Questions

1. Summarize the escalation of Jewish persecution by the Nazis. Identify the key events and their
consequences.

Nazi has a new program for Germany. The program name was the manifestation of
killing program to Jewish people. It was all started from Hitler who has an idea that the Jewish
people are an evil who wants to rule the world. So he has a new vision for a new Germany
without Jewish people. They started dismissed the Jewish people on April 1, 1933 after Hitler
became a leader. They dismiss Jews in Civil service and they blocked in quota for the
participation of Jews in Germany school. The discrimination is getting increase when they
started making a law for the protection of German blood in September 15, 1935. In the same year,
there is the instruction for Jewish people how to behave (the Day of Atonement). However
everything is getting worse since then. On November12, 1938 Nazi has a meeting to discuss the
damage about Germany economy. Jewish people are the one who must responsible because of
that damage. After that, the Jewish people cannot go to university degree, having their own
business or even practicing law or medicine to service the non-Jewish. In 1933, the Nazi also
arrested Australian male homosexual-lesbians. They also arrested Jehovahs Witnesses because
they are refusing to say the utter words Heil Hitler. So Nazi not only dismisses Jewish people
but also another group of non-Jewish people. Nazi also killed Gypsies (Roma). Germany people
also brutalized non-Jewish Poles, destroy Polish society and nationhood. The Germany people
also kill the ghetto population. In the fall of 1940, there are 30 percent of Warsaws populations
which are the Jews; they are being forced into 2.4 percent of the citys area. Disease,
malnutrition, hunger, and poverty took their toll even before the first bullet was fired.
So in summary, basically Germany people want to kill Jews. But at the end, they also kill another
group of non-Jews.


2. Identify and list the statistics that occur throughout the reading.

a. On May 10, 1933, thousands of Nazi students, together with many professors, stormed
university libraries and bookstores in 30 cities throughout Germany to remove tens of
thousands of books written by non-Aryans and those opposed to Nazi ideology.
b. September 15, 1935, the Nrnberg Lawsthe Law for the Protection of German Blood
and German Honour and the Law of the Reich Citizen. So only Germany people who can
attend the political rights and you cannot have marriage or sexual relation to Jewish
people.
c. On the evening of November 9, 1938, this since March had included Austria. Over the
next 48 hours rioters burned or damaged more than 1,000 synagogues and ransacked and
broke the windows of more than 7,500 businesses. The Nazis arrested some 30,000
Jewish men between the ages of 16 and 60 and sent them to concentration camps.
d. On November 12, 1938, Field Marshall Hermann Gring convened a meeting of Nazi
officials to discuss the damage to the German economy from pogroms. The Jewish
community was fined one billion Reich marks. Moreover, Jews were made responsible
for cleaning up the damage.
e. In 1939 the Germans initiated the T4 Programframed euphemistically as a
euthanasia programfor the murder of mentally retarded, physically disabled, and
emotionally disturbed Germans who departed from the Nazi ideal of Aryan supremacy.
f. September 1, 1939, the Jewish question became urgent. When the division of Poland
between Germany and the Soviet Union was complete, more than two million more Jews
had come under German control.
g. In the fall of 1940, the Jewsthen 30 percent of Warsaws populationwere forced into
2.4 percent of the citys area. The ghettos population reached a density of over 200,000
persons per square mile (77,000 per square km) and 9.2 per room.
h. On September 2829, 1941, they killed Jews in family units. Just outside Kiev, Ukraine,
in the valley of Baby Yar, an Einsatzgruppe killed 33,771 Jews.
i. November 30 and December 89, in the Rumbula Forest outside the ghetto in Riga,
Latvia, 25,00028,000 Jews died
j. Beginning in the summer of 1941, Einsatzgruppen killed more than 70,000 Jews at
Ponary, outside Vilna (now Vilnius) in Lithuania.
k. They slaughtered 9,000 Jews, half of them children, at the Ninth Fort adjacent to Kovno
(now Kaunas), Lithuania, on October 28.
l. In early 1942 the Nazis built extermination camps at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec in
Poland. The death camps were to be the essential instrument of the final solution.
m. In early 1942, At Treblinka, a staff of 120, of whom only 30 were SS (the Nazi
paramilitary corps), killed some 750,000 to 900,000 Jews during the camps 17 months of
operation. At Belzec, German records detail a staff of 104, including about 20 SS, who
killed some 600,000 Jews in less than 10 months. At Sobibor, they murdered about
250,000. These camps began operation during the spring and summer of 1942, when the
ghettos of German-occupied Poland were filled with Jews.
n. On May 15, 1944, deportations began, and over the next 55 days, the Nazis deported
some 438,000 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz on 147 trains.
o. German-occupied Denmark rescued most of its own Jews by spiriting them to Sweden by
sea in October 1943.
p. The German government continued to pay reparationsfirst awarded in 1953to
individual Jews and the Jewish people to acknowledge responsibility for the crimes
committed in the name of the German people.


