The Holocaust | World History | Khan Academy

In this video, we're going to talk about what is one of the darkest chapters in human history: the Holocaust, which involved the massacre of roughly 6 million Jews and as many as 11 million civilians in total. In order to understand the Holocaust, we're going to start at World War One. Even prior to World War One, there were massacres, especially of Jews, in places like the Russian Empire. The term pogrom is a Russian word meaning these violent riots or attacks on people for their ethnicity, and there were several throughout the 19th century. However, they go back even before that word was coined, as early as the First Crusades. Famously, in the Rhineland, many of the Jewish people were killed and attacked, and you had a solid thread of anti-Semitism throughout much of Europe, including Germany and Eastern Europe, as we got up to and through World War One.

As we've talked about in other videos, the Central Powers lost World War One, and the Treaty of Versailles placed a lot of the blame on Germany. The national pride of Germany had been shattered; they had lost this war, lost territory, and their economy was in shambles. They're paying reparations, and it is in that context that the National Socialist Party officially forms in 1920, coming out of the German Workers' Party. They focused on ideas of national identity and were, from the start, against ethnic groups, blaming their problems—including the loss of World War One—often on these ethnic groups. In 1921, Hitler, who had fought during World War One and based on some of his writings seemed to have found a lot of meaning during the war, becomes the National Socialist Party leader.

The National Socialist gets abbreviated as Nazi. In 1923, Hitler tries to begin an overthrow of the government, but his coup is unsuccessful, and he is imprisoned. It is while in prison that he writes down his belief system that eventually gets published upon his release in 1925 under the title "Mein Kampf," which can be translated as "My Struggle" or "My Battle."

This is just an excerpt from Mein Kampf: "If we pass all the causes of the German collapse in review, the ultimate and most decisive remains the failure to recognize the racial problem and especially the Jewish menace. The defeats on the battlefield in August 1918," so he's referring to the end of World War One, "would have been child's play to bear. They stood in no proportion to the victories of our people. It was not they that caused our downfall; no, it was brought about by that power which prepared these defeats by systematically, over many decades, robbing our people of the political and moral instincts and forces which alone make nations capable and hence worthy of existence."

He's blaming Germany's defeat in World War One on a relatively small ethnic group. As you can see, a very twisted mind, very twisted thinking: "The lost purity of the blood alone destroys inner happiness forever." So he's very caught up with these ideas of purity; plunges man into the abyss for all time, and the consequences can never more be eliminated from body and spirit.

Over time, what starts off as this fringe leader of a fringe party, as we go into the '20s and as the German economy gets even worse, and there's hyperinflation, more and more people start to throw their support behind these extremists. As we go into the '30s, the National Socialist Party is actually able to get reasonable representation in the German Parliament, and in 1933, the president of Germany appoints Hitler to be chancellor, which is equivalent to being prime minister, despite the Nazis not having a majority in Parliament.

This is the official beginning of what the Nazis will call the Third Reich. Reich translates as realm; they considered the First Reich to be the Holy Roman Empire, and they refer to the Second Reich as the German Empire after the Holy Roman Empire, up and through World War One. They don't consider the Weimar Republic, which they hate, the Third Reich; they consider that the interim Reich, and they consider themselves the Third Reich, the heir to the German Empire and the Holy Roman Empire.

Once Hitler and the Nazis get power, they really get a stranglehold on it. They start persecuting their political opponents, both outside the party and inside the party, and they also start to take action on these twisted ideas Hitler expressed in Mein Kampf. In 1935, they are able to pass the Nuremberg Laws, which strip German Jews of their citizenship. It forbids intermarrying between non-Jewish Germans and Jews. This is only one of many steps that will continue to demean the rights of Jews inside Germany.

In 1938, you have what is known as Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass. Hundreds of synagogues are burned, thousands of Jewish businesses are destroyed, and many Jews are killed that night. Then, as we get into 1939, Hitler's armies famously invade Poland, beginning what many historians consider to be the start of World War II. What would eventually be known as the Holocaust goes into full effect in 1941. Jews are sometimes executed in the streets, in their homes; many of them are captured and sent to concentration camps.

To get a sense of the scale of this operation, we have this excerpt from Michael Berenbaum's book, "The World Must Know": "The policy of extermination involved every level of German society and marshaled the entire apparatus of the German bureaucracy. Parish churches and the Interior Ministry supplied the birth records that defined and isolated Jews. The post office delivered the notifications of definition, expropriation, denaturalization, and deportation. The Finance Ministry confiscated Jewish wealth and property. German industrial and commercial firms fired Jewish workers, officers, and board members, even disenfranchising Jewish stockholders. The universities refused to admit Jewish students, denied degrees to those already enrolled, and dismissed Jewish faculty. Government transportation bureaus handled the billing arrangements with the railroads for the trains that carried Jews to their death."

So the point that's being made here is this could not be done just with Hitler and some of his close associates to kill millions of people on this scale; you needed an entire apparatus, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people were involved in some way. At least several hundred thousand people within Germany must have been aware of what was happening.

Needless to say, the death toll was considerable. This here is a visual depiction of the percentage of the Jewish population that was killed in various regions. As you can see, 80 to 90 percent of the Jewish population in Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland was killed during the Holocaust. In the territories occupied by Germany in Russia during World War II, almost as many have been killed. In France and Italy, a fifth to a quarter of the population was killed.

To put things in more human terms, this is a picture of children who were in Auschwitz, one of the most infamous concentration camps, and you can see their names, their ages, and then when they were killed. Historians believe five to six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, including a million and a half children. This was two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe. But the Holocaust went further; it's believed that over 10 million civilians were killed during the Holocaust. Through over three million prisoners of war were killed, and other people, including several hundred thousand Romani—often referred to as Gypsies—several hundred thousand people with disabilities, and many thousands of homosexuals were all put to death during the Holocaust.

Now we've covered a lot of world history, and a lot of it, unfortunately, has a lot of death, a lot of destruction, and sometimes targeting people for their ethnicity. But never in world history have we seen something at this scale, and because it seemed to be a relatively new concept, a term was coined: genocide. It was coined by Rafael Lemkin, who was a Holocaust survivor and had 49 members of his family killed during the Holocaust. It means killing of a people, "geno," coming from a people or family, and "cide," killing.

But maybe even more interesting than the word definition itself is thinking about why this actually happened, and maybe even more importantly, how society can avoid it. I'll leave you with that question: What do you think was the reason why this happened, and do you think we have a risk of that happening in the future? How can we prevent it?