Jewish Holocaust
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The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the
genocide Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word (, "race, people") with the Lat ...
of
European Jews The history of the Jews in Europe spans a period of over two thousand years. Some Jews, a Judaean tribe from the Levant, Natural History 102:11 (November 1993): 12–19. migrated to Europe just before the rise of the Roman Empire. A notable e ...
during
World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...
. Between 1941 and 1945,
Nazi Germany Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million
Jews Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
across German-occupied Europe; around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out in
pogrom A pogrom () is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russia ...
s and
mass shootings There is a lack of consensus on how to define a mass shooting. Most terms define a minimum of three or four victims of gun violence (not including the shooter or in an inner city) in a short period of time, although an Australian study from 20 ...
; by a policy of
extermination through labor Extermination through labour (or "extermination through work", german: Vernichtung durch Arbeit) is a term that was adopted to describe forced labor in Nazi concentration camps in light of the high mortality rate and poor conditions; in some ...
in
concentration camps Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply ...
; and in
gas chambers A gas chamber is an apparatus for killing humans or other animals with gas, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. Poisonous agents used include hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide. History ...
and
gas van A gas van or gas wagon (russian: душегубка, ''dushegubka'', literally "soul killer"; german: Gaswagen) was a truck reequipped as a mobile gas chamber. During the World War II Holocaust, Nazi Germany developed and used gas vans on a large ...
s in German
extermination camp Nazi Germany used six extermination camps (german: Vernichtungslager), also called death camps (), or killing centers (), in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million peoplemostly Jewsin the Holocaust. The v ...
s, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec,
Chełmno Chełmno (; older en, Culm; formerly ) is a town in northern Poland near the Vistula river with 18,915 inhabitants as of December 2021. It is the seat of the Chełmno County in the Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship. Due to its regional impor ...
,
Majdanek Majdanek (or Lublin) was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, a ...
, Sobibór, and
Treblinka Treblinka () was an extermination camp, built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was in a forest north-east of Warsaw, south of the village of Treblinka in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship. The cam ...
in
occupied Poland ' ( Norwegian: ') is a Norwegian political thriller TV series that premiered on TV2 on 5 October 2015. Based on an original idea by Jo Nesbø, the series is co-created with Karianne Lund and Erik Skjoldbjærg. Season 2 premiered on 10 Octobe ...
. Germany implemented the persecution in stages. Following
Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...
's appointment as chancellor on 30 January 1933, the regime built a network of concentration camps in Germany for political opponents and those deemed "undesirable", starting with Dachau on 22 March 1933. After the passing of the
Enabling Act An enabling act is a piece of legislation by which a legislative body grants an entity which depends on it (for authorization or legitimacy) the power to take certain actions. For example, enabling acts often establish government agencies to carr ...
on 24 March, which gave Hitler dictatorial
plenary power A plenary power or plenary authority is a complete and absolute power to take action on a particular issue, with no limitations. It is derived from the Latin term ''plenus'' ("full"). United States In United States constitutional law, plenary p ...
s, the
government A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government is ...
began isolating Jews from civil society; this included boycotting Jewish businesses in April 1933 and enacting the
Nuremberg Laws The Nuremberg Laws (german: link=no, Nürnberger Gesetze, ) were antisemitic and racist laws that were enacted in Nazi Germany on 15 September 1935, at a special meeting of the Reichstag convened during the annual Nuremberg Rally of ...
in September 1935. On 9–10 November 1938, eight months after Germany annexed Austria, Jewish businesses and other buildings were ransacked or set on fire throughout Germany and Austria on what became known as ''
Kristallnacht () or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (german: Novemberpogrome, ), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's (SA) paramilitary and (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation fro ...
'' (the "Night of Broken Glass"). After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, triggering World War II, the regime set up
ghettos A ghetto, often called ''the'' ghetto, is a part of a city in which members of a minority group live, especially as a result of political, social, legal, environmental or economic pressure. Ghettos are often known for being more impoverished t ...
to segregate Jews. Eventually, thousands of camps and other detention sites were established across German-occupied Europe. The segregation of Jews in ghettos culminated in the policy of extermination the Nazis called the
Final Solution The Final Solution (german: die Endlösung, ) or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question (german: Endlösung der Judenfrage, ) was a Nazi plan for the genocide of individuals they defined as Jews during World War II. The "Final Solution to th ...
to the
Jewish Question The Jewish question, also referred to as the Jewish problem, was a wide-ranging debate in 19th- and 20th-century European society that pertained to the appropriate status and treatment of Jews. The debate, which was similar to other " national ...
, discussed by senior government officials at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January 1942. As German forces captured territories in the East, all anti-Jewish measures were radicalized. Under the coordination of the SS, with directions from the highest leadership of the
Nazi Party The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported t ...
, killings were committed within Germany itself, throughout occupied Europe, and within territories controlled by Germany's allies. Paramilitary
death squads A death squad is an armed group whose primary activity is carrying out extrajudicial killings or forced disappearances as part of political repression, genocide, ethnic cleansing, or revolutionary terror. Except in rare cases in which they are f ...
called '' Einsatzgruppen'', in cooperation with the German Army and local collaborators, murdered around 1.3 million Jews in mass shootings and pogroms from the summer of 1941. By mid-1942, victims were being deported from ghettos across Europe in sealed
freight trains Rail freight transport is the use of railroads and trains to transport cargo as opposed to human passengers. A freight train, cargo train, or goods train is a group of freight cars (US) or goods wagons (International Union of Railways) hauled ...
to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, they were gassed, worked or beaten to death, or killed by disease, starvation, cold, medical experiments, or during death marches. The killing continued until the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945. The Holocaust is understood as being primarily the genocide of the Jews, but during the Holocaust era (1933–1945), systematic mass-killings of other population groups occurred. These included Roma,
Poles Poles,, ; singular masculine: ''Polak'', singular feminine: ''Polka'' or Polish people, are a West Slavic nation and ethnic group, who share a common history, culture, the Polish language and are identified with the country of Poland in C ...
,
Ukrainians Ukrainians ( uk, Українці, Ukraintsi, ) are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Ukraine. They are the seventh-largest nation in Europe. The native language of the Ukrainians is Ukrainian. The majority of Ukrainians are Eastern Ort ...
, Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, and other targeted populations. Smaller groups were also victims of deadly Nazi persecution, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Black Germans,
disabled Disability is the experience of any condition that makes it more difficult for a person to do certain activities or have equitable access within a given society. Disabilities may be cognitive, developmental, intellectual, mental, physical, ...
people,
communists Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a s ...
, and
homosexuals Homosexuality is romantic attraction, sexual attraction, or sexual behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality is "an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions" to pe ...
.


Terminology and scope


Terminology

The first recorded use of the term ''holocaust'' in its modern sense was in 1895 by ''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'' to describe the massacre of Armenian Christians by Ottoman forces. The term comes from the el, ὁλόκαυστος, translit=holókaustos; ''hólos'', "whole" + ''kaustós'', "burnt offering". The biblical term '' shoah'' ( he, שׁוֹאָה), meaning "calamity" (and also used to refer to "destruction" since the Middle Ages), became the standard
Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
term for the murder of the European Jews. According to '' Haaretz'', the writer Yehuda Erez may have been the first to describe events in Germany as the ''shoah''. '' Davar'' and later ''Haaretz'' both used the term in September 1939. On 3 October 1941 the '' American Hebrew'' used the phrase "before the Holocaust", apparently to refer to the situation in France, and in May 1943 the ''New York Times'', discussing the
Bermuda Conference The Bermuda Conference was an international conference between the United Kingdom and the United States held from April 19 to 30, 1943, at Hamilton, Bermuda. The topic of discussion was the question of Jewish refugees who had been liberated b ...
, referred to the "hundreds of thousands of European Jews still surviving the Nazi Holocaust". In 1968 the
Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library ...
created a new category, "Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)". The term was popularised in the United States by the
NBC The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an American English-language commercial broadcast television and radio network. The flagship property of the NBC Entertainment division of NBCUniversal, a division of Comcast, its headquarters are l ...
mini-series ''Holocaust'' (1978) about a fictional family of
German Jews The history of the Jews in Germany goes back at least to the year 321, and continued through the Early Middle Ages (5th to 10th centuries CE) and High Middle Ages (''circa'' 1000–1299 CE) when Jewish immigrants founded the Ashkenazi Jewish ...
, and in November that year the President's Commission on the Holocaust was established. As non-Jewish groups began to include themselves as
Holocaust victims Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, or sexual orientation. The institutionalized practice by the Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulte ...
, many Jews chose to use the Hebrew terms ''Shoah'' or ''Churban''. The Nazis used the phrase "
Final Solution to the Jewish Question The Final Solution (german: die Endlösung, ) or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question (german: Endlösung der Judenfrage, ) was a Nazi plan for the genocide of individuals they defined as Jews during World War II. The "Final Solution to th ...
" (german: die Endlösung der Judenfrage).


Definition

Holocaust historians commonly define the Holocaust as the genocide of the European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945. 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". Other groups targeted after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933 include those whom the Nazis viewed as inherently inferior (some Slavic people, particularly Poles and Russians, the Roma, and the
disabled Disability is the experience of any condition that makes it more difficult for a person to do certain activities or have equitable access within a given society. Disabilities may be cognitive, developmental, intellectual, mental, physical, ...
), and those targeted because of their beliefs or behavior (such as Jehovah's Witnesses, communists, and
homosexuals Homosexuality is romantic attraction, sexual attraction, or sexual behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality is "an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions" to pe ...
). Peter Hayes writes that the persecution of these groups was less uniform than that of the Jews. For example, the Nazis' treatment of the Slavs consisted of "enslavement and gradual attrition", while some Slavs were favored; Hayes lists Bulgarians, Croats, Slovaks, and some Ukrainians. In contrast, according to historian Dan Stone, Hitler regarded the Jews as "a ''Gegenrasse'': a 'counter-race' ... not really human at all".


Distinctive features


Genocidal state

The logistics of the mass murder turned Germany into what
Michael Berenbaum Michael Berenbaum (born July 31, 1945, in Newark, New Jersey) is an American scholar, professor, rabbi, writer, and filmmaker, who specializes in the study of the Holocaust. He served as deputy director of the President's Commission on the Holo ...
called a "genocidal state".
Eberhard Jäckel Eberhard Jäckel (; 29 June 1929 – 15 August 2017) was a German historian. In the 1980s he was a principal protagonist in the Historians' Dispute (''Historikerstreit'') over how to incorporate Nazi Germany and the Holocaust into German hist ...
wrote in 1986 that it was the first time a state had thrown its power behind the idea that an entire people should be wiped out. In total, 165,200
German Jews The history of the Jews in Germany goes back at least to the year 321, and continued through the Early Middle Ages (5th to 10th centuries CE) and High Middle Ages (''circa'' 1000–1299 CE) when Jewish immigrants founded the Ashkenazi Jewish ...
were murdered. Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was to be exterminated, and complex rules were devised to deal with ''Mischlinge'' ("mixed breeds"). Bureaucrats identified who was a Jew, confiscated property, and scheduled trains to deport them. Companies fired Jews and later used them as slave labor. Universities dismissed Jewish faculty and students. German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners; other companies built the crematoria. As prisoners entered the death camps, they surrendered all personal property, which was cataloged and tagged before being sent to Germany for reuse or recycling. Through a concealed account, the German National Bank helped launder valuables stolen from the victims.


Medical experiments

At least 7,000 camp inmates were subjected to medical experiments; most died during them or as a result. The experiments, which took place at Auschwitz,
Buchenwald Buchenwald (; literally 'beech forest') was a Nazi concentration camp established on hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany's 1937 borders. Many actual or sus ...
, Dachau, Natzweiler-Struthof, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen, sought to uncover strategies to counteract chemical weapons, survive harsh environments, develop new vaccines and drugs and treat wounds. Many men and women were also involuntarily sterilized. After the war, 23 senior physicians and other medical personnel were charged at
Nuremberg Nuremberg ( ; german: link=no, Nürnberg ; in the local East Franconian dialect: ''Nämberch'' ) is the second-largest city of the German state of Bavaria after its capital Munich, and its 518,370 (2019) inhabitants make it the 14th-largest ...
with crimes against humanity. They included the head of the German Red Cross, tenured professors, clinic directors, and biomedical researchers. The most notorious physician was
Josef Mengele , allegiance = , branch = Schutzstaffel , serviceyears = 1938–1945 , rank = '' SS''-'' Hauptsturmführer'' (Captain) , servicenumber = , battles = , unit = , awards = , commands = , ...
, an SS officer who became the Auschwitz camp doctor on 30 May 1943. Interested in genetics, and keen to experiment on twins, he would pick out subjects on the ramp from the new arrivals during "selection" (to decide who would be gassed immediately and who would be used as slave labor), shouting "''Zwillinge heraus!''" (twins step forward!). The twins would be measured, killed, and dissected. One of Mengele's assistants said in 1946 that he was told to send organs of interest to the directors of the "Anthropological Institute in Berlin-Dahlem". This is thought to refer to Mengele's academic supervisor, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, director from October 1942 of the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was founded in 1927 in Berlin, Germany. The Rockefeller Foundation partially funded the actual building of the Institute and helped keep the Institute afloat during the Gr ...
in Berlin-Dahlem.


