The Holocaust: Difference between revisions
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{{Short description|Genocide of European Jews by Nazi Germany}} |
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{{redirect4|Holocaust|Shoah}} |
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{{about|the state-sponsored genocide of European Jews during World War II|all peoples persecuted during this era|Holocaust victims}} |
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[[File:Selection Birkenau ramp.jpg|thumb|upright=1.5|Hungarian Jews are selected by Nazis to be sent to the [[Gas chamber#Nazi Germany|gas chamber]] at [[Auschwitz concentration camp]], May/June 1944.<ref name = "Auschwitz Album">[http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/album_auschwitz/index.asp "The Auschwitz Album"]. [[Yad Vashem]]. Retrieved 24 September 2012.</ref>]] |
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{{Use American English|date=August 2020}} |
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'''The Holocaust''' was a [[genocide]] in which approximately six million [[Jews]] were killed by [[Adolf Hitler|Adolf Hitler's]] [[Nazi Germany|Nazi regime]] and its collaborators. Killings took place throughout [[Nazi Germany]] and [[German-occupied Europe|German-occupied territories]].<ref>{{Harvnb|Snyder|2010|p=45}}.<br>Further examples of this usage can be found in: [[#CITEREFBauer2002|Bauer 2002]], [[#CITEREFCesarani2004|Cesarani 2004]], [[#CITEREFDawidowicz1981|Dawidowicz 1981]], [[#CITEREFEvans2002|Evans 2002]], [[#CITEREFGilbert1986|Gilbert 1986]], [[#CITEREFHilberg1996|Hilberg 1996]], [[#CITEREFLongerich2012|Longerich 2012]], [[#CITEREFPhayer2000|Phayer 2000]], [[#CITEREFZuccotti1999|Zuccotti 1999]]</ref> from 1941 to 1945. |
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{{Infobox civilian attack |
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| title = The Holocaust |
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Jews were targeted and methodically murdered in this largest [[genocide]] of the 20th century, part of a broader aggregate of acts of oppression and killings of various ethnic and political groups in Europe by the Nazis.<ref>http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/resource_center/the_holocaust.asp</ref> Every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the genocides, turning the Third Reich into "a genocidal state".<ref name = "Berenbaum 2005 103">{{Harvnb|Berenbaum|2005|p=103}}.</ref> Non-Jewish victims of broader Nazi crimes include [[Romani people|Gypsies]], [[Poles]], [[communists]], [[homosexuals]], [[German mistreatment of Soviet prisoners of war|Soviet POWs]], and the [[Action T4|mentally and physically disabled]]. In total, approximately 11 million people were killed, including one million Jewish children alone.<ref>About.com, The Holocaust, http://history1900s.about.com/od/holocaust/a/holocaustfacts.htm</ref><ref>{{Harvnb|Fitzgerald|2011|p=4}}; {{Harvnb|Hedgepeth|Saidel|2010|p=16}}.</ref> Of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust, approximately two-thirds were killed.<ref>{{Harvnb|Dawidowicz|1975|p=403}}.</ref> A network of about 42,500 facilities in Germany and German-occupied territories were used to concentrate, confine, and kill Jews and [[Holocaust victims|other victims]].<ref name=NYT030113>{{cite news|title=The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking|url=http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/sunday-review/the-holocaust-just-got-more-shocking.html|accessdate=2 March 2013|newspaper=The New York Times|date=1 March 2013|author=Eric Lichtblau}}</ref> and between 100,000 and 500,000 people were direct participants in the planning and execution of the Holocaust.<ref>Interpreting the 20th Century: The Struggle Over Democracy, The Holocaust, Pamela Radcliff, p. 104-107, http://anon.eastbaymediac.m7z.net/anon.eastbaymediac.m7z.net/teachingco/CourseGuideBooks/DG8090_EFF59C.PDF</ref> |
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| partof = [[World War II]] |
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| image = Selection on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1944 (Auschwitz Album) 1a.jpg |
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The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages. Initially the German government passed laws to exclude Jews from civil society, most prominently the [[Nuremberg Laws|Nuremberg Laws of 1935]]. A network of [[Nazi concentration camps|concentration camps]] was established starting in 1933 and [[Ghettos in German-occupied Europe (1939–1944)|ghettos]] were established following the outbreak of [[World War II]] in 1939. In 1941, as Germany conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized paramilitary units called ''[[Einsatzgruppen]]'' were used to murder around two million Jews and "partisans", often in mass shootings. By the end of 1942, victims were being regularly transported by freight train to specially built [[extermination camp]]s where, if they survived the journey, most were systematically killed in [[Gas chamber#Nazi Germany|gas chambers]]. The campaign of murder continued until the [[end of World War II in Europe]] in April–May 1945. |
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| image_size = |
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| alt = Large number of people standing beside a railway siding with the camp gate in the background |
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Jewish armed resistance to the Nazis occurred throughout the Holocaust. One notable example was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of January 1943, when thousands of poorly armed Jewish fighters held the SS at bay for four weeks. An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 [[Jewish partisans]] actively fought the Nazis and their collaborators in Eastern Europe.<ref name="Kennedy 2007 780">{{Harvnb|Kennedy|2007|p=780}}.</ref><ref name=USHMM_RES>[http://www.ushmm.org/education/foreducators/resource/pdf/resistance.pdf "Resistance During the Holocaust"]. ''Holocaust Encyclopedia''. [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]]. Retrieved 27 September 2012.</ref> [[French Jews]] were also highly active in the [[French Resistance]], which conducted a guerilla campaign against the Nazis and Vichy French authorities. In total, there were over a hundred armed Jewish uprisings.<ref name="jewishpartisans1">[http://www.jewishpartisans.org/ Jewish Partisan Education Foundation], Accessed 22 December 2013.</ref> |
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| type = [[Genocide]], [[ethnic cleansing]], [[mass murder]], [[mass shooting]], [[death marches]], [[poison gas]], [[hate crime]] |
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| caption = Jews arriving at [[Auschwitz concentration camp#Auschwitz II-Birkenau|Auschwitz II]] in [[Occupation of Poland (1939–1945)|German-occupied Poland]], May 1944. Most were [[Selection (Holocaust)|selected]] to go to the [[Nazi gas chambers|gas chambers]]. |
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"Holocaust" is from the [[Greek language|Greek]] {{lang|el|ὁλόκαυστος}} ''{{lang|el-Latn|holókaustos}}'': ''hólos'', "whole" and ''kaustós'', "burnt"),<ref>{{Harvnb|Dawidowicz|1975|p=xxxvii}}.</ref> It was also known as '''Shoah''' ([[Hebrew language|Hebrew]]: <big>{{lang|he|השואה}}</big>, ''HaShoah'', "the catastrophe"; [[Yiddish language|Yiddish]]: <big>{{lang|yi|חורבן}}</big>, ''Churben'' and ''Hurban'', from the Hebrew for "destruction"). |
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| location = Europe, primarily [[German-occupied Poland]] and the [[Soviet Union]] |
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| coordinates = |
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{{TOC limit|limit=3}} |
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| date = 1941–1945 |
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| fatalities = [[Holocaust victims|Around 6 million Jews]] |
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==Etymology and use of the term== |
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| perps = [[Nazi Germany]] along with [[Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy|its collaborators]] and [[Axis powers|allies]] |
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{{main|Names of the Holocaust}} |
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The term ''holocaust'' comes from the [[Greek language|Greek]] word ''[[Holocaust (sacrifice)|holókauston]]'', referring to an [[animal sacrifice]] offered to a god in which the whole (''olos'') animal is completely burnt (''kaustos'').<ref>[http://www.ushmm.org/research/library/faq/details.php?topic=01#02 "What is the origin of the word 'Holocaust'?"]. [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]]. Retrieved 25 September 2012.</ref> |
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Writing in Latin, [[Richard of Devizes]], a 12th-century monk, was the first recorded chronicler to use the term "holocaustum" in Britain.<ref>http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/n/e/u/Michael-R-Neuman-Costa-Mesa/WEBSITE-0001/UHP-0707.html Richard 'Lionheart' Plantagenet, King of England (b. September 08, 1157, d. April 06, 1199)</ref> Sir [[Thomas Browne]] employed the word "holocaust" in his philosophical Discourse [[Urn Burial]] in 1658 <ref>'And if the burden of Isaac were sufficient for a holocaust, a man may carry his own pyre'. (chapter 3).</ref> and for centuries, the word was used generally in English to denote great massacres. Since the 1960s, the term has come to be used by scholars and popular writers to refer specifically to the Nazi genocide of Jews.<ref>{{Harvnb|Niewyk|Nicosia|2000|p=45}}.</ref> The television mini-series [[Holocaust (TV miniseries)|''Holocaust'']] is credited with introducing the term into common parlance after 1978.<ref name="Steinweis">[[#CITEREFSteinweis2001|Steinweis 2001]] provides a survey of this phenomenon.</ref> |
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The biblical word ''shoah'' (שואה; also transliterated ''sho'ah'' and ''shoa''), meaning "calamity", became the standard [[Hebrew language|Hebrew]] term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s, especially in Europe and Israel.<ref name="yad def">[http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/resource_center/the_holocaust.asp "The Holocaust: Definition and Preliminary Discussion"], [[Yad Vashem]]. Retrieved 24 September 2012.</ref> ''Shoah'' is preferred by some Jews for several reasons, including the theologically offensive nature of the word "holocaust", which they take to refer to the Greek pagan custom.<ref>For example, Israeli journalist [[Amira Hass]], the daughter of two Holocaust survivors and translator of the 2009 English edition of her mother's diary of surviving Bergen-Belsen ({{Harvnb|Lévy-Hass|2009}}), has argued that " 'The Holocaust' is an incorrect term … as if something came out from the sky, from heaven, some disaster, a calamity, a nature calamity, and not human-made calamity." Asked for a better way to refer to it, she responded, "The German industry of murder. Or the assembly-line of [mass] murder." [http://www.democracynow.org/2009/6/8/diary_of_bergen_belson_1944_1945 "Diary of Bergen-Belsen, 1944-1945": Amira Hass Discusses Her Mother's Concentration Camp Diary]<p>For an opposing view on the allegedly offensive nature of the meaning of the word ''holocaust'', see [[#CITEREFPetrie2000|Peterie 2000]].</ref> |
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The Nazis used a [[euphemism|euphemistic]] phrase, the "[[Final Solution]] to the Jewish Question" (German: ''Endlösung der Judenfrage''), and the phrase "Final Solution" has been widely used as a term for the genocide of the Jews. Nazis used the phrase ''lebensunwertes Leben'' ([[Life unworthy of life]]) in reference to their victims in an attempt to justify the killings. |
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==Distinctive features== |
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===Institutional collaboration=== |
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[[File:WW2-Holocaust-Europe.png|thumb|upright=1.5|[[Ghettos in German-occupied Europe (1939–1944)|Ghettos]] were established in Europe in which Jews were confined before being shipped to [[extermination camp]]s]] |
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Every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics that led to the genocides, turning the Third Reich into what one Holocaust scholar, [[Michael Berenbaum]], has called "a genocidal state".<ref name="Berenbaum 2005 103"/> |
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<blockquote>Every arm of the country's sophisticated bureaucracy was involved in the killing process. Parish churches and the Interior Ministry supplied birth records showing who was Jewish; the Post Office delivered the deportation and denaturalization orders; the Finance Ministry confiscated Jewish property; German firms fired Jewish workers and disenfranchised Jewish stockholders.</blockquote>The universities refused to admit Jews, denied degrees to those already studying, and fired Jewish academics; government transport offices arranged the [[Holocaust train|trains]] for deportation to the camps; German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners; companies bid for the contracts to build the [[crematoria]]; detailed lists of victims were drawn up using the [[Dehomag]] (IBM Germany) company's [[Punched card|punch card]] machines, producing meticulous records of the killings. As prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property, which was catalogued and tagged before being sent to Germany to be reused or recycled. Berenbaum writes that the Final Solution of the Jewish question was "in the eyes of the perpetrators ... Germany's greatest achievement."<ref name = "Berenbaum 2005 104">{{Harvnb|Berenbaum|2005|p=104}}.</ref> [[Max Heiliger|Through a concealed account]], the German national bank helped [[money laundering|launder valuables]] stolen from the victims. |
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[[Saul Friedländer]] writes that: "Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews."<ref name = "Friedländer 2007 xxi">{{Harvnb|Friedländer|2007|p=xxi}}.</ref> He writes that some Christian churches declared that ''converted'' Jews should be regarded as part of the flock, but even then only up to a point. Friedländer argues that this makes the Holocaust distinctive because [[antisemitic]] policies were able to unfold without the interference of countervailing forces of the kind normally found in advanced societies, such as industry, small businesses, churches, trade unions and other vested interests and [[lobbying|lobby]] groups.<ref name = "Friedländer 2007 xxi"/> |
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===Ideology and scale=== |
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{{Antisemitism}} |
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In other genocides, pragmatic considerations such as control of territory and resources were central to the genocide policy. Israeli historian and scholar [[Yehuda Bauer]] argues that: |
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{{quote| |
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The basic motivation [of the Holocaust] was purely ideological, rooted in an illusionary world of Nazi imagination, where an international [[List of conspiracy theories#Antisemitic conspiracy theories|Jewish conspiracy to control the world]] was opposed to a parallel [[Aryan]] quest. No genocide to date had been based so completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract, nonpragmatic ideology—which was then executed by very rational, pragmatic means.<ref>{{Harvnb|Bauer|2002|p=48}}.</ref> |
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}} |
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'''The Holocaust''' was the [[genocide]] of [[History of the Jews in Europe|European Jews]] during [[World War II]]. Between 1941 and 1945, [[Nazi Germany]] and [[Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy|its collaborators]] systematically murdered some [[Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe|six million Jews]] across [[German-occupied Europe]], around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out primarily through [[#Mass shootings|mass shootings]] and poison gas in [[extermination camp]]s, chiefly [[Auschwitz concentration camp#Auschwitz II-Birkenau|Auschwitz-Birkenau]], [[Treblinka extermination camp|Treblinka]], [[Belzec extermination camp|Belzec]], [[Sobibor extermination camp|Sobibor]], and [[Chełmno extermination camp|Chełmno]] in [[Occupation of Poland (1939–1945)|occupied Poland]]. Separate Nazi persecutions killed a similar or larger number of non-Jewish civilians and POWs; the term ''Holocaust'' is sometimes used to refer to the persecution of these [[Holocaust victims|other groups]]. |
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The Nazis developed [[Nazism|their ideology]] based on racism and [[Lebensraum|pursuit of "living space"]], and [[Adolf Hitler's rise to power|seized power]] in early 1933. Meant to [[Emigration of Jews from Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe|force all German Jews]] regardless of means to attempt to emigrate, the regime passed anti-Jewish laws, encouraged harassment, and orchestrated a nationwide [[pogrom]] in November 1938. After Germany [[Invasion of Poland|invaded Poland]] in September 1939, occupation authorities began to establish [[Nazi ghettos|ghettos]] to segregate Jews. Following the [[invasion of the Soviet Union]] in June 1941, 1.5 to 2 million Jews [[The Holocaust#Mass shootings of Jews|were shot]] by German forces and local collaborators. |
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German historian [[Eberhard Jäckel]] wrote in 1986 that one distinctive feature of the Holocaust was that: |
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Later in 1941 or early 1942, the highest levels of the German government decided to [[Final Solution|murder all Jews in Europe]]. Victims were deported by rail to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, most were killed with poison gas. Other Jews continued to be employed in [[Forced labor in Nazi Germany|forced labor camps]] where many died from starvation, abuse, exhaustion, or being used as test subjects in deadly [[Nazi human experimentation|medical experiments]]. Although many Jews tried to escape, surviving in hiding was difficult due to factors such as the lack of money to pay helpers and the risk of denunciation. The property, homes, and jobs belonging to murdered Jews were redistributed to the German occupiers and other non-Jews. Although the majority of Holocaust victims died in 1942, the killing continued at a lower rate until the [[end of World War II in Europe|end of the war]] in May 1945. |
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{{quote| |
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never before had a state with the authority of its responsible leader decided and announced that a specific human group, including its aged, its women and its children and infants, would be killed as quickly as possible, and then carried through this resolution using every possible means of state power.<ref>{{Harvnb|Maier|1988|p=53}}.</ref> |
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}} |
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Many [[Holocaust survivors|Jewish survivors]] emigrated outside of Europe after the war. A few [[Holocaust perpetrators]] faced criminal trials. Billions of dollars in [[Holocaust reparations|reparations]] have been paid, although falling short of the Jews' losses. The Holocaust has also been commemorated in [[List of Holocaust memorials and museums|museums, memorials]], and [[The Holocaust in the arts and popular culture|culture]]. It has become central to Western historical consciousness as a symbol of the ultimate human evil. |
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The killings were systematically conducted in virtually all areas of [[Occupied Europe|German-occupied territory]] in what are now 35 separate European countries.<ref>[http://history1900s.about.com/library/holocaust/blmap.htm "Holocaust Map of Concentration and Death Camps"], History1900s, About.com. 16 June 2010. Retrieved 31 July 2010.</ref> It was at its most severe in Central and Eastern Europe, which had more than seven million Jews in 1939. About five million Jews were killed there, including three million in occupied Poland and over one million in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands also died in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, [[Yugoslavia]], and Greece. The [[Wannsee Conference|Wannsee Protocol]] makes it clear that the Nazis intended to carry their "final solution of the Jewish question" to Britain and all neutral states in Europe, such as Ireland, Switzerland, Turkey, Sweden, Portugal, and Spain.<ref>{{Harvnb|Dear|Foot|2001|p={{page needed|date=November 2012}}}}.</ref> |
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{{TOC limit}} |
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==Terminology and scope== |
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Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was to be exterminated without exception. In other genocides, people were able to escape death by [[religious conversion|converting]] to another religion or in some other way [[religious assimilation|assimilating]]. This option was not available to the Jews of occupied Europe,<ref name="Bauer Bstag">For a summary of this point, see: [[Yehuda Bauer|Bauer, Yehuda]] (27 January 1998). [http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/1990_1999/1998/1/Address%20to%20the%20Bundestag-%20by%20Professor%20Yehuda%20Baue "Address to the Bundestag"]. [[Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Israel)|Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs]]. Retrieved 21 September 2012.</ref> unless their grandparents had converted before 18 January 1871. All persons of recent Jewish ancestry were to be exterminated in lands controlled by Germany.<ref>{{Harvnb|Bauer|2002|p=49}}.</ref> |
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{{Main|Names of the Holocaust}} |
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The term ''Holocaust'', derived from a Greek word meaning "[[Holocaust (sacrifice)|burnt offering]]",{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=14}} has become the most common word used to describe the Nazi extermination of Jews in English and many other languages.{{efn|{{harvnb |Bartov |2023a |pp=18–19 |ps=, "Much of this debate curiously boils down to a very specific historical question, namely, did the Nazis target the Jews for genocide in a manner that was essentially different from their treatment of any other group under their rule? [...] There can be little doubt that the Jews played a singular role in the Nazi ''imaginaire'' and that German Jewish policies distinguished them within the Nazi universe of murder and fantasy; but other groups clearly have been similarly targeted in other genocides [...] 'the extent of the 'final solution' was ... shaped by an antisemitism that was colored by a different element over and above the racism and ethno-nationalism that explains the murder of other groups by Nazi Germany—that element being the view of 'the Jews' as an implacable, collective world enemy.' To be sure, this makes the Holocaust unique only within the context of the Nazi empire ..."}}; |
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{{harvnb |Smith |2023 |p=36 |ps=, "The Holocaust is particular to Jews and yet has had increasing relevance for those who do not identify as Jewish. ... All Jews everywhere were to be murdered because of their racial heritage was 'put into state policy' on January 20, 1942 at the Wannsee conference (Bazyler 2017, 29). Witness to the genocide of the Jews is a uniquely Jewish experience, because only Jews were targeted by that policy, even if other groups were targeted for genocide under other policies. The Nazi regime committed genocide against the Roma and Sinti, governed by separate policies. They also committed war crimes against Soviet Prisoners of War under other policies. So too the mass murder of disabled and the mentally ill had their own policies. The Nazis committed multiple genocides and crimes against humanity, at the same time, sometimes in the same place, governed by different laws, policies, and practices. It is not correct to say that there were many victim types during 'the Holocaust,' if by 'the Holocaust' we mean the genocide of the Jews."}}; |
