The Holocaust

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for how cultural and national identities were affected by the rise of fascist and totalitarian powers and by the Nazi 'new racial order' that culminated in the Holocaust (Skill 3.D; LO L).
• Account for KC-4.1.III.D: how Nazi Germany, driven by racism and antisemitism and supported by some other Axis powers and collaborationist governments, sought to establish a racial order in Europe that culminated in the Holocaust.
• Account for KC-4.4.I.B: how the Second World War nearly destroyed European Jewry, devastated Russian and German men, produced the murder of millions in other targeted groups, generated large-scale migration, and undermined prewar class hierarchies.
• Examine how perpetrator documents (the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935; the Wannsee Protocol of 20 January 1942) and adjudicating documents (the Nuremberg Tribunal judgment of October 1946) reinforce, adjust, or undermine each other as historical evidence (Skill 3.D in direct practice).
• Account for the postwar institutional framework (Nuremberg Tribunal, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UN Genocide Convention) that codified the legal categories of crimes against humanity and genocide.

Topic 8.9 covers the Holocaust: the systematic state-sponsored mass murder of approximately six million European Jews and millions of other targeted groups by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945. KC-4.1.III.D captures the Nazi project: driven by racism and antisemitism, Nazi Germany — with the cooperation of some other Axis powers and collaborationist governments — sought to establish a 'new racial order' in Europe that culminated in the Holocaust. KC-4.4.I.B captures the demographic dimension: the Second World War nearly destroyed European Jewry; produced the murder of millions in other groups targeted by the Nazis (Roma, homosexuals, people with disabilities, and others); generated large-scale migration; and undermined prewar class hierarchies. The lesson is structured in four parts: the radicalization of Nazi racial policy from 1933 to 1942; the implementation of the Final Solution from 1941 to 1945; the cooperation of collaborator governments and local actors; and the postwar institutional response.

The radicalization of Nazi racial policy (1933-1942). The Nazi Party's antisemitic political program had been articulated in Hitler's 1925 book Mein Kampf and in the 1920 Twenty-Five Point NSDAP program. The translation of that program into discriminatory state policy proceeded in three phases. The first phase (1933-1934) consisted of the dismissal of Jewish civil servants under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of 7 April 1933, the boycott of Jewish businesses on 1 April 1933, the Nazi book-burnings of 10 May 1933, and the exclusion of Jews from law, medicine, journalism, and academic life through a series of professional-licensing measures.

The second phase (1935-1938) institutionalized racial categories in law. The Nuremberg Race Laws of 15 September 1935 (the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor) defined Jews as a separate racial category, stripped Jews of Reich citizenship, and prohibited marriage and extramarital relations between Jews and "Aryan" Germans. The supplementary decrees of November 1935 defined Jewish identity by descent (three Jewish grandparents made one a "full Jew"; one or two Jewish grandparents produced the categories of Mischling first or second degree). The 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin produced a brief tactical pause in visible antisemitic activity; the resumed radicalization in 1938 produced the "Aryanization" of Jewish-owned businesses, the requirement of distinguishing first names ("Israel" and "Sara"), and the J-stamp on Jewish passports. The pogrom of 9-10 November 1938 (Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass") destroyed approximately 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses and approximately 250 synagogues across Germany and Austria; approximately 91 Jews were killed and approximately 30,000 men were arrested and sent to Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps.

The third phase (1939-1942) connected Nazi racial policy to the war. The German occupation of Poland from September 1939 placed approximately 2 million Jews under Nazi authority. Ghettoization began in the Lodz ghetto on 8 February 1940 and extended to the Warsaw ghetto on 15 November 1940 (the largest, with approximately 460,000 inhabitants at peak), the Krakow ghetto, and dozens of smaller ghettos across occupied Poland. The ghettos combined forced labor, starvation rations, and concentrated disease into demographic catastrophes that anticipated the systematic killing that followed: approximately 80,000 people died in the Warsaw ghetto from starvation, disease, and shootings before the deportations began. Operation Barbarossa from 22 June 1941 brought the Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units (four units of approximately 3,000 men total) into occupied Soviet territory, where they conducted mass shootings of Jewish populations behind the advancing Wehrmacht. The principal Einsatzgruppen massacres include Babi Yar near Kiev on 29-30 September 1941 (approximately 33,771 Jews killed in two days, the single largest two-day Einsatzgruppen action), Ponary near Vilnius (approximately 70,000 Jews killed between July 1941 and August 1944), and Rumbula near Riga (approximately 25,000 Jews killed on 30 November and 8 December 1941). The Einsatzgruppen and their auxiliary forces killed approximately 1.5-2 million Jews between June 1941 and the end of the war.

