10 - Systematic and Ad Hoc Persecution and Mass Murder in the Holocaust

Summary

The Holocaust is often regarded as distinctive because of its organised, industrial-style killing in specially designed extermination camps: Chełmno in the Wartheland; Auschwitz-Birkenau in eastern Upper Silesia; Majdanek and the ‘Reinhard camps’ – Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka – in the General Government in Poland. But around half of the 6 million Jewish victims were killed outside the camps, in fields and forests, in villages and towns across eastern Europe. Murder outside the camps, sometimes dubbed the ‘Holocaust by bullets’, included shooting into ditches, ravines, pits and mass graves, and death through enforced starvation, disease and maltreatment. In the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus and Poland, Jews were killed not only by invading Germans but also by locals: former neighbours and workmates. These face-to-face killings may appear, at first glance, more like the kinds of genocide that have exploded elsewhere at different times: people killing other people in the localities where they lived. Yet there are significant differences in purpose, scale and complexity.