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{{harvnb |Stone |2023 |loc=Introduction: What is the Holocaust?<!-- search "homosexuals" --> |ps=, "This is why the focus here is on the Jews. Roma, the disabled, Soviet POWs, homosexuals and other groups were victims of the Nazis, and it is entirely legitimate to study their fate alongside one another. But using the term 'Holocaust' to encompass all of these groups with the aim of being inclusive and not prioritizing one group's suffering, actually does a disservice to groups other than Jews. For the Nazis persecuted these groups for different reasons, reasons we fail to appreciate if we collapse them all together."}}; |
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{{harvnb |Engel |2021 |ps=, pp. 3 ("This book is about an encounter between two sets of human beings: on one hand, the people who acted on behalf of the German state, its agencies, or its almost 66 million citizens between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945; on the other, the more than 9 million Jews ...") and 5 ("Those discoveries about the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews made that encounter stand out in the minds of many from other instances of Nazi persecution and encouraged observers to assign it its own special name.")}}; |
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{{harvnb |Jackson |2021 |pp=199–200 |ps=, "The Nazis killed some people almost exclusively due to their supposed genetic inferiority (the mentally and physically handicapped, Slavs, Roma); they killed others almost exclusively due to their perceived cultural decadence (communists, democrats, modernist authors and artists); but only the Jews were indicted on both grounds simultaneously and with equal vigor. ... This is not to say that Roma, communists, and others were not hated and murdered by the Nazis, but it is to note that the Jews were unique in being despised and assaulted in every dimension of their identity, corporeal and psychic."}}; |
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{{harvnb |Sahlstrom |2021 |p=291 |ps=, "the established understanding of the Holocaust today as the genocide of six million Jews"}}; |
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{{harvnb |Bartrop |2019 |p=50 |ps=, "Given this, it must always be remembered that the Holocaust was a premeditated action by the Nazis to permanently eradicate a Jewish presence in Europe. Others—the disabled, Roma, Poles and other Slavs, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, dissenting clergy, communists, socialists, "asocials," and political opponents of all sorts—were also persecuted and in many cases murdered in huge numbers; however, it was the campaign against the Jews that was the ideological "ground zero" for Nazi racial ideology. Others besides Jews were murdered, often on a genocidal scale, and should be remembered and acknowledged: but it was only the Jews who were all to be killed as part of a calculated policy of genocide."}}; |
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{{harvnb |Beorn |2018 |p=4 |ps=, "I will use the term 'Holocaust' to refer mainly to the Nazi attempt to murder the Jews of Europe; however, I will also use the more inclusive term 'Nazi genocidal project' to capture the larger murderous vision of which the Jews were such a large part. This includes Sinti/Roma (gypsies), the handicapped, political 'enemies,' Soviet prisoners of war, and—particularly in the East—entire ethnic groups such as the Slavs. One cannot understand the Holocaust in Eastern Europe without placing it in the context of this larger Nazi genocidal project that foresaw murder and demographic engineering on a colossal scale."}}; |
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{{harvnb |Cesarani |2016 |p=xxxix |ps=, "This book deals with the fate of the Jews, not of 'other victims' of Nazi political repression and racial-biological policies. Several other groups endured social exclusion, incarceration in concentration camps, and mass murder. However, the rationale for the persecution of these groups differed radically from the intentions that underlay anti-Jewish policy. Even though homosexual men and women, Germans of African descent, and the severely mentally and physically disabled were all disparaged in Nazi racial thinking, and depicted as a threat to the strength and purity of the Volk, only the Jews were characterized as an implacable, powerful, global enemy that had to be fought at every turn and finally eliminated."}}; |
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{{harvnb |Hayes |2015 |p=xiii |ps=, "This book also reflects another of its editor's convictions: the Holocaust was National Socialist Germany's assault on the Jews of Europe. Nazism attacked many groups, but none for the same reason that it attacked the Jews, none with the same urgency, and none to the same extent."}}; |
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{{harvnb |Hayes |Roth |2010 |p=2 |ps=, "Other groups—for example, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, and Slavs—were swept up in the maelstrom of the Holocaust, but not for the same reasons as Jews and not with the same consequences ... In none of these cases, however, was the target group considered dangerous or coherent enough to warrant complete or immediate extirpation. This circumstance constitutes a significant difference from policies pursued toward the Jews, a difference that helps to clarify and define the Holocaust itself."}}; |
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{{harvnb |Stone |2010 |pp=1–2 |ps=, "For the purpose of this book, the Holocaust is understood as the genocide of the Jews ... 'Holocaust', then, refers to the genocide of the Jews, which by no means excludes an understanding that other groups—notably Romanies and Slavs—were victims of genocide."}}; |
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{{harvnb |Bloxham |2009 |p=1 |ps=, "Between 5,100,000 and 6,200,000 Jews were murdered during the Second World War, an episode the Nazis called the 'final solution of the Jewish question'. The world today knows it as the Holocaust."}}; |
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{{harvnb |Niewyk |Nicosia |2000 |ps=, pp. 45 ("The Holocaust is commonly defined as the mass murder of more than 5,000,000 Jews by the Germans during World War II. Not everyone finds this a fully satisfactory definition.") and 51 ("the traditional view that it was the genocide of the Jews alone")}}}} |
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The term ''Holocaust'' is sometimes used to refer to the persecution of other groups that the Nazis targeted,{{efn|{{harvnb |King |2023 |pp=26–27 |ps=, "Rather than one big thing, the Holocaust might now be described as an array of event categories. In [[Christopher Browning]]'s terms, the Holocaust involved three separate "clusters of genocidal projects": euthanasia and "racial purification" directed against the disabled and Sinti and Roma (at the time referred to collectively as "Gypsies") within the Third Reich; the eradication of Slavic populations living in countries east of Germany; and the Final Solution proper—that is, the attempted mass murder of every Jew residing anywhere within Germany's sphere of influence (Browning 2010, 407). (The list of persecuted categories—people targeted by the Nazis in ways short of genocide—would of course be longer.)"}}; |
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{{harvnb |Engel |2021 |p=6 |ps=, "Echoing this view, some have contended that the expression 'the Holocaust' ought to refer not only to the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews but also to 'the horrors that Poles, other Slavs, and Gypsies endured at the hands of the Nazis' (Lukas, 1986: 220). Others have extended the term to encompass the Third Reich's treatment of homosexuals, the mentally ill or infrm, and Jehovah's Witnesses, speaking of 11 or 12 million victims of the Holocaust, half of whom were Jews. Still others have employed the word 'holocaust' also when referring to cases of mass murder not perpetrated by the Third Reich."}}; |
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{{harvnb |Kay |2021 |pp=1–2 |ps=, "For perhaps the first time, all major victim groups where the death tolls reached at least into the tens of thousands will be considered together: Jewish and non-Jewish ... it makes a great deal of sense to consider the different strands of Nazi mass killing together rather than in isolation from one another. This of course means going against the grain of most scholarship on the subject by examining the genocide of the European Jews alongside other Nazi mass-murder campaigns."}}; |
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{{harvnb |Gerlach |2016 |pp=14–15 |ps=, "There are a number of words I will try to avoid because of the serious misconceptions they might lead to. The terms 'Holocaust' and 'Shoah' are not useful since neither has any analytical value. 'Holocaust' (derived from the Greek holókauton, or burned sacrifice) has a religious connotation unbefitting of the event it is supposed to refer to, and users of this term may mean by it either the persecution and murder of Jews alone, or Nazi German violence against any group more generally ... Importantly, 'Holocaust' and 'Shoah' have also been criticized as 'teleological and anachronistic' terms that convey a retrospective view that makes complex processes appear 'as a single event.'"}}; |
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{{harvnb |Niewyk |Nicosia |2000 |p=51 |ps=, "The authors of this volume have adopted the third approach to a working definition: The Holocaust—that is, Nazi genocide—was the systematic, state-sponsored murder of entire groups determined by heredity. This applied to Jews, Gypsies, and the handicapped. This section also makes it clear that other definitions are defended by scholars who deserve a respectful hearing."}}}} especially those targeted on a biological basis, in particular the [[Romani Holocaust|Roma and Sinti]], as well as [[German atrocities committed against Soviet prisoners of war|Soviet prisoners of war]] and [[Nazi crimes against the Polish nation|Polish]] and [[World War II casualties of the Soviet Union|Soviet civilians]].{{sfn|Cesarani|2016|p=xxix}}{{sfn|Niewyk|Nicosia|2000|pp=45–52}}{{sfn|Peck|Berenbaum|2002|p=311}} All of these groups, however, were targeted for different reasons.{{sfn|Stone|2023|loc=Introduction: What is the Holocaust?<!-- search "homosexuals" -->}} By the 1970s, the adjective ''Jewish'' was dropped as redundant and Holocaust, now capitalized, became the default term for the destruction of European Jews.{{sfn|Calimani|2018|pp=70–100, 78–79, 86–87, 94–95, xxix}} The Hebrew word ''Shoah'' ("catastrophic destruction") exclusively refers to Jewish victims.{{sfn|Hayes|Roth|2010|p=2}}{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=4}}{{sfn|Cesarani|2016|p=xxix}} The perpetrators used the phrase "[[Final Solution]]" as a euphemism for their genocide of Jews.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=15}} |
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==Background== |
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===Extermination camps=== |
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[[File:Synagoge Pegnitz Nuernberg 1900.jpg|thumb|left|alt=A postcard of a river with buildings behind it|View of the [[Pegnitz (river)|Pegnitz]] River (c. 1900) with the [[Grand Synagogue of Nuremberg]], destroyed in 1938 during the [[November pogroms]]]] |
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{{main|Extermination camp}} |
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[[History of the Jews in Europe|Jews have lived in Europe]] for more than two thousand years.{{sfn | Gilbert | 2015 | p=22}} Throughout the [[Middle Ages]] in Europe, Jews were subjected to [[Religious antisemitism|antisemitism based on Christian theology]], which [[Jewish deicide|blamed them for killing Jesus]].{{sfn|Bergen|2016|pp=14–17}}{{sfn|Weitz|2010|p=58}} In the nineteenth century many European countries [[Jewish emancipation|granted full citizenship rights to Jews]] in hopes that they would [[Jewish assimilation|assimilate]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=20–21}} By the early twentieth century, most Jews in central and western Europe were well integrated into society, while in eastern Europe, where emancipation had arrived later, many Jews still lived in [[shtetls|small towns]], spoke [[Yiddish]], and practiced [[Orthodox Judaism]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=21–22}} [[Political antisemitism]] positing the existence of a [[Jewish question]] and usually an [[international Jewish conspiracy]] emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth century due to the [[rise of nationalism in Europe]] and [[industrialization]] that increased economic conflicts between Jews and non-Jews.{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=195}}{{sfn|Beorn|2018|pp=21–23}} Some scientists began to [[Scientific racism|categorize humans into different races]] and argued that there was a [[Social Darwinism|life or death struggle between them]].{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=25}} Many racists argued that [[racial antisemitism|Jews were a separate racial group alien to Europe]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=146}}{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=196}} |
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The turn of the twentieth century saw a major effort to establish a [[German colonial empire]] overseas, leading to the [[Herero and Nama genocide]] and subsequent racial apartheid regime in [[German South West Africa|South West Africa]].{{sfn|Weitz|2010|p=62}}{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=37}} [[World War I]] (1914–1918) intensified nationalist and racist sentiments in Germany and other European countries.{{sfn|Weitz|2010|pp=64–65}} Jews in eastern Europe were targeted by [[Pogroms during the Russian Civil War|widespread pogroms]].{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=24}} Germany had [[Casualties of World War I|two million war dead]] and lost a [[Treaty of Versailles|substantial territory]];{{sfn|Weitz|2010|pp=64–65}} opposition to the [[Weimar Republic|postwar settlement]] united Germans across the political spectrum.{{sfn|Weitz|2010|p=65}}{{sfn|Bloxham|2009|p=133}} The military promoted the untrue but compelling idea that, rather than being defeated on the battlefield, [[stab-in-the-back myth|Germany had been stabbed in the back]] by socialists and Jews.{{sfn|Weitz|2010|p=65}}{{sfn|Bloxham|2009|p=135}} |
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The use of camps equipped with gas chambers for the purpose of systematic mass extermination of peoples was a unique feature of the Holocaust and unprecedented in history. Never before had there existed places with the express purpose of killing people en masse. These were established at [[Auschwitz concentration camp|Auschwitz]], [[Belzec extermination camp|Belzec]], [[Chełmno extermination camp|Chełmno]], [[Jasenovac extermination camp|Jasenovac]], [[Majdanek concentration camp|Majdanek]], [[Maly Trostenets extermination camp|Maly Trostenets]], [[Sobibór extermination camp|Sobibór]], and [[Treblinka extermination camp|Treblinka]]. |
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[[File:Stab-in-the-back postcard.jpg|thumb|alt=see caption|1919 [[First Austrian Republic|Austrian]] postcard showing a [[Stab-in-the-back myth|Jew stabbing a German Army soldier in the back]]]] |
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===Medical experiments=== |
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{{further|Nazi human experimentation}} |
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[[File:RomanichildrenAuschwitz.jpg|thumb|[[Romani people|Romani]] children in [[Auschwitz concentration camp|Auschwitz]], victims of medical experiments]] |
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The [[Nazi Party]] was founded in the wake of the war,{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=197}} and [[Nazism|its ideology]] is often cited as the main factor explaining the Holocaust.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=143}} From the beginning, the Nazis—not unlike other nation-states in Europe—dreamed of [[A World Without Jews|a world without Jews]], whom they identified as "the embodiment of everything that was wrong with [[modernity]]".{{sfn|Stone|2023|loc=Introduction: What is the Holocaust?}} The Nazis defined the German nation as a [[Volksgemeinschaft|racial community]] unbounded by [[Territorial evolution of Germany|Germany's physical borders]]{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=57}} and sought to purge it of racially foreign and socially deficient elements.{{sfn|Weitz|2010|p=65}}{{sfn|Stone|2020|pp=61, 65}} The Nazi Party and its leader, [[Adolf Hitler]], were also obsessed with reversing Germany's territorial losses and acquiring additional ''[[Lebensraum]]'' (living space) in Eastern Europe for colonization.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=42}}{{sfn|Bergen|2016|pp=52–54}} These ideas appealed to many Germans.{{sfn|Stone|2020|pp=62–63, 65}} The Nazis promised to protect European civilization from the [[Soviet Union|Soviet]] threat.{{sfn|Stone|2010|p=17}} Hitler believed that Jews [[Jewish Bolshevism|controlled the Soviet Union]], as well as the Western powers, and [[Jewish war conspiracy theory|were plotting to destroy Germany]].{{sfn|Evans|2019|pp=120–121, 123}}{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=59}}{{sfn|Stone|2010|p=18}} |
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A distinctive feature of Nazi genocide was the extensive use of human subjects in "medical" experiments. According to [[Raul Hilberg]], "German physicians were highly Nazified, compared to other professionals, in terms of party membership."<ref>{{Harvnb|Hilberg|1995|p=66}}.</ref> Some carried out experiments at Auschwitz, [[Dachau concentration camp|Dachau]], [[Buchenwald]], [[Ravensbrück]], [[Sachsenhausen concentration camp|Sachsenhausen]], and [[Natzweiler]] concentration camps.<ref name = "Harran 2000 384">{{Harvnb|Harran|2000|p=[http://www.holocaustchronicle.org/index.html 384]}}.</ref> |
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==Rise of Nazi Germany== |
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The most notorious of these physicians was Dr. [[Josef Mengele]], who worked in Auschwitz. His experiments included placing subjects in pressure chambers, testing drugs on them, freezing them, attempting to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, and various amputations and other surgeries.<ref name = "Harran 2000 384"/> The full extent of his work will never be known because the truckload of records he sent to Dr. [[Otmar von Verschuer]] at the [[Kaiser Wilhelm Institute]] was destroyed by von Verschuer.<ref>{{Harvnb|Müller-Hill|1998|p=22}}.</ref> Subjects who survived Mengele's experiments were almost always killed and dissected shortly afterwards. |
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[[File:Das Grossdeutsche Reich.jpeg|upright=1.2|thumb|alt=see caption|[[Areas annexed by Nazi Germany|Territorial expansion of Germany]] from 1933 to 1941]] |
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Amidst a [[Great Depression|worldwide economic depression]] and [[Presidential cabinets of the Weimar Republic|political fragmentation]], the Nazi Party rapidly increased its support, reaching a high of 37 percent [[July 1932 German federal election|in mid-1932 elections]],{{sfn|Bloxham|2009|pp=138–139}}{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=33}} by campaigning on issues such as anticommunism and economic recovery.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=151}}{{sfn|Beorn|2018|pp=33–34}} Hitler [[Nazi rise to power|was appointed chancellor]] in January 1933 in a backroom deal supported by right-wing politicians.{{sfn|Bloxham|2009|pp=138–139}} Within months, all other political parties were banned, the regime seized control of the media,{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=39}} tens of thousands of political opponents—especially communists—were arrested, and [[early camps|a system of camps]] for [[protective custody (Nazi Germany)|extrajudicial imprisonment]] was set up.{{sfn|Wachsmann|2015|pp=32–38}} The Nazi regime cracked down on crime and social outsiders—such as [[Romani people in Germany|Roma and Sinti]], [[Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany|homosexual men]], and those perceived as workshy—through a variety of measures, including imprisonment in [[Nazi concentration camps|concentration camps]].{{sfn|Stone|2020|p=66}} The Nazis [[compulsory sterilization|forcibly sterilized]] 400,000 people and subjected others to [[forced abortion]]s for real or supposed hereditary illnesses.{{sfn|Stone|2020|p=67}}{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=55}}{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=47–48}} |
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Although the Nazis sought to control every aspect of public and private life,{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=35}} Nazi repression was directed almost entirely against groups perceived as outside the national community. Most Germans had little to fear provided they did not oppose the new regime.{{sfn|Bloxham|2009|p=148}}{{sfn|Stone|2020|p=65}} The new regime built popular support through economic growth, which partly occurred through [[Economy of Nazi Germany|state-led measures]] such as [[German rearmament|rearmament]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=39}} The annexations of [[German annexation of Austria|Austria]] (1938), [[Munich Agreement|Sudetenland]] (1938), and [[Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia|Bohemia and Moravia]] (1939) also increased the Nazis' popular support.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=40}} Germans were inundated with [[Nazi propaganda|propaganda]] both against Jews{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=39}} and other groups targeted by the Nazis.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=55}} |
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He worked extensively with Romani children. He would bring them sweets and toys, and personally take them to the gas chamber. They would call him "Onkel (Uncle) Mengele".<ref name = "Berenbaum 2005 194_195">{{Harvnb|Berenbaum|2005|pp=194–195}}.</ref> Vera Alexander was a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz who looked after 50 sets of Romani twins: |
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===Persecution of Jews=== |
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{{quote|I remember one set of twins in particular: Guido and Ina, aged about four. One day, Mengele took them away. When they returned, they were in a terrible state: they had been sewn together, back to back, like [[Siamese twins]]. Their wounds were infected and oozing pus. They screamed day and night. Then their parents—I remember the mother's name was Stella—managed to get some [[morphine]] and they killed the children in order to end their suffering.<ref name = "Berenbaum 2005 194_195"/>}} |
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{{main|The Holocaust in Germany}} |
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{{further|Anti-Jewish legislation in pre-war Nazi Germany}} |
