THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST

The Jewish Holocaust was the effort of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany to exterminate the Jews and other people that they considered inferior. As a result, about 12,000,000 people - about half of them Jews - were murdered. The murders were done by every means imaginable but most of the victims perished because of shooting, starvation, disease, and poison gas. Others were tortured to death or died in horrible medical experiments.

Hitler took power in Germany in 1933 and almost immediately began the chain of events that led to the Holocaust. This first phase was the persecution of Jews in Germany and the other countries invaded by Hitler. It lasted until 1941. During this period, while Hitler built his power, Jews were persecuted and brutalized but there was no organized effort to systematically murder them.

In late 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, beginning the Second World War. In order to convince the German High Command to carry out the Jewish Holocaust, he uttered, 'who, after all, remembers the Armenians' inferring that the criminal Turkish government that implemented the Armenian Genocide – the first genocide of the 20th century -- was not punished by the Allies for one of the gravest crimes in human history. In mid-1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. At about the same time, he also decided that there should be a "Final Solution" to "the Jewish question."

A military group known as the SS and a security service known as the SD mainly carried out the “Final Solution,” the murder of the Jews and other “undesirables.” The Gestapo was part of the SD. They arrested Jews and other victims, ran the concentration camps and organized the murder squads.

During the first part of this extermination, military groups murdered 1,500,000 Jews and others. Gradually, the emphasis changed to concentration camps, where the prisoners were worked to death as slave laborers, and extermination camps, where they were murdered in gas chambers. The most famous of these was Auschwitz, which was both a labor camp and an extermination camp. About 1,300,000 people perished at Auschwitz, approximately 1,000,000 of those died in gas chambers.

The Nazis targeted many groups for persecution - among them were Catholics, Poles, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Communists - but only three groups were targeted for systematic extermination: Jews, the handicapped, and the Sinti and Roma (often known as Gypsies).

Sometime in 1944, it became obvious to most Nazi leaders (except Hitler) that they would soon be defeated and put on trial for what they had done. Several, including one of the worst of the criminals, Heinrich Himmler, tried to make deals with the Allies closing in on Nazi Germany. As a result, the actual extermination stopped in November 1944, although thousands of people continued to die in the concentration camps. By that time most of the Jews who lived in Europe before the war, and millions of other innocent people, were dead. The war in Europe ended six months later, in May 1945.

US Genocide Resolutions
H.CON.RES.19
H.RES.39