[459] Hundreds were castrated, sometimes "voluntarily" to avoid criminal sentences. [146] Despite the dangers, thousands of Poles helped Jews. Web11 million, not 6 million, died in the Holocaust The scrapbook of Margaret Gruenbaum, who with her two children was imprisoned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, is now The rest of Poland was occupied by the Soviet Union, which invaded Poland from the east on 17 September 1939. [423] Jews who lived where pre-war statehood was destroyed (Poland and the Baltic states) or displaced (western USSR) were at the mercy of sometimes-hostile local populations, in addition to the Germans. [313] 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,[314] and began searching for more efficient methods. On 17 December 1942, 11 Allies issued the Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations condemning the "bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination". WebOf this total, nearly 1.1 million were Jews, 960,000 of which died in the camp. After the war this program came to be known as Aktion T4,[82] named after Tiergartenstrae4, the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, where the various organizations involved were headquartered. ", List of major perpetrators of the Holocaust, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, Adolf Hitler, antisemitism and the Holocaust, Anti-Jewish legislation in prewar Nazi Germany, Persecution of the Jews in Schleswig-Holstein (19331945), Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, Jewish refugees from German-occupied Europe in the United Kingdom, Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, German camps in occupied Poland during World War II, The Fhrer to the German People: 22 June 1941, Collaboration in German-occupied Soviet Union, Reich Chancellery meeting of 12 December 1941, Germany declared war on the United States, Adolf Hitler's Declaration of War against the United States, Responsibility for the Holocaust Other states, Jewish resistance in German-occupied Europe, Polish resistance movement in World War II, The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland, Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations, German mistreatment of Soviet prisoners of war, Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany, Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany, Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion, Persecution of black people in Nazi Germany, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the Jewish people, Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany, rehabilitation of 500,000 Jewish survivors, Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future" Foundation, "Remaining Jewish Population of Europe in 1945", "Shoah: How a Biblical Term Became the Hebrew Word for Holocaust", "The Holocaust: Definition and Preliminary Discussion", "Senior Management Team: Dr. Michael Gray, Academic and Universities Director", "Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution", "Jewish Losses during the Holocaust: By Country", "Antisemitic Austrian election poster by Bernd Steiner", "Poster promoting the Nazi monthly publication, "Deportations to and from the Warsaw Ghetto", "Einsatzgruppe member kills a Jewish woman and her child near Ivangorod, Ukraine, 1942", "Tattoos and Numbers: The System of Identifying Prisoners at Auschwitz", "Where Memory is a Curse and Amnesia a Blessing: A Journey Through Romania's Holocaust Narrative", "Wannsee Conference and the 'Final Solution', "Jews captured by Waffen SS soldiers during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising", "Could the BBC have done more to help Hungarian Jews? As German forces captured territories in the East, all anti-Jewish measures were radicalized. A stab-in-the-back myth developed, insinuating that disloyal politicians, chiefly Jews and communists, had orchestrated Germany's surrender. Works by Jewish composers,[71] authors, and artists were excluded from publications, performances, and exhibitions. [ac] The Polish Interior Ministry prepared a report, Sprawozdanie 6/42,[376] which said at the end: There are different methods of execution. Some went by truck or wagons; others were marched the entire distance. [267] The first group of 1,034 Jews arrived from Rome on 23 October 1943; 839 were murdered by gas. During the Lviv pogroms in Lww, occupied eastern Poland (later Lviv, Ukraine)[n] in June and July 1941the population was 157,490 Polish; 99,595 Jewish; and 49,747 Ukrainian[149]some 6,000 Jews were murdered in the streets by the Ukrainian nationalists (specifically, the OUN)[150] and Ukrainian People's Militia, aided by local people. [55] From the early 1920s onwards, he compared the Jews to germs and said they should be dealt with in the same way. [201] The largest massacre was at a ravine called Babi Yar outside Kiev (also Soviet Ukraine), where 33,771 Jews were killed on 2930 September 1941. [116] German Jewry was held collectively responsible for restitution of the damage; they also had to pay an "atonement tax" of over a billion Reichsmark. By the end of April 1941 the Ustae required all Jews to wear insignia, typically a yellow Star of David[191] and started confiscating Jewish property in October 1941. [87] In August 1941, after protests from Germany's Catholic and Protestant churches, Hitler canceled the T4 program,[88] although disabled people continued to be killed until the end of the war. [34] Eberhard Jckel 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 a memorandum ten days after the invasion, "U odbilo idom! [373] Also in 1942, Jan Karski sent information to the Allies after being smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto twice. The segregation of Jews in ghettos culminated in the policy of extermination the Nazis called the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, discussed by senior government officials at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January 1942. According to Timothy Snyder, "more Jews fought in the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 than in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943. [126] German plans for Poland included expelling non-Jewish Poles from large areas, settling Germans on the emptied lands,[127] sending the Polish leadership to camps, denying the lower classes an education, and confining Jews. On that day, Hitler gave a speech in his apartment at the Reich Chancellery to senior Nazi Party leaders: the Reichsleiter and the Gauleiter. [312] 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. [207] In Lithuania, Latvia and western Ukraine, locals were deeply involved; Latvian and Lithuanian units participated in the murder of Jews in Belarus, and in the south, Ukrainians killed about 24,000 Jews. 