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The roughly 500,000 [[German Jews]] made up less than 1 percent of the country's population in 1933. They were wealthier on average than other Germans and largely assimilated, although a minority were recent immigrants from eastern Europe.{{sfn|Cesarani|2016|p=7}}{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=43}}{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=96}} Various German government agencies, Nazi Party organizations, and local authorities instituted [[Anti-Jewish legislation in prewar Nazi Germany|about 1,500 anti-Jewish laws]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=39, 41}} In 1933, Jews were banned or restricted from several professions and the [[civil service]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=40}} After hounding the German Jews out of public life by the end of 1934, the regime passed the [[Nuremberg Laws]] in 1935.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=52}} The laws reserved full citizenship rights for those of "German or related blood", restricted Jews' economic activity, and criminalized new marriages and [[Race defilement|sexual relationships between Jews and non-Jewish Germans]].{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=52, 60}}{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=41}} Jews were defined as those with three or four Jewish grandparents; many of those with partial Jewish descent were classified as ''[[Mischlinge]]'', with varying rights.{{sfn|Cesarani|2016|p=106}} The regime also sought to segregate Jews with a view to their ultimate disappearance from the country.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=52}} Jewish students were gradually forced out of the school system. Some municipalities enacted restrictions governing where Jews were allowed to live or conduct business.{{Sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=42}} In 1938 and 1939, Jews were barred from additional occupations, and their businesses were expropriated to force them out of the economy.{{Sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=41}} |
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[[File:View of the old synagogue in Aachen after its destruction during Kristallnacht 03.jpg|thumb|upright|left|alt=A building that has been ransacked with debris strewn around|View of the old synagogue in [[Aachen]] after its destruction during ''[[Kristallnacht]]'']] |
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==Development and execution== |
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Anti-Jewish violence, largely locally organized by members of Nazi Party institutions, took primarily non-lethal forms from 1933 to 1939.{{Sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=43–44}} Jewish stores, especially in rural areas, were often boycotted or vandalized.{{Sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=44–45}} As a result of local and popular pressure, many small towns became entirely [[Judenfrei|free of Jews]] and as many as a third of Jewish businesses may have been forced to close.{{Sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=45}} Anti-Jewish violence was even worse in [[areas annexed by Nazi Germany]].{{Sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=46}} On 9–10 November 1938, the Nazis organized ''[[Kristallnacht]]'' (Night of Broken Glass), a nationwide pogrom. Over 7,500 Jewish shops (out of 9,000) were looted, more than 1,000 [[synagogue]]s were damaged or destroyed,{{sfn|Cesarani|2016|pp=184–185}} at least 90 Jews were murdered,{{sfn|Cesarani|2016|pp=184, 187}} and as many as [[mass arrests after Kristallnacht|30,000 Jewish men were arrested]],{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=44}}{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=112}} although many were released within weeks.{{sfn|Cesarani|2016|p=200}} German Jews were [[Judenvermögensabgabe|levied a special tax]] that raised more than 1 billion [[Reichsmarks]] (RM).{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=117, 119}}{{efn|name=1billion|Equivalent to $400 million at the time,{{sfn|Foreign Claims Settlement Commission|1968|p=655}} or ${{formatnum:{{Inflation|US|0.4|1942|r=0}}}} billion in {{Inflation/year|US}}.<ref name=inflation>{{cite web |title=Consumer Price Index, 1800– |url=https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/inflation-calculator/consumer-price-index-1800- |publisher=Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis |access-date=29 November 2019 |ref={{sfnref|Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis|2019}}}}</ref>}} |
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===Origins=== |
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{{see also|Antisemitism|Christianity and antisemitism|Martin Luther and antisemitism|Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses}} |
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{{quote box|align=right|width=25em|quote="The whole problem of the Jews exists only in nation states, for here their energy and higher intelligence, their accumulated capital of spirit and will, gathered from generation to generation through a long schooling in suffering, must become so preponderant as to arouse mass envy and hatred. In almost all contemporary nations, therefore - in direct proportion to the degree to which they act up nationalistially - the literaral obscenity of leading the Jews to slaughter as scapegoats of every conceivable public and internal misfortune is spreading."|source=—[[Friedrich Nietzsche]], 1886, [MA 1 475]<ref>''Nietzsche der philosoph un Politiker'', 8, 63, ''et passim''. Ed. Alfred Baeumler, Reclam 1931</ref>}} |
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The Nazi government wanted to [[Emigration of Jews from Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe|force all Jews to leave Germany]].{{Sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=48}} By the end of 1939, most Jews who could emigrate had already done so; those who remained behind were disproportionately elderly, poor, or female and could not obtain a visa.{{Sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=49, 53}} The plurality, around 110,000, left for the United States, while smaller numbers emigrated to South America, [[Shanghai Ghetto|Shanghai]], [[Mandatory Palestine]], and South Africa.{{Sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=52}} Germany collected [[Reich Flight Tax|emigration taxes]] of nearly 1 billion RM,{{efn|name=1billion}} mostly from Jews.{{Sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=50}} The policy of forced emigration continued into 1940.{{Sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=51}} |
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[[Yehuda Bauer]] and [[Lucy Dawidowicz]] maintained that from the Middle Ages onward, German society and culture were suffused with antisemitism, and that there was a direct ideological link from medieval [[pogroms]] to the Nazi death camps.<ref>{{Harvnb|Dawidowicz|1975|p=47}}; {{Harvnb|Bauer|1982|p={{page needed|date=November 2012}}}};</ref> |
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Besides Germany, a significant number of other European countries abandoned democracy for some kind of authoritarian or fascist rule.{{sfn|Stone|2010|p=17}} Many countries, including Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia, passed antisemitic legislation in the 1930s and 1940s.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=332–334}} In October 1938, [[Polenaktion|Germany deported many Polish Jews]] in response to a Polish law that enabled the [[denaturalization|revocation of citizenship]] for Polish Jews living abroad.{{Sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=49}}{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=109–110}} |
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The second half of the 19th century saw the emergence in [[History of Germany|Germany]] and [[Austria-Hungary]] of the [[Völkisch movement|''Völkisch'' movement]], developed by such thinkers as [[Houston Stewart Chamberlain]] and [[Paul de Lagarde]]. The movement presented a pseudoscientific, biologically based racism that viewed Jews as a race locked in mortal combat with the [[Aryan race]] for world domination.<ref>{{Harvnb|Fischer|2002|pp=47–49}}.</ref> ''Völkisch'' antisemitism drew upon stereotypes from Christian antisemitism, but differed in that Jews were considered to be a race rather than a religion.<ref>{{Harvnb|Gramel|1992|pp=53–4}}.</ref> |
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==Start of World War II== |
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In a speech before the ''[[Reichstag (German Empire)|Reichstag]]'' in 1895, ''völkisch'' leader [[Hermann Ahlwardt]] called Jews "predators" and "cholera bacilli" who should be "exterminated" for the good of the German people.<ref>{{Harvnb|Gramel|1992|p=61}}.</ref> In his best-selling 1912 book ''Wenn ich der Kaiser wär'' (''If I were the Kaiser''), [[Heinrich Class]], leader of the ''völkisch'' group ''[[Alldeutscher Verband]]'', urged that all German Jews be stripped of their German citizenship and be reduced to ''Fremdenrecht'' (alien status).<ref name = "Friedländer 1997 76">{{Harvnb|Friedländer|1997|p=76}}.</ref> Class also urged that Jews should be excluded from all aspects of German life, forbidden to own land, hold public office, or participate in journalism, banking, and the liberal professions.<ref name = "Friedländer 1997 76"/> Class defined a Jew as anyone who was a member of the Jewish religion on the day the [[German Empire]] was proclaimed in 1871, or anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent.<ref name = "Friedländer 1997 76"/> |
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[[File:Danzigers cheer for Adolf Hitler 2.jpg|thumb|alt=A large crowd of people with swastika banners|Danzigers rallying for Hitler, shortly after the [[Free City of Danzig|free city]]'s [[Danzig crisis|annexation into Germany]]]] |
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The German ''[[Wehrmacht]]'' (armed forces) [[Invasion of Poland|invaded Poland]] on 1 September 1939, triggering declarations of war [[United Kingdom declaration of war on Germany (1939)|from the United Kingdom]] and [[French declaration of war on Germany (1939)|France]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=56}} During the five weeks of fighting, as many as 16,000 civilians, hostages, and [[German atrocities committed against Polish prisoners of war|prisoners of war]] may have been shot by the German invaders;{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=57}} there was also a great deal of looting.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=98}} Special units known as ''[[Einsatzgruppen]]'' followed the army to eliminate any possible resistance.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|pp=99, 101}} Around 50,000 Polish and Polish Jewish leaders and intellectuals [[Intelligenzaktion|were arrested or executed]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=57–58}}{{sfn|Beorn|2018|pp=102–103}} The [[Auschwitz concentration camp]] was established to hold those members of the Polish intelligentsia not killed in the purges.{{sfn|Hayes|2017|p=241}} Around 400,000 Poles were expelled from the [[Wartheland]] in western Poland to the [[General Governorate]] occupation zone from 1939 to 1941, and the area was [[Heim ins Reich|resettled]] by [[Volksdeutsche|ethnic Germans from eastern Europe]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=58}} |
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The rest of Poland was [[Territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union#Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, 1939–1941|occupied by the Soviet Union]], which [[Soviet invasion of Poland|invaded Poland from the east]] on 17 September pursuant to the [[German–Soviet pact]].{{sfn|Beorn|2018|pp=46, 73}} The Soviet Union [[Population transfer in the Soviet Union|deported hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens]] to the Soviet interior, including as many as 260,000 Jews who largely survived the war.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=86}}{{sfn|Cesarani|2016|p=362}} Although most Jews were not communists, some accepted positions in the Soviet administration, contributing to a pre-existing perception among many non-Jews that Soviet rule was a Jewish conspiracy.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|pp=89–90}} In 1940, Germany invaded much of western Europe including [[German invasion of the Netherlands|the Netherlands]], [[German invasion of Belgium (1940)|Belgium]], [[German invasion of Luxembourg|Luxembourg]], [[German invasion of France (1940)|France]], and [[Operation Weserübung|Denmark and Norway]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=56}} In 1941, Germany [[German invasion of Yugoslavia|invaded Yugoslavia]] and [[German invasion of Greece|Greece]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=56}} Some of these new holdings were [[Areas annexed by Nazi Germany|fully or partially annexed into Germany]] while others were placed under [[Reichskommissariat|civilian]] or [[Military Administration (Nazi Germany)|military rule]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=57}} |
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The first [[Medical Experimentation in Africa|medical experimentation]] on humans and [[ethnic cleansing]] by Germans took place in the death camps of [[German South-West Africa]] during the [[Herero and Namaqua Genocide]]. It has been suggested that this was an inspiration for the Holocaust.<ref>{{cite book|title=Identity Politics in the Age of Genocide: The Holocaust and Historical Representation|page=97|author=David B. MacDonald|year=2007|publisher=Routledge|url=http://books.google.de/books?id=X5d8AgAAQBAJ&pg=PT66&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=snippet&q=Herero%20Genocide&f=false|isbn=1134085710}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1314399/Hitlers-Holocaust-blueprint-Africa-concentration-camps-used-advance-racial-theories.html|title=Hitler's Holocaust blueprint: A new book reveals how the Kaiser's Germany used concentration camps in Africa to advance their theories of racial supremacy|date=September 23, 2010}}</ref> |
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The war provided cover for "[[Aktion T4]]", the murder of around 70,000 institutionalized Germans with mental or physical disabilities at specialized killing centers using poison gas.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=58}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=38}}{{sfn|Bergen|2016|p=162}} The victims included all 4,000 to 5,000 institutionalized Jews.{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=37}} Despite efforts to maintain secrecy, knowledge of the killings leaked out and Hitler ordered a halt to the centralized killing program in August 1941.{{sfn|Cesarani|2016|p=284}}{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=59}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|pp=37–38}} Decentralized killings via denial of medical care, starvation, and poisoning caused an additional 120,000 deaths by the end of the war.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=59}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=254}} Many of the same personnel and technologies were later used for the mass murder of Jews.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=207}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=40}} |
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During the German Empire, ''völkisch'' notions and pseudoscientific racism had become common and accepted throughout Germany,<ref name = "Evans 1989 69">{{Harvnb|Evans|1989|p=69}}.</ref> with the educated professional classes of the country, in particular, adopting an ideology of human inequality.<ref>{{Harvnb|Friedlander|1994|pp=495–6}}.</ref> Though the ''völkisch'' parties were defeated in the 1912 ''Reichstag'' elections, being all but wiped out, antisemitism was incorporated into the platforms of the mainstream political parties.<ref name = "Evans 1989 69"/> The [[National Socialist German Workers' Party]] (Nazi Party; NSDAP) was founded in 1920 as an offshoot of the ''völkisch'' movement, and adopted their antisemitism.<ref>{{Harvnb|Fischer|2002|pp=47–51}}.</ref> In a 1986 essay, German historian [[Hans Mommsen]] wrote about the situation in post–World War I Germany that: |
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===Ghettoization and resettlement=== |
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{{quote| |
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{{further|The Holocaust in Poland}} |
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If one emphasizes the indisputably important connection in isolation, one should not then force a connection with Hitler's ''weltanschauung'' [worldview], which was in no ways original itself, in order to derive from it the existence of Auschwitz ... Thoughts about the extermination of the Jews had long been current, and not only for Hitler and his satraps. Many of these found their way to the NSDAP from the [[Deutschvölkischer Schutz und Trutzbund|''Deutschvölkisch Schutz-und Trutzbund'']] [German Racial Union for Protection and Defiance], which itself had been called into life by the [[Alldeutscher Verband|Pan-German Union]].<ref>{{Harvnb|Mommsen|1993|p=121}}.</ref> |
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[[File:Unpaved steet in the Frysztak Ghetto.jpg|thumb|alt=People and buildings with an unpaved street|Unpaved street in the [[Frysztak Ghetto]], [[Krakow District]]]] |
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}} |
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[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-134-0771A-39, Polen, Ghetto Warschau, Kind in Lumpen.jpg|thumb|alt=People walking on a paved surface around a still body|A body lying in the street of the [[Warsaw Ghetto]] in the [[General Governorate]]]] |
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Germany gained control of 1.7 million Jews in Poland.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=96}}{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=148}} The Nazis [[Nisko Plan|tried to concentrate Jews]] in the [[Lublin District]] of the General Governorate. 45,000 Jews were deported by November and left to fend for themselves, causing many deaths.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=108}} Deportations stopped in early 1940 due to the opposition of [[Hans Frank]], the leader of the General Governorate, who did not want his fiefdom to become a dumping ground for unwanted Jews.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|pp=107–109}}{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=201}} After the conquest of France, the Nazis considered [[Madagascar Plan|deporting Jews]] to [[French Madagascar]], but this proved impossible.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=164}}{{sfn|Beorn|2018|pp=109, 117}} The Nazis planned that harsh conditions in these areas would kill many Jews.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=164}}{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=201}} In September 1939, around 7,000 Jews were killed, alongside thousands of Poles, however, they were not systematically targeted as they would be later, and open mass killings would subside until June of 1941.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=63, 437}} |
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Tremendous scientific and technological changes in Germany during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, together with the growth of the welfare state, created widespread hopes that [[utopia]] was at hand and that soon all social problems could be solved.<ref>{{Harvnb|Peukert|1994|pp=280–284}}.</ref> At the same time a racist, social Darwinist, and eugenicist world-view which declared some people to be more biologically valuable than others was common.<ref>{{Harvnb|Peukert|1994|pp=279–280}}.</ref> Historian [[Detlev Peukert]] states that the ''Shoah'' did not result solely from antisemitism, but was a product of the "cumulative radicalization" in which "numerous smaller currents" fed into the "broad current" that led to genocide.<ref>{{Harvnb|Peukert|1994|p=280}}.</ref> After the First World War, the pre-war mood of optimism gave way to disillusionment as German bureaucrats found social problems to be more insoluble than previously thought, which in turn led them to place increasing emphasis on saving the biologically "fit" while the biologically "unfit" were to be written off.<ref>{{Harvnb|Peukert|1994|p=288}}.</ref> |
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[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 102-14469, Berlin, Boykott-Posten vor jüdischem Warenhaus.jpg|thumb|In Germany, ''[[Sturmabteilung]]'' stormtroopers urge a national boycott of all Jewish businesses on 1 April 1933. These SA stormtroopers are outside [[Israel's Department Store]] in Berlin to deter customers. The signs read: "Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews." ("''Deutsche! Wehrt Euch! Kauft nicht bei Juden!''")<ref name=boycotts>[http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Educational_Resources/Curriculum/Broken_Threads/Boycotts/boycotts.html "Boycotts"]. Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, [[University of Minnesota]]. {{Dead link|date=September 2012}}. Retrieved 24 September 2012.</ref> The store was later ransacked during [[Kristallnacht]] in 1938, then handed over to a non-Jewish family.]] |
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The economic strains of the [[Great Depression]] led many in the German medical establishment to advocate the idea of euthanisation of the "incurable" mentally and physically disabled as a cost-saving measure to free up money to care for the curable.<ref>{{Harvnb|Burleigh|2000|pp=47–48}}.</ref> By the time the Nazis came to power in 1933, a tendency already existed in German social policy to save the racially "valuable" while seeking to rid society of the racially "undesirable".<ref>{{Harvnb|Peukert|1994|p=289}}.</ref> |
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During the invasion, synagogues were burned and thousands of Jews fled or were expelled into the Soviet occupation zone.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|pp=87, 103}} Various anti-Jewish regulations were soon issued. In October 1939, adult Jews in the General Governorate were required to perform forced labor.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=116}} In November 1939 they were ordered to wear white armbands.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=115}} Laws decreed the seizure of most Jewish property and the takeover of Jewish-owned businesses. When Jews were forced into ghettos, they lost their homes and belongings.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=116}} |
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Hitler was open about his hatred of Jews. In his book ''[[Mein Kampf]]'', he gave warning of his intention to drive them from Germany's political, intellectual, and cultural life. He did not write that he would attempt to exterminate them, but he is reported to have been more explicit in private. As early as 1922, he allegedly told Major Joseph Hell, at the time a journalist: |
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The first [[Nazi ghettos]] were established in the Wartheland and General Governorate in 1939 and 1940 on the initiative of local German administrators.{{sfn|Miron|2020|pp=247, 251, 254}}{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=117}} The largest ghettos, such as [[Warsaw Ghetto|Warsaw]] and [[Łódź Ghetto|Łódź]], were established in existing residential neighborhoods and closed by fences or walls. In many smaller ghettos, Jews were forced into poor neighborhoods but with no fence.{{sfn|Miron|2020|p=252}} Forced labor programs provided subsistence to many ghetto inhabitants, and in some cases protected them from deportation. Workshops and factories were operated inside some ghettos, while in other cases Jews left the ghetto to work outside it.{{sfn|Miron|2020|p=253}} Because the ghettos were not segregated by sex some family life continued.{{sfn|Miron|2020|pp=253–254}} A Jewish community leadership ({{lang|de|[[Judenrat]]}}) exercised some authority and tried to sustain the Jewish community while following German demands. As a survival strategy, many tried to make the ghettos useful to the occupiers as a labor reserve.{{sfn|Miron|2020|p=254}}{{sfn|Engel|2020|p=240}} Jews in western Europe were not forced into ghettos but faced discriminatory laws and confiscation of property.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=272}}{{sfn|Cesarani|2016|pp=314–315}}{{sfn|Miron|2020|pp=247–248}} |
