St. Joseph Church
Bristol, Connecticut

Deacon Robert M. Pallotti, D. Min.
Pastoral Minister

Roman Catholics Confront the Shoah, Part II

The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem

1939-1945

On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, which formally began the Second World War. Soon after the initiation of hostilities Great Britain declared war on Germany. As the triumphant Wehrmacht raced through half of Poland the Nazis began their campaign to destroy Polish culture and to enslave Polish citizen for forced labor. During this campaign the Nazis killed professors, artists, writers, politicians and several Catholic clergy. Thousands of Jews and Poles were imprisoned.

In 1940 German forces invaded much of Western Europe, easily defeating Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Propelled by his easy victories in the West, Hitler turned his attention and ambitions to the East. Hitler viewed Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as the necessary landmasses for the expansion of the German culture, or "living space," for the German people. On June 22, 1941 the Nazi began the invasion of the Soviet Union in "Operation Barbarossa."

In the months following Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Jews, political leaders, communists and many Gypsies were killed in mass executions. Most of the people killed were Jews. Members of special killing squads known as "Einsatzgruppen" conducted these killings. Among the most infamous of the mass killings at that time were the mass executions at Babi Yar , near Kiev. (1) It is estimated that about 33,000 people were murdered at this site. Such mass executions were carried out by first having the victims dig a large pit and then having them stand around the pit while members of the killing squads fired machine guns at the victims or pistols to the back of the neck.

At this time the Nazi began to confine the Jewish people in ghettos in the large Polish cities of Warsaw and the like. This allowed the Nazi SS to confine the Jewish people until they would be sent to "extermination camps" being set up in Eastern Poland. The ghettos also provide the Nazis with a labor poll for road construction and hard labor.

Ion 1941 and 1942 the "Final Solution" to the Jewish problem was made official policy at the Wannsee Conference held by high Nazi official. The men responsible for carrying out this policy were Reinhard Heidrich and Adolf Eichmann. "Operation Reinhard" began in late 1941 and continued in implementing the mandate of the Wannsee Conference. The main tasks of Operation Reinhard were:

-to plan the overall deportations and extermination activities of the entire operation;

-building the death camps;

-coordinating the deportations of the Jews from the different districts to the death camps;

-killing the Jews in the camps; and

-seizing the assets and valuables of the victims and handing them over to the appropriate Reich authorities. (2)

Operation Reinhard led to the establishment of the extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. In Belzec more than 600,000 persons were killed between May 1942 and August 1943. The Sobibor camp killed 200,000 people by gassing and almost 800,000 people were killed at Treblinka. Almost all of the people killed at these camps were Jews. Most of the victims were murdered soon after arriving at these camps.

Other camps served as slave labor and death camps. Auschwitz-Birkenau was such a camp and became the killing center with the largest numbers of European Jews and Gypsies were killed. It is estimated that 1.25 million people were killed at Auschwitz in Poland. Between May 14 and July 8, 1944, 437,402 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in 48 train! A similar system was instituted at Majdanek where at least 275,000 persons were killed in the gas chambers or died from malnutrition, brutality, and disease. (3)

As the fortunes of war turned against the Nazis and Russian and Allied forces converged from both East and West the SS decided to evacuate the outlying concentration camps. The Germans tried to cover up the evidence of genocide and deported prisoners to camps inside Germany to prevent their liberation. Many people died on these long "death marches."

By the time Germany surrender in mid-May 1945 the "Final Solution" had claimed close to six million Jewish lives, thousands of Gypsies lives, millions of Russian lives and many more lives that approach eleven million deaths. Yet more than killing went on at these camps. Many people were used for inhuman experiments carried out by the Nazi doctors, often without painkillers. So ghastly were many of these experiments that even battle hardened Allied soldiers wept when they heard what had happened to those interred in these camps.

Notes

Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the holocaust A Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Boston, Toronto, London: Little and Brown 1993), p. 62-65; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York, London: Holmes and Meier 1985), pp. 200-238.

Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p.17

Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 61-80

Copyright © 2000 Deacon Robert M. Pallotti, M.A., D.Min.
Pastoral Minister
St. Joseph Church
Bristol, CT.
All Rights Reserved

Compiled by Deacon Robert M. Pallotti, D. Min.
Created 02/19/2000