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The Holocaust, called in Hebrew HaShoah, was the Nazi systematic slaughter of all Jews. It began officially in 1933, when Hitler and the Nazis came to political power in Germany, and it lasted until 1945, when Germany accepted military defeat at the hands of the Allies. During that time, the Nazis committed atrocities unique in the history of the world.

The process of brutalizing and tormenting Jews because they were considered a subhuman race went back to the 1920s as a major part of the Nazi platform. In 1925 Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, which emphasized the need to punish all Jews for their perfidy. However, until the Nazi policy became the law in Germany, the anti-Semitic actions of the 1920s were viewed as mere thuggery. The Holocaust is historically divided into three periods. From 1933 to 1939 the goal of Nazi Germany was to make the state free of Jews by making it financially, emotionally, and physically impossible for the Jewish population to survive there. From 1939 to 1941, Germany engaged in the mass slaughter of Jews. From 1942 to 1945 the Nazis perfected their program of genocide.

Beginning in 1933, Jews were deprived of their citizenship and forbidden to hold public office or have professional jobs. Jewish children could no longer attend public school. It became illegal for non-Jews and Jews to socialize. Jewish businesses were boycotted. Jewish books were burned. There were beatings, tortures, and humiliations. The official policy, however, was to force Jews to flee Germany, not kill them en masse.

American Jewry responded to these oppressive measures with outrage. In the 1930s the American Jewish Congress tried to arouse American public opinion against the Nazis. As part of its anti-Nazi program, it helped establish the Joint Boycott council against German products. The American Jewish Committee worked desperately to convince the Vatican, American statesmen, and even German officials to help Jews get out of Germany.

On the night of November 9, 1938, the Nazis systematically unleashed a nationwide pogrom of unmitigated violence against the Jews. So many Jewish stores and synagogues were destroyed that the riots were called the Night of Broken Glass, Kristallnacht. To add insult to injury, the Nazis then forced the Jewish community to pay for the damages. More than 15,000 Jews were rounded up and sent to German work concentration camps. The intensity of the destruction was so great that many Jews were finally convinced that there was no longer any hope for them in Germany.

Unfortunately, there was no place to run. Countries, including the United States and the British in Palestine, locked their doors against Jewish immigration. During the Holocaust years neither Pope Pious XI nor Pope Pious XII condemned the Nazi atrocities, even when the Jews of Rome were rounded up and sent to the death camps. Not wanting to alienate German Catholics, the Catholic Church carefully remained neutral throughout the Nazi atrocities.

(For an unofficial Catholic response to this statement, click here.)

Aliya Bet, the Jewish movement to transport Jews to Palestine past the British blockade, desperately tried to help Jews escape from the horror of Germany, but only a trickle succeeded.

With the conquest of Poland in 1939, Germany's policy toward the Jews changed, and the second of three periods of the Holocaust began. The Nazi High Command secretly decided on "The Final Solution," the total annihilation of world Jewry.

The first step was to isolate all Jews from the rest of society. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were crowded into tiny areas of large Polish cities, thus creating disease-ridden ghettos. At the same time, the German army gathered large groups of Jews from the conquered areas, and began systematically to shoot and dump them into large mass graves. The extermination of the Jews had begun. From 1939 to 1941, especially in Russia, there were mass slaughters of Jews. While these slaughters were enormous in scope, the Nazis began to realize that these mass murders were being accomplished with only limited efficiency. The army complained about the cost of bullets needed for the killing. Moreover, officers noted that some soldiers became demoralized at shooting naked men, women, and children day and night.

Some concentration camps were set up to work the Jews to death. As an experiment, Jews were killed with carbon monoxide from the trucks transporting them, but this method proved too slow and too costly. All of this was accomplished in official secrecy. The world didn't know of the plan; Jews in the ghettos didn't know of the plan. It was too inhuman to be believable.

At the Wannsee Conference held in January 1942 (chaired by Reinhard Heydrich and with Heinrich Muller, Adolf Eichmann and Roland Friesler in attendance) the Nazis smoothed out the logistics needed to slaughter all Jews, thus beginning the third period of the Holocaust. Extermination camps using poison gas and crematoria were created under the direction of Heinrich Himmler. It was decided to make the extermination of the Jews a systematically organized operation. After this date extermination camps were established in the east that had the capacity to kill large numbers including Belzec (15,000 a day), Sobibor (20,000), Treblinka (25,000) and Majdanek (25,000).

It has been estimated that between 1933 and 1945 a total of 1,600,000 were sent to concentration work camps. Of these, over a million died of a variety of different causes. During this period around 18 million were sent to extermination camps. Of these, historians have estimated that between five and eleven million were killed.

Adolf Eichmann took responsibility for the transportation, administrative coordination, extermination, and burning of all Polish and other foreign Jews, about seven million people. This meant moving them from the ghettos where they had been placed and transporting them to the death camps. It entailed organizing train schedules to move Jews efficiently from France, Greece, Italy, Rumania, and Hungary to the death camps and timing their schedules so as not to create wasteful, long lines of unloaded train cars.

The Nazis wasted nothing. Clothing, hair, jewelry, gold and silver teeth of the dead and near-dead were all collected and used for the military effort. Things had to run efficiently and smoothly. Eichmann was good at his work. By 1943 at just one extermination camp, Auschwitz (the largest), 10,000 Jews a day were killed every day, 365 days a year. Eichmann succeeded in increasing the rate to 12,000 Jews a day. Other death camps, never to be forgotten, included Majdanek, Birkenau, Mautausen, Dachau, Treblinka, Bergen-Belson, Theresienstadt, Buchenwald, Belzec, Sobibor, Riga, and Treblinka.

In addition, Jews were worked to death in camps. These labor camps were excuses for more torture and starvation. They also provided cheap labor for Germany's industries, including I.G. Farben and Krupp. For that reason, many Jews still refuse to buy German products produced by those firms. The death rate in the labor camps was about 80 percent.

By the end of the Holocaust, more than 6 million Jews had been slaughtered. The attempt by some moderns to "prove" that the Holocaust was a Jewish hoax is one of the great obscenities of our generation. The Nazis, always clerically efficient, kept voluminous notes on all of their actions. The piles of eye-glasses, hair, shoes, and clothing carefully stored by the Nazis were silent proof of their atrocities.

In 1939 more than 3 million Jews lived in Poland, where there were wonderful yeshivot, Jewish theatres, and synagogues. Hitler ordered that the finest examples of Jewish art from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Rumania be saved for a museum of the destroyed subhuman race. Thus, hundreds of thousands of ritual art pieces from Eastern Europe survived the Holocaust. The people weren't so fortunate. In 1946, fewer than 105,000 Polish Jews remained. Even smaller percentages of Jews survived in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Hitler's plan effectively destroyed Eastern Europe's Jewry, and they have remained small in number and socially impoverished into the 1990s.