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Bosnia is one of several small countries that emerged from the break-up of Yugoslavia, a multicultural country created after World War I by the victorious Western Allies. Yugoslavia was composed of ethnic and religious groups that had been historical rivals, even bitter enemies, including the Serbs (Orthodox Christians), Croats (Catholics) and ethnic Albanians (Muslims).

During World War II, Yugoslavia was invaded by Nazi Germany and was partitioned. A fierce resistance movement sprang up led by Josip Tito. Following Germany’s defeat, Tito reunified Yugoslavia under the slogan “Brotherhood and Unity,” merging together Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, along with two self-governing provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina. Tito, a Communist, was a strong leader who maintained ties with the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War, playing one superpower against the other while obtaining financial assistance and other aid from both. After his death in 1980 and without his strong leadership, Yugoslavia quickly plunged into political and economic chaos.

A new leader arose by the late 1980s, a Serbian named Slobodan Milosevic, a former Communist who had turned to nationalism and religious hatred to gain power. He began by inflaming long-standing tensions between Serbs and Muslims in the independent provence of Kosovo. Orthodox Christian Serbs in Kosovo were in the minority and claimed they were being mistreated by the Albanian Muslim majority. Serbian-backed political unrest in Kosovo eventually led to its loss of independence and domination by Milosevic. In June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia both declared their independence from Yugoslavia soon resulting in civil war. The national army of Yugoslavia, now made up of Serbs controlled by Milosevic, stormed into Slovenia but failed to subdue the separatists there and withdrew after only ten days of fighting. Milosevic quickly lost interest in Slovenia, a country with almost no Serbs. Instead, he turned his attention to Croatia, a Catholic country where Orthodox Serbs made up 12 percent of the population. During World War II, Croatia had been a pro-Nazi state led by Ante Pavelic and his fascist Ustasha Party. Serbs living in Croatia as well as Jews had been the targets of widespread Ustasha massacres. In the concentration camp at Jasenovac, they had been slaughtered by the tens of thousands. In 1991, the new Croat government, led by Franjo Tudjman, seemed to be reviving fascism, even using the old Ustasha flag, and also enacted discriminatory laws targeting Orthodox Serbs. Aided by Serbian guerrillas in Croatia, Milosevic’s forces invaded in July 1991 to ‘protect’ the Serbian minority. In the city of Vukovar, they bombarded the outgunned Croats for 86 consecutive days and reduced it to rubble. After Vukovar fell, the Serbs began the first mass executions of the conflict, killing hundreds of Croat men and burying them in mass graves. The response of the international community was limited.

The U.S. under President George Bush chose not to get involved militarily, but instead recognized the independence of both Slovenia and Croatia. An arms embargo was imposed for all of the former Yugoslavia by the United Nations. However, the Serbs under Milosevic were already the best armed force and thus maintained a big military advantage. The end of 1991 brokered a U.S.-sponsored cease-fire agreement between the Serbs and Croats fighting in Croatia. In April 1992, the U.S. and European Community chose to recognize the independence of Bosnia, a mostly Muslim country where the Serb minority made up 32 percent of the population. Milosevic responded to Bosnia’s declaration of independence by attacking Sarajevo, its capital city, best known for hosting the 1984 Winter Olympics. Sarajevo soon became known as the city where Serb snipers continually shot down helpless civilians in the streets, including eventually over 3,500 children. Bosnian Muslims were hopelessly outgunned. As the Serbs gained ground, they began to systematically roundup local Muslims in scenes eerily similar to those that had occurred under the Nazis during World War II, including mass shootings, forced repopulation of entire towns, and confinement in make-shift concentration camps for men and boys. The Serbs also terrorized Muslim families into fleeing their villages by using rape as a weapon against women and girls.

The actions of the Serbs were labeled as ‘ethnic cleansing,’ a name which quickly took hold among the international media. Despite media reports of the secret camps, the mass killings, as well as the destruction of Muslim mosques and historic architecture in Bosnia, the world community remained mostly indifferent. The U.N. responded by imposing economic sanctions on Serbia and also deployed its troops to protect the distribution of food and medicine to dispossessed Muslims. But the U.N. strictly prohibited its troops from interfering militarily against the Serbs. Thus they remained steadfastly neutral no matter how bad the situation became. Throughout 1993, confident that the U.N., United States and the European Community would not take militarily action, Serbs in Bosnia freely committed genocide against Muslims. Bosnian Serbs operated under the local leadership of Radovan Karadzic, president of the illegitimate Bosnian Serb Republic. Karadzic had once told a group of journalists, “Serbs and Muslims are like cats and dogs. They cannot live together in peace. It is impossible.” When Karadzic was confronted by reporters about ongoing atrocities, he bluntly denied involvement of his soldiers or special police units.

On February 6, 1994, the world’s attention turned completely to Bosnia as a marketplace in Sarajevo was struck by a Serb mortar shell killing 68 persons and wounding nearly 200. Sights and sounds of the bloody carnage were broadcast globally by the international news media and soon resulted in calls for military intervention against the Serbs. The U.S. under its new President, Bill Clinton, who had promised during his election campaign in 1992 to stop the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, now issued an ultimatum through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) demanding that the Serbs withdraw their artillery from Sarajevo. The Serbs quickly complied and a NATO-imposed cease-fire in Sarajevo was declared. The U.S. then launched diplomatic efforts aimed at unifying Bosnian Muslims and the Croats against the Serbs. However, this new Muslim-Croat alliance failed to stop the Serbs from attacking Muslim towns in Bosnia, which had been declared Safe Havens by the U.N. A total of six Muslim towns had been established as Safe Havens in May 1993 under the supervision of U.N. peacekeepers. Bosnian Serbs not only attacked the Safe Havens but also attacked the U.N. peacekeepers as well. NATO forces responded by launching limited air strikes against Serb ground positions.

The Serbs retaliated by taking hundreds of U.N. peacekeepers as hostages and turning them into human shields, chained to military targets such as ammo supply dumps. At this point, some of the worst genocidal activities of the four-year-old conflict occurred. In Srebrenica, a Safe Haven, U.N. peacekeepers stood by helplessly as the Serbs under the command of General Ratko Mladic systematically selected and then slaughtered nearly 8,000 men and boys between the ages of twelve and sixty – the worst mass murder in Europe since World War II. In addition, the Serbs continued to engage in mass rapes of Muslim females. On August 30, 1995, effective military intervention finally began as the U.S. led a massive NATO bombing campaign in response to the killings at Srebrenica, targeting Serbian artillery positions throughout Bosnia. The bombardment continued into October. Serb forces also lost ground to Bosnian Muslims who had received arms shipments from the Islamic world. As a result, half of Bosnia was eventually retaken by Muslim-Croat troops. Faced with the heavy NATO bombardment and a string of ground losses to the Muslim-Croat alliance, Serb leader Milosevic was now ready to talk peace. On November 1, 1995, leaders of the warring factions including Milosevic and Tudjman traveled to the U.S. for peace talks at Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Ohio. After three weeks of negotiations, a peace accord was declared. Terms of the agreement included partitioning Bosnia into two main portions known as the Bosnian Serb Republic and the Muslim-Croat Federation.

The agreement also called for democratic elections and stipulated that war criminals would be handed over for prosecution. 60,000 NATO soldiers were deployed to preserve the cease-fire. By now, over 200,000 Muslim civilians had been systematically murdered. More than 20,000 were missing and feared dead, while 2,000,000 had become refugees.

It was, according to U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, “the greatest failure of the West since the 1930s.”

Ishmael Jones (pseudonym) is a former member of the Central Intelligence Agency. He joined the agency in the 1980s, where he served as a case officer focusing on human sources with access to intelligence on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. His assignments included more than fifteen years of continuous overseas service in numerous exotic countries and several rogue nations. He resigned from the CIA in good standing. He is the author of the new book, The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture (Encounter Books, July 2008). It is the first book written by a deep cover CIA case officer. All author book profits are donated to veterans’ groups.

(interview made on November 9, 2008)

DRZZ : You are the first deep cover CIA case officer to have ever written a book. Why did you choose to speak to the public and what was the reaction of the CIA ?

JONES : The CIA’s clandestine service is broken and the false and poor quality intelligence it produces poses a risk to free people everywhere. Terrorists and rogue states are prepared to kill free people regardless of nationality, and accurate CIA intelligence to prevent that is vital.

I needed to speak to the public because the CIA has no internal mechanism to address its problems. I met CIA managers throughout the chain of command to try to improve performance. But the CIA’s chain of command is byzantine, octopus-like, evasive, looping back upon itself, and it is not possible to pin down who has responsibility.

I also visited the office of the CIA’s Inspector General but found it to be structured only to handle employee personnel complaints, such as complaints about promotion or discrimination. The Inspector General had no mechanism to solve the CIA’s inability to perform its fundamental mission or to investigate fraud and waste.

When I visited the office of the Inspector General, they at first mistook me for an FBI agent who had come to investigate them. At the time they were under investigation by the FBI for leaking anti-Bush information to the press.

I sent my book to the CIA as required, for their review, prior to publication. The book contained no classified information, but I repeatedly asked them to tell me what they wanted removed from the book. After a year, they simply returned the book to me as a stack of blank pages.

DRZZ : You were raised in the Middle East, Africa and East Asia. Were those worldwide experiences decisive for your choice to join the CIA ?

JONES : I enjoyed living in those places and had wanted to travel and work there again. I was able to compare life in free countries and in dictatorships and kleptocracies, and resolved that I would do what I could to advance freedom and to fight the enemies of freedom.

The CIA tries to hire people with experience in foreign countries. The quality of the people the CIA hires is high, though it tends to waste their talents.

DRZZ : How is it to work as a CIA deep cover agent?

JONES : Family life was great because although I was away from home a great deal, I controlled my time. Because the CIA is a broken organization, working within it can be hard on the soul. It would have been more difficult to work within a CIA office, sitting through endless meetings, watching the clock. I was fortunate to be outside the CIA’s official system of offices, and to spend most of my career in foreign lands

The toughest part, the challenge to my survivability, was always CIA Headquarters itself. The assignments of nearly all of my colleagues ended unhappily because of internal exposures, such as in the Ames and Nicholson spy cases, and the constant pressure of reassignment to offices in the United States. I was fortunate to serve for such a long period of time. I could have continued indefinitely, but finally decided that further service was pointless, and I began working on intelligence reform.

DRZZ : Let’s talk about 9/11. Were you working at the CIA at the time? Could you tell us how the Agency, and you, reacted?

JONES : When those airplanes hit the World Trade Center I thought we would see reform and house-cleaning within the CIA. CIA bureaucrats were quite frightened. During the six months after 9/11, every operation I proposed was approved, and I could travel anywhere and do anything. Bureaucrats were afraid to say no. But then, when the CIA realized there would be no accountability, no change, and in fact the CIA was rewarded for its failure with unlimited billions of dollars, the CIA bureaucracy roared back with enormous strength. Before 9/11 the CIA had been merely bureaucratic; after 9/11 it became viciously more so, and aggressively defensive of its dysfunctional way of life.

DRZZ : Questions remain about the 9/11 attacks. Michael Ross, the former Mossad combattant, talked about the relationships between Al-Qaeda and Iran prior to 9/11. Others quote relationships between Khalid Cheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, and Iraq. Some still believe in a Pakistan‘s ISI involvement.  Isn’t Al-Qaeda a patsy organization created by one or many states, like other terrorist organizations sponsored by the USSR during the Cold War?

JONES : My friend Mossad’s Michael Ross knows a great deal about these relationships and I enjoyed his book, The Volunteer, an excellent memoir of clandestine service.

Good human sources of intelligence would help us understand these relationships and this understanding can lead to solutions for the root causes of terrorism, in addition to the immediate need to stop terrorist attacks and to capture or kill the terrorists. But we simply don’t have this intelligence. We need better intelligence for this understanding, and the American CIA, with its massive funding and its potentially worldwide scope, can do this, if it is systemically reformed. But with a dysfunctional CIA, these linkages are unknown, and our lack of knowledge puts free people at risk.

I know that the phrase “capture or kill” sounds undiplomatic, but it is a relative term. If Paris or Geneva is destroyed by a terrorist’s nuclear weapon, then the phrase will not seem harsh.

DRZZ : President Bush created the NCS to promote reform inside the CIA. Do you think the NCS achieved its task ?

JONES : The NCS has been a failure. It has merely added more layers of bureaucrats on top of the CIA, which was already overburdened with layers, all fighting over turf and money in Washington DC. The NCS staff continues to grow and now numbers in the thousands, all people located within the United States. Many of the people on the NCS staff could make valuable contributions to intelligence collection if they were deployed in foreign assignments as intelligence officers.

DRZZ : You wrote that the CIA is wasting America‘s wealth (tax dollars) on secret and useless programs. Is there no power within Congress to prevent this from happening? Is the CIA lobby in Congress too strong to fight it?

JONES : Secrecy is of course necessary to protect agents and operations, but unfortunately the CIA uses secrecy to hide fraud and waste. In order to obtain a CIA contract it is necessary to have a security clearance, which usually means the person is a former CIA manager. The former CIA managers obtain the contracts from their friends and colleagues who are current CIA managers.

There are no systems designed to prevent fraud and waste at the CIA. If I see a bank being robbed, for example, I can call the FBI or the police and be assured that they will investigate. With CIA fraud and theft, there is no system, no FBI or police who can be contacted.

In a well-known example from years ago, the US Army paid $436 for a hammer worth about $5. But because of the greater transparency of the military budget, these examples can be discovered and exposed. The CIA’s budget is secret and its waste cannot be discovered. In one program alone, meant to place CIA officers in foreign countries, the CIA spent $3 billion without placing a single additional effective officer.

Congress has lost the ability to oversee the CIA because it has been locked into political disputes over wiretapping and the interrogation of prisoners. The political strife has prevented Congress from taking a unified approach to CIA reform. The CIA fuels these disputes with illegal leaks of secret material, especially about prisoner interrogation.

The CIA’s use of press leaks is an excellent example of a covert action operation. The CIA gives the leaks to selected journalists in exchange for favorable articles about the CIA. The journalists build their careers on these leaked stories, and they are careful not to offend the CIA for fear of losing their access to these leaks. The CIA has been especially effective in controlling the Washington Post and to a lesser extent, the New York Times. The Washington Post has always considered itself the home of great investigative journalists, but today, on CIA issues, it is a mouthpiece for the CIA.

DRZZ : “The Human factor” has been written to improve CIA’s weaknesses. One of them, often quoted, is the use of SIGINT instead of HUMINT. Has the CIA clandestine service evolved on this matter since 9/11?

JONES : Most intelligence professionals agree that both SIGINT and HUMINT are important. SIGINT is easier to measure and the SIGINT I’ve seen has been good quality. HUMINT is harder to measure and is more difficult to conduct. HUMINT means lonely meetings in bad hotel rooms, in dysfunctional countries, in often dangerous conditions, so many CIA officers naturally avoid HUMINT in favor of careers at Headquarters and within embassies.

DRZZ : Let’s talk about the relationship between Israel and the CIA. You said that the ability of American supporters of Israel to influence intelligence reform has been hurt by the AIPAC intelligence scandal. Is the historic link between Mossad and CIA broken, or at least severely damaged?

JONES : The Mossad and CIA have a good liaison relationship. What concerns me is that whether or not one is a supporter of Israel, it is in the interest of all free countries that Israel not be obliterated in a nuclear attack. I am not suggesting that Israel’s policies are correct, just that I do not want Israel wiped out in a new genocide. The CIA is the largest, wealthiest intelligence organization in the world and it has the potential to be the early warning system for nuclear attack upon any country, but it is broken.

AIPAC is a political organization which represents American supporters of Israel. The AIPAC scandal occurred when employees of AIPAC gave classified American documents to the government of Israel. Because AIPAC does not want to be perceived as disloyal to the US, it avoids any further connection to American classified information, and it avoids the issue of intelligence reform.

I think this is unfortunate because American intelligence reform may be crucial for Israel’s survival. Israel today is invulnerable to conventional military invasion, but it is very vulnerable to nuclear attack, and it may well be the first target of a terrorist nuclear weapon. AIPAC is one of the most influential political organizations in the US, but it appears to be powerless to do what would be most effective in protecting Israel.

If the CIA is reformed and made to function properly, it can be a worldwide system that can defend people, anywhere, from nuclear attack. The logical connection is very clear – nuclear weapons rely upon 1930’s technology and will become increasingly available. Israel is a primary target of any terrorist who obtains a nuclear weapon. The CIA has the potential to prevent these attacks, but it must be reformed in order to be effective.

DRZZ : The creation of the DNI has broken fifty years of CIA’s domination over the American intelligence community. How did the Agency react to this, and has the DNI helped the CIA’s work in any way?

JONES : The CIA’s clandestine service still controls most human intelligence collection turf and through its embassies it controls the geographical turf of embassy operations. The CIA is still in full control of most HUMINT operations. The DNI simply added additional layers of bureaucrats on top of the CIA structure. The DNI engages in turf and power battles with the CIA in Washington, DC. It’s unfortunate to have all of these people scurrying around offices in Washington when their talents could be employed in gathering intelligence. Bureaucrats are bureaucrats; whether it is the CIA or the DNI, there is no difference.

DRZZ : Many intelligence experts around the world, especially the French, Israelis and British, were shocked by last year’s NIE on Iran. Many saw this as a political offensive led by the CIA against the White House, like the Plame affair. Is the Agency doing more politics than intelligence and clandestine work?

JONES : Last year’s NIE on Iran was dangerous because it was not based on good human intelligence. This is the crux of my entire push for reform. Human source intelligence is simply not being collected. The NIE was based on guesses and opinions. Part of the reason for this NIE was that its writers are opponents of the Bush administration, but another reason was that they did not want to suffer the criticism they suffered over their reports on Iraqi WMD, another document based on guesses. This time, they reckoned, they’d avoid that criticism by stating that Iran was not a WMD threat. Of course, the report drew a great deal of criticism anyway.

DRZZ : What are, in your opinion, the priorities for the Central Intelligence Agency in the coming years? If I summarize your proposals to the CIA: movement of CIA officers from within the United States and within American embassies to assignments on the streets of foreign countries worldwide; and reduction of bureaucratic obstacles to intelligence production. How should the CIA conduct its operations according to you? Do you have any other intelligence agency in mind you think is better managed and could be taken as an example to reform the CIA ?

JONES : I’d be happy to see the CIA change by putting more people on the streets collecting foreign intelligence, with a clear chain of command, reduction of management layers, and accounting and audit of the money. The CIA will fight incremental change with all its strength, however. If these changes can be made, that will be wonderful, but ultimately I think the only effective reform will be to break the CIA up and put its clandestine service under control of the US military, its domestic spying under the control of the FBI, and its liaison with foreign governments placed under control of the State Department.

DRZZ : What is your opinion, as a former case officer, on the Iranian issue?

JONES : Good human intelligence is vital. We don’t have an understanding of Iran’s capabilities and intentions, and because of this our decisions may not be correct. The risk is primarily nuclear, and the risk is that we could lose an American or European city, or the city of an ally elsewhere in the world. The threat from conventional weapons or biological/chemical weapons are less because these weapons are difficult to deploy and the number of people they can kill is limited.

DRZZ : And on today’s Al-Qaeda capabilities?

JONES : Al-Qaeda can eventually repeat an attack on the scale of 9/11, but will kill only in the low thousands of people. We need to prevent them from ever having the ability to kill hundreds of thousands of people. The only way they can do that is with a nuclear weapon, so our top priority should be nuclear counter-proliferation.

If bin Laden is indeed still alive, he should be captured or killed. The CIA should keep replacing the person in charge of this mission until they find someone who will get this job done. The CIA is filled with thousands of aggressive, capable people, many of whom can carry out this mission if they are freed from bureaucracy.

DRZZ : How do you think the new Obama Presidency will affect the CIA’s work ?

JONES : I’m concerned that the Democrats view the CIA as a political ally and are not aware of the danger we face from poor intelligence. The CIA provided Democrats with plentiful anti-Bush information during the Bush years, and nearly cut down President Bush with the Plame incident and the Iraq WMD controversies.

The CIA is an ideal socialist organization – highly paid, nice offices, health benefits. Everyone’s a manager. So from that perspective, many Democrats have a hard time grasping that there can be anything wrong with it. The days of the CIA as a cabal of right-wingers seeking to topple communist governments are long gone, if indeed they ever did exist.

However, there is a ray of hope now, because the election is over. Now that Obama has won power, he needs to hold it. He no longer needs a CIA that provides only anti-Bush ammunition. He needs a CIA that can produce intelligence and protect Americans and allies from attack. His people should realize that if they do not reform the CIA, and if a nuclear attack upon Americans or allies occurs, then they may not be re-elected.

JONES : Nuclear weapons should be the top priority because they can kill in great numbers and can obliterate cities. Rogue state governments and terrorists organizations are gaining increasing abilities to use these weapons. These should be our priority targets.