3. List the acts that violate the UDHR.

UDHR means the universal declaration of Human Rights. It means people have rights as a
human to take a breath, live, and have a freedom. Based on the statistics of in the problem
number 2, we can conclude that Germany people mostly violate the UDHR (starting from part a
until part p in the problems number 2) because they take the rights of people to not put their
opinion freely, to not have their political rights, to not have their rights to live.




Holocaust, Hebrew Shoah, Yiddish and Hebrew urban (Destruction), the systematic
state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others
by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this the final
solution to the Jewish question. This word was chosen because in the ultimate manifestation of
the Nazi killing programthe extermination campsthe bodies of the victims were consumed
whole in crematoria and open fires.

Nazi anti-Semitism and the origins of the Holocaust
Even before the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they had made no secret of their anti-
Semitism. As early as 1919, Adolf Hitler had written, Rational anti-Semitism, however, must
lead to systematic legal opposition.Its final objective must unswervingly be the removal of the
Jews altogether. In Mein Kampf (My Struggle; 192527), Hitler further developed the idea of
the Jews as an evil race struggling for world domination. Nazi anti-Semitism was rooted in
religious anti-Semitism and enhanced by political anti-Semitism. To this the Nazis added a
further dimension: racial anti-Semitism. Nazi racial ideology characterized the Jews
as Untermenschen (German: subhumans). The Nazis portrayed Jews as a race and not a
religious group. Religious anti-Semitism could be resolved by conversion, political anti-
Semitism by expulsion. Ultimately, the logic of Nazi racial anti-Semitism led to annihilation.
When Hitler came to power legally on January 30, 1933, as the head of a coalition government,
his first objective was to consolidate power and to eliminate political opposition. The assault
against the Jews began on April 1 with a boycott of Jewish businesses. A week later the Nazis
dismissed Jews from the civil service, and by the end of the month, the participation of Jews in
German schools was restricted by a quota. On May 10, thousands of Nazi students, together with
many professors, stormed university libraries and bookstores in 30 cities throughout Germany to
remove tens of thousands of books written by non-Aryans and those opposed to Nazi ideology.
The books were tossed into bonfires in an effort to cleanse German culture of un-Germanic
writings. A century earlier, Heinrich Heinea German poet of Jewish originhad said, Where
one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people. In Nazi Germany, the time between the
burning of Jewish books and the burning of Jews was eight years.

As discrimination against Jews increased, German law required a legal definition of a Jew and an
Aryan. Promulgated at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nrnberg on September 15, 1935,
the Nrnberg Lawsthe Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and the
Law of the Reich Citizenbecame the centerpiece of anti-Jewish legislation and a precedent for
defining and categorizing Jews in all German-controlled lands. Marriage and sexual relations
between Jews and citizens of German or kindred blood were prohibited. Only racial
Germans were entitled to civil and political rights. Jews were reduced to subjects of the state.

