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Even at school, when studying the period of the Second World War, we came across such a word as the Holocaust. Trying to better understand this concept, people come to the indescribable horror of the atrocities of the Nazis against the Jews. What is the Holocaust and how many innocent people suffered from Hitler's inhumane policies?

What is the Holocaust

Many meanings of what the Holocaust means can be found in the literature. But the most appropriate definition can be considered as follows: “When this phenomenon occurred in Nazi Germany, the Germans called regular persecution, up to the physical destruction of people of Jewish nationality, not only in the country, but also in all those occupied during the war years. This process has become one of the most massive genocides in history, which is compared with the massacres that took place during the Ottoman Empire.”

How it was

For the entire duration of the war, the Germans destroyed almost 60% of all Jews who at that time lived in Europe. This figure is equal to 1/3 of all representatives of this nationality in the world. At the same time, not only adults were subject to destruction, but also small children and the elderly. The Germans called this process normal and were sure that in this way they were cleaning the world.

However, other peoples were also persecuted. So, the Nazis destroyed almost 1/3 of the Gypsies, 10% of the Poles and, of course, Soviet citizens. Many prisoners who managed to survive recall the various tortures with horror. Almost 3 million Soviet citizens were killed in German concentration camps. First of all, all those who were sick and refused to follow orders were subject to destruction. Various experiments were often carried out on other prisoners, which often led to death.

The number of victims of the Holocaust

Already after the end of the war, many historians tried to count the number of Jews who were exterminated over the years. Most of all, those who lived in Poland died - about 3 million people. Approximately 1 million and 200 thousand were destroyed on the territory of the Soviet Union, of which only 800 thousand lived on the territory of Belarus. In Hungary, this number is 540 thousand, and in the Baltic countries - 210 thousand.

Main events

Studying the concept of what the Holocaust means, experts distinguish 3 phases:

1. Forced resettlement of this people, first from the territory of Germany.
2. After the 40s, most of them ended up on the territory of Poland and other neighboring states. After that, the Germans began to pursue a ghetto policy.
3. Beginning in 1942, the Germans moved to the phase of the complete annihilation of the people, according to a plan drawn up in advance.

Capturing large cities in the territories of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states, the Nazis set about creating ghettos and concentration camps here, where all Jews were brought. The largest of them was the Warsaw ghetto, where about 480 thousand people were accommodated.

The largest of the concentration camps was Auschwitz, where about 1.1 million Jews died, including young children. Today this place is considered a symbol of the Holocaust. It was created in 1941 to contain the arrested Poles. Later it became a place of mass detention of Jews.

In 1943, medical experiments on prisoners began on the territory of Auschwitz.

According to documents that miraculously survived, it was possible to find out that there were about 230,000 children here, of which: 216,000 Jews, 11,000 Gypsies, 3,000 Poles and thousands of children of other nationalities.

In the occupied territory of the USSR, the Germans acted differently towards the Jews. Here they were simply gathered near the ravines and shot.

The reaction of the Jewish people

The resistance that the Jewish people tried to put up was active and passive.

Passive movement became the most numerous. This included any assistance to those who found themselves in a difficult situation. For this, humanitarian aid centers were organized. Many were forced to leave their home and move to a safer place where the likelihood of a German invasion was minimal. There were cases when people driven to despair simply ended their lives by suicide.

Many Jews joined the partisans or the army. Some organized themselves into underground organizations. This was already considered active resistance to the Nazi regime. They became especially widespread on the territory of Ukraine and Belarus. Their main activity was aimed at helping the Red Army in the fight against fascism and protecting innocent people. There were cases of the creation of such organizations directly on the territory of the ghetto or concentration camps. Here they organized uprisings and escapes. The longest is considered the uprising, which managed to start in the Warsaw ghetto. It lasted about a month. To suppress it, the Nazis had to use artillery and heavy military equipment.

This terrible period in the life of the Jewish people ended only after the complete surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945. The world community initiated the creation of a military tribunal and during the Nuremberg trial their leaders were charged with massacres and genocide of the Jewish people.

Etymologically, the word "holocaust" goes back to the Greek components holos(integer) and kaustos(burnt) and was used as a description of the offering that was burned on the sacrificial altar. But since 1914, it has acquired a different, more terrible meaning: the mass genocide of almost 6 million European Jews (and also representatives of other social groups, such as gypsies and homosexuals), perpetrated by the Nazi regime.

