This is just one website, from wikipedia. There are many other websites out there. Please be aware, though, that there are Holocaust denial websites out there, too. They are constructed by people who cannot believe that humans can be THAT hateful and destructive. These websites are wrong.
It's great that you want to learn about the Holocaust and to find reasons for its occurrence. There are many different perspectives and reasons. History is multi-layered and complex. If you need any more information, please contact me. I'm a teacher and every year I do Anne Frank. This summer I am also going to Berlin and will be going to the Shausenhausen concentration camp.
Good luck. Just be careful of the fake websites out there that promote anti-Semitism and hate. Forwarned is forearmed. Cheers, K
The Holocaust
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See Holocaust (disambiguation) and Shoah (disambiguation).
"Selection" on the Judenrampe, Auschwitz, May/June 1944. To be sent to the right meant slave labor; to the left, the gas chambers. This image shows the arrival of Hungarian Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, many of them from the Berehov ghetto. It was taken by Ernst Hofmann or Bernhard Walter of the SS. Courtesy of Yad Vashem. [1]
"Selection" on the Judenrampe, Auschwitz, May/June 1944. To be sent to the right meant slave labor; to the left, the gas chambers. This image shows the arrival of Hungarian Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, many of them from the Berehov ghetto. It was taken by Ernst Hofmann or Bernhard Walter of the SS. Courtesy of Yad Vashem. [1]
The Holocaust (from the Greek holókauston from olon "completely" and kauston "burnt"), also known as Ha-Shoah (Hebrew: השואה), Khurbn (Yiddish: חורבן or Halokaust, האלאקאוסט), is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler.[1]
Other groups were persecuted and killed by the regime, including 220,000–500,000 Sinti and Roma,[2] the disabled, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Soviet POWs, Polish citizens, and political prisoners.[3][4] Many scholars do not include these groups in the definition of the Holocaust, defining it as the genocide of the Jews,[5] or what the Nazis called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" ("Die Endlösung der Judenfrage"). Taking into account all the victims of Nazi persecution, the death toll rises considerably: estimates generally place the total number of victims at nine to 11 million.[6]
The persecution and genocide was accomplished in stages. Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society was enacted years before the outbreak of World War II. Where the Third Reich conquered new territory in eastern Europe and Russia, ghettos were established to contain and marginalize Jewish communities. Specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered large numbers of Jews and political opponents in mass shootings and mobile gassing units. In countries occupied by the Nazis, Jews were interned before being deported to death camps, often crammed into freight cars and transported hundreds of miles by rail, then killed in gas chambers.
The Holocaust
Early elements
Racial policy · Nazi eugenics · Nuremberg Laws · Euthanasia · Concentration camps (list)
Jews
Jews in Nazi Germany, 1933 to 1939
Pogroms: Kristallnacht · Bucharest · Dorohoi · Iaşi · Jedwabne · Lwów
Ghettos: Warsaw · Łódź · Lwów · Kraków · Theresienstadt · Kovno · Wilno
Einsatzgruppen: Babi Yar · Rumbula · Ponary · Odessa
Final Solution: Wannsee · Aktion Reinhard
Death camps: Auschwitz · Belzec · Chełmno · Majdanek · Treblinka · Sobibór · Warsaw · Jasenovac
Resistance: Jewish partisans
Ghetto uprisings (Warsaw)
End of World War II: Death marches · Berihah · Displaced persons
Other victims
East Slavs · Poles · Serbs · Roma · Homosexuals · Jehovah's Witnesses
Responsible parties
Nazi Germany: Hitler · Eichmann · Heydrich · Himmler · SS · Gestapo · SA
Collaborators
Aftermath: Nuremberg Trials · Denazification
Lists
Survivors · Victims · Rescuers
Resources
The Destruction of the European Jews
Phases of the Holocaust
Functionalism vs. intentionalism
v • d • e
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Etymology and use of the term
o 1.1 Definition
* 2 Distinctive features
o 2.1 Efficiency and scale
o 2.2 Medical experiments
* 3 Victims and death toll
o 3.1 Jewish victims
o 3.2 Non-Jewish victims
+ 3.2.1 Roma
+ 3.2.2 Disabled and mentally ill
+ 3.2.3 Gays
+ 3.2.4 Freemasons
+ 3.2.5 Jehovah's Witnesses
* 4 Development and execution
o 4.1 Origins
o 4.2 Increasing persecution and pogroms (1938–1942)
o 4.3 Early measures in Poland
o 4.4 Concentration and labor camps (1933–1945)
o 4.5 Ghettos (1940–1945)
o 4.6 Death squads (1941–1943)
o 4.7 Wannsee Conference and extermination camps (1942–1945)
o 4.8 Jewish resistance
o 4.9 Climax
o 4.10 Escapes and publication of news of the death camps (April–June 1944)
o 4.11 Death marches (1944–1945)
o 4.12 Liberation
* 5 Involvement of other countries and nationals
o 5.1 Rescuers
o 5.2 Collaborators
* 6 Aftermath and historiography
* 7 See also
* 8 Notes
* 9 Further reading
Etymology and use of the term
Main article: Names of the Holocaust
The term holocaust originally derived from the Greek word holókauston, meaning a "completely (holos) burnt (kaustos)" sacrificial offering to a god. Since the late 19th century, it has been used primarily to refer to disasters or catastrophes.
The biblical word Shoa (שואה) (also spelled Shoah and Sho'ah), meaning "calamity," became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s.[7] Shoa is preferred by many Jews for a number of reasons, including the theologically offensive nature of the original meaning of the word holocaust.
Definition
Although the word "holocaust" has been widely used since the 17th century to refer to the violent death of a large number of people, since the 1950s its use has been increasingly restricted; it is now mainly used to describe the Nazi Holocaust, and is usually spelled with a capital H. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word was first used to describe Hitler's treatment of the Jews as early as the spring of 1942, when the Jerusalem historian BenZion Dinur (Dinaburg) stated that the Holocaust was a "catastrophe" that symbolized the unique situation of the Jewish people.[8] By the late 1970s, the term had come to refer to the genocide of the European Jews.
The usual German term for the extermination of the Jews during the Nazi period was Endlösung der Judenfrage (the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question"). In both English and German, "Final Solution" is widely used as an alternative to the Holocaust.[9]
The word "holocaust" is also used in a wider sense to describe other actions of the Nazi regime. These include the killing of around half a million Roma and Sinti, the deaths of several million Soviet prisoners of war, the killing of the intelligentsia, slave laborers, gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled, and political opponents. The use of the word in this wider sense is objected to by many Jewish organizations, particularly those established to commemorate the Jewish Holocaust. Jewish organizations say that the word in its current sense was originally coined to describe the extermination of the Jews, and that the Jewish Holocaust was a crime on such a scale, and of such specificity, as the culmination of the long history of European antisemitism, that it should not be subsumed into a general category with the other crimes of the Nazis.
Even more hotly disputed is the extension of the word to describe events that have no connection with World War II. It is used by Armenians to describe the Armenian genocide of World War I. The terms "Rwandan Holocaust" and "Cambodian Holocaust" are also used to refer to the Rwanda genocide of 1994 and the mass killings of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia respectively.
Distinctive features
Efficiency and scale
Ghettos were established in Europe in which Jews were confined before being shipped to extermination camps.
Ghettos were established in Europe in which Jews were confined before being shipped to extermination camps.
The Nazis methodically tracked the progress of the Holocaust in thousands of reports and documents. Pictured is the Höfle Telegram sent to Adolf Eichmann in January, 1943, that reported that 1,274,166 Jews had been killed in the four Aktion Reinhard camps during 1942.
The Nazis methodically tracked the progress of the Holocaust in thousands of reports and documents. Pictured is the Höfle Telegram sent to Adolf Eichmann in January, 1943, that reported that 1,274,166 Jews had been killed in the four Aktion Reinhard camps during 1942.
The Holocaust can be distinguished from other genocides by the industrial nature and scale of the killings.[10] Detailed lists of potential victims were made and maintained using Dehomag statistical machinery, and meticulous records of the killings were produced. As prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property to the Nazis, which was then precisely catalogued and tagged, before being sent to Germany.
In 1941, after occupying Belarus, the Nazis used mental patients from Minsk asylums as guinea pigs to test the efficiency of their mass slaughter. Initially, they tried shooting them by having them stand one behind the other, so that several people could be killed with one bullet, but it was too slow. Then they tried dynamite, but few were killed and many were left wounded with hands and legs missing. In October 1941, in Mogilev the Germans incorporated gassing as a technique for mass murder for the first time. Gas was poured into a Gaswagen or "gas car", developed by Walter Rauff. It took more than 30 minutes for people inside the Gaswagen to die. Later, the Germans used a larger truck exhaust, which only took only eight minutes to kill all the people inside.[11]
In the spring of 1942, the Aktion Reinhard camps began operating. Carbon monoxide was used in the gas chambers at Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, while Zyklon B, a cyanide-based insecticide, was employed at Majdanek and Auschwitz.[12]
The disposal of large numbers of bodies presented a logistical problem. The Nazis studied how to improve fuel efficiency, using a combination of different fuels, such as coke, wood and body fat. According to surviving Sonderkommandos, multiple bodies were added to the furnaces to obtain optimal fuel efficiency and speed, particularly when the demand was higher.[13]
Corporate involvement in the Holocaust has created significant controversy in recent years. Rudolf Höß, Auschwitz camp commandant, said that far from having to advertise their slave labour services, the concentration camps were approached by various large German businesses, some of which are still in existence.[2] Technology developed by IBM also played a role in the categorization of prisoners, through the use of punched card machines.[10][14]
The slaughter was systematically conducted in virtually all areas of Nazi-occupied territory, where victims were targeted in what are now 35 separate European countries.[15] The mass killing was at its worst in Central and Eastern Europe, which had more than seven million Jews in 1939; about five million Jews were killed there, including three million in occupied Poland and over one million in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands also died in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Yugoslavia, and Greece. There is evidence that the Nazis also planned to carry out their "final solution" in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.[16] The extermination continued in Nazi-controlled territory until the end of World War II, ending only when the Allies entered Germany itself and forced the Nazis to surrender in May 1945.
Medical experiments
A cold water immersion experiment at Dachau concentration camp presided over by Professor Holzlohner (left) and Dr. Rascher (right). The victim is wearing a Luftwaffe garment.
