The Holocaust: A Warning From History

With the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the mass murder of Jews began within a few days, on a scale hitherto unknown. Before June 1941, the Jews under Nazi rule had been subjected to persecution, humiliation, expulsion and random killing. In June 1941, began the deliberate attempt to destroy all Jewish lives over a vast region of Europe. In the immediate wake of the victorious German Army  came the  Einsatzgruppen . Within twelve months, more than one million Jews had been murdered east of the September 1939 border of Greater Germany. Most were driven from their homes, forced at gunpoint to pits and ravines a few miles away, ordered to undress and then shot. No mercy was shown. The Germans understood the complex make-up of the regions through which they advanced. They knew of and exploited the historic tensions between Christianity and Judaism, and between the local people and the Jews. As a result, they were able to call on Lithuanian, Latvian, Beloruss...

At a top secret meeting in Berlin on September 21, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich told the commanders of several SS operational groups in Poland that his "ultimate aim" for Polish Jews must be kept "strictly secret." Meanwhile, he wanted large areas of western Poland to be "cleared completely of Jews," and elsewhere the Jews were to be confined in special areas of cities and towns. Any Jews living outside the designated area would be forced to move into the confined area, which was to be called a "ghetto." Ghettos had existed, as Jewish quarters of towns, hundreds of years earlier, but unlike there medieval predecessors, the new ghettos were to be surrounded by barbed wire, brick walls and armed guards. The ghettos were to be located in cities on railway junctions or along the railway, "so that future measures may be accomplished more easily." The first ghetto was set up in Piotrkow on October 28, 1939. Jews living throughout the town were for...

From September 1, 1939, the Polish Army fought bravely against far larger and better armed German forces attacking them from the north, west and south. A few weeks after the German invasion the Soviet Union, as part of a secret pact signed a week before the German attack, entered Poland from the east. On September 17, Stalin's forces advanced to an agreed line that cut Poland in half. Ten days later, after a tenacious defense against surrounding German forces, Warsaw surrendered. The Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland left more than a million Polish Jews on the Soviet side of the partition line. They were joined by a quarter of a million Jews who managed to cross the new border from west to east before it was sealed -- or who were deliberately pushed over the border by the Germans. The Jews who found themselves under Soviet Communist rule were fortunate for the most part. Most of them survived the war, having been sent by Stalin to Soviet Central Asia, or to labor camps in Siberia. Wh...