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. [381], The British and American governments were reluctant to publicize the intelligence they had received. By the end of the war, they had killed around two million, including about 1.3million Jews and up to a quarter of a million Roma. [436] 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. [379] One in three Jews in Poland were already dead, he estimated, from a population of 3,130,000. [162] Gas chambers had been installed by the spring or summer of 1942. "[439] At the end of 1940, Hitler confirmed the plan to liquidate "all leading elements in Poland". [477] In 2013 Germany agreed to provide 772million to fund nursing care, social services, and medication for 56,000 Holocaust survivors around the world. [43] The most notorious physician was Josef Mengele, an SS officer who became the Auschwitz camp doctor on 30 May 1943. "[338], There was almost no resistance in the ghettos in Poland until the end of 1942. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, triggering World War II, the regime set up ghettos to segregate Jews. [398][399] In January 1945, the Germans held records of 714,000 inmates in concentration camps; by May, 250,000 (35 percent) had died during these marches. ", "Major death marches and evacuations, 19441945", "The 11th Armoured Division (Great Britain)", "FAQ: How many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust? Eventually, thousands of camps and other detention sites were established across German-occupied Europe. [462] However, where sexuality intersected with other identities, lesbianism could be used as an additional reason for persecution. [256] It annexed Thrace and Macedonia, and in February 1943 agreed to a demand from Germany that it deport 20,000 Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp. [85] Overall, the number of mentally and physically disabled people murdered was about 150,000. [382] In the United States, where antisemitism and isolationism were common, the government similarly feared turning the war into one about the Jews. [394] 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. [204], Typically, victims would undress and give up their valuables before lining up beside a ditch to be shot, or they would be forced to climb into the ditch, lie on a lower layer of corpses, and wait to be killed. [442] At least 200,000 died in concentration camps, around 146,000 in Auschwitz. "The Holocaust: Definition and Preliminary Discussion". About 42,000 Jews in the General Government were shot during. [359] In the occupied Polish and Soviet territories, thousands of Jews fled into the swamps or forests and joined the partisans,[360] although the partisan movements did not always welcome them. People are shot by firing squads, killed by an "air hammer" /Hammerluft/, and poisoned by gas in special gas chambers. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2 February 2019. [138] Over 43,000 residents died there in 1941. [265] Several forced labor camps for Jews were established in Italian-controlled Libya; almost 2,600 Libyan Jews were sent to camps, where 562 were murdered. [271], On 7 December 1941, Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor, an American naval base in Honolulu, Hawaii, killing 2,403 Americans. Companies fired Jews and later used them as slave labor. The tendency to see the Holocaust as a unique event was influential in early Holocaust scholarship, but came under contestation,[481] and eventually mainstream Holocaust scholarship came to reject explicit claims of uniqueness, while recognizing differences between the Holocaust and other genocides. From August 1941 they began to murder women and children too. [106][k] When vom Rath died on 9 November, the synagogue and Jewish shops in Dessau were attacked. [144] The Germans ordered the death penalty for anyone helping Jews. [421] In countries allied to Germany, the state's control over its citizens, including the Jews, was seen as a matter of sovereignty. [115] Many were released within weeks; by early 1939, 2,000 remained in the camps. This report was sent to the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C.[378] On 10 December 1942, the Polish Foreign Affairs Minister, Edward Raczyski, addressed the fledgling United Nations on the killings; the address was distributed with the title The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland. [112] Attacks took place in Austria too. Prisoners condemned to death by the Gestapo are murdered by the first two methods. [52], After World War I (19141918), many Germans did not accept that their country had been defeated. the Ustashe of Croatia), or forced others into participation. [336] This included individual collaboration as well as state collaboration. Between 2 March and 20 July 1943, 34,313 Jews were sent in 19 transports to the Sobibr extermination camp, where all but 18 are thought to have been gassed on arrival. [196], In the Bulgarian annexed zones of Macedonia and Thrace, upon demand of the German authorities, the Bulgarians handed over the entire Jewish population, about 12,000 Jews to the military authorities, all were deported. [234] Prisoners wore colored triangles on their uniforms, the color denoting the reason for their incarceration. In just over four-and-a-half years, Nazi Germany systematically murdered at least 1.1 million people at Auschwitz. [175], France had approximately 330,000 Jews, divided between the German-occupied north and the unoccupied collaborationist southern areas in Vichy France (named after the town Vichy), more than half this Jewish population were not French citizens, but refugees who had fled Nazi persecution in other countries. [443] Others died in massacres or in revolts such as the Warsaw Uprising, where 150,000200,000 were killed. [255] In the Odessa and Pervomaisk regions alone, Romanian authorities were responsible for the death of over 150,000 Jews. [235] Jews wore two yellow triangles, one over another to form a six-pointed star. [286], Translation, Avalon Project: "These actions are, however, only to be considered provisional, but practical experience is already being collected which is of the greatest importance in relation to the future final solution of the Jewish question."