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{{quote|Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows—at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example—as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.<ref>{{Harvnb|Fleming|1987|p=17}}.</ref>}} |
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Rape and sexual exploitation of Jewish and non-Jewish women in eastern Europe [[Sexual violence during the Holocaust|was common]].{{sfn|Westermann|2020|pp=127–128}} |
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The German historian [[Hans Mommsen]] claimed that there were three types of antisemitism in Germany: There was 1) the cultural antisemitism found among German conservatives, especially in the military officer corps as well as in the top members of the civil administration; 2) there was the "volkisch" antisemitism or racism which advocated using violence against the Jews; and 3) the religios anti-Judaism, particularly within the Catholic Church. The cultural antisemitism kept the ruling establishment from distancing itself or opposing the violent, racial antisemitism of the Nazis, and religious antisemitism meant that the religious establishment did not present opposition to racial persecution of the Jews..<ref>[[Hans Mommsen|Mommsen, Hans]] (12 December 1997) [http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203850.pdf "Interview with Hans Mommsen"]. [[Yad Vashem]]. Retrieved 26 September 2012.</ref>--[[User:Joel Mc|Joel Mc]] ([[User talk:Joel Mc|talk]]) 11:16, 3 December 2014 (UTC) |
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==Invasion of the Soviet Union== |
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===Legal repression and emigration=== |
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{{further|Anti-Jewish legislation in prewar Nazi Germany|Racial policy of Nazi Germany|Nuremberg Laws|Haavara Agreement}} |
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Right from the establishment of the Third Reich, Nazi leaders proclaimed the existence of a ''[[Volksgemeinschaft]]'' ("people's community"). Nazi policies divided the population into two categories, the ''Volksgenossen'' ("national comrades"), who belonged to the ''Volksgemeinschaft'', and the ''Gemeinschaftsfremde'' ("community aliens"), who did not. Nazi policies about repression divided people into three types of enemies, the "racial" enemies such as the Jews and the Gypsies who were viewed as enemies because of their "blood"; political opponents such as Marxists, liberals, Christians and the "reactionaries" who were viewed as wayward "National Comrades"; and moral opponents such as homosexuals, the "work-shy" and habitual criminals, also seen as wayward "National Comrades".<ref name = "No&Pr 1983 499">{{Harvnb|Noakes|Pridham|1983|p=499}}.</ref> The last two groups were to be sent to concentration camps for "re-education", with the aim of eventual absorption into the ''Volksgemeinschaft'', though some of the moral opponents were to be sterilized, as they were regarded as "genetically inferior".<ref name = "No&Pr 1983 499"/> |
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Germany and its allies Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Italy [[Operation Barbarossa|invaded the Soviet Union]] on 22 June 1941.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=67}}{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=201}} Although the war was launched more for strategic than ideological reasons,{{sfn|Cesarani|2016|p=351}} what Hitler saw as an apocalyptic battle against the forces of [[Jewish Bolshevism]]{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=172}} was to be carried out as a [[war of extermination]] with [[Barbarossa decree|complete disregard]] for the [[laws and customs of war]].{{sfn|Beorn|2018|pp=121–122}}{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|pp=201–202}} A quick victory was expected{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=179}} and was planned to be followed by a massive [[demographic engineering]] project to [[Generalplan Ost|remove 31 million people and replace them with German settlers]].{{sfn|Beorn|2018|pp=63–64}} To increase the speed of conquest the Germans planned to feed their army by looting, exporting additional food to Germany, and to terrorize the local inhabitants with preventative killings.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=68}}{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=180}} The Germans foresaw that the invasion would cause a food shortfall and [[Hunger Plan|planned the mass starvation]] of Soviet cities and some rural areas.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=67–68}}{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=67}}{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=181–182}} Although the starvation policy was less successful than planners hoped,{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=221–222}} the residents of some cities, particularly in Ukraine, and [[Siege of Leningrad|besieged Leningrad]], as well as the Jewish ghettos, endured human-made famine, during which millions of people died of starvation.{{sfn|Bloxham|2009|pp=182–183}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|pp=142, 294}} |
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"Racial" enemies such as the Jews could, by definition, never belong to the ''Volksgemeinschaft''; they were to be totally removed from society.<ref name = "No&Pr 1983 499"/> German historian [[Detlev Peukert]] wrote that the National Socialists' "goal was an utopian ''Volksgemeinschaft'', totally under police surveillance, in which any attempt at nonconformist behaviour, or even any hint or intention of such behaviour, would be visited with terror".<ref>{{Harvnb|Peukert|1987|p=220}}.</ref> Peukert quotes policy documents on the "Treatment of Community Aliens" from 1944, which (though never implemented) showed the full intentions of Nazi social policy: "persons who ... show themselves [to be] unable to comply by their own efforts with the minimum requirements of the national community" were to be placed under police supervision, and if this did not reform them, they were to be taken to a concentration camp.<ref>{{Harvnb|Peukert|1987|p=221}}.</ref> |
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By mid-June 1941, about 30,000 Jews had died, 20,000 of whom had starved to death in the [[Jewish ghettos established by Nazi Germany|ghettos]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=65}} |
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Leading up to the March 1933 ''Reichstag'' elections, the Nazis intensified their campaign of violence against the opposition. With the co-operation of local authorities, they set up concentration camps for extrajudicial imprisonment of their opponents. One of the first, at [[Dachau concentration camp|Dachau]], opened on 9 March 1933.<ref>{{Harvnb|Gilbert|1986|p=32}}.</ref> Initially the camp contained primarily communists and Social Democrats.<ref>{{Harvnb|Longerich|2012|p=155}}.</ref> Other early prisons—for example, in basements and storehouses run by the ''[[Sturmabteilung]]'' (SA) and less commonly by the ''[[Schutzstaffel]]'' (SS)—were consolidated by mid-1934 into purpose-built camps outside the cities, run exclusively by the SS. The initial purpose of the camps was to serve as a deterrent by terrorizing those Germans who did not conform to the ''Volksgemeinschaft''.<ref name="Peukert 1987 214">{{Harvnb|Peukert|1987|p=214}}.</ref> Those sent to the camps included the "educable", whose wills could be broken into becoming "National Comrades", and the "biologically depraved", who were to be sterilized, were to be held permanently, and over time were increasingly subject to [[extermination through labor]], i.e., being worked to death.<ref name="Peukert 1987 214"/> |
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[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1972-026-43, Minsk, Widerstandskämpfer vor Hinrichtung.jpg|thumb|Public execution of [[Masha Bruskina]], a Belarusian Jew who helped Soviet prisoners escape]] |
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[[Nazification of Germany|Throughout the 1930s]], the legal, economic, and social rights of Jews were steadily restricted. The Israeli historian [[Saul Friedländer]] writes that, for the Nazis, Germany drew its strength "from the purity of its blood and from its rootedness in the sacred German earth."<ref name="Friedländer 1997 33">{{Harvnb|Friedländer|1997|p=33}}.</ref> On 1 April 1933, [[Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses|there occurred a boycott of Jewish businesses]], which was the first national antisemitic campaign, initially planned for a week, but called off after one day owing to lack of popular support. In 1933, a series of laws were passed which contained [[Aryan paragraph]]s to exclude Jews from key areas: the [[Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service]], the first antisemitic law passed in the Third Reich; the Physicians' Law; and the Farm Law, forbidding Jews from owning farms or taking part in agriculture. |
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[[German mistreatment of Soviet prisoners of war|Soviet prisoners of war in the custody of the German Army]] were intended to die in large numbers. Sixty percent—3.3 million people—died, primarily of starvation,{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=125}}{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=72}} making them the second largest group of victims of Nazi mass killing after European Jews.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=5}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=294}} Jewish prisoners of war and [[commissar order|commissars]] were systematically executed.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=231–232}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=161}} About a million civilians were killed by the Nazis during [[anti-partisan warfare]], including more than 300,000 in Belarus.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=288}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=190}} From 1942 onwards, the Germans and their allies targeted villages suspected of supporting the partisans, burning them and killing or expelling their inhabitants.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=297–298}} During these operations, nearby small ghettos were liquidated and their inhabitants shot.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=298–299}} By 1943, anti-partisan operations aimed for the depopulation of large areas of Belarus.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=298}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|pp=182–183}} Jews and those unfit for work were typically shot on the spot with others deported.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=298–299}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=182}} Although most of those killed were not Jews,{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=190}}{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=298}} anti-partisan warfare often led to the deaths of Jews.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=300, 310}} |
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===Mass shootings of Jews{{anchor|Mass shootings|Einsatzgruppen|Mass shootings}}=== |
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Jewish lawyers were [[disbarment|disbarred]], and in [[Dresden]], Jewish lawyers and judges were dragged out of their offices and courtrooms and beaten.<ref>{{Harvnb|Friedländer|1997|p=29}}.</ref> At the insistence of then president [[Paul von Hindenburg]], Hitler added an exemption allowing Jewish civil servants who were veterans of the First World War, or whose fathers or sons had served, to remain in office. Hitler revoked this exemption in 1937. Jews were excluded from schools and universities (the Law to Prevent Overcrowding in Schools), from belonging to the Journalists' Association, and from being owners or editors of newspapers.<ref name="Friedländer 1997 33"/> The ''Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung'' of 27 April 1933 wrote: |
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{{Further|The Holocaust in the Soviet Union|The Holocaust in Romania}} |
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[[File:Lviv pogrom (June - July 1941).jpg|thumb|upright=0.7|left|alt=Half naked woman running, and a man carrying a bat|At least 3,000 Jews were killed during the 1941 [[Lviv pogroms (1941)|Lviv pogroms]], mainly by local Ukrainians.{{sfn|Beorn|2020|pp=162–163}}]] |
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The systematic murder of Jews began in the Soviet Union in 1941.{{sfnm|Kay|2021|1pp=13–14|Beorn|2018|2p=128}} During the invasion, many Jews were conscripted into the [[Red Army]]. Out of 10 or 15 million Soviet civilians who [[Evacuation in the Soviet Union|fled eastwards to the Soviet interior]], 1.6 million were Jews.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=72–73}}{{sfn|Miron|2020|p=254}} Local inhabitants killed as many as 50,000 Jews in pogroms in Latvia, [[1941 pogroms in Lithuania|Lithuania]], [[1941 pogroms in eastern Poland|eastern Poland]], Ukraine, and the Romanian borderlands.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=69, 440}}{{sfn|Kopstein|2023|pp=105, 107–108}} Although German forces tried to incite pogroms, their role in causing violence is controversial.{{sfn|Kopstein|2023|p=107}}{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=202}} [[Romanian Armed Forces|Romanian soldiers]] [[1941 Odessa massacre|killed tens of thousands of Jews from Odessa]] by April 1942.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=69}}{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=185}} |
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{{quote|A self-respecting nation cannot, on a scale accepted up to now, leave its higher activities in the hands of people of racially foreign origin . . . Allowing the presence of too high a percentage of people of foreign origin in relation to their percentage in the general population could be interpreted as an acceptance of the superiority of other races, something decidedly to be rejected.<ref>{{Harvnb|Friedländer|1997|pp=30–1}}.</ref>}} |
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Prior to the invasion, the ''Einsatzgruppen'' were reorganized in preparation for mass killings and instructed to shoot Soviet officials and Jewish state and party employees.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=129}} The shootings were justified on the basis of Jews' supposed central role in supporting the communist system, but it was not initially envisioned to kill all Soviet Jews.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=190}}{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=66}} The occupiers relied on locals to identify Jews to be targeted.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|pp=259–260}} The first German mass killings targeted adult male Jews who had worked as civil servants or in jobs requiring education. Tens of thousands were shot by the end of July. The vast majority of civilian victims were Jews.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=69}} In July and August [[Heinrich Himmler]], the leader of the [[Schutzstaffel|SS]] (''Schutzstaffel''), made several visits to the [[death squads]]' zones of operation, relaying orders to kill more Jews.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=132}} At this time, the killers began to murder Jewish women and children too.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=132}}{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=207}} Executions peaked at 40,000 a month [[The Holocaust in Lithuania|in Lithuania]] in August and September and in October and November reached their height [[The Holocaust in Belarus|in Belarus]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=69–70}} |
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In July 1933, the [[Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring]] calling for compulsory sterilization of the "inferior" was passed. This major [[Nazi eugenics|eugenic]] policy led to over 200 [[Hereditary Health Court]]s ({{lang|de|''Erbgesundheitsgerichte''}}) being set up, under whose rulings over 400,000 people were sterilized against their will during the Nazi period.<ref>{{Harvnb|Proctor|1988|p=108}}.</ref> |
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[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1994-092-18A, Sowjetunion, Festnahme von Juden.jpg|thumb|alt=Men rounded up and walking|Original Nazi propaganda caption: "Too bad even for a bullet... The Jews shown here were shot at once." 28 June 1941 in [[Rozhanka, Shchuchyn District|Rozhanka]], Belarus]] |
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[[File:Nuremberg laws.jpg|thumb|Racial [[classification chart]] based on the Nuremberg Laws of 1935.]] |
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[[File:Men with an unidentified unit execute a group of Soviet civilians kneeling by the side of a mass grave.jpg|thumb|alt=Men execute at least four Soviet civilians kneeling by the side of a mass grave|Shooting from behind became popular because killers did not have to look at their victims' faces and the dead were likely to fall into the grave.{{sfn|Russell |2018|pp=135–136}}]] |
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The executions often took place a few kilometers from a town. Victims were rounded up and marched to the execution site, forced to undress, and shot into previously dug pits.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=70}} The favored technique was a shot in the back of the neck with a single bullet.{{sfn|Bloxham|2009|p=203}} In the chaos, many victims were not killed by the gunfire but instead [[buried alive]]. Typically, the pits would be guarded after the execution but sometimes a few victims managed to escape afterwards.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=70}} Executions were public spectacles and the victims' property was looted both by the occupiers and local inhabitants.{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=203}} Around 200 ghettos were established in the occupied Soviet Union, with many existing only briefly before their inhabitants were executed. A few large ghettos such as Vilna, [[Kovno Ghetto|Kovno]], [[Riga Ghetto|Riga]], [[Białystok Ghetto|Białystok]], and [[Lwów Ghetto|Lwów]] lasted into 1943 because they became centers of production.{{sfn|Miron|2020|p=254}} |
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Victims of mass shootings included Jews deported from elsewhere.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=79}} Besides Germany, Romania [[The Holocaust in Romania|killed the largest number of Jews]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=372}}{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=207}} Romania deported about 154,000–170,000 Jews from [[Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina|Bessarabia and Bukovina]] to ghettos in [[Transnistria Governorate|Transnistria]] from 1941 to 1943.{{sfn|Stone|2010|p=36}} Jews from Transnistria were also imprisoned in these ghettos, where the total death toll may have reached 160,000.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=371}} Hungary expelled thousands of [[The Holocaust in Carpathian Ruthenia|Carpathian Ruthenian]] and foreign Jews in 1941, who were shortly thereafter [[Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre|shot in Ukraine]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=380}}{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=224}} At the beginning of September, all German Jews were required to wear a yellow star, and in October, Hitler decided to [[The Holocaust in Germany|deport them to the east]] and ban emigration.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=75–77}}{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=284–285}} Between mid-October and the end of 1941, 42,000 Jews from Germany and its annexed territories and 5,000 [[Romani people in Austria|Romani people from Austria]] were deported to Łódź, Kovno, Riga, and [[Minsk Ghetto|Minsk]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=76}}{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=286}} In late November, [[Ninth Fort massacres of November 1941|5,000 German Jews were shot]] outside of Kovno and [[Rumbula massacre|another 1,000]] near Riga, but Himmler ordered an end to such massacres and some in the senior Nazi leadership voiced doubts about killing German Jews.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=79}}{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=298–299}} Executions of German Jews in the Baltics resumed in early 1942.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=300}} |
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In 1935, Hitler introduced the [[Nuremberg Laws]], which: prohibited "Aryans" from having sexual relations or marriages with Jews, although this was later extended to include "Gypsies, Negroes or their bastard offspring" (the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor),<ref>{{Harvnb|Gellately|2001|pp=216, 231}}</ref> stripped German Jews of their citizenship and deprived them of all [[civil rights]]. At the same time the Nazis used propaganda to promulgate the concept of ''[[Rassenschande]]'' (race defilement) to justify the need for a restrictive law.<ref>{{Harvnb|Evans|2005|pp=539, 551}}</ref> Hitler described the "Blood Law" in particular "the attempt at a legal regulation of a problem, which in the event of further failure would then have through law to be transferred to the final solution of the National Socialist Party". Hitler said that if the "Jewish problem" cannot be solved by these laws, it "must then be handed over by law to the National-Socialist Party for a final solution".<ref>{{Harvnb|Kershaw|1998|p=570}}.</ref> The "[[final solution]]", or "''Endlösung''", became the standard Nazi euphemism for the extermination of the Jews. In January 1939, he said in a public speech: "If international-finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging the nations into yet another world war, the consequences will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (''vernichtung'') of the Jewish race in Europe".<ref>{{Harvnb|Berenbaum|2005|p=57}}.</ref> Footage from this speech was used to conclude the 1940 Nazi propaganda movie ''[[The Eternal Jew (1940 film)|The Eternal Jew]]'' (''Der ewige Jude''), whose purpose was to provide a rationale and blueprint for eliminating the Jews from Europe.<ref>{{Harvnb|Michael|Doerr|2002|p=154}}.</ref> |
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After the expansion of killings to target the entire Soviet Jewish population, the 3,000 men of the ''Einsatzgruppen'' proved insufficient and Himmler mobilized 21 battalions of [[Order Police]] to assist them.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=132}} In addition, Wehrmacht soldiers, [[Waffen-SS]] brigades, and local auxiliaries shot many Jews.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=70}}{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=142}}{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|pp=205–206}} By the end of 1941, more than 80 percent of the Jews in central Ukraine, eastern Belarus, Russia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been shot, but less than 25 percent of those living farther west where 900,000 remained alive.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=71}} By the end of the war, around 1.5 to 2 million Jews were shot{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=128}} and as many as 225,000 Roma.{{sfn|Bergen|2016|p=200}} The murderers found the executions distressing and logistically inconvenient, which influenced the decision to switch to other methods of killing.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|pp=146–147}} |