We must avoid unimportant intelligence issues such as trade negotiations and economics because these are easier targets that draw CIA officers away from the more difficult nuclear and terrorist targets. These are jobs for the State department. Also, a focus on important targets means stronger public support. For example, if an American CIA officer working on terrorists were exposed in India, neither Indians nor Americans would be offended. We should never conduct espionage on the politics or economics of free countries. We need to be in the dark corners of the world, gathering intelligence on threats to the free people of the world.

Posted in 1 ]]> http://dytrand.wordpress.com/2009/05/11/interview-the-actor/feed/ 0 dytrand http://dytrand.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/beginning-2/ http://dytrand.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/beginning-2/#comments Fri, 08 May 2009 03:28:16 +0000 dytrand http://dytrand.wordpress.com/?p=50 ]]>

Beginning..what it means?

be⋅gin⋅ning

–noun

1.	an act or circumstance of entering upon an action or state: the beginning of hostilities.

2.	the point of time or space at which anything begins: the beginning of the Christian era; the beginning of the route.

3.	the first part: the beginning of the book; the beginning of the month.

4.	Often, beginnings. the initial stage or part of anything: the beginnings of science.

5.	origin; source; first cause: A misunderstanding about the rent was the beginning of their quarrel.

–adjective

6.	just formed: a beginning company.

7.	first; opening: the beginning chapters of a book.

8.	basic or introductory: beginning Spanish.

9.	learning the fundamentals: a beginning swimmer.

---

Origin:
1175–1225; ME beginnung, -ing. See begin, -ing ¹

Synonyms:
1. initiation, inauguration, inception. 2. start, commencement, outset, onset, arising, emergence.

Antonyms:
1. ending. 2. end.

be⋅gin

Origin:
bef. 1000; ME beginnen, OE beginnan, equiv. to be- be- + -ginnan to begin, perh. orig. to open, akin to yawn

Antonyms:
1. end.

to prepare for something that you afraid most..surrounded you…

Armenian-populated regions in central and eastern Anatolia and the Transcaucasus before the genocide.

The majority of the Armenian population was concentrated in the east of the Ottoman Empire.

In the Ottoman Empire, in accordance with the Muslim dhimmi system, Armenians, as Christians, were guaranteed limited freedoms (such as the right to worship), but were treated as second-class citizens. Christians and Jews were not considered equals to Muslims: testimony against Muslims by Christians and Jews was inadmissible in courts of law. They were forbidden to carry weapons or ride atop horses, their houses could not overlook those of Muslims, and their religious practices would have to defer to those of Muslims, in addition to various other legal limitations.^[14] Violation of these statutes could result in punishments ranging from the levying of fines to execution.

The three major European powers, Great Britain, France and Russia (known as the Great Powers), took issue with the Empire’s treatment of its Christian minorities and increasingly pressured the Ottoman government (also known as the Sublime Porte) to extend equal rights to all its citizens. Beginning in 1839, the Ottoman government implemented the Tanzimat reforms to improve the situation of minorities, although these would prove largely ineffective. By the late 1870s, Greece, along with several countries of the Balkans, frustrated with conditions, had, often with the help of the Powers, broken free of Ottoman rule. Armenians, for the most part, remained passive during these years, earning them the title of millet-i sadıka or the “loyal millet.”^[15]

Reform implementation, 1860s–1880s

In the mid-1860s to early 1870s, Armenians began to ask for better treatment from the Ottoman government. After amassing the signatures of peasants from eastern Anatolia, the Armenian Communal Council had petitioned to the Ottoman government to redress the issues that the peasants complained about: “the looting and murder in Armenian towns by [Muslim] Kurds and Circassians, improprieties during tax collection, criminal behavior by government officials and the refusal to accept Christians as witnesses in trial.”^[16] The Ottoman government considered these grievances and promised to punish those responsible.^[17]

Following the violent suppression of Christians in the uprisings in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria and Serbia in 1875, the Great Powers invoked the 1856 Treaty of Paris by claiming that it gave them the right to intervene and protect the Ottoman Empire’s Christian minorities.^[18] Under growing pressure, the government declared itself a constitutional monarchy (which was almost immediately dissolved) and entered into negotiations with the powers. At the same time, the Armenian patriarchate of Constantinople, Nerses II, forwarded Armenian complaints of widespread “forced land seizure … forced conversion of women and children, arson, protection extortion, rape, and murder” to the Powers.^[19]

After the conclusion of the 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War, Armenians began to look more towards Tsarist Russia as the guarantors of their security. Nerses approached the Russian leadership during its negotiations with the Ottomans in San Stefano and in the eponymous treaty, convinced them to insert a clause, Article 16, that stipulated that Russian forces occupying the Armenian provinces would only withdraw with the full implementation of Ottoman reforms.^[20] Great Britain was troubled with Russia holding on to so much Ottoman territory and forced it to enter into new negotiations with the convening of the Congress of Berlin on June 13, 1878. Armenians also entered into these negotiations and stated that they sought autonomy, not independence from the Ottoman Empire.^[21] They partially succeeded as Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin contained the same text as Article 16 but removed any mention that Russian forces would remain in the provinces; instead, the Ottoman government was to periodically inform the Great Powers of the progress of the reforms.

The Hamidian Massacres, 1894–1896

Hamidian massacres

In 1876, the Ottoman government was led by Sultan Abdul Hamid II. From the beginning of the reform period after the signing of the Berlin treaty, Hamid II attempted to stall their implementation and asserted that Armenians did not make up a majority in the provinces and that Armenian reports of abuses were largely exaggerated or false. In 1890, Hamid II created a paramilitary outfit known as the Hamidiye which was made up of Kurdish irregulars who were tasked to “deal with the Armenians as he wished.”^[22] As Ottoman officials intentionally provoked rebellions (often as a result of over-taxation) in Armenian populated towns, such as the Sasun Resistance in 1894, these regiments were increasingly used to deal with the Armenians by way of oppression and massacre. Armenians successfully fought off the regiments and brought the excesses to the attention of the Great Powers in 1895 who subsequently condemned the Porte.^[23]

The Powers forced Hamid to sign a new reform package designed to curtail the powers of the Hamidiye in October 1895 but like the Berlin treaty, was never implemented. On October 1, 1895, 2,000 Armenians assembled in Constantinople to petition for the implementation of the reforms but Ottoman police units converged towards the rally and violently broke it up.^[24] Soon, massacres of Armenians broke out in Constantinople and then engulfed the rest of the Armenian populated provinces of Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Harput, Sivas, Trebizond and Van. Estimates differ on how many Armenians were killed but European documentation of the violence, which became known as the Hamidian massacres, placed the figures from anywhere between 100,000–300,000 Armenians.^[25]

Although Hamid was never directly implicated for ordering the massacres, he was suspected for their tacit approval and for not acting to end them.^[26] Frustrated with European indifference to the massacres, Armenians from the Dashnaktsutiun political party seized the European managed Ottoman Bank on August 26, 1896. This incident brought further sympathy for Armenians in Europe and was lauded by the European and American press, which vilified Hamid and painted him as the “great assassin” and “bloody Sultan.”^[27] While the Great Powers vowed to take action and enforce new reforms, these never came into fruition due to conflicting political and economical interests.

Dissolution of the Empire

The Young Turk Revolution, 1908

On July 24, 1908, Armenians’ hopes for equality in the empire brightened once more when a coup d’état staged by officers in the Turkish Third Army based in Salonika, removed Hamid II from power and restored the country back to a constitutional monarchy. The officers were part of the Young Turk movement that wanted to reform administration of the decadent state of the Ottoman Empire and modernize it to European standards. The movement was an anti-Hamidian coalition made up of two distinct groups: the secular liberal constitutionalists and the nationalists; the former was more democratic and accepted Armenians into their wing whereas the latter was more intolerant in regard to Armenian-related issues and their frequent requests for European assistance.^[28] In 1902, during a congress of the Young Turks held in Paris, the heads of the liberal wing, Sabahheddin Bey and Ahmed Riza, partially persuaded the nationalists to include in their objectives to ensure some rights to all the minorities of the empire.

Among the numerous factions of the Young Turks also included the political organization Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). Originally a secret society made up of army officers based in Salonika, the CUP proliferated amongst military circles as more army mutinies took place throughout the empire. In 1908, elements of the Third Army and the Second Army Corps declared their opposition to the Sultan and threatened to march on the capital to depose him. Hamid, shaken by the wave of resentment, stepped down from power as Armenians, Greeks, Arabs, Bulgarians and Turks alike rejoiced in his dethronement.^[29]

The Adana Massacre, 1909

An Armenian town left pillaged and destroyed after the massacres in Adana in 1909.

A countercoup took place on April 13, 1909. Some Ottoman military elements, joined by Islamic theological students, aimed to return control of the country to the Sultan and the rule of Islamic law. Riots and fighting broke out between the reactionary forces and CUP forces, until the CUP was able to put down the uprising and court-martial the opposition leaders.

While the movement initially targeted the nascent Young Turk government, it spilled over into pogroms against Armenians who were perceived as having supported the restoration of the constitution.^[30] When Ottoman Army troops were called in, many accounts record that instead of trying to quell the violence they actually took part in pillaging Armenian enclaves in Adana province.^[31] 15,000–30,000 Armenians were killed in the course of the “Adana Massacre“.^[32][33]

The Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917 period

1915

In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers. Minister of War Enver Pasha developed a plan to encircle and destroy the Russian Caucasus Army at Sarıkamış, to regain territories lost to Russia after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. Enver Pasha’s forces were routed at the Battle of Sarikamis, and almost completely destroyed. Returning to Constantinople, Enver publicly blamed his defeat on Armenians living in the region actively siding with the Russians.^[34]

Labor battalions, February 25

On February 25, 1915, The War minister Enver Pasha sent an order to all military units that Armenians in the active Ottoman forces be demobilized and assigned to the unarmed Labour battalion (Turkish: amele taburlari). Enver Pasha explained this decision as “out of fear that they would collaborate with the Russians”. As a tradition, the Ottoman Army drafted non-Muslim males only between the ages of 20 and 45 into the regular army. The younger (15–20) and older (45–60) non-Muslim soldiers had always been used as logistical support through the labor battalions. Before February, some of the Armenian recruits were utilized as laborers (hamals), though they too would ultimately be executed.^[35]

Transferring Armenian conscripts from active field (armed) to passive, unarmed logistic section was an important aspect of the subsequent genocide. As reported in “The Memoirs of Naim Bey“, the extermination of the Armenians in these battalions was part of a premeditated strategy on behalf of the Committee of Union and Progress. Many of these Armenian recruits were executed by local Turkish gangs.^[36]

Events at Van, April 1915

Armenian troops holding a defense line against Turkish forces in the walled city of Van in May 1915

On April 19, 1915, Jevdet Bey demanded that the city of Van immediately furnish him 4,000 soldiers under the pretext of conscription. However, it was clear to the Armenian population that his goal was to massacre the able-bodied men of Van so that there would be no defenders. Jevdet Bey had already used his official writ in nearby villages, ostensibly to search for arms, which had turned into wholesale massacres.^[37] The Armenians offered five hundred soldiers and to pay exemption money for the rest in order to buy time, however, Djevdet accused Armenians of “rebellion,” and spoke of his determination to “crush” it at any cost. “If the rebels fire a single shot,” he declared, “I shall kill every Christian man, woman, and” (pointing to his knee) “every child, up to here.”

On April 20, 1915, the armed conflict of the Van Resistance began when an Armenian woman was harassed, and the two Armenian men that came to her aid were killed by Turkish soldiers. The Armenian defenders protecting 30,000 residents and 15,000 refugees in an area of roughly one square kilometer of the Armenian Quarter and suburb of Aigestan with 1,500 able bodied riflemen who were supplied with 300 rifles and 1,000 pistols and antique weapons. The conflict lasted until General Yudenich came to rescue them.^[38]

Arrest and deportation of Armenian notables, April 1915

Armenian intellectuals who were arrested and later executed en masse by Ottoman authorities on the night of April 24, 1915.

By 1914, Ottoman authorities had already begun a propaganda drive to present Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire as a threat to the empire’s security. An Ottoman naval officer in the War Office described the planning:

In order to justify this enormous crime the requisite propaganda material was thoroughly prepared in Constantinople. [It included such statements as] “the Armenians are in league with the enemy. They will launch an uprising in Istanbul, kill off the Committee of Union and Progress leaders and will succeed in opening the straits (of the Dardanelles).”^[39]

On the night of April 24, 1915, the Ottoman government rounded-up and imprisoned an estimated 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders.^[40] This date coincided with Allied troop landings at Gallipoli after unsuccessful Allied naval attempts to break through the Dardanelles to Constantinople in February and March 1915.

The Temporary Law of Deportation (the “Tehcir” law)

In May 1915, Mehmed Talat Pasha requested that the cabinet and Grand Vizier Said Halim Pasha legalize a measure for relocation and settlement of Armenians to other places due to what Talat Pasha called “the Armenian riots and massacres, which had arisen in a number of places in the country.” However, Talat Pasha was referring specifically to events in Van and extending the implementation to the regions in which alleged “riots and massacres” would affect the security of the war zone of the Caucasus Campaign. Later, the scope of the immigration was widened in order to include the Armenians in the other provinces. On 29 May 1915, the CUP Central Committee passed the Temporary Law of Deportation (“Tehcir Law”), giving the Ottoman government and military authorization to deport anyone it “sensed” as a threat to national security.^[41] The “Tehcir Law” brought some measures regarding the property of the deportees, but during September a new law was proposed. By means of the “Abandoned Properties” Law (Law Concerning Property, Dept’s and Assets Left Behind Deported Persons, also referred as the “Temporary Law on Expropriation and Confiscation”), the Ottoman government took possession of all “abandoned” Armenian goods and properties. Ottoman parliamentary representative Ahmed Riza protested this legislation:

It is unlawful to designate the Armenian assets as “abandoned goods” for the Armenians, the proprietors, did not abandon their properties voluntarily; they were forcibly, compulsorily removed from their domiciles and exiled. Now the government through its efforts is selling their goods… If we are a constitutional regime functioning in accordance with constitutional law we can’t do this. This is atrocious. Grab my arm, eject me from my village, then sell my goods and properties, such a thing can never be permissible. Neither the conscience of the Ottomans nor the law can allow it.^[42]

On 13 September 1915, the Ottoman parliament passed the “Temporary Law of Expropriation and Confiscation”, stating that all property, including land, livestock, and homes belonging to Armenians, was to be confiscated by the authorities.^[43]

The deportation and extermination process

Map of massacre locations and deportation and extermination centers

With the implementation of Tehcir law, the confiscation of Armenian property and the slaughter of Armenians that ensued upon the law’s enactment outraged much of the western world. While the Ottoman Empire’s wartime allies offered little protest, a wealth of German and Austrian historical documents has since come to attest to the witnesses’ horror at the killings and mass starvation of Armenians.^[44][45][46] In the United States, The New York Times reported almost daily on the mass murder of the Armenian people, describing the process as “systematic”, “authorized” and “organized by the government.” Theodore Roosevelt would later characterize this as “the greatest crime of the war.”^[47]

The Armenians were marched out to the Syrian town of Deir ez-Zor and the surrounding desert. A good deal of evidence suggests that the Ottoman government did not provide any facilities or supplies to sustain the Armenians during their deportation, nor when they arrived.^[48] By August 1915, The New York Times repeated an unattributed report that “the roads and the Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles, and those who survive are doomed to certain death. It is a plan to exterminate the whole Armenian people.”^[49]

Ottoman troops escorting the Armenians not only allowed others to rob, kill, and rape the Armenians, but often participated in these activities themselves.^[48] Deprived of their belongings and marched into the desert, hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished.

Naturally, the death rate from starvation and sickness is very high and is increased by the brutal treatment of the authorities, whose bearing toward the exiles as they are being driven back and forth over the desert is not unlike that of slave drivers. With few exceptions no shelter of any kind is provided and the people coming from a cold climate are left under the scorching desert sun without food and water. Temporary relief can only be obtained by the few able to pay officials.^[48]

The Armenians were driven east, with only what they could carry

It is believed that 25 major concentration camps existed, under the command of Şükrü Kaya, one of the right hand-men of Talat Pasha.^[50] The majority of the camps were situated near Turkey’s modern Iraqi and Syrian borders, and some were only temporary transit camps.^[50] Others, such as Radjo, Katma, and Azaz, are said to have been used only temporarily, for mass graves; these sites were vacated by autumn 1915.^[50] Some authors also maintain that the camps Lale, Tefridje, Dipsi, Del-El, and Ra’s al-’Ain were built specifically for those who had a life expectancy of a few days.^[50]

Although nearly all the camps, including the primary sites, were open air, the remainder of the mass killing in minor camps was not limited to direct killings, but also to mass burning. Eitan Belkind was a Nili member, who infiltrated the Ottoman army as an official. He was assigned to the headquarters of Camal Pasha. He claims to have witnessed the burning of 5,000 Armenians ^[51] Lt. Hasan Maruf, of the Ottoman army, describes how a population of a village were taken all together, and then burned. ^[52] The Commander of the Third Army, Vehib’s 12 pages affidavit, which was dated December 5, 1918, presented in the Trabzon trial series (March 29, 1919) included in the Key Indictment^[53], report such a mass burning of the population of an entire village near Mus. ^[54] that in Bitlis, Mus and Sassoun, The shortest method for disposing of the women and children concentrated in tile various camps was to burn them. And also that, Turkish prisoners who had apparently witnessed some of these scenes were horrified and maddened at the remembering the sight. They told the Russians that the stench of the burning human flesh permeated the air for many days after. The Germans, Ottoman allies, also witnessed the way Armenians were burned according to the Israeli historian, Bat Ye’or, who writes: The Germans, allies of the Turks in the First World War, …saw how civil populations were shut up in churches and burned, or gathered en masse in camps, tortured to death, and reduced to ashes,…^[55] poisoning during the Trabzon trial series, of the Martial court, from the sittings between March 26 and May 17, 1919, the Trabzons Health Services Inspector Dr. Ziya Fuad wrote in a report that Dr. Saib, caused the death of children with the injection of morphine, the information was allegedly provided by two physicians (Drs. Ragib and Vehib), both Dr. Saib colleagues at Trabzons Red Crescent hospital, where those atrocities were said to have been committed.^{[56] [57]} Dr. Ziya Fuad, and Dr. Adnan, public health services director of Trabzon, submitted affidavits, reporting a cases, in which, two school buildings were used to organize children and then sent them on the mezzanine, to kill them with a toxic gas equipment. ^{[58] [59]}

An Armenian woman kneeling beside dead child in field “within sight of help and safety at Aleppo”

The Ottoman surgeon, Dr. Haydar Cemal wrote on the order of the Chief Sanitation Office of the IIIrd Army in January 1916, when the spread of typhus was an acute problem, innocent Armenians slated for deportation at Erzican were inoculated with the blood of typhoid fever patients without rendering that blood ‘inactive’.^{[60] [61]} Jeremy Hugh Baron writes : Individual doctors were directly involved in the massacres, having poisoned infants, killed children and issued false certificates of death from natural causes. Nazim’s brother-in-law Dr. Tevfik Rushdu, Inspector-General of Health Services, organized the disposal of Armenian corpses with thousands of kilos of lime over six months; he became foreign secretary from 1925 to 1938. ^[62] The psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton, writes in a parenthesis when introducing the crimes of NAZI doctors ^[63] Perhaps Turkish doctors, in their participation in the genocide against the Armenians, come closest, as I shall later suggest. Oscar S. Heizer, the American consul at Trabzon, reports: This plan did not suit Nail Bey…. Many of the children were loaded into boats and taken out to sea and thrown overboard. ^[64] The Italian consul of Trabzon in 1915, Giacomo Gorrini, writes: I saw thousands of innocent women and children placed on boats which were capsized in the Black Sea.^[65] Hoffman Philip, the American Charge at Constantinople chargé d’affaires, writes: Boat loads sent from Zor down the river arrived at Ana, one thirty miles away, with three fifths of passengers missing. ^[66] The Trabzon trials reported Armenians having been drown in the Black Sea.^[67]

Teşkilat-i Mahsusa

The remains of Armenians massacred at Erzinjan.^[68]

The Committee of Union and Progress founded a “special organization” (Turkish: Teşkilat-i Mahsusa) that participated in the destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community.^[69] This organization adopted its name in 1913 and functioned like a special forces outfit, or the later Einsatzgruppen.^[70] Later in 1914, the Ottoman government influenced the direction the special organization was to take by releasing criminals from central prisons to be the central elements of this newly formed special organization.^[71] According to the Mazhar commissions attached to the tribunal as soon as November 1914, 124 criminals were released from Pimian prison. Many other releases followed; in Ankara a few months later, 49 criminals were released from its central prison.^{[citation needed]} Little by little from the end of 1914 to the beginning of 1915, hundreds, then thousands of prisoners were freed to form the members of this organization. Later, they were charged to escort the convoys of Armenian deportees.^[72] Vehib Pasha, commander of the Ottoman Third Army, called those members of the special organization, the “butchers of the human species.”^[70]

Contemporaneous reports and reactions

Of this photo, the United States ambassador wrote [1], “Scenes like this were common all over the Armenian provinces, in the spring and summer months of 1915. Death in its several forms—massacre, starvation, exhaustion—destroyed the larger part of the refugees. The Turkish policy was that of extermination under the guise of deportation.”