A cold water immersion experiment at Dachau concentration camp presided over by Professor Holzlohner (left) and Dr. Rascher (right). The victim is wearing a Luftwaffe garment.
Main articles: Nazi human experimentation and Doctors' Trial
Another distinctive feature was the use of human subjects in medical experiments. German physicians carried out such experiments at Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, and Natzweiler concentration camps.[17]
The most notorious of these physicians was Dr. Josef Mengele, who worked in Auschwitz. His experiments included placing subjects in pressure chambers, testing drugs on them, freezing them, attempts to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, various amputations and other brutal surgeries, and in at least one case attempting to transform normal twins into Siamese twins.[18] The full extent of his work will never be known because the two truckloads of records he sent to Dr. Otmar von Verschuer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute were destroyed by the latter. Subjects who survived Mengele's experiments were almost always killed after the experiments for dissection.
Victims and death toll
Using a variety of sources, including documents from the Nazis, scholars have generally agreed upon a range of the number of victims. Recently declassified British and Soviet documents have indicated the total may be higher than previously believed.[19]
Jewish victims
Members of the Sonderkommando burn corpses in the firepits at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Photographer Alberto Errera, August 1944. Courtesy of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum, Poland.
Members of the Sonderkommando burn corpses in the firepits at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Photographer Alberto Errera, August 1944. Courtesy of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum, Poland. [20]
Map titled "Jewish Executions Carried Out by Einsatzgruppe A" from the December 1941 Jäger Report by the commander of a Nazi death squad. Marked "Secret Reich Matter," the map shows the number of Jews shot in the Baltic region, and reads at the bottom: "the estimated number of Jews still on hand is 128,000". Estonia is marked as judenfrei ("free of Jews").
Map titled "Jewish Executions Carried Out by Einsatzgruppe A" from the December 1941 Jäger Report by the commander of a Nazi death squad. Marked "Secret Reich Matter," the map shows the number of Jews shot in the Baltic region, and reads at the bottom: "the estimated number of Jews still on hand is 128,000". Estonia is marked as judenfrei ("free of Jews").
Since 1945, the most commonly cited figure for the total number of Jews killed in the course of the Holocaust has been six million. The Holocaust commemoration center, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, comments:
There is no precise figure for the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. The figure commonly used is the six million quoted by Adolf Eichmann, a senior SS official. Most research confirms that the number of victims was between five and six million. Early calculations range from 5.1 million (Professor Raul Hilberg) to 5.95 million (Jacob Leschinsky). More recent research, by Professor Yisrael Gutman and Dr. Robert Rozett in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, estimates the Jewish losses at 5.59–5.86 million, and a study headed by Dr. Wolfgang Benz presents a range from 5.29 million to six million.
The main sources for these statistics are comparisons of prewar censuses with postwar censuses and population estimates. Nazi documentation containing partial data on various deportations and murders is also used. We estimate that Yad Vashem currently has somewhat more than four million names of victims that are accessible.[21]
Raul Hilberg, in the third edition of his ground-breaking three-volume work, The Destruction of the European Jews, estimates that 5.1 million Jews died during the Holocaust. This figure includes "over 800,000" who died from "Ghettoization and general privation"; 1,400,000 who were killed in "Open-air shootings"; and "up to 2,900,000" who perished in camps. Hilberg estimates the death toll in Poland at "up to 3,000,000".[22] Hilberg's numbers are generally considered to be a conservative estimate, as they generally include only those deaths for which some records are available, avoiding statistical adjustment.[23] British historian Martin Gilbert used a similar approach in his Atlas of the Holocaust, but arrived at a number of 5.75 million Jewish victims, since he estimated higher numbers of Jews killed in Russia and other locations.[24]
Lucy S. Dawidowicz used pre-war census figures to estimate that 5.934 million Jews died. Using official census counts may cause an underestimate since many births and deaths were not recorded in small towns and villages. Another reason some[attribution needed] consider her estimate too low is that many records were destroyed during the war. Her listing of deaths by country of origin is available in the article about her book, The War Against the Jews.[25]
One of the most authoritative German scholars of the Holocaust, Prof. Wolfgang Benz of the Technical University of Berlin, cites between 5.3 and 6.2 million Jews killed in Dimension des Volksmords (1991), while Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett estimate between 5.59 and 5.86 million Jewish victims in the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust (1990).[26]
There were about 8 to 10 million Jews in the territories controlled directly or indirectly by the Nazis (the uncertainty arises from the lack of knowledge about how many Jews there were in the Soviet Union). The 6 million killed in the Holocaust thus represent 60 to 75 percent of these Jews. Of Poland's 3.3 million Jews, over 90 percent were killed. The same proportion were killed in Latvia and Lithuania, but most of Estonia's Jews were evacuated in time. In Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Netherlands and Yugoslavia, over 70 percent were killed. More than 50 percent were killed in Belgium, Hungary and Romania. It is likely that a similar proportion were killed in Belarus and Ukraine, but these figures are less certain. Countries with notably lower proportions of deaths include Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Italy and Norway. Finally, of the 750,000 Jews in Germany and Austria in 1933, only about a quarter survived. Although many German Jews emigrated before 1939, the majority of these fled to Czechoslovakia, France or the Netherlands, from where they were later deported to their deaths.
The number of people killed at the major extermination camps has been estimated as follows: Auschwitz: about 1 million; Belzec: 436,000; Chelmno: 340,000; Majdanek: 300,000 to 350,000; Maly Trostenets: at least 200,000, possibly over 500,000; Sobibór: 260,000; Treblinka: at least 700,000, possibly over 1 million. This gives a total of at least 3.2 million, and possibly 3.8 million. Of these, over 90% were Jews. These seven camps thus accounted for about half the total number of Jews killed in the entire Nazi Holocaust. Virtually the whole Jewish population of Poland died in these camps.
To this figure of 3.2 to 3.8 million must be added at least half a million Jews who died in other camps, including the major concentration camps in Germany. These were not extermination camps, but had large numbers of Jewish prisoners at various times, particularly in the last year of the war as the Nazis withdrew from Poland. About a million people died in these camps, and although the proportion of Jews is not known with certainty, it was probably more than 50 percent. The largest death tolls were at Mauthausen (195,000) Bergen-Belsen (170,000) and Sachsenhausen (100,100). Another 800,000 to 1 million Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet territories (an approximate figure, since the Einsatzgruppen killings were frequently undocumented). Many more died through execution or of disease and malnutrition in the ghettos of Poland before they could be deported.
Non-Jewish victims
Further information: Generalplan Ost, Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles, Second World War persecution and genocide of Serbs, and Nacht und Nebel
The following estimates provide a range of the number of non-Jewish victims:
* 3.5–6 million other Slavic civilians
* 2.5–4 million Soviet POWs
* 1.8–1.9 million Christian Poles and other non-Jewish Poles (estimate includes civilians killed as a result of Nazi aggression and occupation but does not include the military casualties of Nazi aggression or the victims of the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland and of deportations to Central Asia and Siberia)[27]
* 1–1.5 million political dissidents
* 220,000–500,000 Roma & Sinti (Gypsies)[28]
* 100,000 communists
* 80,000–200,000 European Freemasons[29]
* 75,000–250,000 people with disabilities
* 5,000–15,000 gay men [30]
* 2,500–5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses
Roma
Main article: Porajmos
Map of persecution of Roma (Gypsies)
Map of persecution of Roma (Gypsies)
Roma arrivals in the Belzec extermination camp, 1940.
Roma arrivals in the Belzec extermination camp, 1940.
Donald Niewyk and Frances Nicosia write that, because the Sinti and Roma are traditionally a secretive and non-literate people, less is known about their fate than about that of any other group.[31] Yehuda Bauer writes that the lack of information can be attributed to the Gypsies' distrust and suspicion, and to their humiliation, because some of the basic taboos of Gypsy culture regarding hygiene and sexual contact were violated at Auschwitz. Bauer writes that "[m]ost Gypsies could not relate their stories involving these tortures; as a result, most kept silent and thus increased the effects of the massive trauma they had undergone."[32]
Niewyk and Nicosia write that the death toll was at least 130,000 of the nearly one million Roma and Sinti in Nazi-controlled Europe.[31] A detailed study by the late Sybil Milton, formerly senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, calculated a death toll of at least 220,000, and possibly closer to 500,000.[33][34] Ian Hancock, Director of the Program of Romani Studies and the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin, has argued in favour of a higher figure of between 500,000 and 1,500,000.[35] Hancock writes that, proportionately, the death toll equaled "and almost certainly exceed[ed], that of Jewish victims."[36]
“ The Germans wanted to "toss into the Ghetto everything that is characteristically dirty, shabby, bizarre, of which one ought to be frightened, and which anyway has to be destroyed." — Emmanuel Ringelblum on the Roma. ”
Before being sent to the camps, the victims were herded into ghettos, including the Warsaw Ghetto, where they formed a distinct subclass. Further east, teams of Einsatzgruppen tracked down Roma encampments and murdered the inhabitants on the spot, leaving no records of the victims. They were also victimized by the puppet regimes that cooperated with the Nazis, especially the Ustashe regime in Croatia; in Jasenovac concentration camp, tens of thousands of Roma were killed.
In May 1942, Gypsies were placed under the same labor and social laws as the Jews, and on December 16, 1942, Himmler issued a decree that "Gypsy Mischlinge (mixed breeds), Roma Gypsies, and members of the clans of Balkan origins who are not of German blood" should be sent to Auschwitz, unless they had served in the Wehrmacht.[37] On January 29, 1943, another decree ordered the deportation of all German Gypsies to Auschwitz.
This was adjusted on November 15, 1943, when Himmler ordered that, in the occupied Soviet areas, "sedentary Gypsies and part-Gypsies (Mischlinge) are to be treated as citizens of the country. Nomadic Gypsies and part-Gypsies are to be placed on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps."[38] Yehuda Bauer argues that this adjustment reflected Nazi ideology that the Gypsies, originally an Aryan population, had been "spoiled" by non-Gypsy blood.[39]
Disabled and mentally ill
Further information: Aktion T4, Erbkrank, Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, and Rhineland Bastard
"60,000 RM is what this person with genetic defects costs the community during his lifetime. Fellow Germans, that's your money too ..."
