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(CNN Spanish) --
Between 1933 and 1945 the totalitarian government of Germany, controlled by the National Socialist (or Nazi) Party, carried out a campaign of persecution and extermination of the Jewish population in the country.
After the beginning of the Second World War, in August 1939, the Nazis carried this persecution to all the occupied countries - France, the Netherlands, Poland and parts of the Soviet Union, to name just a few examples - and from 1941 the segregations , deportations and mass confinements in concentration camps gave way to extermination.
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At the end of the conflict, an estimated six million Jews were murdered across Europe, according to the United States Holocaust Museum.
This "final solution to the Jewish question," as the extermination program became known, represented the culmination of centuries of anti-Semitism in Europe, and indeed was not the first wave of persecution against Jews.
Vandalized graves with swastikas and anti-Semitic inscriptions in 2019 at the Westhoffen Jewish Cemetery near Strasbourg, eastern France.
(Credit: PATRICK HERTZOG/AFP via Getty Images)
The extermination of European Jews by the Nazis ended with the defeat of Germany in World War II, on May 9, 1945, and the main perpetrators of this Holocaust were tried and sentenced a year later in the Nuremberg Courts.
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In addition to putting the Nazi leaders on trial for their crimes, Nuremberg also exposed, with the detail provided by the documents, photographs and footage, the unprecedented scope and brutality reached during the Holocaust.
A problem that is still current
But antisemitism — discrimination or hostility against Jews as a racial or religious group, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica — is not an extinct phenomenon.
In fact, it is experiencing a moment of expansion, at least in the United States and Europe, fueled by hate speech and unfounded conspiracy narratives that are spreading on social networks.
In an exclusive CNN poll conducted in 2018, one in 20 Europeans said they did not know about the Holocaust, and the figure rose to 12% in Austria, the birth country of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
In addition, a third of those interviewed said that Jews used the Holocaust to improve their positions, one of the most subtle forms of anti-Semitism.
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In fact, 25% of the Hungarians interviewed and 20% of the British and Poles stated that Jews represented 20% of the global population.
In reality, 0.2% of the world defines itself as Jewish, according to the Pew Research Center, and this exaggeration is also linked to anti-Semitism.
In the United States, 10% of adults know what the Holocaust was, as do 25% of
millennials
, according to the Claims Conference, which represents Jews in their negotiations to receive compensation from Nazi Germany.
Only 50% of adults could name a concentration camp like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Sachsenhausen or Bergen-Belsen.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish organization that studies the rise of neo-fascism, in 2019 anti-Semitic attacks in the United States reached an all-time high, which was maintained throughout 2020.
More recently, different personalities have been involved in situations of anti-Semitism, such as the star of the Brooklyn Nets basketball team Kyrie Irving, who apologized this Thursday after retweeting to his five million followers a link to a documentary criticized as anti-Semitic, or the rapper Kanye West, criticized for his anti-Semitic comments on social networks.
Where does anti-Semitism come from?
The term "anti-Semitism" was popularized by the German politician Wilhelm Marr in 1879, and taken to its maximum expression by the Nazis in the 1930s, incorporating racial elements in their prejudices.
The "Semitism" referred to is itself a contentious term linked to the "Semitic races" made up of peoples who speak Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew.
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But Jews have been discriminated against for centuries and in all the countries in which they settled.
In ancient Rome and Hellenic Greece, the monotheism of the Jews was a source of conflict with official polytheism.
While in Christian Europe, during the Middle Ages, Jews were discriminated against for their alleged responsibility, according to Christian tradition, in the death of Jesus.
In Spain, the decision of Castile and Aragon to expel the Sephardic Jews in 1492 was the culmination of a period in which the prohibition of Judaism had led to the persecution of those who, even declaring themselves converts to Catholicism, were suspected of practicing their ancient religion.
While that expulsion did not put an end to the discrimination in Spain against the converts or to the vigilance of the Holy Inquisition, many Jews moved to the Americas, where in the Spanish dominions the persecutions against them did not cease either,
Already in modernity, the Jews began to be economically, socially and politically segregated in Europe, and consequently were isolated from the political processes in the different countries, without receiving civil or political rights.
This isolation, in turn, enhanced the religious identities and traditions of isolated Jews, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
After the French Revolution, in 1789, and the advance of secularism in Europe, the situation of the Jews partially improved when they were integrated into their respective communities, but anti-Semitism continued to be a major force and the Jews continued to be discriminated against.
Auschwitz survivors behind a barbed wire fence.
Some of the children were wearing adult clothing, provided by Soviet soldiers.
(Credit: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images)
At the end of the 19th century, anti-Semitism took on a new scope throughout Europe, hand in hand with racial theories, social Darwinism and eugenics theories developed in the United States, and the Jews were taken as scapegoats for the evils that afflicted them. to the mainland.
The Dreyfus Affair, the false accusation of espionage and treason against a French military officer by a deeply anti-Semitic press and armed forces in France, has become one of the symbols of this period, as has the publication and distribution of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a pamphlet outlining an alleged plan for world domination by the Jews and later discovered to be a forgery carried out by the Russian secret police.
Jews in Europe faced numerous examples of discrimination in the years that followed, but the apex came with Nazism, which promoted a violent form of anti-Semitism.
It was no longer about religious or ideological differences with a group —in Europe, for example, the conversion of Jews to Christianity was promoted—, but about seeking the eradication of a group considered as an inferior race.
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The Holocaust and the so-called "final solution" of the Nazis were the culmination of a long historical process, which began with an anti-Semitic discourse that attracted voters to the Nazi party.
After Nazism came to power in 1933, Jews were almost immediately excluded from political and cultural activities, and suffered severe limitations on their economic activities.
Then came the infamous Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which defined Jews, stripped them of their citizenship in the German Reich, and prohibited them from practicing most professions, among other things.
After the start of the war, the identification of Jews in the occupied territories and their internment in ghettos —specific neighborhoods of the Jewish quarter in different cities— or concentration camps began to grow, as well as mass but informal killing.
Beginning in 1941, however, extermination became official policy.
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