Holocaust

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There can be a tendency sometimes to think of the Holocaust in very singular ways. It seems to be assumed that Hitler’s warped and abhorrent intentions were seamlessly translated into practical action by a cabal of loyal followers and enforced in purpose-built “camps”. There is also a sense that it was systemisation and bureaucratisation more than individual agency that propelled this process forward once it had begun. This idea is not only inaccurate; I think it’s dangerous. I think it will all be over soon and yet up to now, I had hoped to see you again,” the author wrote. “My dear, try to understand that in these conditions, one cannot expect a natural end. In any case, I am fighting for life and I will die with you in my heart.” This is the ground the camps were figuratively built on. The fact that such a place – a mass grave of potentially tens of thousands – could exist, unmarked and unexplored in a modern European nation, is a profoundly disturbing thing. I believe, however, that it is something we need face up to. The invasion of the Soviet Union was a turning point in the course of the war and the Holocaust. As the Nazis occupied Soviet countries in the East, they slaughtered hundreds of thousands of non-combatants that they considered ‘enemies’ within these territories. The challenge had been to “get beyond some of the clichés and think about how catastrophic the loss remains — and how senseless it was”.

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Charlie English’s book The Gallery of Miracles and Madness, which follows the stories of artists in asylums studied by Hans Prinzhorn, suggests that the fusion of Hitler’s attitudes to disability and art (particularly artists’ explorations of insanity in the 1920s and 30s, which were prompted by Prinzhorn’s study) was an essential feature of his grotesque vision for Germany that led to the programmes of murder and genocide. Uncovering this story is historian James Bulgin. James created the Holocaust galleries at the Imperial War Museum; now he examines a chapter of the Holocaust that has been left largely unexplored for more than 80 years. After six years in development, the IWM unveiled its new Holocaust Galleries last October. The redeveloped exhibition came after extensive consultation with survivors and their families – many of whom were aware it would be the last chance they had to shape how their stories are told. “One survivor gripped my hands really tightly and said ‘please just take care of our history’,” says James Bulgin, the IWM’s head of content. “It was a profound moment.”

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The invasion of Poland and the start of the war in Europe provided circumstances for more extremebehaviour from the Nazi regime. Their invasion and occupation tactics were brutal and ruthless.Civilians were on the front line and were not spared. Nazism had become an explicitlymurderous regime. Germany’s territorial expansion also brought about a large increase in the numberof Jews under the control of the Reich. This led to the formation of the first ghettos. James Bulgin tells an important story that highlights how, to many people, the above placenames might sound unfamiliar, as Auschwitz fills Holocaust consciousness for the sheer scale of its horror ( Hitler didn’t build the path to the Holocaust alone – ordinary people were active participants, 27 January). But in truth, all sense of scale is lost when imagining the implications of the Nazis’ genocidal politics, while the human psyche is overwhelmed by the implication of such murderous intent to humanity itself. More importantly, he correctly emphasises that evil can, under particular circumstances, look very much like any one of us. This is, as Hannah Arendt describes, the sheer “banality of evil”. By early 1942, annihilation of the Jews had become the formal policy of the Nazis. The confirmation of the covert plan (Operation ‘Reinhard’) to ‘liquidate’ the 2 million Jews under Nazi control in occupied Poland was approved. This would begin with the deportation and murderof those living in ghettos. The extermination of all Jewish people in Europe is the ultimate goal. This requires immense logistical organisation and complicity not just from the Nazis, but commercial companies and hundreds of thousands of individuals across occupied Europe. Son of two retired Met police officers who avoided jail despite killing two pedestrians while drug-driving faces arrest for the eighth time for refusing to attend court

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It also builds on less explored areas of the Holocaust like the Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads. The exhibition aims to correct the narrative that the genocide was efficient and industrialised, says Bulgin, a trope that is felt to absolve perpetrators of individual culpability. “We wanted to show that in reality the death camps were far more dirty and chaotic,” he says. The so-called Reinhard camps, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka II, were the final destination of approximately 1.75 million men, women and children. Located within occupied Poland,they were designed to be discreet and efficient. People were told that they are being processed for work ’in the east’, but will need to be showered before this procedure. The showerswere actually gas chambers that pumped carbon monoxide into the sealed rooms.The process was brutal, barbaric, and routinely inefficient.James Bulgin is the lead curator for the Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museums.The new galleries at IWM London explore the history of how these events happened.This video is part one of an introduction to this complex history. The genocide now known as the Holocaust was the state-sponsored mass murder of six million Jewish men, women and children. There was nothing inevitable about the decision of the Nazis and their collaborators to attempt to exterminate Europe’s Jews, and hundreds of thousands of people were complicit. The Nazi regime came to power in 1933, which saw the spread of their insidiousideas of racial ideology. Persecution and violence towards Jewish people living within the Reich became sinister and overt. Jewish people were initially pressured to emigrate, and many escaped from the Reich. But thousands were left behind. War was declared on 3 September 1939. The eventsthat followed eventually led to the Nazis’ plan for the extermination of Europe’s Jews.