The Nrnberg Laws formally divided Germans and Jews, yet neither the word German nor the
word Jew was defined. That task was left to the bureaucracy. Two basic categories were
established in November: Jewsthose with at least three Jewish grandparents
and Mischlinge (mongrels, or mixed breeds)people with one or two Jewish grandparents.
Thus, the definition of a Jew was primarily based not on the identity an individual affirmed or
the religion he practiced but on his ancestry. Categorization was the first stage of destruction.
Responding with alarm to Hitlers rise, the Jewish community sought to defend their rights as
Germans. For those Jews who felt themselves fully German and who had patriotically fought in
World War I, the Nazification of German society was especially painful. Zionist activity
intensified. Wear it with pride, journalist Robert Wildest wrote in 1933 of the Jewish identity
the Nazis had so stigmatized. Martin Buber led an effort at Jewish adult education, preparing the
community for the long journey ahead. Rabbi Leo Baeck circulated a prayer for Yom
Kippur (the Day of Atonement) in 1935 that instructed Jews how to behave: We bow down
before God; we stand erect before man. Yet while few, if any, could foresee its eventual
outcome, the Jewish condition was increasingly perilous and expected to get worse.

By the late 1930s there was a desperate search for countries of refuge. Those who could get visas
and qualify under stringent quotas emigrated to the United States. Many went to Palestine, where
the small Jewish community was willing to receive refugees. Still others sought refuge in
neighbouring European countries. Most countries, however, were unwilling to receive large
numbers of refugees.
Responding to domestic pressures to act on behalf of Jewish refugees, U.S. President Franklin D.
Roosevelt convened, but did not attend, the vian Conference on resettlement, in vian-les-
Bains, France, in July 1938. In his invitation to government leaders, Roosevelt specified that they
would not have to change laws or spend government funds; only philanthropic funds would be
used for resettlement. The result was that little was attempted, and less accomplished.

From Kristallnacht to the final solution
On the evening of November 9, 1938, carefully orchestrated anti-Jewish violence erupted
throughout the Reich, which since March had included Austria. Over the next 48 hours rioters
burned or damaged more than 1,000 synagogues and ransacked and broke the windows of more
than 7,500 businesses. The Nazis arrested some 30,000 Jewish men between the ages of 16 and
60 and sent them to concentration camps. Police stood by as the violenceoften the action of
neighbours, not strangersoccurred. Firemen were present not to protect the synagogues but to
ensure that the flames did not spread to adjacent Aryan property. The pogrom was given a
quaint name: Kristallnacht (Crystal Night, or Night of Broken Glass). In its aftermath, Jews
lost the illusion that they had a future in Germany.

On November 12, 1938, Field Marshall Hermann Gring convened a meeting of Nazi officials to
discuss the damage to the German economy from pogroms. The Jewish community was fined
one billion Reichsmarks. Moreover, Jews were made responsible for cleaning up the damage.
German Jews, but not foreign Jews, were barred from collecting insurance. In addition, Jews
were soon denied entry to theatres, forced to travel in separate compartments on trains, and
excluded from German schools. These new restrictions were added to earlier prohibitions, such
as those barring Jews from earning university degrees, from owning businesses, or from
practicing law or medicine in the service of non-Jews. The Nazis would continue to confiscate
Jewish property in a program called Aryanization. Gring concluded the November meeting
with a note of irony: I would not like to be a Jew in Germany!

Non-Jewish victims of Nazism
While Jews were the primary victims of Nazism as it evolved and were central to Nazi racial
ideology, other groups were victimized as wellsome for what they did, some for what they
refused to do, and some for what they were.

Political dissidents, trade unionists, and Social Democrats were among the first to be arrested and
incarcerated in concentration camps. Under the Weimar government, centuries-old prohibitions
against homosexuality had been overlooked, but this tolerance ended violently when the SA
(Storm Troopers) began raiding gay bars in 1933. Homosexual intent became just cause for
prosecution. The Nazis arrested German and Austrian male homosexualsthere was no
systematic persecution of lesbiansand interned them in concentration camps, where they were
forced to wear special yellow armbands and later pink triangles. Jehovahs Witnesses were a
problem for the Nazis because they refused to swear allegiance to the state, register for the draft,
or utter the words Heil Hitler. As a result, the Nazis imprisoned many of the roughly 20,000
Witnesses in Germany. Germans of African descentmany of whom, called Rhineland
bastards by the Nazis, were the offspring of German mothers and French colonial African
troops who had occupied the Rhineland after World War Iwere also persecuted by the Nazis.
Although their victimization was less systematic, it included forced sterilization and, often,
internment in concentration camps. The Nazis also singled out theRoma (Gypsies). They were
the only other group that the Nazis systematically killed in gas chambers alongside the Jews.

