By the end of the war, some 10,000 remained, representing the lowest survival rate in the Balkans and among the lowest in Europe. [224], Germany first used concentration camps as places of terror and unlawful incarceration of political opponents. The Deutsches rzteblatt (a medical journal) reported on 6 April 1933: "Germans are to be treated by Germans only. According to Timothy Snyder, "more Jews fought in the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 than in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943. [36] Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was to be exterminated,[37] and complex rules were devised to deal with Mischlinge ("mixed breeds"). Eichmann's trial revived interest in war criminals and the Holocaust in general. In February 1941, non-Jewish Dutch citizens staged a strike in protest that was quickly crushed. [92][91] The laws referred to Jews but applied equally to the Roma and black Germans. The best known is the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943, when the Germans arrived to send the remaining inhabitants to extermination camps. Companies fired Jews and later used them as slave labor. [195] 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. [292][x] 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". [479][480], Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, 2016. According to Joseph Goebbels' diary, Hitler decided that the police should be withdrawn: "For once the Jews should feel the rage of the people," Goebbels reported him as saying. Grynszpan was handed over to the Germans and his fate is unknown. [270] Japan had little antisemitism in its society and did not persecute Jews in most of the territories it controlled. 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. [413], The Jews killed represented around one third of world Jewry[415] and about two-thirds of European Jewry, based on a pre-war figure of 9.7million Jews in Europe. [176] In July 1940, the Jews in the parts of Alsace-Lorraine that had been annexed to Germany were expelled into Vichy France. [66] On 1 April 1933, there was a boycott of Jewish businesses. [347] The Germans said that 14,000 Jews had been killed7000 during the fighting and 7000 sent to Treblinka[348]and between 53,000[349] and 56,000 deported. The destruction of the Jews must be its necessary consequence. The second WebAs many as 500,000 people, or 70% of the total Cham population, were exterminated. [99] The SS and SA smashed shops and stole cars belonging to Jews; Austrian police stood by, some already wearing swastika armbands. Later, all Poles will disappear from this world. At the end of the war, approximately 380,000 Polish Jews remained alive, the rest having been murdered, mostly in the ghettos and the six death camps: Chelmo, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. The second most numerous group, from 70 to 75 thousand, was the Poles, and the third most numerous, about 20 thousand, the Gypsies. EuroDocs. [72] Jewish doctors were dismissed or urged to resign. There was discussion about whether to include the German Mischlinge (half-Jews). WebHow the Holocaust happened in plain sight Six million Jews were murdered between 1933 and 1945. Michael Gray, a specialist in Holocaust education. [68] Jews were disbarred from practicing law, being editors or proprietors of newspapers, joining the Journalists' Association, or owning farms. [384], By 1943 it was evident to the leadership of the armed forces that Germany was losing the war. [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. [185], 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. From Germany they were sent by freight train to Auschwitz. Open about his hatred of Jews, he subscribed to common antisemitic stereotypes. I will in principle proceed only on the assumption that they will disappear. [46][j], Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, Jews were subjected to antisemitism based on Christian theology, which blamed them for killing Jesus. [208], Einsatzgruppe A arrived in the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) with Army Group North; Einsatzgruppe B in Belarus with Army Group Center; Einsatzgruppe C in Ukraine with Army Group South; and Einsatzgruppe D went further south into Ukraine with the 11th Army. 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. [101] Around 7,000 Jewish businesses were "Aryanized", and all the legal restrictions on Jews in Germany were imposed in Austria. The following day, the United States declared war on Japan, and on 11 December, Germany declared war on the United States. [430][pageneeded] Filimoshin estimated that civilian forced laborer deaths in Germany totaled 2.1million. [102] The vian Conference 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. [79] There were 84,525 applications from doctors in the first year. 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. This page was last edited on 1 March 2023, at 00:12. [331], Beec, Sobibr 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. Estimates range from 1.5 to 3 million people having died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, with the consensus being approximately 2 million. [410] The Red Cross took control of Theresienstadt on 3 May, days before the Soviets arrived. [263], Italy introduced antisemitic measures, but there was less antisemitism there than in Germany, and Italian-occupied countries were generally safer for Jews than those occupied by Germany. [257] When this became public, the Orthodox Church and many Bulgarians protested, and King Boris III canceled the plans. [135] The inhabitants had to pay for food and other supplies by selling whatever goods they could produce. [44] Interested in genetics,[44] 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!" [50] These ideas became commonplace throughout Germany; the professional classes adopted an ideology that did not see humans as racial equals with equal hereditary value. [259] 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. Browning interprets this as a meeting to discuss how to justify and speak about the killing. Companies such as BMW, Deutsche Bank, Ford, Opel, Siemens, and Volkswagen faced lawsuits for their use of forced labor during the war. [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. For France, Gerlach 2016, p.14; for Denmark and Estonia, Snyder 2015, p.212; for Estonia (Estland) and the Wannsee Conference, "Besprechungsprotokoll" (PDF). Denmark was overrun so quickly that there was no time for a resistance to form. [248] In June 1941 Romania joined Germany in its invasion of the Soviet Union and within the first few weeks of the invasion, almost the entire rural Jewish population of Bessarabia and Bukovina were decimated. [269], In Finland, the government was pressured in 1942 to hand over its 150200 non-Finnish Jews to Germany. The Holocaust: Facts and Figures. 