Hundreds of eyewitnesses, including the neutral United States and the Ottoman Empire’s own allies, Germany and Austria-Hungary, recorded and documented numerous acts of state-sponsored massacres. Many foreign officials offered to intervene on behalf of the Armenians, including Pope Benedict XV, only to be turned away by Ottoman government officials who claimed they were retaliating against a pro-Russian insurrection. ^[73] On May 24, 1915, the Triple Entente warned the Ottoman Empire that “In view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres.”^[74]

The American Committee for Relief in the Near East (ACRNE, or “Near East Relief”) was a charitable organization established to relieve the suffering of the peoples of the Near East.^[75] The organization was championed by Henry Morgenthau, Sr., American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Morgenthau’s eyewitness accounts of the mass slaughter of Armenians galvanized much support for ACRNE.^[76]

The U.S. mission in the Ottoman Empire

The United States had several consulates throughout the Ottoman Empire, including locations in Edirne, Kharput, Samsun, Smyrna, Trebizond, Van, Constantinople, and Aleppo. The United States was officially a neutral party until it joined with the Allies in 1917. As the orders for deportations and massacres were enacted, many consular officials reported to the ambassador what they were witnessing. In September 1915 the American consul in Kharput, Leslie Davis, reported his discovery of the bodies of nearly 10,000 Armenians dumped into several ravines near Lake Göeljuk, later referring to this region as the “slaughterhouse province”.^[77]

A telegram sent by Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr. to the State Department on 16 July 1915 describes the massacres as a “campaign of race extermination.”

Fundraising poster for the American Committee for Relief in the Near East – the United States contributed a significant amount of aid to help Armenians during the Armenian Genocide.

An article by the New York Times dated 15 December 1915 states that one million Armenians had been either deported or executed by the Ottoman government.

Workers of the American Committee for Relief in the Near East in Sivas.

Similar reports reached Morgenthau from Aleppo and Van, prompting him to raise the issue in person with Talaat and Enver. As he quoted to them the testimonies of his consulate officials, they justified the deportations as necessary to the conduct of the war, suggesting that complicity of the Armenians of Van with the Russian forces that had taken the city justified the persecution of all ethnic Armenians. In his memoirs, Morgenthau wrote, “When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact…”^[78]

In addition to the consulates, there were also numerous Protestant missionary compounds established in Armenian-populated regions, including Van and Kharput. In memoirs and reports, their staff vividly described the brutal methods used by Ottoman forces and documented numerous instances of atrocities committed against the Christian minority.^[79]

The events were reported regularly in newspapers and literary journals around the world.^[80] Many Americans spoke out against the Genocide, including former president Theodore Roosevelt, rabbi Stephen Wise, William Jennings Bryan, and Alice Stone Blackwell. The American Near East Relief Committee helped donate over $110 million to the Armenians.^[81] In the United States and the United Kingdom, children were regularly reminded to clean their plates while eating and to “remember the starving Armenians”.^[82]

Allied forces in the Middle East

On the Middle Eastern front, the British military engaged Ottoman forces in southern Syria and Mesopotamia. British diplomat Gertrude Bell filed the following report after hearing the account of a captured Ottoman soldier:

The battalion left Aleppo on 3 February and reached Ras al-Ain in twelve hours… some 12,000 Armenians were concentrated under the guardianship of some hundred Kurds… These Kurds were called gendarmes, but in reality mere butchers; bands of them were publicly ordered to take parties of Armenians, of both sexes, to various destinations, but had secret instructions to destroy the males, children and old women… One of these gendarmes confessed to killing 100 Armenian men himself… the empty desert cisterns and caves were also filled with corpses…^[83]

Reacting to numerous eyewitness accounts, British politician Viscount Bryce and historian Arnold J. Toynbee compiled statements from survivors and eyewitnesses from other countries including Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, who similarly attested to the systematized massacring of innocent Armenians by Ottoman government forces. In 1916, they published The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916. Although the book has since been criticized as British wartime propaganda to build up sentiment against the Central Powers, Bryce had submitted the work to scholars for verification before its publication. University of Oxford Regius Professor Gilbert Murray stated of the tome, “…the evidence of these letters and reports will bear any scrutiny and overpower any skepticism. Their genuineness is established beyond question.”^[84] Other professors, including Herbert Fisher of Sheffield University and former American Bar Association president Moorfield Storey, affirmed the same conclusion.^[85]

Winston Churchill described the massacres as an “administrative holocaust” and noted that “the clearance of race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act could be… There is no reason to doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons. The opportunity presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race opposed to all Turkish ambitions.”^[86]

The joint Austrian and German mission

As allies during the war, the Imperial German mission in the Ottoman Empire included both military and civilian components. Germany had brokered a deal with the Sublime Porte to commission the building of a railroad stretching from Berlin to the Middle East, called the Baghdad Railway.

Among the most famous persons to document the massacres was German military medic Armin T. Wegner. Wegner defied state censorship in taking hundreds of photographs of Armenians being deported and subsequently starving in northern Syrian camps.^[87]

German officers stationed in eastern Turkey disputed the government’s assertion that Armenian revolts had broken out, suggesting that the areas were “quiet until the deportations began.”^[88]

Germany’s diplomatic mission was led by Ambassador Baron Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim (and later Count Paul Wolff Metternich). Like Morgenthau, von Wangenheim received many disturbing messages from consul officials around the Ottoman Empire. From the province of Adana, Consul Eugene Buge reported that the CUP chief had sworn to kill and massacre any Armenians who survived the deportation marches.^[89] In June 1915, von Wangenheim sent a cable to Berlin reporting that Talat had admitted the deportations were not “being carried out because of ‘military considerations alone.’” One month later, he came to the conclusion that there “no longer was doubt that the Porte was trying to exterminate the Armenian race in the Turkish Empire.”^[90]

When Wolff-Metternich succeeded von Wangenheim, he continued to dispatch similar cables: “The Committee [CUP] demands the extirpation of the last remnants of the Armenians and the government must yield…. A Committee representative is assigned to each of the provincial administrations…. Turkification means license to expel, to kill or destroy everything that is not Turkish.”^[91]

German engineers and laborers involved in building the railway also witnessed Armenians being crammed into cattle cars and shipped along the railroad line. Franz Gunther, a representative for Deutsche Bank which was funding the construction of the Baghdad Railway, forwarded photographs to his directors and expressed his frustration at having to remain silent amid such “bestial cruelty”.^[92] Major General Otto von Lossow, acting military attaché and head of the German Military Plenipotentiary in the Ottoman Empire, spoke to Ottoman intentions in a conference held in Batum in 1918:

The Turks have embarked upon the “total extermination of the Armenians in Transcaucasia… The aim of Turkish policy is, as I have reiterated, the taking of possession of Armenian districts and the extermination of the Armenians. Talaat’s government wants to destroy all Armenians, not just in Turkey but also outside Turkey. On the basis of all the reports and news coming to me here in Tiflis there hardly can be any doubt that the Turks systematically are aiming at the extermination of the few hundred thousand Armenians whom they left alive until now.^[93]

Similarly, Major General Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein noted that “The Turkish policy of causing starvation is an all too obvious proof… for the Turkish resolve to destroy the Armenians.”^[94] Another notable figure in the German military camp was Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who documented various massacres of Armenians. He sent fifteen reports regarding “deportations and mass killings” to Germany’s chancellor in Berlin. His final report noted that fewer than 100,000 Armenians were left alive in the Ottoman Empire; the rest had been exterminated (German: ausgerottet).^[95] Scheubner-Richter also detailed the methods of the Ottoman government, noting its use of the Special Organization and other bureaucratized instruments of genocide.

Some Germans openly supported the Ottoman policy against the Armenians. As Hans Humann, the German naval attaché in Constantinople said to U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau:^[96]

I have lived in Turkey the larger part of my life … and I know the Armenians. I also know that both Armenians and Turks cannot live together in this country. One of these races has got to go. And I don’t blame the Turks for what they are doing to the Armenians. I think that they are entirely justified. The weaker nation must succumb. The Armenians desire to dismember Turkey; they are against the Turks and the Germans in this war, and they therefore have no right to exist here.

—Hans Humann, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story

In a genocide conference in 2001, professor Wolfgang Wipperman of the Free University of Berlin introduced documents evidencing that the German High Command was aware of the mass killings at the time but chose not to interfere or speak out.^[97]

Russian military

The Russian Empire’s response to the bombardment of its Black Sea naval ports was primarily a land campaign through the Caucasus. Early victories against the Ottoman Empire from the winter of 1914 to the spring 1915 saw significant gains of territory, including relieving the Armenian bastion resisting in the city of Van in May 1915. The Russians also reported encountering the bodies of unarmed civilian Armenians in the areas they advanced through.^[98] In March 1916, the scenes they saw in the city of Erzerum led the Russians to retaliate against the Ottoman III Army whom they held responsible for the massacres, destroying it in its entirety.^[99]

Swedish Embassy and Military Attaché

Sweden, as a neutral state during the entire World War I, had permanent representatives in the Ottoman Turkey, able to continiously report on the ongoing events in the country. The Swedish Embassy in Constantinople, represented by Ambassador Per Gustaf August Cosswa Anckarsvärd, along with Envoy M. Ahlgren, and the Swedish Military Attaché, Captain Einar af Wirsén, closely followed the development in the Ottoman Empire, reporting, among others, on the Armenian massacres. On July 7, 1915, Anckarsvärd dispatched a two page report to Stockholm, beginning with the following information:

The persecutions of the Armenians have reached hair-raising proportions and all points to the fact that the Young Turks want to seize the opportunity, since due to different reasons there are no effective external pressure to be feared, to once and for all put an end to the Armenian question. The means for this are quite simple and consist of the extermination [utrotandet] of the Armenian nation.^[100]

During the remaining of 1915 alone, Anckarsvärd dispatched six other reports entitled “The Persecutions of the Armenians”. In his report on July 22, Anckarsvärd noted that the persecutions of the Armenians were being extended to encompass all Christians in the Ottoman Empire. Quoting the statement of the Greek chargé d’affaires:

[the deportations] can not be any other issue than an annihilation war against the Greek nation in Turkey and as measures hereof they have been implementing forced conversions to Islam, in obvious aim to, that if after the end of the war there again would be a question of European intervention for the protection of the Christians, there will be as few of them left as possible.^[101]

On August 9, 1915, Anckarsvärd dispatched yet another report, confirming his suspicions regarding the plans of the Turkish Government:

It is obvious that the Turks are taking the opportunity to, now during the war, annihilate [utplåna] the Armenian nation so that when the peace comes no Armenian question longer exists.”^[102]

When reflecting upon the situation in Turkey during the final stages of the war, Envoy Alhgren presented an analysis of the prevailing situation in Turkey and the hard times which had befallen the population. In explaining the increased living costs he identified a number of reasons:

…obstacles for domestic trade, the almost total paralysing of the foreign trade and finally the strong decreasing of labour power, caused partly by the mobilisation but partly also by the extermination of the Armenian race [utrotandet af den armeniska rasen].^[103]

Wirsén, when writing his memoirs from his mission to the Balkans and Turkey, Minnen från fred och krig (“Memories from Peace and War”), dedicated an entire chapter to the Armenian genocide, entitled Mordet på en nation (“The Murder of a Nation”). Commenting the deportations as a result of accusing the Armenians for collaboration with the Russians, Wirsén concludes that the subsequent deportations were nothing but a cover for the extermination:

Officially, these had the goal to move the entire Armenian population to the steppe regions of Northern Mesopotamia and Syria, but in reality they aimed to exterminate [utrota] the Armenians, whereby the pure Turkish element in Asia Minor would achieve a dominating position.”^[104]

In conclusion, Wirsén made the following note: “The annihilation of the Armenian nation in Asia Minor must revolt all human feelings…The way the Armenian problem was solved was hair-raising. I can still see in front of me Talaat’s cynical expression, when he emphasized that the Armenian question was solved.”^[105]

The Aftermath

Turkish courts-martial

Domestic courts-martial were designed by Sultan Mehmed VI to punish members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) in Turkish:”Ittihat Terakki” for involving the Empire in World War I. The courts-martial blamed the members of CUP for pursuing a war that did not fit into the notion of Millet. The Armenian issue was used as a tool to punish the leaders of the CUP. Most of the documents generated in these courts were later moved to international trials. By January 1919, a report to Sultan Mehmed VI accused over 130 suspects, most of whom were high officials. The military court found that it was the will of the CUP to eliminate the Armenians physically, via its special organization. The 1919 pronouncement reads as follows:

The Court Martial taking into consideration the above-named crimes declares, unanimously, the culpability as principal factors of these crimes the fugitives Talat Pasha, former Grand Vizir, Enver Efendi, former War Minister, struck off the register of the Imperial Army, Cemal Efendi, former Navy Minister, struck off too from the Imperial Army, and Dr. Nazim Efendi, former Minister of Education, members of the General Council of the Union & Progress, representing the moral person of that party;… the Court Martial pronounces, in accordance with said stipulations of the Law the death penalty against Talat, Enver, Cemal, and Dr. Nazim.

—Turkish Courts-Martial of 1919-20

The term Three Pashas, which include Mehmed Talat Pasha and Ismail Enver, refers to the triumvirate who had fled the Empire at the end of World War I. At the trials in Constantinople in 1919 they were sentenced to death in absentia. The courts-martial officially disbanded the CUP and confiscated its assets, and the assets of those found guilty. At least two of the three were later assassinated by Armenian vigilantes.

International trials

Following the Mudros Armistice, the preliminary Peace Conference in Paris established “The Commission on Responsibilities and Sanctions” in January 1919, which was chaired by U.S. Secretary of State Lansing. Based on the commission’s work, several articles were added to the Treaty of Sèvres, and the acting government of the Ottoman Empire, Sultan Mehmed VI and Damat Adil Ferit Pasha, were summoned to trial. The Treaty of Sèvres (August 1920) planned a trial to determine those responsible for the “barbarous and illegitimate methods of warfare… [including] offenses against the laws and customs of war and the principles of humanity”.^[8] Article 230 of the Treaty of Sèvres required the Ottoman Empire “hand over to the Allied Powers the persons whose surrender may be required by the latter as being responsible for the massacres committed during the continuance of the state of war on territory which formed part of the Ottoman Empire on August 1, 1914.”

Various Ottoman politicians, generals, and intellectuals were transferred to Malta, where they were held for some three years while searches were made of archives in Constantinople, London, Paris and Washington to investigate their actions.^[106] However, the Inter-allied tribunal attempt demanded by the Treaty of Sèvres never solidified and the detainees were eventually returned to Turkey in exchange for British citizens held by Kemalist Turkey.

Trial of Soghomon Tehlirian

Grand Vizier Talat Pasha who was assassinated by Soghomon Tehlirian

On March 15, 1921, former Grand Vizier Talat Pasha was assassinated in the Charlottenburg District of Berlin, Germany, in broad daylight and in the presence of many witnesses. Talat’s death was part of “Operation Nemesis“, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation‘s codename for their covert operation in the 1920s to kill the planners of the Armenian Genocide.

The subsequent trial of the assassin, Soghomon Tehlirian, had an important influence on Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish descent who campaigned in the League of Nations to ban what he called “barbarity” and “vandalism”, and, in 1943, coined the word genocide.

Armenian deaths, 1914 to 1918

Targets of movements from Ottoman Archives

While there is no consensus as to how many Armenians lost their lives during the Armenian Genocide, there is general agreement among western scholars that over 500,000 Armenians died between 1914 and 1918. Estimates vary between 300,000 (per the modern Turkish state) to 1,500,000 (per modern Armenia,^[107] Argentina,^[108] and other states). Encyclopædia Britannica references the research of Arnold J. Toynbee, an intelligence officer of the British Foreign Office, who estimated that 600,000 Armenians “died or were massacred during deportation” in the years 1915–1916.^[109][110]

The study of the Armenian Genocide

Hebrew University scholar Yehuda Bauer suggests of the Armenian Genocide, “This is the closest parallel to the Holocaust.”^[111] He nonetheless distinguishes several key differences between the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, particularly in regard to motivation:

[T]he Nazis saw the Jews as the central problem of world history. Upon its solution depended the future of mankind. Unless International Jewry was defeated, human civilization would not survive. The attitude towards the Jews had in it important elements of pseudo-religion. There was no such motivation present in the Armenian case; Armenians were to be annihilated for power-political reasons, and in Turkey only…

The differences between the holocaust and the Armenian massacres are less important than the similarities—and even if the Armenian case is not seen as a holocaust in the extreme form which it took towards Jews, it is certainly the nearest thing to it.^[111]

Bauer has also suggested that the Armenian Genocide is best understood, not as having begun in 1915, but rather as “an ongoing genocide, from 1896, through 1908/9, through World War I and right up to 1923.”^[112] Lucy Dawidowicz also alludes to these earlier massacres as at least as significant as WWI era events:

In 1897, when the Dreyfus Affair was tearing France apart, Bernard Lazare, a French Jew active in Dreyfus’s defense, addressed a group of Jewish students in Paris on the subject of anti-Semitism. “For the Christian peoples,” he remarked, “an Armenian solution” to their Jew-hatred was available. He was referring to the Turkish massacres of Armenians, which in their extent and horror most closely approximated the murder of European Jews. But, Lazare went on, “their sensibilities cannot allow them to envisage that.” The once unthinkable “Armenian solution” became, in our time, the achievable “Final Solution,” the Nazi code name for the annihilation of the European Jews.

—Lucy Dawidowicz, ^[113]

Law professor Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” in 1943, has stated that he did so with the fate of the Armenians in mind, explaining that “it happened so many times… First to the Armenians, then after the Armenians, Hitler took action.”^[114] Several international organizations have conducted studies of the events, each in turn determining that the term “genocide” aptly describes “the Ottoman massacre of Armenians in 1915-1916.”^[115] Among the organizations affirming this conclusion are the International Center for Transitional Justice, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the United Nations’ Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities.^[116][115]

In 2002, the International Center for Transitional Justice was asked by the Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission to provide a report on the applicability of the Genocide Convention to the controversy. The ICTJ report ruled that it was a genocide, and further that the Republic of Turkey was not liable for the event.^[117]

In 2005, the International Association of Genocide Scholars affirmed^[118] that scholarly evidence revealed the “Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens – an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches” and condemned Turkish attempts to deny its factual and moral reality. In 2007, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity produced a letter signed by 53 Nobel Laureates re-affirming the Genocide Scholars’ conclusion that the 1915 killings of Armenians constituted genocide.^[119][120]

While some consider denial to be a form of hate speech or politically-minded historical revisionism, several western academics have expressed doubts as to the genocidal character of the events.^{[121][122][123]} The most important counterpoint may be that of British scholar Bernard Lewis. While he had once written of “the terrible holocaust of 1915, when a million and a half Armenians perished”,^[124] he later came to believe that the term “genocide” was distinctly inaccurate, because the “tremendous massacres”^[125] were not “a deliberate preconceived decision of the Turkish government.”^[126] This opinion has been joined by Guenter Lewy.^[127]

Academic views within the Republic of Turkey are often at odds with international consensus: this may partly stem from the fact that to acknowledge the Armenian genocide in Turkey carries with it a risk of criminal prosecution. Many Turkish intellectuals have been prosecuted for characterizing the massacres as genocide,^[128][129] including Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink, who was prosecuted three times for “denigrating Turkishness” for his having criticized the Turkish state’s denial of the Armenian Genocide.^[130] In 2007, Dink was murdered by a Turkish nationalist.^[131] Later, photographs of the assassin being honored as a hero while in police custody, posing in front of the Turkish flag with grinning policemen,^[132] gave the academic community still more pause in regard to engaging the Armenian issue.^[133]

Bat Ye’or has suggested that “the genocide of the Armenians was a jihad.”^[134] Ye’or holds jihad and what she calls “dhimmitude” to be among the “principles and values” that led to the Armenian Genocide.^[135] This perspective is challenged by Fà’iz el-Ghusein, a Bedouin Arab witness of the Armenian persecution, whose 1918 treatise aimed “to refute beforehand inventions and slanders against the Faith of Islam and against Moslems generally… [W]hat the Armenians have suffered is to be attributed to the Committee of Union and Progress… [I]t has been due to their nationalist fanaticism and their jealousy of the Armenians, and to these alone; the Faith of Islam is guiltless of their deeds.”^[136] Arnold Toynbee writes that “the Young Turks made Pan-Islamism and Turkish Nationalism work together for their ends, but the development of their policy shows the Islamic element receding and the Nationalist gaining ground.”^[137] Toynbee, and various other sources, report that many Armenians were spared death by marrying into Turkish families or converting to Islam. El-Ghusein points out that many converts were put to death, concerned that Westerners would come to regard the “extermination of the Armenians”^[138] as “a black stain on the history of Islam, which ages will not efface.”^[139] In one instance, when an Islamic leader appealed to spare Armenian converts to Islam, El-Ghusein quotes a government functionary as responding that “politics have no religion”, before sending the converts to their deaths.^[138]

Noam Chomsky has suggested that, rather than the Armenian Genocide having been relegated to the periphery of public awareness, “more people are aware of the Armenian genocide during the First World War than are aware of the Indonesian genocide in 1965″.^[140] Taner Akcam‘s A Shameful Act has contextualized the Armenian Genocide with the desperate Ottoman struggle at Gallipoli, suggesting that panic of imminent destruction caused Ottoman authorities to opt for deportation and extermination.^[141]

The Republic of Turkey and the Armenian Genocide

The Republic of Turkey‘s formal stance is that the deaths of Armenians during the “relocation” or “deportation” cannot aptly be deemed “genocide,” a position that has been supported with a plethora of diverging justifications: that the killings were not deliberate or were not governmentally orchestrated, that the killings were justified because Armenians posed a Russian-sympathizing threat^[142] as a cultural group, that Armenians merely starved, or any of various characterizations recalling marauding “Armenian gangs.”^{[143][144][145]} Some suggestions seek to invalidate the genocide on semantic or anachronistic grounds (the word “genocide” was not coined until 1943).