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Jewish intellectuals were among the first to leave. The philosopher [[Walter Benjamin]] left for Paris on 18 March 1933. Novelist [[Lion Feuchtwanger]] went to Switzerland. The conductor [[Bruno Walter]] fled after being told that the hall of the [[Berlin Philharmonic]] would be burned down if he conducted a concert there: the ''[[Frankfurter Zeitung]]'' explained on 6 April that Walter and fellow conductor [[Otto Klemperer]] had been forced to flee because the government was unable to protect them against the mood of the German public, which had been provoked by "Jewish artistic liquidators".<ref>{{Harvnb|Friedländer|1997|p=1}}.</ref> [[Albert Einstein]] was visiting the US on 30 January 1933. He returned to Ostende in Belgium, never to set foot in Germany again, and calling events there a "psychic illness of the masses"; he was expelled from the [[Kaiser Wilhelm Society]] and the [[Prussian Academy of Sciences]], and his citizenship was rescinded.<ref name="Friedländer 1997 12">{{Harvnb|Friedländer|1997|p=12}}.</ref> When Germany annexed [[Austria]] in 1938, [[Sigmund Freud]] and his family fled from Vienna to England. Saul Friedländer writes that when [[Max Liebermann]], honorary president of the [[Prussian Academy of Arts]], resigned his position, not one of his colleagues expressed a word of sympathy, and he was still ostracized at his death two years later. When the police arrived in 1943 with a stretcher to deport his 85-year-old bedridden widow, she committed suicide with an [[drug overdose|overdose]] of [[barbiturate]]s rather than be taken.<ref name="Friedländer 1997 12"/> |
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==Systematic deportations across Europe== |
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===Kristallnacht (1938)=== |
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Most historians agree that Hitler issued an [[Hitler order|explicit order]] to kill all Jews across Europe,{{sfn|Evans|2019|p=120}} but there is disagreement when.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=78}}{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=204}} Some historians cite inflammatory statements by Hitler and other Nazi leaders as well as the concurrent [[The Holocaust in German-occupied Serbia|mass shootings of Serbian Jews]], plans for [[extermination camps]] in Poland, and the beginning of the deportation of German Jews as indicative of the final decision having been made before December 1941.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=78}}{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=303}} Others argue that these policies were initiatives by local leaders and that the final decision was made later.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=78}} On 5 December 1941, the Soviet Union [[Winter campaign of 1941–42|launched its first major counteroffensive]]. On 11 December, [[German declaration of war on the United States|Hitler declared war on the United States]] after Japan [[attack on Pearl Harbor|attacked Pearl Harbor]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=79–80}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=199}} The next day, he [[Reich Chancellery meeting of 12 December 1941|told leading Nazi party officials]], referring to his [[Hitler's prophecy|1939 prophecy]], "The world war is here; the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence."{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=199}}{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=306}} |
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{{main|Kristallnacht}} |
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[[File:Burning Synagoge Kristallnacht 1938.jpg|thumb|left|A synagogue burns on 10 November 1938]] |
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On 7 November 1938, Jewish minor [[Herschel Grünspan]] assassinated Nazi German diplomat [[Ernst vom Rath]] in Paris.<ref name = "Benz 2007 97">{{Harvnb|Benz|2007|p=97}}.</ref> This incident was used by the [[Nazis]] as a pretext to go beyond legal repression to large-scale physical violence against Jewish Germans. What the Nazis claimed to be spontaneous "public outrage" was in fact a wave of pogroms instigated by the [[Nazi Party]], and carried out by [[Sturmabteilung|SA]] members and affiliates throughout Nazi Germany, at the time consisting of [[Weimar Germany|Germany proper]], Austria and [[Sudetenland]].<ref name = "Benz 2007 97"/> These pogroms became known as ''Reichskristallnacht'' ("the Night of Broken Glass", literally "''Crystal Night''"), or ''November pogroms''. Jews were attacked and Jewish property was vandalized, over 7,000 Jewish shops and more than 1,200 synagogues (roughly two-thirds of the synagogues in areas under German control) were damaged or destroyed.<ref name = "Diamant RK">{{Harvnb|Diamant|1998}}.</ref> |
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It took the Nazis several months after this to organize a continent-wide genocide.{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=199}} [[Reinhard Heydrich]], head of the [[Reich Main Security Office]] (RSHA), convened the [[Wannsee Conference]] on 20 January 1942. This high-level meeting was intended to coordinate anti-Jewish policy.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=84–85}} The majority of Holocaust killings were carried out in 1942, with it being the peak of the genocide, as over 3 million Jews were murdered, with 20 or 25 percent of Holocaust victims dying before early 1942 and the same number surviving by the end of the year.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=202}}{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=99}} |
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The death toll is assumed to be much higher than the official number of 91 dead.<ref name = "Benz 2007 97"/> 30,000 were sent to concentration camps, including [[Dachau]], [[Sachsenhausen concentration camp|Sachsenhausen]], [[Buchenwald]], and [[Oranienburg]],<ref>{{Harvnb|Benz|2007|p=97}} (26,000 to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen); {{Harvnb|Buchholz|1999|p=510}} (Pomeranian Jews to Oranienburg).</ref> where they were kept for several weeks, and released when they could either prove that they were about to emigrate in the near future, or transferred their property to the Nazis.<ref>{{Harvnb|Buchholz|1999|p=510}}.</ref> German Jewry was collectively made responsible for restitution of the material damage of the pogroms, amounting to several hundred thousand [[Reichsmark]]s, and furthermore had to pay an "atonement tax" of more than a billion [[Reichsmark]]s.<ref name = "Benz 2007 97"/> After these pogroms, Jewish emigration from Germany accelerated, while public Jewish life in Germany ceased to exist.<ref name = "Benz 2007 97"/> |
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===Resettlement and deportation=== |
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[[File:StLouisPorthole.jpg|thumb|upright|The 930 [[Jewish refugees]] aboard the MS ''[[MS St. Louis|St. Louis]]'' were refused entry to Cuba, the United States and Canada, and the ship was forced to return to Europe]] |
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Before the war, the Nazis considered mass deportation of German (and subsequently the European) Jewry from Europe. Hitler's agreement to the 1938–9 Schacht Plan, and the continued flight of thousands of Jews from Hitler's clutches for an extended period when the Schacht Plan came to nothing, indicate that the preference for a concerted genocide of the type that came later did not yet exist.<ref>[[#CITEREFBauer1989|Bauer 1989]], p. 7. For details of the original Schacht Plan, see [http://archive.jta.org/article/1938/12/19/2844562/schacht-ransom-plan-seen-doomed-to-failure-opposed-in-britain "Schacht 'ransom' Plan Seen Doomed to Failure; Opposed in Britain"]. ''[[Jewish Telegraphic Agency]]''. 18 December 1938. Retrieved 30 September 2012.</ref> |
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Plans to reclaim former German colonies such as [[Tanganyika]] and [[South West Africa]] for Jewish resettlement were halted by Hitler, who argued that no place where "so much blood of heroic Germans had been spilled" should be made available as a residence for the "worst enemies of the Germans".<ref>{{Harvnb|Brechtken|1998|pp=200–1}}.</ref> Diplomatic efforts were undertaken to convince the other colonial powers, primarily the United Kingdom and France, to accept expelled Jews in their colonies.<ref>{{Harvnb|Brechtken|1998|p=196ff}}.</ref> Areas considered for possible resettlement included British [[Palestine]],<ref name="Brechtken 1998 205">{{Harvnb|Brechtken|1998|p=205}}.</ref> Italian [[Ethiopia|Abyssinia]],<ref name="Brechtken 1998 205"/> British [[Rhodesia]],<ref>{{Harvnb|Poprzeczny|2004|p=150}}.</ref> French [[Madagascar]],<ref name="Brechtken 1998 205"/> and Australia.<ref>{{Harvnb|Brechtken|1998|p=197}}.</ref> |
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Of these areas, [[Madagascar]] was the most seriously discussed. [[Reinhard Heydrich|Heydrich]] called the [[Madagascar Plan]] a "territorial final solution"; it was a remote location, and the island's unfavorable conditions would hasten deaths.<ref>{{Harvnb|Naimark|2001|p=73}}.</ref> Approved by Hitler in 1938, the resettlement planning was carried out by [[Adolf Eichmann|Adolf Eichmann's]] office, only being abandoned once the mass killing of Jews had begun in 1941. In retrospect, although futile, this plan did constitute an important psychological step on the path to the Holocaust.<ref>{{Harvnb|Browning|2004|p=81}}.</ref> The end of the Madagascar Plan was announced on 10 February 1942. The German Foreign Office was given the official explanation that, due to the war with the Soviet Union, Jews were to be "sent to the east".<ref>{{Harvnb|Hildebrand|2005|p=70}}.</ref> |
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Nazi bureaucrats also developed plans to deport Europe's Jews to [[Siberia]].<ref>{{cite web|last=Cesarani|first=David|authorlink=David Cesarani|date=17 February 2011|title=From Persecution to Genocide|url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/genocide/radicalisation_01.shtml|publisher=BBC History|accessdate=25 September 2012}}</ref> Palestine was the only location to which any Nazi relocation plan succeeded in producing significant results, by means of an agreement begun in 1933 between the Zionist Federation of Germany (''die Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland'') and the Nazi government, the [[Haavara Agreement]]. This agreement resulted in the transfer of about 60,000 German Jews and $100 million from Germany to Palestine, up until the outbreak of World War II.<ref>{{Harvnb|Black|2001|p={{page needed|date=November 2012}}}}; {{Harvnb|Nicosia|2000|p={{page needed|date=November 2012}}}}.</ref> |
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===Early measures=== |
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====In German-occupied Poland==== |
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{{main|The Holocaust in Poland}} |
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{{further|Invasion of Poland|Occupation of Poland (1939–45)|History of the Jews in Poland}} |
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[[File:Germany1941.png|thumb|upright=1.5|left|[[Nazi Germany]] 1941, including [[Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany|areas annexed from Poland]] and the [[General Government]] area]] |
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Germany's [[Invasion of Poland (1939)|invasion of Poland]] in September 1939 increased the urgency of the "Jewish Question". Poland, was home to approximately three million Jews ([[Demographic history of Poland|nearly nine percent of the population]]), in [[History of the Jews in Poland|centuries-old communities]], two-thirds of whom fell under Nazi control with Poland's capitulation. |
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[[Reinhard Heydrich]], Reichsprotektor of [[Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia|Bohemia and Moravia]], recommended concentrating all the Polish Jews in [[ghetto]]s in major cities, where they would be put to work for the German war industry. The ghettos would be in cities located on railway junctions in order to furnish, in Heydrich's words, "a better possibility of control and later deportation."<ref>{{Harvnb|Browning|2004|p=111}}.</ref> During his interrogation in 1961, Adolf Eichmann recalled that this "later deportation" actually meant "physical extermination."<ref>{{Harvnb|Cesarani|2005|p=99}}.</ref> |
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{{rquote|right| |
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'''''I ask nothing of the Jews except that they should disappear.|[[Hans Frank]], Nazi governor for occupied Poland.'''''<ref>{{Harvnb|Mann|2005|p=246}}.</ref> |
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}} |
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<!-- Deleted image removed: [[File:GermanPoliceTormentingJew.JPG|thumb|German policemen tormenting a Jew in [[Rzeszów]], Poland]] --> |
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In September, Himmler appointed Heydrich head of the [[RSHA|Reich Main Security Office]] (''Reichssicherheitshauptamt'' or RSHA, not to be confused with the [[RuSHA]]). This organization was made up of seven departments, including the [[Sicherheitsdienst|Security Police]] (SD), and the [[Gestapo]].<ref>{{Harvnb|Lumsden|2002|pp=83, 84}}.</ref> They were to oversee the work of the [[Schutzstaffel|SS]] in occupied Poland, and carry out the policy towards the Jews described in Heydrich's report. The first organized murders of Jews by German forces occurred during [[Operation Tannenberg]] and through ''[[Selbstschutz]]'' units. The Jews were later herded into ghettos, mostly in the [[General Government]] area of central Poland, where they were put to work under the Reich Labor Office headed by [[Fritz Sauckel]]. Here many thousands died from maltreatment, disease, starvation, and exhaustion, but there was still no program of systematic killing. There is little doubt, however, that the Nazis saw forced labor as a form of extermination. The expression ''Vernichtung durch Arbeit'' ("destruction through work") was frequently used. |
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{{further|Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland}} |
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Although it was clear by late 1941 that the SS hierarchy was determined to embark on a policy of killing all the Jews under German control, there was still opposition to this policy within the Nazi regime, although the motive was economic, not humanitarian. [[Hermann Göring]], who had overall control of the German war industry, and the German army's Economics Department, argued that the enormous Jewish labor force assembled in the General Government area (more than a million able-bodied workers), was an asset too valuable to waste, particularly with Germany failing to secure rapid victory of the Soviet Union. |
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====In other occupied countries==== |
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[[File:Nazi Holocaust by bullets - Jewish mass grave near Zolochiv, west Ukraine.jpg|250x250px|thumbnail|right|Jewish mass grave near [[Zolochiv]], west Ukraine (Nazi occupied USSR). Photo was found by Soviets at former Gestapo headquarters in Zolochiv.]] |
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When Germany occupied Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France in 1940, and Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941, antisemitic measures were also introduced into these countries, although the pace and severity varied greatly from country to country according to local political circumstances. Jews were removed from economic and cultural life and were subject to various restrictive laws, but physical deportation did not occur in most places before 1942. The [[Vichy France|Vichy]] regime in occupied France actively collaborated in persecuting French Jews. Germany's allies Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Finland were pressured to introduce antisemitic measures, but for the most part they did not comply until compelled to do so. During the course of the war some 900 Jews and 300 Roma passed through the Banjica concentration camp in Belgrade, intended primarily for Serbian communists, royalists and others who resisted occupation. The German puppet regime in Croatia, on the other hand, began actively persecuting Jews on its own initiative, so the ''Legal Decree on the Nationalization of the Property of Jews and Jewish Companies'' was declared on 10 October 1941 in the Independent State of Croatia. |
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=====In North Africa===== |
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{{see also|The Holocaust in Italian Libya}} |
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Though the vast majority of the Jews affected and killed during Holocaust were of [[Ashkenazi]] descent, [[Sephardi Jews|Sephardi]] and [[Mizrahi Jews|Mizrahi]] Jews suffered greatly as well. |
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In the 1930s, the [[Italian Fascism|Fascist Italian]] regime initiated anti-Semitic laws which barred Jews from government jobs, government schools and required them to stamp "Jewish race" into their passports.<ref name=haaretz>{{cite news|author=Amiram Barkat|title=A new look at Libyan Jewry's Holocaust experience|url=http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/a-new-look-at-libyan-jewry-s-holocaust-experience-1.11501|accessdate=21 September 2013|newspaper=[[Haaretz]]|date=30 April 2003}}</ref> However, this was not enough to deter Jews from [[Libya]], as 25% of the population in [[Tripoli]] was Jewish with over 44 synagogues in existence.<ref name=geoimages>{{cite web|author=Maurice Roumani|title=Aspects of the Holocaust in Libya|url=http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/libyajew/LibyanJews/RoumaniAspects.html|work=[[UC Berkeley]]|accessdate=21 September 2013}}</ref> In 1942, the Jewish Quarter of [[Benghazi]] was occupied by the Nazis and more than 2,000 Jews were deported and sent to Nazi labor camps. By the end of WWII, about one-fifth of those who were sent away had perished.<ref name=yad-vashem>{{cite web|author=Sheryl Ochayon|title=The International School for Holocaust Studies - The Jews of Libya|url=http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/newsletter/25/jews_libya.asp|work=[[Yad Vashem]]|accessdate=21 September 2013}}</ref> Several forced labor camps for Jews were established in Libya, the largest of which, the Giado camp, held almost 2,600 inmates, of whom 562 died of weakness, hunger, and disease. Smaller labor camps were established in [[Gharyan]], Jeren, and Tigrinna.<ref name=yad-vashem/><ref>Daniel Greenfield (April 8, 2013). "[http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-story-of-a-holocaust-survivor-from-benghazi/ The Story of a Holocaust Survivor from Benghazi]". FrontPage Magazine. Retrieved 21 September 2013.</ref> |
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[[Tunisia]], the only North African country to come under direct Nazi occupation, had 100,000 Jews when the Nazis arrived in November 1942. During their six months of occupation, the Nazis imposed anti-Semitic policies in Tunisia, including forcing Jews to wear the Yellow Star, fines, and confiscation of property. Some 5,000 Tunisian Jews were subjected to forced labor, and some were deported to European death camps.<ref>[http://www.timesofisrael.com/holocaust-conference-in-tunisia-commemorates-forced-labor-deportations/ Holocaust conference in Tunisia commemorates forced labor, deportations]</ref> More than 2,500 Tunisian Jews died in slave labor camps during the German occupation.<ref>[http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/world-war-ii-new-research-taints-image-of-desert-fox-rommel-a-484510.html World War II: New Research Taints Image of Desert Fox Rommel]</ref> |
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====General Government and Lublin reservation (Nisko plan)==== |
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{{main|Nisko Plan|General Government}} |
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On 28 September 1939, Germany gained control over the Lublin area through the [[Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact|German-Soviet agreement]] in exchange for [[Lithuania]].<ref>{{Harvnb|Niewyk|Nicosia|2000|p=232}}.</ref> According to the [[Nisko Plan]], they set up the Lublin-Lipowa Reservation in the area. The reservation was designated by Adolf Eichmann, who was assigned the task of removing all Jews from Germany, Austria and the [[Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia]].<ref>{{Harvnb|Cesarani|2005|pp=9, 77–78}}.</ref> They shipped the first Jews to Lublin less than three weeks later on 18 October 1939. The first train loads consisted of Jews deported from Austria and the [[Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia]].<ref>{{Harvnb|Niewyk|Nicosia|2000|p=153}}.</ref> By 30 January 1940, a total of 78,000 Jews had been deported to Lublin from Germany, Austria and [[Czechoslovakia]].<ref>{{Harvnb|Kats|1970|p=35}}.</ref> On 12 and 13 February 1940, the [[History of Pomerania (1933-1945)#Deportation of the Pomeranian Jews|Pomeranian Jews were deported]] to the Lublin reservation, resulting in [[Pomerania Province (1815-1945)|Pomeranian]] [[Gauleiter]] [[Franz Schwede-Coburg]] to be the first to declare his [[Gau (country subdivision)]] ''[[judenrein]]'' ("free of Jews").<ref>Yad ṿa-shem, rashut ha-zikaron la-Shoʾah ṿela-gevurah, ''Yad Vashem studies XXXI'', Yad Vashem Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, 2003, p.322</ref> On 24 March 1940 Göring put the Nisko Plan on hold, and abandoned it entirely by the end of April.<ref>{{Harvnb|Niewyk|Nicosia|2000|p=154}}.</ref> By the time the Nisko Plan was stopped, the total number of Jews who had been transported to Nisko had reached 95,000, many of whom had died from starvation.<ref>Dwork and Jan van Pelt, ''Holocaust: A History'', 208.</ref> |
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In July 1940, due to the difficulties of supporting the increased population in the General Government, Hitler had the deportations temporarily halted.<ref>{{cite book|last=Rubenstein|first=Richard L.|authorlink=Richard L. Rubenstein|author2=Roth, John K. |title=Approaches to Auschwitz|edition=2nd|year=2003|publisher=Westminster John Knox Press|isbn=978-0-664-22353-3|page=164|chapter=War and the Final solution}}</ref> |
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In October 1940, ''Gauleiters'' [[Josef Bürckel]] and [[Robert Heinrich Wagner]] oversaw Operation ''Bürckel'', the expulsion of the Jews into unoccupied France from their ''Gaues'' and the parts of [[Alsace-Lorraine]] that had been annexed that summer to the ''Reich''.<ref name = "Krausnick 1968 57">{{Harvnb|Krausnick|1968|p=57}}.</ref> Only those Jews in [[Anti-miscegenation laws#Nazi Germany|mixed marriages]] were not expelled.<ref name = "Krausnick 1968 57"/> The 6,500 Jews affected by Operation ''Bürckel'' were given at most two hours warning on the night of 22–23 October 1940, before being rounded up. The nine trains carrying the deported Jews crossed over into France "without any warning to the French authorities", who were not happy with receiving them.<ref name = "Krausnick 1968 57"/> The deportees had not been allowed to take any of their possessions with them, these being confiscated by the German authorities.<ref name = "Krausnick 1968 57"/> The German Foreign Minister [[Joachim von Ribbentrop]] treated the ensuing complaints by the Vichy government over the expulsions in a "most dilatory fashion".<ref name = "Krausnick 1968 57"/> As a result, the Jews expelled in Operation ''Bürckel'' were interned in harsh conditions by the Vichy authorities at the camps in [[Gurs internment camp|Gurs]], [[Camp de Rivesaltes|Rivesaltes]] and [[Camp des Milles|Les Milles]] while awaiting a chance to return them to Germany.<ref name = "Krausnick 1968 57"/> |
