UNIT 5
The Holocaust: Responses and responsibility
5.2 Who was responsible? Why were six million Jewish people murdered during the Second World War? Many people would say because Hitler hated Jews, but Hitler was only one man who could never have killed millions of people alone. Explaining why and how the Holocaust happened is not easy or straightforward. But it is not impossible. A good place to start is by asking who did what, and thinking about the consequences that those actions had. This allows us to start to consider what people were responsible for. On the following pages, you will learn about the actions of just a few people.
Activities 1 Discuss the case studies in this chapter. For each one, note down what was done and what the consequences of these actions were.
2 How responsible (or not) were these people for the Holocaust? Use your notes from activity 1 and add to them.
The ‘Death Dealer’ On 23 June 1941, the German army occupied Kaunas in Lithuania. Two days later, Walter Stahlecker – the head of one of the Einsatzgruppen – visited the city. He gave antisemitic speeches and encouraged violence towards Jews living in Kaunas. People quickly followed his lead, and over the next four days, around 3,800 Jews were murdered. One of the worst events took place on the forecourt of a garage. Jews were dragged onto the yard where they were beaten to death by local civilians. One of these men was known as the ‘Death Dealer’. Armed with a huge iron bar, he smashed people’s skulls open as a watching crowd clapped and cheered.
Eleonore Gusenbauer Gusenbauer’s house overlooked a quarry where prisoners from Mauthausen concentration camp were forced to do hard physical labour. On 27 September 1941, she wrote a letter to the local police: ‘Inmates … are constantly being shot … Those who are badly struck still live for some time and lie next to the dead for hours and in some cases for half a day. My property is situated on an elevation close [by] … and therefore one often becomes the unwilling witness of such misdeeds. I am sickly in any case and such sights make such demands on my nerves, that I will not be able to bear it much longer. I request that it be arranged that such inhuman deeds will cease or else be conducted out of sight.’
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