Turkish World War I casualty figures are often cited to mitigate the effect of the number of Armenian dead.^[146]

Turkish governmental sources have asserted that the historically-demonstrated “tolerance of Turkish people”^[147] itself renders the Armenian Genocide an impossibility. One military document leverages 11th century history to disprove the Armenian Genocide: “It was the Seljuk Turks who saved the Armenians that came under the Turkish domination in 1071 from the Byzantine persecution and granted them the right to live as a man should.”^[147] A Der Spiegel article addressed this modern Turkish conception of history thus:

Would you admit to the crimes of your grandfathers, if these crimes didn’t really happen?” asked ambassador Öymen. But the problem lies precisely in this question, says Hrant Dink, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Istanbul-based Armenian weekly Agos. Turkey’s bureaucratic elite have never really shed themselves of the Ottoman tradition — in the perpetrators, they see their fathers, whose honor they seek to defend.

This tradition instills a sense of identity in Turkish nationalists — both from the left and the right, and it is passed on from generation to generation through the school system. This tradition also requires an antipole against which it could define itself. Since the times of the Ottoman Empire, religious minorities have been pushed into this role.^[148]

In 2005, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan invited Turkish, Armenian and international historians to form a commission to re-evaluate the “events of 1915″ (his preferred description^[149]) by using archives in Turkey, Armenia and other countries.^[150] Armenian president Robert Kocharian rejected this offer by saying,

It is the responsibility of governments to develop bilateral relations and we do not have the right to delegate that responsibility to historians. That is why we have proposed and propose again that, without pre-conditions, we establish normal relations between our two countries.^[151]

Additionally, Turkish foreign minister of the time, Abdullah Gül, invited the United States and other countries to contribute such a commission by appointing scholars “investigate this tragedy and open ways for Turks and Armenians to come together”.^[152]

The Turkish government continues to protest the formal recognition of the genocide by other countries, and to dispute^{[citation needed]} that there ever was a genocide.

Controversies

Efforts by the Turkish government and its agents to quash mention of the genocide have resulted in numerous scholarly, diplomatic, political and legal controversies. Prosecutors acting on their own initiative have utilized Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code prohibiting “insulting Turkishness” to silence a number of prominent Turkish intellectuals who spoke of atrocities suffered by Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman Empire.^[153] These prosecutions have often been accompanied by hate campaigns and threats, as was the case for Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian intellectual murdered in 2007. The leading lawyer behind the prosecutions, Kemal Kerincsiz, is under investigation for complicity in the underground Ergenekon network.

In 1982, the Israeli Foreign Ministry attempted to prevent an international conference on genocide, held in Tel Aviv, from including any mention of the Armenian Genocide. Several reports suggested that Turkey had warned that Turkish Jews might face “reprisals”, if the conference permitted Armenian participation.^[154] This charge was “categorically denied” by Turkey;^[155] the Israeli Foreign Ministry supported Turkey in this protestation that there had been no threats against Jews, suggesting that its misgivings as to the genocide conference were based on considerations “vital to the Jewish nation”.^[156]

A 1989 U.S. Senate proposal to recognize the Armenian Genocide stoked the ire of Turkey. The proposal occurred in the context of the publication of internal U.S. documents which laid out a State Department official’s eyewitness report that “thousands and thousands of Armenians, mostly innocent and helpless women and children, were butchered”, in the last days of the Ottoman Empire.^[157] Turkey responded by blocking U.S. Navy visits to Turkey and suspending some U.S. military training facilities on Turkish territory.^[157] The American scholar who assembled the U.S. archive documents for publication went into hiding after a series of anonymous threats.^[157]

In 1990, psychologist Robert Jay Lifton received a letter from the Turkish Ambassador to the United States, questioning his inclusion of references to the Armenian Genocide in one of his books. The ambassador inadvertently included a draft of the letter, presented by scholar Heath W. Lowry, advising the ambassador on how to prevent mention of the Armenian Genocide in scholarly works.^[158] In 1996, Lowry was named to a chair at Princeton University, which had been financed by the Turkish government, sparking a debate on ethics in scholarship.^[159][160]

According to some newly discovered documents that belonged to the interior minister of the Ottoman Empire, over 970,000 Ottoman Armenians disappeared from official population records from 1915 through 1916. These documents have been published in a recent book titled The Remaining Documents of Talat Pasha written by the Turkish historian Murat Bardakçı. The book is a collection of documents and records that once belonged to Mehmed Talat, known as Talat Pasha, the primary architect of the Armenian deportations. The documents were given to Mr. Bardakçi by Mr. Talat’s widow, Hayriye, in 1983. According to the documents, the number of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire before 1915 stood at 1,256,000. The number plunged to 284,157 two years later in 1917^[161].

Armenia and the Armenian Genocide

Armenia has been involved in a protracted ethnic-territorial conflict with Azerbaijan, a Turkic state, since Azerbaijan became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991. The conflict has featured several pogroms, massacres, and waves of ethnic cleansing, by both sides. Some foreign policy observers and historians have suggested that Armenia and the Armenian diaspora have sought to portray the modern conflict as a continuation of the Armenian Genocide, in order to influence modern policy-making in the region.^[162][163] According to Thomas Ambrosio, the Armenian Genocide furnishes “a reserve of public sympathy and moral legitimacy that translates into significant political influence… to elicit congressional support for anti-Azerbaijan policies.”^[162]

The rhetoric leading up to the onset of the conflict, which unfolded in the context of several pogroms of Armenians, was dominated by references to the Armenian Genocide, including fears that it would be, or was in the course of being, repeated.^[164][165] During the conflict, the Azeri and Armenian governments regularly accused each other of genocidal intent, although these claims have been treated skeptically by outside observers.^[163]

Recognition of the Armenian Genocide

As a response to the continuing denial of the Armenian Genocide by the Turkish State, many activists among Armenian Diaspora communities have pushed for formal recognition of the Armenian genocide from various governments around the world. 21 countries and 42 U.S. states have adopted resolutions acknowledging the Armenian Genocide as a bona fide historical event.

Cultural loss

The premeditated destruction of objects of Armenian cultural, religious, historical and communal heritage was yet another key purpose of both the genocide itself and the post-genocidal campaign of denial. Armenian churches and monasteries were destroyed, Armenian cemeteries flattened, and, in several cities (e.g. Van), Armenian quarters were demolished. ^[166]

In 1914, the Armenian Patriarch in Constantinople presented a list of the Armenian holy sites under his supervision. The list contained 2,549 religious places of which 200 were monasteries while 1 600 were churches. A review in 1974 showed that only 916 Armenian churches could be identified, of which half were as good as totally destroyed and 252 of the remaining objects were only ruins. Only 197 objects/sites were in stable conditions.^[167]

Commemoration

Memorials

The Tsitsernakaberd Armenian Genocide memorial in Yerevan, Armenia

Over 135 memorials, spread across 25 countries, commemorate the Armenian Genocide.^[168]

In 1965, the 50th anniversary of the genocide, a 24-hour mass protest was initiated in Yerevan demanding recognition of the Armenian Genocide by Soviet authorities. The memorial was completed two years later, at Tsitsernakaberd above the Hrazdan gorge in Yerevan. The 44 metres (140 ft) stele symbolizes the national rebirth of Armenians. Twelve slabs are positioned in a circle, representing 12 lost provinces in present day Turkey. At the center of the circle there is an eternal flame. Each April 24, hundreds of thousands of people walk to the genocide monument and lay flowers around the eternal flame.

Another memorial, at Alfortville, Paris, was bombed on May 3, 1984, by a hit-team headed by Grey Wolves member Abdullah Catli and paid by the Turkish intelligence agency (MİT) ^[169].

Art

The earliest example of the Armenian genocide on art was a medal issued in St. Petersburg, signifying Russian sympathy for Armenian suffering. It was struck in 1915, as the massacres and deportations were still raging. Since then, dozens of medals in different countries have been commissioned to commemorate the event.^[170]

Armenian-Russian “Hour of Trial” Medal, issued in 1915

Several eyewitness accounts of the events were published, notably those of Swedish missionary Alma Johansson and U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr. German medic Armin Wegner wrote several books about the events he witnessed while stationed in the Ottoman Empire. Years later, having returned to Germany, Wegner was imprisoned for opposing Nazism,^[171] and his books were subjected to Nazi book burnings.^[172] Probably the best known literary work on the Armenian Genocide is Franz Werfel‘s 1933 The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. It was a bestseller that became particularly popular among the youth of the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi era.^[173]

Kurt Vonnegut‘s 1988 novel Bluebeard features the Armenian Genocide as an underlying theme. Other novels incorporating the Armenian Genocide include Louis de Berniéres‘ Birds without Wings, Edgar Hilsenrath‘s German-language The Story of the Last Thought, and Polish Stefan Żeromski‘s 1925 The Spring to Come. A story in Edward Saint-Ivan’s 2006 anthology “The Black Knight’s God” includes a fictional survivor of the Armenian Genocide.

The first film about the Armenian Genocide appeared in 1919, a Hollywood production entitled Ravished Armenia. It resonated with acclaimed director Atom Egoyan, influencing his 2002 Ararat. There are also references in Elia Kazan‘s America, America or Henri Verneuil‘s Mayrig. At the Berlin Film Festival of 2007 Italian directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani presented another film about the events, based on Antonia Arslan’s book, La Masseria Delle Allodole (The Farm of the Larks).^[174] Richard Kalinoski’s play, Beast on the Moon, is about two Armenian Genocide survivors.

Arshile Gorky‘s The Artist and His Mother (ca. 1926-1936)

The paintings of Armenian-American Arshile Gorky, a seminal figure of Abstract Expressionism, were often speculated to have been informed by the suffering and loss of the period.^[175] In 1915, at age 10, Gorky fled his native Van and escaped to Russian-Armenia with his mother and three sisters, only to have his mother die of starvation in Yerevan in 1919. His The Artist and His Mother painting is based on a photograph with his mother taken in Armenia before his mother’s passing.

In 1975, famous French-Armenian singer Charles Aznavour recorded the song “Ils sont tombés” (“They Fell”), dedicated to the memory of Armenian Genocide victims.^[176]

American composer and singer Daniel Decker has achieved critical acclaim for his collaborations with Armenian composer Ara Gevorgyan. The song “Adana”, named for the province of a 1909 pogrom of the Armenian people, tells the story of the Armenian Genocide. “Adana” has been translated into 17 languages and recorded by singers around the world.^[177]

The American band System of a Down, composed of four descendants of Armenian Genocide survivors, has promoted awareness of the Armenian Genocide, through its lyrics and concerts.^[178]

In late 2003, Diamanda Galás released the album Defixiones, Will and Testament: Orders from the Dead, an 80-minute memorial tribute to the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek victims of the genocide in Turkey. “The performance is an angry meditation on genocide and the politically cooperative denial of it, in particular the Turkish and American denial of the Armenian, Assyrian, and Anatolian Greek genocides from 1914 to 1923″.^[179]

Suatu sore, ditahun 1525. Penjara tempat tahanan orang-orang di situ terasa hening mencengkam. Jendral Adolf Roberto, pemimpin penjara yang terkenal bengis, tengah memeriksa setiap kamar tahanan. Setiap sipir penjara membungkukkan badannya rendah-rendah ketika ‘algojo penjara‘ itu berlalu di hadapan mereka. Karena kalau tidak, sepatu ‘jenggel‘ milik tuan Roberto yang fanatik Kristen itu akan mendarat di wajah mereka.

Roberto marah besar ketika dari sebuah kamar tahanan terdengar seseorang mengumandangkan suara-suara yang amat ia benci.

“Hai…hentikan suara jelekmu! Hentikan…! ” Teriak Roberto sekeras-kerasnya sembari membelalakan mata.

Namun apa yang terjadi? 
Laki-laki di kamar tahanan tadi tetap saja bersenandung dengan khusyu’nya. Roberto bertambah berang. Algojo penjara itu menghampiri kamar tahanan yang luasnya tak lebih sekadar cukup untuk satu orang.
Dengan congak ia menyemburkan ludahnya ke wajah renta sang tahanan yang keriput hanya tinggal tulang. Tak puas sampai di situ, ia lalu menyulut wajah dan seluruh badan orang tua renta itu dengan rokoknya yang menyala.

Sungguh ajaib… Tak terdengar secuil pun keluh kesakitan. Bibir yang pucat kering milik sang tahanan amat gengsi untuk meneriakkan kata Rabbi, wa ana’abduka.. . Tahanan lain yang menyaksikan kebiadaban itu serentak bertakbir sambil berkata, “Bersabarlah wahai ustadz…Insya Allah tempatmu di Syurga.”
Melihat kegigihan orang tua yang dipanggil ustadz oleh sesama tahanan, ‘algojo penjara‘ itu bertambah memuncak amarahnya. Ia perintahkan pegawai penjara untuk membuka sel, dan ditariknya tubuh orang tua itu keras-keras hingga terjerembab di lantai.

“Hai orang tua busuk! Bukankah engkau tahu,aku tidak suka bahasa jelekmu itu?! Aku tidak suka apa-apa yang berhubung dengan agamamu!
Ketahuilah orang tua dungu, bumi Spanyol ini kini telah berada dalam kekuasaan bapak kami, Tuhan Yesus.
Anda telah membuat aku benci dan geram dengan ’suara-suara’ yang seharusnya tak pernah terdengar lagi di sini.
Sebagai balasannya engkau akan kubunuh. Kecuali, kalau engkau mau minta maaf dan masuk agama kami. ”

Mendengar “khutbah” itu orang tua itu mendongakkan kepala, menatap Roberto dengan tatapan tajam dan dingin.
Ia lalu berucap, “Sungguh…aku sangat merindukan kematian, agar aku segera dapat menjumpai kekasihku yang amat kucintai, Allah.
Bila kini aku berada di puncak kebahagiaan karena akan segera menemuiNya, patutkah aku berlutut kepadamu, hai manusia busuk?
Jika aku turuti kemauanmu, tentu aku termasuk manusia yang amat bodoh.”

Baru saja kata-kata itu terhenti, sepatu lars Roberto sudah mendarat diwajahnya.
Laki-laki itu terhuyung. Kemudian jatuh terkapar di lantai penjara dengan wajah bersimbah darah. Ketika itulah dari saku baju penjaranya yang telah lusuh,
meluncur sebuah ‘buku kecil‘. Adolf Roberto bermaksud memungutnya.

 Namun tangan sang Ustadz telah terlebih dahulu mengambil dan menggenggamnya erat-erat.
“Berikan buku itu, hai laki-laki dungu!” bentak Roberto.
”Haram bagi tanganmu yang kafir dan berlumuran dosa untuk menyentuh barang suci ini!“ucap sang ustadz
dengan tatapan menghina pada Roberto. Tak ada jalan lain, akhirnya Roberto mengambil jalan paksa untuk mendapatkan buku itu.

Sepatu lars berbobot dua kilogram itu ia gunakan untuk menginjak jari-jari tangan sang ustadz yang telah lemah. Suara gemeretak tulang yang patah terdengar menggetarkan hati. Namun tidak demikian bagi Roberto. Laki-laki bengis itu malah merasa bangga mendengar gemeretak tulang yang terputus. Bahkan ‘algojo penjara‘ itu merasa lebih puas lagi ketika melihat tetesan darah mengalir dari jari-jari musuhnya yang telah hancur.

Setelah tangan renta itu tak berdaya, Roberto memungut buku kecil yang membuatnya penasaran. Perlahan Roberto membuka sampul buku yang telah lusuh.
Mendadak algojo itu termenung. “Ah…sepertinya aku pernah mengenal buku ini. Tapi kapan? Ya, aku pernah mengenal buku ini.” suara hati Roberto bertanya-tanya.

Perlahan Roberto membuka lembaran pertama itu…
Pemuda berumur tiga puluh tahun itu bertambah terkejut tatkala melihat tulisan-tulisan “aneh” dalam buku itu.

Rasanya ia pernah mengenal tulisan seperti itu dahulu. Namun, sekarang tak pernah dilihatnya di bumi Spanyol.

Akhirnya Roberto duduk disamping sang ustadz yang telah melepas nafas-nafas terakhirnya. Wajah bengis sang algojo kini diliputi tanda tanya yang dalam.
Mata Roberto rapat terpejam. Ia berusaha keras mengingat peristiwa yang dialaminya sewaktu masih kanak-kanak.

Perlahan, sketsa masa lalu itu tergambar kembali dalam ingatan Roberto. Pemuda itu teringat ketika suatu sore di masa kanak-kanaknya terjadi kericuhan besar di negeri tempat kelahirannya ini.

Sore itu ia melihat peristiwa yang mengerikan di lapangan Inkuisisi (lapangan tempat pembantaian kaum muslimin di Andalusia). Di tempat itu tengah berlangsung pesta darah dan nyawa. Beribu-ribu jiwa tak berdosa berjatuhan di bumi Andalusia.

Di hujung kiri lapangan, beberapa puluh wanita berhijab (jilbab) digantung pada tiang-tiang besi yang terpancang tinggi.
 Tubuh mereka bergelantungan tertiup angin sore yang kencang, membuat pakaian muslimah yang dikenakan berkibar-kibar di udara.

Sementara, di tengah lapangan ratusan pemuda Islam dibakar hidup-hidup pada tiang-tiang salib, hanya karena tidak mau memasuki agama yang dibawa oleh para rahib.

Seorang bocah laki-laki mungil tampan, berumur tujuh tahunan, malam itu masih berdiri tegak di lapangan Inkuisisi yang telah senyap. Korban-korban kebiadaban itu telah syahid semua. Bocah mungil itu mencucurkan air matanya menatap sang ibu yang terkulai lemah di tiang gantungan.

Perlahan-lahan bocah itu mendekati tubuh sang ummi yang sudah tak bernyawa, sembari menggayuti abayanya.

Sang bocah berkata dengan suara parau, “Ummi, ummi, mari kita pulang.
Hari telah malam. Bukankah ummi telah berjanji malam ini akan mengajariku lagi tentang alif, ba, ta, tsa….? Ummi, cepat pulang ke rumah ummi…”

Bocah kecil itu akhirnya menangis keras, ketika sang ummi tak jua menjawab ucapannya.
Ia semakin bingung dan takut, tak tahu harus berbuat apa. Untuk pulang ke rumah pun ia tak tahu arah. Akhirnya bocah itu berteriak memanggil bapaknya “Abi…Abi.. .Abi…“. Namun ia segera terhenti berteriak memanggil sang bapak ketika teringat kemarin sore bapaknya diseret dari rumah oleh beberapa orang berseragam.

“Hai…siapa kamu?!” teriak segerombolan orang yang tiba-tiba mendekati sang bocah.

“Saya Ahmad Izzah, sedang menunggu Ummi…” jawab sang bocah memohon belas kasih.

“Hah…siapa namamu bocah, coba ulangi!” bentak salah seorang dari mereka.

“Saya Ahmad Izzah…” sang bocah kembali menjawab dengan agak grogi.

Tiba-tiba “plak! sebuah tamparan mendarat di pipi sang bocah. “Hai bocah…! Wajahmu bagus tapi namamu jelek. Aku benci namamu.
Sekarang kuganti namamu dengan nama yang bagus. Namamu sekarang ‘Adolf Roberto’ ..Awas! Jangan kau sebut lagi namamu yang jelek itu.
Kalau kau sebut lagi nama lamamu itu, nanti akan kubunuh!” ancam laki-laki itu. Sang bocah meringis ketakutan, sembari tetap meneteskan air mata.Anak laki-laki mungil itu hanya menurut ketika gerombolan itu membawanya keluar lapangan Inkuisisi. Akhirnya bocah tampan itu hidup bersama mereka.

Roberto sadar dari renungannya yang panjang. Pemuda itu melompat ke arah sang tahanan. Secepat kilat dirobeknya baju penjara yang melekat pada tubuh sang ustadz.
Ia mencari-cari sesuatu di pusar laki-laki itu. Ketika ia menemukan sebuah ‘tanda hitam‘ ia berteriak histeris,
”Abi…Abi.. .Abi…“
. Ia pun menangis keras, tak ubahnya seperti Ahmad Izzah dulu.

