What Was the Holocaust? (What Was?)

by Gail Herman

Six million Jews did not. They were killed by the Nazis in concentration camps. About six million other victims were also led to their deaths: gay people, the Roma, disabled people, and people from certain religious and political groups.

When Christianity took hold in the world, anti-Jewish feeling spread. There were false, awful stories that Jews had killed Jesus.

Then, in 1914, the kaiser (emperor) of Germany started a world war in Europe. It raged on until 1918 with Germany’s surrender. A treaty was signed with very harsh terms for Germany. The kaiser was gone. Germany lost land. It had to disband its army. For starting the war, it had to pay billions of dollars to the countries that Germany had fought against. But Germany didn’t have any money.

By 1929, millions of Germans were out of work. Most had their savings wiped out. Many wanted change, a new direction for the country.

Gerda Weissmann Klein spoke out about the Holocaust for decades.

A Protestant minister in Germany admitted to once having been anti-Semitic. His name was Martin Niemöller. He had been a member of the Nazi Party. During the war, however, Niemöller changed. He saw the evil for what it was. He spent seven years in concentration camps for speaking out against Hitler. In his speeches, Niemöller named groups of people who were taken away while he had remained silent. He included Jews, Communists, Catholics, and more. But he always ended with: Then they came for me— And there was no one left to speak out for me.

Genocide The word genocide was coined during the Holocaust. Its definition is: the deliberate killing of people from a particular group. Tragically, the mass killing of Jews by the Nazis is not the only instance of genocide. There have been others in much more recent times. Starting in 2003, in Sudan, a country in northeastern Africa, wild gangs sponsored by the government began slaughtering people who lived in an area called Darfur. Victims were killed because of their race, not their religion, with black Darfuri targeted. To date, more than four hundred thousand people have been killed and three million sent into exile.