For the anti-Semite and Fascist leader Adolf Hitler, the Jews were an inferior nation, an outside threat to the purity of the German race. , throughout which the Jews were constantly subjected to persecution, the final decision of the Fuhrer resulted in an event that we now call the Holocaust. Under the guise of a war in occupied Poland - mass death centers.

Before the Holocaust: Historical Anti-Semitism and Hitler's Rise to Power

European anti-Semitism began far from . The term was first used in the 1870s, and there is evidence of hostility towards Jews long before the Holocaust. According to ancient sources, even the Roman authorities, having destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, forced the Jews to leave Palestine.

In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Enlightenment tried to revive tolerance for religious diversity, and in the 19th century, the European monarchy, in the person of Napoleon, passed a law that put an end to the persecution of Jews. Nevertheless, for the most part, anti-Semitic sentiments in society were more racial than religious in nature.

Even at the beginning of the 21st century, the world is feeling the effects of the Holocaust. In recent years, Swiss government and banking institutions have acknowledged their involvement in fascist activities and set up funds to help victims of the Holocaust and other victims of human rights violations, genocide or other catastrophes.

It is still difficult to pinpoint the roots of Hitler's extreme anti-Semitism. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army. Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the defeat of the country in 1918.

Shortly after the end of the war, Hitler joined the national German Workers' Party, which later formed into the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). While imprisoned as a traitor for his direct participation in the Beer Putsch of 1923, Adolf wrote his famous memoirs, and part-time propaganda tract, " Mein Kampf” (“My Struggle”), where he predicted a pan-European war, which should lead to “the complete annihilation of the Jewish race in Germany.”

The leader of the NSDAP was obsessed with the idea of ​​the superiority of the "pure" German race, which he called "Aryan", and the need for such a thing as " Lebensraum”- living and territorial space for expanding the range of this race. After being released from prison for ten years, Hitler skillfully exploited the weaknesses and failures of his political rivals to raise his party's profile from obscurity to power.

On January 20, 1933, he was appointed Chancellor of Germany. After the death of the President in 1934, Hitler proclaimed himself "Fuhrer" - the supreme ruler of Germany.

Nazi Revolution in Germany 1933-1939

Two related goals - racial purity and spatial expansion ( Lebensraum) - became the basis of Hitler's worldview, and since 1933, having united, were the driving force behind both his foreign and domestic policies. One of the first to feel the wave of Nazi persecution was their direct political opponents, the Communists (or Social Democrats).

The first official concentration camp was opened in March 1933 in Dachau (near Munich) and was ready to accept its first lambs for slaughter - objectionable to the new communist regime. Dachau was under the control of the head of the elite national guard of the Schutzstaffel (SS), and then the chief of the German police.

By July 1933 the German concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) contained about 27 thousand people. Crowded Nazi rallies and symbolic actions, such as public book burnings by Jews, communists, liberals and foreigners, which were coercive, helped to convey the right messages from the power party to the people.

In 1933, there were about 525 thousand Jews in Germany, which was only 1% of the total population of Germany. Over the next six years, the Nazis undertook the "Aryanization" of Germany: they "liberated" non-Aryans from public service, liquidated Jewish-owned businesses, and deprived Jewish lawyers and doctors of all clients.

According to the Nuremberg Laws (adopted in 1935), every German citizen whose maternal and paternal grandparents were of Jewish origin was considered a Jew, and those who had Jewish grandparents on only one side, labeled humiliating Mischlinge which means "half-breed".

Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became ideal targets for stigmatization (unfair negative social labeling) and further persecution. The culmination of this kind of relationship between society and political forces was "Kristallnacht" ("night of breaking glass"): German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish shops were broken; about 100 Jews were killed and thousands more were arrested.

From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews who nevertheless managed to leave Germany alive were in constant fear and felt the uncertainty not only of their future, but also of the present.

Start of the War 1939-1940

In September 1939, the German army occupied the western half of Poland. Shortly thereafter, German police forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews to leave their homes and settle in ghettos, giving confiscated property to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside of Germany who identified as Germans), Germans from the Reich, or Polish non-Jews.