Fikirannya terus bergelut dengan masa lalunya. Ia masih ingat betul, bahwa buku kecil yang ada di dalam genggamannya adalah Kitab Suci milik bapanya, yang dulu sering dibawa dan dibaca ayahnya ketika hendak menidurkannya.
 Ia jua ingat betul ayahnya mempunyai ‘tanda hitam‘ pada bagian pusar. Pemuda beringas itu terus meraung dan memeluk erat tubuh renta nan lemah. Tampak sekali ada penyesalan yang amat dalam atas ulahnya selama ini.
 Lidahnya yang sudah berpuluh-puluh tahun alpa akan Islam, saat itu dengan spontan menyebut, “Abi… aku masih ingat alif, ba, ta, tsa…”

Hanya sebatas kata itu yang masih terekam dalam benaknya.
 Sang ustadz segera membuka mata ketika merasakan ada tetesan hangat yang membasahi wajahnya.
Dengan tatapan samar dia masih dapat melihat seseorang yang tadi menyiksanya habis-habisan kini tengah memeluknya.

“Tunjuki aku pada jalan yang telah engkau tempuh Abi, tunjukkan aku pada jalan itu…” Terdengar suara Roberto memelas.

Sang ustadz tengah mengatur nafas untuk berkata-kata, ia lalu memejamkan matanya.
 Air matanya pun turut berlinang. Betapa tidak, jika sekian puluh tahun kemudian, ternyata ia masih sempat berjumpa dengan buah hatinya, ditempat ini.

Sungguh tak masuk akal. Ini semata-mata bukti kebesaran Alloh.
 Sang Abi dengan susah payah masih bisa berucap. “Anakku, pergilah engkau ke Mesir.
Di sana banyak saudaramu. Katakan saja bahwa engkau kenal dengan Syaikh Abdulloh Fattah Ismail Al-Andalusy.
Belajarlah engkau di negeri itu,“
 Setelah selesai berpesan sang ustadz menghembuskan nafas terakhir dengan berbekal kalimah indah “Asyahadu alla Illaaha ilAlloh, wa asyahadu anna Muhammad ar-Rasullulloh. ..“.

Beliau pergi dengan menemui Rabbi-nya dengan tersenyum, setelah sekian lama berjuang dibumi yang fana ini.

Kini Ahmad Izzah telah menjadi seorang ‘alim di Mesir. Seluruh hidupnya dibaktikan untuk agamanya, Islam, sebagai ganti kekafiran yang di masa muda sempat disandangnya. Banyak pemuda Islam dari berbagai penjuru berguru dengannya…

Al-Ustadz Ahmad Izzah Al-Andalusy.

Benarlah firman Allah…
”Maka hadapkanlah wajahmu dengan lurus kepada agama Allah, tetaplah atas fitrah Allah yang telah menciptakan manusia menurut fitrahnya itu. Tidak ada perubahan atas fitrah Allah. Itulah agama yang lurus, tetapi kebanyakan manusia tidak mengetahui.” (QS 30:30)

Sumber: Majalah Sabili tahun 1988

Senin, 23/02/2009 13:18 WIB Cetak |  Kirim

Istambul, Khujali, Karabakh, 26 Ferbuari 1992. Salju turun demikian tebal. Udara benar-benar gigil. Seluruh pelosok kota tampak serupa tak berpenghuni. Musim dingin di wilayah sabuk Kaukasus memang benar-benar bagai neraka beku.

Akhir bulan Februari itu rupanya menjadi hari-hari yang mencekam di kota Khujali, yang menjadi bagian dari Karabakh, wilayah kecil yang menjadi sengketa antara Armenia dan Azerbaijan. Khujali pada paruh terakhir musim dingin itu telah menjadi panggung pembantaian yang mengerikan.

Malam itu, ratusan orang Muslim, termasuk anak-anak, perempuan, dan orang tua, yang berasal dari rumpun etnik Azeri (Azerbaijan) dan kebanyakan tinggal di kota Khujali, Karabakh, dibantai secara brutal oleh tentara militer Armenia.

Terletak 270 km sebelah barat Baku, ibu kota Azerbaijan, Karabakh sejatinya masuk ke dalam bagian wilayah negara Azerbaijan. Namun, wilayah tersebut dihuni oleh mayoritas etnik Armenia.

Penduduk etnik Armenia setempat memproklamasikan kemerdekaan Republik Nagorno-Karabakh dari Azerbaijan pada 10 Desember 1991, namun kedaulatan republik tersebut tidak diakui oleh dunia internasional dan wilayah tersebut secara de jure dianggap sebagai bagian dari Azerbaijan.

Militer Armenia pun turut campur tangan lebih jauh, juga Rusia yang ikut membantu Armenia. Konflik antara Armenia yang mayoritas penduduknya bergama Kristen Ortodok-Apostle dengan Azerbaijan yang berpenduduk mayoritas Muslim pun segera meledak. Kedua negara bertetangga itu terlibat perang urat syaraf.

Khujali, kota kecil dan bersahaja yang berpenduduk 3 ribu Muslim entik Azerbaijan, sontak menjadi kota yang paling tertekan dan mencekam pada saat semakin memuncaknya suhu konflik antar kedua negara.

Kasak kusuk yang beredar di kota yang terletak lebih dekat ke Azerbaijan itu mengatakan, jika orang-orang Armenia akan membantai mereka. Dan kasak-kusuk itu pun menjelma menjadi kenyataan. Pada malam 26 Ferbuari 1992, ribuan etnik Armenia-Karabakh yang dibantu oleh militer Armenia melumat kota Khujali yang tengah bergegas untuk beristirahat.

Sekalipun penyerbuan waktu itu hanya berjalan semalam saja, namun korban yang jatuh tercatat lebih dari 600 orang, termasuk anak-anak, perempuan, dan orang tua. Mesjid-mesjid, madrasah, rumah, dan bangunan-bangunan kota Khujali banyak yang hancur. Khujali di malam itu benar-benar menjadi ladang pembantaian.

Pasca pembantaian itu, sebagian orang Khujali yang masih tersisa memilih untuk bertahan hidup di kota itu. Namun, sebagian orang-orang etnik Azeri lainnya yang tinggal di Karabakh dan di wilayah-wilayah Armenia banyak yang memilih mengungsi ke Azerbaijan.

Setahun kemudian (1993), Armenia dan Azerbaijan mengadakan gencatan senjata. Meski demikian, sebagian wilayah Azerbaijan masih diduduki Armenia dan konflik Karabakh masih belum tuntas, bahkan hingga saat ini.

Sayangnya, tragedi pembanaian Muslim Khujali oleh Militer Armenia pada Februari 1992 itu kemudian terlupakan begitu saja. Orang-orang banyak yang tak mengetahui perihal genosida mengerikan itu, sekalipun dewan HAM Internasional telah memutuskan Armenia melakukan kejahatan kemanusiaan atas kasus Khujali.

Dan pada Sabtu (21/2) kemarin, WAMY (World Assembly of Muslim Youth), organisasi pemuda Muslim internasional yang dipayungi oleh Liga Dunia Islam (Rabitah al-Alam al-Islami) menggelar misi internasional dengan tajuk “al-Adalah li Khujali” (Kedilan untuk Muslim Khujali) di Istanbul, Turki.

Salah satu pembukaan dari misi tersebut adalah digelarnya pameran fotografi dengan tema besar “Khujali fi Uyun Syabab al-Muslim” (Khujali dalam Optik Pemuda Muslim), yang digelar di gerai pameran stasiun utama Metro (Kereta Listrik) Istanbul.

Situs berita Turki berbahasa Arab Akhbar al-Alam (22/2) mengabarkan, pameran tersebut akan digelar hingga 26 Februari mendatang, dan diikuti oleh fotografer dari pelbagai negara.

Sumber penyelenggara pameran menyatakan, dengan digelarnya misi ini, diharapkan dunia internasional, khususnya dunia Muslim, dapat membantu dan bersimpati untuk masa depan Muslim Azeri di Khujali, juga masa depan Muslim Kabarakh.

Sebelumnya, pada Mei tahun lalu, pameran fotografi dengan tema serupa juga pernah digelar di Baku, Azerbaijan. (atj cairo/alm)

Main article: Names of the Holocaust

The term holocaust originally derived from the Greek word holókauston, meaning a “completely (holos) burnt (kaustos)” sacrificial offering to a god. Its Latin form (holocaustum) was first used with specific reference to a massacre of Jews by the chroniclers Roger of Howden^[7] and Richard of Devizes in the 1190s. Since the late 19th century, it has been used primarily to refer to disasters or catastrophes.

The biblical word Shoah (שואה) (also spelled Sho’ah and Shoa), meaning “calamity,” became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s.^[8] Shoah is preferred by many Jews for a number of reasons, including the theologically offensive nature of the word holocaust, as a Greek pagan custom.^[9]

Definition

The word holocaust has been used since the 18th century to refer to the violent deaths of a large number of people.^[10] For example, Winston Churchill and other contemporaneous writers used it before World War II to describe the Armenian Genocide of World War I.^[11] Since the 1950s its use has increasingly been restricted, with its usage now mainly used as a proper noun to describe the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi party.^{[citation needed]}

Holocaust was adopted as a translation of Shoah—a Hebrew word connoting catastrophe, calamity, disaster, and destruction^[12]—which was used in 1940 in Jerusalem in a booklet called Sho’at Yehudei Polin, and translated as The Holocaust of the Jews of Poland. Shoah had earlier been used in the context of the Nazis as a translation of catastrophe; for example, in 1934, Chaim Weizmann told the Zionist Action Committee that Hitler’s rise to power was an “unvorhergesehene Katastrophe, etwa ein neuer Weltkrieg” (“an unforeseen catastrophe, perhaps even a new world war“); the Hebrew press translated Katastrophe as Shoah.^[13] In the spring of 1942, the Jerusalem historian BenZion Dinur (Dinaburg) used Shoah in a book published by the United Aid Committee for the Jews in Poland to describe the extermination of Europe’s Jews, calling it a “catastrophe” that symbolized the unique situation of the Jewish people.^[12][14] The word Shoah was chosen in Israel to describe the Holocaust, the term institutionalized by the Knesset on April 12, 1951, when it established Yom Ha-Shoah Ve Mered Ha-Getaot, the national day of remembrance. In the 1950s, Yad Vashem was routinely translating this into English as “the Disaster”; at that time, holocaust was often used to mean the conflagration of much of humanity in a nuclear war.^[15] Since then, Yad Vashem has changed its practice; the word Holocaust, usually now capitalized, has come to refer principally to the genocide of the European Jews.^[8][13]

The usual German term for the extermination of the Jews during the Nazi period was the euphemistic phrase Endlösung der Judenfrage (the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question“). In both English and German, “Final Solution” is widely used as an alternative to “Holocaust”.^[16] For a time after World War II, German historians also used the term Völkermord (“genocide”), or in full, der Völkermord an den Juden (“the genocide of the Jewish people”), while the prevalent term in Germany today is either Holocaust or increasingly Shoah. An attempt by the German TV documentarian Guido Knopp in 2000 to “Germanize” the term by spelling it Holokaust has not yet been successful.^[17]

The word holocaust is also used in a wider sense to describe other actions of the Nazi regime. These include the killing of around half a million migrant Romani peoples, the Roma and Sinti, the deaths of several million Soviet prisoners of war, along with slave laborers, gay men, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled, and a vast assortment of perceived potential troublemakers and political opponents. The use of the word in this wider sense is objected to by many Jewish organizations, particularly those established to commemorate the Jewish Holocaust. Jewish organizations say that the word in its current sense was originally coined to describe the extermination of the Jews, and that the Jewish Holocaust was a crime on such a scale, and of such totality and specificity, as the culmination of the long history of European antisemitism, that it should not be subsumed into a general category with the other crimes of the Nazis.^[18]

Even more hotly disputed is the extension of the word to describe events that have no connection with World War II. The terms Rwandan Holocaust and Cambodian Holocaust are used to refer to the Rwanda genocide of 1994 and the mass killings by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia respectively, and African Holocaust is used to describe the slave trade and the colonization of Africa, also known as the Maafa.

Distinctive features

Compliance of Germany’s institutions

Ghettos were established in Europe in which Jews were confined before being shipped to extermination camps.

Michael Berenbaum writes that Germany became a “genocidal state.”^[6] Every arm of the country’s sophisticated bureaucracy was involved in the killing process. Parish churches and the Interior Ministry supplied birth records showing who was Jewish; the Post Office delivered the deportation and denaturalization orders; the Finance Ministry confiscated Jewish property; German firms fired Jewish workers and disenfranchised Jewish stockholders; the universities refused to admit Jews, denied degrees to those already studying, and fired Jewish academics; government transport offices arranged the trains for deportation to the camps; German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners; companies bid for the contracts to build the crematoria; detailed lists of victims were drawn up using the Dehomag company’s punch card machines, producing meticulous records of the killings. As prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property, which was carefully catalogued and tagged before being sent to Germany to be reused or recycled. Berenbaum writes that the Final Solution of the Jewish question was “in the eyes of the perpetrators … Germany’s greatest achievement.”^[19]

Saul Friedländer writes that: “Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews.”^[20] He writes that some Christian churches declared that converted Jews should be regarded as part of the flock, but even then only up to a point.

Friedländer argues that this makes the Holocaust distinctive because antisemitic policies were able to unfold without the interference of countervailing forces of the kind normally found in advanced societies, such as industry, small businesses, churches, and other vested interests and lobby groups.^[20]

Dominance of ideology and the scale of the genocide

In other genocides, pragmatic considerations such as control of territory and resources were central to the genocide policy. Yehuda Bauer argues that:

[T]he basic motivation [of the Holocaust] was purely ideological, rooted in an illusionary world of Nazi imagination, where an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world was opposed to a parallel Aryan quest. No genocide to date had been based so completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract, nonpragmatic ideology – which was then executed by very rational, pragmatic means.”^[21]

Responding to the German philosopher Ernst Nolte who claimed that the Holocaust was not unique, the German historian Eberhard Jäckel wrote in 1986 that the Holocaust was unique because:

“the National Socialist killing of the Jews was unique in that never before had a state with the authority of its responsible leader decided and announced that a specific human group, including its aged, its women and its children and infants, would be killed as quickly as possible, and then carried thorugh this resolution using every possible means of state power”.^[22]

The slaughter was systematically conducted in virtually all areas of Nazi-occupied territory in what are now 35 separate European countries.^[23] It was at its worst in Central and Eastern Europe, which had more than seven million Jews in 1939. About five million Jews were killed there, including three million in occupied Poland and over one million in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands also died in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Yugoslavia and Greece. The Wannsee Protocol makes clear that the Nazis also intended to carry out their “final solution of the Jewish question” in England and Ireland.^[24]

Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was to be exterminated without exception. In other genocides, people were able to escape death by converting to another religion or in some other way assimilating. This option was not available to the Jews of occupied Europe.^[25] All persons of recent Jewish ancestry were to be exterminated in lands controlled by Germany.^[26]

Medical experiments

A cold water immersion experiment at Dachau concentration camp presided over by Professor Holzlohner (left) and Dr. Rascher (right).

Another distinctive feature was the extensive use of human subjects in medical experiments. German physicians carried out such experiments at Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen and Natzweiler concentration camps.^[27]

The most notorious of these physicians was Dr. Josef Mengele, who worked in Auschwitz. His experiments included placing subjects in pressure chambers, testing drugs on them, freezing them, attempting to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children’s eyes and various amputations and other brutal surgeries.^[27] The full extent of his work will never be known because the truckload of records he sent to Dr. Otmar von Verschuer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute were destroyed by von Verschuer.^[28] Subjects who survived Mengele’s experiments were almost always killed and dissected shortly afterwards.

Romani children in Auschwitz, victims of medical experiments.

He seemed particularly keen on working with Romani children. He would bring them sweets and toys, and would personally take them to the gas chamber. They would call him “Onkel Mengele”.^[29] Vera Alexander was a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz who looked after 50 sets of Romani twins:

Victims and death toll

The number of victims depends on which definition of “the Holocaust” is used. Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia write in The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust that the term is commonly defined^[3] as the mass murder, and attempt to wipe out, European Jewry, which would bring the total number of victims to just under six million — around 78 percent of the 7.3 million Jews in occupied Europe at the time.^[40]

Broader definitions include up to 1,500,000 Romani, and the 200,000 disabled and mentally ill who were killed, because these groups were also targeted for eradication. A broader definition still includes political and religious dissenters, two to three million Soviet POWs, and 5,000 to 15,000 gay men, bringing the death toll to nine million. This rises to 11 million if the deaths of 1.8 to 2 million ethnic Poles are included. The broadest definition would include Soviet civilians, raising the death toll to 17 million.^[3] R.J. Rummel estimates the total democide death toll of Nazi Germany to be 21 million.

Jews

Figures from Lucy Dawidowicz showing the annihilation of the Jewish population of Europe.^[30]

Members of the Sonderkommando burn corpses in the fire pits at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Photographer Alberto Errera, August 1944. Courtesy of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum, Poland.^[41]

Since 1945, the most commonly cited figure for the total number of Jews killed has been six million. The Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, writes that there is no precise figure for the number of Jews killed. The figure most commonly used is the six million cited by Adolf Eichmann, a senior SS official. Early calculations range from 5.1 million from Raul Hilberg, to 5.95 million from Jacob Leschinsky. Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust estimate 5.59–5.86 million.^[42] A study led by Wolfgang Benz of the Technical University of Berlin suggests 5.29–6.2 million.^[43][44] Yad Vashem writes that the main sources for these statistics are comparisons of prewar and postwar censuses and population estimates, and Nazi documentation on deportations and murders. Yad Vashem reports that it has the names of four million of the victims.^[43]

Hilberg’s estimate of 5.1 million, in the third edition of The Destruction of the European Jews, includes over 800,000 who died from “ghettoization and general privation”; 1,400,000 killed in open-air shootings; and up to 2,900,000 who perished in camps. Hilberg estimates the death toll of Jews in Poland as up to 3,000,000.^[45] Hilberg’s numbers are generally considered to be a conservative estimate, as they typically include only those deaths for which records are available, avoiding statistical adjustment.^[46]

British historian Martin Gilbert used a similar approach in his Atlas of the Holocaust, but arrived at a number of 5.75 million Jewish victims, since he estimated higher numbers of Jews killed in Russia and other locations.^[47] Lucy S. Dawidowicz used pre-war census figures to estimate that 5.934 million Jews died (see her figures (left) here).^[48]

There were about 8 to 10 million Jews in the territories controlled directly or indirectly by the Nazis (the uncertainty arises from the lack of knowledge about how many Jews there were in the Soviet Union). The six million killed in the Holocaust thus represent 60 to 75 percent of these Jews. Of Poland’s 3.3 million Jews, over 90 percent were killed. The same proportion were killed in Latvia and Lithuania, but most of Estonia‘s Jews were evacuated in time. Of the 750,000 Jews in Germany and Austria in 1933, only about a quarter survived. Although many German Jews emigrated before 1939, the majority of these fled to Czechoslovakia, France or the Netherlands, from where they were later deported to their deaths. In Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Netherlands, and Yugoslavia, over 70 percent were killed. More than 50 percent were killed in Belgium, Hungary, and Romania. It is likely that a similar proportion were killed in Belarus and Ukraine, but these figures are less certain. Countries with notably lower proportions of deaths include Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Italy, and Norway.

The number of people killed at the major extermination camps is estimated as: Auschwitz-Birkenau: 1.4 million;^[50] Treblinka: 870,000;^[51] Belzec: 600,000;^[52] Majdanek: 360,000;^[53] Chelmno: 320,000;^[54] Sobibór: 250,000;^[55]. This gives a total of over 3.8 million; of these, 80–90% were estimated to be Jews. These seven camps alone thus accounted for half the total number of Jews killed in the entire Nazi Holocaust. Virtually the entire Jewish population of Poland died in these camps.

In addition to those who died in the above extermination camps, at least half a million Jews died in other camps, including the major concentration camps in Germany. These were not extermination camps, but had large numbers of Jewish prisoners at various times, particularly in the last year of the war as the Nazis withdrew from Poland. About a million people died in these camps, and although the proportion of Jews is not known with certainty, it was estimated to be at least 50 percent. Another 800,000 to one million Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet territories (an approximate figure, since the Einsatzgruppen killings were frequently undocumented).^[56] Many more died through execution or of disease and malnutrition in the ghettos of Poland before they could be deported.

Slavs

Main article: Generalplan Ost

One of Hitler’s ambitions at the start of the war was to exterminate, expel, or enslave most or all Slavs from their native lands so as to make living space for German settlers. This plan of genocide^[57] was to be carried into effect gradually over a period of 25-30 years.^[58]

Ethnic Poles

Execution of Poles by Einsatzkommando – Leszno, October 1939

Announcement of death penalty for Poles helping Jews.

