The term, “Holocaust” has historically been used to reference both the ongoing persecution of Jewry in society as well as it’s specific culmination of the systematic killing of the Jewish people during the mid twentieth century. Due to the extended and often convoluted past involving the mistreatment of Jewish people, identifying the inciting event proves to be difficult, and is debatable from a multitude of perspectives. Early on, the oppression was prominent but was not a dominant factor of everyday life. The seemingly unsatisfiable goals of the Nazi regime yielded to the omnipresent violence that was illustrated at the exact time the Holocaust began, which was July of 1941. Counterarguments may postulate that aggressive oppression and discrimination …show more content…
On July 3, The Jager Report, which was a detailed chronicle of a member of a mobile killing squad in Lithuania, outlined that “so far there hasn’t been an execution. Today we were all on alert all day. It should be happening tonight.” His terse tone and anticipation were almost guaranteed to be pervasive because of the strength the Nazis had gained by this point. Everyone knew that something colossal and even immeasurable was on the cusp. That thing was the Holocaust. By July 5, “the first layer of sand had already been thrown on the first group (at about 5 am)… During the afternoon some three hundred more Jews and Poles were finished off.” Even in just 48 short hours, the Einsatzkommando grew more comfortable with discussing death and explicitly shared the events of the day without hesitation. In parallel fashion, the clinical Ponary Diary notes the occurrence of “some shots from the forest. Probably exercises, because in the forest there is an ammunition dump…” on page 11. After paying careful attention for a couple of days, it becomes apparent that Jewish people are being taken into the woods in caravans and being murdered. Although it could be argued that this method of killing was nonchalant and spectator-oriented in comparison to the mechanic methods that were adopted later on, the intention of this action was still mass murder, which is proven by the fact …show more content…
Ghettoization made the eventual killing opportune in the sense that minimal effort had to be put in to tracking down Jews and others who the Nazi party sought to murder. In The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, Hermann Kruk recounted that “they started driving tenets out of their apartments… it is estimated that about 5,000 people were driven out, including old people and children” on September 1, 1941 (83). This evidence could be used to diagnose the inception of the Holocaust as fall of 1941, but that statement is not endorsable because of the fact that at this point, orders had already been given out and this was simply the time in which the Nazi’s were taking action on one specific area. The very calculated system of the Nazis thrived on an element of surprise, and so the moment in which a victim discovered his or her fate was often only briefly before aggressive action would be taken against that person. However, the assailant (the Nazis), knew of their own intentions in advance, and even confirmed that “clarification of the Jewish question has most likely been achieved by now” in reference to a correspondence that occurred in November of 1941 (Primary Document 19). Further, on December 16, 1941 Frank states that “we must finish off the jews. the Fuhrer put it into words once” which illuminates the fact that Hitler’s resolution