Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

by Peter Hayes

no more than 5–10 percent of the Jews who survived the Holocaust did so by virtue of someone’s individual heroism.

Individual heroism could achieve only so much in the face of the Nazi onslaught, yet about one-quarter of the European Jews in Nazi-occupied or -allied states and one-third of all the European Jews as of 1939 survived the Holocaust.

This gave the Jews time to get away from their homes before the German police came to apprehend them on the evening of October 1, 1943. During the ensuing weeks, the Jewish Danes had two more priceless advantages in making their escape: an offer of asylum from the Swedish government for anyone who got to its shores, and only a narrow body of water to cross. Even so, most of them got away only because German navy patrol boats off the Danish coast made no attempt to interfere with the roughly 700 vessels—mainly fishing boats—that carried the exodus. Only 284 Danish Jews fell into Nazi hands in the roundup of October 1, and 22 more drowned while trying to escape. Ultimately, 7,742 reached Sweden, including 1,376 German Jewish refugees, along with 686 non-Jewish spouses. Perhaps even more amazing than these numbers is the fact that after the war, when these people returned to Denmark, they found their homes and property not only unmolested but also often carefully tended in their absence. In Italy, Mussolini had just announced the imposition of forced labor on Italian Jews and was on the verge of commanding deportations when he was overthrown in July 1943, and the Jews in Italian-occupied Croatia already had been interned in a potential transit camp. But in the chaos that surrounded the influx of the German army, the remaining 2,600 Croatian Jews could escape, and most of the 32,000 Italian ones remaining in the northern two-thirds of the country had time to go underground. Th...

Although only 1 percent of the Jews were professionals, these Jews accounted for 63 percent of the people employed in commerce as of 1921, and 56 percent of the MDs ten years later, along with 43 percent of the teachers, 33.5 percent of the lawyers, and 22 percent of the journalists and publishers. On the eve of World War II, firms owned by Jews employed more than 40 percent of the Polish workforce, and Jews paid 35–40 percent of Poland’s taxes.

Throughout the 1930s, the USSR declined to offer a haven to all but a handful of ranking Jewish communists. The Soviet Union declared that Jewish refugees were unsuited to life in an unfamiliar socialist society and, in any case, not the USSR’s responsibility, since their persecution was a product of capitalist quarreling.

poll in 1938 found that 58 percent of Americans considered Jews in Europe at least “partly” at fault for their own persecution. Another survey in July 1939 showed that 32 percent of Americans believed Jews had too much influence in business, while another 10 percent favored deporting Jews.

Even David Ben-Gurion, the principal Jewish leader in Palestine, feared that too much receptivity to Jewish refugees elsewhere would endanger the Zionist project.

and shops, and arrested and beat Jews. Church authorities hardly could mount a full-throated defense of Jewry from persecution because they had so long advocated and indeed enforced forms of it. As Mussolini pointed out when he inaugurated Italy’s first antisemitic laws in 1938—which excluded Jews from the Fascist Party, the military, and public education, ejected them from honorary societies, revoked grants of citizenship to them since 1919, and limited the size of businesses or estates they could own—these restrictions were not as severe as the ones the popes had imposed in the lands they ruled until 1870, including the city of Rome.

Broadly speaking, the Church’s doctrine was “no salvation without the sacraments”; that is, one cannot go to heaven without having had access to baptism, communion, confirmation, confession, marriage, holy orders, and extreme unction or the last rites (now called the anointing of the sick). Moreover, one cannot have the sacraments without the clergy who administer them: no salvation without priests.

A Gallup poll in July 1942 found that 44 percent of the respondents thought that Jews had too much power and influence; two years later, another such survey reported that the same proportion—44 percent—considered Jews “a threat” to the United States.

Only about 10 percent of the Germans who ever worked at Auschwitz went on trial anywhere after the war, and the mid- to low-ranking personnel at most concentration camps were largely ignored later or given light sentences—at least by American standards—when tried. Of the 50,000 members of the Police Battalions that killed about half a million people in occupied Eastern Europe, only 64 men were ever charged and 41 ever sentenced.

“Holocaust,” which derives from the ancient Greek term for “an offering totally consumed by fire”—in other words, a religious sacrifice.

To avoid this sort of ascription of meaning, even holiness, to mass murder, the Hebrew word “Shoah,” which means “destruction,” probably would be preferable.