaustum is used in Latinized form along with holocau (s) toma and holocaustosis). There it comes from the Greek and biblical forms òλόκαυ (σ) τος, òλόκαυ (σ) τον "burnt entirely", "burnt offering, burnt offering", òλοκαύτωμα "burnt offering", òλοκαύτωσις "burnt offering".
In Russian, it was found in the forms "olokaust" and "olokaustum" ("Gennadiev's Bible" 1499), in Kurganov's "Letter" (18th century), the concept of "holocaust" is given with the interpretation of "sacrifice, burnt offering".
Some scholars argue that the word "holocaust", meaning sacrifice, was chosen by the Zionists because they intended to sacrifice six million Jews in order to gain Palestinian lands.
It is believed that the word "Holocaust" in relation to the events of World War II was first used in the 1960s by Elie Wiesel, who argued that Jews were exterminated in large numbers by throwing them alive in a furnace, and the word became widespread after the release of the TV serial "The Holocaust. "(1978).
General information
The well-known story of the Holocaust boils down to the fact that the government of the Third Reich allegedly intended to exterminate the Jews in Europe, and that during the Second World War, as a result of their policies, six million Jews died. It is argued that the only victims of the Holocaust were Jews - the complete extermination of this particular people within the framework of the so-called program of the “final solution of the Jewish question” was supposedly an important element of Hitler's policy. It is alleged that in this way 6 million Jews were exterminated (this number is sacred for the preachers of the Holocaust). Moreover, it is argued that not only the Germans are to blame for the death of these people, but also all other European peoples, who allegedly turned a blind eye to the destruction of the Jews (and even attempts to ask the question "Why did the Jews not even try to defend themselves?" anti-Semitism).
Holocaust ideology in essence can be reduced to the following five principles:
1. Jews have always suffered, and always innocently.
2. Their suffering culminated in the Third Reich in 1933-1945, when Hitler decided to exterminate all Jews.
3. Although it was mainly the Germans who destroyed them (and this guilt will remain with them forever and ever), all the peoples of the world are guilty, because they allowed the destruction of innocent Jews.
4. The Germans and other European peoples, being directly or indirectly guilty of the extermination of the Jews, are the peoples of the Christian civilization. Therefore, Christianity is guilty of the mass death of Jews.
5. The Jews did not even just suffer from Nazism, their suffering is incomparable and surpassed everything that can be imagined. Including the suffering of Christ on the Cross. Hence Christianity is disproved. There has not yet been a true Messiah, and the true Savior of humanity is the Jewish people, who are becoming a collective "messiah."
The set of hypotheses explaining the Holocaust as the result of direct design and conspiracy on the part of the National Socialists is a typical conspiracy theory (conspiracy theory).
According to the Jews, the Holocaust does not fit into the consciousness of a person - it was a unique, phenomenal, exceptional, incomprehensible, extraordinary, amazing, extraordinary, unusual, supernatural, extraordinary, unparalleled, unprecedented and out of the ordinary event of a cosmic scale, it is impossible explain, understand and know.
Nevertheless, the Jews managed to turn the death of their people during the war into victory and to benefit from it. No other nation affected by the war claims to have a separate mention of itself in history. In fact, the Russian people deserves a separate mention, as the people who suffered the greatest human losses, several times higher than the human losses of any other people (in absolute terms). However, in such a large-scale war, which engulfed a large number of states, it is blasphemy to count who killed more and who died. The only ones for whom there was nothing sacred and who even began to earn capital from the sufferings and sacrifices of their people were Jews.
In the West, the Holocaust theme completely overshadowed the battles for Stalingrad, Berlin, Kiev, the blockade of Leningrad. Today, the West is dominated by a strange retelling of the events of World War II, centered on the fate of the Jewish people. According to the Holocaust theorists, the Nazis decided to destroy the entire Jewish people, young and old, for this they started a war with the whole world. And the world did not care about the fate of the Jews and calmly looked at their death. Nevertheless, a miracle happened: it would seem that the perished Jews were saved and created their own state.