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During 1940 and 1941, the murder of large numbers of Jews in German-occupied Poland continued, and the deportation of Jews to the General Government was undertaken. The deportation of Jews from Germany, particularly Berlin, was not officially completed until 1943. (Many Berlin Jews were able to survive in hiding.) By December 1939, 3.5 million Jews were crowded into the General Government area. |
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===Concentration and labor camps (1933–1945)=== |
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{{further|Nazi concentration camps|List of Nazi concentration camps|Extermination through labor}} |
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[[File:Rows of bodies of dead inmates fill the yard of Lager Nordhausen, a Gestapo concentration camp.jpg|thumb|left|12 April 1945: [[Mittelbau-Dora|Lager Nordhausen]], where 20,000 inmates are believed to have died]] |
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From the beginning of the Third Reich concentration camps were founded, initially as places of incarceration. Although the death rate in the concentration camps was high, with a mortality rate of 50%, they were not designed to be killing centers. (By 1942, six large extermination camps had been established in Nazi-occupied Poland, which were built solely for mass killings.) After 1939, the camps increasingly became places where Jews and [[POW]]s were either killed or made to work as slave laborers, undernourished and tortured.<ref>{{Harvnb|Harran|2000|p=[http://www.holocaustchronicle.org/index.html 321]}}.</ref> It is estimated that the Germans established 15,000 camps and subcamps in the occupied countries, mostly in eastern Europe.<ref>[https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/cclist.html "Concentration Camp Listing"], Jewish Virtual Library.</ref><ref>[http://www.jewishgen.org/ForgottenCamps/ "The Forgotten Camps"].</ref> New camps were founded in areas with large Jewish, Polish intelligentsia, communist, or Roma and Sinti populations, including inside Germany. The transportation of prisoners was often carried out under horrifying conditions using rail freight cars, in which many died before reaching their destination. |
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[[Extermination through labour|Extermination through labor]] was a policy of systematic extermination – camp inmates would literally be worked to death, or worked to physical exhaustion, when they would be gassed or shot.<ref>{{Harvnb|Bloxham|2000|pp=1–37}}; {{Harvnb|Longerich|2010|pp=314–320}}.</ref> Slave labour was used in war production, for example producing [[V-2]] rockets at [[Mittelbau-Dora]], and various armaments around the [[Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp]] complex. |
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Upon admission, some camps [[Identification in Nazi camps|tattooed prisoners]] with a prisoner ID.<ref>{{Harvnb|Harran|2000|p=[http://www.holocaustchronicle.org/index.html 461]}}.</ref> Those fit for work were dispatched for 12 to 14-hour shifts. Before and after, there were roll calls that could sometimes last for hours, with prisoners regularly dying of exposure.<ref name=NormalDay>{{cite web|url=http://www.jewishgen.org/ForgottenCamps/Camps/DayEng.html|title="Just a Normal Day in the Camps", JewishGen, {{nowrap|6 January 2007}}|publisher=Jewishgen.org|date=30 March 1999|accessdate=31 July 2010}}</ref> |
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===Ghettos (1940–1945)=== |
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{{main|Ghettos in occupied Europe 1939-1944|List of Nazi-era ghettos}} |
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:''Main ghettos: [[Białystok Ghetto|Białystok]], [[Budapest Ghetto|Budapest]], [[Kraków Ghetto|Kraków]], [[Kovno Ghetto|Kovno]], [[Łódź Ghetto|Łódź]], [[Lvov Ghetto|Lvov]], [[Riga Ghetto|Riga]], [[Vilna Ghetto|Vilna]], [[Warsaw Ghetto|Warsaw]]'' |
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[[File:Childwarsawghetto.jpg|thumb|A child lying in the streets of the [[Warsaw Ghetto]]]] |
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After the invasion of Poland, the Nazis established ghettos in the incorporated territories and General Government in which Jews were confined. These were initially seen as temporary, until the Jews were deported out of Europe; as it turned out, such deportation never took place, with the ghettos' inhabitants instead being sent to extermination camps. The Germans ordered that each ghetto be run by a ''[[Judenrat]]'' (Jewish council) consisting of Jewish community leaders, with the first order for the establishment of such councils contained in a letter dated 29 September 1939 from Heydrich to the heads of the ''Einsatzgruppen''.<ref>{{Harvnb|Trunk|1996|pp=1–6}}.</ref> The ghettos were formed and closed off from the outside world at different times and for different reasons.<ref>{{Harvnb|Browning|1986|pp=345–8}}; {{Harvnb|Hilberg|2003|pp=216–7}}.<br>One reads that the Łódź ghetto was closed in April 1940 to force the Jews inside to give up money and valuables they did not actually have; that the Warsaw ghetto was closed for health considerations (of people outside, not inside, the ghetto); but that the Lublin ghetto was not established until April 1941.</ref> The councils were responsible for the day-to-day running of the ghetto, including the distribution of food, water, heat, medical care, and shelter. The Germans also mandated them to undertake confiscations, organize forced labor, and, finally, facilitate deportations to extermination camps.<ref>{{Harvnb|Hilberg|1980|p=104}}; {{Harvnb|Hilberg|1995|p=106}}.</ref> The councils' basic strategy was one of trying to minimise losses, largely by cooperating with Nazi authorities (or their surrogates), accepting the increasingly terrible treatment, bribery, and petitioning for better conditions and clemency.<ref>{{Harvnb|Hilberg|1995|p=170}}.</ref> Overall, to try and mitigate still worse cruelty and death, "the councils offered words, money, labor, and finally lives."<ref>{{Harvnb|Hilberg|1980|p=103}}.</ref> |
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The ultimate test of each ''Judenrat'' was the demand to compile lists of names of deportees to be murdered. Though the predominant pattern was compliance with even this final task,<ref>{{Harvnb|Hilberg|1980|p=104}}.</ref> some council leaders insisted that not a single individual should be handed over who had not committed a [[capital crime]]. Leaders such as Joseph Parnas in [[Lviv]], who refused to compile a list, were shot. On 14 October 1942, the entire council of Byaroza committed suicide rather than cooperate with the deportations.<ref>{{Harvnb|Berenbaum|2005|pp=81–3}}.</ref> [[Adam Czerniaków]] in Warsaw killed himself on 23 July 1942 when he could take no more as the final liquidation of the ghetto got under way.<ref>{{Harvnb|Hilberg|1995|p=117}}; {{Harvnb|Lichten|1984|p=71}}.</ref> Others, like [[Chaim Rumkowski]], who became the "dedicated autocrat" of Łódź,<ref>{{Harvnb|Hilberg|1995|p=109}}.</ref> argued that their responsibility was to save the Jews who ''could'' be saved, and that therefore others had to be sacrificed. |
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The importance of the councils in facilitating the persecution and murder of ghetto inhabitants was not lost on the Germans: one official was emphatic that "the authority of the Jewish council be upheld and strengthened under all circumstances",<ref>{{Harvnb|Hilberg|2003|p=1111}}.</ref> another that "Jews who disobey instructions of the Jewish council are to be treated as saboteurs."<ref name="Hilberg 1995 106">{{Harvnb|Hilberg|1995|p=106}}.</ref> When such cooperation crumbled, as happened in the Warsaw ghetto after the Jewish Combat Organisation displaced the council's authority, the Germans lost control.<ref>{{Harvnb|Snyder|2010|p=285}}.</ref> |
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The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest, with 380,000 people; the Łódź Ghetto was second, holding 160,000. They were, in effect, immensely crowded prisons, described by Michael Berenbaum as instruments of "slow, passive murder."<ref name = "Berenbaum 2005 114">{{Harvnb|Berenbaum|2005|p=114}}.</ref> Though the Warsaw Ghetto contained 30% of the population of the Polish capital, it occupied only 2.4% of the city's area, averaging 9.2 people per room.<ref name=USHMMDeportationsWarsaw>[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005413 "Deportations to and from the Warsaw Ghetto"]. ''Holocaust Encyclopedia''. [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]]. Retrieved 27 September 2012.</ref> |
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Between 1940 and 1942, starvation and disease, especially [[typhoid fever|typhoid]], killed hundreds of thousands. Over 43,000 residents of the Warsaw ghetto died there in 1941,<ref name=USHMMDeportationsWarsaw/> more than one in ten; in [[Theresienstadt]], more than half the residents died in 1942.<ref name = "Berenbaum 2005 114"/> |
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{{quote|The Germans came, the police, and they started banging houses: "Raus, raus, raus, Juden raus." ... [O]ne baby started to cry ... The other baby started crying. So the mother urinated in her hand and gave the baby a drink to keep quiet ... [When the police had gone], I told the mothers to come out. And one baby was dead ... from fear, the mother [had] choked her own baby. |Abraham Malik, describing his experience in the [[Kovno Ghetto]]<ref>{{Harvnb|Berenbaum|2005|pp=115–6}}.</ref>}} |
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Himmler ordered the start of the deportations on 19 July 1942, and three days later, on 22 July, the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto began; over the next 52 days, until 12 September 300,000 people from Warsaw alone were [[Holocaust trains|transported in freight trains]] to the [[Treblinka extermination camp]]. Many other ghettos were completely depopulated. |
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{{further|Timeline of Treblinka}} |
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The first [[ghetto uprising]] occurred in September 1942 in the small town of [[Lakhva|Łachwa]] in south-east Poland. Although there were armed resistance attempts in the larger ghettos in 1943, such as the [[Warsaw Ghetto Uprising]] and the [[Białystok Ghetto Uprising]], in every case they failed against the overwhelming Nazi military force, and the remaining Jews were either killed or deported to the death camps.<ref>{{Harvnb|Berenbaum|2005|p=116}}.</ref> |
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===Pogroms (1939–1942)=== |
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{{main|Pogrom|Dorohoi Pogrom|Iaşi pogrom|Jedwabne Massacre|Legionnaires' Rebellion and Bucharest Pogrom|History of Lviv#Lviv pogroms and the Holocaust|Odessa massacre}} |
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A number of deadly [[pogrom]]s by local populations occurred during the Second World War, some with Nazi encouragement, and some spontaneously. This included the [[Iaşi pogrom]] in Romania on 30 June 1941, in which as many as 14,000 Jews were killed by Romanian residents and police, and the [[Jedwabne massacre|Jedwabne pogrom]] of July 1941, in which 300 Jews were locked in a barn set on fire by the local Poles in the presence of Nazi ''[[Ordnungspolizei#Police Battalions|Ordnungspolizei]]'', which was preceded by the execution of 40 Jewish men at the same location by the Germans. – Such were the final finding of the official investigation conducted in 2000–2003 by the [[Institute of National Remembrance]], confirmed by the number of victims in the two graves examined by the archeological and anthropological team participating in the exhumation. Earlier higher estimates based on hearsay were disproved.<ref name="Buffalo">Public Prosecutor Radosław J. Ignatiew (9 July 2002), [http://info-poland.buffalo.edu/classroom/J/final.html Jedwabne: Final Findings of Poland's Institute of National Memory.] ''Polish Academic Information Center'', University of Buffalo.</ref><ref name="ipn.gov.pl4643">[http://ipn.gov.pl/wydzial-prasowy/komunikaty/komunikat-dot.-postanowienia-o-umorzeniu-sledztwa-w-sprawie-zabojstwa-obywateli "Komunikat dot. postanowienia o umorzeniu śledztwa w sprawie zabójstwa obywateli polskich narodowości żydowskiej w Jedwabnem w dniu 10 lipca 1941 r."] Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, ul. Towarowa 28, 00-839 Warszawa. {{pl icon}}</ref><ref name="gov">IPN Communiqué. Final findings. [https://web.archive.org/web/20121114125013/http://www.ipn.gov.pl/ftp/pdf/jedwabne_postanowienie.pdf Postanowienie o umorzeniu sledztwa.] [[Institute of National Remembrance]], 30 June 2001. PDF file, direct download 25.4 MB. {{pl icon}}</ref><ref name="memorial stone">The inscription on the memorial stone raised in the place of the barn at Jedwabne read: "Place of torture and execution of the Jewish population. The Gestapo and Nazi gendarmerie burned 1,600 people alive on 10 July 1941." ({{lang-pl|Miejsce kaźni ludności żydowskiej. Gestapo i żandarmeria hitlerowska spaliła żywcem 1600 osób 10.VII.1941.}}). In 2001 the stone was removed and deposited in the Polish Army Museum in [[Białystok]] because it did not present the confirmed number of dead.</ref><ref>{{cite book |author=Gross, Jan Tomasz |title=Neighbors: the destruction of the Jewish community in Jedwabne, Poland |publisher=Princeton University Press |location=Princeton, N.J |year=2001 |pages= |isbn=0-691-08667-2 |oclc= |doi= |accessdate=}}p.7</ref> |
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===Death squads (1941–1943)=== |
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{{main|The Holocaust in Ukraine|The Holocaust in Lithuania|The Holocaust in Latvia|The Holocaust in Estonia|The Holocaust in Belarus|The Holocaust in Russia|Einsatzgruppen|Mass graves in the Soviet Union|War crimes of the Wehrmacht}} |
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{{See also|Babi Yar|Rumbula massacre|Kamianets-Podilskyi Massacre|Ponary massacre}} |
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The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 opened a new phase. The Holocaust intensified after the Nazis occupied Lithuania, where close to 80% of the country's 220,000 [[Lithuanian Jews|Jews]] were [[Holocaust in Lithuania|exterminated]] before the end of the year.<ref>{{Harvnb|Kwiet|1998|p=4}}; {{Harvnb|Porat|2002|p=161}}.</ref> The Soviet territories occupied by early 1942, including all of Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and [[Moldova]] and most Russian territory west of the line [[Leningrad]]-Moscow-[[Rostov]], contained about three million Jews at the start of the war. Hundreds of thousands had fled Poland in 1939. |
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[[File:Kiev Jew Killings in Ivangorod (1942).jpg|thumb|left|Executions of Kiev Jews by German army mobile killing units (''Einsatzgruppen'') near [[Ivanhorod (Ukraine)|Ivanhorod]] in Ukraine. The photo was mailed from the [[Eastern Front (World War II)|Eastern Front]] to Germany and intercepted by a member of [[Polish resistance movement in World War II|the Polish resistance]]]] |
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Members of the local populations in certain occupied Soviet territories participated actively in the killings of Jews and others.<ref name = "Matthäus 2004 268_276">{{Harvnb|Matthäus|2004|pp=268–276}}.</ref> Ultimately it was the Germans who organized and channelled these local participants in the Holocaust.<ref name = "Matthäus 2004 268_276"/> In Lithuania, Latvia and western Ukraine; locals were deeply involved in the murder of Jews from the very beginning of the German occupation.<ref name = "Matthäus 2004 268_276"/> The Latvian [[Arajs Kommando]] was an example of an auxiliary unit involved in these killings.<ref name = "Matthäus 2004 268_276"/> In addition, Latvian and Lithuanian units left their own countries, and committed the murders of Jews in Belarus. To the south, Ukrainians killed approximately 24,000 Jews.<ref name = "Matthäus 2004 268_276"/> Ukrainians went to Poland, where they served as concentration and death camp guards.<ref name = "Matthäus 2004 268_276"/> [[Ustaše militia]] in Croatian areas also carried out acts of persecution and murder. |
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[[File:Einsatzgruppe A.jpg|thumb|right|''[[Einsatzkommando#Einsatzgruppe A|Einsatzgruppe]]'' A; members execute Jews on the outskirts of Kovno, 1941-1942]] |
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Many of the mass killings were carried out in public, a change from previous practice.<ref name = "Matthäus 2004 268_276"/> German witnesses to these killings emphasized the participation of the locals.<ref name = "Matthäus 2004 268_276"/> |
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Germany usually justified the massacres committed by the ''Einsatzgruppen'' on the grounds of anti-partisan or anti-bandit operations, but the German historian [[Andreas Hillgruber]] wrote that this was merely an excuse for the German Army's considerable involvement in the Holocaust in Russia. He wrote in 1989 that the terms "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" were indeed correct labels for what happened.<ref>Hillgruber, Andreas "War in the East and the Extermination of the Jews," pp. 85–114 from ''The Nazi Holocaust Part 3, The "Final Solution": The Implementation of Mass Murder Volume 1'' edited by Michael Marrus, Mecler: Westpoint, CT 1989 pp. 102–103.</ref> Hillgruber maintained that the slaughter of about 2.2 million defenseless men, women and children for the reasons of racist ideology cannot possibly be justified for any reason, and that those German generals who claimed that the ''Einsatzgruppen'' were a necessary anti-partisan response were lying.<ref>Hillgruber (1989), "War in the East and Extermination of the Jews," p. 103.</ref> |
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Army co-operation with the SS in anti-partisan and anti-Jewish operations was close and intensive.<ref name = "Förster 1998 276">{{Harvnb|Förster|1998|p=276}}.</ref> In mid-1941, the [[SS Cavalry Brigade]] commanded by [[Hermann Fegelein]], during the course of "anti-partisan" [[Pripyat swamps (punitive operation)|operations]] in the [[Pripyat Marshes]], killed 699 Red Army soldiers, 1,100 partisans and 14,178 Jews.<ref name = "Förster 1998 276"/> Before the operation, Fegelein had been ordered to shoot all adult Jews while driving the women and children into the marshes. After the operation, General Max von Schenckendorff, who commanded the rear areas of [[Army Group Centre|Army Group Center]], ordered on 10 August 1941 that all ''Wehrmacht'' [[Security Division (Germany)|security divisions]] when on anti-partisan duty should emulate Fegelein's example, and organized between 24–26 September 1941 in [[Mogilev]] a joint SS-''Wehrmacht'' seminar on how best to kill Jews.<ref name = "Förster 1998 276"/> The seminar ended with the 7th Company of Police Battalion 322 shooting 32 Jews at a village called Knjashizy before the assembled officers, as an example of how to "screen" the population for partisans.<ref name = "Förster 1998 277">{{Harvnb|Förster|1998|p=277}}.</ref> |
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As the war diary of the Battalion 322 read: |
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{{quote|The action, first scheduled as a training exercise, was carried out under real-life conditions (''ernstfallmässig'') in the village itself. Strangers, especially partisans could not be found. The screening of the population, however resulted in 13 Jews, 27 Jewish women and 11 Jewish children, of which 13 Jews and 19 Jewish women were shot in co-operation with the Security Service<ref name = "Förster 1998 277"/>}} |
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Based on what they had learned during the Mogilev seminar, one ''Wehrmacht'' officer told his men, "Where the partisan is, there is the Jew and where the Jew is, there is the partisan".<ref name = "Förster 1998 277"/> |
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In Order No. 24 24 November 1941, the commander of the 707th division declared: |
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{{quote|''Jews and Gypsies'':...As already has been ordered, the Jews have to vanish from the flat country and the Gypsies have to be annihilated too. The carrying out of ''larger'' Jewish actions is not the task of the divisional units. They are carried out by civilian or police authorities, if necessary ordered by the commandant of White Ruthenia, if he has special units at his disposal, or for security reasons and in the case of collective punishments. When smaller or larger groups of Jews are met in the flat country, they can be liquidated by divisional units or be massed in the ghettos near bigger villages designated for that purpose, where they can be handed over to the civilian authority or the SD.<ref>{{Harvnb|Förster|1998|p=278}}.</ref>}} |
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The German historian Jürgen Förster, a leading expert on the subject of ''Wehrmacht'' war crimes argued that they (the ''Wehrmacht'') played a key role in the Holocaust. He said it is wrong to describe the ''Shoah'' as solely the work of the SS with the ''Wehrmacht'' as a passive and disapproving bystander.<ref>{{Harvnb|Förster|1998|p=280}}.</ref> |
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[[File:Liepaja December 1941 massacres 01.jpeg|thumb|The [[Liepāja massacres|mass murder of 2,749 Jews on the beach near the city of Liepāja]], in [[Latvia]], on 15–17 December 1941]] |
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[[Raul Hilberg]] writes that the German ''Einsatzgruppen'' commanders were ordinary citizens: the great majority were professionals, most were intellectuals, and they brought to bear all their skills and training in becoming efficient killers.<ref>{{Harvnb|Hilberg|2003|p=291}}.</ref> |
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The large-scale killings of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories was assigned to SS formations called ''[[Einsatzgruppen]]'' ("task groups"), under the overall command of Heydrich. These had been used to a limited extent in Poland in 1939, but were organized in the Soviet territories on a much larger scale. ''Einsatzgruppe'' A was assigned to the Baltic area, ''Einsatzgruppe'' B to Belarus, ''Einsatzgruppe'' C to north and central Ukraine, and ''Einsatzgruppe'' D to Moldova, south Ukraine, [[Crimea]], and, during 1942, the north [[Caucasus]].<ref>{{Harvnb|Browning|2004|p=225}}.</ref> |
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According to [[Otto Ohlendorf]] at [[Einsatzgruppen Trial|his trial]], "the ''Einsatzgruppen'' had the mission to protect the rear of the troops by killing the Jews, Gypsies, Communist functionaries, active Communists, and all persons who would endanger the security." In practice, their victims were nearly all defenseless Jewish civilians (not a single ''Einsatzgruppe'' member was killed in action during these operations). By December 1941, the four ''Einsatzgruppen'' listed above had killed, respectively, 125,000, 45,000, 75,000, and 55,000 people—a total of 300,000 people—mainly by shooting or with hand grenades at mass killing sites outside the major towns. |
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The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum provides the account of one survivor of the ''Einsatzgruppen'' in [[Piryatin]], Ukraine, when the Germans killed 1,600 Jews on 6 April 1942, the second day of [[Passover]]: |
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{{quote|I saw them do the killing. At 5:00 pm they gave the command, "Fill in the pits." Screams and groans were coming from the pits. Suddenly I saw my neighbor Ruderman rise from under the soil ... His eyes were bloody and he was screaming: "Finish me off!" ... A murdered woman lay at my feet. A boy of five years crawled out from under her body and began to scream desperately. "Mommy!" That was all I saw, since I fell unconscious.<ref>{{Harvnb|Berenbaum|2005|p=93}}.</ref> |
