e first spark in what was to become the Holocaust, one of the most ghastly episodes in the modern history of mankind. Before he campaign against the Jews was halted by the defeat of Germany, something like 11 million people had been slaughtered in the name of Nazi racial purity. The Jews were not the only victims of the Holocaust. Millions of Russians, Poles, gypsies and other “subhumans” were also murdered. But Jews were the favored targets--first and foremost. It took the Nazis some time to work up to the full fury of their endeavor. In the years following 1933, the Jews were systematically deprived by law of their civil rights, of their jobs and property. Violence and brutality became a part of their everyday lives. Their places of worship were defiled, their windows smashed, their stores ransacked. Old men and young were pummeled and clubbed and stomped to death by Nazi jack boots. Jewish women were accosted and ravaged, in broad daylight, on main thoroughfares. Some Jews fled Germany. But most, with a kind of stubborn belief in God and Fatherland, sought to weather the Nazi terror. It was forlorn hope. In 1939, after Hitler’s conquest of Poland, the Nazis cast aside all restraint. Jews in their millions were now herded into concentration camps, there to starve and perish as slave laborers. Other millions were driven into dismal ghettos, which served as holding pens until the Nazis got around to disposing of them. The mass killings began in 1941, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Nazi murder squads followed behind the Wehrmacht enthusiastically slaying Jews and other conquered peoples. Month by month the horrors escalated....
