As the Allied troops began to advance, Soviet troops were able to liberate the Majdanek camp of Eastern Poland on July 24, 1944 where over 360,000 Jews had already been executed. Himmler then ordered for the complete ruination of the gas chambers in fear of the encroaching Soviet Army.

As Hitler’s Reich started to fall apart, the SS rounded up the surviving inmates of the outlying concentration camps in order to conduct death marches. The total numbers of the Nazi holocaust included about 66,000 from the Auschwitz camp. Many holocaust victims dropped dead during the march, collapsing from exhaustion, or were shot by the SS if they failed to keep up with the rest of the marchers.

By January 27, 1945, the Soviet Army had finally made it to Auschwitz but by then there was an estimated 1.5 million Jews dead along with 500,000 Polish prisoners, Gypsies, and Soviet POWs perished. The Western Allies forced their way into Germany in the spring of that year to liberate the holocaust victims in the camps Buchenwald, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. The full extent of the terrible 12-year Nazi holocaust became realized as American and British soldiers found heaps of emaciated corpses and by listening to the horrifying accounts told by the surviving holocaust victims.

April 30, 1945 marked the final end to the holocaust as Berlin became surrounded by the Soviet Army. On the same day, Hitler had committed suicide, and the Reich collapsed soon after. The numbers after it was all over showed that most of Europe’s Jews had been killed, with four million lives being lost in gas chambers and another two million either shot dead or having suffered the imminent causes of starvation, exertion, disease, or trauma within the ghettos. The remaining surviving holocaust victims were left with the horrific and traumatic memories of the hardships endured and the remainders of a shattered race.

The holocaust left tremendous concerns and painful questions long after the holocaust liberation. How could such a tragedy occur among human beings? Was there no opposition? Were all Germans ignorant to the happenings of the holocaust or were they inherently evil enough to be okay with the beyond cruel mass murdering of so many innocent lives? 

Although the Hitler Reich was rather popular among most Germans, the German secret state police called the Gestapo and the German Security Service made efforts to suppress the open criticism against the Nazi regime. However, there were some Germans that opposed the Nazi state and its increased regimentation of their society which enforced the coordination of the German individuals to the Nazi goals and institutions. Out of the few attempts of bringing down Hitler, only few were close to a holocaust liberation. 

The opposition was shown through either non-compliance with Nazi regulations, or failed attempts at assassinating Hitler in an attempt for a holocaust liberation. Among the first to resist the Nazi regime was in the political opposition that had been planned by a few leftist parties including the Communist Party of Germany and the Social Democratic Party of Germany. These oppositions were unfortunately ineffective to the German Security Police that quelled the leftist organizations with force.

Another area of Nazi regime included the need to “coordinate” religious life within the state. While in the beginning, the agreement between the Third Reich and the Vatican of July 1933 offered guidelines to regulate relations between the regime and the Catholic church, the Nazis gradually came to suppress all religious groups, including Catholic groups as they sought to defame the Catholic church through a series of “priest trails” that would be presented in front of people.

Though the church never publicly denounced the regime and were “silent” about the persecution of Jews on the record, they did play a role in the opposition to the holocaust killings of those that were mentally or physically handicapped. Also, some individual clergymen reached out to help and protect Jews when they could.

Political and religious opposition also was joined by the opposition rising from a small group of German youth who strongly resented the mandatory enlisting to the Hitler Youth. Munich’s university students had formed a resistance group against the holocaust called the White Rose in 1942. Its leaders, professor Kurt Huber, Hans Scholl, his sister Sophie Scholl were arrested and executed in 1943 for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets that spoke to raising awareness of the holocaust and its evils, called for a holocaust liberation.

A more conservative group including military officers and diplomats decided that an anti-Nazi revolt could be affected should Hitler die a violent death. The closest effort to a holocaust liberation occurred on July 20, 1944, some military officers tried to attempt to assassinate Hitler while he was in his Prussian headquarters at Rastenburg. The plan consisted of an officer leaving a bomb hidden within a briefcase near Hitler as he attended a holocaust military briefing about the eastern front. The group hoped that right-wing traditional conservative Karl Goerdeler could replace Hitler after the assassination. 

There were even several disillusioned Nazis included in this group such as a Berlin police president and a Criminal Police Chief. Hitler survived the blast resulting in a failed coup attempt. Chief justice of the Berlin people’s court, Roland Freisler, presided the trial for those that were involved in the plot. To no surprise, Freisler had them convicted and most of the group were executed in Berlin’s Ploetzensee prison.