The term burnt offering refers to the genocide organized by the Nazi Germans, mainly of Jews, during the Second World War. You Jews and any other minority considered inferior by the Nazis, they were systemically grouped together, exploited to exhaustion, and then summarily executed. The Holocaust was part of SolutionFinal, a Nazi plan that sought to eliminate Europe's Jews, as well as other minorities such as gypsies, homosexuals and blacks.
Origin of Jew Hatred
Hatred of Jews, or anti-Semitism, in Europe has its origins in the Middle Ages, but in Germany, the anti-Semitic discourse gained strength from the nineteenth century. With the end of World War I and the economic crisis in Weimar Republic (1918-1933), the political discourse of the Austrian adolf hitler, leader of Nazism, gained ground from the 1920s.
In his book, "MineFight” (meinKampf, in German), Hitler defended the idea of the supposed superiority of the German race (called the Aryan race) and the creation of the so-called “space
vital” (lebensraum, in German), which preached the existence of an empire for the Aryan race that would live at the expense of the exploitation of other peoples considered “inferior”.Once in power, Hitler used all possible tools to carry out the persecution of the Jews: from the indoctrination of German youth to the creation of forced labor camps and the realization in pogroms – violent acts concentrated against a group.
With the beginning of World War II, numerous hypotheses were discussed about the fate of Jews and other persecuted minorities: it was considered letting them starve to death in a project that estimated the deaths of millions of people or sending all Jews to Madagascar, in Africa. Finally, the chosen solution – as it was the most viable and Hitler's favorite – was the creation of ghettos and more fieldsinworkforcedandinextermination in territories conquered with the use of firing squads.
The architects of the holocaust: Heirinch Himmler (left) and Reinhard Heydrich (center) in Paris, 1940 **
As the Nazi project was put into practice, ghettos were created in various places, especially in Poland, responsible for bringing together the Jewish population. Ghettos were forced labor camps where Jewish labor was exploited and also places of detention. In the Warsaw ghetto, for example, more than 400,000 Jews were gathered in a space of three square kilometers. Jews from all parts of Europe were sent to the ghettos and many died of hunger and disease. Many others were not even sent to the ghettos, as they were executed.
The use of concentration camps was expanded from 1940 and, in that same year, the largest concentration camp was created: Auschwitz, in which more than a million people died. Other concentration and extermination camps used in the holocaust were Buchenwald, birkenau, Dachau, Treblinka etc.
The project of extermination of the Jews was carried out mainly by ReinhardTristanEugenHeydrich and HeinrichHimmler, that ahead of Einsatzgruppen and of the SS, respectively, created veritable death squads, trained for the extermination of minorities that were under Nazi control. Death in concentration camps occurred due to hunger, disease, physical exhaustion as a result of forced labor, shooting, in addition to the gas chambers, where the pesticide was used Zyklon B.
*Image credits: Lucky Team Studio and Shutterstock
**Image credits: Everett Historical and Shutterstock
By Daniel Neves
Graduated in History
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/o-que-e/historia/o-que-e-holocausto.htm