"60,000 RM is what this person with genetic defects costs the community during his lifetime. Fellow Germans,[40] that's your money too ..."[41]
“
Our starting point is not the individual: We do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked...Our objectives are different:We must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world. — Joseph Goebbels, 1938.[42]
”
Aktion T4 was a program established in 1939 to maintain the genetic purity of the German population by killing or sterilizing German and Austrian citizens who were disabled or suffering from mental illness.[43] Between 1939 and 1941, 75,000–250,000 people were killed,[citation needed] and 300,000 forcibly sterilized.[44]
The program was named after Tiergartenstraße 4, the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, the headquarters of the Gemeinnnützige Stiftung für Heil und Anstaltspflege (General Foundation for Welfare and Institutional Care), [45] led by Philipp Bouhler, head of Hitler’s private chancellery (Kanzlei des Führer der NSDAP) and Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician.
Brandt was tried in December 1946 at Nuremberg, along with 22 others, in a case known as United States of America v. Karl Brandt et al., also known as the Doctors' Trial. He was hanged at Landsberg Prison on June 2, 1948.
Gays
The Homomonument in Amsterdam, a memorial to the gay victims of Nazi Germany.
The Homomonument in Amsterdam, a memorial to the gay victims of Nazi Germany.
Main article: History of homosexual people in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust#Concentration Camps
Between 5,000 and 15,000 gay men are estimated to have died in concentration camps.[30] Homosexuality was declared contrary to "wholesome popular sentiment," and gay men were regarded as "defilers of German blood."[30] The Gestapo encouraged people to report suspected homosexual behavior, raided gay bars, tracked individuals using the address books of those they arrested, and used the subscription lists of gay magazines to find others.[30]
Tens of thousands were convicted between 1933 and 1944 and sent to camps for "rehabilitation." Forced to wear yellow armbands[4] and later pink triangles,[30] they routinely received more grueling and dangerous work assignments than other non-Jewish inmates, under the policy of "Extermination through work".[46] They were humiliated, tortured, castrated, used in hormone experiments conducted by the SS, and then killed. Political enemies such as Catholic priests were also killed after being accused of homosexuality.[30]
Freemasons
A memorial for Loge Liberté chérie, a Masonic lodge founded in November 1943 in Hut 6 of Emslandlager VII (KZ Esterwegen), the only Masonic lodge to have been founded in a Nazi concentration camp.
A memorial for Loge Liberté chérie, a Masonic lodge founded in November 1943 in Hut 6 of Emslandlager VII (KZ Esterwegen), the only Masonic lodge to have been founded in a Nazi concentration camp.
Further information: Freemasonry under Totalitarian Regimes#Nazi Germany and Occupied Europe, Liberté chérie (Freemasonry), and Nacht und Nebel
In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that Freemasonry had "succumbed" to the Jews: "The general pacifistic paralysis of the national instinct of self-preservation begun by Freemasonry is then transmitted to the masses of society by the Jewish press."[47]
The records of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office) show that Freemasons were persecuted.[48][49] Freemason concentration camp inmates were graded as political prisoners, and wore an inverted red triangle.[50] It is estimated that between 80,000 and 200,000 were killed.[29]
In 1938, a forget-me-not badge — made by the same factory as the Masonic badge, and first used by the Grand Lodge Zur Sonne, in 1926 — was chosen for the annual Nazi Party Winterhilfswerk. Winterhilfswerk was a supposed charitable organization, which actually collected money used for rearmament. This coincidence enabled Freemasons to wear forget-me-not badge as a secret sign of membership.[51][52][53] The badge is now worn in the coat lapel by freemasons around the world to remember all those that have suffered in the name of Freemasonry, and specifically those during the Nazi era.[54][55]
Jehovah's Witnesses
Main article: Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses
Refusing to pledge allegiance to the Nazi party or to serve in the military, roughly 12,000 Jehovah's Witnesses — nicknamed Ernste Bibelforscher (Earnest Bible Students) by the Nazis — were forced to wear a purple star and placed in concentration camps, where they were given the option of renouncing their faith and submitting to the state's authority. About 2,000 were killed; those who survived lost their employment.
Historian Detlef Garbe, director at the Neuengamme (Hamburg) Memorial, writes that "no other religious movement resisted the pressure to conform to National Socialism with comparable unanimity and steadfastness."[56]
Development and execution
Origins
The Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1933, and persecution of German Jews began almost immediately, causing about half of all German Jews to leave the country before 1939. During the 1930s, the legal, economic and social rights of Jews were steadily restricted, and many Jews, particularly political and intellectual leaders, were sent to concentration camps, where most of them were eventually killed or died. Before 1939, however, there was no systematic killing of Jews either in Germany or in Austria. Most of the Austrian Jews, for example, were allowed to emigrate, minus their possessions, by the Nazi official in charge of Jewish emigration, Adolf Eichmann.
In his autobiography Mein Kampf (1925), Hitler was open about his hatred of Jews and gave ample warning of his intention to drive them from Germany's political, intellectual and cultural life. He did not actually say that if he came to power he would attempt to exterminate the Jews, but he was more explicit in private. As early as 1922 he told Major Josef Hell: "The annihilation (vernichtung) of the Jews will be my first and foremost task." He said that he would personally hang all the Jews of Munich. "Exactly the same thing will happen in the other cities until Germany is cleansed of its last Jew." [3]
In 1935, Hitler introduced the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship and deprived them of all civil rights. In his speech introducing the laws, Hitler said that if they were "insufficient" in solving the "Jewish question," it would be necessary to pass a law "handing over the problem to the National Socialist Party for final solution (Endlösung)." This expression became the standard Nazi euphemism for the extermination of the Jews. In January 1939, he said in a public speech: "If international finance-Jewry should succeed once more in plunging the nations into yet another world war, the consequences will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe." There is no documentary evidence that Hitler ordered the preparation of a concrete plan for exterminating the Jews. The most likely originator of such a plan was Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi paramilitary force (the SS), a fanatical antisemite and Hitler's most trusted lieutenant.
The question of the treatment of the Jews became an urgent one for the Nazis after September 1939, when they occupied the eastern half of Poland, home to about two million Jews. Himmler's right-hand man, Reinhard Heydrich, reported to Himmler on how to deal with the situation. He recommended concentrating all the Polish Jews in ghettos in major cities, where they would be put to work for the German war industry. The ghettos would be in cities located on railway junctions, so that, in Heydrich's words, "future measures can be accomplished more easily." At his trial in 1961, Adolf Eichmann testified that the expression "future measures" was understood to mean "physical extermination."
Increasing persecution and pogroms (1938–1942)
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v • d • e
Pogroms and massacres: Babi Yar, Dorohoi Pogrom, Iaşi pogrom, Jedwabne Massacre, Kristallnacht, Legionnaires' Rebellion and Bucharest Pogrom, Lviv pogroms, Ponary massacre, Odessa massacre.
Interior of Berlin Central Synagogue after Kristallnacht
Interior of Berlin Central Synagogue after Kristallnacht
Many scholars date the start of the Holocaust to the anti-Jewish riots of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, on November 9, 1938, in which Jews were attacked and Jewish property was vandalized across Germany. Approximately 100 Jews were killed, and another 30,000 sent to concentration camps, while over 7,000 Jewish shops and 1,668 synagogues (almost every synagogue in Germany) were damaged or destroyed. Similar events took place in Vienna.
A number of deadly pogroms by local populations occurred during the Second World War, some with Nazi encouragement, and some spontaneously. This included the Iaşi pogrom in Romania on June 30, 1941, in which as many 14,000 Jews were killed by Romanian residents and police, and the Jedwabne pogrom, in which between 380 and 1,600 Jews were killed by local Poles in July 1941.
Early measures in Poland
I ask nothing of the Jews except that they should disappear.
– Hans Frank, Nazi governor of Poland.[57][58]
In September 1939, Himmler appointed Heydrich head of the Reich Security Head Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA), a body overseeing the work of the SS, the Security Police (SD) and the Gestapo in occupied Poland and charged with carrying out the policy towards the Jews described in Heydrich's report. (This body should not be confused with the Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt or Race and Resettlement Main Office, RuSHA, which was involved in carrying out the deportation of Jews.) The Jews were herded into ghettos, mostly in the General Government area of central Poland, where they were put to work under the Reich Labor Office headed by Fritz Saukel. Here many thousands were killed in various ways, and many more died of disease, starvation and overwork, but there was still no program of systematic killing. There is no doubt, however, that the Nazis saw forced labor as a form of extermination. The expression Vernichtung durch Arbeit ("destruction through work") was frequently used.
When the Germans occupied Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium and France in 1940, and Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941, antisemitic measures were also introduced into these countries, although the pace and severity varied greatly from country to country according to local political circumstances. Jews were removed from economic and cultural life and were subject to various restrictive laws, but physical deportation did not occur in most places before 1942. The Vichy regime in occupied France actively collaborated in persecuting French Jews. Germany's allies Italy, Finland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria were pressured to introduce anti-Jewish measures, but for the most part they did not comply until compelled to do so. Bulgaria and Finland introduced no anti-Jewish measures at all, and Hungary did so only after the country was occupied by Germany in 1944. The German puppet regime in Croatia, on the other hand, began actively persecuting Jews on its own initiative.
During 1940 and 1941, the killing of large numbers of Jews in Poland continued, and the deportation of Jews from Germany, Austria and the "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia" (today's Czech Republic) to Poland was undertaken. Eichmann was assigned the task of removing all Jews from these territories, although the deportation of Jews from Germany, particularly Berlin, was not officially completed until 1943. (Many Berlin Jews were able to survive in hiding — it is a paradox of the Holocaust that Berlin was one of the few places where this was possible.) By December 1939, 3.5 million Jews were crowded into the General Government area.
The Governor-General, Hans Frank, noted that this many people could not be simply shot. "We shall have to take steps, however, designed in some way to eliminate them." It was this dilemma which led the SS to experiment with large-scale killings using poison gas. This method had already been used during Hitler's campaign of euthanasia in Germany (known as "T4"). SS Obersturmführer Christian Wirth seems to have been the inventor of the gas chamber.
Although it was clear by 1941 that the SS hierarchy led by Himmler and Heydrich was determined to embark on a policy of killing all the Jews under German control, there were important centers of opposition to this policy within the Nazi regime. The grounds for the opposition were mainly economic, not humanitarian. Hermann Göring, who had overall control of the German war industry, and the German army's Economics Department, representing the armaments industry, argued that the enormous Jewish labor force assembled in the General Government area (more than a million able-bodied workers) was an asset too valuable to waste while Germany was preparing to invade the Soviet Union.