In the endless corridors of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, the Soviet army is not even mentioned. Millions of dead Soviet soldiers do not fit into the Zionist story of Jewish tragedy, Jewish heroism and indifference of the "goy" world. The average American and some Europeans have embraced this Jewish concept, which has been established in hundreds of films, books, newspaper articles, and monuments. In Western Europe, the Second World War and victory have been completely replaced by the theme of the Holocaust.
The most famous propaganda centers specializing in the creation and dissemination of myths and legends of the Holocaust are Israel's National Memorial to Catastrophe and Heroism (Yad Vashem) and the American Holocaust Memorial Museum. In Russia, it is the Holocaust Center and Fund, which was founded and co-chaired by Ilya Altman and led by Alla Gerber.
Many historians find many contradictions and inconsistencies in the legend of mass extermination called "Holocaust". However, any attempt to express doubts about the reality of the Holocaust or its scale provokes a violent reaction from the Jewish community and may end in court, as happened with the British historian D. Irving. He was detained in Austria on charges of violating the law banning the propaganda of National Socialism and the whitewashing of his crimes. 16 years before his arrest, giving two reports in Austria, he denied the presence of gas chambers in the Auschwitz concentration camp and the fascist pogroms during the "Kristallnacht" in 1938. The court in Vienna, despite the historian's "repentance", sentenced him to three years in prison (instead of the originally required 10 years). Another historian, Ernst Zündel, was sentenced to 5 years in prison by a court in Mannheim (Germany) on February 15, 2007 for denying the Holocaust. President Ulrich Meinertzhagen called the convict "a dangerous political agitator and instigator"
As of the end of January 2007, a resolution condemning the denial of the Holocaust as a historical fact (it has no legal force and is advisory in nature) was supported by 103 countries out of 192 members of the UN General Assembly, including all European states, Israel, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Laws making Holocaust denial a crime exist in a number of European countries and in Israel.
Debunking the myth of the Holocaust is a scientific feat comparable to the feat of natural scientists during the Inquisition, and carried out during the second half of the 20th century by the forces of a relatively small group of ascetic historians called revisionists. Many of them were persecuted and imprisoned for denying the Holocaust, were forced to leave their homeland, and the lives of them and their families were endangered by the paramilitary Zionist formations. However, repression against advanced scientists is not able to change the global trend to expose Zionist propaganda. Every year the Zionist propaganda about 6 million gassed Jews loses its popularity.
Official version
Classic works that describe versions of the Holocaust are Gerald Reitlinger's "The Final Solution" (1953), Raul Hilberg's "The Destruction of the European Jews", first edition 1961 , second and "final" edition 1985), as well as the "Holocaust Encyclopedia" published by V. Laker in Russian in Moscow in 2005.
The classic works on gas chambers are the books "National Socialist Massacre with Poisonous Gas" by E. Kogon, H. Langbein and A. Ruckerl "Nationalsozialistishe Massentotungen durch Giftgas", 1983) and Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers, by Jean-Claude Pressac (AUSCHWITZ: Technique and operation of the gas chambers, 1989); classic work on the issue of the number of Jewish losses - the collection "The scale of the genocide", publisher W. Benz (W. Benz "Dimension des Volkermordes", 1991).
The classic version of the Holocaust is based solely on the testimony of witnesses and is not supported by documents, court proceedings or forensic research.
Back in 1950, the first historian of the Holocaust, French Jew Leon Poliakov, wrote:
"The extermination of the Jews, both regarding its planning and in many other points, is covered with a darkness of obscurity ... Not a single document has survived - perhaps such a document never existed at all."