[290]. [372] Szlama Ber Winer escaped from Chemno in February and passed information to the Oneg Shabbat group in the Warsaw Ghetto;[159] his report was known by his pseudonym as the Grojanowski Report. [268] Around 8,500 Jews were deported in all. [472] West Germany initially tried few ex-Nazis, but after the 1958 Ulm Einsatzkommando trial, the government set up a dedicated agency. [281], SS-Obergruppenfhrer Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA), convened what became known as the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942 at Am Groen Wannsee 5658, a villa in Berlin's Wannsee suburb. WebBefore the Nazi takeover of powerin 1933, Europe had a vibrant and mature Jewish culture. [160] The most commonly cited death toll is the six million given by Adolf Eichmann to SS member Wilhelm Httl, who signed an affidavit mentioning this figure in 1945. [66] On 1 April 1933, there was a boycott of Jewish businesses. [p] Cesarani writes that the killing of Jews was at this point a "subset" of these activities. [220], 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 decisionFhrerentscheidung (Fhrer's decision)to murder the European Jews had been made at this point. [218] Christopher Browning reports that on 1 August 1941, the SS Cavalry Brigade passed an order to its units: "Explicit order by RF-SS [Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfhrer-SS]. "[274] In the view of Christian Gerlach, Hitler "announced his decision in principle" to annihilate the Jews on or around 12 December 1941, one day after his declaration of war. ", "Nazi Persecution of Soviet Prisoners of War", "Hitler's War; Hitler's Plans for Eastern Europe", "The trial of German major war criminals: proceedings of the International Military Tribunal sitting at Nuremberg Germany", "What was the Warsaw Uprising? [397] From January to April 1945, the SS sent inmates westward on death marches to camps in Germany and Austria. [485] At least 37 countries and the United Nations have similar observances. Red signified a political prisoner, Jehovah's Witnesses had purple triangles, "asocials" and criminals wore black and green, and gay men wore pink. [461] The police closed gay bars and shut down gay publications. [177] Vichy France's government implemented anti-Jewish measures in Metropolitan France, in French Algeria and in the two French Protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco. By the end of the Holocaust, six million European Jews were murdered. 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. [53], Early antisemites in the Nazi Party included Dietrich Eckart, publisher of the Vlkischer Beobachter, the party's newspaper, and Alfred Rosenberg, who wrote antisemitic articles for it in the 1920s. 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 in Berlin-Dahlem. Eichmann's trial revived interest in war criminals and the Holocaust in general. [405] Buchenwald was liberated by the Americans on 11 April;[406] Bergen-Belsen by the British on 15 April;[407] Dachau by the Americans on 29 April;[408] Ravensbrck by the Soviets on 30 April;[409] and Mauthausen by the Americans on 5 May. [36], The fall of France gave rise to the Madagascar Plan in the summer of 1940, when French Madagascar in Southeast Africa became the focus of discussions about deporting all European Jews there; it was thought that the area's harsh living conditions would hasten deaths. [310], Chemno, with gas vans only, had its roots in the Aktion T4 euthanasia program. "[73], 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,[75] people the Nazis called Lebensunwertes Leben (life unworthy of life). [327] 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 Hss, who estimated that about one-third of the victims were killed immediately. Those present included (annotated, left to right): Frank continued by discussing their deportation, then asked: "But what is to happen to the Jews? Almost all Jews in German-occupied Poland, the Baltic states and the USSR were murdered, with a 5 percent chance of survival on average. After Belgium's surrender, the country was ruled by a German military governor, Alexander von Falkenhausen, who enacted anti-Jewish measures against its 90,000 Jews, many of them refugees from Germany or Eastern Europe. [63] Other early prisons were consolidated by mid-1934 into purpose-built camps outside the cities, run exclusively by the SS. [328] 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. "[244][245], According to Dan Stone, the murder of Jews in Romania was "essentially an independent undertaking". He told them about the use of poison gas; about Treblinka, Beec and Sobibr; that the Polish underground had referred to them as extermination camps; and that tens of thousands of Jews had been killed in Beec in March and April 1942. The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah,[a] was the genocide of European Jews during World WarII. [18] As non-Jewish groups began to include themselves as Holocaust victims, many Jews chose to use the Hebrew terms Shoah or Churban. When [401], The first major camp encountered by Allied troops, Majdanek, was discovered by the advancing Soviets, along with its gas chambers, on 25 July 1944.