Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed

Content Warning: This section discusses antisemitism, racism, and the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was the intentional and brutal attempt by the Nazi government to enact genocide on the Jewish people of Europe and beyond. Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis murdered more than six million Jews via mass shootings, gas chambers, and death due to disease and privation in the harsh conditions of concentration camps and ghettos. In addition to Jews, the Nazis targeted people whose political or religious beliefs conflicted with the regime’s racist worldview. Anyone in Germany or Eastern Europe who openly criticized the Nazi regime was among the first actively placed in concentration camps. Later, the Nazis actively targeted communists, Catholics, atheists, people with disabilities, gay men, Polish people, the Roma people, anyone who potentially had a mental illness, the unhoused, and Soviets as well. The exact number of people the Nazis targeted, tortured, and murdered is unknown because they practiced mass cremation and used mass graves. The Holocaust refers not only to the mass murder perpetrated by Hitler and the Nazis but also to the antisemitic propaganda and general dehumanization of the Jewish people in Germany and Eastern Europe in particular.

As Hallie makes clear in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, the Nazis’ fascist authoritarianism was not unique in Europe at the time.