Holocaust

The Holocaust refers primarily to the effort to destroy the European Jewry under National Socialist German rule during World War II, an attempt that horrified the world, gave momentum to the ending of the war, and spurred the establishment of an independent state of Israel. The term stems from the Greek word holokau[s]ton, a translation of the Hebrew word olah, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God. Used before for other human catastrophes, after 1945 the word Holocaust began to be employed exclusively for the persecution and annihilation of the European Jews by National Socialist Germany after 1933 and is, nowadays, widely accepted as the global coin for these events. While some scholars include the millions of other victims, for example, gypsies or Soviet POWs (prisoners of war), for others, the Holocaust specifically denotes the systematic extermination of approximately 5.7 million Jews from 1941 to 1945.

The National Socialists defined Jews by the religion of their parents and grandparents. Therefore, many Christians of Jewish origin also became targets of the radical expulsion policies after 1933 at both the national and local levels in the German state. The Nazis attacked not only individual Jews but also their religious institutions and set ablaze more than 1,000 synagogues in Germany and in recently annexed Austria during the notorious Kristallnacht of 1938. The next radical steps of segregation, the ban on Jewish businesses, forced labor, and expropriation, were first introduced in greater Germany and later in all countries occupied by the Third Reich. When most emigration routes were blocked and Poland was brutally conquered in the fall of 1939, the Germans forced hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews to live in ghettos or labor camps. During World War II, an estimated 1 million Jewish forced laborers toiled for the German economy in Europe. The genocide started with mass shootings by SS (Shutzstaffel) and security police squads during the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. Between 1942 and 1944, millions of Jews deported from all over Europe—even with the help of allies such as Slovakia and Vichy-France—were extinguished in the gas chambers in death camps at Auschwitz, Sobibór, and Treblinka.

Neither the Protestant nor the Catholic churches in Germany or other European countries spoke out effectively against the persecution and mass murder. Only a few Christians stood up and helped the Jews survive. Theologians of all religions continue to debate the horrible events and especially the question of how one can still believe in God after this terrible human catastrophe.