Jewish ghettos in Poland, surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, functioned as captive city-states ruled by Jewish councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overcrowding made the ghetto a breeding ground for diseases such as typhus.

Simultaneously with the occupation in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected almost 70,000 native Germans in specialized institutions such as psychiatric hospitals and hospitals for the care of the disabled to begin the so-called euthanasia program, which consisted of gassing patients.

This program caused a lot of protests from prominent religious figures in Germany, so Hitler officially closed it in August 1941. Yet the program continued to operate in secret, with catastrophic consequences: across Europe, 275,000 people who were considered disabled of various degrees were killed. Today, when we can look back along the historical vector, it becomes obvious that this euthanasia program was the first experimental experience on the road to the Holocaust.

The final solution of the Jewish question 1940-1941

Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler's empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European gypsies, were transported to Polish ghettos.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in the war. Mobile assassination units called Einsatzgruppen( Einsatzgruppen), killed by execution more than 500 thousand Soviet Jews and others objectionable to the regime during the German occupation.

One of the Fuhrer's commanders-in-chief sent Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (SS security service), a memorandum dated July 31, 1941, indicating the need Endlosung“The final solution to the Jewish question.”

Beginning in September 1941, every person identified as a Jew in Germany was marked with a yellow star ("Star of David"), making them open targets for attack. Tens of thousands of German Jews were deported to Polish ghettos and captured Soviet cities.

Since June 1941, experiments began to be carried out in a concentration camp near Krakow to find methods of mass murder. In August, 500 Soviet prisoners of war were poisoned with Cyclone-B gas poison. The SS then made a huge order for gas to a German firm that specialized in the production of pesticides.

Holocaust death camps 1941–1945

From the end of 1941, the Germans began to massively transport objectionable people from Polish ghettos to concentration camps, starting with those who were considered the least useful for the implementation of Hitler's idea: the sick, the old, the weak and the very young. For the first time, mass gassings were used in the Belzec camp ( Belzec), near Lublin, March 17, 1942.

Five more mass killing centers were built in camps in occupied Poland, including Chełmno ( Chelmno), Sobibor ( Sobibor), Treblinka ( Treblinka), Maidanek ( Majdanek) and the largest of them - Auschwitz-Birkenau ( Auschwitz-Birkenau).

From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory, as well as from other countries friendly to Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer-autumn of 1942, when more than 300 thousand people were transported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.

Although the Nazis tried to keep the camps secret, the scale of the killing made this almost impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi activities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were heavily criticized after the war for not reacting or for not publicizing the news of the massacres.

Most likely, such inactivity was caused by several factors. First, mainly by the focus of the allies on winning the war. Secondly, there was a general misunderstanding of the news about the Holocaust, denial and disbelief that such atrocities could occur on such a scale.

At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were killed in a process that resembled a large-scale industrial operation. The labor camp employed a large number of imprisoned Jews and non-Jews; although only the Jews were gassed, thousands of other unfortunates died of starvation or disease.

End of fascist rule

In the spring of 1945, the German leadership was disintegrating amid internal divisions, while Goering and Himmler, meanwhile, tried to distance themselves from their Fuhrer and seize power. In his last will and political testament, dictated in a German bunker on April 29, Hitler blamed his defeat on "International Jewry and its collaborators" and called on the German leaders and people to follow "strict observance of racial distinctions and ruthless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples" - Jews. The next day he committed suicide. The official surrender of Germany in World War II took place just a week later, on May 8, 1945.

German troops began evacuating many of the death camps in the fall of 1944, placing prisoners under guard to move as far as possible from the front lines of the advancing enemy. These so-called "death marches" continued until the German surrender, as a result of which, according to various sources, from 250 to 375 thousand people died.

In his now classic book Surviving Auschwitz, the Italian Jewish author Primo Levi described his own condition, as well as that of his fellow prisoners in Auschwitz on the eve of the arrival of Soviet troops in the camp in January 1945: “We are in a world of death and ghosts. . The last trace of civilization has disappeared around us as well. The work of bringing people to bestial degradation, begun by the Germans at the zenith of their glory, was carried to the end by the Germans, distraught from defeat.

