The Holocaust. What was it and how was it possible?

The Holocaust ... What is this? Apocalypse? Plague of hatred for the whole nation? These are the most terrible crimes of the "brown plague" against humanity. Sophisticated destruction and extermination of an entire people. This historic event is a universal tragedy.

For the first time, the "Holocaust" as a term was used in the first decade of the 20th century. In use, the word came from the Greek Bible texts and meant a "burnt offering." It was used in relation to Jewish pogroms, to the genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Later, with the advent of Hitler in Germany, Nazi racial policies based on the concept of racial hygiene were implemented. Its essence was the division of people into representatives of the superior race and elements of the lower races. A proper selection was required. He expressed himself in the persecution, sterilization, the destruction of people belonging to the group of "inferior": people with physical and mental disabilities, Roma, Slavs, Jews, political opponents, homosexuals and members of other minorities and groups. This bureaucratic, methodically organized operation to exterminate people was called the "Holocaust." What is this ideology, striking thorough elaboration and detailed elaboration of measures aimed primarily at the complete annihilation of an entire people?

The Jewish Holocaust was described in the books of Elie Wiesel, a Jewish writer who passed through the hell of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. After his first book "And the world was silent," published in 1956, the word "holocaust" began to be written with a capital letter.

From the beginning of the Nazi regime, concentration camps were established, where Jews, Roma and other victims of racial and ethnic hatred were sent. For the control of the situation, forced labor camps, ghettos for the Jewish population were created. For the further deportation of people, transfer camps operated. A huge number of them functioned throughout Germany and the occupied territories.

In 1938, the world was shocked by the events of Kristallnacht. It was a coordinated pogrom of Jews, many of whom were maimed or killed, thousands of people were sent to concentration camps.

During the war, special punitive detachments, the so-called Einsatzgruppen, followed the army to carry out mass destruction operations for the lower strata of the population, including Jews and Gypsies. In the occupied territories, hundreds of thousands of people were shot, sent to the ghetto and to the death camps.

At the end of the war, the SS men, with the aim of preventing the release of a large number of prisoners by the Allied troops, carried them on foot marches and trains. These were the so-called "death marches". Until May 7, 1945, a similar Holocaust continued. What is it It was? This was the deliberate extermination of the Jews, which was divided into three stages. By 1940 it was planned to solve the Jewish question by mass eviction from Germany and other regions it occupied. The second stage was the beginning of the concentration of all Jews in the ghetto, which opened in Poland and other eastern regions occupied by Germany. This continued until 1942. The third stage presupposed a final solution of the Jewish question, the essence of which consisted precisely in the planned physical destruction of the people.

People were killed, the local culture of the Jews, the memory of this unique integral part of the culture of Eastern Europe was destroyed. In a sense, the Nazis successfully solved the Jewish question.

Is there any way to understand the Holocaust? What is it? Anti-Semitism, at that time inherent in the mass German consciousness, or malignant destructiveness, characteristic of the human race? If by the thirties the Jewish population was about 8 million, by the end of the "burnt-in" period, it had barely reached 2 million. Together with the Jewish people, the "brown plague" buried representatives of other nationalities. Hunger, more than 31 million Slavs and up to 500 thousand Gypsies were starved, tortured and killed.

The largest death camps were located in Poland. One of the most highly productive from the standpoint of the technology of destroying people was the Auschwitz camp, or Auschwitz (in German). Here in a day in the crematoriums and gas chambers 12 thousand people died.

On January 27, one of the largest concentration camps of death was released. This January day became synonymous with the most terrible crime against humanity in history, and was subsequently declared a commemoration day for the victims of the Holocaust.

In 2005, a colossal monument to the victims of the Holocaust was opened in Berlin in the form of a stone labyrinth created from more than 2,700 concrete slabs of various heights. Passing between them, you notice that it is rather difficult to find a way out. Such a plan of P. Eisenman, an American architect, clearly causes loss and anxiety. It was during the war that Jews experienced them - they had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

People surrounded by other people committed unprecedented and large-scale destruction of the people - the Holocaust. What is this? How did this become possible? Where did the trait pass for which you can not go, beyond which people ceased to be human?

The Holocaust is a terrible example of the misanthropic views of the Nazis. But how much after it there were still deportations, repressions, direct genocide. Is there any way to change anything? Human indifference, unwillingness or inability to feel compassion, indifference to cruelty, to another's pain, infringement of human rights or a whole people can lead to disaster again. They say that you can change the world if you change yourself.