Origins


Antisemitism and the ''völkisch'' movement

Throughout the
Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...
in Europe, Jews were subjected to
antisemitism Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is considered to be a form of racism. Antis ...
based on Christian theology, which blamed them for killing Jesus. Even after the
Reformation The Reformation (alternatively named the Protestant Reformation or the European Reformation) was a major movement within Western Christianity in 16th-century Europe that posed a religious and political challenge to the Catholic Church and in ...
,
Catholicism The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...
and
Lutheranism Lutheranism is one of the largest branches of Protestantism, identifying primarily with the theology of Martin Luther, the 16th-century German monk and reformer whose efforts to reform the theology and practice of the Catholic Church launched th ...
continued to persecute Jews, accusing them of
blood libel Blood libel or ritual murder libel (also blood accusation) is an antisemitic canardTurvey, Brent E. ''Criminal Profiling: An Introduction to Behavioral Evidence Analysis'', Academic Press, 2008, p. 3. "Blood libel: An accusation of ritual mur ...
s and subjecting them to
pogrom A pogrom () is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russia ...
s and expulsions. The second half of the 19th century saw the emergence, in the German empire and
Austria-Hungary Austria-Hungary, often referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire,, the Dual Monarchy, or Austria, was a constitutional monarchy and great power in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. It was formed with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of ...
, of the ''völkisch'' movement, developed by such thinkers as
Houston Stewart Chamberlain Houston Stewart Chamberlain (; 9 September 1855 – 9 January 1927) was a British-German philosopher who wrote works about political philosophy and natural science. His writing promoted German ethnonationalism, antisemitism, and scientific ...
and
Paul de Lagarde Paul Anton de Lagarde (2 November 1827 – 22 December 1891) was a German biblical scholar and orientalist, sometimes regarded as one of the greatest orientalists of the 19th century. Lagarde's strong support of anti-Semitism, vocal opposition ...
. The movement embraced a pseudo-scientific racism that viewed Jews as a
race Race, RACE or "The Race" may refer to: * Race (biology), an informal taxonomic classification within a species, generally within a sub-species * Race (human categorization), classification of humans into groups based on physical traits, and/or s ...
whose members were locked in mortal combat with the
Aryan race The Aryan race is an obsolete historical race concept that emerged in the late-19th century to describe people of Proto-Indo-European heritage as a racial grouping. The terminology derives from the historical usage of Aryan, used by modern I ...
for world domination. These ideas became commonplace throughout Germany; the professional classes adopted an ideology that did not see humans as racial equals with equal hereditary value. The Nazi Party (the ''Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei'' or
National Socialist German Workers' Party The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported th ...
) originated as an offshoot of the ''völkisch'' movement, and it adopted that movement's antisemitism.


Germany after World War I, Hitler's world view

After
World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
(1914–1918), many Germans did not accept that their country had been defeated. A stab-in-the-back myth developed, insinuating that disloyal politicians, chiefly Jews and communists, had orchestrated Germany's surrender. Inflaming the anti-Jewish sentiment was the apparent over-representation of Jews in the leadership of communist revolutionary governments in Europe, such as Ernst Toller, head of a short-lived revolutionary government in Bavaria. This perception contributed to the canard of
Jewish Bolshevism Jewish Bolshevism, also Judeo–Bolshevism, is an anti-communist and antisemitic canard, which alleges that the Jews were the originators of the Russian Revolution in 1917, and that they held primary power among the Bolsheviks who led the revo ...
. Early antisemites in the Nazi Party included
Dietrich Eckart Dietrich Eckart (; 23 March 1868 – 26 December 1923) was a German '' völkisch'' poet, playwright, journalist, publicist, and political activist who was one of the founders of the German Workers' Party, the precursor of the Nazi Party. Eckart ...
, publisher of the ''
Völkischer Beobachter The ''Völkischer Beobachter'' (; "'' Völkisch'' Observer") was the newspaper of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) from 25 December 1920. It first appeared weekly, then daily from 8 February 1923. For twenty-four years it formed part of the official pub ...
'', the party's newspaper, and
Alfred Rosenberg Alfred Ernst Rosenberg ( – 16 October 1946) was a Baltic German Nazi theorist and ideologue. Rosenberg was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart and he held several important posts in the Nazi government. He was the head o ...
, who wrote antisemitic articles for it in the 1920s. Rosenberg's vision of a secretive Jewish conspiracy ruling the world would influence Hitler's views of Jews by making them the driving force behind communism. Central to Hitler's world view was the idea of expansion and ''
Lebensraum (, ''living space'') is a German concept of settler colonialism, the philosophy and policies of which were common to German politics from the 1890s to the 1940s. First popularized around 1901, '' lso in:' became a geopolitical goal of Imper ...
'' (living space) in Eastern Europe for German Aryans, a policy of what Doris Bergen called "race and space". Open about his hatred of Jews, he subscribed to common antisemitic stereotypes. From the early 1920s onwards, he compared the Jews to germs and said they should be dealt with in the same way. He viewed
Marxism Marxism is a left-wing to far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialectical ...
as a Jewish doctrine, said he was fighting against "Jewish Marxism", and believed that Jews had created communism as part of a conspiracy to destroy Germany.


Rise of Nazi Germany


Dictatorship and repression (January 1933)

With the appointment in January 1933 of
Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...
as Chancellor of Germany and the Nazi's seizure of power, German leaders proclaimed the rebirth of the ''
Volksgemeinschaft ''Volksgemeinschaft'' () is a German expression meaning "people's community", "folk community", Richard Grunberger, ''A Social History of the Third Reich'', London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971, p. 44. "national community", or "racial community", ...
'' ("people's community"). Nazi policies divided the population into two groups: the ''Volksgenossen'' ("national comrades") who belonged to the ''Volksgemeinschaft'', and the ''Gemeinschaftsfremde'' ("community aliens") who did not. 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. The latter two groups were to be sent to concentration camps for "re-education", with the aim of eventual absorption into the ''Volksgemeinschaft''. "Racial" enemies could never belong to the ''Volksgemeinschaft''; they were to be removed from society. Before and after the March 1933 Reichstag elections, the Nazis intensified their campaign of violence against opponents, setting up concentration camps for extrajudicial imprisonment. One of the first, at Dachau, opened on 22 March 1933. Initially the camp contained mostly Communists and Social Democrats. Other early prisons were consolidated by mid-1934 into purpose-built camps outside the cities, run exclusively by the SS. The camps served as a deterrent by terrorizing Germans who did not support the regime. Throughout the 1930s, the legal, economic, and social rights of Jews were steadily restricted. On 1 April 1933, there was a boycott of Jewish businesses. On 7 April 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was passed, which excluded Jews and other "non-Aryans" from the civil service. Jews were disbarred from practicing law, being editors or proprietors of newspapers, joining the Journalists' Association, or owning farms. In
Silesia Silesia (, also , ) is a historical region of Central Europe that lies mostly within Poland, with small parts in the Czech Republic and Germany. Its area is approximately , and the population is estimated at around 8,000,000. Silesia is split ...
, in March 1933, a group of men entered the courthouse and beat up Jewish lawyers; Friedländer writes that, in Dresden, Jewish lawyers and judges were dragged out of courtrooms during trials. Jewish students were restricted by quotas from attending schools and universities. Jewish businesses were targeted for closure or "Aryanization", the forcible sale to Germans; of the approximately 50,000 Jewish-owned businesses in Germany in 1933, about 7,000 were still Jewish-owned in April 1939. Works by Jewish composers, authors, and artists were excluded from publications, performances, and exhibitions. Jewish doctors were dismissed or urged to resign. The '' Deutsches Ärzteblatt'' (a medical journal) reported on 6 April 1933: "Germans are to be treated by Germans only."


Sterilization Law, ''Aktion T4''

The economic strain of the Great Depression led Protestant charities and some members of the German medical establishment to advocate compulsory sterilization of the "incurable" mentally and physically disabled, people the Nazis called ''Lebensunwertes Leben'' (
life unworthy of life The phrase "life unworthy of life" (german: Lebensunwertes Leben) was a Nazi designation for the segments of the populace which according to the Nazi regime had no right to live. Those individuals were targeted to be murdered by the state (" ...
). On 14 July 1933, the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring (''Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses''), the Sterilization Law, was passed. ''The New York Times'' reported on 21 December that year: "400,000 Germans to be sterilized". There were 84,525 applications from doctors in the first year. The courts reached a decision in 64,499 of those cases; 56,244 were in favor of sterilization. Estimates for the number of involuntary sterilizations during the whole of the Third Reich range from 300,000 to 400,000. In October 1939 Hitler signed a "euthanasia decree" backdated to 1 September 1939 that authorized '' Reichsleiter'' Philipp Bouhler, the chief of Hitler's Chancellery, and
Karl Brandt Karl Brandt (8 January 1904 – 2 June 1948) was a German physician and ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) officer in Nazi Germany. Trained in surgery, Brandt joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and became Adolf Hitler's escort doctor in August 1934. A member of ...
, Hitler's personal physician, to carry out a program of involuntary euthanasia. After the war this program came to be known as ''
Aktion T4 (German, ) was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post- war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of 4, a street address o ...
'', named after
Tiergartenstraße Tiergartenstraße is a street in the Tiergarten district in central Berlin, the capital of Germany. The street runs east-west along the southern edge of the Großer Tiergarten park from Kemperplatz and Ben-Gurion-Straße near Sony Center and P ...
 4, the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, where the various organizations involved were headquartered. T4 was mainly directed at adults, but the euthanasia of children was also carried out. Between 1939 and 1941, 80,000 to 100,000 mentally ill adults in institutions were killed, as were 5,000 children and 1,000 Jews, also in institutions. There were also dedicated killing centers, where the deaths were estimated at 20,000, according to Georg Renno, deputy director of Schloss Hartheim, one of the euthanasia centers, or 400,000, according to Frank Zeireis, commandant of the Mauthausen concentration camp. Overall, the number of mentally and physically disabled people murdered was about 150,000. Although not ordered to take part, psychiatrists and many psychiatric institutions were involved in the planning and carrying out of ''Aktion T4''. In August 1941, after protests from Germany's Catholic and Protestant churches, Hitler canceled the T4 program, although disabled people continued to be killed until the end of the war. The medical community regularly received bodies for research; for example, the
University of Tübingen The University of Tübingen, officially the Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen (german: Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen; la, Universitas Eberhardina Carolina), is a public research university located in the city of Tübingen, Baden-W ...
received 1,077 bodies from executions between 1933 and 1945. The German neuroscientist Julius Hallervorden received 697 brains from one hospital between 1940 and 1944: "I accepted these brains of course. Where they came from and how they came to me was really none of my business."


Nuremberg Laws, Jewish emigration

On 15 September 1935, the Reichstag passed the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, known as the
Nuremberg Laws The Nuremberg Laws (german: link=no, Nürnberger Gesetze, ) were antisemitic and racist laws that were enacted in Nazi Germany on 15 September 1935, at a special meeting of the Reichstag convened during the annual Nuremberg Rally of ...
. The former said that only those of "German or kindred blood" could be citizens. Anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents was classified as a Jew. The second law said: "Marriages between Jews and subjects of the state of German or related blood are forbidden." Sexual relationships between them were also criminalized; Jews were not allowed to employ German women under the age of 45 in their homes. The laws referred to Jews but applied equally to the Roma and black Germans. Although other European countries—Bulgaria, Independent State of Croatia, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Slovakia, and Vichy France—passed similar legislation, Gerlach notes that "Nazi Germany adopted more nationwide anti-Jewish laws and regulations (about 1,500) than any other state." By the end of 1934, 50,000 German Jews had left Germany, and by the end of 1938, approximately half the German Jewish population had left, among them the conductor
Bruno Walter Bruno Walter (born Bruno Schlesinger, September 15, 1876February 17, 1962) was a German-born conductor, pianist and composer. Born in Berlin, he escaped Nazi Germany in 1933, was naturalised as a French citizen in 1938, and settled in the U ...
, who fled after being told that the hall of the
Berlin Philharmonic The Berlin Philharmonic (german: Berliner Philharmoniker, links=no, italic=no) is a German orchestra based in Berlin. It is one of the most popular, acclaimed and well-respected orchestras in the world. History The Berlin Philharmonic was fo ...
would be burned down if he conducted a concert there.
Albert Einstein Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...
, who was in the United States when Hitler came to power, never returned to Germany; his citizenship was revoked and he was expelled from the
Kaiser Wilhelm Society The Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science (German: ''Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften'') was a German scientific institution established in the German Empire in 1911. Its functions were taken over by ...
and
Prussian Academy of Sciences The Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences (german: Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften) was an academy established in Berlin, Germany on 11 July 1700, four years after the Prussian Academy of Arts, or "Arts Academy," to which "Berlin ...
. Other Jewish scientists, including
Gustav Hertz Gustav Ludwig Hertz (; 22 July 1887 – 30 October 1975) was a German experimental physicist and Nobel Prize winner for his work on inelastic electron collisions in gases, and a nephew of Heinrich Rudolf Hertz. Biography Hertz was born in Hamb ...
, lost their teaching positions and left the country.


''Anschluss'' (12 March 1938)

On 12 March 1938, Germany annexed Austria. Ninety percent of Austria's 176,000 Jews lived in Vienna. The SS and SA smashed shops and stole cars belonging to Jews; Austrian police stood by, some already wearing swastika armbands. Jews were forced to perform humiliating acts such as scrubbing the streets or cleaning toilets while wearing
tefillin Tefillin (; Israeli Hebrew: / ; Ashkenazic pronunciation: ), or phylacteries, are a set of small black leather boxes with leather straps containing scrolls of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah. Tefillin are worn by adult Jews durin ...
. Around 7,000 Jewish businesses were "Aryanized", and all the legal restrictions on Jews in Germany were imposed in Austria. The
Évian Conference The Évian Conference was convened 6–15 July 1938 at Évian-les-Bains, France, to address the problem of German and Austrian Jewish refugees wishing to flee persecution by Nazi Germany. It was the initiative of United States President Franklin ...
was held in France in July 1938 by 32 countries, to help German and Austrian Jewish refugees, but little was accomplished and most countries did not increase the number of refugees they would accept. In August that year, Adolf Eichmann was appointed manager (under
Franz Walter Stahlecker Franz Walter Stahlecker (10 October 1900 – 23 March 1942) was commander of the SS security forces ('' Sicherheitspolizei'' (SiPo) and the ''Sicherheitsdienst'' (SD) for the '' Reichskommissariat Ostland'' in 1941–42. Stahlecker commanded '' ...
) of the
Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Vienna The Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Vienna () was a ''Sicherheitsdienst'' (SD-Security Service) agency established in August 1938 to accelerate the forced emigration of the Austrian Jews and (starting in October 1939) to organize and carr ...
(''Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung in Wien'').
Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts ...
and his family arrived in London from Vienna in June 1938, thanks to what David Cesarani called "Herculean efforts" to get them out.