Some parts of the German army disapproved of atrocities against Jews on principle, and during this period there were frequent conflicts between the Army and the SS over policy in Poland. Ultimately, neither Göring nor the army leadership was willing or able to challenge Himmler's authority, particularly since Himmler made it clear he had Hitler's support.
Concentration and labor camps (1933–1945)
Prisoners in Austria's Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp climbing the 186 steps of the notorious Stairway of Death, carrying heavy stone slabs on their backs. Although not an extermination camp, around 44,000 inmates are believed to have died there, an example of extermination through labour.
Prisoners in Austria's Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp climbing the 186 steps of the notorious Stairway of Death, carrying heavy stone slabs on their backs. Although not an extermination camp, around 44,000 inmates are believed to have died there,[59] an example of extermination through labour.
April 12, 1945: Rows of dead inmates in Lager Nordhausen, a Gestapo concentration camp, where around 20,000 inmates are believed to have died.
April 12, 1945: Rows of dead inmates in Lager Nordhausen, a Gestapo concentration camp, where around 20,000 inmates are believed to have died.
Further information: Extermination through labour, List of Nazi German concentration camps, Nazi concentration camps, Nazi concentration camp badges.
The major concentration and extermination camps: Auschwitz, Belzec, Bergen-Belsen, Chełmno, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Grini, Jasenovac, Klooga, Majdanek, Maly Trostenets, Mauthausen-Gusen, Ravensbrück, Treblinka
After the 1932 elections it became clear to the Nazi leaders that they would never be able to secure a majority of the votes and that they would have to rely on other means to gain power. Leading up to the 1933 elections, the Nazis began intensifying acts of violence to wreak havoc among the opposition. At the same time, with cooperation from local authorities, they set up camps as concentration centers within Germany. One of the first was Dachau, which opened in March 1933. These early camps were meant to hold, torture, or kill only political prisoners, such as Communists and Social Democrats. Eventually, the Nazis imprisoned Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, critical journalists, and other "undesirables".[60]
These early prisons — usually basements and storehouses — were eventually consolidated into full-blown, centrally run camps outside the cities. By 1942, six large extermination camps had been established in Nazi-occupied Poland.[60] After 1939, the camps increasingly became places where Jews and POWs were either killed or forced to live as slave laborers, undernourished and tortured.[61]
New camps were focused on areas with large Jewish, Polish intelligentsia, communist, or Roma and Sinti populations, including inside Germany. Most of the camps were located in the area of General Government in occupied Poland, but there were camps in every country occupied by the Nazis. The transportation of prisoners was often carried out under horrifying conditions using rail freight cars, in which many died before reaching their destination.
While not designed as a method for systematic extermination, many concentration camp prisoners died because of harsh conditions or were eventually executed. Upon admission, some camps tattooed prisoners with a prisoner ID.[62] Those fit for work were dispatched for 12 to 14 hour shifts. Before and after, there were roll calls that could sometimes last for hours, with prisoners regularly dying of exposure.[63]
Ghettos (1940–1945)
Further information: Ghetto, Cluj Ghetto, Emanuel Ringelblum, Kraków Ghetto, Judenrat, Łachwa Ghetto, Łódź Ghetto, Lwów Ghetto, Oyneg Shabbos, Theresienstadt Ghetto, Warsaw Ghetto, Wilna Ghetto
A child dying in the streets of the crowded Warsaw Ghetto, where hunger and disease killed tens of thousands.
A child dying in the streets of the crowded Warsaw Ghetto, where hunger and disease killed tens of thousands.
After the invasion of Poland, the Nazis created ghettos to which Jews (and some Roma and Sinti) were confined, until they were eventually shipped to death camps and killed. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest, with 380,000 people and the Łódź Ghetto, the second largest, holding about 160,000, but ghettos were instituted in many cities. The ghettos were established throughout 1940 and 1941, and were immediately turned into immensely crowded prisons; though the Warsaw Ghetto contained 30% of the population of Warsaw, it occupied only about 2.4% of city's area, averaging 9.2 people per room. From 1940 through 1942, disease (especially typhoid fever) and starvation killed hundreds of thousands of Jews confined in the ghettos.
Each ghetto was run by a Judenrat (Jewish council) of German-appointed Jewish community leaders, who were responsible for the day-to-day running of the ghetto, including the provision of food, water, heat, medicine, and shelter, and who were also expected to make arrangements for deportations to extermination camps. Heinrich Himmler ordered the start of the deportations on July 19, 1942, and three days later, on July 22, the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto began; over the next 52 days, until September 12, 300,000 people from Warsaw alone were transported in freight trains to the Treblinka extermination camp. Many other ghettos were completely depopulated.
Michael Berenbaum writes that the defining moment that tested the courage and character of each Judenrat came when they were asked to provide a list of names of the next group to be deported. The Judenrat members went through the tried and tested methods of delay, bribery, stonewalling, pleading, and argumentation, until finally a decision had to be made. Some argued that their responsibility was to save the Jews who could be saved, and that therefore others had to be sacrificed; others argued, following Maimonides, that not a single individual should be handed over who had not committed a capital crime. Judenrat leaders such as Dr. Joseph Parnas in Lviv, who refused to compile a list, were shot. On October 14, 1942, the entire Judenrat of Byaroza committed suicide rather than cooperate with the deportations.[64]
The first ghetto uprising occurred in September 1942 in the small town of Łachwa in southeast Poland. Though there were armed resistance attempts in the larger ghettos in 1943, such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Białystok Ghetto Uprising, in every case they failed against the Nazi military, and the remaining Jews were either killed or sent to the camps.
Death squads (1941–1943)
Main article: Einsatzgruppen
A member of Einsatzgruppe D is about to shoot a man sitting by a mass grave in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, in 1942. Present in the background are members of the German Army, the German Labor Service, and the Hitler Youth. The back of the photograph is inscribed "The last Jew in Vinnitsa".
A member of Einsatzgruppe D is about to shoot a man sitting by a mass grave in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, in 1942. Present in the background are members of the German Army, the German Labor Service, and the Hitler Youth.[65] The back of the photograph is inscribed "The last Jew in Vinnitsa".
The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 opened a new phase. The Soviet territories occupied by early 1942, including all of Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, and Ukraine, and most Russian territory west of the line Leningrad-Moscow-Rostov, contained about four million Jews, including hundreds of thousands who had fled Poland in 1939. Despite the chaos of the Soviet retreat, some effort was made to evacuate Jews, and about a million succeeded in escaping further east. The remaining three million were left at the mercy of the Nazis.
In these territories, there were fewer restraints on the mass killing of Jews than there were in countries like France or the Netherlands, where there was a long tradition of tolerance and the rule of law, or even Poland where, despite a strong tradition of antisemitism, there was considerable resistance to Nazi persecution of Polish Jews. In the Baltic states, Belarus, and Ukraine, native antisemitism was reinforced by hatred of Communist rule, which many people associated with the Jews. Thousands of people in these countries actively collaborated with the Nazis. Ukrainians and Latvians joined SS auxiliary forces in large numbers and did much of the dirty work in Nazi extermination camps. Raul Hilberg writes that these were ordinary citizens, not hoodlums or thugs; the great majority were university-educated professionals.[66] They used their skills to become efficient killers, according to Michael Berenbaum.[65]
Despite the subservience of the Army high command to Hitler, Himmler did not trust the Army to approve of, let alone carry out, the large-scale killings of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories. This task was assigned to SS formations called Einsatzgruppen ("task groups"), under the overall command of Heydrich. These had been used on a limited scale in Poland in 1939, but were now organized on a much larger scale. Einsatzgruppe A (commanded by SS-Brigadeführer Franz Stahlecker was assigned to the Baltic area, Einsatzgruppe B (SS-Brigadeführer Artur Nebe) to Belarus, Einsatzgruppe C (SS-Gruppenführer Otto Rasch) to north and central Ukraine, and Einsatzgruppe D (SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf) to Moldova, south Ukraine, the Crimea, and, during 1942, the north Caucasus.
According to Ohlendorf at his trial, "the Einsatzgruppen had the mission to protect the rear of the troops by killing the Jews, gypsies, Communist functionaries, active Communists, and all persons who would endanger the security." In practice, their victims were nearly all defenseless Jewish civilians (not a single Einsatzgruppe member was killed in action during these operations). By December 1941, the four Einsatzgruppen listed above had killed, respectively, 125,000, 45,000, 75,000, and 55,000 people — a total of 300,000 people — mainly by shooting or with hand grenades at mass killing sites outside the major towns.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tells the story of one survivor of the Einsatzgruppen in Piryatin, Ukraine, when they killed 1,600 Jews on April 6, 1942, the second day of Passover:
I saw them do the killing. At 5:00 p.m. they gave the command, "Fill in the pits." Screams and groans were coming from the pits. Suddenly I saw my neighbor Ruderman rise from under the soil ... His eyes were bloody and he was screaming: "Finish me off!" ... A murdered woman lay at my feet. A boy of five years crawled out from under her body and began to scream desperately. "Mommy!" That was all I saw, since I fell unconscious.[65]
The most notorious masasacre of Jews in the Soviet Union was at a ravine called Babi Yar outside Kiev, where 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation on September 29-30, 1941. The killing of all the Jews in Kiev was decided on by the military governor (Major-General Friedrich Eberhardt) the Police Commander for Army Group South (SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln) and the Einsatzgruppe C Commander Otto Rasch. It was carried out by a mixture of SS, SD and Security Police, assisted by Ukrainian police. A truck driver described the scene:
“ Kikes of the city of Kiev and vicinity! On Monday, September 29, you are to appear by 08:00 a.m. with your possessions, money, documents, valuables, and warm clothing at Dorogozhitskaya Street, next to the Jewish cemetery. Failure to appear is punishable by death. — Order posted in Kiev in Russian and Ukrainian, on or around September 26, 1941.[67] ”
[O]ne after the other, they had to remove their luggage, then their coats, shoes, and overgarments and also underwear ... Once undressed, they were led into the ravine which was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep ... When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the Schutzpolizei and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot ... The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun ... I saw these marksmen stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other ... The marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew, who had meanwhile lain down, and shoot him.[67]
Karl Wolff (second from the right) with Heinrich Himmler (far left) at the Obersalzberg, May 1939. Wolf wrote in his diary that Himmler had vomited after witnessing the mass shooting of 100 Jews.
