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threat to German society was removed. In a mass crack-
down, hundreds were detained in the first few days, and tens
of thousands in succeeding weeks.
Then, on March 20, 1933, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich
Himmler announced the establishment of the first com-
pound for political prisoners, about fifteen kilometers north-
west of Munich, on the outskirts of the town of Dachau. Other
camps soon followed, among them Oranienburg, Papenburg,
Esterwegen, Kemna, Lichtenburg, and Börgermoor.
These camps were originally places of political imprison-
ment. In their most basic sense they removed political oppo-
sition from the midst of the community and intimidated the
population into accepting the Nazi regime.
Jews had often previously been arrested for transgressing
within the framework of the existing political classifications,
but from 1935 onward, due largely to the effects of the
so-called Nuremberg Laws on Citizenship and Race, they
were frequently victimized for their Jewishness alone.
According to these laws, the formal status of Jews in the Nazi
state was defined and enacted. Jewish businesses were boy-
cotted, Jewish doctors were excluded from public hospitals
and only permitted to practice on other Jews, Jewish judicial
figures were dismissed and disbarred, and Jewish students
were expelled from universities. Jews were excluded increas-
ingly from participation in all forms of German life. The
Nuremberg Laws also withdrew from Jews the privilege
of German citizenship. It became illegal for a Jew and a
non-Jew to marry or engage in sexual relationships. Life was
to be made so intolerable for Jews that they would seek to
The Holocaust is the term in English most closely identified
with the attempt by Germany’s National Socialist regime,
together with its European allies and collaborators, to exter-
minate the Jews of Europe during the period of World War
II—particularly during its most destructive phase between
1941 and 1944. While an exact number of those murdered is
impossible to determine, the best estimates settle at a figure
approximating around 6 million Jews, one million of whom
were children under the age of 12 and half a million of whom
were aged between 12 and 18.
While the term “Holocaust” has more and more entered
common parlance in order to describe the event, two other
terms are also employed, particularly within the Jewish
world. The Hebrew word Churban, or “catastrophe,” which
historically has been employed to describe the destruction of
the two temples in Jerusalem, is one of these; the other, uti-
lized increasingly today, is the Hebrew term Shoah (“calam-
ity,” or, sometimes, “destruction”).
The first step on the road to the Holocaust can be said to
have taken place on the night of February 27, 1933, when the
Reichstag building in Berlin, the home of the German parlia-
ment, was set on fire. The day after the fire, on the pretext
that it had been set by communists and that a left-wing revo-
lution was imminent, newly appointed chancellor Adolf
Hitler persuaded President Paul von Hindenburg to sign a
Decree for the Protection of the People and the State, sus-
pending all the basic civil and individual liberties guaranteed
under the constitution. It empowered the government to
take such steps as were necessary to ensure that the current
Historical Introduction