Polish civilians after execution in Warsaw.

Auschwitz I patch with the letter “P”: required wear for Polish inmates

Main articles: Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles, Occupation of Poland (1939–1945), and Pacification operations in German-occupied Poland

German planners in November 1939 called for nothing less than ‘the complete destruction’ of the Polish people.^[59] “All Poles”, Heinrich Himmler swore, “will disappear from the world”. The Polish state under German occupation was to be cleared of ethnic Poles and settled by German colonists.^[60] Of the Poles, by 1952 only about 3-4 million of them were supposed to be left residing in the former Poland, and then only to serve as slaves for German settlers. They were to be forbidden to marry, the existing ban on any medical help to Poles in Germany would be extended, and eventually Poles would cease to exist. On August 22, 1939, about one week before the onset of the war, Hitler “prepared, for the moment only in the East, my ‘Death’s Head‘ formations with orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living space we need.”^[61]

The genocide against ethnic Poles was not at the scale of the genocide against ethnic Jews. Nazi planners decided that a genocide against ethnic Poles at the same scale as against ethnic Jews could not proceed in the short run since “such a solution to the Polish question would represent a burden to the German people into the distant future, and everywhere rob us of all understanding, not least in that neighbouring peoples would have to reckon at some appropriate time, with a similar fate”.^[59] Between 1.8 and 2.1 million non-Jewish Polish citizens perished in German hands during the course of the war, about four-fifths of whom were ethnic Poles with the remaining fifth being ethnic minorities of Ukrainians and Belarusians, the vast majority of them civilians.^[32][33] At least 200,000 of these victims died in concentration camps with about 146,000 being killed in Auschwitz. Many others died as a result of general massacres such as in the Warsaw Uprising where between 120,000 and 200,000 civilians were killed.^[62] The policy of the Germans in Poland included diminishing food rations, conscious lowering of the state of hygiene and depriving the population of medical services. The general mortality rate rose from 13 to 18 per thousand.^[63] Overall, about 5.1 million of the victims of Nazism were Polish citizens,^[33] both Jewish and non-Jewish, and over the course of the war Poland lost over 16 percent of its pre-war population; 3.1 million (90 percent) of the 3.4 million Polish Jews and 2.0 million (six percent) of the 31.7 million non-Jewish Polish citizens died in German hands.^[64] Over 90 percent of the death toll came through non-military losses, as most of the civilians were targeted by various deliberate actions by Germans and Soviets.^[62]

A common German practice in occupied Poland was to round up random civilians on the streets of Polish cities. The term “łapanka” carried a sardonic connotation from the word’s earlier use for the children’s game known in English as “tag.” Between 1942 and 1944 there were around 400 victims of this practice daily in Warsaw alone, with numbers on some days reaching several thousand. For example, on September 19, 1942, close to 3000 men and women caught in the round-ups all over Warsaw the previous two days were sent by train to Germany.^[65] Additionally, between 20,000 and 200,000^[66] Polish children were forcibly separated from their parents and, after undergoing scrutiny to ensure that they were of “Nordic” racial stock, were sent to Germany to be raised by German families.^[67]

South and East Slavs

Main articles: World War II persecution of Serbs, Occupation of Belarus by Nazi Germany, and Reichskommissariat Ukraine

In the Balkans, up to 500,000 Serbs were killed in Yugoslavia.^[68][69] Hitler’s high plenipotentiary in South East Europe, Hermann Neubacher, later wrote: “When leading Ustaše state that one million Orthodox Serbs (including babies, children, women and old men) were slaughtered, this in my opinion is a boasting exaggeration. On the basis of reports I received, I estimated that threequarters of a million defenceless people were slaughtered.”^[70] German forces, under express orders from Hitler, fought with a special vengeance against the Serbs, who were considered Untermensch.^[71] The Ustaše collaborators conducted a systematic extermination of large numbers of people for political, religious or racial reasons. The most numerous victims were Serbs. The USHMM and Jewish Virtual Library reports between 56,000 and 97,000 persons were killed at the Jasenovac concentration camp.^[72][73][74] However, Yad Vashem reports 600,000 deaths at Jasenovac.^[75]

In Belarus, Nazi Germany imposed a regime in the country that was responsible for burning down some 9,000 villages, deporting some 380,000 people for slave labour, and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. More than 600 villages, like Khatyn, were burned along with their entire population and at least 5,295 Belarusian settlements were destroyed by the Nazis and some or all of their inhabitants killed. Altogether, 2,230,000 people (24 percent of the population) were killed during the three years of German occupation.^[76] This includes 370,000 military dead^[77] and 245,000 Jews killed by the Einsatzgruppen.^[48]

Soviet POWs

Soviet POWs in German captivity

Main article: Nazi crimes against Soviet POWs

According to Michael Berenbaum, between two and three million Soviet prisoners-of-war—or around 57 percent of all Soviet POWs—died of starvation, mistreatment, or executions between June 1941 and May 1945, and most those during their first year of captivity. According to other estimates by Daniel Goldhagen, an estimated 2.8 million Soviet POWs died in eight months in 1941–42, with a total of 3.5 million by mid-1944.^[78] The USHMM has estimated that 3.3 million of the 5.7 million Soviet POWs died in German custody—compared to 8,300 of 231,000 British and American prisoners.^[79] The death rates decreased as the POWs were needed to work as slaves to help the German war effort; by 1943, half a million of them had been deployed as slave labor.^[31]

Romani people

Romani arrivals in the Belzec extermination camp, 1940.

Map of persecution of the Roma.

Main article: Porajmos

Because the Roma and Sinti are traditionally a secretive people with a culture based on oral history, less is known about their experience of the genocide than about that of any other group.^[80][81] Yehuda Bauer writes that the lack of information can be attributed to the Roma’s distrust and suspicion, and to their humiliation, because some of the basic taboos of Romani culture regarding hygiene and sexual contact were violated at Auschwitz. Bauer writes that “[m]ost [Roma] could not relate their stories involving these tortures; as a result, most kept silent and thus increased the effects of the massive trauma they had undergone.”^[82]

Donald Niewyk and Frances Nicosia write that the death toll was at least 130,000 of the nearly one million Roma and Sinti in Nazi-controlled Europe.^[80] Michael Berenbaum writes that serious scholarly estimates lie between 90,000 and 220,000.^[83] A detailed study by the late Sybil Milton, formerly senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, calculated a death toll of at least 220,000, and possibly closer to 500,000.^[84][85] Ian Hancock, Director of the Program of Romani Studies and the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin, has argued in favour of a higher figure of between 500,000 and 1,500,000.^[86] Hancock writes that, proportionately, the death toll equaled “and almost certainly exceed[ed], that of Jewish victims.”^[87]

Before being sent to the camps, the victims were herded into ghettos, including several hundred into the Warsaw Ghetto.^[89] Further east, teams of Einsatzgruppen tracked down Romani encampments and murdered the inhabitants on the spot, leaving no records of the victims. They were also targeted by the puppet regimes that cooperated with the Nazis, e.g. the Ustaše regime in Croatia, where a large number of Romani were killed in the Jasenovac concentration camp.

In May 1942, the Romani were placed under the same labor and social laws as the Jews. On December 16, 1942, Heinrich Himmler, Commander of the SS and regarded as the “architect” of the Nazi genocide,^[90] issued a decree that “Gypsy Mischlinge (mixed breeds), Romani, and members of the clans of Balkan origins who are not of German blood” should be sent to Auschwitz, unless they had served in the Wehrmacht.^[91] On January 29, 1943, another decree ordered the deportation of all German Romani to Auschwitz.

This was adjusted on November 15, 1943, when Himmler ordered that, in the occupied Soviet areas, “sedentary Gypsies and part-Gypsies (Mischlinge) are to be treated as citizens of the country. Nomadic Gypsies and part-Gypsies are to be placed on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps.”^[92] Bauer argues that this adjustment reflected Nazi ideology that the Roma, originally an Aryan population, had been “spoiled” by non-Romani blood.^[93]

Disabled and mentally ill

“60,000 RM is what this person with genetic defects costs the community during his lifetime. Fellow German,^[94] that’s your money too …”^[95]

Main articles: Nazi eugenics, Aktion T4, Erbkrank, Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, Rhineland Bastard, and Schloss Hartheim

Aktion T4 was a program established in 1939 to maintain the genetic purity of the German population by killing or sterilizing German and Austrian citizens who were judged to be disabled or suffering from mental disorder.^[97]

Between 1939 and 1941, 80,000 to 100,000 mentally ill adults in institutions were killed; 5,000 children in institutions; and 1,000 Jews in institutions.^[98] Outside the mental health institutions, the figures are estimated as 20,000 (according to Dr. Georg Renno, the deputy director of Schloss Hartheim, one of the euthanasia centers) or 400,000 (according to Frank Zeireis, the commandant of Mauthausen concentration camp).^[98] Another 300,000 were forcibly sterilized.^[99] Overall it has been estimated that over 200,000 individuals with mental disorders of all kinds were put to death, although their mass murder has received relatively little historical attention. Despite not being formally ordered to take part, psychiatrists and psychiatric institutions were at the center of justifying, planning and carrying out the atrocities at every stage, and “constituted the connection” to the later annihilation of Jews and other “undesirables” in the Holocaust.^[100]

The program was named after Tiergartenstraße 4, the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, the headquarters of the Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil und Anstaltspflege (General Foundation for Welfare and Institutional Care),^[101] led by Philipp Bouhler, head of Hitler’s private chancellery (Kanzlei des Führer der NSDAP) and Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician.

Brandt was tried in December 1946 at Nuremberg, along with 22 others, in a case known as United States of America vs. Karl Brandt et al., also known as the Doctors’ Trial. He was hanged at Landsberg Prison on June 2, 1948.

Homosexuals

The Homomonument in Amsterdam, a memorial to the gay victims of Nazi Germany.

Main articles: Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, Pink triangle, and History of homosexual people in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust

Between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexuals of German nationality are estimated to have been sent to concentration camps.^[38] James D. Steakley writes that what mattered in Germany was criminal intent or character, rather than criminal acts, and the “gesundes Volksempfinden” (“healthy sensibility of the people”) became the leading normative legal principle.^[102] In 1936, Himmler created the “Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion.” Homosexuality was declared contrary to “wholesome popular sentiment,”^[38] and homosexuals were consequently regarded as “defilers of German blood.” The Gestapo raided gay bars, tracked individuals using the address books of those they arrested, used the subscription lists of gay magazines to find others, and encouraged people to report suspected homosexual behavior and to scrutinize the behavior of their neighbours.^[38][102]

Tens of thousands were convicted between 1933 and 1944 and sent to camps for “rehabilitation,” where they were identified by yellow armbands^[103] and later pink triangles worn on the left side of the jacket and the right trouser leg, which singled them out for sexual abuse.^[102] Hundreds were castrated by court order.^[104] They were humiliated, tortured, used in hormone experiments conducted by SS doctors, and killed.^[38] Steakley writes that the full extent of gay suffering was slow to emerge after the war. Many victims kept their stories to themselves because homosexuality remained criminalized in postwar Germany. Nevertheless, only a small percentage (around two percent) of German homosexuals were persecuted by Nazis.^[102]

Freemasons and Jehovah’s Witnesses

A memorial for Loge Liberté chérie, founded in November 1943 in Hut 6 of Emslandlager VII (KZ Esterwegen), one of two Masonic Lodges founded in a Nazi concentration camp.

Main articles: Suppression of Freemasonry#Nazi Germany and Occupied Europe, Nacht und Nebel, and Persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Nazi Germany

In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that Freemasonry had “succumbed” to the Jews: “The general pacifistic paralysis of the national instinct of self-preservation begun by Freemasonry is then transmitted to the masses of society by the Jewish press.”^[105] Freemasons were sent to concentration camps as political prisoners, and forced to wear an inverted red triangle.^[106] It is estimated that between 80,000 and 200,000 were killed.^[107][108] However , the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum believes “because many of the Freemasons who were arrested were also Jews and/or members of the political opposition, it is not known how many individuals were placed in Nazi concentration camps and/or were targeted only because they were Freemasons.”^[109]

Refusing to pledge allegiance to the Nazi party or to serve in the military, roughly 12,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses were forced to wear a purple triangle and placed in camps, where they were given the option of renouncing their faith and submitting to the state’s authority. Between 2,500 and 5,000 were killed.^[39] Historian Detlef Garbe, director at the Neuengamme (Hamburg) Memorial, writes that “no other religious movement resisted the pressure to conform to National Socialism with comparable unanimity and steadfastness.”^[110]

Political activists

German communists, socialists and trade unionists were among the earliest domestic opponents of Nazism^[111] and were also among the first to be sent to concentration camps. Hitler claimed that communism was a Jewish ideology which the Nazis termed “Judeo-Bolshevism“, and that socialists and trade unionists were allies and servants of Jewish-controlled international communism. Fear of communist agitation was used as justification for the Enabling Act of 1933, the law which gave Hitler his original dictatorial powers. Herman Göring later testified at the Nuremberg Trials that the Nazis’ willingness to repress German communists prompted President Paul von Hindenburg and the German elite to cooperate with the Nazis. The first concentration camp was built at Dachau, in March 1933, to imprison German communists, socialists, trade unionists and others opposed to the Nazis.^[112] Communists, social democrats and other political prisoners were forced to wear a red triangle.

Hitler and the Nazis also hated German leftists because of their resistance to the party’s racism. Many leaders of German leftist groups were Jews, and Jews were especially prominent among the leaders of the Spartacist Uprising in 1919. Hitler already referred to Marxism and “Bolshevism” as a means of “the international Jew” to undermine “racial purity” and survival of the Nordics or Aryans (sometimes of all white Europeans), as well to stir up socioeconomic class tension and labor unions against the government or state-owned businesses. Within the concentration camps such as Buchenwald, German communists were privileged in comparison to Jews because of their “racial purity.”^[113]

Whenever the Nazis occupied a new territory, members of communist, socialist, or anarchist groups were normally to be the first persons detained or executed. Evidence of this is found in Hitler’s infamous Commissar Order, in which he ordered the summary execution of all political commissars captured among Soviet soldiers, as well as the execution of all Communist Party members in German held territory.^[114][115] Einzatsgruppen carried out these executions in the east.^[116]

Nacht und Nebel (German for “Night and Fog”) was a directive (German: Erlass) of Hitler on December 7, 1941 signed and implemented by Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces Wilhelm Keitel, resulting in kidnapping and disappearance of many political activists throughout Nazi Germany’s occupied territories.

Development and execution

Origins

See also: Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses

At 10 a.m. on April 1, 1933, members of the Sturmabteilung moved into place all over Germany, positioning themselves outside Jewish-owned businesses to deter customers. These stormtroopers are outside Israel’s Department Store in Berlin. The signs read: “Germans! Defend yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews.” (“Deutsche! Wehrt Euch! Kauft nicht bei Juden!“)^[117] The store was ransacked during Kristallnacht in 1938, then handed over to a non-Jewish family.

The Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany on January 30, 1933, and the persecution and exodus of Germany’s 525,000 Jews began almost immediately. In his autobiography Mein Kampf (1925), Hitler had been open about his hatred of Jews, and gave ample warning of his intention to drive them from Germany’s political, intellectual, and cultural life. He did not write that he would attempt to exterminate them, but he is reported to have been more explicit in private. As early as 1922, he allegedly told Major Joseph Hell, at the time a journalist:

Jewish intellectuals were among the first to leave. The philosopher Walter Benjamin left for Paris on March 18, 1933. Novelist Leon Feuchtwanger went to Switzerland. The conductor Bruno Walter fled after being told that the hall of the Berlin Philharmonic would be burned down if he conducted a concert there: the Frankfurter Zeitung explained on April 6 that Walter and fellow conductor Otto Klemperer had been forced to flee because the government was unable to protect them against the “mood” of the German public, which had been provoked by “Jewish artistic liquidators.”^[119] Albert Einstein was visiting the U.S. on January 30, 1933. He returned to Ostende in Belgium, never to set foot in Germany again, and calling events there a “psychic illness of the masses”; he was expelled from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and his citizenship was rescinded.^[120] Saul Friedländer writes that when Max Liebermann, honorary president of the Prussian Academy of Arts, resigned his position, not one of his colleagues expressed a word of sympathy, and he died ostracized two years later. When the police arrived in 1943 with a stretcher to deport his 85-year-old bedridden widow, she committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturates rather than be taken.^[120]

Throughout the 1930s, the legal, economic, and social rights of Jews were steadily restricted. Friedländer writes that, for the Nazis, Germany drew its strength for its “purity of blood” and its “rootedness in the sacred German earth.”^[121] In 1933, a series of laws were passed to exclude Jews from key areas: the Civil Service Law; the physicians’ law; and the farm law, forbidding Jews from owning farms or taking part in agriculture. Jewish lawyers were disbarred, and in Dresden, Jewish lawyers and judges were dragged out of their offices and courtrooms, and beaten up.^[122] Jews were excluded from schools and universities, and from belonging to the Journalists’ Association, or from being newspaper editors.^[121] The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of April 27, 1933 wrote:

A self-respecting nation cannot, on a scale accepted up to now, leave its higher activities in the hands of people of racially foreign origin … Allowing the presence of too high a percentage of people of foreign origin in relation to their percentage in the general population could be interpreted as an acceptance of the superiority of other races, something decidedly to be rejected.^[123]

In 1935, Hitler introduced the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship and deprived them of all civil rights. In his speech introducing the laws, Hitler said that if the “Jewish problem” cannot be solved by these laws, it “must then be handed over by law to the National-Socialist Party for a final solution (Endlösung).”^[124] The expression “Endlösung” became the standard Nazi euphemism for the extermination of the Jews. In January 1939, he said in a public speech: “If international-finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging the nations into yet another world war, the consequences will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe.”^[125]

The question of the treatment of the Jews became an urgent one for the Nazis after September 1939, when they occupied the western half of Poland, home to about two million Jews. Himmler’s right-hand man, Reinhard Heydrich, recommended concentrating all the Polish Jews in ghettos in major cities, where they would be put to work for the German war industry. The ghettos would be in cities located on railway junctions, so that, in Heydrich’s words, “future measures can be accomplished more easily.”^[126] During his interrogation in 1961, Adolf Eichmann testified that the expression “future measures” was understood to mean “physical extermination.”^[126]

Increasing persecution and pogroms (1938–1942)

Berlin’s Fasanenstrasse synagogue after Kristallnacht, November 9–10, 1938.

Main articles: Pogrom, Babi Yar, Dorohoi Pogrom, Iaşi pogrom, Jedwabne Massacre, Kristallnacht, Legionnaires’ Rebellion and Bucharest Pogrom, Lviv pogroms and the Holocaust, Ponary massacre, and Odessa massacre

On Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, on November 9, 1938, Jews were attacked and Jewish property was vandalized across Germany. Approximately 100 Jews were killed, and another 30,000 sent to concentration camps, while over 7,000 Jewish shops and 1,668 synagogues (almost every synagogue in Germany) were damaged or destroyed. Similar events took place in Austria, particularly Vienna.

A number of deadly pogroms by local populations occurred during the Second World War, some with Nazi encouragement, and some spontaneously. This included the Iaşi pogrom in Romania on June 30, 1941, in which as many 14,000 Jews were killed by Romanian residents and police, and the Jedwabne pogrom, in which between 380 and 1,600 Jews were killed by local Poles in July 1941.^[127]

Madagascar plan

While Jews were murdered on mass scale since 1939, in 1940 some Nazis considered eliminating Jews by the unrealistic Madagascar Plan which, however futile, in retrospect did constitute an important psychological step on the path to the Holocaust.^[128] The planning was carried out by Eichmann’s office; Heydrich called it a “territorial final solution”. The plan was to ship all European Jews to Madagascar. In view of the difficulties of supporting more population in the General Gouvernment in July 1940, Hitler, still hoping for success with the Madagascar plan, stopped the deportation of Jews there.^[129] This was temporary, however, as the military situation offered no possibility to conquer Britain. The plan may have been foreseen as a remote and slower genocide through the unfavorable conditions on the island.^[130] Although the Final Solution was already in place and Jews were being exterminated, the formal declaration of the Plan’s end was abandoned on February 10, 1942, when the German Foreign Office was given an official explanation that due to the war with the Soviet Union Jews are going to be “sent to the east”. ^[131]

Early measures in German occupied Poland

Germany 1941, including occupied Poland and the General Government area.

German policemen tormenting a Jew in Rzeszów, Poland.

Main articles: Armia Krajowa, History of the Jews in Poland, History of Poland (1939-1945), Invasion of Poland (1939), Invasion of Poland, Polish government in Exile, and World War II crimes in Poland

Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, leading Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, and France to declare war. Hans Frank, a German lawyer, was appointed Governor-General in October.