Consequences of the Holocaust

The wounds of the Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah ( Shoah), or disaster, healed slowly. The surviving prisoners from the camps were never able to return home, as in many cases they lost their families and were condemned by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, an unprecedented number of refugees, prisoners of war and other migrants moved throughout Europe in the late 1940s.

In an attempt to punish the perpetrators of the Holocaust, the Allies organized the Nuremberg trials of 1945-1946, which brought to light all the horrific atrocities of the Nazis. In 1948, increasing pressure on the Allied Powers to establish a sovereign homeland, a national home, for Jewish Holocaust survivors led to a mandate to establish the State of Israel.

Over the following decades, ordinary Germans grappled with the bitter legacy of the Holocaust as survivors and victims' families tried to reclaim wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years.

Beginning in 1953, the German government made payments to individual Jews and the Jewish people as a way to acknowledge the responsibility of the German people for crimes committed on their behalf.

The history of the Second World War is not only “pages of valor and glory”, but also a tragic tale of the suffering of millions of people. The story about the Holocaust helps schoolchildren to imagine the picture of war and genocide carried out by the Nazis in a more three-dimensional way.
The purpose of the manual is to help the teacher introduce the theme of the Holocaust into the narrative of the causes and events of the war.
Of course, this is not easy. Many teachers prefer not to touch on this topic because of its versatility and complexity.
First of all, the teacher does not have enough hours to talk about a person in war and during war, about his suffering, about how war breaks people's lives and destinies, about how difficult it is to save oneself in extreme situations.
The papers are grouped under five headings. All of them can become the basis of an elective.
Some teachers consider it possible to time the story of the Holocaust to the memorable dates of the calendar, for example, the anniversaries of the Wannsee Conference, the shooting at Babi Yar, the liberation of Auschwitz.
There is another option. It seems possible to talk about the Holocaust in the context of topics included in existing programs. Information about the events of the Catastrophe can form an organic whole with a presentation of other events of the war.
The main place should be occupied by the organization of students' work on documents, their analysis under the guidance of a teacher or independently - in the classroom or at home. This form of training will make it possible to comprehend the document as a historical source and monument of the era, to teach how to work with it.
The most productive form of studying documents is group work.
In this case, all students should be provided with texts. To do this, it is enough to have 4-5 copies of the documents collected in the manual.
If the history room has the appropriate equipment (epiprojector, graph projector), you can project the document onto the screen, which will help students concentrate and create favorable conditions for teamwork. It is possible to place documents on the stand or on the wall. The materials placed on the stand are used by the teacher and students during the lesson at all its stages.
Here's what the paper workflow might look like in a lesson on the topic "The Nazis came to power in Germany."
The teacher's task is to help students get an idea of ​​how the country gradually turned into a totalitarian state. Students will inevitably come across new and difficult theoretical positions, concepts that are not explained at all in most modern history textbooks.
Methods for introducing documents into the fabric of the lesson can be different. When working with texts, the teacher writes on the blackboard (or introduces using banners for a graph projector, computer display) key concepts: racism, national discrimination, anti-Semitism, human rights, genocide. Students are invited to reveal one of these concepts, based on documents (orally or in a short written message).
Another example is the study of the topic “Nazi occupation regime on the territory of the USSR” (course “History of Russia”, XI grade).
When studying this topic, we are talking about the goals of the invaders in the occupied territories, about economic exploitation, about the attitude towards the population, about the destruction of "hostile elements" in the conquered zones (the Nazis included Jews among such "elements"). The documents included in the manual allow you to talk about the last two thematic stories. In the general scenario of the disclosure of the topic, these plots are important because they provide an opportunity to show how the Nazis suppressed the human dignity of those living in the occupied territory, how the terror regime was established and implemented.
To organize work on questions for documents, the teacher distributes students into groups (4-5 students in each).
The lesson can start with a short introduction by the teacher, in which he talks about the huge number of victims, not only on the battlefield, but also in the occupied territory. The papers are then distributed to the students. One group of schoolchildren receives a document “From the protocol of the interrogation of SS Gruppenfuehrer Ohlendorf”, the other gets acquainted with excerpts from the diary of Olga Shargorodskaya, a resident of Yalta. The third group of students reads an excerpt from the diary of a student from Mariupol, Sarah Gleich. Another group of schoolchildren receive a photo document “Prisoners of the Ghetto in Smolensk” and excerpts from a diary kept by 16-year-old Kremenets schoolboy Roman Kravchenko.
Collectively prepare answers to the proposed questions. The teacher leads the discussion by involving students in the discussion of problems.
Another topic related to the Holocaust is the "Resistance Movement". When studying it, it is possible to emphasize the general humanistic motives of this movement - the nobility of goals, the heroism and self-sacrifice of its participants, the solidarity of representatives of different peoples participating in this movement.
It is appropriate to note the participation of the Jewish population in this struggle. The teacher can bring to the attention of schoolchildren calls for an uprising in the Vilnius ghetto, documents about the actions of an underground detachment of children, about the actions of underground workers in Minsk (all these texts are reproduced in the manual).
The schemes of conducting lessons discussed above can also be used in the optional (special course) classes on the history of the Holocaust. Some of his classes should be devoted to watching and discussing fragments of documentaries and feature films related to the events of the Second World War, meetings with ghetto prisoners and members of the Resistance.
Documents about the Holocaust, collected in the manual, can also serve as material for a conversation between a teacher and elementary school students. In this context, we should mention the story of an underground detachment of children in the ghetto, the memoirs of 12-year-old ghetto prisoner Roman Levin about his desire to survive, stories about the righteous people of the world.
Sheets of a package of documentary materials can become the basis of expositions that students, under the guidance of a teacher, prepare after school hours. In this case, publications of newspapers and magazines are also used. Such stands can be dedicated to memorable dates from the history of the Holocaust - the anniversaries of Kristallnacht or the Wannsee Conference, the Nuremberg trials or the execution in Babi Yar, the release of prisoners of death camps. Similar stands can be hung in the history room or in the recreation area adjacent to the room.
Documents that have the power of emotional impact, evoke empathy (for example, diary entries, photographs, etc.) can be the starting point for search work, for participation in essay competitions, etc.

