Question

how did the holocaust end?

Answer 1

Answer:

The End of the Holocaust: The Liberation of the Camps

Bridgman, Jon. The End of the Holocaust: The Liberation of the Camps. Portland, OR: Areopagitica Press, 1990. Print.

Among the thousands of books that have examined various aspects of the Jewish Holocaust, surprisingly few have treated the final days of the death camps in any detail. From July 1944 to May 1945, the Russian army liberated ten camps east of the Oder River; the Allied Forces liberated the five western camps in April and May of 1945. The names—Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald—form the 20th century’s most horrifying litany.

Jon Bridgman’s absorbing account embraces the immediate prelude to the liberation of the camps when the advancing Allied armies provoked contradictory orders from Hitler and Himmler, the circumstances of the liberation of each of the camps, the policies of the various liberators, and the consequences of liberation, in particular its effect on American and European perceptions of the war and its aftermath.

As the author points out, it was the drama of liberation more than any other aspect of the Holocaust that brought home to the West the horror of the Final Solution, ending once and for all the false belief that stories of Nazi atrocities were exaggerated Allied propaganda.

Answer 2

The word “Holocaust,” from the Greek words “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burned), was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar. Since 1945, the word has taken on a new and horrible meaning: the ideological and systematic state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of millions of European Jews (as well as millions of others, including Romani people, the intellectually disabled, dissidents and homosexuals) by the German Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945.

To the anti-Semitic Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, Jews were an inferior race, an alien threat to German racial purity and community. After years of Nazi rule in Germany, during which Jews were consistently persecuted, Hitler’s “final solution”–now known as the Holocaust–came to fruition under the cover of World War II, with mass killing centers constructed in the concentration camps of occupied Poland. Approximately six million Jews and some 5 million others, targeted for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons, died in the Holocaust. More than one million of those who perished were children.