''Kristallnacht'' (9–10 November 1938)

On 7 November 1938,
Herschel Grynszpan Herschel Feibel Grynszpan (Yiddish: הערשל פײַבל גרינשפּאן; German: ''Hermann Grünspan''; 28 March 1921 – last rumoured to be alive 1945, declared dead 1960) was a Polish-Jewish expatriate born and raised in Weimar Germany ...
, a Polish Jew, shot the German diplomat
Ernst vom Rath Ernst Eduard vom Rath (3 June 1909 – 9 November 1938) was a member of the German nobility, a Nazi Party member, and German Foreign Office diplomat. He is mainly remembered for his assassination in Paris in 1938 by a Polish Jewish teenager, ...
in the German Embassy in Paris, in retaliation for the expulsion of his parents and siblings from Germany. When vom Rath died on 9 November, the synagogue and Jewish shops in Dessau were attacked. According to Joseph Goebbels' diary, Hitler decided that the police should be withdrawn: "For once the Jews should feel the rage of the people," Goebbels reported him as saying. The result, David Cesarani writes, was "murder, rape, looting, destruction of property, and terror on an unprecedented scale". Known as ''
Kristallnacht () or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (german: Novemberpogrome, ), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's (SA) paramilitary and (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation fro ...
'' ("Night of Broken Glass"), the pogrom on 9–10 November 1938 saw over 7,500 Jewish shops (out of 9,000) looted and attacked, and over 1,000 synagogues damaged or destroyed. Groups of Jews were forced by the crowd to watch their synagogues burn; in
Bensheim Bensheim () is a town in the Bergstraße district in southern Hessen, Germany. Bensheim lies on the Bergstraße and at the edge of the Odenwald mountains while at the same time having an open view over the Rhine plain. With about 40,000 inhabita ...
they were made to dance around it and in
Laupheim Laupheim (; Swabian: ''Laoba'') is a major district town in southern Germany in the state of Baden-Württemberg. Laupheim was first mentioned in 778 and gained city rights in 1869. One of the main trading routes, from Ulm to Ravensburg and then ...
to kneel before it. At least 90 Jews were murdered. The damage was estimated at 39 million
Reichsmark The (; sign: ℛℳ; abbreviation: RM) was the currency of Germany from 1924 until 20 June 1948 in West Germany, where it was replaced with the , and until 23 June 1948 in East Germany, where it was replaced by the East German mark. The Reich ...
. Contrary to Goebbel's statements in his diary, the police were not withdrawn; the regular police,
Gestapo The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one orga ...
, SS and SA all took part, although
Heinrich Himmler Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (; 7 October 1900 – 23 May 1945) was of the (Protection Squadron; SS), and a leading member of the Nazi Party of Germany. Himmler was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and a main architect of th ...
was angry that the SS had joined in. Attacks took place in Austria too. The extent of the violence shocked the rest of the world. ''The Times'' of London stated on 11 November 1938: Between 9 and 16 November, 30,000 Jews were sent to the
Buchenwald Buchenwald (; literally 'beech forest') was a Nazi concentration camp established on hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany's 1937 borders. Many actual or sus ...
, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. Many were released within weeks; by early 1939, 2,000 remained in the camps. German Jewry was held collectively responsible for restitution of the damage; they also had to pay an "atonement tax" of over a billion Reichsmark. Insurance payments for damage to their property were confiscated by the government. A decree on 12 November 1938 barred Jews from most remaining occupations. ''Kristallnacht'' marked the end of any sort of public Jewish activity and culture, and Jews stepped up their efforts to leave the country.


Resettlement

Before World War II, Germany considered mass deportation from Europe of German, and later European, Jewry. Among the areas considered for possible resettlement were British Palestine and, after the war began, French Madagascar,
Siberia Siberia ( ; rus, Сибирь, r=Sibir', p=sʲɪˈbʲirʲ, a=Ru-Сибирь.ogg) is an extensive region, geographical region, constituting all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has been a ...
, and two reservations in Poland. Palestine was the only location to which any German resettlement plan produced results, via the
Haavara Agreement The Haavara Agreement () was an agreement between Nazi Germany and Zionist German Jews signed on 25 August 1933. The agreement was finalized after three months of talks by the Zionist Federation of Germany, the Anglo-Palestine Bank (under the ...
between the
Zionist Federation of Germany The Zionist Federation of Germany (german: Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland) also known as the Zionist Association for Germany was a Zionist organisation in Germany that was formed in 1897 in Cologne by Max Bodenheimer. It had attracte ...
and the German government. Between November 1933 and December 1939, the agreement resulted in the emigration of about 53,000 German Jews, who were allowed to transfer RM 100 million of their assets to Palestine by buying German goods, in violation of the Jewish-led anti-Nazi boycott of 1933.


Outbreak of World War II


Invasion of Poland (1 September 1939)


Ghettos

Between 2.7 and 3 million Polish Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, out of a population of 3.3 – 3.5 million. More Jews lived in Poland in 1939 than anywhere else in Europe; another 3 million lived in the Soviet Union. When the German
Wehrmacht The ''Wehrmacht'' (, ) were the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the ''Heer'' (army), the '' Kriegsmarine'' (navy) and the ''Luftwaffe'' (air force). The designation "''Wehrmacht''" replaced the previo ...
(armed forces) invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, triggering declarations of war from the UK and
France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan area ...
, Germany gained control of about two million Jews in the territory it occupied. The rest of Poland was occupied by the Soviet Union, which invaded Poland from the east on 17 September 1939. The Wehrmacht in Poland was accompanied by seven SS ''Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolitizei'' ("special task forces of the Security Police") and an '' Einsatzkommando'', numbering 3,000 men in all, whose role was to deal with "all anti-German elements in hostile country behind the troops in combat". German plans for Poland included expelling non-Jewish Poles from large areas, settling Germans on the emptied lands, sending the Polish leadership to camps, denying the lower classes an education, and confining Jews. The Germans sent Jews from all territories they had annexed (Austria, the
Czech lands The Czech lands or the Bohemian lands ( cs, České země ) are the three historical regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia. Together the three have formed the Czech part of Czechoslovakia since 1918, the Czech Socialist Republic since ...
, and western Poland) to the central section of Poland, which was termed the General Government. Jews were eventually to be expelled to areas of Poland not annexed by Germany. Still, in the meantime, they would be concentrated in major cities
ghettos A ghetto, often called ''the'' ghetto, is a part of a city in which members of a minority group live, especially as a result of political, social, legal, environmental or economic pressure. Ghettos are often known for being more impoverished t ...
to achieve, according to an order from
Reinhard Heydrich Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich ( ; ; 7 March 1904 – 4 June 1942) was a high-ranking German SS and police official during the Nazi era and a principal architect of the Holocaust. He was chief of the Reich Security Main Office (inclu ...
dated 21 September 1939, "a better possibility of control and later deportation". From 1 December, Jews were required to wear Star of David armbands. The Germans stipulated that each ghetto be led by a ''
Judenrat A ''Judenrat'' (, "Jewish council") was a World War II administrative agency imposed by Nazi Germany on Jewish communities across occupied Europe, principally within the Nazi ghettos. The Germans required Jews to form a ''Judenrat'' in every c ...
'' of 24 male Jews, who would be responsible for carrying out German orders. These orders included, from 1942, facilitating deportations to extermination camps. The
Warsaw Ghetto The Warsaw Ghetto (german: Warschauer Ghetto, officially , "Jewish Residential District in Warsaw"; pl, getto warszawskie) was the largest of the Nazi ghettos during World War II and the Holocaust. It was established in November 1940 by the G ...
was established in November 1940, and by early 1941 it contained 445,000 people; the second largest, the
Łódź Ghetto The Łódź Ghetto or Litzmannstadt Ghetto (after the Nazi German name for Łódź) was a Nazi ghetto established by the German authorities for Polish Jews and Roma following the Invasion of Poland. It was the second-largest ghetto in all of ...
, held 160,000 as of May 1940. The inhabitants had to pay for food and other supplies by selling whatever goods they could produce. In the ghettos and forced-labor camps, at least half a million died of starvation, disease, and poor living conditions. Although the Warsaw Ghetto contained 30 percent of the city's population, it occupied only 2.4 percent of its area, averaging over nine people per room. Over 43,000 residents died there in 1941.


Pogroms in occupied eastern Poland

Peter Hayes writes that the Germans created a "
Hobbesian Thomas Hobbes ( ; 5/15 April 1588 – 4/14 December 1679) was an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book ''Leviathan'', in which he expounds an influent ...
world" in Poland in which different parts of the population were pitted against each other. A perception among ethnic Poles that the Jews had supported the Soviet invasion contributed to existing antisemitism, which Germany exploited, redistributing Jewish homes and goods, and converting synagogues, schools and hospitals in Jewish areas into facilities for non-Jews. The Germans ordered the death penalty for anyone helping Jews. Informants pointed out who was Jewish and the Poles who were helping to hide them during the '' Judenjagd'' (hunt for the Jews). Despite the dangers, thousands of Poles helped Jews. Nearly 1,000 were executed for having done so, and
Yad Vashem Yad Vashem ( he, יָד וַשֵׁם; literally, "a memorial and a name") is Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Jews who were murdered; honoring Jews who fought against th ...
has named over 7,000 Poles as
Righteous Among the Nations Righteous Among the Nations ( he, חֲסִידֵי אֻמּוֹת הָעוֹלָם, ; "righteous (plural) of the world's nations") is an honorific used by the State of Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to sa ...
. Pogroms occurred throughout the occupation. During the
Lviv pogroms The Lviv pogroms were the consecutive pogroms and massacres of Jews in June and July 1941 in the city of Lwów in German-occupied Eastern Poland/Western Ukraine (now Lviv, Ukraine). The massacres were perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists (sp ...
in Lwów, occupied eastern Poland (later Lviv,
Ukraine Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...
) in June and July 1941—the population was 157,490 Polish; 99,595 Jewish; and 49,747 Ukrainian—some 6,000 Jews were murdered in the streets by the Ukrainian nationalists (specifically, the OUN) and
Ukrainian People's Militia Ukrainian People's Militsiya or the Ukrainian National Militsiya ( uk, Українська Народна Міліція), was a paramilitary formation created by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in the General Government territor ...
, aided by local people. Jewish women were stripped, beaten, and raped. Also, after the arrival of ''
Einsatzgruppe C (, ; also ' task forces') were (SS) paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany that were responsible for mass murder, primarily by shooting, during World War II (1939–1945) in German-occupied Europe. The had an integral role in the im ...
'' units on 2 July, another 3,000 Jews were killed in mass shootings carried out by the German SS. During the
Jedwabne pogrom The Jedwabne pogrom was a massacre of Polish Jews in the town of Jedwabne, German-occupied Poland, on 10 July 1941, during World War II and the early stages of the Holocaust. At least 340 men, women and children were murdered, some 300 of whom ...
, on 10 July 1941, a group of 40 Polish men, spurred on by German
Gestapo The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one orga ...
agents who arrived in the town a day earlier, killed several hundred Jews; around 300 were burned alive in a barn. According to Hayes, this was "one of sixty-six nearly simultaneous such attacks in the province of
Suwałki Suwałki ( lt, Suvalkai; yi, סואוואַלק) is a city in northeastern Poland with a population of 69,206 (2021). It is the capital of Suwałki County and one of the most important centers of commerce in the Podlaskie Voivodeship. Suwałki ...
alone and some two hundred similar incidents in the Soviet-annexed eastern provinces".


German Nazi Extermination camps in Poland

At the end of 1941, the Germans began building extermination camps in Poland:
Auschwitz II Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. I ...
, Bełżec,
Chełmno Chełmno (; older en, Culm; formerly ) is a town in northern Poland near the Vistula river with 18,915 inhabitants as of December 2021. It is the seat of the Chełmno County in the Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship. Due to its regional impor ...
,
Majdanek Majdanek (or Lublin) was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, a ...
, Sobibór, and
Treblinka Treblinka () was an extermination camp, built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was in a forest north-east of Warsaw, south of the village of Treblinka in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship. The cam ...
. Gas chambers had been installed by the spring or summer of 1942. The SS liquidated most of the ghettos of the General Government area in 1942–1943 (the
Łódź Ghetto The Łódź Ghetto or Litzmannstadt Ghetto (after the Nazi German name for Łódź) was a Nazi ghetto established by the German authorities for Polish Jews and Roma following the Invasion of Poland. It was the second-largest ghetto in all of ...
was liquidated in mid-1944), and shipped their populations to these camps, along with Jews from all over Europe. The camps provided locals with employment and with black-market goods confiscated from Jewish families who, thinking they were being resettled, arrived with their belongings. According to Hayes, dealers in currency and jewellery set up shop outside the Treblinka extermination camp (near Warsaw) in 1942–1943, as did prostitutes. By the end of 1942, most of the Jews in the General Government area were dead. The Jewish death toll in the extermination camps was over three million overall; most Jews were gassed on arrival.


Invasion of Norway and Denmark

Germany invaded Norway and Denmark on 9 April 1940, during
Operation Weserübung Operation Weserübung (german: Unternehmen Weserübung , , 9 April – 10 June 1940) was Germany's assault on Denmark and Norway during the Second World War and the opening operation of the Norwegian Campaign. In the early morning of 9 Ap ...
. Denmark was overrun so quickly that there was no time for a resistance to form. Consequently, the Danish government stayed in power and the Germans found it easier to work through it. Because of this, few measures were taken against the Danish Jews before 1942. By June 1940 Norway was completely occupied. In late 1940, the country's 1,800 Jews were banned from certain occupations, and in 1941 all Jews had to register their property with the government. On 26 November 1942, 532 Jews were taken by police officers, at four o'clock in the morning, to Oslo harbor, where they boarded a German ship. From Germany they were sent by freight train to Auschwitz. According to Dan Stone, only nine survived the war.