Karl Wolff (second from the right) with Heinrich Himmler (far left) at the Obersalzberg, May 1939. Wolf wrote in his diary that Himmler had vomited after witnessing the mass shooting of 100 Jews.[68]
In August 1941 Himmler travelled to Minsk where he personally witnessed 100 Jews being shot in a ditch outside the town, an event described by SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff in his diary. "Himmler's face was green. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his cheek where a piece of brain had squirted up on to it. Then he vomited." After recovering his composure, he lectured the SS men on the need to follow the "highest moral law of the Party" in carrying out their tasks.
By the end of 1941, however, the Einsatzgruppen had killed only 15 percent of the Jews in the occupied Soviet territories, and it was apparent that these methods could not be used to kill all the Jews of Europe. Even before the invasion of the Soviet Union, experiments with killing Jews in the back of vans using gas from the van's exhaust had been carried out, and when this proved too slow, more lethal gasses were tried. For large-scale killing by gas, however, fixed sites would be needed, and it was decided — probably by Heydrich and Eichmann — that the Jews should be brought to camps specifically built for the purpose.
In the summer of 1941, Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz-Birkenau labor camp 60km south of Krakow, was told to prepare a much larger camp to be used solely for killing by gas. Himmler told him: "The Fuhrer has ordered the final solution of the Jewish question. We, the SS, have to execute the order...I have therefore chosen Auschwitz for this purpose." The first gassings, using an industrial gas derived from prussic acid and known by the brand name Zyklon-B, were carried out at Auschwitz in September.
Wannsee Conference and extermination camps (1942–1945)
Further information: Operation Reinhard, Wannsee Conference.
Extermination camps (Vernichtungslager): Auschwitz II, Belzec, Chełmno, Jasenovac, Maly Trostenets, Majdanek, Sobibór, Treblinka.
The dining room of the Wannsee villa, where the Wannsee conference took place. The 15 men seated at the table on January 20, 1942 to discuss the "final solution of the Jewish question"were considered the best and the brightest in the Reich.
The dining room of the Wannsee villa, where the Wannsee conference took place. The 15 men seated at the table on January 20, 1942 to discuss the "final solution of the Jewish question"[69]were considered the best and the brightest in the Reich.[70]
Auschwitz I
Auschwitz I
The railway line leading to the death camp at Auschwitz II (Birkenau).
The railway line leading to the death camp at Auschwitz II (Birkenau).
Empty poison gas canisters used to kill inmates and piles of hair shaven from their heads are stored in the museum at Auschwitz II.
Empty poison gas canisters used to kill inmates and piles of hair shaven from their heads are stored in the museum at Auschwitz II.
A gas chamber in Auschwitz immediately after liberation, January 1945.
A gas chamber in Auschwitz immediately after liberation, January 1945.
Corpses in Auschwitz; from Yad Vashem.
Corpses in Auschwitz; from Yad Vashem.
By the end of 1941, Himmler and Heydrich were increasingly impatient with the progress of the Final Solution. Their main opponent was Göring, who had succeeded in exempting Jewish industrial workers from the orders to deport all Jews to the General Government and who had allied himself with the Army commanders who were opposing the extermination of the Jews out of mixture of economic calculation, distaste for the SS and (in some cases) humanitarian sentiment. Although Göring's power had declined since the defeat of his Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, he still had privileged access to Hitler and had great obstructive power.
Heydrich therefore convened a conference — the Wannsee Conference — on January 20, 1942 at a villa in the suburbs of Berlin to finalize a plan for the extermination of the Jews. The plan became known (after Heydrich) as Aktion Reinhard (Operation Reinhard). Those present included Heydrich, Eichmann, Heinrich Müller (head of the Gestapo), and representatives of the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, the Ministry for the Interior, the Four Year Plan Office, the Ministry of Justice, the General Government in Poland (where over two million Jews still lived), the Foreign Office, the Race and Resettlment Office, and the Nazi Party, and the office responsible for distributing Jewish property.[70] Also present was SS-Sturmbannführer Rudolf Lange, the SD commander in Riga, who had recently carried out the liquidation of the Riga ghetto. He seems to have been there to advise the officials on the practicalities of killing people on an industrial scale.
Michael Berenbaum writes that the 15 men seated at the table were considered the best and the brightest; more than half of them held doctorates from German universities. Butlers served brandy as they talked.[70]
The men were presented with a plan for killing all the Jews in Europe, although the minutes taken by Eichmann refer to this only through euphemisms. The officials were told there were 2.3 million Jews in the General Government, 850,000 in Hungary, 1.1 million in the other occupied countries, and up to 5 million in the Soviet Union (although only 3 million of these were in areas under German occupation) - a total of about 6.5 million. These would all be transported by train to extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) in Poland, where those unfit for work would be gassed at once. In some camps, such as Auschwitz, those fit for work would be kept alive for a while, but eventually all would be killed. Göring's representative, Dr. Erich Neumann, gained a limited exemption for some classes of industrial workers.
During 1942, in addition to Auschwitz, five other camps were designated as extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) for the carrying out of the Reinhard plan. Two of these, at Chelmno (also known as Kulmhof) and Majdanek were already functioning as labor camps: these now had extermination facilities added to them. Three new camps were built for the sole purpose of killing large numbers of Jews as quickly as possible, at Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka. A seventh camp, at Maly Trostenets in Belarus, was also used for this purpose.
Extermination camps are frequently confused with concentration camps such as Dachau and Belsen, which were mostly located in Germany and intended as places of incarceration and forced labor for a variety of enemies of the Nazi regime (such as Communists and homosexuals). They should also be distinguished from slave labor camps, which were set up in all German-occupied countries to exploit the labor of prisoners of various kinds, including prisoners of war. In all Nazi camps there were very high death rates as a result of starvation, disease and exhaustion, but only the extermination camps were designed specifically for mass killing.
“ There was a place called the ramp where the trains with the Jews were coming in. They were coming in day and night, and sometimes one per day and sometimes five per day, from all sorts of places in the world ... Constantly, people from the heart of Europe were disappearing, and they were arriving to the same place with the same ignorance of the fate of the previous transport. And the people in this mass ... I knew that within a couple of hours ... ninety percent would be gassed. — Rudolf Vrba, who worked on the Judenrampe in Auschwitz from August 18, 1942 to June 7, 1943.[71] ”
The method of killing at these camps was by poison gas, usually in gas chambers, although many prisoners were killed in mass shootings and by other means. At the pure extermination camps, all the prisoners arrived by train, and were taken directly from the platforms to a reception area where all their clothes and other possessions were taken, and women had their heads shaved (the hair was used to make felt). They were then herded naked into the gas chambers: usually they were told these were showers or delousing chambers. Solid pellets of Zyklon-B were dropped into the chambers, releasing a toxic gas, and those within died within minutes.
The gas was then pumped out, the bodies were removed, and any gold fillings in their teeth were extracted with pliers. The bodies of those killed were destroyed in crematoria (except at Sobibór where they were cremated on outdoor pyres), and the ashes buried or scattered. All this work was done by Jews known as Sonderkommandos, who thus bought themselves a few extra months of life. The camps were run by SS officers, but most of the guards were Ukrainian or Baltic auxiliaries. Regular German soldiers were kept well away from the camps.
Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chambers to accommodate 2,000 people at one time, whereas at Treblinka their 10 gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each. The way we selected our victims was as follows: we had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were sent into the Camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated, since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under the clothes but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.
– Rudolf Höß, Auschwitz camp commandant, Nuremberg testimony.[72]
At Auschwitz and the other labor camps, prisoners were separated on arrival into those capable of work — that is, fit adults under 50 — and those judged unfit for work. The latter were immediately killed by the methods already described, although the survivors were generally unaware of this. Those kept alive as workers were housed in crowded barracks under conditions of extreme deprivation and harsh discipline. Most of them eventually died of disease, hunger and exhaustion, although many were executed for trivial breaches of discipline, or at the whim of the guards and officers. Few of these prisoners survived more than a year, although there are accounts by prisoners who survived the war as camp workers.
The numbers killed at each extermination camp are estimated as:
* Auschwitz II: 1,400,000
* Belzec: 600,000
* Chelmno: 320,000
* Majdanek: 78,000
* Sobibór: 250,000
* Treblinka: 700,000
* Jasenovac: 97,000
* Maly Trostenets: 65,000
Jewish resistance
Further information: Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.
For uprisings: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Białystok Ghetto Uprising, Marcinkance Ghetto Uprising, Sobibór extermination camp, Żydowski Związek Walki, Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa.
For Jewish partisans, volunteers, and escapees: Yitzhak Arad, Bielski partisans, Masha Bruskina, Eugenio Calò, Jewish Brigade, Jewish partisans, Abba Kovner, Dov Lopatyn, Moše Pijade, Haviva Reik, Special Interrogation Group, Hannah Szenes, Rudolf Vrba, Alfréd Wetzler, Simcha Zorin.
For how stories were preserved in the Warsaw Ghetto: Emanuel Ringelblum, Oyneg Shabbos (group).
An image from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
An image from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
A man jumping out of a window of a burning house during the Warsaw uprising.
A man jumping out of a window of a burning house during the Warsaw uprising.
The failure of pre-war European Jewry to save itself from the Nazis was a powerful factor fuelling militant Zionism in the postwar years, and since 1948 has stiffened Israel's determination to do whatever it thinks necessary to defend itself, even in the teeth of world opinion. Jewish failure to resist the Holocaust has thus become a factor in current political controversy.
There are some examples of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust, most notably the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of January 1943, when thousands of poorly armed Jewish fighters held the SS at bay for four weeks, and killed several hundred Germans before being crushed by overwhelmingly superior forces. This was followed by the rising in the Treblinka extermination camp in May 1943, when about 200 inmates succeeded in escaping from the camp after overpowering the guards. Two weeks later, there was a rising in the Bialystok ghetto. In September, there was a short-lived rising in the Vilnius ghetto. In October, 600 Jewish and Russian prisoners attempted an escape at the Sobibór death camp. About 60 survived and joined the Soviet partisans. Most of the participants in these risings were killed, but some managed to escape and joined partisan units.
On October 7, 1944, the Jewish Sonderkommandos at Auschwitz staged an uprising. Female prisoners had smuggled in explosives from a weapons factory, and Crematorium IV was partly destroyed by an explosion. The prisoners then attempted a mass escape, but all 250 were killed soon after.
