The Holocaust is a special term used to mention the genocide of about six million Jews in Europe during the World War II. Holocaust was basically a systematic effort of Nazi Germany backed by the state to exterminate some particular communities, for the most part the Jews.

However, there is another academic opinion that shows some broader aspect of the term Holocaust. According to this opinion, the Holocaust also refers to the execution of millions of people other than Jews, such as Romani, Soviet prisoners of war, Soviet civilians, and people with disabilities, ethnic Poles, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and other religious and political opponents. If we combine all these victims, the number will raise to eleven to seventeen million people.

Strategies of Execution

The Holocaust execution was not carried out in a single phase. So many different phases were carried out for execution. In order to purge the civil society of the Jews before Word War II, the Nazi government had passed legislation. In many areas, the concentration camps were created where the detainees were undergone unbearable toils and inhuman biological experiments.

There were some specialized units assigned this task to kill the Jews and political adversaries by shooting groups in newly conquered Eastern Europe. Generally, the Romani and Jews were kept in an overcrowded isolation before taking them to the concentration camps. He who survived the journey was put into the gas chambers for extermination.

Seizure of territory and resources are other vital features of the genocide.

Toward explaining the very WHY of Holocaust

It is believed that the prominent motivation behind the execution of Holocaust was entirely ideological that is, an imaginary world imagined by the Nazis, where Jews are supposed to have finished an international conspiracy to command over the world resources in utter conflict with an Aryan (Nazi) mission.

Each member of the Nazi Germany was a sole participant for the logistics of the mass killing. A scholar very aptly titles the atrocities carried out in Holocaust by the Nazis Germany as “a genocidal state.”

Saul Friedlander explained that not a single religious community, social group, scholarly institution, or professional association in Germany extending through Europe showed any sign of sympathy with the Jews. He further explains that there were few Christian Churches who can advocate to some extent the members of the Jews converted to Christianity.

According to Friedlander, the event of Holocaust in itself was of idiosyncratic nature, as opposed to the norms prevailing in the modern society, the unconcerned anti-Semitic practices underwent for the first time in history without any solid resistance such as, industry, churches, entrepreneurial concerns, or any other anthropological groups.

It was never seen before that the few leaders deciding the fate of a particular human community along with its old members, children and women. The Holocaust in itself was a unique event where a particular group or community was executed from the surface of the earth merely on the plea: “Kill them; they are salt of the earth!”