Introduction

The Holocaust (in Hebrew, the Shoah) was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators during the Second World War, 1939-1945. “Holocaust” is a word of Greek origin meaning “sacrifice by fire.” The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jews, deemed “inferior,” were an alien threat to so-called German racial purity.

During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived “racial inferiority”: Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others). Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioural grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and gay people.

A Basic History of the Holocaust

In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at over nine million. Most European Jews lived in countries that Nazi Germany would occupy or influence during World War II. By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the “Final Solution,” the Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe. Although Jews, whom the Nazis deemed a priority danger to Germany, were the primary victims of Nazi racism, other victims included some 200,000 Roma. At least 200,000 mentally or physically disabled patients, mainly Germans, living in institutional settings, were also murdered in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

Under the rule of Adolf Hitler, the persecution and segregation of the Jews was implemented in stages. After the Nazi party achieved power in Germany in 1933, Hitler began introducing his program of state-sponsored racism.  What followed included anti-Jewish legislation, economic boycotts of Jewish businesses, “racial purity” laws against the Jews bans against Jews working in professions and the violence of the Kristallnacht (”Night of Broken Glass”) pogrom on November 9-10, 1938 all of which aimed to systematically isolate Jews from society, deny them basic rights, dehumanize them and, hopefully, drive them out of the country.

After the September 1939 German invasion of Poland (beginning World War II), anti-Jewish policy escalated to the imprisonment and eventual murder of European Jewry. The Nazis first established ghettos (enclosed areas designed to isolate and control the Jews), which immediately became overcrowded and unsanitary, and which lacked adequate food.

In the early years of the regime, the Nazi government established concentration camps to detain real and imagined political and ideological opponents. Increasingly in the years before the outbreak of war, Nazi SS and police officials incarcerated Jews, Roma, and other victims of ethnic and racial hatred in these camps. To concentrate and monitor the Jewish population, as well as to facilitate later deportation of the Jews, the Germans and their collaborators created ghettos, transit camps, and forced-labour camps for Jews.

The German authorities also established numerous forced-labour camps, both in the so-called Greater German Reich and in German-occupied territory, for non-Jews whose labour the Germans sought to exploit.

Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) and other units moved behind German lines to carry out mass-murder operations against Jews, Roma, and Soviet state and Communist Party officials. German SS and police units, supported by units of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS, murdered more than a million Jewish men, women, and children, and hundreds of thousands of others. Between 1941 and 1944, Nazi German authorities deported millions of Jews from Germany, from occupied territories, and from the countries of many of its Axis allies to ghettos and to killing centres, often called extermination camps, where they were murdered in specially developed gassing facilities.

In January 1942, at a conference in Wannsee, Germany, the Nazis plotted the bureaucratic details of their “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”  As part of the initial operationalization of the planned genocide, three killing centres, with no purpose other than mass murder, were established in occupied-Poland — Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.  Other killing centres, such as Majdanek and Chelmno also became notorious, and in the spring of 1942, Himmler designated Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau) as a killing facility. At Auschwitz, the Nazis murdered approximately one million Jews from various European countries.  Auschwitz remains the largest Jewish cemetery in the world, and will always be synonymous with utter evil.

In the final months of the war, SS guards moved camp inmates by train or on forced marches, often called “death marches,” in an attempt to prevent the Allied liberation of large numbers of prisoners. As Allied forces moved across Europe in a series of offensives against Germany, they began to encounter and liberate concentration camp prisoners, as well as prisoners in the process of marching from one camp to another. The marches continued until the War ended. Approximately six million Jewish men, women, and children had been killed during the Holocaust – two-thirds of the Jews living in Europe before the outbreak of World War II.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many of the survivors found shelter in displaced persons (DP) camps administered by the Allied powers. Between 1948 and 1951, almost 700,000 Jews emigrated to Israel, including 136,000 Jewish displaced persons from Europe. Other Jewish DPs emigrated to Canada and other nations. The last DP camp closed in 1957. The crimes committed during the Holocaust devastated most European Jewish communities and eliminated thousands of Jewish communities in occupied Eastern Europe entirely.

Holocaust Denial

Despite the overwhelming documentary and eye-witness testimony to the destruction of European Jewry, a new form of antisemitism appeared in the decades after the Second World War.  This took the form of denying that the Holocaust had ever taken place and that those smaller number of Jews who had died were either the collateral victims of military action or the victims of disease and starvation.

Holocaust Denial has its roots in the conspiracy theories that have given birth to virtually all forms of antisemitism. In its simplest form, antisemitism is “a rumour about the Jews”, a suspicion that they are untrustworthy and dishonest. In this case, the “rumour” is that the Jews have fabricated evidence regarding the murder of 6 million men, women and children in order to extort reparations from countries and corporations or to falsely shame the world into supporting the creation of the State of Israel.

Deniers (they falsely claim the respectability of historians by referring to themselves as revisionists) reject that they are engaging in antisemitic behaviour, but the protests immediately ring false when we consider the physical evidence of the death camps, the documentary evidence captured by the Allies and the eyewitness testimony of victims, perpetrators and bystanders. Opposing this evidence is a thick collection of fabrications that have been collected by the deniers as “proof” of the legitimacy of their work. Seizing on any inconsistency in the documentary record of genocide, deniers claim that such variations “prove” that the historical record is counterfeit. Legitimate historians, on the other hand, observe that such variations are expected when personal accounts (for example) are being correlated. Indeed, suspicion tends to be better founded when eye-witness accounts to a single event are perfectly aligned.

Canadian Jewish Congress and Holocaust Commemoration

Canadian Jewish Congress has defended our community against the slander of Holocaust deniers for decades, most famously in our intervention in the human rights case against Ernst Zundel. Internationally, CJC has participated in conferences (such as the Stockholm International Conference on the Holocaust) where an intergovernmental program of education was created to fight Holocaust denial and promote Holcoaust remembrance.  CJC also joined in the international condemnation against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, an inveterate Holocaust denier who, in 2007, hosted a conference to which Holocaust deniers where invited to debate the “historical veracity” of the murder of the Jews.

Congress was in the forefront of urging justice against Nazi war criminals and enablers found in Canada and was the lead voice in urging Canada’s membership on the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research. Congress has worked to promote Holocaust commemoration in Canada through memorial days, school curricula, interventions with embassies on issues of restitution and looted art and artifacts, and advocacy on behalf of, and in partnership with, Holocaust survivors in Canada and around the world.

Canadian Jewish Congress continues to address this form of antisemitism through advocacy and partnerships with Holocaust Education Centres and Federations across Canada.

Portions of this essay have been taken from The Holocaust Encyclopedia, “The Holocaust” and “The Final Solution”. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, http://www.ushmm.org/.