Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

[xxii] The consequences of the anti-Jewish policies of Nazi Germany and its fascist allies from 1933 to 1945, culminating in genocide. It is estimated that close to 6 million people of Jewish origin died in the Nazi extermination programme, the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Problem’, the most notorious part of which involved the mass gassing and cremation of victims in death camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka [50]. Most of the Jews killed by the Nazis came from Central and Eastern Europe (see European jewry). Polish Jewry, which before the war numbered more than 3 million, was almost completely destroyed. The basis of the policy behind the Holocaust was the racial theory of the Germans as a master race and the Jews as a subhuman group who corrupt pure Aryan peoples and have to be eliminated. These theories were put forward by 19th-century European racists, e.g. J. A. Gobineau and H. S. Chamberlain, but it was Hitler and his Nazi propagandists who turned racist theory into an active social programme. Jews were discriminated against economically, made to wear a distinctive badge, the yellow star, were herded together into ghettoes, were used as slave labour, were experimented on by Nazi doctors, and were killed by mass shootings or gassings. [11; 17; 20; 25; 37: xxvii, xxviii; 44; 52; 55: xxxi; 57: xx, xxi] ... log in or subscribe to read full text