Invasion of France and the Low Countries

In May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands,
Luxembourg Luxembourg ( ; lb, Lëtzebuerg ; french: link=no, Luxembourg; german: link=no, Luxemburg), officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, ; french: link=no, Grand-Duché de Luxembourg ; german: link=no, Großherzogtum Luxemburg is a small lan ...
,
Belgium Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...
, and
France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan area ...
. After Belgium's surrender, the country was ruled by a German military governor,
Alexander von Falkenhausen Alexander Ernst Alfred Hermann Freiherr von Falkenhausen (29 October 187831 July 1966) was a German general and military advisor to Chiang Kai-shek. He was an important figure during the Sino-German cooperation to reform the Chinese Army. In 19 ...
, who enacted anti-Jewish measures against its 90,000 Jews, many of them refugees from Germany or Eastern Europe. In the Netherlands, the Germans installed
Arthur Seyss-Inquart Arthur Seyss-Inquart (German: Seyß-Inquart, ; 22 July 1892 16 October 1946) was an Austrian Nazi politician who served as Chancellor of Austria in 1938 for two days before the ''Anschluss''. His positions in Nazi Germany included "deputy govern ...
as ''
Reichskommissar (, rendered as "Commissioner of the Empire", "Reich Commissioner" or "Imperial Commissioner"), in German history, was an official gubernatorial title used for various public offices during the period of the German Empire and Nazi Germany. Ger ...
'', who began to persecute the country's 140,000 Jews. Jews were forced out of their jobs and had to register with the government. In February 1941, non-Jewish Dutch citizens staged a strike in protest that was quickly crushed. From July 1942, over 107,000 Dutch Jews were deported; only 5,000 survived the war. Most were sent to Auschwitz; the first transport of 1,135 Jews left Holland for Auschwitz on 15 July 1942. Between 2 March and 20 July 1943, 34,313 Jews were sent in 19 transports to the
Sobibór extermination camp Sobibor (, Polish: ) was an extermination camp built and operated by Nazi Germany as part of Operation Reinhard. It was located in the forest near the village of Żłobek Duży in the General Government region of German-occupied Poland. As a ...
, where all but 18 are thought to have been gassed on arrival. France had approximately 330,000 Jews, divided between the German-occupied north and the unoccupied collaborationist southern areas in
Vichy France Vichy France (french: Régime de Vichy; 10 July 1940 – 9 August 1944), officially the French State ('), was the fascist French state headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II. Officially independent, but with half of its te ...
(named after the town
Vichy Vichy (, ; ; oc, Vichèi, link=no, ) is a city in the Allier department in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region of central France, in the historic province of Bourbonnais. It is a spa and resort town and in World War II was the capital of ...
), more than half this Jewish population were not French citizens, but refugees who had fled Nazi persecution in other countries. The occupied regions were under the control of a military governor, and there, anti-Jewish measures were not enacted as quickly as they were in the Vichy-controlled areas. In July 1940, the Jews in the parts of Alsace-Lorraine that had been annexed to Germany were expelled into Vichy France. Vichy France's government implemented anti-Jewish measures in Metropolitan France, in French Algeria and in the two French Protectorates of
Tunisia ) , image_map = Tunisia location (orthographic projection).svg , map_caption = Location of Tunisia in northern Africa , image_map2 = , capital = Tunis , largest_city = capital , ...
and
Morocco Morocco (),, ) officially the Kingdom of Morocco, is the westernmost country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It overlooks the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and has land borders with Algeria t ...
. Tunisia had 85,000 Jews when the Germans and Italians arrived in November 1942; an estimated 5,000 Jews were subjected to forced labor. The
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is the United States' official memorial to the Holocaust. Adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the USHMM provides for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust hi ...
estimates that between 72,900 and 74,000 Jews were murdered during the Holocaust in France.


Madagascar Plan

The fall of France gave rise to the Madagascar Plan in the summer of 1940, when French Madagascar in
Southeast Africa Southeast Africa or Southeastern Africa is an African region that is intermediate between East Africa and Southern Africa. It comprises the countries Botswana, Eswatini, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania ...
became the focus of discussions about deporting all European Jews there; it was thought that the area's harsh living conditions would hasten deaths. Several Polish, French and British leaders had discussed the idea in the 1930s, as did German leaders from 1938. Adolf Eichmann's office was ordered to investigate the option, but no evidence of planning exists until after the defeat of France in June 1940. Germany's inability to defeat Britain, something that was obvious to the Germans by September 1940, prevented the movement of Jews across the seas, and the Foreign Ministry abandoned the plan in February 1942.


Invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece

Yugoslavia Yugoslavia (; sh-Latn-Cyrl, separator=" / ", Jugoslavija, Југославија ; sl, Jugoslavija ; mk, Југославија ;; rup, Iugoslavia; hu, Jugoszlávia; rue, label=Pannonian Rusyn, Югославия, translit=Juhoslavija ...
and
Greece Greece,, or , romanized: ', officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the southern tip of the Balkans, and is located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Greece shares land borders ...
were invaded in April 1941 and surrendered before the end of the month. Germany, Italy and Bulgaria divided Greece into occupation zones but did not eliminate it as a country. The pre-war Greek Jewish population had been between 72,000 and 77,000. By the end of the war, some 10,000 remained, representing the lowest survival rate in the Balkans and among the lowest in Europe. Yugoslavia, home to 80,000 Jews, was dismembered; regions in the north were annexed by Germany and Hungary, regions along the coast were made part of Italy, Kosovo and western Macedonia were given to Albania, while Bulgaria received eastern Macedonia. The rest of the country was divided into the
Independent State of Croatia The Independent State of Croatia ( sh, Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH; german: Unabhängiger Staat Kroatien; it, Stato indipendente di Croazia) was a World War II-era puppet state of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. It was established in p ...
(NDH), an Italian-German
puppet state A puppet state, puppet régime, puppet government or dummy government, is a state that is ''de jure'' independent but ''de facto'' completely dependent upon an outside power and subject to its orders.Compare: Puppet states have nominal sove ...
whose territory comprised Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, with the Croatian fascist
Ustaše The Ustaše (), also known by anglicised versions Ustasha or Ustashe, was a Croatian fascist and ultranationalist organization active, as one organization, between 1929 and 1945, formally known as the Ustaša – Croatian Revolutionary Move ...
party placed in power; and German occupied Serbia, governed by German military and police administrators who appointed the Serbian collaborationist
puppet government A puppet state, puppet régime, puppet government or dummy government, is a state that is ''de jure'' independent but ''de facto'' completely dependent upon an outside power and subject to its orders.Compare: Puppet states have nominal sover ...
,
Government of National Salvation The Government of National Salvation ( sr, Влада народног спаса, Vlada narodnog spasa, (VNS); german: Regierung der nationalen Rettung), also referred to as Nedić's government (, ) and Nedić's regime (, ), was the colloquial na ...
, headed by
Milan Nedić Milan Nedić ( sr-Cyrl, Милан Недић; 2 September 1878 – 4 February 1946) was a Yugoslav and Serbian army general and politician who served as the chief of the General Staff of the Royal Yugoslav Army and minister of war in the R ...
. In August 1942 Serbia was declared free of Jews, after the Wehrmacht and German police, assisted by collaborators of the Nedić government and others such as Zbor, a pro-Nazi and
pan-Serbian Serbian nationalism asserts that Serbs are a nation and promotes the cultural and political unity of Serbs. It is an ethnic nationalism, originally arising in the context of the general rise of nationalism in the Balkans under Ottoman rule, und ...
fascist party, had murdered nearly the entire population of 17,000 Jews. In the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), the Nazi regime demanded that its rulers, the Ustaše, adopt antisemitic racial policies, persecute
Jews Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
and set up several concentration camps. NDH leader
Ante Pavelić Ante Pavelić (; 14 July 1889 – 28 December 1959) was a Croatian politician who founded and headed the fascist ultranationalist organization known as the Ustaše in 1929 and served as dictator of the Independent State of Croatia ( hr, l ...
and the Ustaše accepted Nazi demands. By the end of April 1941 the Ustaše required all Jews to wear insignia, typically a yellow Star of David and started confiscating Jewish property in October 1941. During the same time as their
persecution of Serbs Anti-Serb sentiment or Serbophobia ( sr-Cyrl-Latn, србофобија, srbofobija, separator=" / ") is a generally negative view of Serbs as an ethnic group. Historically it has been a basis for the persecution of ethnic Serbs. A distincti ...
and Roma, the Ustaše took part in the Holocaust, and killed the majority of the country's Jews; the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is the United States' official memorial to the Holocaust. Adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the USHMM provides for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust hi ...
estimates that 30,148 Jews were murdered. According to
Jozo Tomasevich Josip "Jozo" Tomasevich (March 16, 1908 – October 15, 1994; hr, Josip Jozo Tomašević) was an American economist and military historian. He was professor emeritus at San Francisco State University. Education and career Tomašević was born ...
, the Jewish community in
Zagreb Zagreb ( , , , ) is the capital and largest city of Croatia. It is in the northwest of the country, along the Sava river, at the southern slopes of the Medvednica mountain. Zagreb stands near the international border between Croatia and Slov ...
was the only one to survive out of 115 Jewish religious communities in Yugoslavia in 1939–1940. The state broke away from Nazi antisemitic policy by promising honorary Aryan citizenship, and thus freedom from persecution, to Jews who were willing to contribute to the "Croat cause". Marcus Tanner states that the "SS complained that at least 5,000 Jews were still alive in the NDH and that thousands of others had emigrated, by buying 'honorary Aryan' status". Nevenko Bartulin, however posits that of the total Jewish population of the NDH, only 100 Jews attained the legal status of Aryan citizens, 500 including their families. In both cases a relatively small portion out of a Jewish population of 37,000. 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.


Invasion of the Soviet Union (22 June 1941)


Reasons

Germany invaded the
Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...
on 22 June 1941, a day
Timothy Snyder Timothy David Snyder (born August 18, 1969) is an American historian specializing in the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute ...
called "one of the most significant days in the history of Europe ... the beginning of a calamity that defies description". German propaganda portrayed the conflict as an ideological war between German National Socialism and Jewish Bolshevism, and as a racial war between the Germans and the Jewish, Romani, and Slavic ''
Untermenschen ''Untermensch'' (, ; plural: ''Untermenschen'') is a Nazi term for non-Aryan "inferior people" who were often referred to as "the masses from the East", that is Jews, Roma, and Slavs (mainly ethnic Poles, Serbs, and later also Russians). The ...
'' ("sub-humans"). The war was driven by the need for resources, including, according to David Cesarani, agricultural land to feed Germany, natural resources for German industry, and control over Europe's largest oil fields. Between early fall 1941 and late spring 1942,
Jürgen Matthäus Jürgen Matthäus (born 1959) is a German historian and head of the research department of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is an author and editor of multiple works on the history of World War II and the Holocaust. Matthäus was ...
writes, 2 million of the 3.5 million Soviet POWs captured by the
Wehrmacht The ''Wehrmacht'' (, ) were the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the ''Heer'' (army), the '' Kriegsmarine'' (navy) and the ''Luftwaffe'' (air force). The designation "''Wehrmacht''" replaced the previo ...
had been executed or had died of neglect and abuse. By 1944 the Soviet death toll was at least 20 million.


Mass shootings

As the method of widespread execution was shooting rather than gas chamber, the Holocaust in the Soviet Union is sometimes referred to as the Holocaust by bullets. As German troops advanced, the mass shooting of "anti-German elements" was assigned, as in Poland, to the '' Einsatzgruppen'', this time under the command of
Reinhard Heydrich Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich ( ; ; 7 March 1904 – 4 June 1942) was a high-ranking German SS and police official during the Nazi era and a principal architect of the Holocaust. He was chief of the Reich Security Main Office (inclu ...
. 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". Cesarani writes that the killing of Jews was at this point a "subset" of these activities. 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. The latter was known as ''Sardinenpackung'' ("packing sardines"), a method reportedly started by SS officer Friedrich Jeckeln. According to
Wolfram Wette Wolfram Wette (born 11 November 1940) is a German military historian and peace researcher. He is an author or editor of over 40 books on the history of Nazi Germany, including the seminal '' Germany and the Second World War'' series from the ...
, the German army took part in these shootings as bystanders, photographers, and active shooters. 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. Some Ukrainians went to Poland to serve as guards in the camps. ''Einsatzgruppe'' A arrived in the Baltic states (
Estonia Estonia, formally the Republic of Estonia, is a country by the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland across from Finland, to the west by the sea across from Sweden, to the south by Latvia, a ...
, Latvia, and Lithuania) with
Army Group North Army Group North (german: Heeresgruppe Nord) was a German strategic formation, commanding a grouping of field armies during World War II. The German Army Group was subordinated to the ''Oberkommando des Heeres'' (OKH), the German army high comman ...
; ''Einsatzgruppe'' B in
Belarus Belarus,, , ; alternatively and formerly known as Byelorussia (from Russian ). officially the Republic of Belarus,; rus, Республика Беларусь, Respublika Belarus. is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by ...
with
Army Group Center Army Group Centre (german: Heeresgruppe Mitte) was the name of two distinct strategic German Army Groups that fought on the Eastern Front in World War II. The first Army Group Centre was created on 22 June 1941, as one of three German Army for ...
; ''Einsatzgruppe'' C in the
Ukraine Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...
with
Army Group South Army Group South (german: Heeresgruppe Süd) was the name of three German Army Groups during World War II. It was first used in the 1939 September Campaign, along with Army Group North to invade Poland. In the invasion of Poland Army Group So ...
; and ''Einsatzgruppe'' D went further south into Ukraine with the 11th Army. Each Einsatzgruppe numbered around 600–1,000 men, with a few women in administrative roles. Traveling with nine German
Order Police battalions The Order Police battalions were militarised formations of the German Order Police (uniformed police) during the Nazi era. During World War II, they were subordinated to the SS and deployed in German-occupied areas, specifically the Army Grou ...
and three units of the
Waffen-SS The (, "Armed SS") was the combat branch of the Nazi Party's ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) organisation. Its formations included men from Nazi Germany, along with Waffen-SS foreign volunteers and conscripts, volunteers and conscripts from both occup ...
, the ''Einsatzgruppen'' and their local collaborators had murdered almost 500,000 people by the winter of 1941–1942. By the end of the war, they had killed around two million, including about 1.3 million Jews and up to a quarter of a million Roma. Notable massacres include the July 1941
Ponary massacre , location = Paneriai (Ponary), Vilnius (Wilno), Reichskommissariat Ostland , coordinates = , date = July 1941 – August 1944 , incident_type = Shootings by automatic and semi-automatic weapons, genocide , perpetrators ...
near
Vilnius Vilnius ( , ; see also other names) is the capital and largest city of Lithuania, with a population of 592,389 (according to the state register) or 625,107 (according to the municipality of Vilnius). The population of Vilnius's functional urb ...
( Soviet Lithuania), in which Einsatgruppe B and Lithuanian collaborators shot at least 70,000 Jews, 20,000 Poles and 8,000 Russians. In the
Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre The Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre was a World War II mass shooting of Jews carried out in the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa, by the German Police Battalion 320 along with Friedrich Jeckeln's ''Einsatzgruppen'', the Hungarian soldiers, a ...
(
Soviet Ukraine The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic ( uk, Украї́нська Радя́нська Соціалісти́чна Респу́бліка, ; russian: Украи́нская Сове́тская Социалисти́ческая Респ ...
), nearly 24,000 Jews were killed between 27 and 30 August 1941. The largest massacre was at a ravine called
Babi Yar Babi Yar (russian: Ба́бий Яр) or Babyn Yar ( uk, Бабин Яр) is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and a site of massacres carried out by Nazi Germany's forces during its campaign against the Soviet Union in World War II. T ...
outside Kiev (also Soviet Ukraine), where 33,771 Jews were killed on 29–30 September 1941. The Germans used the ravine for mass killings throughout the war; up to 100,000 may have been killed there.


