Читать книгу Judaism I - Группа авторов - Страница 23

Dr. Michael Berenbaum of the American Jewish University in Los Angeles surveys the years before and during the Holocaust. Economic, social, populist, religious, and governmental conditions facilitated Hitler’s rise. Enmity toward the Jews was expressed by the church’s teachings of contempt. The Nazis’ racial definition meant Jews were persecuted not just for their religious practices, but because of their so-called racial identity. The Nazi Party destroyed democracy from within. By the time emigration was prohibited, more than six in ten German Jews had fled into exile.

In March 1938, German troops entered Austria. The persecution of Jews began the night of 9‒10 November 1938, known as Kristallnacht. More than a thousand synagogues, their Torah scrolls, bibles, and prayer books were burned. 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps in Germany. In 1940, Germany attacked Belgium, France, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Norway. With each conquest, more Jews came under German control. With the exception of Amsterdam, ghettos were not present in Western Europe. Further east, after June 1941, ghettos were imposed after the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units, had done their murderous work. Except for Denmark, western Jews were persecuted, rounded up, incarcerated in transit camps, and sent to death camps in occupied Poland.

The Final Solution became policy in 1941. Six »death factories« allowed the Nazis and their collaborators to murder Jews, confiscate their goods, and dispose of the bodies to hide their crimes. The final stage was an attempt by the perpetrators to evacuate the Jews from the most horrific concentration camps—where German troops and their collaborators could be caught in war crimes. In the waning days of World War II American troops discovered the concentration camps of Ohrdruf, Mauthausen, Nordhausen, Buchenwald, and Dachau.

The Nuremberg Trials, convened by President Harry S. Truman, were undertaken by the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish émigré to the United States and international lawyer, wrote of the need to name and outlaw the crime. The word he chose was »genocide«—the murder of a people. He pushed The Convention on Genocide through the United Nations in December 1948.