History: Understanding the Holocaust

The defining image of the Holocaust for many people is that of the ramp at Auschwitz. Beside a line of cattle trucks, people are selected for work or death. The process takes a matter of seconds for each person. It is conducted by a small number of Germans in uniform. Over one million people would die in Auschwitz, the majority in the gas chambers, others worked to death in the surrounding factories and in the camp itself.

Before Auschwitz a less remembered Holocaust took place in two phases. Initially the Jewish population within the occupied areas of the USSR were individually shot at hundreds of sites outside cities, towns and villages. It is estimated that over two million people were murdered in this way. When this became unbearable for the perpetrators, death camps were established on pre-war Polish territory. At Chelmno, Sobibor and Treblinka a tiny number of people briefly escaped death to facilitate the mass murder of their fellow deportees. For most, death came quickly on arrival at the death camps. An estimated 1.7 million people were murdered in this way. In total an estimated six million Jews would be murdered mostly in a short, intense phase of killing between Spring of 1942 and summer of 1943.

The facts of the Holocaust raise uncomfortable questions most notably, but not exclusively, for the Germans who perpetrated the genocide. How could this happen and could it have been prevented?