The history of mankind, perhaps, does not remember a more cruel crime than the Holocaust. From the Greek language, this term is translated as "burnt offering", it became widespread only after the 1950s. The story of the victims of the Holocaust is the terrible catastrophe of European Jewry, which began in 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and established the absolute dictatorship of the National Socialists. Pseudo-scientific racial theories and the desire to cleanse the German nation of those who were considered objectionable served as the guide of the new government. The most devastating blow then had to be experienced by the Jews, and even children became victims of the Holocaust.

• Why were Jews the victims of the Holocaust?
  • History of hatred for Jews
  • What do the experts say?
• Number of victims of the Holocaust
• International Holocaust Remembrance Day
• Museums of Holocaust victims

Why were Jews the victims of the Holocaust?

History of hatred for Jews

To the question of why it was the Jews who became victims of the Holocaust, scientists and historians have several reasonable answers, and all of them originate in the mists of time.

Historically, Jews lived outside their homeland for many centuries. Living on the territory of other peoples, they retained their language and religion. In appearance, clothing and traditions, they differed from Europeans. When Christianity arose, Judeophobic ideas about Jews began to form. The Catholic Church accused them of killing Jesus Christ.

In the 5th century, Augustine the Blessed formulated the “correct” Christian attitude towards people of Jewish origin: Jews cannot be killed, but they can and should be humiliated. Thus, the religious consciousness perceived the image of the Jew as something negative, impure. As a result, Jews had to live in separate quarters, their birth rate and freedom of movement were limited by the authorities. They were expelled from different states, including Russia. The connection between religious Judeophobia and the state was very close.

Video about the history of Holocaust victims:

The concept of "anti-Semitism" first appeared in the 19th century. Anti-Semitic sentiments were especially popular in Germany. Hitler, who came to power, unified them in the Nazi ideology and sentenced the Jews to complete annihilation. Nazi ideology assumed that the fault of the Jews lay in the very fact of their birth.

In addition, the list of victims of the Holocaust included all the "subhuman" and "inferior", which were considered all Slavic peoples, homosexuals, gypsies, mentally ill.

The Nazis set themselves the goal of wiping out the Jews as a biological species, making the Holocaust their official policy.

What do the experts say?

