In the aftermath of the First World War, a nascent Nazi Party began stirring unrest in Germany, exploiting the bitterness and resentment festering among those still livid over the terms of Versailles. Throughout the 1920s, Hitler tapped into such sentiments among his followers, pointing to Jews as the source of Germany’s plummeting international stature and failing economy. He accused them of poisoning and corrupting German culture and posing an existential threat to the Aryan “master race.” The scathing rhetoric inflamed existing prejudice and gained traction among despairing listeners.

Once in power, the Nazis slowly unleashed their wrath, orchestrating a vicious campaign of coordinated persecution against the Jews they claimed were undermining a German resurgence. Driving Jews out of state positions and depriving them of citizenship were first steps toward Hitler’s quest for racial purity—one that would eventually extend across the full reach of the Third Reich. For more than a decade, millions of Jews and others across Europe perished at the hands of the Nazis and their allies, and millions more suffered immeasurably.

It became known as the Holocaust.

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In 1933, there were 520,000 Jews in Germany, comprising less than one percent of the general population. Though the number of German Jews was small, the newly empowered Nazis wasted little time imposing a series of measures to diminish their standing and shun them from public life. Jews were removed from the civil service, prohibited from owning property, and targeted for nationwide boycotts of their businesses. By 1935, new citizenship and race laws were in place, rescinding German citizenship for anyone with at least three Jewish grandparents, making Jews outcasts in their own country, stripped of their legal, political, and civil rights.

There were few objections among fellow Germans. Many were already leery of Jews and became openly disdainful once Nazi propaganda began filling state-controlled newspapers and airwaves with antisemitic missives and tropes. Branded a treacherous and deceitful people, Jews were wholly dehumanized, likened to rats and other vermin infesting Germany and targeted for street beatings and public humiliations from Nazi thugs. It all reached a crescendo in November 1938, when Nazi stormtroopers and Hitler Youth, whipped into a frenzy, joined in a night of violent rioting across Germany and Austria, killing, assaulting, and raping Jews of all ages. Their synagogues, shops, and homes were vandalized and burned down, and the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) ended with tens of thousands of Jews arrested, most shipped off to labor camps.

Throughout the upheaval of the 1930s, Jews were still permitted to emigrate from Germany, and many sought to escape the antagonism enveloping the country. Over half fled, with the most fortunate journeying to the United States and Britain, though the two countries placed strict caps on the number of Jewish refugees accepted. Others resettled in other parts of Europe, but their relief was short-lived, as much of the continent would soon be subsumed by the Nazis.

The exodus continued until October 1941, when Hitler closed the borders, aiming to exert greater control over the Jewish population in the expanding Reich. Armed Nazis fanned across German-occupied Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic states, and the Soviet Union, rounding up Jews by the hundreds of thousands and locking them into more than 1,100 cordoned-off districts and neighborhoods known as ghettos. Sealed off from the outside world by ten-foot walls and barbed wire fences, the ghettos were densely populated pockets of misery and poverty, teeming with rats, lice, and disease. In the Polish city of Lodz, 165,000 Jews were squeezed into an area little more than a square mile, while in Warsaw, 400,000 Jews—one-third of the city’s population—were forced to live in just two percent of its living space. Those inside the ghettos attempted to maintain some semblance of community, but severe food shortages led to widespread hunger, and with living areas so condensed, deadly diseases such as typhus spread rapidly.

By the end of 1941, the death toll among Jews in Hitler’s grasp was climbing precipitously. Starvation and disease were claiming thousands of victims in the ghettos, while German military and security forces, led by SS Einsatzgruppen, continued their massacres across Poland and—following Operation Barbarossa—in Soviet territory. Most European Jews remained alive, but conditions were worsening, both inside the ghettos and across an extensive network of secret camps, where hundreds of thousands of prisoners experienced unspeakable cruelties and the most heinous atrocities ever conceived.

The Concentration Camps

In early 1933, the Nazis moved quickly to crack down on all dissent, arresting and removing from German society those considered enemies of the Reich. Most were political opponents of the Nazi regime—communists, liberals, trade unionists, and those who dared to speak out—but others perceived as threats to German culture, such as Roman Catholic priests, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and suspected homosexuals, were also targeted. The Nazis held the prisoners inside an abandoned factory in Dachau, a town just outside Munich, in what became Germany’s first concentration camp. None of the inmates had been formally prosecuted—their detention was indefinite, and at the sole whim of the Gestapo and other security authorities.

Within a few years, such camps had proliferated across the Third Reich. Increasingly filled with German Jews after 1938, many were built near population centers with large Jewish communities, such as Buchenwald, near Weimar, and Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück, both outside Berlin, the latter exclusively for women. Over the years, it evolved into an elaborate system, eventually encompassing two dozen main camps and thousands of sub-camps operating across Germany, Poland, Austria, the Baltics, and other occupied territories. Though prisoners were predominantly Jewish, there was no shortage of others the Nazis abhorred, including Roma, a once-nomadic people often referred to contemptuously as Gypsies, who came to Europe centuries earlier from northern India.