Toward the Holocaust

At first the ''Einsatzgruppen'' targeted the male Jewish intelligentsia, defined as male Jews aged 15–60 who had worked for the state and in certain professions. The commandos described them as "Bolshevist functionaries" and similar. From August 1941 they began to murder women and children too. Christopher Browning reports that on 1 August 1941, the
SS Cavalry Brigade The SS Cavalry Brigade (''SS-Kavallerie-Brigade'') was a unit of the German Waffen-SS during World War II. Operating under the control of the '' Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS'', it initially performed rear security duties in German-occupied Pola ...
passed an order to its units: "Explicit order by RF-SS einrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS All Jews must be shot. Drive the female Jews into the swamps." Two years later, in a speech on 6 October 1943 to party leaders,
Heinrich Himmler Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (; 7 October 1900 – 23 May 1945) was of the (Protection Squadron; SS), and a leading member of the Nazi Party of Germany. Himmler was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and a main architect of th ...
said he had ordered that women and children be shot, but according to
Peter Longerich Peter Longerich (born 1955) is a German professor of history and German historian. He is regarded by fellow historians, including Ian Kershaw, Richard Evans, Timothy Snyder, Mark Roseman and Richard Overy, as one of the leading German authori ...
and
Christian Gerlach Hans Christian Gerlach is professor of Modern History at the University of Bern. Gerlach is also Associate Editor of the ''Journal of Genocide Research'' and author of multiple books dealing with the Hunger Plan, the Holocaust, and genocide. Wri ...
, the murder of women and children began at different times in different areas, suggesting local influence. Historians agree that there was a "gradual radicalization" between the spring and autumn of 1941 of what Longerich calls Germany's ''Judenpolitik'', but they disagree about whether a decision—''Führerentscheidung'' (Führer's decision)—to murder the European Jews had been made at this point. According to Browning, writing in 2004, most historians say there was no order, before the invasion of the Soviet Union, to kill all the Soviet Jews. Longerich wrote in 2010 that the gradual increase in brutality and numbers killed between July and September 1941 suggests there was "no particular order". Instead, it was a question of "a process of increasingly radical interpretations of orders".


Concentration and labor camps

Germany first used concentration camps as places of terror and unlawful incarceration of political opponents. Large numbers of Jews were not sent there until after ''
Kristallnacht () or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (german: Novemberpogrome, ), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's (SA) paramilitary and (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation fro ...
'' in November 1938. After war broke out in 1939, new camps were established, many outside Germany in occupied Europe. Most wartime prisoners of the camps were not Germans but belonged to countries under German occupation. After 1942, the economic function of the camps, previously secondary to their penal and terror functions, came to the fore. Forced labor of camp prisoners became commonplace. The guards became much more brutal, and the death rate increased as the guards not only beat and starved prisoners but killed them more frequently. '' Vernichtung durch Arbeit'' ("extermination through labor") was a policy; camp inmates would literally be worked to death, or to physical exhaustion, at which point they would be gassed or shot. 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 shifts were long and often involved exposure to dangerous materials. Transportation to and between camps was often carried out in closed freight cars with little air or water, long delays and prisoners packed tightly. In mid-1942 work camps began requiring newly arrived prisoners to be placed in quarantine for four weeks. Prisoners wore colored triangles on their uniforms, the color denoting the reason for their incarceration. Red signified a political prisoner, Jehovah's Witnesses had purple triangles, "asocials" and criminals wore black and green, and gay men wore pink. Jews wore two yellow triangles, one over another to form a six-pointed star. Prisoners in Auschwitz were tattooed on arrival with an identification number.


Germany's allies


Romania

Romania ranks first among Holocaust perpetrator countries other than Germany. Romanian antisemitic legislation was not an attempt to placate the Germans, but rather entirely home-grown, preceding German hegemony and Nazi Germany itself. The ascendance of Germany enabled Romania to disregard the minorities treaties that were imposed upon the country after the First World War. Antisemitic legislation in Romania was usually aimed at exploiting Jews rather than humiliating them as in Germany. At the end of 1937, the
Government A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government is ...
of
Octavian Goga Octavian Goga (; 1 April 1881 – 7 May 1938) was a Romanian politician, poet, playwright, journalist, and translator. Life and politics Goga was born in Rășinari, near Sibiu. Goga was an active member in the Romanian nationalisti ...
came to power, Romania thus becoming the second overtly antisemitic state in Europe. Romania was the second country in Europe after Germany to enact antisemitic legislation, and the only one besides Germany to do so before the 1938 ''
Anschluss The (, or , ), also known as the (, en, Annexation of Austria), was the annexation of the Federal State of Austria into the German Reich on 13 March 1938. The idea of an (a united Austria and Germany that would form a " Greater Germany ...
''. Romania was the only country other than Germany itself that "implemented all the steps of the destruction process, from definitions to killings." According to Dan Stone, the murder of Jews in Romania was "essentially an independent undertaking". Although Jewish persecution was unsystematic within the pre-war borders of Romania, it was systematic in the Romanian
occupied territories Military occupation, also known as belligerent occupation or simply occupation, is the effective military control by a ruling power over a territory that is outside of that power's sovereign territory.Eyāl Benveniśtî. The international law ...
of the Soviet Union. Romania implemented anti-Jewish measures in May and June 1940 as part of its efforts towards an alliance with Germany. By March 1941 all Jews had lost their jobs and had their property confiscated. In June 1941 Romania joined Germany in its
invasion of the Soviet Union Operation Barbarossa (german: link=no, Unternehmen Barbarossa; ) was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies, starting on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during the Second World War. The operation, code-named afte ...
and within the first few weeks of the invasion, almost the entire rural Jewish population of Bessarabia and Bukovina were decimated. Thousands of Jews were murdered in January and June 1941 in the
Bucharest pogrom Between 21 and 23 January 1941, a rebellion of the Iron Guard paramilitary organization, whose members were known as Legionnaires, occurred in Bucharest, Romania. As their privileges were being gradually removed by the ''Conducător'' Ion Ant ...
and Iași pogrom. According to a 2004 report by
Tuvia Friling Tuvia Friling (born 7 May 1953) is an Emeritus professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Previously he served as a senior researcher at the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism and a lecturer at the Is ...
and others, up to 14,850 Jews were murdered during the Iași pogrom. The Romanian military murdered up to 25,000 Jews during the Odessa massacre between 18 October 1941 and March 1942, assisted by gendarmes and the police. Within the city of Odessa, Jews were segregated to ghettos where they were later deported en masse, with the majority dying from disease, hunger and murder. In July 1941,
Mihai Antonescu Mihai Antonescu (18 November 1904 – 1 June 1946) was a Romanian politician who served as Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister during World War II, executed in 1946 as a war criminal. Early career Born in Nucet, Dâmbovița County, w ...
, Romania's deputy prime minister, said it was time for "total ethnic purification, for a revision of national life, and for purging our race of all those elements which are foreign to its soul, which have grown like mistletoes and darken our future." Romania set up concentration camps in
Transnistria Transnistria, officially the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (PMR), is an unrecognised breakaway state that is internationally recognised as a part of Moldova. Transnistria controls most of the narrow strip of land between the Dniester riv ...
, reportedly extremely brutal, where 154,000–170,000 Jews were deported from 1941 to 1943. In the Odessa and Pervomaisk regions alone, Romanian authorities were responsible for the death of over 150,000 Jews.


Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Hungary

Bulgaria introduced anti-Jewish measures between 1940 and 1943 (requirement to wear a yellow star, restrictions on owning telephones or radios, and so on). 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 Treblinka () was an extermination camp, built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was in a forest north-east of Warsaw, south of the village of Treblinka in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship. The camp ...
. All 11,000 Jews from the annexed territories were sent to be murdered, and plans were made to deport 6,000–8,000 Bulgarian Jews from Sofia to meet the quota. When this became public, the Orthodox Church and many Bulgarians protested, and King
Boris III Boris III ( bg, Борѝс III ; Boris Treti; 28 August 1943), originally Boris Klemens Robert Maria Pius Ludwig Stanislaus Xaver (Boris Clement Robert Mary Pius Louis Stanislaus Xavier) , was the Tsar of the Kingdom of Bulgaria from 1918 until h ...
canceled the plans. Instead, Jews native to Bulgaria were sent to the provinces. Stone writes that Slovakia, led by Roman Catholic priest
Jozef Tiso Jozef Gašpar Tiso (; hu, Tiszó József; 13 October 1887 – 18 April 1947) was a Slovak politician and Roman Catholic priest who served as president of the Slovak Republic, a client state of Nazi Germany during World War II, from 1939 to 194 ...
(president of the
Slovak State Slovak may refer to: * Something from, related to, or belonging to Slovakia (''Slovenská republika'') * Slovaks, a Western Slavic ethnic group * Slovak language, an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic languages * Slovak, Arka ...
, 1939–1945), was "one of the most loyal of the collaborationist regimes". 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. Another 2,396 were deported and 2,257 killed that autumn during an uprising, and 13,500 were deported between October 1944 and March 1945. According to Stone, "the Holocaust in Slovakia was far more than a German project, even if it was carried out in the context of a 'puppet' state." Although Hungary expelled Jews who were not citizens from its newly annexed lands in 1941, it did not deport most of its Jews until the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944. Between 15 May and early July 1944, 437,000 Jews were deported, mostly to Auschwitz, where most of them were murdered by gas; there were four transports a day, each carrying 3,000 people. In Budapest in October and November 1944, the Hungarian Arrow Cross forced 50,000 Jews to march to the Austrian border as part of a deal with Germany to supply forced labor. So many died that the marches were stopped.


Italy, Finland, and Japan

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. Most Italian Jews, over 40,000, survived the Holocaust. In September 1943, Germany occupied the northern and central areas of Italy and established a fascist puppet state, the Italian Social Republic or Salò Republic. Officers from RSHA IV B4, a
Gestapo The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one orga ...
unit, began deporting Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The first group of 1,034 Jews arrived from Rome on 23 October 1943; 839 were murdered by gas. Around 8,500 Jews were deported in all. Several forced labor camps for Jews were established in Italian-controlled Libya; almost 2,600
Libyan Jews The history of the Jews in Libya stretches back to the 3rd century BCE, when Cyrenaica was under Greek rule. The Jewish population of Libya, a part of the Sephardi-Maghrebi Jewish community continued to populate the area continuously until the m ...
were sent to camps, where 562 were murdered. In Finland, the government was pressured in 1942 to hand over its 150–200 non-Finnish Jews to Germany. After opposition from both the government and public, eight non-Finnish Jews were deported in late 1942; only one survived the war. Japan had little antisemitism in its society and did not persecute Jews in most of the territories it controlled. Jews in
Shanghai Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the Huangpu River flowin ...
were confined, but despite German pressure they were not killed.


Final Solution


Pearl Harbor, Germany declares war on the United States

On 7 December 1941, Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor, an American naval base in
Honolulu Honolulu (; ) is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of Hawaii, which is in the Pacific Ocean. It is an unincorporated county seat of the consolidated City and County of Honolulu, situated along the southeast coast of the island ...
, Hawaii, killing 2,403 Americans. The following day, the United States declared war on Japan, and on 11 December, Germany declared war on the United States. According to
Deborah Dwork According to the Book of Judges, Deborah ( he, דְּבוֹרָה, ''Dəḇōrā'', "bee") was a prophetess of the God of the Israelites, the fourth Judge of pre-monarchic Israel and the only female judge mentioned in the Bible. Many scholars ...
and
Robert Jan van Pelt Robert Jan van Pelt (born 15 August 1955) is a Dutch author, architectural historian, professor at the University of Waterloo and a Holocaust scholar. One of the world's leading experts on Auschwitz, he regularly speaks on Holocaust related topic ...
, Hitler had trusted American Jews, whom he assumed were all-powerful, to keep the United States out of the war in the interests of German Jews. When America declared war, he blamed the Jews. Nearly three years earlier, on 30 January 1939, Hitler had told the Reichstag: "if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will be not the Bolshevising of the earth, and thus a victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!" In the view of
Christian Gerlach Hans Christian Gerlach is professor of Modern History at the University of Bern. Gerlach is also Associate Editor of the ''Journal of Genocide Research'' and author of multiple books dealing with the Hunger Plan, the Holocaust, and genocide. Wri ...
, Hitler "announced his decision in principle" to annihilate the Jews on or around 12 December 1941, one day after his declaration of war. On that day, Hitler gave a speech in his apartment at the
Reich Chancellery The Reich Chancellery (german: Reichskanzlei) was the traditional name of the office of the Chancellor of Germany (then called ''Reichskanzler'') in the period of the German Reich from 1878 to 1945. The Chancellery's seat, selected and prepared ...
to senior Nazi Party leaders: the '' Reichsleiter'' and the ''
Gauleiter A ''Gauleiter'' () was a regional leader of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) who served as the head of a '' Gau'' or '' Reichsgau''. ''Gauleiter'' was the third-highest rank in the Nazi political leadership, subordinate only to '' Reichsleiter'' and to ...
''. The following day, Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, noted in his diary: Christopher Browning argues that Hitler gave no order during the Reich Chancellery meeting but made clear that he had intended his 1939 warning to the Jews to be taken literally, and he signaled to party leaders that they could give appropriate orders to others. According to Gerlach, an unidentified former German ''Sicherheitsdienst'' officer wrote in a report in 1944, after defecting to Switzerland: "After America entered the war, the annihilation (''Ausrottung'') of all European Jews was initiated on the Führer's order." Four days after Hitler's meeting with party leaders,
Hans Frank Hans Michael Frank (23 May 1900 – 16 October 1946) was a German politician and lawyer who served as head of the General Government in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Second World War. Frank was an early member of the German Workers' Party ...
, Governor-General of the General Government area of occupied Poland, who was at the meeting, spoke to district governors: "We must put an end to the Jews ... I will in principle proceed only on the assumption that they will disappear. They must go." On 18 December 1941, Hitler and Himmler held a meeting to which Himmler referred in his appointment book as "''Juden frage , als Partisanen auszurotten''" ("Jewish question / to be exterminated as partisans"). Browning interprets this as a meeting to discuss how to justify and speak about the killing.


