Annihilation: The Destruction of European Jews

Germany, 1933. Adolf Hitler, at the head of the Nazi Party, has just become Chancellor and is faced with leading a republic in the throes of economic crisis and rampant inflation. Hitler used the cult of personality nurtured by his propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, who spread the Nazis xenophobic and anti-Semitic ideology, which Hitler had been touting since the First World War.

In 1938, the Third Reich annexed Austria and applied a policy of systematic expulsion of foreign Jews resident on its territory. By 1 January 1939, there were no longer any Jewish businesses on Reich soil. The situation of German Jews grew worse: banished from German society, demonized by the regime, they were presented as the enemy within, but no longer had any possibility of leaving the country.

By June 1940, Nazi Germany had occupied Paris. France was cut in two. North of the demarcation line was the German-occupied zone and to the south was a zone headed by Marshal Petain, whose seat of government was in the central spa town of Vichy. The Vichy regime very quickly, and without pressure from the Germans, passed the first Jewish laws.

Leading historians reflect on the barbarity of the Holocaust. By 1941, the Nazis were using gas as the hideous method for mass killings at their death camps - including Auschwitz.

In the Warsaw ghetto, Emanuel Ringelblum and the other members of the documentary group Oyneg Shabbos collected whatever they could to recount life in the ghetto. When they learn of the death at Chelmno of Jews from neighboring towns and from the Lodz ghetto at the end of 1941, they realized that the Nazis and their local auxiliaries had embarked on an operation of annihilation.

By summer 1942, deportations were systematic across those parts of Europe occupied by the Nazis. The convoys which arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau came from Poland, also western and southern Europe. Hitler issued an order for all Polish Jews to be killed before December 1942. The pace of deportations picked up, and the children from the ghetto of Lodz were deported starting from early September.

On 20 November 1945, the trial of the top brass of the Third Reich, including Goring, opened in Nuremberg, the city where the anti-Jewish laws were drawn up in 1935. One year later, the international military tribunal sentenced 12 of the accused to death, and seven to jail. Some Jewish witnesses testified, and only Hans Frank, the Governor General of Poland, acknowledged the persecution of Jews.

Last in the deeply moving series about the Holocaust. While the hunt to find surviving Nazis continues today, efforts are being made to preserve the memory of their tragic victims.