In 1939 the Germans initiated the T4 Programframed euphemistically as a euthanasia
programfor the murder of mentally retarded, physically disabled, and emotionally disturbed
Germans who departed from the Nazi ideal of Aryan supremacy. The Nazis pioneered the use of
gas chambers and mass crematoria under this program.

Following the invasion of Poland, German occupation policy especially targeted the Jews but
also brutalized non-Jewish Poles. In pursuit of Lebensraum (living space), Germany sought
systematically to destroy Polish society and nationhood. The Nazis killed Polish priests and
politicians, decimated the Polish leadership, and kidnapped the children of the Polish elite, who
were raised as voluntary Aryans by their new German parents. Many Poles were also forced
to perform hard labour on survival diets, deprived of property and uprooted, and interned in
concentration camps.

Nazi expansion and the formation of ghettos
Paradoxically, at the same time that Germany tried to rid itself of its Jews via forced emigration,
its territorial expansions kept bringing more Jews under its control. Germany annexed Austria in
March 1938 and the Sudetenland (now in the Czech Republic) in September 1938. It established
control over the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now in the Czech Republic) in March
1939. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the Jewish question became
urgent. When the division of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union was complete,
more than two million more Jews had come under German control. For a time, the Nazis
considered shipping the Jews to the island of Madagascar, off the southeast coast of Africa. But
as the seas became a war zone and the resources required for such a massive deportation scarce,
they discarded the plan as impractical.

On September 21, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich ordered the establishment of the Judenrte (Jewish
Councils), comprising up to 24 menrabbis and Jewish leaders. Heydrichs order made these
councils personally responsible in the literal sense of the term for carrying out German orders.
When the Nazis sealed the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of German-occupied Polands 400
ghettos, in the fall of 1940, the Jewsthen 30 percent of Warsaws populationwere forced
into 2.4 percent of the citys area. The ghettos population reached a density of over 200,000
persons per square mile (77,000 per square km) and 9.2 per room. Disease, malnutrition, hunger,
and poverty took their toll even before the first bullet was fired.

For the German rulers, the ghetto was a temporary measure, a holding pen for the Jewish
population until a policy on its fate could be established and implemented. For the Jews, ghetto
life was the situation under which they thought they would be forced to live until the end of the
war. They aimed to make life bearable, even under the most trying circumstances. When the
Nazis prohibited schools, they opened clandestine schools. When the Nazis banned religious life,
it persisted in hiding. The Jews used humour as a means of defiance, so too song. They resorted
to arms only late in the Nazi assault.

The Einsatzgruppen
Entering conquered Soviet territories alongside the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces) were
3,000 men of the Einsatzgruppen (deployment groups), special mobile killing units. Their task
was to murder Jews, Soviet commissars, and Roma in the areas conquered by the army. Alone or
with the help of local police, native anti-Semitic populations, and accompanying Axis troops,
theEinsatzgruppen would enter a town, round up their victims, herd them to the outskirts of the
town, and shoot them. They killed Jews in family units. Just outside Kiev, Ukraine, in the valley
of Baby Yar, an Einsatzgruppe killed 33,771 Jews on September 2829, 1941. In the Rumbula
Forest outside the ghetto in Riga, Latvia, 25,00028,000 Jews died on November 30 and
December 89. Beginning in the summer of 1941, Einsatzgruppen killed more than 70,000 Jews
at Ponary, outside Vilna (now Vilnius) in Lithuania. They slaughtered 9,000 Jews, half of them
children, at the Ninth Fort adjacent to Kovno (now Kaunas), Lithuania, on October 28.