French journalist Jean Daniel, a Jew by birth, characterizes the Holocaust as follows:
“Only the devil could have invented this ... And not the slightest trace remained. A hellish process, a committed crime. "
There is no single canonical version of the Holocaust because each "expert" or "historian of the Holocaust" puts forward his own interpretation, interpretation and vision of events, based not on material evidence and historiographic sources, but only on contradictory and often incredible testimonies of "Holocaust witnesses". The assumptions and calculations of the "Holocaust experts", who express a fairly wide range of judgments, guesses and opinions, very often do not agree and do not coincide with each other - therefore, the "official" version of the Holocaust is characterized by a scatter of estimates, vague and vague. A particularly characteristic example is the estimate of the death toll in Auschwitz - according to different "experts" and "witnesses of the Holocaust," it ranges from 300,000 to 9 million. "Holocaust specialist" Lucy Davidovich in her book, The War against the Jews "(War against the Jews. 1987, p. 191) writes that 5.37 million Jews were killed in 6 camps. Another, also well-known "Holocaust specialist," Raoul Hilberg, in his three-volume opus The Extermination of European Jews (1990, p. 946), insists on 2.7 million killed in six camps. The difference, therefore, is 2.67 million, while both luminaries do not explain where they got these numbers from. For more details see http://maxpark.com/community/politic/content/1864648
Historians of all fronts agree that the policy of the National Socialists towards Jews after Hitler came to power was originally aimed solely at removing Jews from Germany. Already on August 28, 1933, the Reich Ministry of Economics signed the so-called "Haavar Agreement" with the Jewish Agency for the colonization of Palestine, which was to become the basis for the emigration of 52 thousand German Jews to Palestine until 1942.
On January 25, 1939, Reichsmarschall G. Goering issued a decree establishing the "Imperial Center for Jewish Emigration." But after the outbreak of World War II, when Germany seized territories with a Jewish population in the millions, the "solution to the Jewish question" through emigration was no longer achievable. Initially discussed was an option to resettle all European Jews to Madagascar, but due to the practical impracticability of this project in wartime, it was replaced by a “territorial final solution” plan by deporting Jews to the occupied eastern regions while maximizing the use of the Jewish labor force.
According to the works of orthodox historians, the terms "emigration", "displacement" and "eviction", which are often found in German documents in connection with the policy towards Jews, from some moment, which is not precisely indicated, were used as conventional concepts denoting "physical extermination ". For a long time it was considered proven that the plan for the physical destruction of European Jewry was adopted on January 20, 1942 at a conference on Lake Wannsee near Berlin.
Back in 1992, Israel's leading Holocaust theorist Yehuda Bauer called the "Wannsee Conference" a "stupid story," yet other Holocaust theorists still seriously claim that the conference supposedly made a decision on the Jewish issue. All orthodox historians admit that Hitler's order to exterminate the Jews has not been found, but many of them explain this by the fact that such an order could have been given orally - and consider their assumption a weighty argument in favor of the existence of the Holocaust. Historians who connect the start of the Holocaust with Hitler's orders are called “functionalists”. For many years they have been arguing with another scholastic school of professional Holocaust researchers - “intentionalists”, who proceed from the premise that the Holocaust happened spontaneously without orders from above and was carried out by the German bureaucracy out of anti-Semitic motives.
According to orthodox historians, starting in 1942, millions of European Jews were allegedly killed in six “extermination camps” located on Polish territory. Four of them (Belsen, Sobibor, Treblinka and Chelmno) were supposedly exclusively centers of murder, while Auschwitz and Majdanek were originally conceived as labor camps and prisoner of war camps and only from a certain point acquired the function of extermination centers. The exterminists (supporters of the Jewish genocide theory) baselessly assert that in Belsen, Sobibor and Treblinka, the massacres were allegedly carried out in stationary gas chambers using the exhaust gases of diesel engines; the mass of corpses was first allegedly buried in huge ditches, and then, when the threat of Germany's defeat was outlined, they were dug again, burned in the open air and the ash was scattered in the wind. In Chelmno, gas chambers were allegedly used instead of stationary gas chambers. In Auschwitz and Majdanek, the pesticide cyclone-B containing hydrocyanic acid was allegedly used for murder (and in Majdanek, additionally, carbon monoxide from bottles); in the last two camps, the bodies of those killed were allegedly burned in crematoria.
In 1996, the anti-revisionist French historian Jacques Bainac admitted that due to the "absence of any traces" (he understood by this both documents and material traces) it is impossible to scientifically prove the existence of gas chambers in Nazi camps for killing people, nevertheless, many exterminists accept the existence of gas chambers without proof.
