Persecution and the Holocaust

The Holocaust — the systematic, state-sponsored murder of six million Jews and millions of others — was the most extreme consequence of Nazi racial ideology. CCEA examiners expect you to trace the escalation of anti-Semitic policy from 1933 to the Final Solution, and to understand the role of ideology, war and individual decision-making.

Nazi racial ideology

Nazi ideology was built on pseudo-scientific racism. Hitler argued in Mein Kampf that humanity was divided into races in a hierarchy of value, with the Aryan (Germanic) race at the top. Jews were presented not merely as a religious or ethnic group but as a biological threat — a "parasite" undermining German racial purity from within.

This ideology was taught in schools, propagated in posters and newspapers, and enshrined in law. It provided the justification for an escalating programme of persecution.

Phase 1: Exclusion and discrimination 1933-1939

1933: Jewish businesses were boycotted; Jews were excluded from the civil service, law and medicine.

1935 — Nuremberg Laws: Two laws fundamentally changed the legal status of Jews in Germany:

• The Reich Citizenship Law stripped Jews of German citizenship; they became "subjects" without political rights.
• The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour banned marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews.

The Nuremberg Laws affected around 500,000 German Jews.

1938 — Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass", 9-10 November 1938): Following the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jewish refugee, the Nazis orchestrated a nationwide pogrom. Around 7,500 Jewish shops were smashed, 91 Jews were killed (official figure; the real toll was higher), 267 synagogues were burned, and approximately 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. The event signalled a decisive escalation — from legal discrimination to mass violence.

After Kristallnacht, Jews were forced to pay for the damage themselves (a collective fine of one billion Reichsmarks) and were excluded from schools, theatres, cinemas and public transport.

Phase 2: Ghettoisation 1939-1942

After the invasion of Poland (September 1939), the Nazis controlled the largest Jewish population in Europe — around 3.3 million Polish Jews.

Jews in occupied territories were forced into ghettos — sealed, overcrowded urban areas from which they could not leave. The Warsaw Ghetto held over 400,000 people in appalling conditions; tens of thousands died of starvation and disease before deportations to death camps began.

The ghettos served multiple purposes: they concentrated the Jewish population for future action, expropriated their property, exploited their labour, and — through the deliberate withholding of food and medicine — killed many through attrition.

Phase 3: The Final Solution 1941-1945

The invasion of the Soviet Union (June 1941) marked a further escalation. Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) followed the German army, shooting Jews, Soviet commissars and other "undesirables" in mass executions. The largest single massacre was Babi Yar (33,000 Jews shot near Kyiv over two days in September 1941).

The Wannsee Conference (20 January 1942) was a meeting of senior Nazi officials chaired by Reinhard Heydrich that coordinated the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" — the systematic murder of all European Jews. This was not the moment the decision was made (killings had been happening for months) but the bureaucratic coordination of the process.

Death camps were established in occupied Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek. Unlike concentration camps (which used prisoners as forced labour), death camps were built specifically for mass killing using poison gas (Zyklon B at Auschwitz). Approximately 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz alone.

By 1945, approximately six million Jews had been murdered — around two-thirds of the pre-war European Jewish population. The Holocaust also killed around 200,000 Roma, 200,000 disabled people (T4 euthanasia programme), and large numbers of Soviet POWs, political prisoners, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses.

Historical debate: intentionalism vs functionalism

Historians debate how the Holocaust developed:

• Intentionalists (e.g. Lucy Dawidowicz) argue Hitler always planned to murder the Jews — it was in Mein Kampf from 1924.
• Functionalists (e.g. Hans Mommsen) argue the Holocaust evolved through a chaotic process of competing bureaucracies radicalising policy without a single master plan.
• Synthesists argue for a combination: Hitler's ideology created the direction; war and administrative pressures drove escalation.

CCEA examiners may ask you to compare historical interpretations of the Holocaust using AO4.