The mass shootings continued unabated, with a first wave and then a second. When the killing
ended in the face of a Soviet counteroffensive, special units returned to dig up the dead and burn
their bodies to destroy the evidence of the crimes. It is estimated that the Einsatzgruppen killed
more than one million people, most of whom were Jews.

The extermination camps
On January 20, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference at a lakeside villa
in a Berlin suburb to organize the final solution to the Jewish question. Around the table were
15 men representing government agencies necessary to implement so bold and sweeping a
policy. The language of the meeting was clear, but the meeting notes were circumspect:
Another possible solution to the [Jewish] question has now taken the place of emigration, i.e.,
evacuation to the east.Practical experience is already being collected which is of the greatest
importance in the relation to the future final solution of the Jewish question. Participants
understood evacuation to the east to mean deportation to killing centres.

In early 1942 the Nazis built extermination camps at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec in Poland.
The death camps were to be the essential instrument of the final solution.
The Einsatzgruppen had traveled to kill their victims. With the extermination camps, the process
was reversed. The victims traveled by train, often in cattle cars, to their killers. The
extermination camps became factories producing corpses, effectively and efficiently, at minimal
physical and psychological cost to German personnel. Assisted by Ukrainian and Latvian
collaborators and prisoners of war, a few Germans could kill tens of thousands of prisoners each
month. At Chelmno, the first of the extermination camps, the Nazis used mobile gas vans.
Elsewhere, they built permanent gas chambers linked to the crematoria where bodies were
burned. Carbon monoxide was the gas of choice at most camps.Zyklon-B, an especially lethal
killing agent, was employed primarily at Auschwitz and later at other camps.

Auschwitz, perhaps the most notorious and lethal of the concentration camps, was actually three
camps in one: a prison camp (Auschwitz I), an extermination camp (Auschwitz IIBirkenau),
and a slave-labour camp (Auschwitz IIIBuna-Monowitz). Upon arrival, Jewish prisoners faced
what was called a Selektion. A German doctor presided over the selection of pregnant women,
young children, the elderly, handicapped, sick, and infirm for immediate death in the gas
chambers. As necessary, the Germans selected able-bodied prisoners for forced labour in the
factories adjacent to Auschwitz where one German company, IG Farben, invested 700,000
million Reichsmarks in 1942 alone to take advantage of forced labour. Deprived of adequate
food, shelter, clothing, and medical care, these prisoners were literally worked to death.
Periodically, they would face another Selektion. The Nazis would transfer those unable to work
to the gas chambers of Birkenau.

While the death camps at Auschwitz and Majdanek used inmates for slave labour to support the
German war effort, the extermination camps at Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibor had one task
alone: killing. At Treblinka, a staff of 120, of whom only 30 were SS (the Nazi paramilitary
corps), killed some 750,000 to 900,000 Jews during the camps 17 months of operation. At
Belzec, German records detail a staff of 104, including about 20 SS, who killed some 600,000
Jews in less than 10 months. At Sobibor, they murdered about 250,000. These camps began
operation during the spring and summer of 1942, when the ghettos of German-occupied Poland
were filled with Jews. Once they had completed their missionsmurder by gassing, or
resettlement in the east, to use the language of the Wannsee protocolsthe Nazis closed the
camps. There were six extermination camps, all in German-occupied Poland, among the
thousands of concentration and slave-labour camps throughout German-occupied Europe.

The impact of the Holocaust varied from region to region, and from year to year in the 21
countries that were directly affected. Nowhere was the Holocaust more intense and sudden than
in Hungary. What took place over several years in Germany occurred over 16 weeks in Hungary.
Entering the war as a German ally, Hungary had persecuted its Jews but not permitted their
deportation. After Germany invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944, this situation changed
dramatically. By mid-April the Nazis had confined Jews to ghettos. On May 15, deportations
began, and over the next 55 days, the Nazis deported some 438,000 Jews from Hungary to
Auschwitz on 147 trains.

