Where they came from and how they came to me was really none of my business. According to Yitzhak Arad, this was the highest number of SS officers killed in a single revolt. The second WebBefore the Nazi takeover of powerin 1933, Europe had a vibrant and mature Jewish culture. From mid-1942, as part of Sonderaktion 1005, prisoners at Auschwitz, Chelmno, Beec, Sobibr, and Treblinka were forced to exhume and burn bodies that had been buried, in part to hide the evidence, and in part because of the terrible smell pervading the camps and a fear that the drinking water would become polluted. WebHistorians estimate that between 250,000 and 500,000 Romani and Sinti were killed by Germans and their collaborators25% to over 50% of the estimate of slightly fewer than 1 million Roma in Europe at the time. [281], SS-Obergruppenfhrer Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA), convened what became known as the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942 at Am Groen Wannsee 5658, a villa in Berlin's Wannsee suburb. [256] It annexed Thrace and Macedonia, and in February 1943 agreed to a demand from Germany that it deport 20,000 Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp. The Russian Academy of Science article by M. V. Filimoshin based this figure on sources published in the Soviet era. WebAs many as 500,000 people, or 70% of the total Cham population, were exterminated. The rest of Poland was occupied by the Soviet Union, which invaded Poland from the east on 17 September 1939. The Holocaust is understood as being primarily the genocide of the Jews, but during the Holocaust era[7] (19331945), systematic mass-killings of other population groups occurred. [377], Sprawozdanie 6/42 had reached London by 12 November 1942, where it was translated into English to become part of a 108-page report, "Report on Conditions in Poland", on which the date 27 November 1942 was handwritten. According to Haaretz, the writer Yehuda Erez may have been the first to describe events in Germany as the shoah. Auschwitz, for example, was expanded in October 1941 by building Auschwitz II-Birkenau a few kilometers away. [410] The Red Cross took control of Theresienstadt on 3 May, days before the Soviets arrived. [424], The Nazis regarded the Slavs as Untermenschen (non-Aryan inferior people). [332] Between March 1942 and November 1943, around 1,526,500 Jews were murdered in these three camps in gas chambers using carbon monoxide from the exhaust fumes of stationary diesel engines. [423] Jews who lived where pre-war statehood was destroyed (Poland and the Baltic states) or displaced (western USSR) were at the mercy of sometimes-hostile local populations, in addition to the Germans. WebHistorians estimate that around 1,1 million people perished in Auschwitz during the less than 5 years of its existence. [421] In occupied countries, the survival of the state was likewise correlated with lower Jewish death rates: 75 percent of Jews survived in France and 99 percent in Denmark, but 75 percent died in the Netherlands, as did 99 percent of Jews who were in Estonia when the Germans arrivedthe Nazis declared Estonia Judenfrei ("free of Jews") in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference. He warned the Jews that if they were to cause another world war, it would lead to their destruction. According to Hayes, dealers in currency and jewellery set up shop outside the Treblinka extermination camp (near Warsaw) in 19421943, as did prostitutes. Those present included (annotated, left to right): Frank continued by discussing their deportation, then asked: "But what is to happen to the Jews? WebThe United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that 3.3 million of 5.7 million Soviet POWs died in German custody. Archived from the original on 22 June 2006. [428] The death rates decreased when the POWs were needed to help the German war effort; by 1943, half a million had been deployed as slave labor. * Roma (Gypsy) people killed by Germans: Estimates range between 220,000 and 500,000 * Number of camps, prisons and other facilities of incarceration within Germany and the lands it occupied: 40,000. [i] In total, 165,200 German Jews were murdered. [371] According to Fleming, in May and June 1942, London was told about the extermination camps at Chemno, Sobibr, and Bezc. [130][m] From 1 December, Jews were required to wear Star of David armbands. [230] The Germans estimated the average prisoner's lifespan in a concentration camp at three months, as a result of lack of food and clothing, constant epidemics, and frequent punishments for the most minor transgressions. The General Government must become just as free of Jews as the Reich.". Germany implemented the persecution in stages. Consequently, the Danish government stayed in power and the Germans found it easier to work through it. [b] Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia, in The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust (2000), favor a definition that includes the Jews, Roma, and disabled people: "the systematic, state-sponsored murder of entire groups determined by heredity". [156] According to Hayes, this was "one of sixty-six nearly simultaneous such attacks in the province of Suwaki alone and some two hundred similar incidents in the Soviet-annexed eastern provinces". [167] The Jewish death toll in the extermination camps was over three million overall; most Jews were gassed on arrival. WebOn the eve of the German occupation of Poland in 1939, 3.3 million Jews lived there. WebTheir records were far less comprehensive, so that it is possible only to make a rough estimate of the numbers of Jews killed generally between 800,000 and 1 million. [138] Over 43,000 residents died there in 1941. [369] This was in large measure thanks to Captain Witold Pilecki of the Polish Home Army, who was sent to the camp in September 1940 after allowing himself to be arrested in Warsaw. [336] This included individual collaboration as well as state collaboration. [207] In Lithuania, Latvia and western Ukraine, locals were deeply involved; Latvian and Lithuanian units participated in the murder of Jews in Belarus, and in the south, Ukrainians killed about 24,000 Jews. [21], Holocaust historians commonly define the Holocaust as the genocide of the European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945. [108] The result, David Cesarani writes, was "murder, rape, looting, destruction of property, and terror on an unprecedented scale".[109]. [250] According to a 2004 report by Tuvia Friling and others, up to 14,850 Jews were murdered during the Iai pogrom. [196], In the Bulgarian annexed zones of Macedonia and Thrace, upon demand of the German authorities, the Bulgarians handed over the entire Jewish population, about 12,000 Jews to the military authorities, all were deported. [268] Around 8,500 Jews were deported in all. [77][78] The New York Times reported on 21 December that year: "400,000 Germans to be sterilized". So many died that the marches were stopped. "Racial" enemies could never belong to the Volksgemeinschaft; they were to be removed from society. [232], Transportation to and between camps was often carried out in closed freight cars with little air or water, long delays and prisoners packed tightly. Prisoners condemned to death by the Gestapo are murdered by the first two methods. [248] In June 1941 Romania joined Germany in its invasion of the Soviet Union and within the first few weeks of the invasion, almost the entire rural Jewish population of Bessarabia and Bukovina were decimated. [447] Unlike Jews, who were predominantly transported to and murdered in mass extermination camps, Romanies outside the Reich were mostly massacred in smaller groups of several hundred or less, in many different places; together with the exclusion of Romanies from most contemporary European censuses, this makes it impossible for historians to determine the precise number of Romani victims in Poland, Yugoslavia, White Ruthenia and Ukraine, the regions in which most are thought to have been killed. WebThe Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. [421] Of Poland's 3.3million Jews, about 90 percent were murdered. Enemies were divided into three groups: the "racial" or "blood" enemies, such as the Jews and Roma; political opponents of Nazism, such as Marxists, liberals, Christians, and the "reactionaries" viewed as wayward "national comrades"; and moral opponents, such as gay men, the work-shy, and habitual criminals. At Treblinka, to calm the victims, the arrival platform was made to look like a train station, complete with a fake clock. By the end of the war, some 10,000 remained, representing the lowest survival rate in the Balkans and among the lowest in Europe. Read More Testimonies Video Lectures [401], The first major camp encountered by Allied troops, Majdanek, was discovered by the advancing Soviets, along with its gas chambers, on 25 July 1944. [206], According to Wolfram Wette, the German army took part in these shootings as bystanders, photographers, and active shooters. [202] The point of the attacks was to destroy the local Communist Party leadership and therefore the state, including "Jews in the Party and State employment", and any "radical elements". [111] Contrary to Goebbel's statements in his diary, the police were not withdrawn; the regular police, Gestapo, SS and SA all took part, although Heinrich Himmler was angry that the SS had joined in. p.171. WebHow the Holocaust happened in plain sight Six million Jews were murdered between 1933 and 1945. The pre-war Greek Jewish population had been between 72,000 and 77,000. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. [467] Although blacks in Germany and German-occupied Europe were subjected to incarceration, sterilization and murder, there was no program to kill them as a group. [d] The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination through labor in concentration camps; and in gas chambers and gas vans in German extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Beec, Chemno, Majdanek, Sobibr, and Treblinka in occupied Poland.