All these far-fetched assessments and contradictory statements are trying to combine into a single concise Zionist version of the Holocaust, the international Internet resource Wikipedia, the Russian-language section of which is moderated mainly by Jews from the USSR living in the CIS and beyond. However, articles on the Holocaust in all international sections of Wikipedia completely ignore facts that deny the existence of the Holocaust or reduce its "generally accepted" scope.
Distinctive features of the Holocaust
... a deliberate attempt at the complete extermination of an entire nation,
... about six million Jews were exterminated,
... Jews were exterminated on purpose, and were not victims of war,
... the purpose of extermination was the genocide of the Jews,
... the existence of a system designed to massacre Jews
... grandiose, interethnic scale of extermination: Jews were persecuted and exterminated throughout the territory of Europe occupied by Germany
... the blame for the Holocaust lies with everyone: the Nazis, Germany, its allies, neutral states and states that were at war with Germany (for not being saved), but not the Jews,
... The Holocaust is a unique phenomenon in human history in terms of the size, quality and meaning of the suffering inflicted, and no other mass extermination of people can compare with it: they are either not so large-scale, or unintentional, or were not aimed at exterminating entire ethnic groups.
In addition, the official version contains details such as:
... the complete defenselessness of the Jews,
... the extermination of Jews took place in six specially created death camps in Poland,
... killing Jews in gas chambers,
... disposal of the bodies of Jews: clothes, shoes and valuables were collected, gold teeth were torn out, hair and skin were sent to the needs of light industry, soap was cooked from fat, glue and machine oil were produced.
... burning the bodies of Jews in crematoria,
... brutal and fatal inhuman medical experiments the Nazis conducted on Holocaust victims
The main thesis of Holocaust theorists is that the Nazis had a plan or program to exterminate the Jews.
The methods of extermination of the Jews
From modern literature on the Holocaust, one can learn that the massacres of Jews were carried out in the following ways:
... in Auschwitz and Majdanek using the cyclone-B insecticide; in Majdanek partially carbon monoxide;
... in Chelmno by injecting exhaust gases into a van mounted on a truck;
... in Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka with diesel engine exhaust in wooden gas chambers;
... in the occupied territories of the USSR in gas vehicles and with the help of mass shootings.
Evolution of the official version
The story of the Holocaust has changed significantly in a relatively short period of time. Many allegations of mass extermination that the general public once believed in were quietly removed from the repertoire of Holocaust propagandists.
For a long time, the following methods and methods of extermination of Jews belonged to the "reliable and deserving respect" information:
... in electric baths;
... burning alive (the word "holocaust" means the burning of the victim alive among the ancient Jews);
... thermite bombs;
... quicklime;
... using an insecticide against bedbugs and lice (gas holocaust);
... by grinding in a huge mill;
... drowning;
... by removing exhaust gases inside the truck (diesel holocaust);
... pneumatic hammer;
... dissolution in acid;
... by shooting (bullet holocaust)
... ferry (steam holocaust);
... suffocation by pumping air out of the room;
... morphine injections;
... air injections;
... boiling water;
... heavy rubber truncheons (all with the stamp "Krupp"), with which the heads and genitals of the prisoners were broken ";
... feeding to wild animals.
Soon after the war, any mention of these exotic methods of mass extermination was almost completely excluded, not only from official statements, but even from fiction. Then Elie Wiesel's lie that Jews were supposedly thrown alive into burning furnaces was rejected. Instead, a myth was invented about the existence in concentration camps of special gas chambers for the mass, deliberate extermination of Jews and about crematoria for the incineration of millions of corpses.
Modern adherents of the historicity of the "Holocaust" now do not want to know anything about all these false stories, although at one time they were all confirmed by "trustworthy witnesses", as is now the case with gas chambers, the existence of which is prohibited by the laws of a number of countries of the "free democratic "world.
