What you should know about the Holocaust

The first thing I would like to make clear is this.

• The Holocaust is not the only genocide in history.  As the most history-shaking and most well-documented example, it is worth learning about in order to understand the nature of hatred and intolerance, and apply its lessons in a multicultural setting.
• The Holocaust did not just happen to Jews.  It was the systematic murder of anyone deemed inferior, including: Slavs, Poles, Gypsies, Blacks, gays, communists, dissenters, the handicapped, and the elderly.
• We focus on the case of the Holocaust of the Jews because it is the single most ambitious and well-documented mass-murder in history, and because it makes it easier to understand other genocides and other hate crimes.

Understanding the Nazis

• The Holocaust was not just for hatred.  It was a cold, cynical, and calculated attempt at reshaping Europe to suit Germany's purposes.   Not only would the people of Northern Europe be cleansed, but also Kiev and St. Petersburg would be burned to the ground, Moscow would be flooded, and all the people massacred.  Any mentions of the Russians as anything but "Muscovites" would be erased from the history books, so that never again would Germany have to worry about those Russians to their east.  A "human wall" would separate the rump state of Russia from the new German territory-- Slavs to the east of the Urals; Aryans to the west.
• The Eastern European countryside would be reshaped into a "breadbasket", like the American Midwest, to feed Germany without the need to import food. Agricultural products from the rich black soil of Ukraine, and fish gathered in the Black Sea and shipped in from a fortified island of Crimea. Germans would repopulate the region from Ukraine to Leningrad.
• Hitler was fully responsible for Nazi Germany and its actions.  Someone else could NOT have taken his place and done everything exactly the same.  He and the NSDAP never got more than 35% of the vote.  He came to power by (basically) persuading the democratically-elected leader to quit his job and give it to him. Not just anyone pull off the "give me your job" demand, especially after a failed coup d'état attempt. (4) (5)
• Adolf Hitler was a patriotic war veteran with daddy issues and financial struggles.  He loved his dogs, liked painting and the arts, rocked out to terrible music, and ate mostly vegetables.  Hitler wanted to eradicate poverty, suffering and hunger among his beloved people.  Adolf Hitler was not born a bad person.  He could have been a normal and good person, if he had wanted to. His own decisions turned him into a monster.   Hell, he wasn't even raised an anti-semite-- he chose to be one.  He saw the world as "us" versus "them," and he was willing to do ANYTHING to "them" to help "us".
  At some point in your life, if you feel the cruel sting of being broke, the sore fatigue of seeing needless suffering around you, and hatred's cold claws clenching around your heart, I hope you will understand  the single most frightening fact in history: Hitler was human.  Hitler was once just like you. Once. 

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Pre-Holocaust Antisemitism

Please note Zafar's list of pogroms and raids.  This kind of unnecessary bloodshed is what gave the word "medieval" its negative connotation.  Here's some attempt to grasp the illogic of pre-Holocaust antisemitism, which was EVERYWHERE in Europe, and in much of the rest of the world, too.

Usury

The early Catholic Church banned Christians from Usury, or collecting loans with interest.  Without any competition, Jews became the only bankers in Medieval Europe, and often charged exorbitant rates.  This was before banking regulations.  When giving out a loan, a valuable possession was taken as a security deposit; inability of the debtor to pay back the loan with interest resulted in the lender keeping the deposit.  Naturally, Christians came to resent these people, who made so much money off something banned as immoral in their religion.

Anti-Semitic Myths

Medieval Europeans believed in a lot of crazy things.  They believed in witchcraft and fairies and alchemy.  They had no trouble accepting myths about those weird people in the strange clothes and hats, speaking their own suspicious secret language.  In contrast to the rigid authoritarian society under the church, Jewish culture was decentralized and individualistic, which also raised suspicion.

Before the Holocaust, many Christians believed that Jews:

• were guilty of Deicide, because "his blood be upon us and upon our children" applied at least a thousand generations out or so (even though, as the Vatican got around to admitting fairly recently, it was a Roman execution and Jews were probably innocent)

• on Sabbath and holy days, would drink the blood of Christian children. (projection from Communion discomfort?) (see Blood Libel)
• poisoned wells, spreading the plague
• never took off their hats because they had horns under there.
• worshiped the Devil, explaining their financial prosperity
• were subhuman, heartless criminals (see The Merchant of Venice; Oliver Twist)
• were responsible for the scourge of communism
• were responsible for the evils of capitalism
• had spread to so many countries and were planning World Domination through banking institutions-- a myth which persists today.  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a popular book written in 1903 that had major influence on all 20th century Anti-Semitism, claimed to be the minutes from the meetings of the Jewish World Domination Council of Doom. (See also: Rothschild Family Conspiracy Theories)
  
  
  
  
  
  

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  The Truth

  The most important thing to learn about the Holocaust is that these people were normal.  They were just people.  Take a look at some of these faces.  They're wearing different clothes and have some crazy facial hair, but... don't they look kind of like people you know?  They're smiling, thinking, slouching, spacing out, shuffling, staring, wondering, concentrating...  They're just living their lives.  They're just people.
  
  
  
  
  (Above) my grandmother (left-most) and her family, about a decade before their imprisonment. Only she and her sister (who was in Paris) survived.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  People.  Just ordinary people, each with their stories and their lives and their concerns.
  

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  Tragedy

  Then, they were imprisoned, starved, diseased, shot, poisoned, incinerated, tortured, raped, and humiliated.  My grandmother was one of a couple of survivors from her village.  Could you imagine losing almost everyone you know?  The sheer horror of the story gets lost in the macroscopic scale.  The following is an excerpt from her memoir:
  
  

  I knew <my brother> Butz was dying and I couldn't do anything for him. His breathing was labored and his skin was pallid. His head felt hot. My brother looked out of the little window in the room and said, “The Americans will not let them do this to us.” Then his eyes looked cloudy and the grip he held on my hand loosened. Those were his last words 
  <...On> the 4th of March in 1942, he died with his eyes wide open looking at me-- the same way my father did. He died with his head cradled in my arms. I had seen the entire process of his dying. I watched the lice evacuate his body and coat--the true sign that he was dead. This time my heart was completely frozen.

  And the important thing is to understand just how tragic and unspeakable and needless the loss of any individual life is... and then multiply that tragedy times 14 million.
  
  
  

But that's not where the story ends.
Once you understand everything that was terrible about the Holocaust and embraced and accepted the tragedy-- once you've reached that point of comprehending the hopeless despair, horror, and crippling depression-- you can find the happy ending.  
The story of the Righteous Among the Nations, the individuals who risked their own lives to save others, will surely send chills down your spine and tears of joy down your cheeks. Oskar Schindler, Chiune Sugihara, Irene Sendler, Constantin Karadja, and many others.  Good, selfless human beings are everywhere.

As long as there are Holocaust survivors, I hope that everyone will get the chance to meet one.  Perhaps you might think of Holocaust survivors as joyless; humorless; victims; husks of their former selves.  That would have meant the Nazis succeeded-- but this is not so. I hope you see that they survived and they never lost their humanity.   I hope you take pride in the sheer strength and incredible endurance of the human spirit.  Those who survived continued their lives, they had children, they loved, laughed and lived well.  If living well is the best revenge, well, there is something of a happy ending in all this.

The above and below photos depict survivors' wide range of incredible emotions at the exact moment they realized they were liberated.

(above) A happy couple, much later in life.
(below) My grandfather and my uncle.  Look at that tacky 60's wallpaper!

Links:

20 Photos That Change The Holocaust Narrative
The Holocaust: Photographs
The Righteous Among The Nations