Wannsee Conference (20 January 1942)

SS-''
Obergruppenführer ' (, "senior group leader") was a paramilitary rank in Nazi Germany that was first created in 1932 as a rank of the ''Sturmabteilung'' (SA) and adopted by the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) one year later. Until April 1942, it was the highest commissio ...
''
Reinhard Heydrich Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich ( ; ; 7 March 1904 – 4 June 1942) was a high-ranking German SS and police official during the Nazi era and a principal architect of the Holocaust. He was chief of the Reich Security Main Office (inclu ...
, head of the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA), convened what became known as the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942 at Am Großen Wannsee 56–58, a villa in Berlin's
Wannsee Wannsee () is a locality in the southwestern Berlin borough of Steglitz-Zehlendorf, Germany. It is the westernmost locality of Berlin. In the quarter there are two lakes, the larger ''Großer Wannsee'' (Greater Wannsee, "See" means lake) and the ...
suburb. The meeting had been scheduled for 9 December 1941, and invitations had been sent between 29 November and 1 December, but on 8 December it had been postponed indefinitely, probably because of Pearl Harbor. On 8 January, Heydrich sent out notes again, this time suggesting 20 January. The 15 men present at Wannsee included Heydrich, SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, head of
Reich Security Head Office Referat IV B4 Reich Security Head Office Referat IV B4, known as RSHA IV B4 (German: ' IV D4 until March 1941, or ''Judenreferat''), was a sub-department of Germany's Reich Security Head Office (''Reichssicherheitshauptamt'' or RSHA) and the Gestapo during the ...
("Jewish affairs"); SS Major General Heinrich Müller, head of RSHA Department IV (the
Gestapo The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one orga ...
); and other SS and party leaders. According to Browning, eight of the 15 had doctorates: "Thus it was not a dimwitted crowd unable to grasp what was going to be said to them." Thirty copies of the minutes, the Wannsee Protocol, were made. Copy no. 16 was found by American prosecutors in March 1947 in a German Foreign Office folder. Written by Eichmann and stamped "Top Secret", the minutes were written in "euphemistic language" on Heydrich's instructions, according to Eichmann's later testimony. Discussing plans for a "
final solution to the Jewish question The Final Solution (german: die Endlösung, ) or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question (german: Endlösung der Judenfrage, ) was a Nazi plan for the genocide of individuals they defined as Jews during World War II. The "Final Solution to th ...
" ("''Endlösung der Judenfrage''"), and a "final solution to the Jewish question in Europe" ("''Endlösung der europäischen Judenfrage''"), the conference was held to coordinate efforts and policies ("''Parallelisierung der Linienführung''"), and to ensure that authority rested with Heydrich. There was discussion about whether to include the German ''Mischlinge'' (half-Jews). Heydrich told the meeting: "Another possible solution of the problem has now taken the place of emigration, i.e. the evacuation of the Jews to the East, provided that the Fuehrer gives the appropriate approval in advance." He continued: The evacuations were regarded as provisional ("''Ausweichmöglichkeiten''"). The final solution would encompass the 11million Jews living in territories controlled by Germany and elsewhere in Europe, including Britain, Ireland, Switzerland, Turkey, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, and Hungary, "dependent on military developments". According to Longerich, "the Jews were to be annihilated by a combination of forced labour and mass murder."


Extermination camps

At the end of 1941 in occupied Poland, the Germans began building additional camps or expanding existing ones. Auschwitz, for example, was expanded in October 1941 by building
Auschwitz II-Birkenau Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 Nazi concentration camps, concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany, occupied Poland (in a portion annexed int ...
a few kilometers away. By the spring or summer of 1942, gas chambers had been installed in these new facilities, except for Chełmno, which used
gas van A gas van or gas wagon (russian: душегубка, ''dushegubka'', literally "soul killer"; german: Gaswagen) was a truck reequipped as a mobile gas chamber. During the World War II Holocaust, Nazi Germany developed and used gas vans on a large ...
s. Other camps sometimes described as extermination camps include Maly Trostinets near
Minsk Minsk ( be, Мінск ; russian: Минск) is the capital and the largest city of Belarus, located on the Svislach and the now subterranean Niamiha rivers. As the capital, Minsk has a special administrative status in Belarus and is the admi ...
in the occupied Soviet Union, where 65,000 are thought to have been murdered, mostly by shooting but also in gas vans;; ; .
Mauthausen Mauthausen was a Nazi concentration camp on a hill above the market town A market town is a settlement most common in Europe that obtained by custom or royal charter, in the Middle Ages, a market right, which allowed it to host a regu ...
in Austria;
Stutthof Stutthof was a Nazi concentration camp established by Nazi Germany in a secluded, marshy, and wooded area near the village of Stutthof (now Sztutowo) 34 km (21 mi) east of the city of Danzig ( Gdańsk) in the territory of the Germ ...
, near Gdańsk, Poland; and Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück in Germany.


Gas vans

Chełmno, with gas vans only, had its roots in the
Aktion T4 (German, ) was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post- war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of 4, a street address o ...
euthanasia program. In December 1939 and January 1940, gas vans equipped with gas cylinders and a sealed compartment had been used to kill disabled people in occupied Poland. As the mass shootings continued in Russia, Himmler and his subordinates in the field feared that the murders were causing psychological problems for the SS, and began searching for more efficient methods. In December 1941, similar vans, using exhaust fumes rather than bottled gas, were introduced into the camp at Chełmno, Victims were asphyxiated while being driven to prepared burial pits in the nearby forests. The vans were also used in the occupied Soviet Union, for example in smaller clearing actions in the
Minsk ghetto The Minsk Ghetto was created soon after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. It was one of the largest in Belorussian SSR, and the largest in the German-occupied territory of the Soviet Union.Donald L. Niewyk, Francis R. Nicosia, ''The Co ...
, and in Yugoslavia. Apparently, as with the mass shootings, the vans caused emotional problems for the operators, and the small number of victims the vans could handle made them ineffective.


Gas chambers

Christian Gerlach Hans Christian Gerlach is professor of Modern History at the University of Bern. Gerlach is also Associate Editor of the ''Journal of Genocide Research'' and author of multiple books dealing with the Hunger Plan, the Holocaust, and genocide. Wri ...
writes that over three million Jews were murdered in 1942, the year that "marked the peak" of the mass murder. At least 1.4 million of these were in the General Government area of Poland. Victims usually arrived at the extermination camps by freight train. Almost all arrivals at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka were sent directly to the gas chambers, with individuals occasionally selected to replace dead workers. At Auschwitz, about 20 percent of Jews were selected to work. Those selected for death at all camps were told to undress and hand their valuables to camp workers. They were then herded naked into the gas chambers. To prevent panic, they were told the gas chambers were showers or delousing chambers. At Auschwitz, after the chambers were filled, the doors were shut and pellets of Zyklon-B were dropped into the chambers through vents, releasing toxic
prussic acid Hydrogen cyanide, sometimes called prussic acid, is a chemical compound with the formula HCN and structure . It is a colorless, extremely poisonous, and flammable liquid that boils slightly above room temperature, at . HCN is produced on an in ...
. Those inside were murdered within 20 minutes; the speed of death depended on how close the inmate was standing to a gas vent, according to the commandant
Rudolf Höss Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss (also Höß, Hoeß, or Hoess; 25 November 1901 – 16 April 1947) was a German SS officer during the Nazi era who, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, was convicted for war crimes. Höss was the longest-serving comm ...
, who estimated that about one-third of the victims were killed immediately. Johann Kremer, an SS doctor who oversaw the gassings, testified that: "Shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through the opening and it was clear that they fought for their lives." The gas was then pumped out, and the Sonderkommando—work groups of mostly Jewish prisoners—carried out the bodies, extracted gold fillings, cut off women's hair, and removed jewelry, artificial limbs and glasses. At Auschwitz, the bodies were at first buried in deep pits and covered with lime, but between September and November 1942, on the orders of Himmler, 100,000 bodies were dug up and burned. In early 1943, new gas chambers and crematoria were built to accommodate the numbers. Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka became known as the Operation Reinhard camps, named after the German plan to murder the Jews in the General Government area of occupied Poland. Between March 1942 and November 1943, around 1,526,500 Jews were murdered in these three camps in gas chambers using
carbon monoxide Carbon monoxide (chemical formula CO) is a colorless, poisonous, odorless, tasteless, flammable gas that is slightly less dense than air. Carbon monoxide consists of one carbon atom and one oxygen atom connected by a triple bond. It is the simple ...
from the exhaust fumes of stationary diesel engines. Gold fillings were pulled from the corpses before burial, but unlike in Auschwitz the women's hair was cut before death. At Treblinka, to calm the victims, the arrival platform was made to look like a train station, complete with a fake clock. Most of the victims at these three camps were buried in pits at first. From mid-1942, as part of ''
Sonderaktion 1005 ' 1005 (, 'Special Action 1005'), also called ''Aktion'' 1005 or ' (, 'Exhumation Action'), was a top-secret Nazi operation conducted from June 1942 to late 1944. The goal of the project was to hide or destroy any evidence of the mass murder ...
'', prisoners at Auschwitz, Chelmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, 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. The corpses—700,000 in Treblinka—were burned on wood in open fire pits and the remaining bones crushed into powder.


Collaboration

Although the Holocaust was planned and directed by Germans, the Nazi regime found willing collaborators in other countries (e.g. the Ustashe of
Croatia , image_flag = Flag of Croatia.svg , image_coat = Coat of arms of Croatia.svg , anthem = "Lijepa naša domovino"("Our Beautiful Homeland") , image_map = , map_caption = , capit ...
), or forced others into participation. This included individual collaboration as well as state collaboration. According to Dan Stone the Holocaust was a pan-European phenomenon, a series of "Holocausts" impossible to conduct without local collaborators and Germany's allies. Stone writes that "many European states, under the extreme circumstances of World War II, took upon themselves the task of solving the 'Jewish question' in their own way."


Resistance


Jewish resistance

There was almost no resistance in the ghettos in Poland until the end of 1942.
Raul Hilberg Raul Hilberg (June 2, 1926 – August 4, 2007) was a Jewish Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the preeminent scholar on the Holocaust. Christopher R. Browning has called him the founding fath ...
accounted for this by evoking the history of Jewish persecution: compliance might avoid inflaming the situation until the onslaught abated.
Timothy Snyder Timothy David Snyder (born August 18, 1969) is an American historian specializing in the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute ...
noted that it was only during the three months after the deportations of July–September 1942 that agreement on the need for armed resistance was reached. Several resistance groups were formed, such as the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) and Jewish Military Union (ŻZW) in the
Warsaw Ghetto The Warsaw Ghetto (german: Warschauer Ghetto, officially , "Jewish Residential District in Warsaw"; pl, getto warszawskie) was the largest of the Nazi ghettos during World War II and the Holocaust. It was established in November 1940 by the G ...
and the
United Partisan Organization The Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye ( yi, ; "United Partisan Organization"; referred to as FPO by its Yiddish initials) was a Jewish resistance organization based in the Vilna Ghetto that organized armed resistance against the Nazis during ...
in Vilna. Over 100 revolts and uprisings occurred in at least 19 ghettos and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The best known is the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; pl, powstanie w getcie warszawskim; german: link=no, Aufstand im Warschauer Ghetto was the 1943 act of Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto in German-occupied Poland during World War II to oppose Nazi Germany' ...
in April 1943, when the Germans arrived to send the remaining inhabitants to extermination camps. Forced to retreat on 19 April from the ŻOB and ŻZW fighters, they returned later that day under the command of SS General
Jürgen Stroop Jürgen Stroop (born Josef Stroop, 26 September 1895 – 6 March 1952) was a German SS commander during the Nazi era, who served as SS and Police Leader in occupied Poland and Greece. He led the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 19 ...
(author of the
Stroop Report The Stroop Report is an official report prepared by General Jürgen Stroop for the SS chief Heinrich Himmler, recounting the German suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the liquidation of the ghetto in the spring of 1943. Originally ti ...
about the uprising). Around 1,000 poorly armed fighters held the SS at bay for four weeks. Polish and Jewish accounts stated that hundreds or thousands of Germans had been killed, while the Germans reported 16 dead. The Germans said that 14,000 Jews had been killed—7000 during the fighting and 7000 sent to Treblinka—and between 53,000 and 56,000 deported. According to ''
Gwardia Ludowa Gwardia Ludowa (; People's Guard) or GL was a communist underground armed organization created by the communist Polish Workers' Party in German occupied Poland, with sponsorship from the Soviet Union. Formed in early 1942, within a short time Gw ...
'', a Polish resistance newspaper, in May 1943: During a revolt in Treblinka on 2 August 1943, inmates killed five or six guards and set fire to camp buildings; several managed to escape. In the
Białystok Ghetto The Białystok Ghetto ( pl, getto w Białymstoku) was a Nazi ghetto set up by the German SS between July 26 and early August 1941 in the newly formed District of Bialystok within occupied Poland. About 50,000 Jews from the vicinity of Białyst ...
on 16 August, Jewish insurgents fought for five days when the Germans announced mass deportations. On 14 October, Jewish prisoners in Sobibór attempted an escape, killing 11 SS officers, as well as two or three Ukrainian and ''Volksdeutsche'' guards. According to
Yitzhak Arad Yitzhak Arad ( he, יצחק ארד; né Icchak Rudnicki; November 11, 1926 – May 6, 2021) was an Israeli historian, author, IDF brigadier general and Soviet partisan. He also served as Yad Vashem's director from 1972 to 1993, and specialised ...
, this was the highest number of SS officers killed in a single revolt. Around 300 inmates escaped (out of 600 in the main camp), but 100 were recaptured and shot. On 7 October 1944, 300 Jewish members, mostly Greek or Hungarian, of the '' Sonderkommando'' at Auschwitz learned they were about to be killed, and staged an uprising, blowing up crematorium IV. Three SS officers were killed. The ''Sonderkommando'' at crematorium II threw their ''Oberkapo'' into an oven when they heard the commotion, believing that a camp uprising had begun. By the time the SS had regained control, 451 members of the ''Sonderkommando'' were dead; 212 survived. Estimates of Jewish participation in partisan units throughout Europe range from 20,000 to 100,000. In the occupied Polish and Soviet territories, thousands of Jews fled into the swamps or forests and joined the partisans, although the partisan movements did not always welcome them. An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 joined the
Soviet partisan Soviet partisans were members of resistance movements that fought a guerrilla war against Axis forces during World War II in the Soviet Union, the previously Soviet-occupied territories of interwar Poland in 1941–45 and eastern Finland. The ...
movement. One of the famous Jewish groups was the Bielski partisans in Belarus, led by the Bielski brothers. Jews also joined Polish forces, including the
Home Army The Home Army ( pl, Armia Krajowa, abbreviated AK; ) was the dominant resistance movement in German-occupied Poland during World War II. The Home Army was formed in February 1942 from the earlier Związek Walki Zbrojnej (Armed Resistance) est ...
. According to Timothy Snyder, "more Jews fought in the
Warsaw Uprising The Warsaw Uprising ( pl, powstanie warszawskie; german: Warschauer Aufstand) was a major World War II operation by the Polish underground resistance to liberate Warsaw from German occupation. It occurred in the summer of 1944, and it was led ...
of August 1944 than in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943."