Policies differed widely among Germanys Balkan allies. In Romania it was primarily the
Romanians themselves who slaughtered the countrys Jews. Toward the end of the war, however,
when the defeat of Germany was all but certain, the Romanian government found more value in
living Jews who could be held for ransom or used as leverage with the West. Bulgaria permitted
the deportation of Jews from neighbouring Thrace and Macedonia, but government leaders faced
stiff opposition to the deportation of native Bulgarian Jews.

German-occupied Denmark rescued most of its own Jews by spiriting them to Sweden by sea in
October 1943. This was possible partly because the German presence in Denmark was relatively
small. Moreover, while anti-Semitism in the general population of many other countries led to
collaboration with the Germans, Jews were an integrated part of Danish culture. Under these
unique circumstances, Danish humanitarianism flourished.

In France, Jews under Fascist Italian occupation in the southeast fared better than the Jews
of Vichy France, where collaborationist French authorities and police provided essential support
to the understaffed German forces. The Jews in those parts of France under direct German
occupation fared the worst. Although allied with Germany, the Italians did not participate in the
Holocaust until Germany occupied northern Italy after the overthrow of the Fascist
leader, Benito Mussolini.

Throughout German-occupied territory the situation of Jews was desperate. They had meagre
resources and few allies and faced impossible choices. A few people came to their rescue, often
at the risk of their own lives. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest on July 9,
1944, in an effort to save Hungarys sole remaining Jewish community. Over the next six
months, he worked with other neutral diplomats, the Vatican, and Jews themselves to prevent the
deportation of these last Jews. Elsewhere, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a French Huguenot village,
became a haven for 5,000 Jews. In Poland, where it was illegal to aid Jews and where such
action was punishable by death, theZegota (Council for Aid to Jews) rescued a similar number of
Jewish men, women, and children. Financed by the Polish government in exile and involving a
wide range of clandestine political organizations, the Zegota provided hiding places, financial
support, and forged identity documents.

Some Germans, even some Nazis, dissented from the murder of the Jews and came to their aid.
The most famous was Oskar Schindler, a Nazi businessman, who had set up operations using
involuntary labour in German-occupied Poland in order to profit from the war. Eventually, he
moved to protect his Jewish workers from deportation to extermination camps. In all occupied
countries, there were individuals who came to the rescue of Jews, offering a place to hide, some
food, or shelter for days, weeks, or even for the duration of the war. Most of the rescuers did not
see their actions as heroic but felt bound to the Jews by a common sense of humanity. Israel later
recognized rescuers with honorary citizenship and commemoration at Yad Vashem, Israels
memorial to the Holocaust.

The aftermath
Although the Germans killed victims from several groups, the Holocaust is primarily associated
with the murder of the Jews. Only the Jews were targeted for total annihilation, and their
elimination was central to Hitlers vision of the New Germany. The intensity of the Nazi
campaign against the Jews continued unabated to the very end of the war and at points even took
priority over German military efforts.

When the war ended, Allied armies found between seven and nine million displaced persons
living outside their own countries. More than six million people returned to their native lands,
but more than one million refused repatriation. Some had collaborated with the Nazis and feared
retaliation. Others feared persecution under the new communist regimes. For the Jews, the
situation was different. They had no homes to return to. Their communities had been shattered,
their homes destroyed or occupied by strangers, and their families decimated and dispersed. First
came the often long and difficult physical recuperation from starvation and malnutrition, then the
search for loved ones lost or missing, and finally the question of the future.

Many Jews lived in displaced-persons camps. At first they were forced to dwell among their
killers because the Allies did not differentiate on the basis of religion, merely by nationality.
Their presence on European soil and the absence of a country willing to receive them increased
the pressure on Britain to resolve the issue of a Jewish homeland in British-administered
Palestine. Both well-publicized and clandestine efforts were made to bring Jews to Palestine. In
fact, it was not until after the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948 and the
liberalization of American immigration laws in 1948 and 1949 (allowing the admission of
refugees from Europe) that the problem of finding homes for the survivors was solved.