In September, Himmler appointed Reinhard Heydrich head of the Reich Security Head Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA), a body overseeing the work of the SS, the Security Police (SD), and the Gestapo in occupied Poland and charged with carrying out the policy towards the Jews described in Heydrich’s report. (This body should not be confused with the Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt or Race and Resettlement Main Office, RuSHA, which was involved in carrying out the deportation of Jews.) First organized murders of Jews by German forces occurred during Operation Tannenberg and through Selbstschutz units. Later the Jews were herded into ghettos, mostly in the General Government area of central Poland, where they were put to work under the Reich Labor Office headed by Fritz Saukel. Here many thousands were killed in various ways, and many more died of disease, starvation, and exhaustion, but there was still no program of systematic killing. There is no doubt, however, that the Nazis saw forced labor as a form of extermination. The expression Vernichtung durch Arbeit (“destruction through work”) was frequently used.

When the Germans occupied Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France in 1940, and Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941, anti-Semitic measures were also introduced into these countries, although the pace and severity varied greatly from country to country according to local political circumstances. Jews were removed from economic and cultural life and were subject to various restrictive laws, but physical deportation did not occur in most places before 1942. The Vichy regime in occupied France actively collaborated in persecuting French Jews. Germany’s allies Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Finland were pressured to introduce antisemitic measures, but for the most part they did not comply until compelled to do so. The German puppet regime in Croatia, on the other hand, began actively persecuting Jews on its own initiative^{[citation needed]}.

During 1940 and 1941, the murder of large numbers of Jews in German occupied Poland continued, and the deportation of Jews from Germany, Austria and the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia” (today’s Czech Republic) to General Gouvernment was undertaken. Eichmann was assigned the task of removing all Jews from these territories, although the deportation of Jews from Germany, particularly Berlin, was not officially completed until 1943. (Many Berlin Jews were able to survive in hiding.) By December 1939, 3.5 million Jews were crowded into the General Government area.

The Governor-General, Hans Frank, noted that this many people could not be simply shot. “We shall have to take steps, however, designed in some way to eliminate them.” It was this dilemma which led the SS to experiment with large-scale killings using poison gas. This method had already been used during Hitler’s campaign of euthanasia in Germany (known as “T4″). SS Obersturmführer Christian Wirth seems to have been the inventor of the gas chamber.

Although it was clear by 1941 that the SS hierarchy led by Himmler and Heydrich was determined to embark on a policy of killing all the Jews under German control, there were important centers of opposition to this policy within the Nazi regime. The grounds for the opposition were mainly economic, not humanitarian. Hermann Göring, who had overall control of the German war industry, and the German army’s Economics Department, representing the armaments industry, argued that the enormous Jewish labor force assembled in the General Government area (more than a million able-bodied workers) was an asset too valuable to waste while Germany was preparing to invade the Soviet Union.

During this period there were a few conflicts between the Army and the SS over policy in Poland. Ultimately, neither Göring nor the army leadership was willing or able to challenge Himmler’s authority, particularly since Himmler made it clear he had Hitler’s support.

Concentration and labor camps (1933–1945)

April 12, 1945: Lager Nordhausen, where 20,000 inmates are believed to have died.

• Further information: Extermination through labour, List of Nazi German concentration camps, Nazi concentration camps, Nazi concentration camp badges.
• The major concentration and extermination camps: Auschwitz, Belzec, Bergen-Belsen, Chełmno, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Grini, Jasenovac, Klooga, Majdanek, Maly Trostinets, Mauthausen-Gusen, Ravensbrück, Treblinka.
• Camp badges: Black triangle, Pink triangle, Purple triangle, Yellow badge.

Leading up to the 1933 elections, the Nazis began intensifying acts of violence to wreak havoc among the opposition. With the cooperation of local authorities, they set up camps as concentration centers within Germany. One of the first was Dachau, which opened in March 1933. These early camps were meant to hold, torture, or kill only political prisoners, such as Communists and Social Democrats.^[133]

These early prisons – usually basements and storehouses – were eventually consolidated into full-blown, centrally run camps outside the cities. By 1942, six large extermination camps had been established in Nazi-occupied Poland.^[133] After 1939, the camps increasingly became places where Jews and POWs were either killed or forced to live as slave laborers, undernourished and tortured.^[134] It is estimated that the Germans established 15,000 camps in the occupied countries, many of them in Poland.^[135][136]

New camps were focused on areas with large Jewish, Polish intelligentsia, communist, or Roma and Sinti populations, including inside Germany. The transportation of prisoners was often carried out under horrifying conditions using rail freight cars, in which many died before reaching their destination.

Extermination through labour, a means whereby camp inmates would literally be worked to death – or frequently worked until they could no longer perform work tasks, followed by their selection for extermination – was invoked as a further systematic extermination policy. Furthermore, while not designed as a method for systematic extermination, many camp prisoners died because of harsh overall conditions or from executions carried out on a whim after being allowed to live for days or months.

Upon admission, some camps tattooed prisoners with a prisoner ID.^[137] Those fit for work were dispatched for 12 to 14 hour shifts. Before and after, there were roll calls that could sometimes last for hours, with prisoners regularly dying of exposure.^[138]

Ghettos (1940–1945)

• Further information: Emanuel Ringelblum, Judenrat, Ghettos in occupied Europe 1939-1944, Oyneg Shabbos
• Main ghettos: Cluj Ghetto, Kraków Ghetto, Łachwa Ghetto, Łódź Ghetto, Lwów Ghetto, Theresienstadt Ghetto, Warsaw Ghetto, Wilna Ghetto

A child dying in the streets of the crowded Warsaw Ghetto, where hunger and disease killed 43,000 in 1941 alone.^[89]

After the invasion of Poland, the German Nazis established ghettos throughout 1941 and 1942 to which Jews and some Romani were confined, until they were eventually shipped to death camps to be murdered. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest, with 380,000 people, and the Łódź Ghetto the second largest, holding 160,000. They were, in effect, immensely crowded prisons, described by Michael Berenbaum as instruments of “slow, passive murder.”^[139] Though the Warsaw Ghetto contained 400,000 people^[89]—30% of the population of Warsaw—it occupied only 2.4% of the city’s area, averaging 9.2 people per room.

From 1940 through 1942, starvation and disease, especially typhoid, killed hundreds of thousands. Over 43,000 residents of the Warsaw ghetto died there in 1941,^[89] more than one in ten; in Theresienstadt, more than half the residents died in 1942.^[139]

Each ghetto was run by a Judenrat (Jewish council) of German-appointed Jewish community leaders, who were responsible for the day-to-day running of the ghetto, including the provision of food, water, heat, medicine, and shelter, and who were also expected to make arrangements for deportations to extermination camps. Heinrich Himmler ordered the start of the deportations on July 19, 1942, and three days later, on July 22, the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto began; over the next 52 days, until September 12, 300,000 people from Warsaw alone were transported in freight trains to the Treblinka extermination camp. Many other ghettos were completely depopulated.

Berenbaum writes that the defining moment that tested the courage and character of each Judenrat came when they were asked to provide a list of names of the next group to be deported. The Judenrat members went through the tried and tested methods of delay, bribery, stonewalling, pleading, and argumentation, until finally a decision had to be made. Some argued that their responsibility was to save the Jews who could be saved, and that therefore others had to be sacrificed; others argued, following Maimonides, that not a single individual should be handed over who had not committed a capital crime. Judenrat leaders such as Dr. Joseph Parnas in Lviv, who refused to compile a list, were shot. On October 14, 1942, the entire Judenrat of Byaroza committed suicide rather than cooperate with the deportations.^[141]

The first ghetto uprising occurred in September 1942 in the small town of Łachwa in southeast Poland. Though there were armed resistance attempts in the larger ghettos in 1943, such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Białystok Ghetto Uprising, in every case they failed against the Nazi military, and the remaining Jews were either killed or deported to the camps, which the Germans euphemistically called “resettlement in the East.”^[142]

Death squads (1941–1943)

Main articles: Einsatzgruppen and Mass graves in the Soviet Union

A member of Einsatzgruppe D is about to shoot a man sitting by a mass grave in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, in 1942. Present in the background are members of the German Army, the German Labor Service, and the Hitler Youth.^[143] The back of the photograph is inscribed “The last Jew in Vinnitsa”.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 opened a new phase. The Holocaust intensified after the Nazis occupied Lithuania, where close to 80 percent of Lithuanian Jews were exterminated before the end of the year.^[144][145] The Soviet territories occupied by early 1942, including all of Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Moldova and most Russian territory west of the line Leningrad-Moscow-Rostov, contained about four million Jews, including hundreds of thousands who had fled Poland in 1939. Despite the chaos of the Soviet retreat, some effort was made to evacuate Jews, and about a million succeeded in escaping further east. The remaining three million were left at the mercy of the Nazis.

In these territories, there were fewer restraints on the mass killing of Jews than there were in countries like France or the Netherlands, where there was a long tradition of tolerance and the rule of law, or even Poland where, despite a strong tradition of antisemitism, there was considerable resistance to Nazi persecution of Polish Jews. In the Baltic states, Belarus, and Ukraine, native antisemitism was reinforced by hatred of Communist rule, which many people associated with the Jews. Thousands of people in these countries actively collaborated with the Nazis. Ukrainians and Latvians joined SS auxiliary forces in large numbers and did much of the dirty work in Nazi extermination camps. Raul Hilberg writes that these were ordinary citizens; the great majority were university-educated professionals.^[146] They used their skills to become efficient killers, according to Michael Berenbaum.^[143]

Despite the subservience of the Army high command to Hitler, Himmler did not trust the Army to approve of, let alone carry out, the large-scale killings of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories. This task was assigned to SS formations called Einsatzgruppen (“task groups”), under the overall command of Heydrich. These had been used on a limited scale in Poland in 1939, but were now organized on a much larger scale. Einsatzgruppe A (commanded by SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Franz Stahlecker) was assigned to the Baltic area, Einsatzgruppe B (SS-Brigadeführer Artur Nebe) to Belarus, Einsatzgruppe C (SS-Gruppenführer Dr. Otto Rasch) to north and central Ukraine, and Einsatzgruppe D (SS-Gruppenführer Dr. Otto Ohlendorf) to Moldova, south Ukraine, the Crimea, and, during 1942, the north Caucasus. Of the four Einsatzgruppen, three were commanded by holders of doctorate degrees, of whom one (Rasch) held a double doctorate.^[147]

According to Ohlendorf at his trial, “the Einsatzgruppen had the mission to protect the rear of the troops by killing the Jews, Romani, Communist functionaries, active Communists, and all persons who would endanger the security.” In practice, their victims were nearly all defenseless Jewish civilians (not a single Einsatzgruppe member was killed in action during these operations). By December 1941, the four Einsatzgruppen listed above had killed, respectively, 125,000, 45,000, 75,000, and 55,000 people—a total of 300,000 people—mainly by shooting or with hand grenades at mass killing sites outside the major towns.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tells the story of one survivor of the Einsatzgruppen in Piryatin, Ukraine, when they killed 1,600 Jews on April 6, 1942, the second day of Passover:

I saw them do the killing. At 5:00 p.m. they gave the command, “Fill in the pits.” Screams and groans were coming from the pits. Suddenly I saw my neighbor Ruderman rise from under the soil … His eyes were bloody and he was screaming: “Finish me off!” … A murdered woman lay at my feet. A boy of five years crawled out from under her body and began to scream desperately. “Mommy!” That was all I saw, since I fell unconscious.^[143]

The most notorious massacre of Jews in the Soviet Union was at a ravine called Babi Yar outside Kiev, where 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation on September 29–30, 1941. The killing of all the Jews in Kiev was decided on by the military governor (Major-General Friedrich Eberhardt), the Police Commander for Army Group South (SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln) and the Einsatzgruppe C Commander Otto Rasch. It was carried out by a mixture of SS, SD and Security Police, assisted by Ukrainian police.

On Monday the Jews of Kiev gathered by the cemetery, expecting to be loaded onto trains. The crowd was large enough that most of the men, women, and children could not have known what was happening until it was too late: by the time they heard the machine-gun fire, there was no chance to escape. All were driven down a corridor of soldiers, in groups of ten, and then shot. A truck driver described the scene:

[O]ne after the other, they had to remove their luggage, then their coats, shoes, and overgarments and also underwear … Once undressed, they were led into the ravine which was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep … When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the Schutzpolizei and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot … The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun … I saw these marksmen stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other … The marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew, who had meanwhile lain down, and shoot him.^[148]

From left to right; Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Karl Wolff (second from the right) at the Obersalzberg, May 1939. Wolff wrote in his diary that Himmler had vomited after witnessing the mass shooting of 100 Jews.^[149]

In August 1941 Himmler travelled to Minsk, where he personally witnessed 100 Jews being shot in a ditch outside the town, an event described by SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff in his diary. “Himmler’s face was green. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his cheek where a piece of brain had squirted up on to it. Then he vomited.” After recovering his composure, he lectured the SS men on the need to follow the “highest moral law of the Party” in carrying out their tasks.

In December 1941, a few cases of typhus broke out in the Bogdanovka concentration camp in Transnistria, where over 50,000 Jews were held.^[150] A decision was made by the German adviser to the Romanian administration of the district and the Romanian District Commissioner to murder all the inmates. The Aktion began on December 21, and was carried out by Romanian soldiers and gendarmes, Ukrainian police and civilians from Golta,^[151] and local ethnic Germans under the commander of the Ukrainian regular police, Kazachievici. Thousands of disabled and ill inmates were forced into two locked stables, which were doused with kerosene and set ablaze, burning alive all those inside. Other inmates were led in groups to a ravine in a nearby forest and shot in the neck. The remaining Jews dug pits with their bare hands in the bitter cold, and packed them with frozen corpses. Thousands of Jews froze to death. A break was made for Christmas, but the killing resumed on December 28. By December 31, over 40,000 Jews had been killed.^[152]

By the end of 1941, however, the Einsatzgruppen had killed only 15 percent of the Jews in the occupied Soviet territories, and it was apparent that these methods could not be used to kill all the Jews of Europe. Even before the invasion of the Soviet Union, experiments with killing Jews in the back of vans using gas from the van’s exhaust had been carried out, and when this proved too slow, more lethal gasses were tried. For large-scale killing by gas, however, fixed sites would be needed, and it was decided—probably by Heydrich and Eichmann—that the Jews should be brought to camps specifically built for the purpose.

In his Nuremberg testimony on April 15, 1946, Rudolf Höß, the commandant of Auschwitz, testified that Heinrich Himmler personally ordered him to prepare Auschwitz to carry out the ‘final solution’:

In the summer of 1941 I was summoned to Berlin to Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler to receive personal orders. He told me something to the effect—I do not remember the exact words—that the Fuehrer had given the order for a final solution of the Jewish question. We, the SS, must carry out that order. If it is not carried out now then the Jews will later on destroy the German people. He had chosen Auschwitz on account of its easy access by rail and also because the extensive site offered space for measures ensuring isolation.^{[153][154][155][156]}

Laurence Rees writes that Höß may have misremembered the year this was said to him. Himmler did indeed visit Höß in the summer of 1941, but there is no evidence that the Final Solution had been planned at this stage. Rees writes that the meeting predates the killings of Jewish men by the Einsatzgruppen in the East and the expansion of the killings in July 1941. It also predates the Wannsee Conference. Rees speculates that the conversation with Himmler was most likely in the summer of 1942.^[157] The first gassings, using an industrial gas derived from prussic acid and known by the brand name Zyklon-B, were carried out at Auschwitz in September 1941.^[158]

Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution (1942–1945)

Further information: Operation Reinhard and Wannsee Conference

The dining room of the Wannsee villa, where the Wannsee conference took place. The 15 men seated at the table on January 20, 1942 to discuss the “final solution of the Jewish question”[159] were considered the best and the brightest in the Reich.[160]

Facsimiles of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference. This page lists the number of Jews in every European country.

Auschwitz I

The railway line leading to the death camp at Auschwitz II (Birkenau).

Empty poison gas canisters used to kill inmates and piles of hair shaven from their heads are stored in the museum at Auschwitz II.

What remains of the gas chambers at Auschwitz II (Birkenau); photographed in 2006.

Corpses in Auschwitz; from Yad Vashem.

Those present at the conference: Josef Bühler, Adolf Eichmann, Roland Freisler, Reinhard Heydrich, Otto Hofmann, Gerhard Klopfer, Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger, Rudolf Lange, Georg Leibbrandt, Martin Luther, Heinrich Müller, Erich Neumann, Karl Eberhard Schöngarth, Wilhelm Stuckart

By the end of 1941, Himmler and Heydrich were becoming increasingly impatient with the progress of the Final Solution. Their main opponent was Göring, who had succeeded in exempting Jewish industrial workers from the orders to deport all Jews to the General Government and who had allied himself with the Army commanders who were opposing the extermination of the Jews out of mixture of economic calculation, distaste for the SS and (in some cases) humanitarian sentiment. Although Göring’s power had declined since the defeat of his Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, he still had privileged access to Hitler.

The Nazis methodically tracked the progress of the Holocaust in thousands of reports and documents. Pictured is the Höfle Telegram sent to Adolf Eichmann in January, 1943, that reported that 1,274,166 Jews had been killed in the four Aktion Reinhard camps during 1942.

Heydrich therefore convened the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942 at a villa, Am Großen Wannsee No. 56-58, in the suburbs of Berlin to finalize a plan for the extermination of the Jews.^[161] The plan became known (after Heydrich) as Aktion Reinhard (Operation Reinhard). Present were Heydrich, Eichmann, Heinrich Müller (head of the Gestapo), and representatives of the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, the Ministry for the Interior, the Four Year Plan Office, the Ministry of Justice, the General Government in Poland (where over two million Jews still lived), the Foreign Office, the Race and Resettlement Office, and the Nazi Party, and the office responsible for distributing Jewish property.^[160] Also present was SS-Sturmbannführer Rudolf Lange, the SD commander in Riga, who, with Friedrich Jeckeln had recently carried out the liquidation of 24,000 Latvian Jews from the Riga ghetto in the Rumbula massacre.^[161]

Michael Berenbaum writes that the 15 men seated at the table were considered the best and the brightest; more than half of them held doctorates from German universities. Butlers served brandy as they talked.^[160]

The men were presented with a plan for killing all the Jews in Europe, including 330,000 Jews in England and 4,000 in Ireland,^[161] although the minutes taken by Eichmann refer to this only through euphemisms, such as ” … emigration has now been replaced by evacuation to the East. This operation should be regarded only as a provisional option, though in view of the coming final solution of the Jewish question it is already supplying practical experience of vital importance.”^[161]

The officials were told there were 2.3 million Jews in the General Government, 850,000 in Hungary, 1.1 million in the other occupied countries, and up to 5 million in the Soviet Union (although only 3 million of these were in areas under German occupation) —a total of about 6.5 million. These would all be transported by train to extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) in Poland, where those unfit for work would be gassed at once. In some camps, such as Auschwitz, those fit for work would be kept alive for a while, but eventually all would be killed. Göring’s representative, Dr. Erich Neumann, gained a limited exemption for some classes of industrial workers.

Extermination camps

Approx. number killed at each extermination camp (Source: Yad Vashem^[162]); Help improve coordinates:

Camp name	Killed	Coordinates	Ref.
Auschwitz II	1,400,000	50°2′9″N 19°10′42″E / 50.03583°N 19.17833°E / 50.03583; 19.17833 (Oświęcim (Auschwitz, Poland))	[50][163][164]
Belzec	600,000	50°22′18″N 23°27′27″E / 50.37167°N 23.4575°E / 50.37167; 23.4575 (Belzec (Poland))	[52][165]
Chelmno	320,000	52°9′27″N 18°43′43″E / 52.1575°N 18.72861°E / 52.1575; 18.72861 (Chelmno (Poland))	[54][166]
Jasenovac	600,000	45°16′54″N 16°56′6″E / 45.28167°N 16.935°E / 45.28167; 16.935 (Jasenovac (Sisačko-Moslavačka, Croatia))	[167][168]
Majdanek	360,000	51°13′13″N 22°36′0″E / 51.22028°N 22.6°E / 51.22028; 22.6 (Majdanek (Poland))	[53][169]
Maly Trostinets	65,000	53°51′4″N 27°42′17″E / 53.85111°N 27.70472°E / 53.85111; 27.70472 (Malyy Trostenets (Belarus))	[170][171]
Sobibór	250,000	51°26′50″N 23°35′37″E / 51.44722°N 23.59361°E / 51.44722; 23.59361 (Sobibór (Poland))	[55][172]
Treblinka	870,000	52°37′35″N 22°2′49″E / 52.62639°N 22.04694°E / 52.62639; 22.04694 (Treblinka (Poland))	[51][173]

During 1942, in addition to Auschwitz, five other camps were designated as extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) for the carrying out of the Reinhard plan.^[174][175] Two of these, Chelmno (also known as Kulmhof) and Majdanek were already functioning as labor camps: these now had extermination facilities added to them. Three new camps were built for the sole purpose of killing large numbers of Jews as quickly as possible, at Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka. A seventh camp, at Maly Trostinets in Belarus, was also used for this purpose. Jasenovac was an extermination camp where mostly ethnic Serbs were killed.