Experts express different opinions about the reasons for such a large-scale and unprecedented destruction of people. It is especially unclear why millions of ordinary German citizens participated in this process.

• Daniel Goldhagen considers the main cause of the Holocaust to be anti-Semitism (national intolerance), which at that time massively took over the German consciousness.
• Yehuda Bauer, a leading specialist on the Holocaust, has a similar opinion on this matter.
• The German historian and journalist Gotz Ali has suggested that the Nazis supported the policy of genocide because of the property taken from the victims and appropriated by ordinary Germans.
• According to the German psychologist Erich Fromm, the cause of the Holocaust lies in the malignant destructiveness that is inherent in the entire biological human race.

Number of victims of the Holocaust

The number of victims of the Holocaust is horrifying: during World War II, the Nazis destroyed 6 million Jews. However, at present, many researchers argue that in fact there were much more Nazi camps than was commonly believed a few years ago. Accordingly, the number of victims also increases.

Historians have discovered about 42 thousand institutions in which the Nazis isolated, punished and destroyed both Jewish and other groups of the population considered inferior. They carried out this policy in vast territories - from France to the USSR. But the largest number of repressive institutions were in Poland and Germany.

So, in 2000, a project was launched, the purpose of which was to search for death camps, forced labor camps, medical centers in which pregnant women had abortions, prisoner of war camps and brothels, whose kept women were forced to serve the German military. In total, more than 400 scientists took part in the project, taking into account the real facts and memories of the victims of the Holocaust.

After the work done, American researchers released new figures showing how many victims of the Holocaust were actually: about 20 million people.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is celebrated on January 27th. This day was approved by the UN General Assembly in 2005, calling on all member countries to develop and educate programs aimed at ensuring that the lessons of the Holocaust are preserved in the memory of all subsequent generations. The people of the world must remember these terrible events in order to be able to prevent future acts of genocide. Many countries around the world have created memorials and museums that are dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust. Every year on January 27, mourning ceremonies, commemorative events and actions are held there.

Such events are also held on this day in the Auschwitz memorial camp - a complex of Nazi concentration camps and death camps, where Slavs and Jews - victims of the Holocaust - died en masse in 1940-1945.

According to many scientists, it is very difficult for the human mind to fully comprehend the genocide that originated in a state rich in spiritual traditions and developed culture. These monstrous events took place in civilized Europe practically before the eyes of the whole world. To ensure that such a Holocaust will never happen again, people must strive to understand its origins and consequences.

(Holocaust, The).

Auschwitz, a Polish village that housed one of the largest Nazi concentration camps, has become a symbol of mass murder and the horrors of the Holocaust. One of the many Nazi death camps personifies in the public mind the entire system of mass deportation, humiliation, and killing of people created by the German Nazis during World War II. The term "holocaust", commonly used to refer to the Nazi persecution and ruthless extermination of 6 million Jews in 1933-45, has become a symbol of immeasurable suffering and private and mass manifestations of evil in the 20th century. First floor. This century, which the New Cambridge Modern History refers to as the "era of violence," was marked by two violent climaxes, the Holocaust and Hiroshima.

The analysis of historians showed how insufficient and indifferent the reaction of the inhabitants of Germany and other countries was, in front of the eyes of the covered Nazis persecuted the Jews. Historians accuse the Allied governments of not giving the order to bomb Auschwitz and the roads leading to it during the war with Germany. Even Jewish organizations in America have been criticized for not doing enough to save European Jews. However, the greatest burden of responsibility fell on the Christian churches, especially in Germany, for their indifference and inaction before and during the Holocaust. In addition, certain provisions of the Christian faith and the actual behavior of Christians nurtured anti-Judaism, which led to the fact that the people supported radical anti-Semitic movements until 1933. An ominous imprint on the German Lutheran tradition was left by the anti-Semitic statements of Martin Luther in 1543, as well as rabid anti-Semitism A. Shteker, Crimea since 1874 was a court preacher. In addition, the traditional Christian doctrine of "damned Jews" who were accused of deicide was sometimes perceived as a call for anti-Semitic actions. The Second Vatican Council, in a 1965 document, recognized the perniciousness of this teaching: one cannot lay the blame on all the Jews who lived at that time, and on the Jews of today. Protestants also revised their teaching about the Jews. In 1980, the synod of the Rhineland of the German Evangelical (Protestant) Church enthusiastically adopted the policy document "Resolution on the resumption of relations between Christians and Jews." Describing the Holocaust as a turning point and a prelude to a new relationship, the resolution recognizes the "common responsibility and guilt of German Christianity." It goes on to say that the continued existence of Jewry and the creation of the State of Israel signify God's loyalty to his people. Jews and Christians are proclaimed God's witnesses before the world and before each other; at the same time, the resolution notes that the Church cannot preach to the Jewish people on an equal footing with other peoples. Thus, the document touches on the delicate topic of a mission to the Jews, which some Jews after the Holocaust identify with the desire for spiritual genocide. They ask the question: don't Christians want to make the world free of Jews (Judenrein)! At least one evangelical preacher, Billy Graham, refrains from preaching to Jews.