The Final Solution and the camp system (1941-1945). The transition from mass shootings to industrialized killing accelerated through the second half of 1941. Hermann Goering's letter of 31 July 1941 authorized Reinhard Heydrich (head of the Reich Security Main Office, RSHA) to prepare the "complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence." The first systematic gassings began at the Chelmno camp in occupied Poland on 8 December 1941 using gas vans (carbon-monoxide poisoning). The Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, held at a villa on the Wannsee in suburban Berlin and chaired by Heydrich with fifteen senior officials of the German state and Nazi party in attendance, coordinated the bureaucratic implementation of the policy across the German state apparatus — the Foreign Office, the Justice Ministry, the Reich Chancellery, the Office of the Four-Year Plan, the General Government, the Ostministerium — rather than initiating it. The Wannsee Protocol's projection of approximately 11 million European Jews to be processed under the policy gives the bureaucratic scope of the program; Adolf Eichmann (head of the RSHA's Department IV-B-4, "Jewish Affairs") served as the conference secretary and remained the principal logistical coordinator of the deportations through the end of the war.

Six dedicated extermination camps in occupied Poland implemented the killing. The four Aktion Reinhard camps (Belzec, opened March 1942; Sobibor, opened May 1942; Treblinka, opened July 1942; and the dual function camp Majdanek near Lublin) killed approximately 1.7 million Jews between March 1942 and November 1943, primarily from the Polish ghettos. The Chelmno camp killed approximately 152,000-180,000 Jews using gas vans. The largest and most systematic was Auschwitz-Birkenau, the dual concentration-camp / extermination-camp complex near Oswiecim (Auschwitz I as the original 1940 concentration camp; Auschwitz II-Birkenau as the extermination facility from March 1942; Auschwitz III-Monowitz as a slave-labor complex for the IG Farben Buna synthetic-rubber plant). Auschwitz-Birkenau's four large gas-chamber and crematorium complexes (built 1943) used Zyklon B (hydrogen-cyanide pellets) and processed approximately 1.1 million victims, of whom approximately 90 percent were Jews. The Hungarian deportations of mid-May to early July 1944 (approximately 437,000 Jews deported, of whom approximately 320,000 were killed on arrival) demonstrated the system's late-war operational peak. Death marches from autumn 1944 onward, as the eastern camps were evacuated ahead of the advancing Red Army, killed approximately 250,000 additional victims through exposure, exhaustion, and shootings.

Other targeted groups. KC-4.1.III.D identifies the Holocaust as the culminating Nazi atrocity and KC-4.4.I.B identifies the parallel murder of millions in other groups targeted by the Nazis. Aktion T4, the Nazi medical-killing program of 1939-1941, killed approximately 70,000 disabled people through gassing at six killing centers; the program's personnel and methods were transferred to the Aktion Reinhard camps after Aktion T4 was officially halted in August 1941 (informal killings of disabled patients continued in hospitals through the end of the war and brought the total disabled victims to approximately 250,000). The Roma and Sinti suffered the Porajmos (Romani for "the devouring"), the systematic killing of approximately 200,000-500,000 Roma and Sinti across occupied Europe; the Auschwitz "Gypsy camp" (B-IIe) housed approximately 23,000 Roma and Sinti, of whom approximately 19,000 died. Soviet prisoners of war died at approximately 3.3 million out of approximately 5.7 million captured; deliberate starvation, exposure, and shootings produced the second-largest single category of Nazi victims. Polish elites died at approximately 1.8-1.9 million (the AB-Aktion of May-July 1940 killed approximately 6,500 Polish intellectuals and political leaders; the Pacification of Zamosc of 1942-1943 expelled and killed Polish villagers). Homosexual men were prosecuted under the expanded Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code; approximately 5,000-15,000 were sent to concentration camps. Jehovah's Witnesses and political opponents (Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists) were among the earliest concentration-camp populations from 1933.

The cooperation of collaborator governments. KC-4.1.III.D identifies the cooperation of "some other Axis powers and collaborationist governments" as part of the Nazi racial project. The principal collaborator regimes include Vichy France (under Marshal Philippe Petain and Pierre Laval), which passed the Statut des Juifs in October 1940 and June 1941 without German requirement, organized the Velodrome d'Hiver roundup of 16-17 July 1942 (approximately 13,152 Jews arrested in Paris), and assisted in the deportation of approximately 76,000 Jews from France to Auschwitz; the Croatian Ustase state under Ante Pavelic, which operated the Jasenovac concentration camp complex (approximately 77,000-99,000 victims, predominantly Serbs, Jews, Roma, and Croatian political opponents); the Slovak State under Jozef Tiso, which paid Germany 500 Reichsmarks per deported Jew and deported approximately 58,000 Jews to Auschwitz between March and October 1942; the Hungarian Arrow Cross regime from October 1944, which intensified the deportations under Eichmann's direct supervision; and Romania under Ion Antonescu, which carried out mass killings of approximately 280,000-380,000 Jews in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria, predominantly outside the German SS apparatus. Local police, civil-service personnel, and railway workers across occupied Europe enabled the systematic identification, deportation, and killing.

