Hi I’m John Green and this is Crash Course

European History.

Today, we’re going to talk about the Holocaust,

which was an integral part of Nazism in World

War II.

The genocide of the Holocaust--millions of

Jewish people were systematically murdered--shows

humanity at its most depraved.

And we’ve thought a lot about how much footage

to show from the camps where so many millions

were condemned to death, and we’ve decided

not to have a Thought Bubble in today’s

episode.

But we will be showing some archival footage,

not least because anti-semitic disinformation

campaigns throughout the last seventy years

have sought to minimize or outright deny that

the Holocaust happened.

Maybe there’s no countering such conspiracy

theories--the evidence of the Holocaust is

vast, including hundreds of thousands of witness

accounts, testimony from war crimes trials,

and extensive documentation by the Nazis themselves

of their attempts to systematically elminate

Jewish people from the world--and also others

deemed inferior, including disabled people,

Roma people, many Slavs, Communists, and LGBT

people.

But we think it is important to try to tell

the truth, both in what we say and in what

we show.

Some maintain that the Holocaust is incomprehensible--an

outsized phenomenon beyond ordinary concepts

of good and evil.

And in some ways that’s true, but it ignores

the centuries of anti-Semitism that laid the

groundwork for the dehumanization of Jewish

people that intensified in the 20th century.
It is critical that we remember the horrors
of the holocaust.

History is, in the broadest sense, collective

memory, and as Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel

has written, “Without memory, there would

be no civilization, no society, no future.”

And so let us try to remember.

[Intro]
The beginning of the mass murder occurred

late in the 1930s, when doctors mobilized

to murder some 200,000 disabled people in

the T4 project, which aimed to save the purported

purity of the German race.

In Permission for the Destruction of Worthless

Life (1920), a noted jurist and a psychiatrist

argued that people deemed “without value”

should be eliminated.

T4 murderers used carbon monoxide gas to kill

their victims, including in mobile gas chambers.

Many of these victims were taken from institutions

without the knowledge of their families.

The list of dangerous people or people without

value resulted from multiple hatreds: of disabled

people, but also of Jewish people, and Sinti

and Roma people, and certain groups of Slavs

such as Poles, Czechs, and Russians, also

homosexuals, black people, and Jehovah’s

Witnesses—to name just a few.

In the 1930s, political opponents and these

marginalized people comprised those in early

concentration camps, which were more like

large-scale prisons, albeit ones where murder

was common, as distinct from the extermination

camps that were set up later in the war, and

which functioned primarily as places to systematically

murder people.

In 1939, as German soldiers moved through

Poland they murdered many Poles including
Polish Jews, especially going after the most
literate citizens, like political leaders,

teachers and professors.

And as Nazi forces moved eastward, Christian

citizens joined in this murderous rampage

against Jewish people, as a supposedly righteous

crusade against those who had killed Jesus.

Jesus, for the record, was Jewish, and he

was killed by Roman authorities not Jewish

ones, but none of this hatred was fact-based.

Special Nazi forces called the Einzatzgruppen

took the lead but they were joined by civilians

and policing officials.

Hitler had always aspired to rid Germany of

Jews, initially by means like forced migration

or the creation of such dire living conditions

that Jewish people would die at a rapid rate.

And the creation of the Warsaw ghetto embodied

this hope for ethnic cleansing: some thirty

percent of the city’s population was jammed

into two percent of its space to live on drastically

reduced rations and necessities such as coal

and medical supplies.

“The more that die, the better,” enthused

Hans Frank, Governor of German occupied Poland.

And then, in the early years of the war, the

plan for what became the Holocaust took shape,

in part because it was felt that Poles were

not being converted into slave labor fast

enough and also because it was felt that Jewish

people were not dying quickly enough.

As the Nazi invasion of the USSR (Operation

Barbarossa) began to fail by the end of 1941,

Nazi officials set in motion a system of industrial

killing modeled on the T4 program, including

plans for transport of Jewish and other victims

to extermination camps.

They then communicated these plans to those

responsible for carrying them out at the Wannsee
Conference outside Berlin in January 1942.

Jewish leaders were tasked with selecting

members of their conquered communities supposedly

to be resettled to the east.

But these “resettlements” were not resettlements--instead,

they entailed being transported to the new

extermination camps and gassed on arrival

(as was the case for most children and women)

or worked to death (as was the case for boys

and men and some women).

Some camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau were

both labor and extermination camps, while

others such as Chelmno were solely to murder

captives.

And it should also be noted that mass killings

continued around captured cities and towns,

not just in extermination camps.

Nazi soldiers who objected, and there were

some, were simply given other assignments.

It was possible, the record shows, to just

say no.

But many soldiers and other authorities believed

in the so-called “Final Solution” of killing

all Jewish people.

Soliders and other authorities were often

white supremacists--although historians have

differing judgements about the weight of other

motivations, such as obedience to authority,

the normalization of mass murder, or greed

and opportunities to steal from victims--just

to name a few of the possible motivations.

Eventually, people were able to begin reporting

not just the brutality of forced deportations

but also their lethal outcome.

This was called the “Jewish mouth-radio.”

But resistance was incredibly difficult for

people who were weakened by starvation, and
lack of medical care, and a range of other
physical and mental abuse.

Still, in 1943 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto used

guns provided by the Polish resistance to

rise up against their Nazi occupiers.

The Germans slaughtered most of the ghetto

inhabitants, with a few escapees joining other

resistance groups in Poland.