After hot steam chambers, mills, lime wagons, etc. were replaced by gas chambers, among the "historians" began many years of fuss over this issue. They really want the theory of gas chambers to somehow fit into the framework of common sense, but in vain. Structures that are passed off as gas chambers have survived in the "death camps" and their characteristics are too far from what the exterminists suggest to believe (supporters of the version of the genocide of the Jews)
At one time it was believed that the Germans killed Jews with gas in Dachau, Buchenwald and other concentration camps in Germany itself. This part of the story of the mass extermination of the Jews proved to be so untenable that it was abandoned more than 30 years ago.
No serious historian now supports the once-proven story of "extermination camps" in the former German Reich. Even the famous "Nazi hunter" Simon Wiesenthal admitted that "there were no extermination camps on German soil."
According to the documents of the Nuremberg Trials, more than 13 million Jews died in the "fire of the Holocaust" - more than six million were killed by the Gestapo, more than four million were killed in Auschwitz, more than one million were killed in Majdanek and at least two million in Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Flossenbürge , Ravensbrücke, Nijengamme, Gusen, Natzweiler, Gross-Rosen, Niederhagen, Stutthof and Arbeitsdorf.
Until 1960, exterminists claimed that there were gas chambers in camps in Germany and Austria. Thousands of "survivors" talked about them, German officers gave "confessions" and after the Nuremberg trials were executed for participating in the extermination of people in the gas chambers in these camps, but in 1960 the Allies themselves admitted that all these testimonies and confessions were false and these camps never had gas chambers.
During the Tribunal in Nuremberg, the chief counselor of justice of the USSR L.N. Smirnov stated that the "technical minds of the SS" developed methods of making soap from human bodies and tanning human skin for practical purposes. Allied prosecutors provided testimony, Dr. Spanner's alleged formula for making soap, and soap allegedly made from humans was also presented. In April 1990, Yad Vashem Archives Director Samuel (Shmul) Krakowski said: "Historians have concluded that soap was not made from human fat."
Based on the testimony of the Nuremberg Tribunal, the number of victims in Auschwitz was estimated at 4 million. However, in 1995, Jewish organizations replaced the memorial plaque in Auschwitz. Instead of four million, there are now 1.5 million dead. However, the overall dogmatic figure of the Holocaust of 6 million has not changed from this.
Currently, some exterminists, realizing that the myth of the gas chambers is beginning to completely collapse, are trying to diversify the version of the murders, diverting attention from the alleged gas chambers and gas chambers towards the SD, or rather towards the Einsatzgroups of the Security Police and SD http: // ejwiki. org / wiki /% D0% 90% D0% B9% D0% BD% D0% B7% D0% B0% D1% 82% D1% 86% D0% B3% D1% 80% D1% 83% D0% BF% D0 % BF% D1% 8B_% D0% BF% D0% BE% D0% BB% D0% B8% D1% 86% D0% B8% D0% B8_% D0% B1% D0% B5% D0% B7% D0% BE % D0% BF% D0% B0% D1% 81% D0% BD% D0% BE% D1% 81% D1% 82% D0% B8_% D0% B8_% D0% A1% D0% 94
... For example, the French Jew Jacques Attali writes:
"The overwhelming majority of Jewish deaths were killed between 1940 and 1942 from the personal weapons of German soldiers and police, rather than perishing in the death factories that were later put in place."
Using new phraseology, Jews refer to it as the "bullet holocaust", which is now intended to replace the exposed "holocaust from gas, from lice" and "the holocaust from the combustion products of a diesel engine."
Evidence of the Holocaust
Article for January 9, 1938, New York Times. Even then, there was talk about six million victims of Jewish nationality in Europe, nine months before Kristallnacht. The revisionists counted over a hundred pre-war media references of "six million dead Jews" since 1900.
All evidence of the Holocaust is post-war testimony from a small group of “miraculous survivors”. Their testimonies are contradictory, and only a few of them claim to have been direct witnesses to the “gassing” - they mostly learned these rumors from others. There are no documents confirming the existence of the Holocaust, there are no reliable statistics and reliable evidence: no mass graves of Jews, no mountains of ash, no crematoria capable of processing millions of corpses, no “human soap”, no “gas chambers”, no lamp shades were found made of human skin - no other artifacts to prove the existence of an event called the "Holocaust".
