How did the Holocaust start? 

The Holocaust started gradually. Centuries of ingrained theological anti-Judaism led to racial antisemitism, which resulted in the desire to eliminate the Jews from within Christian lands. The exterminationist aspect of the Holocaust started in earnest in 1941, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, when the Germans instituted the systematic process of murdering all Jews under their jurisdiction first by shooting and then by gassing them.

Gabriel Wilensky

The Start of the Holocaust

After the invasion of Poland in 1939 the Germans established ghettos in several Polish cities, where Jews were effectively imprisoned. This is how the Holocaust started. Living conditions in the cramped ghettos was appalling, and disease, hunger and overcrowding killed tens of thousands. The Germans deported Jews from all over occupied Europe to these ghettos, modeled after the ghettos the Catholic Church had established all over Europe since the Middle Ages.

“After the invasion of Poland in 1939 the Germans established ghettos in several Polish cities, where Jews were effectively imprisoned.”

With the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 the Germans began the systematic extermination of the Jews, the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”. The Nazis established special mobile killing squads called the Einsatzgruppen which were attached to the German armed forces and whose only purpose was to follow the army into the Soviet Union and murder all Jews and political undesirables in their wake. This they did with unrelenting efficiency, but shooting thousands of men, women and children at close range every day, day after day, took a toll on the German murderers. So, the Germans set up special concentration camps where they could deport millions of Jews and impersonally kill them systematically by cramming hundreds of them at a time into specially constructed gas chambers, and dispose of their bodies in industrial crematoria. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the 20,000 German concentration camps, the Germans murdered about 10,000 Jews every day during the campaign to exterminate the Jews of Hungary in 1944. In the end, between disease, starvation, forced labor, the killing squads, the concentration and death camps and the death marches the Germans murdered 6,000,000 Jews.

Want to stay informed about the topic?
Subscribe below.

10 + 11 =

Blaming the Jews for the Black Death Plague

During the Middle Ages Christians believed Jews were associated with the devil and were out to eliminate Christianity. Christians believed Jews were…

Attacking Iran: Is there an option?

It seems that a clear parallel can be drawn between the former situation with Saddam Hussein and Iraq, and the situation in the 1930s with Adolf Hitler and…

Concentration Camps

When the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933 they began a systematic campaign to eliminate political opposition, which was later expanded to include all the people the party…

The Truth About Pope Pius XII: Are We Getting It?

When it comes to the role of the churches and of Pope Pius XII during WWII, the world seems to be divided into three camps: those who are neutral or…

Being Protector of Morals-in-Chief

The Catholic Church claims to be the highest moral authority on Earth. It also teaches to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, and to avoid doing to others what we don’t want others doing to us. …

Bolshevism is the mortal enemy of the Church

The Bolshevik Revolution was a watershed event that brought down the Romanovs and a long tradition of Tsarist rule in Russia. …

Who started the Holocaust?

There is no question that the people who started the Holocaust were the Nazis, backed by the vast majority of the German population. However, it’s important to point out…

Hitler’s Aides: Willing Collaborators in the Extermination of Jews

The Warsaw Ghetto was one of the many ghettos the Germans established in various European cities. The ghettos were created with the…

Official Church Publications: What Did the Church Have to Say?

Before the Second World War erupted the Holy See published the encyclical “With burning anxiety”, written largely by Cardinal Secretary…

Denial of the Jewish Holocaust

Until recently most people who used the term “The Holocaust” understood it to mean the extermination of six million Jews during the Second World War. Is this still the…