[4]. [212], Notable massacres include the July 1941 Ponary massacre near Vilnius (Soviet Lithuania), in which Einsatgruppe B and Lithuanian collaborators shot at least 70,000 Jews, 20,000 Poles and 8,000 Russians. [132] These orders included, from 1942, facilitating deportations to extermination camps. The French had planned to try Grynszpan for murder, but the German invasion in 1940 interrupted the proceedings. NDH leader Ante Paveli and the Ustae accepted Nazi demands. [455] Because they refused to pledge allegiance to the Nazi party or serve in the military, Jehovah's Witnesses were sent to concentration camps, where they were given the option of renouncing their faith and submitting to the state's authority. We cannot be sentimental about it. [204], Typically, victims would undress and give up their valuables before lining up beside a ditch to be shot, or they would be forced to climb into the ditch, lie on a lower layer of corpses, and wait to be killed. In just over four-and-a-half years, Nazi Germany systematically murdered at least 1.1 million people at Auschwitz. [66] On 1 April 1933, there was a boycott of Jewish businesses. [4] By the spring or summer of 1942, gas chambers had been installed in these new facilities, except for Chemno, which used gas vans. In Western Europe, he writes, Jewish communities failed to piece the information together, while in Eastern Europe they could not accept that the stories they had heard from elsewhere would end up applying to them too. [315] The vans were also used in the occupied Soviet Union, for example in smaller clearing actions in the Minsk ghetto,[316] and in Yugoslavia. [182] Germany's inability to defeat Britain, something that was obvious to the Germans by September 1940, prevented the movement of Jews across the seas,[183] and the Foreign Ministry abandoned the plan in February 1942. Antisemitic legislation in Romania was usually aimed at exploiting Jews rather than humiliating them as in Germany. [146] Despite the dangers, thousands of Poles helped Jews. Yad Vashem (undated): "The Holocaust was the murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators. [434][435] Hitler's plan combined classic imperialism with Nazi racial ideology. It deported 7,500 Jews in 1938 on its own initiative; introduced anti-Jewish measures in 1940; and by the autumn of 1942 had deported around 60,000 Jews to Poland. The second most numerous group, from 70 to 75 thousand, was the Poles, and the third most numerous, about 20 thousand, the Gypsies. [68] Jews were disbarred from practicing law, being editors or proprietors of newspapers, joining the Journalists' Association, or owning farms. At the end of the war, approximately 380,000 Polish Jews remained alive, the rest having been murdered, mostly in the ghettos and the six death camps: Chelmo, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. [264] Most Italian Jews, over 40,000, survived the Holocaust. [144] By the end of 1942, most of the Jews in the General Government area were dead. Other camps sometimes described as extermination camps include Maly Trostinets near Minsk in the occupied Soviet Union, where 65,000 are thought to have been murdered, mostly by shooting but also in gas vans;[307] Mauthausen in Austria;[308] Stutthof, near Gdask, Poland;[309] and Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrck in Germany. [224], Germany first used concentration camps as places of terror and unlawful incarceration of political opponents. For other uses, see, Dining room in which the conference took place, German extermination and concentration camps built in, Women on their way to the gas chamber, near Crematorium V, Auschwitz II, August 1944. [468], During the International Military Tribunal, 21 Nazi leaders were tried, primarily for waging wars of aggression, but the trial also exposed the systematic murder of European Jews. But, tragically, gay Holocaust Either the German authorities were a party to this outbreak or their powers over public order and a hooligan minority are not what they are proudly claimed to be. [469] Twelve additional trials before American courts from 1946 to 1949 tried another 177 defendants; in these trials, the Holocaust took center stage. Those were not empty words. [242][243] Romania was the only country other than Germany itself that "implemented all the steps of the destruction process, from definitions to killings. Laqueur, Walter; Baumel, Judith Tydor (2001). The movement embraced a pseudo-scientific racism that viewed Jews as a race whose members were locked in mortal combat with the Aryan race for world domination. [438] After Germany lost the war, the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials and Poland's Supreme National Tribunal