Jewish partisans (see the list at the top of this section) actively fought the Nazis and their collaborators in many countries. The Jewish Brigade, a unit of 5,000 volunteers from the British Mandate of Palestine fought in the British Army. German-speaking volunteers from the Special Interrogation Group performed commando and sabotage operations against the Nazis behind front lines in the Western Desert Campaign.
In Poland and the occupied Soviet lands, thousands of Jews fled into the swamps and forests and joined the partisans, although the partisan movements did not always welcome them. In Lithuania and Belarus, an area with a heavy concentration of Jews and also an area which suited partisan operations, Jewish partisan groups operated, and saved thousands of Jews from extermination. No such opportunities, of course, existed for the Jewish populations of cities such as Amsterdam or Budapest. Joining the partisans was an option only for the young and the fit, who were willing moreover to abandon their families to their fate. The strong Jewish sense of family solidarity meant that this was not an option for most Jews, who prefered to die togther rather than be separated.
For the great majority of Jews resistance could take only the passive forms of delay, evasion, negotiation, bargaining and, where possible, bribery of German officials. The Nazis enouraged this by forcing the Jewish communities to police themselves, through bodies such as the Reich Association of Jews (Reichsvereinigung der Juden) in Germany and the Jewish Councils (Judenrate) in the Polish urban ghettos. They cunningly held out the promise of concessions in exchange for each surrender, enmeshing the Jewish leaderships so deeply in well-intentioned compromise that a decision to stand and fight was never possible. The Holocaust survivor Alexander Kimel wrote: "The youth in the Ghettos dreamed about fighting. I believe that although there were many factors that inhibited our responses, the most important factors were isolation and historical conditioning to accepting martyrdom."[73]
The historical conditioning of the Jewish communities of Europe to accept persecution and to avert disaster through compromise and negotiation was the most important factor in the failure to resist until the very end (the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising only took place when the Jewish population had been reduced from 500,000 to 100,000 and it was obvious that no further compromise was possible). Paul Johnson writes:
The Jews had been persecuted for a millennium and a half and had learned from long experience that resistance cost lives rather than saved them. Their history, their theology, their folklore, their social structure, even their vocabulary trained them to negotiate, to pay, to plead, to protest, not to fight.
Johnson also argues that the emigration of millions of Jews, mainly the young, energetic and ambitious, to America and to Palestine over the previous 50 years had left the Jewish communities composed mainly of the religious, the conservative and the resigned to their fate. In the Soviet areas, the Jewish leadership had already been exterminated by the Communist regime.
The Jewish communities were systematically deceived about German intentions, and also cut off from most sources of news about the outside world. The Germans always told the Jews that they were being deported to work camps in the east, and maintained this illusion through elaborate deceptions all the way to the gas chamber doors. As photographs testify, Jews disembarked at the railway stations at Auschwitz and other extermination camps carrying sacks and suitcases, clearly having no idea of the fate that awaited them. Rumours of the reality of the extermination camps filtered back only slowly to the ghettos, and were usually not believed, just as they were not believed when courageous couriers such as Jan Karsky conveyed them to the western Allies.
Climax
SS chief Heinrich Himmler in 1945. In October 1943, speaking of "the Jewish question," he told senior Nazi officials: "The difficult decision had to be taken, to cause this people to disappear from the earth."
SS chief Heinrich Himmler in 1945. In October 1943, speaking of "the Jewish question," he told senior Nazi officials: "The difficult decision had to be taken, to cause this people to disappear from the earth."
Heydrich was assassinated in Prague in June 1942. He was succeeded as head as the RSHA by Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Kaltenbrunner and Eichmann, under Himmler's close supervision, oversaw the climax of the Final Solution. During 1943 and 1944, the extermination camps worked at a furious rate to kill the hundreds of thousands of people shipped to them by rail from almost every country within the German sphere of influence. At Auschwitz, up to 20,000 people were killed and incinerated every day.
Despite the high productivity of the war industries based in the Jewish ghettos in the General Government, during 1943 they were liquidated, and their populations shipped to the camps for extermination. The largest of these operations, the deportation of 100,000 people from the Warsaw Ghetto in early 1943, provoked the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which was suppressed with great brutality. At the same time, rail shipments arrived regularly from western and southern Europe. Few Jews were shipped from the occupied Soviet territories to the camps: the killing of Jews in this zone was left in the hands of the SS, aided by locally-recruited auxiliaries. In any case, by the end of 1943 the Germans had been driven from most Soviet territory.
Shipments of Jews to the camps had priority on the German railways, and continued even in the face of the increasingly dire military situation after the Battle of Stalingrad at the end of 1942 and the escalating Allied air attacks on German industry and transport. Army leaders and economic managers complained at this diversion of resources and at the killing of irreplaceable skilled Jewish workers. By 1944, moreover, it was evident to most Germans not blinded by Nazi fanaticism that Germany was losing the war. Many senior officials began to fear the retribution that might await Germany and them personally for the crimes being committed in their name. But the power of Himmler and the SS within the German Reich was too great to resist, and Himmler could always evoke Hitler's authority for his demands. Few people realized that for Hitler and Himmler killing the Jews was more important than winning the war.
In October 1943, Himmler gave a speech to senior Nazi Party officials gathered in Posen (Poznan in western Poland). Here he came closer than ever before to stating explicitly that he was intent on exterminating the Jews of Europe.
I may here in this closest of circles allude to a question which you, my party comrades, have all taken for granted, but which has become for me the most difficult question of my life, the Jewish question... I ask of you that what I say in this circle you really only hear and never speak of... We come to the question: how is it with the women and children? I have resolved even here on a completely clear solution. I do not consider myself justified in eradicating the men - so to speak killing them or ordering them to be killed - and allowing the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up... The difficult decision had to be taken, to cause this people to disappear from the earth.
The audience for this speech included Admiral Karl Dönitz and Armaments Minister Albert Speer, both of whom successfully claimed at the Nuremberg trials that they had had no knowledge of the Final Solution. The text of this speech was not known at the time of their trials.
The scale of extermination slackened somewhat at the beginning of 1944 once the Polish ghettos were emptied, but in March 1944, Hitler ordered the military occupation of Hungary, and Eichmann was dispatched to Budapest to supervise the deportation of Hungary's 800,000 Jews. More than half of them were shipped to Auschwitz in the course of the year. The commandant, Rudolf Höss, said at his trial that he killed 400,000 Hungarian Jews in three months. This operation met strong opposition within the Nazi hierarchy, and there were some suggestions that Hitler should offer the Allies a deal under which the Hungarian Jews would be spared in exchange for a favorable peace settlement. There were unofficial negotiations in Istanbul between Himmler's agents, British agents, and representatives of Jewish organizations, and at one point an attempt by Eichmann to exchange one million Jews for 10,000 trucks — the so-called "blood for goods" proposal — but there was no real possibility of such a deal being struck (see Joel Brand and Rudolf Kastner).
Escapes and publication of news of the death camps (April–June 1944)
Bratislava, June-July 1944. Rudolf Vrba (right) escaped from Auschwitz on April 7, 1944, bringing the first credible news to the world of the mass murder that was taking place here. Arnost Rosin (left), escaped on May 27, 1944. The man in the middle is Josef Weiss of the Bratislava Ministry of Health. He made copies of Vrba's report about Auschwitz, which the escapees kept hidden behind a picture of the Virgin Mary in an apartment they were renting.
Bratislava, June-July 1944. Rudolf Vrba (right) escaped from Auschwitz on April 7, 1944, bringing the first credible news to the world of the mass murder that was taking place here. Arnost Rosin (left), escaped on May 27, 1944. The man in the middle is Josef Weiss of the Bratislava Ministry of Health. He made copies of Vrba's report about Auschwitz, which the escapees kept hidden behind a picture of the Virgin Mary in an apartment they were renting.[74]
Escapes from the camps were few, but not unknown. Even when prisoners did succeed in escaping, they were sometimes betrayed by the Poles to the Germans, although Polish historians argue that the few Auschwitz escapes that succeeded were made possible by the Polish underground operating inside the camp, and by the help of local people outside.[75]
Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz in April 1944, eventually reaching Slovakia from where they were able to make their way to the west, carrying the first eyewitness account of the extermination camps to a (generally disbelieving) world; the 32-page document they dictated to Jewish officials in Slovakia about the mass murder at Auschwitz became known as the Vrba-Wetzler report.[76][74]
Two other Auschwitz inmates, Arnost Rosin and Czesław Mordowicz escaped on May 27, 1944, arriving in Slovakia on June 6, the day of the Normandy landing (D-Day). Hearing about Normandy, they believed the war was over and got drunk to celebrate, using dollars they'd smuggled out of the camp. They were arrested for violating currency laws, and spent eight days in prison, before the Judenrat paid their fines. The additional information they offered the Judenrat was added to Vrba and Wetzler's report and became known as the Auschwitz Protocols. They reported that, between May 15 and May 27, 1944, 100,000 Hungarian Jews had arrived at Birkenau, and had been killed at an unprecedented rate, with human fat being used to accelerate the burning.[77]
The BBC and The New York Times published material from the Vrba-Wetzler report on June 15[78] and June 20, 1944. The subsequent pressure from world leaders persuaded Miklos Horthy to bring the mass deportations of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz to a halt on July 9, saving up to 200,000 Jews from the extermination camps.[79]
Death marches (1944–1945)
Dachau inmates on a death march through a German village, April 1945.
Dachau inmates on a death march through a German village, April 1945.
Main article: Death marches (Holocaust)
By mid 1944, the Final Solution had largely run its course. Those Jewish communities within easy reach of the Nazi regime had been largely exterminated, in proportions ranging from more than 90 percent in Poland to about 25 percent in France. In May, Himmler claimed in a speech that "The Jewish question in Germany and the occupied countries has been solved," and this was broadly correct. During 1944, in any case, the task became steadily more difficult. German armies were evicted from the Soviet Union, the Balkans and Italy, and Germany's allies defected or were defeated. In June, the western Allies landed in France. Allied air attacks and the operations of partisans made rail transport increasingly difficult, and the objections of the military to the diversion of rail transport for carrying Jews to Poland more urgent and harder to ignore.