In the camps themselves, resistance was even

less plausible for people living on two hundred

calories a day and constantly monitored by

heavily armed guards.

From the beginning, the Nazis, though proudly

committed to, in Hitler’s words, “the

destruction of the Jewish race in Europe,”

did a lot to hide their mass murder.

Death camps had ornate entry gates adorned

with cheering messages.

Those to be murdered were greeted by bands

playing merry tunes.

So imagine the shock as new inmates were stripped

of their illusions of safety in the camps:

“You see those flames?” one newly arrived

wife and mother was asked by a seasoned prisoner.

“That’s the crematory over there.

. . Call it by the name we use: the bakery.

Perhaps it is your family that is being burned

at the moment.”

Some miraculously survived.

Women, raised to be guardians of tradition,

often celebrated Jewish holidays, and the

birthdays of their fellow inmates, and cared

for one another when possible.

And they were strengthened by these deeds.

One chronicler of the death camps, Italian

chemist Primo Levi, credited his survival

to another prisoner who shared his bread ration

and did favors.

Thanks to these acts, Levi wrote, “I managed

not to forget that I myself was a man.”

Serving in a camp where overworked and starved

prisoners were to be immediately murdered,

Levi described how the Nazi regime drained

away the “divine spark” so that prisoners

came to feel like “non-men.”

He went on: “If I could enclose the evil

of our time in one image, I would choose this

image which is familiar to me: a faceless

man, with head dropped and shoulders curved,

on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace

of thought is to be seen.”

Given that, “One hesitates to call them

living; one hesitates to call their death

death.

. . .”
But people also kept their humanity and hope

in spite of the odds against them.

In 1943 hundreds of captives rose up at the

Treblinka Extermination Camp, killing Ukrainian

guards.

Although most of the rebels were killed, some

successfully fled to join resistance forces.

A year later at Auschwitz, women prisoners

smuggled in explosives that men used to blow

up a crematorium and assassinate guards.

But none of the resisters survived.

Overall, deaths from the deliberately planned

and executed extermination of Jewish—the

Holocaust, or Shoah as it is known in Hebrew—are

estimated at six million people not to mention

the abuse and torture of those who survived

to the liberation of the camps in 1944 and

1945.

It’s tempting to focus on those stories

of survival, because we have records and accounts

of the experiences of people like Primo Levi

and Elie Wiesel, but we have to remember that

most people did not have miraculous escape

stories.

Most people were simply murdered for who they

were.

Of course, combatants in World War II also

unleashed additional mass murder beyond the

Holocaust itself.

In 1943, German forces uncovered victims of

the 1940 Soviet execution of some 22,000 Polish

military officers and professionals—engineers,

professors, and lawyers, for example.

Just like Nazi executions of the intelligentsia,

the goal was to deprive a conquered people

of their leadership.

But Soviet executions did not primarily aim

to bolster “Russian blood” or a “Russian

race,” although with the outbreak of war

non-Russians were often driven out of businesses

and some professions.

But the Holocaust was very different because

it was a systematic attempt to eliminate a

people from the world via mass murder.

It was genocide.

Now, as we’ve mentioned, Jewish people were

not the only victims of Nazi mass murder:

Millions of non-Jewish Poles were also killed.

In the Nazi’s so called “racial science,”

Slavs were not seen as all the same: Slovaks

and Croats were seen as superior to Poles

and Czechs for example.

And Russians were seen as among the lowest

Slavs because they were seen as “Judeo-Bolsheviks”—a

term that combined anti-Semitism with the

hatred of Soviet communism.
Obviously, although some Bolsheviks were Jewish,
many were not—Lenin and Stalin to name just

two of the most notable examples.

But German soldiers murdered freely, motivated

by the propaganda and speechifying filled

with hatred for these twin demonized entities.

Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Belarusians,

and others also joined in the slaughter because

they too had been taught to hate Jewish people

and had age-old animosities toward Russian

might in the region and newer animosities

toward Bolshevik ambitions for conquest in

eastern Europe.

Often individuals didn’t need encouragement

by the Germans for murder and even murdered

in advance of their arrival because they wanted

to help the Nazis out and also take the possessions

of their murdered neighbors.

One notorious case occurred in Jedwabne, Poland

where townspeople rounded up their Jewish

neighbors, raped and beat to death many of

them and burned the rest alive in a barn.

Then, following the Nazi example, they took

their neighbors’ possessions for themselves.

So by the end of World War II, had people

taken a lesson from all this?

I don’t know.

Racism and jingoistic nationalism remained

powerful forces in European life, and in human

life--as indeed they are today.

In some towns, surviving Jewish people who

returned to claim their property were driven

out or even murdered;

And the diverse group of refugees who sought

safety and shelter after the war often found

none, as indeed Jewish trying to escape Europe

in the 1930s and early 1940s had been denied
refuge around the world.

After the war ended, many survivors of the

camps gathered in port cities of the Mediterranean

waiting for ships to take them anywhere that

would accept them.

In the U.S., where anti-Semitism remained

high, only five thousand Jewish people were

allowed entry.

And that’s very important to understand:

Anti-Semitism was not only a destructive force

in Europe, then or now.

And that consistent, long-term imagining of

Jewish people as evil or inferior or inhuman

allowed the horrors of the Holocaust to happen

unchecked, and kept Jewish people from the

safe harbor they might otherwise have found.

And that is something to remember not only

about history but also about our world today.

As the Israeli holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer

has written, “Thou shalt not be a victime,

thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above

all, thou shalt not be a bystander.”

Thanks for watching.

I’ll see you next week.