Witness's testimonies
The whole myth about the Holocaust has no material evidence and is based only on the testimony of the so-called. "Holocaust witnesses" or in other words "miraculous survivors."
Abbot Renard, a French Catholic priest, exemplifies the falsification of history and the unceremonious manner in which many Jews - former concentration camp prisoners - deal with the truth. He was in Buchenwald with the revisionist Paul Rassinier. After the war, Abbot Renard published a book about his camp experiences, in which, in particular, he wrote: "I saw how thousands of people fell under their souls, from which instead of life-giving moisture a suffocating gas came out."
This prompted Rassinier to track down his former comrade in misfortune - this was in early 1947 - and remind him that Buchenwald, as we know, did not have any gas chambers. “Of course,” the pious man objected, “it was a literary turnover, an empty phrase, a commonplace, but in the end it doesn't matter at all whether everything really happened like this or not.”
Lost speech from surprise that this servant of God was lying so carelessly, Rassinier left. The official version of what happened to the Jews during World War II is based on evidence similar to the invention of the pious abbot, so the scientific methods of research used by the revisionists terrify the propagandists of the Holocaust myth.
Another famous example is Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and professional “Holocaust survivor” who travels from country to country, talks about Auschwitz and is “living proof” of the Holocaust. Wiesel was at Auschwitz with his father. In the 1950s, he wrote a thick book in Yiddish. In its French version called "Night" there is not a word about gas chambers. He says that the Germans burned Jews - especially nursing infants - in gigantic ditches of fire.
At the end of his book, he reports that at the end of 1944 he underwent an operation in the Auschwitz "extermination camp" hospital (although the exterminists constantly claim that the Germans killed children, the elderly and the sick) and that later the Germans said: "The sick and recovering can stay with doctors when the Russians come. " According to Eli, he and his father decided to stay with the "German executioners" rather than wait for the "Russian liberators."
Interestingly, in the German translation of Wiesel's book, wherever there is “crematorium” in the French text, this word is replaced by “gas chamber”. Wiesel is not a "survivor" but a former prisoner. He is living proof that there was no extermination of the Jews.
Jews do not know whether there were gas chambers or not, but they believe that there were. Believers don't lie, they believe. Moreover, the stories of the gas chambers are very much like Talmudic lies. T. n. Survivors, especially when they go to school, describe relationships in concentration camps. Only a very few of them claim to have been present at the extermination of people in the gas chambers. Their testimonies contradict each other as regards the number of victims of each such operation, the path to the gas chambers, the time until the death of the victims, the methods of destruction of the corpses, etc. Witnesses at the Nuremberg trials were not cross-examined and could tell the most incredible things which no one questioned.
Evidence
No material evidence was found in the form of ash heaps or crematoria, in which 6 million corpses could be burned. There is no solid evidence of the existence of gas chambers in the camps and no reliable demographic statistics. Also on the territory of Europe not a single mass grave of Jews - victims of the Holocaust, killed by gas or shot, was found. Exterminists reject any research method (criminal, forensic, ballistic, chemical, etc.) of alleged murder sites to provide evidence.
Historians, as a rule, consider material (i.e. physical) evidence to be decisive (of course, if it is not later shown that it is fake). However, in the case of the Holocaust, the lack of physical evidence to support the existence of a large-scale destruction program is not considered significant. The Nazis are said to have destroyed their gigantic, lethal production facility so thoroughly that there is no way to discover it after the war. There can be no doubt that the Nazis really could destroy all physical evidence so thoroughly, including making the ashes of six million people disappear from all the places in which they were supposed to be buried. To think in this way and to doubt is to commit a crime of thought, and to voice those doubts is to incite hatred.
Thus, today it is more convenient for historians to believe that the Nazis possessed supernatural powers (that is, they could make all physical evidence evaporate without any hope of recovery and discovery, even with the help of the most advanced modern technologies), instead of concluding that volume, that the lack of physical evidence supports the claims of the Holocaust revisionists.