Polish resistance and flow of information

The
Polish government-in-exile The Polish government-in-exile, officially known as the Government of the Republic of Poland in exile ( pl, Rząd Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej na uchodźstwie), was the government in exile of Poland formed in the aftermath of the Invasion of Pola ...
in London received information about the extermination camp at Auschwitz from the Polish leadership in Warsaw from 1940 onwards, and by August 1942 there was "a continual flow of information to and from Poland", according to Michael Fleming. This was in large measure thanks to Captain
Witold Pilecki Witold Pilecki (13 May 190125 May 1948; ; codenames ''Roman Jezierski, Tomasz Serafiński, Druh, Witold'') was a Polish World War II cavalry officer, intelligence agent, and resistance leader. As a youth, Pilecki joined Polish underground s ...
of the Polish
Home Army The Home Army ( pl, Armia Krajowa, abbreviated AK; ) was the dominant resistance movement in German-occupied Poland during World War II. The Home Army was formed in February 1942 from the earlier Związek Walki Zbrojnej (Armed Resistance) est ...
, who was sent to the camp in September 1940 after allowing himself to be arrested in Warsaw. An inmate until he escaped in April 1943, his mission was to set up a resistance movement ( ZOW), prepare to take over the camp, and smuggle out information. On 6 January 1942, the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs,
Vyacheslav Molotov Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov. ; (;. 9 March Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates">O._S._25_February.html" ;"title="Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates.html" ;"title="nowiki/>Old Style and New Style dates">O. S. 25 February">Old_Style_and_New_Style_dat ...
, sent out diplomatic notes about German atrocities, based on reports about mass graves and bodies surfacing in areas the
Red Army The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army ( Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, afte ...
had liberated, as well as witness reports from German-occupied areas. According to Fleming, in May and June 1942, London was told about the extermination camps at Chełmno, Sobibór, and Bełzėc. Szlama Ber Winer escaped from Chełmno in February and passed information to the Oneg Shabbat group in the Warsaw Ghetto; his report was known by his pseudonym as the Grojanowski Report. Also in 1942,
Jan Karski Jan Karski (24 June 1914 – 13 July 2000) was a Polish soldier, resistance-fighter, and diplomat during World War II. He is known for having acted as a courier in 1940–1943 to the Polish government-in-exile and to Poland's Western Allies ab ...
sent information to the Allies after being smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto twice. By c. July 1942, Polish leaders in Warsaw had learned about the mass killing of Jews in Auschwitz. The Polish Interior Ministry prepared a report, ''Sprawozdanie 6/42'', which said at the end: ''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. This report was sent to the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C. On 10 December 1942, the Polish Foreign Affairs Minister, Edward Raczyński, addressed the fledgling United Nations on the killings; the address was distributed with the title ''
The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland ''The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland'' was a brochure published by the Polish government-in-exile in 1943 to disseminate the text of Raczyński's Note of 10 December 1942. It was the first official information to the Wester ...
''. He told them about the use of poison gas; about Treblinka, Bełżec and Sobibór; that the Polish underground had referred to them as extermination camps; and that tens of thousands of Jews had been killed in Bełżec in March and April 1942. One in three Jews in Poland were already dead, he estimated, from a population of 3,130,000. Raczyński's address was covered by the ''New York Times'' and ''The Times'' of London.
Winston Churchill Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 187424 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 during the Second World War, and again from ...
received it, and Anthony Eden presented it to the British cabinet. On 17 December 1942, 11 Allies issued the
Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations The Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations was the first formal statement to the world about the Holocaust, issued on December 17, 1942, by the American and British governments on behalf of the Allied Powers. In it, they describe th ...
condemning the "bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination". The British and American governments were reluctant to publicize the intelligence they had received. A BBC Hungarian Service memo, written by Carlile Macartney, said in 1942: "We shouldn't mention the Jews at all." The British government's view was that the Hungarian people's antisemitism would make them distrust the Allies if Allied broadcasts focused on the Jews. In the United States, where antisemitism and isolationism were common, the government similarly feared turning the war into one about the Jews. Although governments and the German public appear to have understood what was happening to the Jews, it seems the Jews themselves did not. According to
Saul Friedländer Saul Friedländer (; born October 11, 1932) is a Czech-Jewish-born historian and a professor emeritus of history at UCLA. Biography Saul Friedländer was born in Prague to a family of German-speaking Jews. He was raised in France and lived thro ...
, " stimonies left by Jews from all over occupied Europe indicate that, in contradistinction to vast segments of surrounding society, the victims did not understand what was ultimately in store for them." 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.


End of the war


The Holocaust in Hungary

By 1943 it was evident to the leadership of the armed forces that Germany was losing the war. Rail shipments of Jews were still arriving regularly from western and southern Europe at the extermination camps. Shipments of Jews had priority on the German railways over anything but the army's needs, and continued even in the face of the increasingly dire military situation at the end of 1942. Army leaders and economic managers complained about this diversion of resources and the killing of skilled Jewish workers, but Nazi leaders rated ideological imperatives above economic considerations. The mass murder reached a "frenetic" pace in 1944 when Auschwitz gassed nearly 500,000 people. On 19 March 1944, Hitler ordered the military occupation of Hungary and dispatched Adolf Eichmann to supervise the deportation of its Jews. Between 15 May and 9 July, 440,000 Jews were deported from Hungary to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, almost all sent directly to the gas chambers. A month before the deportations began, Eichmann offered through an intermediary, Joel Brand, to exchange one million Jews for 10,000 trucks from the Allies, which the Germans would agree not to use on the Western front. The British thwarted the proposal by leaking it. ''The Times'' called it "a new level of fantasy and self-deception". Publication of the Vrba–Wetzler report halted Hungarian government cooperation with Jewish deportations for several months and sparked international interventions that saved tens of thousands of lives.


Death marches

As the Soviet armed forces advanced, the SS closed down the camps in eastern Poland and tried to conceal what had happened. The gas chambers were dismantled, the crematoria dynamited, and the mass graves dug up and corpses cremated. From January to April 1945, the SS sent inmates westward on death marches to camps in Germany and Austria. 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. Already sick after exposure to violence and starvation, they were marched to train stations and transported for days without food or shelter in open freight cars, then forced to march again at the other end to the new camp. Some went by truck or wagons; others were marched the entire distance. Those who lagged behind or fell were shot.


Liberation

The first major camp encountered by Allied troops,
Majdanek Majdanek (or Lublin) was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, a ...
, was discovered by the advancing Soviets, along with its gas chambers, on 25 July 1944.
Treblinka Treblinka () was an extermination camp, built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was in a forest north-east of Warsaw, south of the village of Treblinka in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship. The cam ...
, Sobibór, and Bełżec were never liberated, but were destroyed by the Germans in 1943. On 17 January 1945, 58,000 Auschwitz inmates were sent on a death march westwards; when the camp was liberated by the Soviets on 27 January, they found just 7,000 inmates in the three main camps and 500 in subcamps.
Buchenwald Buchenwald (; literally 'beech forest') was a Nazi concentration camp established on hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany's 1937 borders. Many actual or sus ...
was liberated by the Americans on 11 April;
Bergen-Belsen Bergen-Belsen , or Belsen, was a Nazi concentration camp in what is today Lower Saxony in northern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. Originally established as a prisoner of war camp, in 1943, parts of it became a concentrati ...
by the British on 15 April; Dachau by the Americans on 29 April; Ravensbrück by the Soviets on 30 April; and
Mauthausen Mauthausen was a Nazi concentration camp on a hill above the market town A market town is a settlement most common in Europe that obtained by custom or royal charter, in the Middle Ages, a market right, which allowed it to host a regu ...
by the Americans on 5 May. The Red Cross took control of Theresienstadt on 3 May, days before the Soviets arrived. The British 11th Armoured Division found around 60,000 prisoners (90 percent Jews) when they liberated Bergen-Belsen, as well as 13,000 unburied corpses; another 10,000 people died from
typhus Typhus, also known as typhus fever, is a group of infectious diseases that include epidemic typhus, scrub typhus, and murine typhus. Common symptoms include fever, headache, and a rash. Typically these begin one to two weeks after exposure. ...
or malnutrition over the following weeks.


Death toll

The Jews killed represented around one third of world Jewry and about two-thirds of European Jewry, based on a pre-war figure of 9.7 million Jews in Europe. Most heavily concentrated in the east, the pre-war Jewish population in Europe was 3.5 million in Poland; 3 million in the Soviet Union; nearly 800,000 in Romania, and 700,000 in Hungary. Germany had over 500,000. The death camps in occupied Poland accounted for half the Jews murdered. At Auschwitz, the number of Jewish victims was 960,000;
Treblinka Treblinka () was an extermination camp, built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was in a forest north-east of Warsaw, south of the village of Treblinka in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship. The cam ...
870,000; Bełżec 600,000;
Chełmno Chełmno (; older en, Culm; formerly ) is a town in northern Poland near the Vistula river with 18,915 inhabitants as of December 2021. It is the seat of the Chełmno County in the Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship. Due to its regional impor ...
320,000; Sobibór 250,000; and
Majdanek Majdanek (or Lublin) was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, a ...
79,000. The most commonly cited death toll is the six million given by Adolf Eichmann to SS member Wilhelm Höttl, who signed an
affidavit An ( ; Medieval Latin for "he has declared under oath") is a written statement voluntarily made by an ''affiant'' or '' deponent'' under an oath or affirmation which is administered by a person who is authorized to do so by law. Such a stateme ...
mentioning this figure in 1945. Historians' estimates range from 4,204,000 to 7,000,000. According to
Yad Vashem Yad Vashem ( he, יָד וַשֵׁם; literally, "a memorial and a name") is Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Jews who were murdered; honoring Jews who fought against th ...
, " l the serious research" confirms that between five and six million Jews were murdered. Death rates were heavily dependent on the survival of European states willing to protect their Jewish citizens. In countries allied to Germany, the state's control over its citizens, including the Jews, was seen as a matter of sovereignty. The continuous presence of state institutions thereby prevented the Jewish communities' complete destruction. 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 arrived—the Nazis declared Estonia ''
Judenfrei ''Judenfrei'' (, "free of Jews") and ''judenrein'' (, "clean of Jews") are terms of Nazi origin to designate an area that has been "cleansed" of Jews during The Holocaust. While ''judenfrei'' refers merely to "freeing" an area of all of its ...
'' ("free of Jews") in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference. The survival of Jews in countries where states were not destroyed demonstrates the "crucial" influence of non-Germans (governments and others), according to
Christian Gerlach Hans Christian Gerlach is professor of Modern History at the University of Bern. Gerlach is also Associate Editor of the ''Journal of Genocide Research'' and author of multiple books dealing with the Hunger Plan, the Holocaust, and genocide. Wri ...
. 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. Almost all Jews in German-occupied Poland, the Baltic states and the USSR were murdered, with a 5 percent chance of survival on average. Of Poland's 3.3 million Jews, about 90 percent were murdered.


Other victims of Nazi persecution


Soviet civilians and POWs

The Nazis regarded the
Slav Slavs are the largest European ethnolinguistic group. They speak the various Slavic languages, belonging to the larger Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European languages. Slavs are geographically distributed throughout northern Eurasia, main ...
s as ''
Untermenschen ''Untermensch'' (, ; plural: ''Untermenschen'') is a Nazi term for non-Aryan "inferior people" who were often referred to as "the masses from the East", that is Jews, Roma, and Slavs (mainly ethnic Poles, Serbs, and later also Russians). The ...
''. German troops destroyed villages throughout the Soviet Union, rounded up civilians for forced labor in Germany, and caused famine by taking foodstuffs. In
Belarus Belarus,, , ; alternatively and formerly known as Byelorussia (from Russian ). officially the Republic of Belarus,; rus, Республика Беларусь, Respublika Belarus. is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by ...
, Germany imposed a regime that deported 380,000 people for slave labor, murdered 1.6 million, and destroyed at least 5,295 settlements. The
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is the United States' official memorial to the Holocaust. Adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the USHMM provides for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust hi ...
estimates that 3.3 million of 5.7 million Soviet POWs died in German custody. 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. A 1995 paper published by M. V. Filimoshin, an associate of the Russian Defense Ministry, put the civilian death toll in the regions occupied by Germany at 13.7 million. Filimoshin cited sources from the Soviet era to support his figures and used the terms "
genocide Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word (, "race, people") with the Lat ...
" and "premeditated extermination" when referring to deaths of 7.4 million civilians caused by direct, intentional violence. Civilians killed in reprisals during the Soviet partisan war account for a major portion. Filimoshin estimated that civilian forced laborer deaths in Germany totaled 2.1 million. Germany had a policy of forced confiscation of food that resulted in famine deaths of an estimated 6% of the population, or 4.1 million. Russian government sources currently cite these civilian casualty figures in their official statements.