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}} |
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[[File:EG A Šiauliai Lithuania July 1941.JPG|thumb|Men forced to dig their own graves by ''Einsatzgruppe'' troops, [[Šiauliai Ghetto|Šiauliai]], July 1941]] |
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The most notorious massacre of Jews in the Soviet Union was at a ravine called [[Babi Yar]] outside [[Kiev]], where 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation on 29–30 September 1941.<ref>{{Harvnb|Evans|2008|pp=226–7}}.</ref> The decision to kill all the Jews in Kiev was made by the military governor (Major-General [[Friedrich-Georg Eberhardt|Friedrich Eberhardt]]), the Police Commander for [[Army Group South]] (SS-''Obergruppenführer'' [[Friedrich Jeckeln]]), and the ''Einsatzgruppe'' C Commander [[Otto Rasch]]. A mixture of SS, SD and Security Police, assisted by Ukrainian police, carried out the killings. Although they did not participate in the killings, men of the [[6th Army (Wehrmacht)|6th Army]] played a key role in rounding up the Jews of Kiev and transporting them to be shot at Babi Yar.<ref>{{Harvnb|Murray|Millett|2000|p=141}}.</ref> |
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On Monday, the Jews of Kiev as ordered gathered by the cemetery, expecting to be loaded onto trains. The crowd was large enough that most of the men, women, and children could not have known what was happening until it was too late; by the time they heard the machine gun fire, there was no chance to escape. All were driven down a corridor of soldiers, in groups of ten, and then shot. A truck driver described the scene, as: |
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{{quote|one after the other, they had to remove their luggage, then their coats, shoes, and outer garments and also underwear ... Once undressed, they were led into the ravine which was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep ... When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the ''Schutzpolizei'' and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot ... The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a [[submachine gun]] ... I saw these marksmen stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other ... The marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew, who had meanwhile lain down, and shoot him.<ref>{{Harvnb|Berenbaum|2005|pp=97–98}}.</ref>}} |
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[[File:Obersalzberg meeting - May 1939.png|thumb|From left to right; [[Heinrich Himmler]], [[Reinhard Heydrich]], and [[Karl Wolff]] (second from the right) at the [[Berghof (Hitler)|Obersalzberg]], May 1939. Wolff wrote in his diary that Himmler had vomited after witnessing the mass shooting of 100 Jews.<ref>Isaacs, Jeremy (23 November 2006). [http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/nov/23/obituaries.mainsection "Obituary: Susan McConachy"]. ''[[The Guardian]]''. Retrieved 25 September 2012.</ref>]] |
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In August 1941 Himmler travelled to [[Minsk]], where he personally witnessed 100 Jews being shot in a ditch outside the town, an event described by [[Karl Wolff]] in his diary: "Himmler's face was green. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his cheek where a piece of brain had squirted up onto it. Then he vomited." After recovering his composure, Himmler lectured the SS men on the need to follow the "highest moral law of the Party" in carrying out their tasks.<ref>{{Harvnb|Gilbert|1986|p=191}}.</ref> |
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===New methods of mass murder=== |
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Starting in December 1939, the Nazis introduced new methods of mass murder by using gas.<ref name = "Benz 2007 98">{{Harvnb|Benz|2007|p=98}}.</ref> First, experimental [[gas van]]s equipped with gas cylinders and a sealed trunk compartment, were used to kill mental care clients of [[sanatoria]] in [[Pomerania Province (1815-1945)|Pomerania]], [[East Prussia]], and [[Occupation of Poland (1939–1945)|occupied Poland]], as part of an operation termed [[Action T4]].<ref name = "Benz 2007 98"/> In the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, larger vans holding up to 100 people were used from November 1941, using the engine's exhaust rather than a cylinder.<ref name = "Benz 2007 98"/> These vans were introduced to the [[Chełmno extermination camp]] in December 1941, and another 15 of them were used by the Einsatzgruppen in the [[Eastern Front (World War II)|occupied Soviet Union]].<ref name = "Benz 2007 98"/> These gas vans were developed and run under supervision of the SS-''Reichssicherheitshauptamt'' (Reich Main Security Office) and were used to kill about 500,000 people, primarily Jews but also Romani and others.<ref name = "Benz 2007 98"/> The vans were carefully monitored and after a month of observation a report stated that "ninety seven thousand have been processed using three vans, without any defects showing up in the machines".<ref>{{Harvnb|Kogon|Langbein|Rueckerl|1993|p={{page needed|date=November 2012}}}}.</ref> |
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A need for new mass murder techniques was also expressed by [[Hans Frank]], governor of the General Government, who noted that this many people could not be simply shot. "We shall have to take steps, however, designed in some way to eliminate them." It was this problem which led the SS to experiment with large-scale killings using poison gas. [[Christian Wirth]] seems to have been the inventor of the gas chamber. |
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{{clear}} |
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===Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution (1942–1945)=== |
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{{further|Operation Reinhard|Wannsee Conference|Final Solution}} |
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[[File:Wannsee-room.jpg|thumb|The dining room of the Wannsee villa, where the [[Wannsee conference]] took place. The 15 men seated at the table on 20 January 1942 to discuss the "[[final solution of the Jewish question]]"<ref name=Heydrichletter>[http://www.ghwk.de/engl/february-26-1942.htm Letter from Reinhard Heydrich to Martin Luther], Foreign Office, February 26, 1942, regarding the minutes of the [[Wannsee Conference]].</ref> were considered the best and the brightest in the Reich.<ref>{{Harvnb|Berenbaum|2005|pp=101–2}}.</ref>]] |
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[[File:Wannsee Conference - List of Jews in European countries.JPG|thumb|Facsimiles of the minutes of the [[Wannsee Conference]]. This page lists the number of Jews in every European country]] |
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[[File:Arbeit-auschwitz04.jpg|thumb|[[Auschwitz#Auschwitz I|Auschwitz I]]]] |
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[[File:Rail leading to Auschwitz II (Birkenau).jpg|thumb|The railway line leading to the death camp at [[Auschwitz#Auschwitz II (Birkenau)|Auschwitz II (Birkenau)]]]] |
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[[File:Holocaust-gas-hair.jpg|thumb|Empty poison gas canisters used to kill inmates, along with piles of hair shaven from their heads, are stored in the museum at [[Auschwitz#Auschwitz II (Birkenau)|Auschwitz II]]]] |
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[[File:Ruin of the gas chamber of Crematorium II.jpg|thumb|The ruins of the Crematorium II gas chamber at [[Auschwitz#Auschwitz II (Birkenau)|Auschwitz II (Birkenau)]]. Holocaust scholar [[Robert Jan van Pelt]] comments that more people lost their lives in this room than in any other room on Earth: 500,000 people.<ref name=morris>{{cite web |last= Morris |first= Errol |date= 12 May 1999 |title= Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. |url= http://www.errolmorris.com/film/mrd_transcript.html |publisher= Fourth Floor Productions |accessdate= 25 September 2012}}</ref>]] |
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[[File:Hoefletelegram.jpg|left|thumb|The Nazis methodically tracked the progress of the Holocaust in thousands of reports and documents. Pictured is the [[Höfle Telegram]] sent to Adolf Eichmann in January 1943, that reported that 1,274,166 Jews had been killed in the four [[Aktion Reinhard]] camps during 1942]] |
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The [[Wannsee Conference]] was convened by [[Reinhard Heydrich]] on 20 January 1942 in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee and brought together some 15 Nazi leaders which included a number of state secretaries, senior officials, party leaders, SS officers and other leaders of government departments who were responsible for policies which were linked to Jewish issues. The initial purpose of the meeting was to discuss plans for a comprehensive solution to the "Jewish question in Europe." Heydrich intended to "outline the mass murders in the various occupied territories . . . as part of a solution to the European Jewish question ordered by Hitler . . . to ensure that they, and especially the ministerial bureaucracy, would share both knowledge and responsibility for this policy."<ref>{{Harvnb|Longerich|2010|p=305}}.</ref> |
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[[File:WannseeList.jpg|120px|thumbnail|left|List of Jewish populations by country used at the Wannsee Conference in 1942]] |
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A copy of the minutes which were drawn up by Eichmann has survived, but on Heydrich's instructions, they were written up in "euphemistic language." Thus the exact words used at the meeting are not known.<ref>{{Harvnb|Longerich|2010|p=306}}.</ref> However, Heydrich addressed the meeting indicating the policy of emigration was superseded by a policy of evacuating Jews to the east. This was seen to be only a temporary solution leading up to a final solution which would involve some 11 million Jews living not only in territories controlled then by the Germans, but to major countries in the rest of the world including the UK, and the US.<ref>{{Harvnb|Longerich|2010|p=307}}.</ref> There was little doubt what the solution was: "Heydrich also made it clear what was understood by the phrase 'Final Solution': the Jews were to be annihilated by a combination of forced labour and mass murder."<ref>{{Harvnb|Longerich|2010|p=308}}.</ref> |
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The officials were told there were 2.3 million Jews in the General Government, 850,000 in Hungary, 1.1 million in the other occupied countries, and up to five million in the USSR, although two million of these were in areas still under Soviet control – a total of about 6.5 million. These would all be transported by train to [[extermination camp]]s (''Vernichtungslager'') in Poland, where almost all of them would be gassed at once. In some camps, such as Auschwitz, those fit for work would be kept alive for a while, but eventually all would be killed. Göring's representative, Dr. [[Erich Neumann (politician)|Erich Neumann]], gained a limited exemption for some classes of industrial workers.<ref>{{Harvnb|Cesarani|2005|pp=113–114}}.</ref> |
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===Reaction=== |
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====German public==== |
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In his 1983 book, ''Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich'', [[Ian Kershaw]] examined the ''[[Alltagsgeschichte]]'' (history of everyday life) in Bavaria during the Nazi period.<ref>{{Harvnb|Marrus|2000|p=89}}.</ref> Describing the attitudes of most Bavarians, Kershaw argued that the most common viewpoint was indifference towards what was happening to the Jews.<ref name = "Marrus 2000 89_90">{{Harvnb|Marrus|2000|pp=89–90}}.</ref> Kershaw argued that most Bavarians were vaguely aware of the ''Shoah'', but were vastly more concerned about the war than about the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".<ref name = "Marrus 2000 89_90"/> Kershaw made the analogy that "the road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference".<ref>{{Harvnb|Evans|1989|p=71}}; {{Harvnb|Marrus|2000|p=91}}.</ref> |
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Kershaw's assessment that most Bavarians, and by implication most Germans, were indifferent to the ''Shoah'' faced criticism from the Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka, an expert on public opinion in Nazi Germany, and the Canadian historian Michael Kater. Kater maintained that Kershaw downplayed the extent of popular antisemitism, and that though admitting that most of the "spontaneous" antisemitic actions of Nazi Germany were staged, argued that because these actions involved substantial numbers of Germans, it is wrong to see the extreme antisemitism of the Nazis as coming solely from above.<ref name = "Marrus 2000 92">{{Harvnb|Marrus|2000|p=92}}.</ref> Kulka argued that most Germans were more antisemitic than Kershaw portrayed them in ''Popular Opinion and Political Dissent'', and that rather than "indifference", "passive complicity" would be a better term to describe the reaction of the German people.<ref>{{Harvnb|Marrus|2000|p=93}}.</ref> |
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In a study focusing only on the views about Jews or Germans opposed to the Nazi regime, the German historian Christof Dipper in his 1983 essay "''Der Deutsche Widerstand und die Juden''" (translated into English as "The German Resistance and the Jews" in ''Yad Vashem Studies'', Volume 16, 1984) argued that the majority of the anti-Nazi national-conservatives were antisemitic.<ref name = "Marrus 2000 92"/> Dipper wrote that for the majority of the national-conservatives "the bureaucratic, pseudo-legal deprivation of the Jews practiced until 1938 was still considered acceptable".<ref name = "Marrus 2000 92"/> Though Dipper noted no one in the [[German resistance]] supported the Holocaust, he also commented that the national-conservatives did not intend to restore civil rights to the Jews after the planned overthrow of Hitler.<ref name = "Marrus 2000 92"/> Dipper went on to argue that, based on such views held by opponents of the regime, "a large part of the German people ... believed that a "Jewish Question" existed and had to be solved ...".<ref name = "Marrus 2000 92"/> |
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A study conducted in 2012 established that in Berlin alone there were 3,000 camps of various functions, another 1,300 were in Hamburg and its co-researcher concluded that it is unlikely that the German population could avoid knowing about the persecution considering such prevalence.<ref name=NYT030113 /> [[Robert Gellately]] has argued that the German civilian population were, by and large, aware of what was happening. According to Gellately, the government openly announced the conspiracy through the media and civilians were aware of its every aspect except for the use of gas chambers.<ref>Ezard, John (17 February 2001). [http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2001/feb/17/johnezard "Germans knew of Holocaust horror about death camps"]. ''[[The Guardian]]''. Retrieved 23 September 2012.</ref> In contrast, some historical evidence indicates that the vast majority of Holocaust victims, prior to their deportation to concentration camps, were either unaware of the fate that awaited them or were in denial; they honestly believed that they were to be resettled.<ref>{{Harvnb|Lower|2006|p=245}}; {{Harvnb|Niewyk|Nicosia|2000|p=26}}; {{Harvnb|Yahil|1991|p=257}}.</ref> |
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====International==== |
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{{Main|International response to the Holocaust}} |
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===Motivation=== |
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In his 1965 essay "Command and Compliance", which originated in his work as an expert witness for the prosecution at the [[Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials]], the German historian Hans Buchheim wrote there was no coercion to murder Jews and others, and all who committed such actions did so out of free will.<ref name = "Buchheim 1968 372_373">{{Harvnb|Buchheim|1968|pp=372–373}}.</ref> Buchheim wrote that chances to avoid executing criminal orders "...were both more numerous and more real than those concerned are generally prepared to admit...",<ref name = "Buchheim 1968 372_373"/> and that he found no evidence that SS men who refused to carry out criminal orders were sent to concentration camps or executed.<ref>{{Harvnb|Buchheim|1968|p=381}}.</ref> Moreover, SS rules prohibited acts of gratuitous sadism, as Himmler wished for his men to remain "decent", and that acts of sadism were taken on the individual initiative of those who were either especially cruel or who wished to prove themselves ardent National Socialists.<ref name = "Buchheim 1968 372_373"/> Finally, he argued that those of a non-criminal bent who committed crimes did so because they wished to conform to the values of the group they had joined and were afraid of being branded "weak" by their colleagues if they refused.<ref>{{Harvnb|Buchheim|1968|pp=386–7}}.</ref> |
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In his 1992 monograph ''Ordinary Men'', the Holocaust historian [[Christopher Browning]] examined the deeds of German [[Reserve Police Battalion 101]] of the ''[[Ordnungspolizei#Police Battalions|Ordnungspolizei]]'' (Order Police), used to commit massacres and round-ups of Jews as well as mass deportations to the Nazi death camps. The members of the battalion were middle-aged men of working-class background from [[Hamburg]], who were too old for regular military duty. They were given no special training for genocide and at first, the commander gave his men the choice of opting out of direct participation in murder if they found it too unpleasant (even by being part of a passive cordon round the area of the killing). The majority chose not to exercise that option; fewer than 12 men, out of a battalion of 500 did so. Influenced by postwar [[Milgram experiment]] on obedience, Browning argued that the men of the battalion killed out of peer pressure, not blood-lust.<ref>{{Harvnb|Browning|1992|p=57.}}</ref> |
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The Russian historian Sergei Kudryashov studied the guards trained at the [[Trawniki concentration camp#Key role of Trawniki men in the Final Solution|Trawniki SS camp division]] ("[[Trawniki men]]"), who provided the bulk of personnel for the [[Operation Reinhard]] death camps and performed massacres for Battalion 101. Most of them were former Red Army soldiers who volunteered to join the ''SS'' in order to get out of the POW camps.<ref>{{Harvnb|Kudryashov|2004|pp=232–32}}.</ref> [[Christopher R. Browning]] wrote that ''Hiwis'' "were screened on the basis of their anti-Communist (and hence almost invariably anti-Semitic) sentiments."<ref name="Browning">{{cite web | url=http://hampshirehigh.com/exchange2012/docs/BROWNING-Ordinary%20Men.%20Reserve%20Police%20Battalion%20101%20and%20the%20Final%20Solution%20in%20Poland%20(1992).pdf | title=Arrival in Poland | publisher=Penguin Books | work=Ordinary Men: [[Reserve Police Battalion 101]] and the Final Solution in Poland | date=1992; 1998 | accessdate=1 May 2013 | author=[[Christopher R. Browning]] | pages=52, 77, 79, 80 | format=PDF file, direct download 7.91 MB complete | quote=''Also:'' [http://www.webcitation.org/6GIJ2XpOy PDF cache archived by WebCite.]}}</ref> The majority of the "volunteers" were from Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania ([[European non-Germans in the German armed forces during World War II|Hilfswillige]], or Hiwis).<ref name="Browning" /> Kudryashov claimed that he found little sign of antisemitism or any attraction to National Socialism among the Trawniki men (not confirmed by Browning),<ref name="Browning" /> many of whom prior to their capture had been Communists according to Kudryashov.<ref name = "Kudryashov 2004 234">{{Harvnb|Kudryashov|2004|p=234}}.</ref> Despite the generally apathetic views of the Trawniki guards, the vast majority faithfully carried out the SS's expectations of how to mistreat Jews; the mistreatment of Jews by the Trawniki guards was "systematic and without any particular cause".<ref name = "Kudryashov 2004 234"/> Many, though not all of the Trawniki men executed Jews, and almost all of them while working as guards in the Operation Reinhard camps personally killed dozens of Jews.<ref>{{Harvnb|Kudryashov|2004|pp=234–5}}.</ref> Following Christopher Browning, Kudryashov argued that the Trawniki men were examples of ordinary people becoming willing killers.<ref>{{Harvnb|Kudryashov|2004|pp=226–7, 234–5}}.</ref> |
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The "Trawniki men" (German: ''Trawnikimänner'') were deployed in all major killing sites of the "Final Solution" – it was their primary purpose of training. They took an active role in the executions of Jews at [[Belzec]], [[Sobibór]], [[Treblinka extermination camp|Treblinka II]], [[Warsaw Ghetto|Warsaw]] (three times), [[Częstochowa Ghetto|Częstochowa]], [[Lublin Ghetto|Lublin]], [[Lvov Ghetto|Lvov]], [[Radom Ghetto|Radom]], [[Kraków Ghetto|Kraków]], [[Białystok Ghetto|Białystok]] (twice), [[Majdanek]] as well as [[Auschwitz]], not to mention Trawniki itself.<ref name="Browning" /><ref name="Jabłoński">{{cite web | url=http://www.trawniki.hg.pl/traw/obozjab.html | title=Hitlerowski obóz w Trawnikach | publisher=Trawniki official website | work=The camp history | accessdate=2013-04-30 |author=Mgr Stanisław Jabłoński (1927–2002) | language=Polish}}</ref> |
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===Extermination camps=== |
===Extermination camps=== |
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{{ |
{{Main|Extermination camp}} |
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[[File:Przeładunek Żydów do wagonów kolejki wąskotorowej do Chełmna.jpg|thumb|Deportation to Chełmno]] |
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{|class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left:1em; font-size:80%" |
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|+Approx. number killed at each extermination camp<ref>Source: [http://www.yadvashem.org/ Yad Vashem]. Retrieved 7 May 2007</ref> |
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!Camp name!!Killed!![[Geographic coordinate system|Coordinates]]!!Ref. |
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!align="left"|[[Auschwitz concentration camp|Auschwitz II]] |
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|align="right"|1,000,000 |
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|{{Coord|50|2|9|N|19|10|42|E|region:PL-25_type:landmark_source:GNIS|display=inline|name=Oświęcim (Auschwitz, Poland)}} |
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| style="text-align:center;"|<ref name=yvsau/><ref>Per [http://www1.yadvashem.org/education/lessonplan/english/auschwitz/auschwitz.htm Yadvashem.org]{{dead link|date=January 2011}}, Auschwitz II total numbers are "between 1.3M–1.5M", so we use the middle value 1.4M as estimate here.</ref><ref>Coordinates from: [[Auschwitz concentration camp]]</ref> |
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!align="left"|[[Belzec extermination camp|Belzec]] |
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|align="right"|600,000 |
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|{{Coord|50|22|18|N|23|27|27|E|region:PL-70_type:landmark_source:GNIS|name=Belzec (Poland)}} |
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| style="text-align:center;"|<ref name=yvsbe/><ref>Coordinates from: [[Belzec extermination camp]]</ref> |
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!align="left"|[[Chełmno extermination camp|Chełmno]] |
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|align="right"|320,000 |
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|{{Coord|52|9|27|N|18|43|43|E|region:PL-51_type:landmark_source:GNIS|name=Chełmno (Poland)}} |
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| style="text-align:center;"|<ref name=yvsch/><ref>Coordinates from: [[Chełmno extermination camp]]</ref> |