Some avoided deportation to the camps, hiding where they could or living under assumed identities. Aided by friends, neighbors, and even strangers, they eluded security authorities for months and sometimes years. It was an extraordinary risk for their accomplices, as the Gestapo searched relentlessly for those in hiding, interrogating whomever they pleased and shooting or hanging anyone even suspected of guilt. Some eagerly collaborated with the Nazis, reporting on neighbors and turning in those they knew to be in hiding. Their motives varied; many were vehement antisemites and Nazi sympathizers, while others sought personal or monetary gain. Foreign governments such as Vichy France also cooperated with the Nazis, directing their police forces to hand over any Jews found within their borders.

It often meant a death sentence. The camps were hellish, barbaric places, where prisoners were routinely starved, beaten, raped, and tortured. Administered by the ironfisted Waffen-SS, the military wing of the SS, the guards were drawn primarily from the Death’s Head Division, known for its killing sprees in the East. Among new arrivals, belongings were seized, including wedding rings, family heirlooms, and other valuables. Much of it was looted by the SS, its ranks filled with thieves and profiteers, including high-ranking officials who leased out Jews in their custody as slave laborers to German war industries. Both inside and outside the camps, prisoners labored for long hours in factories and workshops, assembling German war goods from artillery shell casings to uniforms.

Discipline was severe, and conditions in the camps were beyond deplorable. After their heads were shaved, prisoners were issued threadbare uniforms that became tattered, lice-infested rags. Barracks and living spaces were overcrowded, with as many as five people to a bed, and the scraps of food provided were barely enough to keep prisoners alive and working. Medical care was nonexistent, as the only camp physicians were sadistic Nazi zealots who used the facilities as laboratories for human experimentation. They routinely tested deranged theories about racial differences in human anatomy on prisoners, and forced sterilizations, castrations, and other mutilations were common. Any interaction with Nazi doctors and scientists came with fatal consequences.

The Killing Centers

The millions of Jews languishing in ghettos and concentration camps became so wilted by hunger and sickness, the Nazis no longer considered them productive workers. Many in the SS hierarchy viewed their meager food rations as a waste, and the disease-ridden camps and ghettos a health and security threat to the Reich.

In January 1942, a cross-section of senior German government officials met at a villa in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, to deliberate “the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem”—a euphemism for the genocide of European Jews. Their principal focus was to improve efficiencies among various government functions involved with the ongoing mass murder in occupied territories. In the East alone, the SS was slaughtering thousands of Jews each week, gunning down large groups as they stood over mass graves. One example came in September 1941, after German forces occupied the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. The city’s Jews were taken by SS Einsatzgruppen to a nearby ravine called Babi Yar, where the Nazis shot more than 33,000 men, women, and children in just two days.

With the Nazis intending to expand the scale of murder from thousands to millions, such mass shootings were deemed impractical. The weapons and ammunition were needed on the Eastern Front, and witnesses and evidence would invariably be left behind. There was even concern for those pulling the triggers, with Nazi leaders fretting about the psychological effect on the SS men. They turned to poison gas, a method already tested on Soviet POWs and as part of a “euthanasia” program, when the Nazis murdered tens of thousands of children and adults with mental and physical disabilities.

Using compounds such as Zyklon-B, a highly toxic pesticide, the Nazis planned to administer gassings in newly built, specialized facilities that could accommodate such large-scale slaughter. Sometimes referred to as death camps, each of these killing centers was remotely located in occupied Poland, where most Jews were held and where rail lines could support large-scale transport. The first to open was Chelmno, less than forty miles from Lodz in central Poland, but others would soon follow. After emptying the ghettos and concentration camps of Jews and other prisoners, the Nazis loaded them into railcars designed to hold livestock. Packed shoulder to shoulder, the prisoners were forced to stand for hours and days during the long journeys, often in withering heat. Denied food, water, and access to toilets or medical care, many died in transit.

The trains eventually arrived at what resembled labor camps, but none were built for long-term confinement. Prisoners were prodded off the trains at gunpoint, their luggage and possessions taken and sorted into piles for future plundering by the SS. Ordered to shed their clothes, adults and children alike were handed a towel and bar of soap and led into what appeared to be large shower rooms. Once the doors were sealed behind them, gaseous fumes were released, killing all inside after several excruciating minutes. When it was over, other Jews were ordered to haul the bodies to burn pits or crematoriums, where they were incinerated into ash. The SS also employed large, mobile vans, packing over fifty people into each. Told the vans were for transport to labor sites, prisoners inside were asphyxiated by exhaust fumes during the brief drive, their corpses later dumped into mass graves.