Ethnic Poles

From the start of the war against Poland, Germany intended to realize
Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...
's plan, set out in his book '' Mein Kampf'', to acquire "living space" (''
Lebensraum (, ''living space'') is a German concept of settler colonialism, the philosophy and policies of which were common to German politics from the 1890s to the 1940s. First popularized around 1901, '' lso in:' became a geopolitical goal of Imper ...
'') in the east for massive settlement of German colonists.Janusz Gumkowski and Kazimierz Leszczynski
"Hitler's War; Hitler's Plans for Eastern Europe"
1961, in ''Poland under Nazi Occupation'', Polonia Publishing House,
Warsaw Warsaw ( pl, Warszawa, ), officially the Capital City of Warsaw,, abbreviation: ''m.st. Warszawa'' is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the River Vistula in east-central Poland, and its population is officia ...
, pp. 7–33, 164–78.
Hitler's plan combined classic imperialism with Nazi racial ideology. While the long-term goal of Nazi Germany was removal of Jews from occupied Poland, in the initial months of occupation the SS predominantly directed physical violence towards ethnic Poles, arresting and executing educated elites in an attempt to prevent the development of organized resistance. On 7 September 1939,
Reinhard Heydrich Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich ( ; ; 7 March 1904 – 4 June 1942) was a high-ranking German SS and police official during the Nazi era and a principal architect of the Holocaust. He was chief of the Reich Security Main Office (inclu ...
stated that all Polish nobles, clergy, and Jews were to be murdered.Piotrowski, Tadeusz. Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration With Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918–1947. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. 2007, page 23 On 12 September,
Wilhelm Keitel Wilhelm Bodewin Johann Gustav Keitel (; 22 September 188216 October 1946) was a German field marshal and war criminal who held office as chief of the '' Oberkommando der Wehrmacht'' (OKW), the high command of Nazi Germany's Armed Forces, duri ...
added Poland's intelligentsia to the list. On 15 March 1940, SS chief
Heinrich Himmler Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (; 7 October 1900 – 23 May 1945) was of the (Protection Squadron; SS), and a leading member of the Nazi Party of Germany. Himmler was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and a main architect of th ...
stated: "All Polish specialists will be exploited in our military-industrial complex. Later, all Poles will disappear from this world. It is imperative that the great German nation consider the elimination of all Polish people as its chief task." At the end of 1940, Hitler confirmed the plan to liquidate "all leading elements in Poland". After Germany lost the war, the
International Military Tribunal International is an adjective (also used as a noun) meaning "between nations". International may also refer to: Music Albums * ''International'' (Kevin Michael album), 2011 * ''International'' (New Order album), 2002 * ''International'' (The T ...
at the
Nuremberg Trials The Nuremberg trials were held by the Allies against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany, for plotting and carrying out invasions of other countries, and other crimes, in World War II. Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany invaded m ...
and Poland's
Supreme National Tribunal The Supreme National Tribunal ( pl, Najwyższy Trybunał Narodowy TN}) was a war-crime tribunal active in communist-era Poland from 1946 to 1948. Its aims and purpose were defined by the State National Council in decrees of 22 January and 17 Oc ...
concluded that the aim of German policies in Polandthe extermination of Poles and Jewswas a genocide in biological terms. An estimated 1.8–1.9 million non-Jewish Polish citizens were killed by Germans during the war. At least 200,000 died in concentration camps, around 146,000 in Auschwitz. Others died in massacres or in revolts such as the
Warsaw Uprising The Warsaw Uprising ( pl, powstanie warszawskie; german: Warschauer Aufstand) was a major World War II operation by the Polish underground resistance to liberate Warsaw from German occupation. It occurred in the summer of 1944, and it was led ...
, where 150,000–200,000 were killed.


Roma

Historians estimate that Germany and its allies killed between 250,000 and 500,000 Roma, around 25–50 percent of the community in Europe. Research cited by
Ian Hancock Ian Francis Hancock ( Romani: Yanko le Redžosko; born 29 August 1942) is a linguist, Romani scholar and political advocate. He was born and raised in England and is one of the main contributors in the field of Romani studies. He is director ...
suggests the pre-war Romani population of Europe may have been much higher, resulting in estimates of up to 1.5 million Roma deaths. 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 White Ruthenia ( cu, Бѣла Роусь, Bela Rous'; be, Белая Русь, Biełaja Ruś; pl, Ruś Biała; russian: Белая Русь, Belaya Rus'; ukr, Біла Русь, Bila Rus') alternatively known as Russia Alba, White Rus' or W ...
and Ukraine, the regions in which most are thought to have been killed. Robert Ritter, head of Germany's Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit, called Roma "a peculiar form of the human species who are incapable of development and came about by mutation". 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. He adjusted the order on 15 November 1943 to allow "sedentary Gypsies and part-Gypsies" in the occupied Soviet areas to be viewed as citizens. In Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, the Roma were subject to restrictions on movement and confinement to collection camps, while in Eastern Europe they were sent to concentration camps, where large numbers were murdered.


Political and religious opponents

German communists, socialists and trade unionists were among the first to be sent to concentration camps. ''
Nacht und Nebel ''Nacht und Nebel'' (German: ), meaning Night and Fog, was a directive issued by Adolf Hitler on 7 December 1941 targeting political activists and resistance "helpers" in the territories occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II, who were to ...
'' ("Night and Fog"), a directive issued by Hitler on 7 December 1941, resulted in the disappearance, torture and death of political activists throughout German-occupied Europe; the courts had sentenced 1,793 people to death by April 1944, according to
Jack Fischel Jack R. Fischel is an American academic. Fischel was a professor of history at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, where he lectured for 37 years. Education Fischel graduated from Hunter College (now of the City University of New York) with a ...
. 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. Between 2,700 and 3,300 were sent to the camps, where 1,400 died. According to German historian Detlef Garbe, "no other religious movement resisted the pressure to conform to National Socialism with comparable unanimity and steadfastness."


Homosexuals

Around 100,000 gay men were arrested in Germany and 50,000 jailed between 1933 and 1945; 5,000–15,000 are thought to have been sent to concentration camps. Hundreds were
castrated Castration is any action, surgical, chemical, or otherwise, by which an individual loses use of the testicles: the male gonad. Surgical castration is bilateral orchiectomy (excision of both testicles), while chemical castration uses pharmac ...
, sometimes "voluntarily" to avoid criminal sentences. In 1936, Himmler created the
Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion The Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion () was the central instrument of Nazi Germany for the fight against homosexuality in Nazi Germany and the fight against abortion. History The ''Reichszentrale'' was created ...
. The police closed
gay bar A gay bar is a drinking establishment that caters to an exclusively or predominantly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) clientele; the term '' gay'' is used as a broadly inclusive concept for LGBT communities. Gay bars once serv ...
s and shut down gay publications. Lesbians were left relatively unaffected; the Nazis saw them as "asocials", rather than sexual deviants. However, where sexuality intersected with other identities, lesbianism could be used as an additional reason for persecution.Schoppman, C
'Elsa Conrad – Margarete Rosenberg – Mary Pünjer – Henny Schermann'
in, Eschebach, Insa, ed.
Homophobie und Devianz: weibliche und männliche Homosexualität im Nationalsozialismus
'. Metropol, 2012.
In some concentration camps brothels were established to punish lesbian women by raping them. Sex with Jewish women was forbidden on grounds of racial disgrace by the Nazis, but rape was not considered a racial disgrace in concentration camps.


Afro-Germans

There were 5,000–25,000 Afro-Germans in Germany when the Nazis came to power. 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.


Aftermath and legacy


Trials

During the
International Military Tribunal International is an adjective (also used as a noun) meaning "between nations". International may also refer to: Music Albums * ''International'' (Kevin Michael album), 2011 * ''International'' (New Order album), 2002 * ''International'' (The T ...
, 21 Nazi leaders were tried, primarily for waging wars of aggression, but the trial also exposed the systematic murder of European Jews. Twelve additional trials before American courts from 1946 to 1949 tried another 177 defendants; in these trials, the Holocaust took center stage. These trials were ineffective in their goal of re-educating Germans; by 1948, only 30 percent of Germans believed Nazism was a bad idea. A consensus in West German society demanded amnesty and release of the convicted prisoners. West Germany initially tried few ex-Nazis, but after the 1958
Ulm Einsatzkommando trial The Ulm Einsatzkommando trial (1958) was the first major trial of Nazi crimes under West Germany, West German law (rather than by an international or military tribunal). Ten suspects, former members of the Einsatzkommando ''Tilsit'', were charged fo ...
, the government set up a dedicated agency. Other trials of Nazis and collaborators took place in Western and Eastern Europe. In 1960 Mossad agents captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and brought him to Israel to stand trial on 15 charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the Jewish people. He was convicted in December 1961 and executed in June 1962. Eichmann's trial revived interest in war criminals and the Holocaust in general.


Reparations

The government of
Israel Israel (; he, יִשְׂרָאֵל, ; ar, إِسْرَائِيل, ), officially the State of Israel ( he, מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, label=none, translit=Medīnat Yīsrāʾēl; ), is a country in Western Asia. It is situated ...
requested $1.5 billion from the
Federal Republic of Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated between ...
in March 1951 to finance the rehabilitation of 500,000 Jewish survivors, arguing that Germany had stolen $6 billion from the European Jews. Israelis were divided about the idea of taking money from Germany. The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (known as the Claims Conference) was opened in New York, and after negotiations the claim was reduced to . West Germany allocated another $125 million for reparations in 1988. Companies such as BMW,
Deutsche Bank Deutsche Bank AG (), sometimes referred to simply as Deutsche, is a German multinational investment bank and financial services company headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany, and dual-listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and the New York Sto ...
,
Ford Ford commonly refers to: * Ford Motor Company, an automobile manufacturer founded by Henry Ford * Ford (crossing), a shallow crossing on a river Ford may also refer to: Ford Motor Company * Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company * Ford F ...
, Opel, Siemens, and
Volkswagen Volkswagen (),English: , . abbreviated as VW (), is a German motor vehicle manufacturer headquartered in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony, Germany. Founded in 1937 by the German Labour Front under the Nazi Party and revived into a global brand post-W ...
faced lawsuits for their use of forced labor during the war. In response, Germany set up the "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future" Foundation in 2000, which paid €4.45 billion to former slave laborers (up to €7,670 each). In 2013 Germany agreed to provide €772 million to fund nursing care, social services, and medication for 56,000 Holocaust survivors around the world. The French state-owned railway company, the SNCF, agreed in 2014 to pay $60 million to Jewish-American survivors, around $100,000 each, for its role in the transport of 76,000 Jews from France to extermination camps between 1942 and 1944. File:Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europeabove.jpg, ''
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (german: Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas), also known as the Holocaust Memorial (German: ''Holocaust-Mahnmal''), is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by arc ...
'' in Berlin, 2016 File:Stolpersteine, Berlin-Mitte, Germany, 30 December 2011.jpg, ''
Stolperstein A (; plural ; literally 'stumbling stone', metaphorically a 'stumbling block') is a sett-size, concrete cube bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution. The project, initia ...
e'',
Berlin-Mitte Mitte () (German for "middle" or "center") is a central locality () of Berlin in the eponymous district () of Mitte. Until 2001, it was itself an autonomous district. Mitte proper comprises the historic center of Alt-Berlin centered on the ch ...
, 2011


Remembrance and historiography

The tendency to see the Holocaust as a unique event was influential in early Holocaust scholarship, but came under contestation, and eventually mainstream Holocaust scholarship came to reject explicit claims of uniqueness, while recognizing differences between the Holocaust and other genocides. In popular culture, Hitler is a hegemonic historical analogy for evil and
Nazi comparisons Nazi analogies or Nazi comparisons are any comparisons or parallels which are related to Nazism or Nazi Germany, which often reference Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, the ''SS'', or the Holocaust. Despite criticism, such comparisons have been empl ...
are common.
Yom HaShoah Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laG'vurah ( he, יום הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה, , lit=Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day), known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah (יום השואה) and in English as Holocaust Rem ...
became
Israel Israel (; he, יִשְׂרָאֵל, ; ar, إِسْرَائِيل, ), officially the State of Israel ( he, מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, label=none, translit=Medīnat Yīsrāʾēl; ), is a country in Western Asia. It is situated ...
's Holocaust Remembrance Day in 1951. At least 37 countries and the United Nations have similar observances.


See also

*
Hunger Plan The Hunger Plan (german: der Hungerplan; der Backe-Plan) was a partially implemented plan developed by Nazi bureaucrats during World War II to seize food from the Soviet Union and give it to German soldiers and civilians. The plan entailed the gen ...


Explanatory notes


References


Citations


Works cited

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Knowlton, James and Cates, Truett (translators, 1993). * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


External links


Global Directory of Holocaust Museums

H-Holocaust
H-Net __NOTOC__ H-Net ("Humanities & Social Sciences Online") is an interdisciplinary forum for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. It is best known for hosting electronic mailing lists organized by academic disciplines; according to the o ...
discussion list for librarians, scholars and advanced students.
"Auschwitz: Drone video of Nazi concentration camp"
BBC News, 27 January 2015. * {{DEFAULTSORT:Holocaust, The 1940s in Europe Anti-black racism in Europe Anti-communism Anti-Masonry Anti-Polish sentiment in Europe Anti-Russian sentiment Antisemitic attacks and incidents Ethnic cleansing in Europe Genocides in Europe History of the Jews in Europe History of the Romani people during World War II Homophobia Mass murder in 1941 Mass murder in 1942 Mass murder in 1943 Mass murder in 1944 Mass murder in 1945 Nazi war crimes Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses Vichy France