The Holocaust II Trivia Quiz

Answer: Genocide

They also continued to refer to the 'Madagascar Plan' long after it had become completely unrealistic.

The word 'genocide' was created in the US in 1943 by the Polish Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin (1900-59), to describe crimes such as the Nazis' attempt to exterminate the Jews and the Ottoman Turks' mass slaughter of Armenians in 1915-17. 'We have a crime for which there is no name', he said.

Answer: They were destroyed by the SS and the opportunity for liberation never arose

When these camps were dissolved the SS destroyed most of the more obvious traces of their function. At Auschwitz, too, they blew up several key installations and destroyed many records. The Treblinka site was grassed over, and the SS even had a farmhouse built there and installed a former Treblinka guard as the farmer.

These four camps were all extermination camps. In this respect they differed from the Auschwitz group of camps, which combined the functions of an extermination camp with those of an extremely harsh concentration camp.

Answer: Nowhere

No such document has ever been found - not even a copy without a signature. Historians tried to locate one for decades, but without success. Most experts on the history of Nazi Germany now believe that the Holocaust did not begin with a single order. Rather, it seems that in September-December, 1941, Hitler repeatedly and insistently made his wishes known to his immediate entourage and that these were passed down the line. (He may also have issued an oral order). Since the outbreak of war in 1939 Hitler had become more obsessed than ever with 'the Jewish question' and the 'need' to 'solve' it.

This may come as a surprise to those who have always assumed that the Holocaust began with a single specific written order. Since c. 1980 a growing number of historians have considered it likely that the 'Final Solution' resulted from a series of rapidly escalating incremental orders and decisions, including some local 'initiatives' that were later sanctioned at the top retrospectively. The popular view of a dictatorship as a régime where the dictator always barks out unambiguous orders, loud and clear, to those below is unhelpful in this case.

Obviously, many Holocaust deniers claim that the lack of a signed order by the Führer himself means that he didn't order it. However, the absence of a written order merely indicates that the Holocaust happened in a slightly different way from that which is widely assumed.

For a discussion of the issues, see Ian Kershaw, 'Hitler and the Holocaust', in Ian Kershaw, "Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution", Yad Vashem and Yale University Press, 2008, pp. 237-81.

Answer: By seizing and selling the victims' assets

This applied in particular to victims sent to extermination camps. In some cases they were even bullied into buying rail tickets to their unspecified destinations. There was no budget for the 'Final Solution'. The Holocaust was highly profitable for the SS, especially the hiring out of slave labourers to work under SS supervision for German corporations.

Answer: The figure given on the plaque had never been used in the original estimate of six million

The figure of 6 million was *not* arrived at by traipsing round various camps and noting inscriptions on plaques. (The estimate of 6 million is based on a range of sources, but doesn't include figures on plaques). Moreover, many victims were killed in mass open air shootings or starved to death in ghettos and not killed in camps.

It was always known that the figure of 4 million on the original Auschwitz plaque was far too high. However, between 1945 and 1989 the Polish government did not want to be seen to dispute the Soviet figure, especially as it included erroneous assumptions about the number of Soviet POWs killed there. Franciszek Piper (born 1941), head of the research department at the Auschwitz Museum, began work in 1980 on more accurate calculations. Mindful of the 1945 miscalculations, he was cautious and relied as far as possible on written records of rail 'transports' arriving at Auschwitz.

Answer: Nuremberg Tribunal, 1945-6

The figure can be found in Wilhelm Hoettl's affidavit. He was Kaltenbrunner's adjutant and he quoted Eichmann as having told him in August 1944 'that four million Jews had been killed in extermination camps, while a further two million had died in other ways ...' Obviously, this is not ideal evidence. However, since the early 1960s all serious scholarship on this has confirmed a figure in the range of 5.1-6 million.

Screenwriter Ben Hecht wrote an article entitled 'Remember Us', which appeared in February 1943 in "Reader's Digest". He said that there had been six million Jews under Nazi rule, of whom one third had already been killed and another third were likely to be killed. Suggestions by some Holocaust deniers that the figures given in Hoettl's affidavit were somehow brought into line with those in Hecht's article are far-fetched and bizarre.

Answer: Slovakia

The government of Slovakia then reimbursed itself by seizing property left behind by the victims. Initially, the SS wanted only healthy Jews of working age, in order to provide labour for the I-G Farben plant at Mononwitz (Auschwitz III). To avoid responsibility for the remaining elderly Jews and children, Father Tiso's Slovak government paid the SS RM500 a head for removing them to Auschwitz. Of course, the SS had no use for these unfortunate people, either, and killed them as soon as possible after arrival. (Slovakia was the only country to pay the Nazis to deport Jews).

The Japanese authorities were bewildered by the Nazis' hatred of the Jews and allowed about 25,000 Jews to take refuge in Shanghai, which was under Japanese occupation from 1937 to 1945. Before Pearl Harbor and the subsequent disruption of international communications in the Pacific, some Jews were also allowed to pass through Japan en route from Germany, Poland and Lithuania (via Vladivostok) to Latin America.

Answer: I surely can't kill them

Ribbentrop and Hitler both made it very clear indeed that Hungary was expected either to annihilate the Hungarian Jews itself or hand them over to Germany. In fact, Hitler subjected Horthy to a lengthy tirade. (The minutes of the meeting have survived).

In March 1944 the Germans took over Hungary and installed a puppet government consisting of their own stooges, mainly members of the Arrow Cross Party. The deportations of Hungarian Jews, mainly to Auschwitz, started soon afterwards.

Answer: To round up and kill 'enemies of the Reich'

However, the Nazi regime regarded Jews in Eastern Europe as Communists and as born 'enemies of Germany'. This view was not questioned by the men in these units. The Nazis were very keen on notions of 'Jewish Bolshevism' - the view that most Jews were Bolsheviks and that Communism was a specifically 'Jewish ideology'.

Answer: Yes

The British government was kept informed, mainly by the Polish Home Army (resistance) and other Polish groups, and passed information on to the U.S. government. British intelligence also intercepted many of the frequent wireless reports from the 'Einsatzgruppen' to Berlin giving the numbers of victims killed. British officials were initially deeply skeptical, but from the autumn of 1942 information was passed on to (and reported in) the media.

Moreover, on 17 December 1942 Anthony Eden read out a statement in the House of Commons by the British government and eleven other Allied governments condemning this 'this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination'. (However, at that stage the Allies seem not to have grasped the sheer scale of the Holocaust).

In late 1942 and early 1943 there was even talk about what might be done in practical terms. In Britain, Victor Gollancz established a committee to try to find ways of reducing the toll. Moreover, the Polish courier, Jan Karski (1914-2000) wrote a book about the Warsaw Ghetto and Belzec. It was published in 1944 in the U.S. and sold 400,000 copies by the end of the war. Some pamphlets on the subject were also published from 1943 on.

Many people say that the public in the Allied countries had 'no idea' about the Holocaust till the first camps were liberated. Perhaps the media reports did not register with many members of the public ... In a war, news about dramatic events, such as battles, tends to be more interesting than reports about ongoing processes.

Obviously, with the liberation of concentration camps and the publication of photos and newsreels, it became much easier to visualize what had happened.