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. 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. [15] In 1968 the Library of Congress created a new category, "Holocaust, Jewish (19391945)". [230] The Germans estimated the average prisoner's lifespan in a concentration camp at three months, as a result of lack of food and clothing, constant epidemics, and frequent punishments for the most minor transgressions. 2007, page 23, sfn error: no target: CITEREFPiotrowski2007 (, "They conducted deliberate and systematic genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories in order to destroy particular races and classes of people and national, racial, or religious groups, particularly Jews, Poles, and Gypsies and others. [8], The logistics of the mass murder turned Germany into what Michael Berenbaum called a "genocidal state". [112] Attacks took place in Austria too. 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. [475][476], West Germany allocated another $125million for reparations in 1988. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, triggering World War II, the regime set up ghettos to segregate Jews. [141] A perception among ethnic Poles that the Jews had supported the Soviet invasion[142] contributed to existing antisemitism,[143] which Germany exploited, redistributing Jewish homes and goods, and converting synagogues, schools and hospitals in Jewish areas into facilities for non-Jews. [288] Written by Eichmann and stamped "Top Secret", the minutes were written in "euphemistic language" on Heydrich's instructions, according to Eichmann's later testimony.[289]. [468], During the International Military Tribunal, 21 Nazi leaders were tried, primarily for waging wars of aggression, but the trial also exposed the systematic murder of European Jews. 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. [148], Pogroms occurred throughout the occupation. [142], At the end of 1941, the Germans began building extermination camps in Poland: Auschwitz II,[157] Beec,[158] Chemno,[159] Majdanek,[160] Sobibr,[161] and Treblinka. [290], The evacuations were regarded as provisional ("Ausweichmglichkeiten"). "[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). WebBefore the Nazi takeover of powerin 1933, Europe had a vibrant and mature Jewish culture. [96] Albert Einstein, 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 and Prussian Academy of Sciences. The damage was estimated at 39million Reichsmark. The courts reached a decision in 64,499 of those cases; 56,244 were in favor of sterilization. [134] In the ghettos and forced-labor camps, at least half a million died of starvation, disease, and poor living conditions. [b] Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe;[c] around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. According to Dan Stone, only nine survived the war. The continuous presence of state institutions thereby prevented the Jewish communities' complete destruction. "[363][ab], The Polish government-in-exile 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. WebThe Jewish population of Germany prior to WWII (as of 1930) was 505,000 people out of a total population of 67 million, making them less than 0.75% of the total population. [403] On 17 January 1945, 58,000 Auschwitz inmates were sent on a death march westwards;[404] 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. [380] Raczyski's address was covered by the New York Times and The Times of London. [387] 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. [132] These orders included, from 1942, facilitating deportations to extermination camps. [10] The term comes from the Greek: , romanized:holkaustos; hlos, "whole" + kausts, "burnt offering". [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. These Holocaust victimsincluded about six million Jewishpeople. "[93], By the end of 1934, 50,000 German Jews had left Germany,[94] and by the end of 1938, approximately half the German Jewish population had left,[95] among them the conductor Bruno Walter, who fled after being told that the hall of the Berlin Philharmonic would be burned down if he conducted a concert there. [213] In the Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre (Soviet Ukraine), nearly 24,000 Jews were killed between 27 and 30 August 1941. [98], On 12 March 1938, Germany annexed Austria. Davar and later Haaretz both used the term in September 1939. "[279][u] 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"). [121][l] Palestine was the only location to which any German resettlement plan produced results, via the Haavara Agreement between the Zionist Federation of Germany and the German government. [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. [19][g] The Nazis used the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (German: die Endlsung der Judenfrage). Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz. The Russian Academy of Science article by M. V. Filimoshin based this figure on sources published in the Soviet era. Other Victims The majority, around 1 million people, were Jews. In the course of the practical execution of the Final Solution, Europe will be combed through from west to east. [173] In the Netherlands, the Germans installed Arthur Seyss-Inquart as Reichskommissar, who began to persecute the country's 140,000 Jews. "[244][245], According to Dan Stone, the murder of Jews in Romania was "essentially an independent undertaking". [70] Jewish students were restricted by quotas from attending schools and universities. [165][o] 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. The Times of London stated on 11 November 1938: No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults upon defenseless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday. When America declared war, he blamed the Jews.[273]. On 15 March 1940, SS chief Heinrich Himmler stated: "All Polish specialists will be exploited in our military-industrial complex. Following Adolf Hitler'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. [461] The police closed gay bars and shut down gay publications. [240][241] 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. They also included five million of people who were not Jewish, mainly Poles, Sinti and [58] 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. 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. But, tragically, gay Holocaust [324] Those selected for death at all camps were told to undress and hand their valuables to camp workers. [323] At Auschwitz, about 20 percent of Jews were selected to work. 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