The Night War

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and religious discrimination.

Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany in the period after World War I, and under his influence, the Nazi Party grew to be the largest in Germany by 1932. Shortly thereafter, Hitler was appointed chancellor by President von Hindenburg. In 1934, after von Hindenburg’s death, Hitler merged the chancellery with the presidency, assuming the title of Führer, which means “leader” or “guide.” Hitler’s rhetoric centered on establishing Germany as a leading world power made up of ethnically pure and genetically superior Germans, whom he referred to as the “Aryan” race.

Part of Hitler’s plan for German expansion and domination was the extermination of European Jewry; Hitler conceived of Judaism as a race rather than as a religious belief system. He believed that Jews were a lesser, subhuman species: untermenschen, who were determined to achieve world domination at the detriment of all other races, especially the Aryan race.

Initially, murders of Jews took the form of close-range shooting into mass graves. This was carried out by a specialized sub-group of the Nazi army called the Einsatzgruppen. Tens of thousands of Jews in Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania lost their lives in this way. However, this was not considered an expedient solution, and the physical and psychological strain on German troops from this method of killing was considered problematic. Furthermore, by October 1939, the Nazis had control of over 2 million Jews between Germany, Poland, Austria, and the Czech Republic (known at the time as the territories of Sudetenland, Moravia, and Bohemia), and this number continued to grow with German expansion.

The Nazi Party developed the “final solution” to the Jewish “problem”: an intentional, mass extermination of European Jews. A network of 23 main concentration camps and hundreds of satellite camps was created in several countries, but predominantly Germany and Poland. Within the camp system, there were six purpose-built killing centers established in German-controlled Poland: Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, and—most notorious of all—Auschwitz-Birkenau. Mobile gas vans were initially used at these centers. Later, permanent gas chambers were built attached to crematoriums. To minimize the psychological cost to German personnel, labor of Jewish prisoners or prisoners of war were often used as the sonderkommandos, the workers in the gas chambers and crematoria.

The deportation from Paris in mid-1942, known as the Vélodrome d’Hiver (or “Vél d’Hiv”) roundup, described by Miri in The Night War, is based on historical fact. Over 7,000 Jews were crammed into the arena without food, water, or access to basic sanitation for days. Eventually, they were loaded onto buses destined for the Auschwitz extermination camp. Approximately 77,000 French Jews and non-French Jews living in France during the 1940s were killed during the Holocaust. In total, over 6 million European Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, which only ceased when concentration camps were liberated by allied soldiers (Berenbaum, Michael. “Holocaust.” Britannica, 13 Feb. 2025).