At this time, as the Soviet armed forces approached, the camps in eastern Poland were closed down, any surviving inmates being shipped west to camps closer to Germany, first to Auschwitz and later to Gross Rosen in Silesia. Auschwitz itself was closed as the Soviets advanced through Poland. The last 13 prisoners, all women, were killed in Auschwitz on November 25, 1944; records show they were "unmittelbar getötet" ("killed immediately"), leaving open whether they were gassed or otherwise disposed of.[80]
Despite the desperate military situation, great efforts were made to conceal evidence of what had happened in the camps. The gas chambers were dismantled, the crematoria dynamited, mass graves dug up and the corpses cremated, and Polish farmers were induced to plant crops on the sites to give the impression that they had never existed. In October, Himmler, who was trying to negotiate a secret deal with the Allies behind Hitler's back, ordered an end to the Final Solution. But the hatred of the Jews in the ranks of the SS was so strong that Himmler's order was generally ignored. Local commanders continued to kill Jews, and to shuttle them from camp to camp by forced "death marches," until the last weeks of the war.
Already sick after months or years of violence and starvation, prisoners were forced to march for tens of miles in the snow to train stations; then transported for days at a time without food or shelter in freight trains with open carriages; and forced to march again at the other end to the new camp. Those who lagged behind or fell were shot. Around 100,000 Jews died during these marches.[81]
The largest and best known of the death marches took place in January 1945, when the Soviet army advanced on Poland. Nine days before the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz, the SS marched 60,000 prisoners out of the camp toward Wodzislaw, 56 km (35 miles) away, where they were put on freight trains to other camps. Around 15,000 died on the way. Elie Wiesel and his father, Shlomo, were among the marchers:
An icy wind blew in violent gusts. But we marched without faltering.
Pitch darkness. Every now and then, an explosion in the night. They had orders to fire on any who could not keep up. Their fingers on the triggers, they did not deprive themselves of this pleasure. If one of us had stopped for a second, a sharp shot finished off another filthy son of a *****.
Near me, men were collapsing in the dirty snow. Shots.[82]
Liberation
Starving prisoners in Ebensee, Austria, liberated by the 80th Division, May 7, 1945.
Starving prisoners in Ebensee, Austria, liberated by the 80th Division, May 7, 1945.
A grave inside Bergen-Belsen, liberated by the British, April 15, 1945.
A grave inside Bergen-Belsen, liberated by the British, April 15, 1945.
“ Suddenly we felt the earth tremble; something was moving. We were convinced the Germans were about to blow up the camp ... It was 3 p.m. We heard a loud voice repeating the same words in English and in German: "Hello, hello. You are free. We are British soldiers and have come to liberate you." — Hadassah Rosensaft, inmate of Bergen-Belsen.[83] ”
In July 1944, the first major camp, Majdanek, was discovered by the advancing Soviets, who liberated Auschwitz in January 1945. In most of the camps discovered by the Soviets, almost all prisoners had already been removed, leaving only a few thousand prisoners alive.
Camps were also liberated by American and British forces, including Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15, 1945. Some 60,000 prisoners were discovered at Belsen by the British 11th Armoured Division,[84] 13,000 corpses lay unburied, and another 10,000 died from typhus or malnutrition over the following weeks.[85] The British forced the remaining SS guards to gather up the corpses and place them in mass graves.[86]
The BBC's Richard Dimbleby famously described the scenes that greeted him and the British Army at Belsen:
Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which ... The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them ... Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live ... A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms ... He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.
This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.[87]
Involvement of other countries and nationals
Further information: Évian Conference, Bermuda Conference, International response to the Holocaust.
Rescuers
Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese Consul-General in Kaunas, Lithuania, issued thousands of visas to Jews fleeing Poland in defiance of orders from his foreign ministry. The last diplomat to leave Kaunas, Sugihara continued stamping visas from the open window of his departing train.
Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese Consul-General in Kaunas, Lithuania, issued thousands of visas to Jews fleeing Poland in defiance of orders from his foreign ministry. The last diplomat to leave Kaunas, Sugihara continued stamping visas from the open window of his departing train.
Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and his colleagues saved as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews by providing them with diplomatic passes.
Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and his colleagues saved as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews by providing them with diplomatic passes.
Further information: Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Chiune Sugihara, List of people who assisted Jews during the Holocaust, List of Righteous Among the Nations by country, Luiz Martins de Souza Dantas, Hugh O'Flaherty, Raoul Wallenberg, Rescue of the Danish Jews, Righteous Among the Nations, Witold Pilecki, Żegota.
Since 1963, a commission organized by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Israel, and headed by an Israeli Supreme Court justice, has been charged with the duty of awarding people who rescued Jews from the Holocaust the honorary title Righteous Among the Nations. As of January 2007, 21,758 people have received the honor.[88]
King Christian X of Denmark saved the lives of most of Denmark's 7,500 Jews in October 1943, by spiriting them in fishing boats to safety in Sweden. The few Danish Jews who were captured by the Nazis found their homes and possessions waiting for them when they returned, exactly as they had left them.[citation needed]
The Nazi-allied government of Bulgaria, led by Bogdan Filov, did not deport its 50,000 Jewish citizens, after yielding to pressure from the parliament deputy speaker Dimitar Peshev and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, though Bulgaria did not prevent Germany from deporting Jews to concentration camps from areas in occupied Greece and Macedonia.
The government of Finland refused repeated requests from Germany to deport its Finnish Jews to Germany. German demands for the deportation of Jewish refugees from Norway were largely refused. In Rome, some 4,000 Italian Jews and prisoners of war avoided deportation, many of them hidden in safe houses or evacuated from Italy by a resistance group organized by an Irish priest, Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty. Once a Vatican ambassador to Egypt, O' Flaherty used his political connections to help secure sanctuary for dispossessed Jews.
Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes issued 30,000 visas to Jews and other persecuted minorities, though it cost him his career in 1941, when Portuguese dictator Salazar forced him out of his job. He died in poverty in 1954. Brazilian diplomat Luiz Martins de Souza Dantas illegally issued Brazilian diplomatic visas to hundreds of Jews in France during the Vichy Government, saving them from certain death. Chiune Sempo Sugihara, Japanese Consul-General in Kaunas, Lithuania, 1939–1940, issued thousands of visas to Jews fleeing Poland in defiance of explicit orders from the Japanese foreign ministry. The last foreign diplomat to leave Kaunas, Sugihara continued stamping visas from the open window of his departing train. After the war, Sugihara was fired from the Japanese foreign service, ostensibly due to downsizing. In 1985, Sugihara’s wife and son received the Righteous Among the Nations honor in Jerusalem, on behalf of the ailing Sugihara, who died in 1986. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, the Italian Giorgio Perlasca, Chinese consul-general to Austria Ho Feng Shan, and others also saved tens of thousands of Jews with fake diplomatic passes.
In April 1943, members of the Belgian resistance held up the twentieth convoy train to Auschwitz, and freed 231 people.[citation needed]
The French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon sheltered several thousand Jews, and similar acts were repeated throughout Europe, as illustrated by the famous case of Anne Frank, often at great risk to the rescuers. Between 1933 and 1941, the Chinese city of Shanghai accepted unconditionally over 30,000 Jewish refugees escaping the Holocaust in Europe, a number greater than those taken in by Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India combined during World War II. After 1941, the occupying Nazi-aligned Japanese ghettoised the Jewish refugees in Shanghai into an area known as the Shanghai ghetto. Some of the Jewish refugees there aided the Chinese resistance against the Japanese. Many of the Jewish refugees in Shanghai migrated to the United States and Israel after 1948 due to the Chinese Civil War (1946–1950).
There were also groups, such as the Polish Żegota organization, that took drastic and dangerous steps to rescue victims. Witold Pilecki, a member of Armia Krajowa, the Polish Home Army, organized a resistance movement in Auschwitz from 1940, and Jan Karski tried to spread word of the Holocaust.
Collaborators
Created in 1941, the Drancy internment camp on the outskirts of Paris was under the control of the French police until July 3, 1943. SS-Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner directed it until August 1944. He was convicted in absentia in France in 2001 for crimes against humanity, and is believed to be the highest-ranking Nazi still at large.
Created in 1941, the Drancy internment camp on the outskirts of Paris was under the control of the French police until July 3, 1943. SS-Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner directed it until August 1944. He was convicted in absentia in France in 2001 for crimes against humanity, and is believed to be the highest-ranking Nazi still at large.[89]
A group of girls wearing the yellow badge in Brussels, Belgium, May 1943. A report commissioned by the Belgian senate concluded that the Belgian authorities "anticipated and went beyond" the demands of the occupying German forces in segregating and dispossessing Jews.
A group of girls wearing the yellow badge in Brussels, Belgium, May 1943. A report commissioned by the Belgian senate concluded that the Belgian authorities "anticipated and went beyond" the demands of the occupying German forces in segregating and dispossessing Jews.[90]
Further information: The response of individual states.
Although the Holocaust was planned and directed by Germans, the Nazi regime found willing collaborators in other countries, both those allied to Germany and those under German occupation.
The civil service and police of the Vichy regime in occupied France actively collaborated in persecuting French Jews. Germany's allies, Italy, Finland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, were pressured to introduce anti-Jewish measures; with the exception of Romania, they did not comply until compelled to do so. Bulgaria and Finland refused to co-operate, and the 50,000 Bulgarian Jews survived almost unscathed. The Hungarian regime of Miklós Horthy also refused to coooperate, but after the German invasion of Hungary on March 18, 1944, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz. The Romanian regime of Ion Antonescu enthusiastically collaborated, but its inefficiency meant that only a third of Romania's 600,000 Jews were deported. The German puppet regime in Croatia actively persecuted Jews on its own initiative.
Probably the most conspicuous collaborators in the Holocaust were the Romanians, whose army killed about 400,000 Jews during their occupation of Bessarabia (Moldova), Bukovina and parts of western Ukraine, including Odessa. Otto Ollendorf testified at his trial that the behaviour of the Romanians assisting the Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine disgusted even the SS: they engaged in an orgy of rape and plunder, and killed most of their victims by herding them into barns and burning them alive.
The Nazis sought to enlist support for their programs in all the countries they occupied, although their recruitment methods differed in various countries according to Nazi racial theories. In the "Nordic" countries of Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands, they tried to recruit young men into the Waffen SS, with sufficient success to create the "Wiking" SS division on the eastern front, whose members fought for Germany with great fanaticism until the end of the war. In the Baltic states and Ukraine, on the other hand, they recruited large numbers of auxiliary troops into SS battalions that were used for anti-partisan work and guard duties at extermination and concentration camps. Most of these recruits were peasant boys, who enlisted simply to gain a ration card, but the Germans were able in these countries to appeal to long traditions of local antisemitism.