concluded that the aim of German policies in Poland the extermination of Poles and Jews was a genocide in biological terms. [233] In mid-1942 work camps began requiring newly arrived prisoners to be placed in quarantine for four weeks. WebIt is estimated that the SS and police deported at least 1.3 million people to the Auschwitz camp complex between 1940 and 1945. [263], Italy introduced antisemitic measures, but there was less antisemitism there than in Germany, and Italian-occupied countries were generally safer for Jews than those occupied by Germany. [12][f], On 3 October 1941 the American Hebrew used the phrase "before the Holocaust", apparently to refer to the situation in France,[14] and in May 1943 the New York Times, discussing the Bermuda Conference, referred to the "hundreds of thousands of European Jews still surviving the Nazi Holocaust". Now the world war has come. [59], Before and after the March 1933 Reichstag elections, the Nazis intensified their campaign of violence against opponents,[60] setting up concentration camps for extrajudicial imprisonment. [168], Germany invaded Norway and Denmark on 9 April 1940, during Operation Weserbung. [123], Between 2.7 and 3million Polish Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, out of a population of 3.33.5 million. [169] By June 1940 Norway was completely occupied. [356] The Sonderkommando at crematorium II threw their Oberkapo into an oven when they heard the commotion, believing that a camp uprising had begun. A stab-in-the-back myth developed, insinuating that disloyal politicians, chiefly Jews and communists, had orchestrated Germany's surrender. Civilians killed in reprisals during the Soviet partisan war account for a major portion. This perception contributed to the canard of Jewish Bolshevism. [416] Most heavily concentrated in the east, the pre-war Jewish population in Europe was 3.5million in Poland; 3million in the Soviet Union; nearly 800,000 in Romania, and 700,000 in Hungary. [398][399] In January 1945, the Germans held records of 714,000 inmates in concentration camps; by May, 250,000 (35 percent) had died during these marches. [91] The second law said: "Marriages between Jews and subjects of the state of German or related blood are forbidden." [83] T4 was mainly directed at adults, but the euthanasia of children was also carried out. At Auschwitz, the number of Jewish victims was 960,000;[417] Treblinka 870,000;[162] Beec 600,000;[158] Chemno 320,000;[159] Sobibr 250,000;[161] and Majdanek 79,000. After the war this program came to be known as Aktion T4,[82] named after Tiergartenstrae4, the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, where the various organizations involved were headquartered. The majority, around 1 million people, were Jews. [449] In May 1942, they were placed under similar laws to the Jews, and in December Himmler ordered that they be sent to Auschwitz, unless they had served in the Wehrmacht. [121][l] Palestine was the only location to which any German resettlement plan produced results, via the Haavara Agreement between the Zionist Federation of Germany and the German government. [85] Overall, the number of mentally and physically disabled people murdered was about 150,000. sfn error: no target: CITEREFGoldsteinGoldstein2016 (. Later, all Poles will disappear from this world. Forced to retreat on 19 April from the OB and ZW fighters, they returned later that day under the command of SS General Jrgen Stroop (author of the Stroop Report about the uprising). [134] In the ghettos and forced-labor camps, at least half a million died of starvation, disease, and poor living conditions. Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration With Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 19181947. [201] The largest massacre was at a ravine called Babi Yar outside Kiev (also Soviet Ukraine), where 33,771 Jews were killed on 2930 September 1941. [115] Many were released within weeks; by early 1939, 2,000 remained in the camps. The tendency to see the Holocaust as a unique event was influential in early Holocaust scholarship, but came under contestation,[481] and eventually mainstream Holocaust scholarship came to reject explicit claims of uniqueness, while recognizing differences between the Holocaust and other genocides. EuroDocs. [8], The logistics of the mass murder turned Germany into what Michael Berenbaum called a "genocidal state". [79] There were 84,525 applications from doctors in the first year. [275] The following day, Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, noted in his diary: Regarding the Jewish question, the Fhrer is determined to clear the table. [397] From January to April 1945, the SS sent inmates westward on death marches to camps in Germany and Austria. "[290] He continued: Under proper guidance, in the course of the Final Solution, the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. 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