Evolving political and racist anti-Semitism in con. XIX beginning The 20th century, along with the economic and social chaos in Germany after the First World War, created favorable conditions for Nazi propaganda. After 30 Jan. 1933 Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor, the Nazi regime's hardening of the Jews can be divided into four stages.

193335 Jews were subjected to episodic persecution in their economic and industrial activities, incl. economic boycott of Jewish business (April 1, 1933), the expulsion of Jews from public service (April 7, 1933) and a ban on basic professions.

193538 The infringement of civil rights, the culmination of which was the so-called. Nuremberg Laws: Jews were deprived of German citizenship, they were forbidden to marry non-Jews. Beginning of "Aryanization" of Jewish property and capital.

193841 Deportations and pogroms, the beginning of the Crimea was laid by Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938). Expropriation of Jewish business and sending Jews to concentration camps.

194145 Implementation of the plan for the physical extermination of the Jews, starting in June 1941 German invasion of Russia; the systematic extermination of Jews by special mobile groups and gas in gas chambers. After the Wannsee Conference in Berlin (January 20, 1942), concentration camps equipped with gas chambers and crematoria become centers of mass extermination.

The Nazi phrase about the "final solution" of the Jewish question was heard at the Wannsee Conference, where top officials coordinated their activities, working out practical steps towards the Jews. Now, to denote the mass destruction of European Jews, two words are used: "holocaust" (derived from the Greek word for a burnt offering) and the Jewish Shoah (in the Bible: "catastrophe", "destruction", "darkness", "emptiness") . Both words were first used in Israel in relation to the Nazi anti-Jewish program: "Shoah" in 1940, and "holocaust" between 1957 and 1959.

The strong condemnation of the Holocaust influenced the modern human rights movement. The "Genocide Convention" of the United Nations, the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" were adopted, and many national and international human rights groups emerged. Fighters against Nazism, courageous people like Raoul Wallenberg, who saved Jews, have become real historical examples for today's human rights activists. Many Christians helped Jews to be saved, but the Church as an institution remained silent and did not take open, fearless, concerted actions to help the persecuted. The German Protestant Confessional Church cared about the fate of baptized Jews, but not about Jews as such.

The Holocaust is studied by scientists working in various fields of psychology, sociology, political science, literature, history, and theology. In addition to the inevitable ethical questions, in the course of research, questions about theodicy and the Jewish roots of Christianity were again raised. The uniqueness and universality of the Holocaust has been widely discussed. In Holocaust stories, the special wisdom and mercy of survivors serve as a lesson to all of us.

R. zerner (translated by Yu.T.) Bibliography: L.S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 19331945; H.L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 19381945; R. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews; B.L. Shervin and S.G. Ament, Encountering the Holocaust: An Interdisciplinary Survey; J. Sloan, ed., Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum; J. Blatter and S. MiIton,/lr(of the Holocaust; T. Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps; P. Friedman, Their Brothers Keepers; L. L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination; I. Leitner, Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of A uschwitz; E. Wiesel, Night; E. Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust; E. Fleisehner, Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? B. Klappert and H. Starek, eds., Umkehrund Emeuentng, C. Klein, AntiJudaism in Christian Theology, F. Littell and H. G. Locke, eds., The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust, R. L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz and The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future R. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, M. Bergman and M. Jucovy, eds., Generations of the Holocaust, H. Krystal, ed., Massive Psychic Trauma.

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