In recent years, the extent of local collaboration with the Nazis in eastern Europe has become more apparent. Historian Alan Bullock writes: "The opening of the archives both in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe has produced incontrovertible evidence [of] ... collaboration on a much bigger scale than hitherto realized of Ukrainians and Lithuanians as well as Hungarians, Croats and Slovaks in the deportation and murder of Jews."
Aftermath and historiography
* General discussion: After the Holocaust.
* Legal response: Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Doctors' Trial, German war crimes, Nuremberg Trials, War crimes of the Wehrmacht.
* Victims: List of victims of Nazism.
* Survivors: List of famous Holocaust survivors, Sh'erit ha-Pletah, Wiedergutmachung.
* Memorials: Holocaust memorials, Yom HaShoah.
* Cultural, political, and scholarly responses: Holocaust denial, Holocaust theology, The Holocaust in art and literature.
* For the issue of where responsibility for the Holocaust lies: The Holocaust (responsibility), Command responsibility, and for an account of the historiographical positions: Functionalism versus intentionalism and Historikerstreit.
* For further resources: Holocaust (resources).
See also
* Antiziganism
* Aryanization
* Bereavement in Judaism
* Évian Conference
* Friedrich Kellner
* Ilse Koch
* International Holocaust Cartoon Competition
* Irma Grese
* List of composers associated with The Holocaust
* Jews outside Europe under Nazi occupation
* Phases of the Holocaust
* Voyage of the Damned
Notes
1. ^ Niewyk, Donald L. The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 2000, p.45: "The Holocaust is commonly defined as the murder of more than 5,000,000 Jews by the Germans in World War II." Also see "The Holocaust," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2007: "the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this "the final solution to the Jewish question."
2. ^ "Sinti and Roma", United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
3. ^ Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, p. xx.
4. ^ a b "Non-Jewish victims of Nazism," Encyclopaedia Britannica.
5. ^
* "The Holocaust: Definition and Preliminary Discussion", Yad Vashem: "The Holocaust, as presented in this resource center, is defined as the sum total of all anti-Jewish actions carried out by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945: from stripping the German Jews of their legal and economic status in the 1930s, to segregating and starving Jews in the various occupied countries, to the murder of close to six million Jews in Europe. The Holocaust is part of a broader aggregate of acts of oppression and murder of various ethnic and political groups in Europe by the Nazis."
* Niewyk, Donald L. The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 2000, p.45: "The Holocaust is commonly defined as the murder of more than 5,000,000 Jews by the Germans in World War II."
* "Holocaust," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2007: "the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this "the final solution to the Jewish question" (emphasis added).
* "Holocaust", Encarta: "Holocaust, the almost complete destruction of Jews in Europe by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II (1939-1945). The leadership of Germany’s Nazi Party ordered the extermination of 5.6 million to 5.9 million Jews (see National Socialism). Jews often refer to the Holocaust as Shoah (from the Hebrew word for “catastrophe” or “total destruction”)."
* Paulson, Steve. "A View of the Holocaust", BBC: "The Holocaust was the Nazis' assault on the Jews between 1933 and 1945. It culminated in what the Nazis called the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe', in which six million Jews were murdered."
* "The Holocaust", Auschwitz.dk: "The Holocaust was the systematic annihilation of six million Jews by the Nazis during World War 2."
* "Holocaust—Definition", Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies: "HOLOCAUST (Heb., sho'ah). In the 1950s the term came to be applied primarily to the destruction of the Jews of Europe under the Nazi regime, and it is also employed in describing the annihilation of other groups of people in World War II. The mass extermination of Jews has become the archetype of GENOCIDE, and the terms sho'ah and "holocaust" have become linked to the attempt by the Nazi German state to destroy European Jewry during World War II ... One of the first to use the term in the historical perspective was the Jerusalem historian BenZion Dinur (Dinaburg), who, in the spring of 1942, stated that the Holocaust was a "catastrophe" that symbolized the unique situation of the Jewish people among the nations of the world."
* Also see the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies list of definitions: "Holocaust: A term for the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945."
* "The Holocaust", Compact Oxford English Dictionary: "(the Holocaust) the mass murder of Jews under the German Nazi regime in World War II."
* The 33rd Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches defines the Holocaust as "the Nazi attempt to annihilate European Jewry," cited in Hancock, Ian. "Romanies and the Holocaust: A Reevaluation and an Overview", Stone, Dan. (ed.) The Historiography of the Holocaust. Palgrave-Macmillan, New York 2004, pp. 383-396.
* Bauer, Yehuda. Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2001.
* Dawidowicz, Lucy. The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945. Bantam, 1986, p.xxxvii: "'The Holocaust' is the term that Jews themselves have chosen to describe their fate during World War II."
6. ^ Donald Niewyk suggests that the broadest definition would produce a death toll of 17 million. A figure of 26 million is given in Service d'Information des Crimes de Guerre: Crimes contre la Personne Humain, Camps de Concentration. Paris, 1946, p. 197.
7. ^ ""The Holocaust: Definition and Preliminary Discussion", Yad Vashem, accessed June 8, 2005.
8. ^ "Holocaust—Definition", Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
9. ^ A useful analysis of the terms can be found in Bartov, Omer. "Antisemitism, the Holocaust, and Reinterpretation of National Socialism," in Berenbaum, Michael & Peck, Abraham J. (eds.) The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined. Bloomington 1998, pp. 75-98.
10. ^ a b Counted for Persecution; IBM's Role in the Holocaust.
11. ^ Overy, Richard. Russia's War. Penguin Books, 1998.
12. ^ "The extermination camps", Encyclop&ae;dia Britannica.
13. ^ Zimmerman, John C. "Body disposal at Auschwitz: The end of Holocaust denial", The Holocaust History Project.
14. ^ Black, Edwin. IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation, Three Rivers Press, 2001, p. 560.
15. ^ Holocaust Map of Concentration and Death Camps.
16. ^ Gilbert, Martin. The Oxford Companion to World War II Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995
17. ^ See Harran, Marilyn. The Holocaust Chronicles, A History in Words and Pictures, Louis Weber, 2000.
18. ^ Harran, Marilyn. The Holocaust Chronicles, A History in Words and Pictures, Louis Weber, 2000, p. 384.
19. ^ Davis, Douglas. "7 million died in Holocaust"], Jerusalem Post, May 20, 1997.
20. ^ Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Oświęcim, Poland.
21. ^ "How many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust?", FAQs about the Holocaust, Yad Vashem.
22. ^ Hilberg, Raul. The destruction of the European Jews (Yale Univ. Press, 2003, c1961).
23. ^ Yisrael Gutman, Michael Berenbaum, Raul Hilberg, Franciszek Piper, Yehuda Bauer, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press, 1998, p.71.
24. ^ Gilbert, Martin, Atlas of the Holocaust, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc, 1993.
25. ^ Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against The Jews, 1933–1945, New York : Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975 ISBN 0-03-013661-X
26. ^ Wolfgang Benz in Dimension des Volksmords: Die Zahl der Jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Deutscher Taschebuch Verlag, 1991). Israel Gutman, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Macmillan Reference Books; Reference edition (October 1, 1995)
27. ^ Poles: Victims of the Nazi Era at the US Holocaust Museum
28. ^ "Sinti and Roma", United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
29. ^ a b Freemasons for Dummies, Christopher Hodapp, ISBN 0-7645-9796-5, Hungry Minds Inc, U.S., 2005.
30. ^ a b c d e f The Holocaust Chronicle, Publications International Ltd., p. 108.
31. ^ a b Niewyk, Donald & Nicosia, Frances. "The Gypsies," The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, p. 47.
32. ^ Bauer, Yehuda. "Gypsies," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1994); this edition 1998, p. 453.
33. ^ cited in Re. Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation (Swiss Banks) Special Master's Proposals, September 11, 2000).
34. ^ "Sinti and Roma", United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
35. ^ Hanock, Ian. "Romanies and the Holocaust: A Reevaluation and an Overview", published in Stone, D. (ed.) (2004) The Historiography of the Holocaust. Palgrave, Basingstoke and New York.
36. ^ Hancock, Ian. Jewish Responses to the Porajmos (The Romani Holocaust), Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota.
37. ^ Bauer, Yehuda. "Gypsies," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1994); this edition 1998, p. 444.
38. ^ Bauer, Yehuda. "Gypsies," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1994); this edition 1998, p. 445.
39. ^ Bauer, Yehuda. "Gypsies," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1994); this edition 1998, p. 446.
40. ^ The word translated here as "fellow Germans" is Volkesgenosse, a term used by the Nazis to signify pure German blood. The Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Arbeiterpartei 1920 manifesto stated: "Staatsbürger kann nur sein, wer Volksgenosse ist. Volksgenosse kann nur sein, wer deutschen Blutes ist, ohne Rücksichtnahme auf die Konfession. Kein Jude kann daher Volksgenosse sein." ("Citizens must be Volksgenosse. Volksgenosse must be of German blood... No Jew can be Volksgenosse.")
41. ^ Poster advertising Neues Volk, the monthly magazine of the Bureau for Race Politics of the NSDAP.
42. ^ [http://isurvived.org/TOC-I.html Holocaust Remembrance Network.
43. ^ Kershaw, Ian. Hitler, volume II, Norton 2000, p. 430.
44. ^ Neugebauer, Wolfgang. "Racial Hygiene in Vienna 1938", Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift, special edition, March 1998.
45. ^ Sereny, Gitta. Into That Darkness, Pimlico 1974, p. 48.
46. ^ Harran, Marilyn. The Holocaust Chronicles, A History in Words and Pictures, Louis Weber, 2000, p. 108.
47. ^ Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf, pp. 315 and 320.
48. ^ Documented evidence from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum pertaining to the persecution of the Freemasons accessed May 21, 2006.
49. ^ RSHA Amt VII, Written Records, overseen by Professor Franz Six, was responsible for "ideological" tasks, by which was meant the creation of antisemitic and anti-masonic propaganda.
50. ^ Katz, Jews and Freemasons in Europecited in The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, volume 2, page 531.
51. ^ (German) Das Vergißmeinnicht-Abzeichen und die Freimaurerei, Die wahre Geschichte Accessed July 8, 2006.
52. ^ "THE BLUE FORGET-ME-NOT" - ANOTHER SIDE OF THE STORY Accessed July 8, 2006.
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