What was the Holocaust?

The Holocaust is the name given to process carried out by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in which the majority of European Jews and millions of other "undesirables" were murdered. It is believed that over 11,000,000 people were killed by the Nazi regime in a systematic manner.

It has come to be associated with the destruction of the Jews because about two-thirds of all the Jews in Europe -an estimated six million - were killed. It is important because for the first time in history, a government set out to destroy an entire people simply because they existed. The Holocaust has come to represent the supreme example of genocide in human history. Although the Holocaust took place during the Second World War, the war was not the cause of it. It was the result of people being manipulated and being fed prejudice based on ignorance, fear and misunderstanding about minority groups and other groups who were "different".

Why did it happen?

The Holocaust happened because the Nazis were racist. They believed that the world's population could be divided into different 'races' and each had different characteristics, which meant that some were superior to others. They believed the German people were 'Aryans', a 'master race', who were superior to others. They even created a league table of 'races' with the Aryans at the top and with Jews, Sinti and Roma (Gypsies) and black people at the bottom. These "inferior" people were seen as a threat to the purity and strength of the German nation. When the Nazis came to power they persecuted these people, took away their human rights and eventually decided that they should be exterminated. Even amongst the Aryans, there were some groups who were seen as "undesirable" and a threat to Aryan superiority.

The Victims of the Holocaust

The Jews were the main group victimized by the Nazis. Hitler and other Nazi leaders saw them not as a religious group but as a poisonous "race" who lived off the work of others. He blamed them for Germany's defeat in the First World War and he saw the trouble in Germany that followed was largely the work of the Socialists and Communists whose leaders included several Jews. For hundreds of years the Jews had been blamed for the death of Jesus Christ and this had led to various levels of persecution at different times. The Nazis were able to build on this anti-Jewish feeling to justify the removal of human rights from Jewish people.

Between 1933 and 1938 a number of laws were passed which succeeded in destroying the lives of German Jews. As German armies captured other countries this programme was extended into the newly occupied countries. This process eventually led to the concentration and death camps Of the 8,860,000 Jews who lived in Europe at the time an estimated 6,000,000 were killed.

Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) were targeted by the Nazis because they were non-Aryans and so they were racially inferior. Like the Jews they had been persecuted, either officially or unofficially, for centuries. Under the Nazis Roma and Sinti families were rounded up and moved into special areas. Between 200,000 and 500,000 Gypsies were killed during the Holocaust.

Disabled people were victims in the Holocaust because they did not fit in with the Nazis ideal of the master race. These people also included the mentally ill, the incurably sick, alcoholics and epileptics. They were classed as 'unworthy of life' and as a 'biological threat' to Aryan genetic purity. People in asylums were viewed as a burden on society. During the Holocaust over 300,000 people were sterilised by force and over 200,000 patients from asylums were killed

Stanley Green's secret photograph
taken in the Buchanwald concentration camp.

Other victims were the Slavic people of Eastern Europe. The Nazis saw them as being racially inferior and only fit to serve the "master race". Hitler made them a focus of Nazi hatred because of their association with Communism. Millions of Poles, Russians and others were killed in prisoner of war, labour and extermination camps.

Political opponents of the Nazis such as Communists, Social Democrats and trade unionists were harassed, subjected to brutal treatment and often put in prisons and concentration camps without trial. This also happened to religious opponents of the Nazis such as Jehovah's Witnesses and to groups of people whose lifestyle was thought to be inappropriate such as homosexuals.

Other genocide in the 20th century

The world was so horrified by the Holocaust that the newly formed United Nations introduced its Convention on Genocide in 1948 and this was later followed by the Declaration on Human Rights. Despite this, genocide and "ethnic cleansing" have continued in many countries around the world.

In the last ten years there have been numerous, well-documented atrocities committed in places such as Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo.

The two main groups who live in the African country of Rwanda are the Tutsi and the Hutu. Between April and June 1994, about 800,000 Tutu civilians were wiped out in a brutal, political campaign of genocide carried out by Hutu extremists. Hundreds of thousands more Tutsi were forced to leave their homes and many died in overcrowded and disease ridden refugee camps.

Throughout the 1990s the former European country of Yugoslavia was divided by civil war as the country broke up. Even though the different religious and cultural groups had lived side by side for hundreds of years, terrible atrocities were carried out. In the 1992 war, the smallest of the ethnic groups, the Bosnian Muslims were the victims. The human rights abuses against all sections of the population and the treatment of the Bosnian Muslims were some of the most terrible events to occur on European soil since the Holocaust. Of the hundreds and thousands of people killed or wounded, 51,000 were children. Over a million people were forced out of their homes in Bosnia and many fled the region as refugees.

In the winter of 1998-99 it looked as if it was about to be repeated in the Serbian province of Kosovo. Hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Muslims were deprived of their identities and forced out of their homes by extremist Serbians. This time the international community reacted and sent troops in to protect the civilians.

Albert Bedane 1893-1980

On the 4th of January 2000 Albert Bedane was recognised as one of the Righteous among the Nations. This is the highest Holocaust honour given by the state of Israel. Bedane was honoured for his heroism in hiding a Jewish woman during the German Occupation.

Although he was born in France in 1893, Albert and his parents came to Jersey the following year. During the First World War he served in the Hampshire Regiment and when he left the army in 1920 he joined the medical staff of the Royal Jersey Militia. He married soon after and in 1925 his daughter, Valerie, was born. He had his own clinic in Roseville Street, St Helier where he worked as a Chartered Masseur - a physiotherapist.

In June 1940, as the German army was approaching the islands, Albert's wife and daughter went to England but he stayed in the island.

It was while he was living alone in his home in Roseville Street that he began sheltering people hiding from the German authorities - escaped prisoners, French PoWs, Russian slave workers, and a Jewish woman, Mrs Mary Richardson. He managed to feed his extra "guests" because some of his patients were farmers and so they paid their bills with food instead of money. After the Occupation when he was asked why he had risked his life to help so many people his answer was quite simple . . . I thought that if I was going to be killed I would rather be killed for a sheep than a lamb. .

The Jewish lady he helped was Mary Richardson. She lived with her husband, a retired English sea captain, in Dicq Road close to Albert's house in Roseville Street. When the first anti-Jewish Order was issued she did not register as a Jew. However, in February 1941 she had to because every islander over the age of 14 had to get an identity card. She gave false details in an attempt to hide her real identity. She said that she was born Mary Erica Algernon in British Guiana. In reality she was Erica Olvenich born in Holland.

In late June 1943 she was taken to College House at Victoria College where the Feldkommandantur told her that she would be sent to a very nice, special camp where she would be well looked after. She was allowed to go back home to collect her clothing and valuables and while she was there she managed to escape. She made her way to Albert Bedane's clinic in Roseville Street where she hid in a secret cellar. She remained in hiding for the next few months before she was moved into a room on the upper floor. Whenever the clinic was searched Mrs Richardson hid in the secret cellar. In the final weeks of the Occupation she came out of hiding to look after her husband who was by then an invalid.

Albert Bedane was a quiet man whose heroism went unmarked for a long time. In 1965 he was presented with a gold watch by the Russian government in recognition of his efforts in saving Russian forced workers. When he died on the 8th January 1980 he was cremated at Westmount Crematorium.