The most notorious facility in the entire system was Auschwitz, an enormous complex some forty miles west of Kraków. Originally built as a work camp, a sign at the entrance greeted new arrivals with the declaration “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes You Free). The Nazis then separated prisoners based on age and physical condition. The able-bodied, their wrists tattooed with identification numbers, were kept alive to toil in nearby coal mines and factories. Those deemed incapable of work—children, the elderly, and the sickly—were taken to Birkenau, a nearby killing center, and led directly into the gas chambers. Before its liberation in 1945, the SS slaughtered over one million Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Other killing centers tallied equally horrifying numbers. Treblinka, less than fifty miles from Warsaw, came close to matching the slaughter at Auschwitz-Birkenau; the SS there murdered an estimated 925,000 Jews. Another 434,000 were killed at Belzec; at least 172,000 at Chelmno; and 167,000 at Sobibor. Most were Poles and Soviets, but few European countries under Hitler’s thumb were able to shield their Jews from harm. Hungary, an Axis partner, was among them, until early 1944 when its support for continuing the war began to wane. German occupation forces moved in, and 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz. Though some became laborers, more than 300,000 others were gassed, all within a matter of weeks.

By the time the Holocaust finally ended, over six million Jews had been murdered. Others—communists, homosexuals, the disabled, intellectuals, petty criminals, and so many more—suffered as well, perhaps none more so than the Roma community. A precise number of those killed in the Holocaust is unknown, but estimates are in the hundreds of thousands, decimating a population that numbered roughly one million before the slayings began.

Aftermath

Genocide, the systematic elimination of non-combatants belonging to a particular ethnic or political group, was not unknown before the 1930s, nor was the Holocaust the last time the world would experience the mass slaughter of innocents. But in expanding their state-sponsored killing machinery across the broadest possible territory, sweeping in as many victims as could be found, the Nazis imposed the most radical incarnation of genocide ever known.

What distinguished the Holocaust was not just the scale of the Nazi enterprise—camps, rail networks, a vast administrative arm, the death of millions—but the intent. Other mass murders of select populations were connected to efforts to expand political or economic power, such as Stalin’s orchestration of famine among Ukrainians in the early 1930s. In contrast, the Nazi desire to “liquidate” Jews was moved by simple, visceral hatred. In plotting to slaughter every European Jew, the Nazis introduced the world to the darkest, most depraved chapter in human history.

As the Germans began retreating from occupied lands, pushed back by Soviet forces across the East, the SS rushed to dismantle the camps and the killing centers. Any traces of their existence were destroyed; barracks, administrative offices, and crematoriums were razed; and incriminating documents burned. After surviving prisoners were forced to exhume and incinerate decomposed bodies left in mass graves, grounds were plowed over, and crops planted in their place.

Of the remaining prisoners, those unfit for labor were put to death, and the rest moved westward to camps in Germany. Rail transport was limited by then, so most had to cross hundreds of miles on foot. Already weakened, their bodies skeletal, many succumbed to illness, exposure, or starvation on the backbreaking death marches. Those who collapsed or could not keep pace were shot by guards.

The glut of camps and killing centers was impossible to conceal. Those in nearby communities put the puzzle pieces together—trains passing through, fully loaded with human cargo but returning entirely empty; skies darkened with ash from the around-the-clock use of crematoriums; and worst of all, the revolting, ongoing stench of burning flesh. Escapees were few, but they, too, had spread word of the camps, and their stories began reaching the highest levels of Allied governments. Arguments persist to this day whether Allied leaders should have intervened where they could, perhaps by bombing the rail system used for deportations when this became possible in mid-1944. They declined to do so, maintaining that their most effective and expedient means for ending the atrocities was to win the war. Any diversion of resources away from that objective, it was argued, would only prolong the suffering.

Even with the eyewitness accounts, the full measure of the Nazi genocide was not truly understood until advancing Allied soldiers began discovering campsites, many partially intact. The first came in July 1944, when Soviet armies moving into central Poland found remnants of the Majdanek camp, including gas chambers. The Allies began documenting the atrocities, using survivor accounts, newsreels, and photographs of the camps, determined to hold all those involved accountable. In late 1945, a post-war International Military Tribunal was convened in Nuremberg, Germany, where some two dozen defendants from the Nazi elite, including senior political, military, and industry leaders, were charged with war crimes. With Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler already dead, Hermann Göring was the highest-ranking Nazi official to stand trial. Nineteen of the defendants were found guilty, and twelve sentenced to death. Göring took his own life in his jail cell, while the others were hanged and then, fittingly, cremated at Dachau.

In subsequent months and years, American-led military tribunals and German denazification courts similarly prosecuted other prominent Nazis, from high-level government officials to camp commandants, physicians, guards, and other SS personnel. Not all who were complicit faced consequences. Among them, police officers, judges, government officials, other civil servants, industrialists, financiers, doctors, lawyers, and so many others who willingly facilitated and implemented the Nazi policies that spawned a decade of terror.

They were not alone. Millions of other Germans who were indifferent or harbored genuine misgivings about the early violence and persecution had refused to act or speak out, fearful of retribution from the Nazi regime. The acceptance and tolerance of such appalling evil, and passivity among so many, were elemental to the Holocaust and among its most shameful legacies. From the silence to the savagery, it all remains an indelible and eternal stain on humanity.