Holocaust ... What is it? Apocalypse? The plague of hatred for an entire nation? These are the most terrible crimes of the "brown plague" against humanity. Sophisticated destruction and extermination of an entire nation. This historical event is a universal tragedy.
For the first time, the "Holocaust" as a term was used in the first decade of the 20th century. In everyday life, the word came from Greek biblical texts and meant "burnt offering." It was used in relation to the Jewish pogroms, to the genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Later, with the
advent of Hitler in Germany, a Nazi racial policy based on the concept of racial hygiene was implemented. Its essence was the division of people into representatives of the higher race and the elements of the lower races. Appropriate selection was required. It was expressed in the persecution, sterilization, and extermination of people belonging to the “inferior” group: people with physical and mental disabilities, gypsies, Slavs, Jews, political opponents, homosexuals, and representatives of other minorities and groups. This bureaucratic, methodically organized operation to exterminate people was called the Holocaust. What kind of ideology is it that strikes with its thorough thoughtfulness and detailed elaboration of measures aimed primarily at the complete destruction of an entire nation?
The Jewish Holocaust was described in the books of
Eli Wiesel, a Jewish writer who went through the hell of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. After his first book, “And the world was silent,” published in 1956, the word “Holocaust” began to be
capitalized.Since the beginning of the Nazi regime, concentration camps were established where Jews, Gypsies, and other victims of racial and ethnic hatred went. To control the situation, forced labor camps were created, ghettos for the Jewish population. For further deportation of people, there were transfer camps. A huge number of them functioned throughout Germany and in the occupied territories.
In 1938, the events of Kristallnacht shocked the world. It was a coordinated pogrom of Jews, many of whom were mutilated or killed, thousands of people were sent to concentration camps.
During the war, special punitive detachments, the so-called Einsatzgruppes, followed the army with the goal of conducting operations on the mass extermination of lower population groups, including Jews and Gypsies. In the occupied territories, hundreds of thousands of people were shot, sent to ghettos and death camps.
At the end of the war, the SS men prevented the release by the Allied forces of a huge number of prisoners by moving them on foot marches and trains. These were the so-called "death marches." Until May 7, 1945, a similar Holocaust continued. What is it It was? This was the deliberate extermination of the Jews, which was divided into three stages. By 1940, it was planned to solve the Jewish question by mass eviction from Germany and other regions it occupied. The second stage was the beginning of the concentration of all Jews in the ghettos, which opened in Poland and other eastern regions occupied by Germany. This continued until 1942. The third stage involved the final solution of the Jewish question, the essence of which consisted precisely in the systematic physical destruction of the people.
People were killed, the local culture of the Jews, the memory of this unique integral part of the culture of Eastern Europe was destroyed. In a sense, the Nazis successfully managed to resolve the Jewish question.
Is there any way to understand the Holocaust? What is it? Anti-Semitism, at that time inherent in the mass German consciousness, or malignant destructiveness inherent in the human race? If by the thirties the Jewish population was about 8 million, then by the end of the burnt-out period it barely reached 2 million. Together with the Jewish people, the “brown plague” buried representatives of other nationalities. Over 31 million Slavs and up to 500 thousand Gypsies were starved to death, tortured and killed.
The largest death camps were located in Poland. One of the most highly productive in terms of technology of extermination of people was the Auschwitz camp, or Auschwitz (in German). Here, in one day, 12 thousand people died in crematoria and gas chambers.
On January 27, one of the largest death concentration camps was released. This January day became synonymous with the worst crime against humanity in history, and was subsequently declared a Holocaust remembrance day.
In 2005, a colossal monument to the victims of the Holocaust was opened in Berlin in the form of a stone labyrinth created from more than 2700 concrete slabs of various heights. Passing between them, you notice that it is quite difficult to find a way out. A similar plan by P. Eisenman, an American architect, clearly causes confusion and anxiety. It was them who were experienced by the Jews during the war years - they had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
People surrounded by other people committed an unprecedented and massive destruction of the people - the Holocaust. What is it? How did this become possible? Where was that line that you can’t cross, beyond which people ceased to be people?
The Holocaust is a terrible example of Nazi misanthropic views. But how many more deportations, repressions, direct genocide were after him. Is there any way to change anything? Human indifference, unwillingness or inability to compassion, indifference to cruelty, to someone else's pain, infringement of the rights of a person or an entire nation can again lead to disaster. They say that you can change the world if you change yourself.