War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust

The “last stage of war in Europe” (205) took place between 1944 and 1945. Bergen classes this period as the “death throes” of the Third Reich.

A Soviet offensive advanced on Germany with the odds stacked in their favor. Although there were four Soviet casualties for every German casualty, the Soviets had an advantage in sheer numbers.

The Allies executed frequent air raids against Germany. American bombings in particular were numerous and inaccurate, taking a heavy toll on German civilians. German petroleum and chemical industries ground to a near-halt in 1945, though Germany’s “total military output in 1944 was more than five times the country’s 1939 level” (207).

Bergen asserts that it was not “internal dissension but military defeat [that] eventually brought down the Nazi regime” (209). However, she highlights a failed assassination attempt known as the Plot of July 20, 1944, in which a “high-ranking General Staff officer named Colonel Claus Schenck von Stauffenberg (1907-1944) would plant a bomb at a meeting in the ‘Wolf’s Lair,’ Hitler’s East Prussian headquarters. The death of Hitler would then give the signal for a coup d’état in Berlin. The plan failed” (210). Hitler was uninjured when the bomb went off; Stauffenberg was captured and executed via firing squad. His coconspirators were imprisoned, and many of them were killed. This failed coup resulted in a crackdown on German opposition of Hitler’s regime.

By early 1945, the war’s impending end was clear even to Nazi true believers. That year, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary signed armistices with the USSR and declared war on Germany.

Germany sustained labor shortages that forcibly slowed its genocidal operations. However, Bergen describes the myriad “killing frenzies of the last stage of Hitler’s war” (212). In response to an uprising in Warsaw, German forces leveled the city. Hungarian Jews and Roma still poured into concentration camps and killing centers every day, and the “killing center of Auschwitz reached new records of destruction in the final phase of the war […] camp functionaries murdered as many as twelve-thousand Jews per day […] Of the twenty-three thousand Gypsies sent to Auschwitz, almost twenty thousand died there” (215).

The Germans began to lose control of occupied territory in mid-1944; they elected to evacuate their prisoners from concentration camps and killing centers. These prisoners, suffering from the extreme conditions of the camps, were ordered to trek away from the advancing front; these compulsory journeys, known as death marches, killed approximately 250,000 to 375,000 prisoners. The death marches continued until Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945.

In December 1944, the Germans lost the Battle of the Bulge. British and American forces advanced rapidly in early 1945. German forces flagged severely, and their death toll quadrupled from what it was at the beginning of the decade.

The Third Reich’s waning months are known as “the twilight of the gods.” Hitler dismissed Göring and Himmler from their positions on the accusation of treachery. Both were later captured by Allied forces and committed suicide in custody. Hitler and his wife Ava Braun—along with Goebbels, his wife, and their six children—died by suicide in a bunker on April 30. Admiral Karl Dönitz succeeded Hitler as führer and reportedly died shortly thereafter.

Bergen begins this chapter with a case study of a Russian Jewish Holocaust survivor whom she calls “N.” The account begins in the 1930s and follows N as he travels across Europe, fleeing both Stalinism and Nazism. N survived life in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, but he died as a forced laborer in Siberia. The terms of the Allied agreement meant that Soviet citizens like N were turned over to Soviet authorities.

Bergen also describes the Bergen-Belsen camp’s slow crawl of liberation by the British. On April 15, 1945, British forces stormed Bergen-Belsen, but the inmates were abandoned for 48 hours before the British formally took control. In that time, more than 80 prisoners were executed.

The aftermath of the war was fraught; “[h]orror on the scale of the Holocaust did not simply disappear with the arrival of the Allied liberators” (223). Roughly 10 million refugees filtered into the Western zones of occupied Germany. Those zones were controlled by British, American, and French forces. Bergen writes,

Many ethnic Germans had eagerly served the cause of race and space and benefited from the deprivation and exploitation of their neighbors. In some cases, Soviet and local authorities expelled ethnic Germans, both to remove potential troublemakers and to free up space for resettlement programs of their own (224).

The Allies formalized as the United Nations (UN) and created the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to address postwar humanitarian crises. Displaced Persons (DPs) were given aid and filtered into DP camps, which developed “internal leadership and communal spirit” (225).

Allied leadership launched the International Military Tribunal and the Nuremberg Trials and carried them out between 1945 and 1946. The initiatives strove to identify and separate “Nazis” from “Germans.” Nazis would be punished, while innocent Germans would be integrated into society.