Upon liberating the camps, many Allied units were so shocked by what they saw that they meted
out spontaneous punishment to some of the remaining SS personnel. Others were arrested and
held for trial. The most famous of the postwar trials occurred in 194546 at Nrnberg, the former
site of Nazi Party rallies. There, the International Military Tribunal tried 22 major Nazi officials
for war crimes, crimes against the peace, and a new category of crimes: crimes against humanity.

This new category encompassed murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other
inhumane acts committed against any civilian populationpersecution on political, racial, or
religious groundswhether or not in violation of the domestic laws of the country where
perpetrated. After the first trials, 185 defendants were divided into 12 groups, including
physicians responsible for medical experimentation (but not so-called euthanasia), judges who
preserved the facade of legality for Nazi crimes, Einsatzgruppe leaders, commandants of
concentration camps, German generals, and business leaders who profited from slave labour. The
defendants made up, however, a miniscule fraction of those who had perpetrated the crimes. In
the eyes of many, their trials were a desperate, inadequate, but necessary effort to restore a
semblance of justice in the aftermath of so great a crime. The Nrnberg trials established the
precedent, later enshrined by international convention, that crimes against humanity are
punishable by an international tribunal.

Over the ensuing half-century, additional trials further documented the nature of the crimes and
had a public as well as a judicial impact. The 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, who
supervised the deportations of Jews to the death camps, not only brought him to justice but made
a new generation of Israelis keenly aware of the Holocaust. The Auschwitz trials held in
Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, between 1963 and 1976 increased the German publics
knowledge of the killing and its pervasiveness. The trials in France of Klaus Barbie (1987) and
Maurice Papon (199698) and the revelations of Franois Mitterrand in 1994 concerning his
indifference toward Vichy Frances anti-Jewish policy called into question the notion of French
resistance and forced the French to deal with the issue of collaboration. These trials also became
precedents as world leaders considered responses to other crimes against humanity in places such
as Bosnia and Rwanda.

The defeat of Nazi Germany left a bitter legacy for the German leadership and people. Germans
had committed crimes in the name of the German people. German culture and the German
leadershippolitical, intellectual, social, and religioushad participated or been complicit in
the Nazi crimes or been ineffective in opposing them. In an effort to rehabilitate the good name
of the German people, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) firmly established a
democracy that protected the human rights of all its citizens and made financial reparations to the
Jewish people in an agreement passed by parliament in 1953. West German democratic leaders
made special efforts to achieve friendly relations with Israel. In the German Democratic
Republic (East Germany), the communist leaders attempted to absolve their population of
responsibility for the crimes, portraying themselves as the victims of the Nazis, and Nazism as a
manifestation of capitalism. The first gesture of the postcommunist parliament of East Germany,
however, was an apology to the Jewish people. At one of its first meetings in the newly
renovated Reichstag building in 1999, the German parliament voted to erect a Holocaust
memorial in Berlin. The first state visitor to Berlin after its reestablishment as capital of a united
Germany was Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the history of the Holocaust continued to be unsettling. The
Swiss government and its bankers had to confront their role as bankers to the Nazis and in
recycling gold and valuables taken from the victims. Under the leadership of German prime
minister Gerhard Schrder, German corporations and the German government established a fund
to compensate Jews and non-Jews who worked in German slave labour and forced labour
programs during the war. Insurance companies were negotiating over claims from descendants of
policyholders killed during the warclaims that the companies denied immediately after the war
by imposing prohibitive conditions, such as the presentation of a death certificate specifying the
time and place of death of the insured. In several eastern European countries, negotiations
addressed Jewish property that the Nazis had confiscated during the war but that could not be
returned under the regions communist governments. Artworks stolen during the war and later
sold on the basis of dubious records were the subject of legal struggles to secure their return to
the original owners or to their heirs. The German government continued to pay reparationsfirst
awarded in 1953to individual Jews and the Jewish people to acknowledge responsibility for
the crimes committed in the name of the German people.





First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for meand there was no one left to speak for me.