Extermination camps are frequently confused with concentration camps such as Dachau and Belsen, which were mostly located in Germany and intended as places of incarceration and forced labor for a variety of enemies of the Nazi regime (such as Communists and gays). They should also be distinguished from slave labor camps, which were set up in all German-occupied countries to exploit the labor of prisoners of various kinds, including prisoners of war. In all Nazi camps there were very high death rates as a result of starvation, disease and exhaustion, but only the extermination camps were designed specifically for mass killing.

The extermination camps were run by SS officers, but most of the guards were Ukrainian or Baltic auxiliaries. Regular German soldiers were kept well away.

Gas chambers

At the extermination camps with gas chambers all the prisoners arrived by train. Sometimes entire trainloads were sent straight to the gas chambers, but usually the camp doctor on duty subjected individuals to selections, where a small percentage were deemed fit to work in the slave labor camps; the majority were taken directly from the platforms to a reception area where all their clothes and other possessions were seized by the Nazis to help fund the war. They were then herded naked into the gas chambers. Usually they were told these were showers or delousing chambers, and there were signs outside saying “baths” and “sauna.” They were sometimes given a small piece of soap and a towel so as to avoid panic, and were told to remember where they had put their belongings for the same reason. When they asked for water because they were thirsty after the long journey in the cattle trains, they were told to hurry up, because coffee was waiting for them in the camp, and it was getting cold.^[177]

According to Rudolf Höß, commandant of Auschwitz, bunker 1 held 800 people, and bunker 2 held 1,200.^[178] Once the chamber was full, the doors were screwed shut and solid pellets of Zyklon-B were dropped into the chambers through vents in the side walls, releasing toxic HCN, or hydrogen cyanide. Those inside died within 20 minutes; the speed of death depended on how close the inmate was standing to a gas vent, according to Höß, who estimated that about one third of the victims died immediately.^[179] Joann Kremer, an SS doctor who oversaw the gassings, testified that: “Shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through the opening and it was clear that they fought for their lives.”^[180] When they were removed, if the chamber had been very congested, as they often were, the victims were found half-squatting, their skin colored pink with red and green spots, some foaming at the mouth or bleeding from the ears.^[179]

The gas was then pumped out, the bodies were removed (which would take up to four hours), gold fillings in their teeth were extracted with pliers by dentist prisoners, and women’s hair was cut.^[181] The floor of the gas chamber was cleaned, and the walls whitewashed.^[180] The work was done by the Sonderkommando prisoners, Jews who hoped to buy themselves a few extra months of life. In crematoria 1 and 2, the Sonderkommando lived in an attic above the crematoria; in crematoria 3 and 4, they lived inside the gas chambers.^[182] When the Sonderkommando had finished with the bodies, the SS conducted spot checks to make sure all the gold had been removed from the victims’ mouths. If a check revealed that gold had been missed, the Sonderkommando prisoner responsible was thrown into the furnace alive as punishment.^[183]

At first, the bodies were buried in deep pits and covered with lime, but between September and November 1942, on the orders of Himmler, they were dug up and burned. In the spring of 1943, new gas chambers and crematoria were built to accommodate the numbers.^[184]

Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chambers to accommodate 2,000 people at one time, whereas at Treblinka their 10 gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each. The way we selected our victims was as follows: we had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were sent into the Camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated, since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under the clothes but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.

– Rudolf Höß, Auschwitz camp commandant, Nuremberg testimony.^[185]

Jewish resistance

:*Further information: Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

• For uprisings: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Białystok Ghetto Uprising, Marcinkance Ghetto Uprising, Sobibór extermination camp, Żydowski Związek Walki, Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa.
• For Jewish partisans, volunteers, and escapees: Yitzhak Arad, Bielski partisans, Masha Bruskina, Eugenio Calò, Jewish Brigade, Jewish partisans, Abba Kovner, Dov Lopatyn, Moše Pijade, Haviva Reik, Special Interrogation Group, Hannah Szenes, Rudolf Vrba, Alfréd Wetzler, Shalom Yoran, Simcha Zorin.
• For how stories were preserved in the Warsaw Ghetto: Emanuel Ringelblum, Oyneg Shabbos (group).

An image from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Jews captured and forcibly pulled out from dug outs by the Germans during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The photo is from Jurgen Stroop’s report to Heinrich Himmler

Yehuda Bauer and other historians argue that resistance consisted not only of physical opposition, but of any activity that gave the Jews dignity and humanity in humiliating and inhumane conditions.^[186]

In every ghetto, in every deportation train, in every labor camp, even in the death camps, the will to resist was strong, and took many forms. Fighting with the few weapons that would be found, individual acts of defiance and protest, the courage of obtaining food and water under the threat of death, the superiority of refusing to allow the Germans their final wish to gloat over panic and despair. Even passivity was a form of resistance. To die with dignity was a form of resistance. To resist the demoralizing, brutalizing force of evil, to refuse to be reduced to the level of animals, to live through the torment, to outlive the tormentors, these too were acts of resistance. Merely to give a witness of these events in testimony was, in the end, a contribution to victory. Simply to survive was a victory of the human spirit.”

– Martin Gilbert. The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy.^[187]

There are many examples of Jewish resistance, most notably the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of January 1943, when thousands of poorly armed Jewish fighters held the SS at bay for four weeks, and killed several hundred Germans before being crushed by overwhelmingly superior forces. This was followed by the uprising in the Treblinka extermination camp in May 1943, when about 200 inmates escaped from the camp after overpowering the guards. Two weeks later, there was an uprising in the Bialystok ghetto. In September, there was a short-lived uprising in the Vilnius ghetto. In October, 600 Jewish and Russian prisoners attempted an escape at the Sobibór death camp. About 60 survived and joined the Soviet partisans. On October 7, 1944, the Jewish Sonderkommandos at Auschwitz staged an uprising. Female prisoners had smuggled in explosives from a weapons factory, and Crematorium IV was partly destroyed by an explosion. The prisoners then attempted a mass escape, but all 250 were killed soon after.

An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Jewish partisans (see the list at the top of this section) actively fought the Nazis and their collaborators in Eastern Europe.^[188] The Jewish Brigade, a unit of 5,000 volunteers from the British Mandate of Palestine fought in the British Army. German-speaking volunteers from the Special Interrogation Group performed commando and sabotage operations against the Nazis behind front lines in the Western Desert Campaign.

In occupied Poland and Soviet territories, thousands of Jews fled into the swamps or forests and joined the partisans, although the partisan movements did not always welcome them. In Lithuania and Belarus, an area with a heavy concentration of Jews, and also an area which suited partisan operations, Jewish partisan groups saved thousands of Jewish civilians from extermination. No such opportunities existed for the Jewish populations of cities such as Budapest. However in Amsterdam, and other parts of the Netherlands, many Jews were active in the Dutch Resistance.^[189] Joining the partisans was an option only for the young and the fit who were willing to leave their families. Many Jewish families preferred to die together rather than be separated.

“Many people think the Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter, and that’s not true—it’s absolutely not true. I worked closely with many Jewish people in the Resistance, and I can tell you, they took much greater risks than I did.”

– Pieter Meerburg. The Heart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers and Their Stories of Courage.^[190]

For the great majority of Jews resistance could take only the passive forms of delay, evasion, negotiation, bargaining and, where possible, bribery of German officials. The Nazis encouraged this by forcing the Jewish communities to police themselves, through bodies such as the Reich Association of Jews (Reichsvereinigung der Juden) in Germany and the Jewish Councils (Judenrate) in the urban ghettos in occupied Poland. They held out the promise of concessions in exchange for each surrender, enmeshing the Jewish leadership so deeply in well-intentioned compromise that a decision to stand and fight was never possible. Holocaust survivor Alexander Kimel wrote: “The youth in the Ghettos dreamed about fighting. I believe that although there were many factors that inhibited our responses, the most important factors were isolation and historical conditioning to accepting martyrdom.”^[191]

The historical conditioning of the Jewish communities of Europe to accept persecution and avert disaster through compromise and negotiation was the most important factor in the failure to resist until the very end. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising took place only when the Jewish population had been reduced from 500,000 to 100,000, and it was obvious that no further compromise was possible. Paul Johnson writes: “The Jews had been persecuted for a millennium and a half and had learned from long experience that resistance cost lives rather than saved them. Their history, their theology, their folklore, their social structure, even their vocabulary trained them to negotiate, to pay, to plead, to protest, not to fight.”^[192]

The Jewish communities were also systematically deceived about German intentions, and were cut off from most sources of news from the outside world. The Germans told the Jews that they were being deported to work camps – euphemistically calling it “resettlement in the East” – and maintained this illusion through elaborate deceptions all the way to the gas chamber doors to avoid uprisings. As photographs testify, Jews disembarked at the railway stations at Auschwitz and other extermination camps carrying sacks and suitcases, clearly having no idea of the fate that awaited them. Rumours of the reality of the extermination camps filtered back only slowly to the ghettos, and were usually not believed, just as they were not believed when couriers such as Jan Karski, the Polish resistance fighter, conveyed them to the western Allies.^[193]

Climax

Heydrich was assassinated in Prague in June 1942. He was succeeded as head of the RSHA by Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Kaltenbrunner and Eichmann, under Himmler’s close supervision, oversaw the climax of the Final Solution. During 1943 and 1944, the extermination camps worked at a furious rate to kill the hundreds of thousands of people shipped to them by rail from almost every country within the German sphere of influence. By the spring of 1944, up to 8,000 people were being gassed every day at Auschwitz.^[194]

Despite the high productivity of the war industries based in the Jewish ghettos in the General Government, during 1943 they were liquidated, and their populations shipped to the camps for extermination. The largest of these operations, the deportation of 100,000 people from the Warsaw Ghetto in early 1943, provoked the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which was suppressed with great brutality. At the same time, rail shipments arrived regularly from western and southern Europe. Few Jews were shipped from the occupied Soviet territories to the camps: the killing of Jews in this zone was left in the hands of the SS, aided by locally recruited auxiliaries. In any case, by the end of 1943 the Germans had been driven from most Soviet territory.

Shipments of Jews to the camps had priority on the German railways, and continued even in the face of the increasingly dire military situation after the Battle of Stalingrad at the end of 1942 and the escalating Allied air attacks on German industry and transport. Army leaders and economic managers complained at this diversion of resources and at the killing of irreplaceable skilled Jewish workers. By 1944, moreover, it was evident to most Germans not blinded by Nazi fanaticism that Germany was losing the war. Many senior officials began to fear the retribution that might await Germany and them personally for the crimes being committed in their name. But the power of Himmler and the SS within the German Reich was too great to resist, and Himmler could always evoke Hitler’s authority for his demands.

SS arresting some of the Jewish population, Budapest October 1944

SS arresting some of the Jewish population, Budapest October 1944

In October 1943, Himmler gave a speech to senior Nazi Party officials gathered in Posen (Poznan in western Poland). Here he came closer than ever before to stating explicitly that he was intent on exterminating the Jews of Europe:

I may here in this closest of circles allude to a question which you, my party comrades, have all taken for granted, but which has become for me the most difficult question of my life, the Jewish question … I ask of you that what I say in this circle you really only hear and never speak of … We come to the question: how is it with the women and children? I have resolved even here on a completely clear solution. I do not consider myself justified in eradicating the men—so to speak killing them or ordering them to be killed—and allowing the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up … The difficult decision had to be taken, to cause this people to disappear from the earth.

The audience for this speech included Admiral Karl Dönitz and Armaments Minister Albert Speer, both of whom successfully claimed at the Nuremberg trials that they had had no knowledge of the Final Solution. The text of this speech was not known at the time of their trials.

The scale of extermination slackened somewhat at the beginning of 1944 once the ghettos in occupied Poland were emptied, but in March 19, 1944, Hitler ordered the military occupation of Hungary, and Eichmann was dispatched to Budapest to supervise the deportation of Hungary’s 800,000 Jews. Hitler had personally complained to the Hungarian regent Admiral Miklos Horthy on the previous day, March 18, 1944, that:

More than half of them were shipped to Auschwitz in the course of the year. The commandant, Rudolf Höß, said at his trial that he killed 400,000 Hungarian Jews in three months. This operation met strong opposition within the Nazi hierarchy, and there were some suggestions that Hitler should offer the Allies a deal under which the Hungarian Jews would be spared in exchange for a favorable peace settlement. There were unofficial negotiations in Istanbul between Himmler’s agents, British agents, and representatives of Jewish organizations, and at one point an attempt by Eichmann to exchange one million Jews for 10,000 trucks—the so-called “blood for goods” proposal—but there was no real possibility of such a deal being struck (see Joel Brand and Rudolf Kastner).

Escapes, publication of news of the death camps (April–June 1944)

Bratislava, June–July 1944. Rudolf Vrba (right) escaped from Auschwitz on April 7, 1944, bringing the first credible news to the world of the mass murder that was taking place there. Arnost Rosin (left), escaped on May 27, 1944.^[196]

Escapes from the camps were few, but not unknown. The few Auschwitz escapes that succeeded were made possible by the Polish underground inside the camp and local people outside.^[197] In 1940, the Auschwitz commandant reported that “the local population is fanatically Polish and … prepared to take any action against the hated SS camp personnel. Every prisoner who managed to escape can count on help the moment he reaches the wall of a first Polish farmstead.”^[198]

In February 1942, an escaped inmate from the Chelmno extermination camp, Jacob Grojanowski, reached the Warsaw Ghetto, where he gave detailed information about the Chelmno camp to the Oneg Shabbat group. His report, which became known as the Grojanowski Report, was smuggled out of the ghetto through the channels of the Polish underground to the Delegatura, and reached London by June 1942. It is unclear what was done with the report at that point.^{[54][199][200][201]} In the meantime, by the 1st of February, the United States Office of War Information had decided not to release information about the extermination of the Jews because it was felt that it would mislead the public into thinking the war was simply a Jewish problem.^[202]

In 1943 the news about gassing Jews was at least broadcasted from London to The Netherlands. It was also published in illegal newspapers of Dutch resistance (for example in Het Parool of September 27, 1943). However, the news was so unbelievable that many assumed it was merely war propaganda. The publications were halted because they were counter-productive for the Dutch resistance. Nevertheless, many Jews were warned that they would be murdered, but as escape was impossible for most of them, they preferred to believe that the warnings were false.^[203][204]

In April 1943, Captain Witold Pilecki, a member of the Polish underground and a soldier of the Home Army, worked out a plan to enter Auschwitz and volunteered to be sent there. He organized an underground network Związek Organizacji Wojskowej – (eng.Union of Military Organizations) that was ready to initiate an uprising but it was decided that the probability of success was too low for the uprising to succeed. UMO’s numerous and detailed reports became later a principal source of intelligence on Auschwitz for the Western Allies. Pilecki escaped from Auschwitz with information that became the basis of a two-part report in August 1943 that was sent to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in London. The report included details about the gas chambers, about “selection,” and about the sterilization experiments. It stated that there were three crematoria in Birkenau able to burn 10,000 people daily, and that 30,000 people had been gassed in one day. The author wrote: “History knows no parallel of such destruction of human life.” Raul Hilberg writes that the report was filed away with a note that there was no indication as to the reliability of the source.^[205] When Pilecki returned to Poland after the war the communist authorities arrested and accused him of spying for the Polish government in exile. He was sentenced to death in a show trial and was executed on May 25, 1948.

Auschwitz concentration camp photos of Pilecki (1941)

Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, Jewish inmates, escaped from Auschwitz in April 1944, eventually reaching Slovakia. The 32-page document they dictated to Jewish officials about the mass murder at Auschwitz became known as the Vrba-Wetzler report. Vrba had an eidetic memory and had worked on the Judenrampe, where Jews disembarked from the trains to be “selected” either for the gas chamber or slave labor. The level of detail with which he described the transports allowed Slovakian officials to compare his account with their own deportation records, and the corroboration convinced the Allies to take the report seriously.^[206][196]

Two other Auschwitz inmates, Arnost Rosin and Czesław Mordowicz escaped on May 27, 1944, arriving in Slovakia on June 6, the day of the Normandy landing (D-Day). Hearing about Normandy, they believed the war was over and got drunk to celebrate, using dollars they’d smuggled out of the camp. They were arrested for violating currency laws, and spent eight days in prison, before the Judenrat paid their fines. The additional information they offered the Judenrat was added to Vrba and Wetzler’s report and became known as the Auschwitz Protocols. They reported that, between May 15 and May 27, 1944, 100,000 Hungarian Jews had arrived at Birkenau, and had been killed at an unprecedented rate, with human fat being used to accelerate the burning.^[207]

The BBC and The New York Times published material from the Vrba-Wetzler report on June 15^[208] and June 20, 1944. The subsequent pressure from world leaders persuaded Miklos Horthy to bring the mass deportations of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz to a halt on July 9, saving up to 200,000 Jews from the extermination camps.^[207]

Death marches (1944–1945)

Main article: Death marches (Holocaust)

By mid 1944, the Final Solution had largely run its course. Those Jewish communities within easy reach of the Nazi regime had been largely exterminated, in proportions ranging from more than 90 percent in Poland to about 25 percent in France. In May, Himmler claimed in a speech that “The Jewish question in Germany and the occupied countries has been solved.”^[209] During 1944, in any case, the task became steadily more difficult. German armies were evicted from the Soviet Union, the Balkans and Italy, and German allies were either defeated or were switching sides to the Allies. In June, the western Allies landed in France. Allied air attacks and the operations of partisans made rail transport increasingly difficult, and the objections of the military to the diversion of rail transport for carrying Jews to Poland more urgent and harder to ignore.

At this time, as the Soviet armed forces approached, the camps in eastern Poland were closed down, any surviving inmates being shipped west to camps closer to Germany, first to Auschwitz and later to Gross Rosen in Silesia. Auschwitz itself was closed as the Soviets advanced through Poland. The last 13 prisoners, all women, were killed in Auschwitz II on November 25, 1944; records show they were “unmittelbar getötet” (“killed”), leaving open whether they were gassed or otherwise disposed of.^[210]

Despite the desperate military situation, great efforts were made to conceal evidence of what had happened in the camps. The gas chambers were dismantled, the crematoria dynamited, mass graves dug up and the corpses cremated, and Polish farmers were induced to plant crops on the sites to give the impression that they had never existed. In October 1944, Himmler, who is believed to have been negotiating a secret deal with the Allies behind Hitler’s back, ordered an end to the Final Solution. But the hatred of the Jews in the ranks of the SS was so strong that Himmler’s order was generally ignored. Local commanders continued to kill Jews, and to shuttle them from camp to camp by forced “death marches” until the last weeks of the war.^[211]

Already sick after months or years of violence and starvation, prisoners were forced to march for tens of miles in the snow to train stations; then transported for days at a time without food or shelter in freight trains with open carriages; and forced to march again at the other end to the new camp. Those who lagged behind or fell were shot. Around 100,000 Jews died during these marches.^[212]

The largest and best-known of the death marches took place in January 1945, when the Soviet army advanced on Poland. Nine days before the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz, the SS marched 60,000 prisoners out of the camp toward Wodzislaw, 56 km (35 miles) away, where they were put on freight trains to other camps. Around 15,000 died on the way. Elie Wiesel and his father, Shlomo, were among the marchers:

An icy wind blew in violent gusts. But we marched without faltering.
Pitch darkness. Every now and then, an explosion in the night. They had orders to fire on any who could not keep up. Their fingers on the triggers, they did not deprive themselves of this pleasure. If one of us had stopped for a second, a sharp shot finished off another filthy son of a bitch.
Near me, men were collapsing in the dirty snow. Shots.^[213]

Liberation

Starving prisoners in Mauthausen camp, Ebensee, Austria, liberated by the U.S. 80th Infantry Division on May 5, 1945.

A grave inside Bergen-Belsen, liberated by the British on April 15, 1945.

Main articles: Battle of Berlin, Death of Adolf Hitler, Prague Offensive, and Victory in Europe Day

The first major camp, Majdanek, was discovered by the advancing Soviets on July 23, 1944. Auschwitz was liberated, also by the Soviets, on January 27, 1945; Buchenwald by the Americans on April 11; Bergen-Belsen by the British on April 15; Dachau by the Americans on April 29; Ravensbrück by the Soviets on the same day; Mauthausen by the Americans on May 5; and Theresienstadt by the Soviets on May 8.^[214] Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec were never liberated, but were destroyed by the Nazis in 1943. Colonel William W. Quinn of the U.S. 7th Army said of Dachau: “There our troops found sights, sounds, and stenches horrible beyond belief, cruelties so enormous as to be incomprehensible to the normal mind.”^[215][216]

In most of the camps discovered by the Soviets, almost all the prisoners had already been removed, leaving only a few thousand alive—7,000 inmates were found in Auschwitz, including 180 children who had been experimented on by doctors.^[218] Some 60,000 prisoners were discovered at Bergen-Belsen by the British 11th Armoured Division,^[219] 13,000 corpses lay unburied, and another 10,000 died from typhus or malnutrition over the following weeks.^[220] The British forced the remaining SS guards to gather up the corpses and place them in mass graves.^[221]

The BBC’s Richard Dimbleby described the scenes that greeted him and the British Army at Belsen:^[222]

Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which … The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them … Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live … A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms … He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days. This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.