Jewish resistance also belongs to the historical record. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 19 April to 16 May 1943 produced the first major urban uprising against the German occupation in Europe; approximately 13,000 Jews were killed in the fighting, and the surviving population of the ghetto was deported to Treblinka and Majdanek. The Sobibor Uprising of 14 October 1943 produced a successful prisoner revolt that killed eleven SS guards and allowed approximately 300 prisoners to escape (approximately 50 survived to liberation); the camp was closed shortly thereafter. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando Revolt of 7 October 1944 destroyed Crematorium IV. Partisan units, escape networks (the most famous of which produced approximately 9,000 Bielski Partisans in the Naliboki Forest of present-day Belarus), and rescue networks (Raoul Wallenberg's protective passports in Budapest, the Danish rescue of approximately 7,200 Jews to Sweden in October 1943, the Dutch resistance hiding networks) all sat alongside the better-known story of mass passivity and complicity.

The postwar institutional response. The Nuremberg International Military Tribunal sat from 20 November 1945 to 1 October 1946; twenty-two principal Nazi defendants were tried under three new categories of international law: crimes against peace (Articles 6(a)), war crimes (6(b)), and crimes against humanity (6(c)). Twelve defendants were sentenced to death; three were acquitted; the remainder received custodial sentences of varying length. The subsequent twelve American Nuremberg Military Tribunal trials (1946-1949) prosecuted approximately 185 additional defendants, including the Doctors' Trial (December 1946-August 1947) and the Einsatzgruppen Trial (September 1947-April 1948). The term "genocide" had been coined by the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe; the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on 9 December 1948. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted by a commission under Eleanor Roosevelt, was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948. The State of Israel was established on 14 May 1948 in part as a postwar response to the destruction of European Jewry; the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem from 11 April to 15 December 1961 produced the principal subsequent legal proceeding on the Holocaust, with Eichmann's testimony and Hannah Arendt's contested 1963 reportage Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The Holocaust's longer-running effect on European national and cultural identity (Topic 8.9's CED theme NEI) runs through six decades of memorial, museum, and educational practice across the continent.

The Skill 3.D argument. Topic 8.9's suggested skill is 3.D (Source Argument: account for the way claims or evidence reinforce, adjust, or undermine the argument of a source). The skill applies in two principal ways. First, students should examine how Nazi-perpetrator documents (the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935; the Wannsee Protocol of 20 January 1942) reinforce, adjust, or undermine each other: the legalistic register of the 1935 Race Laws established categories that the 1942 Wannsee Protocol presupposed and operationalized at industrial scale. Second, students should examine how perpetrator documents and adjudicating documents (the Nuremberg Tribunal judgment of October 1946) interact: the Tribunal's reliance on captured German documentary evidence, including the Wannsee Protocol itself (recovered in Foreign Office archives in Berlin in 1947 by American prosecutor Robert Kempner), produced an evidentiary record in which the perpetrators' own bureaucratic record provided the principal proof of the criminal scope of the policy.

Three perpetrator and adjudicating documents that frame the trajectory of Nazi racial policy from legal categorization through mass-killing planning to postwar prosecution.

1. (Causation, Skill 3.D) Examine how the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 and the Wannsee Protocol of 1942 reinforce and adjust each other as historical evidence. What does the legal register of 1935 conceal that the bureaucratic register of 1942 reveals?
2. (Causation) Account for KC-4.1.III.D: how did Nazi racism and antisemitism, supported by other Axis powers and collaborationist governments, culminate in the Holocaust? Cite specific phases of the radicalization between 1933 and 1945.
3. (Causation) Account for KC-4.4.I.B: how did the Second World War devastate European demography? Cite specific figures for European Jewry, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma and Sinti, disabled victims, and the Russian and German military and civilian losses.
4. (Causation, Skill 3.D) Examine how the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal of 1945-1946 used captured German documentary evidence (the Wannsee Protocol, Einsatzgruppen reports, the Race Laws) to establish the criminal scope of the Nazi racial project. What does the perpetrators' bureaucratic record provide that survivor testimony alone could not?
5. (Causation) Account for the postwar institutional response: the Nuremberg Tribunal categories of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of December 1948; and the UN Genocide Convention of December 1948. What did each instrument codify, and what gap did each leave?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.