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!align="left"|[[Jasenovac concentration camp|Jasenovac]] |
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|align="right"|58–97,000 |
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|{{Coord|45|16|54|N|16|56|6|E|region:HR-14_type:landmark_source:GNIS|name=Jasenovac (Sisačko-Moslavačka, Croatia)}} |
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| style="text-align:center;"|<ref name=yvsja>[http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%206358.pdf Jasenovac], Yad Vashem.</ref><ref>Coordinates from: [[Jasenovac concentration camp]]</ref> |
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!align="left"|[[Majdanek]] |
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|align="right"|360,000 |
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|{{Coord|51|13|13|N|22|36|0|E|region:PL-45_type:landmark_source:GNIS|name=Majdanek (Poland)}} |
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| style="text-align:center;"|<ref name=yvsmaj/><ref>Coordinates from: [[Majdanek]]</ref> |
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!align="left"|[[Maly Trostenets extermination camp|Maly Trostinets]] |
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|align="right"|65,000 |
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|{{Coord|53|51|4|N|27|42|17|E|region:BO-00_type:landmark_source:GNIS|name=Malyy Trostenets (Belarus)}} |
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| style="text-align:center;"|<ref name=yvsmal>[http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%206636.pdf Maly Trostinets], Yad Vashem.</ref><ref>Coordinates from: [[Maly Trostenets extermination camp]]</ref> |
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!align="left"|[[Sobibór extermination camp|Sobibór]] |
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|align="right"|250,000 |
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|{{Coord|51|26|50|N|23|35|37|E|region:PL-29_type:landmark_source:GNIS|name=Sobibór (Poland)}} |
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| style="text-align:center;"|<ref name=yvsso/><ref>Coordinates from: [[Sobibór extermination camp]]</ref> |
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!align="left"|[[Treblinka extermination camp|Treblinka]] |
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|align="right"|870,000 |
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|{{Coord|52|37|35|N|22|2|49|E|region:PL-49_type:landmark_source:GNIS|name=Treblinka (Poland)}} |
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| style="text-align:center;"|<ref name=yvstr/><ref>Coordinates from: [[Treblinka extermination camp]]</ref> |
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|} |
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[[Gas vans]] developed from those used to kill mental patients since 1939 were assigned to the ''Einsatzgruppen'' and first used in November 1941; victims were forced into the van and killed with engine exhaust.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=279}} The first extermination camp was [[Chełmno extermination camp|Chełmno]] in the Wartheland, established on the initiative of the local civil administrator [[Arthur Greiser]] with Himmler's approval; it began operations in December 1941 using gas vans.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=74}}{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=209}}{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=290–291}} In October 1941, [[Higher SS and Police Leader]] of Lublin [[Odilo Globocnik]]{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=210}} began work planning [[Belzec extermination camp|Belzec]]—the first purpose-built extermination camp to feature stationary [[gas chamber]]s using carbon monoxide based on the previous [[Aktion T4]] programme<ref>[[Peter Longerich]], ''Holocaust, the Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews'', p. 280</ref><ref name="Nazi Genocide pp. 96, 99">[[Henry Friedlander]] ''The Origins of Nazi Genocide, From Euthanasia to the Final Solution'', pp. 96, 99</ref>—amid increasing talk among German administrators in Poland of large-scale murder of Jews in the General Governorate.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=280, 293–294, 302}}{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=74}} In late 1941 in [[The Holocaust in East Upper Silesia|East Upper Silesia]], Jews in forced-labor camps operated by the [[Schmelt Organization]] deemed "unfit for work" began to be sent in groups to Auschwitz where they were murdered.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=280–281, 292}}{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=208–209}} In early 1942, [[Zyklon B]] became the preferred killing method in extermination camps{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=281–282}} after gassing experiments were conducted on Russian POWs in late August 1941.{{sfn|Browning|2004|pp=526–527}}<ref name="Nazi Genocide pp. 96, 99"/> |
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During 1942, in addition to Auschwitz, five other camps were designated as extermination camps (''Vernichtungslager'') for the carrying out of the ''Reinhard'' plan.<ref name=aktr>{{cite web|url=http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%205724.pdf|title=Aktion Reinhard|publisher=Yad Vashem|format=PDF}}</ref><ref>Although [[Chełmno extermination camp|Chełmno]] was not technically part of Operation ''Reinhard'', it began functioning as an extermination camp in December 1941.[http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%205915.pdf Yadvashem.org]</ref> Two of these, [[Chełmno extermination camp|Chełmno]]<ref>Chełmno, which used gas vans rather than gas chambers to commit mass murder, had its roots in the extension of the Euthanasia Program to the [[Warthegau]] and the subsequent liquidation of large numbers of that region's Jews beginning in September 1941. See [[#CITEREFMontague2012|Montague 2012]], pp. 9–48.</ref> and Majdanek, were already functioning as, respectively, a labor camp and a POW camp: these now had extermination facilities added to them. Three new camps were built for the sole purpose of killing large numbers of Jews as quickly as possible, at [[Belzec extermination camp|Belzec]], Sobibór and Treblinka. A seventh camp, at Maly Trostinets in Belarus, was also used for this purpose. Jasenovac was an extermination camp where mostly ethnic [[Serbs]] were killed. |
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The camps were located on rail lines to make it easier to transport Jews to their deaths, but in remote places to avoid notice.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=210}} The stench caused by mass killing operations was noticeable to anyone nearby.{{sfn|Bergen|2016|pp=247, 251}} Except in the deportations from western and central Europe, people were typically deported to the camps in [[Holocaust trains|overcrowded cattle cars]]. As many as 150 people were forced into a single [[boxcar]]. Many died ''en route'', partly because of the low priority accorded to these transports.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=286–287}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=204}} Shortage of rail transport sometimes led to postponement or cancellation of deportations.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=283}} Upon arrival, the victims were robbed of their remaining possessions, forced to undress, had their hair cut, and were chased into the gas chamber.{{sfn|Kay|2021|pp=204–205}} Death from the gas was agonizing and could take as long as 30 minutes.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=330}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=199}} The gas chambers were primitive and sometimes malfunctioned. Some prisoners were shot because the gas chambers were not functioning.{{sfn|Stone|2010|pp=153–154}} At other extermination camps, nearly everyone on a transport was killed on arrival, but at Auschwitz around 20–25 percent were separated out for labor,{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=199}} although many of these prisoners died later on{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=211}} through starvation, mass shooting, torture,<ref>{{cite book |last=Borkin |first=Joseph |url=https://archive.org/details/crimepunishmento0000bork |title=The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben |publisher=Free Press |year=1978 |isbn=978-0-02-904630-2 |location=New York City |url-access=registration}}</ref> and medical experiments.<ref name="Weindling von Villiez Loewenau Farron 2016 pp. 1–6">{{cite journal |last1=Weindling |first1=Paul |last2=von Villiez |first2=Anna |last3=Loewenau |first3=Aleksandra |last4=Farron |first4=Nichola |year=2016 |title=The victims of unethical human experiments and coerced research under National Socialism |journal=Endeavour |publisher=Elsevier BV |volume=40 |issue=1 |pages=1–6 |doi=10.1016/j.endeavour.2015.10.005 |issn=0160-9327 |pmc=4822534 |pmid=26749461}}</ref> |
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Extermination camps are frequently confused with concentration camps such as Dachau and [[Belsen]], which were mostly located in Germany and intended as places of incarceration and forced labor for a variety of enemies of the Nazi regime (such as Communists and homosexuals). They should also be distinguished from slave labor camps, which were set up in all German-occupied countries to exploit the labor of prisoners of various kinds, including prisoners of war. In all Nazi camps there were very high death rates as a result of starvation, disease and exhaustion, but only the extermination camps were designed specifically for mass killing. |
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Belzec, [[Sobibor extermination camp|Sobibor]], and [[Treblinka extermination camp|Treblinka]] reported a combined revenue of RM 178.7 million from belongings stolen from their victims, far exceeding costs.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=273}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=209}} Combined, the camps required the labor of less than 3,000 Jewish prisoners, 1,000 [[Trawniki men]] (largely Ukrainian auxiliaries), and very few German guards.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=274}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=204}} About half of the Jews killed in the Holocaust died by poison gas.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=121}} Thousands of Romani people were also murdered in the extermination camps.{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=247}} Prisoner uprisings at [[Treblinka uprising|Treblinka]] and [[Sobibor uprising|Sobibor]] meant that these camps were shut down earlier than envisioned.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=111}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=208}} |
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{{quote|There was a place called the ramp where the trains with the Jews were coming in. They were coming in day and night, and sometimes one per day and sometimes five per day . . . Constantly, people from the heart of Europe were disappearing, and they were arriving to the same place with the same ignorance of the fate of the previous transport. And the people in this mass . . . I knew that within a couple of hours . . . ninety percent would be gassed.|[[Rudolf Vrba]], who worked on the ''Judenrampe'' in [[Auschwitz concentration camp|Auschwitz]] from August 18, 1942 to June 7, 1943.<ref name = "Berenbaum 2005 114"/> |
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}} |
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The extermination camps were run by SS officers, but most of the guards were Ukrainian or Baltic auxiliaries.{{citation needed|date=March 2014}} |
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====Gas chambers==== |
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At the extermination camps with gas chambers all the prisoners arrived by train. Sometimes entire trainloads were sent straight to the gas chambers, but usually the camp doctor on duty subjected individuals to selections, where a small percentage were deemed fit to work in the slave labor camps; the majority were taken directly from the platforms to a reception area where all their clothes and other possessions were seized by the Nazis to help fund the war. They were then herded naked into the gas chambers. Usually they were told these were showers or delousing chambers, and there were signs outside saying "baths" and "sauna." They were sometimes given a small piece of soap and a towel so as to avoid panic, and were told to remember where they had put their belongings for the same reason. When they asked for water because they were thirsty after the long journey in the cattle trains, they were told to hurry up, because coffee was waiting for them in the camp, and it was getting cold.<ref>{{Harvnb|Piper|1998|p=173}}.</ref> |
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[[File:Birkenau Extermination Camp - Oswiecim, Poland - NARA - 305904.jpg|thumb|Picture of Auschwitz–Birkenau taken by an American surveillance plane, 13 September 1944.]] |
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According to [[Rudolf Höss]], commandant of Auschwitz, bunker 1 held 800 people, and bunker 2 held 1,200.<ref>{{Harvnb|Piper|1998|p=162}}.</ref> Once the chamber was full, the doors were screwed shut and solid pellets of [[Zyklon-B]] were dropped into the chambers through vents in the side walls, releasing toxic HCN, or [[hydrogen cyanide]]. Those inside died within 20 minutes; the speed of death depended on how close the inmate was standing to a gas vent, according to Höß, who estimated that about one-third of the victims died immediately.<ref name = "Piper 1998 170">{{Harvnb|Piper|1998|p=170}}.</ref> 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."<ref name = "Piper 1998 163">{{Harvnb|Piper|1998|p=163}}.</ref> When they were removed, if the chamber had been very congested, as they often were, the victims were found half-squatting, their skin colored pink with red and green spots, some foaming at the mouth or bleeding from the ears.<ref name = "Piper 1998 170"/> |
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The gas was then pumped out, the bodies were removed (which would take up to four hours), gold fillings in their teeth were extracted with pliers by dentist prisoners, and women's hair was cut.<ref>{{Harvnb|Piper|1998|p=163}}<br>See also {{Harvnb|Goldensohn|2005|p=298}}, quoting [[Rudolf Höss]]: "We cut the hair from women after they had been exterminated in the gas chambers. The hair was then sent to factories, where it was woven into special fittings for gaskets." Höß said that only women's hair was cut and only after they were dead. He said he had first received the order to do this in 1943.</ref> The floor of the gas chamber was cleaned, and the walls whitewashed.<ref name = "Piper 1998 163"/> The work was done by the ''[[Sonderkommando]],'' which were work units of Jewish prisoners. In crematoria 1 and 2, the ''Sonderkommando'' lived in an attic above the crematoria; in crematoria 3 and 4, they lived inside the gas chambers.<ref>{{Harvnb|Piper|1998|p=172}}.</ref> When the ''Sonderkommando'' had finished with the bodies, the SS conducted spot checks to make sure all the gold had been removed from the victims' mouths. If a check revealed that gold had been missed, the ''Sonderkommando'' prisoner responsible was thrown into the furnace alive as punishment.<ref>{{Harvnb|Piper|1998|p=171}}.</ref> |
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At first, the bodies were buried in deep pits and covered with lime, but between September and November 1942, on the orders of Himmler, they were dug up and burned. In early 1943, new gas chambers and crematoria were built to accommodate the numbers.<ref>{{Harvnb|Piper|1998|p=164}}.</ref> |
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{{quotation| |
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Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chambers to accommodate 2,000 people at one time, whereas at Treblinka their 10 gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each. The way we selected our victims was as follows: we had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were sent into the Camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated, since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under the clothes but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.|[[Rudolf Höss]], Auschwitz camp commandant, Nuremberg testimony.<ref>{{Harvnb|Pelt|2002|p=4}}.</ref> |
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}} |
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===Jewish resistance=== |
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[[File:Stroop Report - Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 06b.jpg|thumb|Jews captured and forcibly pulled out from dugouts by the Germans during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The photo is from [[Jurgen Stroop]]'s [[Stroop Report|report]] to Heinrich Himmler]] |
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[[File:Ghetto Uprising Warsaw2.jpg|thumb|Warsaw Ghetto uprising]] |
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{{Main|Jewish resistance during the Holocaust}} |
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In ''[[The Destruction of the European Jews]]'', [[Raul Hilberg]] noted: |
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{{quote|The reaction pattern of the Jews is characterized by [an] almost complete lack of resistance. In marked contrast to German propaganda, the documentary evidence of Jewish resistance, overt or submerged, is very slight. On a European-wide scale the Jews had no resistance organization, no blueprint for armed action, no plan even for psychological warfare. They were completely unprepared.<br> |
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... Measured in German casualties, Jewish armed opposition shrinks into insignificance.<br> |
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... A large component of the entire [destruction] process depended on Jewish participation, from the simple acts of individuals to the organized activity in councils.<br> |
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... Jewish resistance organizations attempting to reverse the mass inertia spoke the words: "Do not be led like sheep to slaughter."<br> |
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... Franz Stangl, who had commanded two death camps, was asked in a West German prison about his reaction to the Jewish victims. He said that only recently he had read a book about lemmings. It reminded him of Treblinka.<ref>{{Harvnb|Hilberg|2003|pp=1104–1105, 1111}}.</ref>}} |
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In his important study, [[Peter Longerich]] observes likewise: "On the Jewish side there was practically no resistance."<ref name = "Longerich 2012 341">{{Harvnb|Longerich|2010|p=341}}.</ref> Hilberg accounts for this compliant attitude by evoking the history of Jewish persecution: as had been the case so many times before down through the centuries, simply appealing to their oppressors, and complying with orders, would hopefully avoid inflaming the situation and so mitigate the damage done to the Jews until the onslaught abated. "There were many casualties in these times of stress, but always the Jewish community emerged once again like a rock from a receding tidal wave. The Jews had never disappeared from the earth." They were "caught in the straitjacket of their history", and the realisation that this time was different came too late.<ref>{{Harvnb|Hilberg|2003|pp=1112–1118}}.<p>Polish Rabbi [[Menachem Ziemba]], for example, compared the liquidation of the Jews of his country to the situation that faced French and German Jews during the First Crusade, when the Halakha "determined one way of reacting to the distress". The Nazi onslaught "prompts us to react in an entirely different manner. In the past, during religious persecution, we were required by the law 'to give up our lives even for the least essential practice.' In the present, however, when we are faced by an arch-foe, whose unparalleled ruthlessness and program of total annihilation know no bounds," said Ziemba, the Halakha demands "that we fight and resist to the very end with unequaled determination and valor for the sake of Sanctification of the Divine Name." See {{Cite web | last = Green | first = David B. | date = 14 January 2013 | title = This day in Jewish history / The Warsaw Ghetto uprising begins, in the mind | url = http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/this-day-in-jewish-history/this-day-in-jewish-history-the-warsaw-ghetto-uprising-begins-in-the-mind-1.493880 | website = haaretz.com | accessdate = 24 October 2014 }}</ref> |
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Discussing the case of Warsaw, Timothy Snyder notes in a similar vein that it was only during the three months after the massive deportations of July–September 1942 that general agreement on the need for armed resistance was reached, and lays the passivity emanating from the conservative center of Jewish politics at the door of the overall success the Jewish community had enjoyed by engaging in a ''quid pro quo'' with the pre-war Polish government.<ref>{{Harvnb|Snyder|2010|p=283}}.</ref> By the time of the biggest act of armed resistance, the [[Warsaw Ghetto Uprising]] of spring 1943, only a small minority of Polish Jews were still alive.<ref name = "Longerich 2012 341"/> |
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[[Yehuda Bauer]] and other historians argue that resistance consisted not only of physical opposition, but of any activity that gave the Jews dignity and humanity in humiliating and inhumane conditions.<ref> |
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* Bauer, Yehuda. ''Forms of Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust.'' In ''The Nazi Holocaust: Historical Articles on the Destruction of European Jews.'' Vol. 7: Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust, edited by Michael R. Marrus, 34–48. Westport, Connecticut: Meckler, 1989. |
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* Bauer, Yehuda, ''They chose life: Jewish resistance in the Holocaust'', New York, The American Jewish Committee, 1973. |
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* [http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_yad/magazine/magazine_new/jewish_resistance.html Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust] by Israel Gutman. [[Yad Vashem]]. |
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* [http://www.ushmm.org/education/foreducators/resource/pdf/resistance.pdf Resistance During the Holocaust] U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum |
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* [http://www.ushmm.org/research/center/lerman/bibliography/pdf/bibliography.pdf Jewish Resistance. A Working Bibliography.] The Miles Lerman Center for the Study of Jewish Resistance. Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum</ref> |
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{{Quote|In every ghetto, in every deportation train, in every labor camp, even in the death camps, the will to resist was strong, and took many forms. Fighting with the few weapons that would be found, individual acts of defiance and protest, the courage of obtaining food and water under the threat of death, the superiority of refusing to allow the Germans their final wish to gloat over panic and despair. |
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Even passivity was a form of resistance. To die with dignity was a form of resistance. To resist the demoralizing, brutalizing force of evil, to refuse to be reduced to the level of animals, to live through the torment, to outlive the tormentors, these too were acts of resistance. Merely to give a witness of these events in testimony was, in the end, a contribution to victory. Simply to survive was a victory of the human spirit.|[[Martin Gilbert]]. ''The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy''.<ref>{{Harvnb|Gilbert|1986|p=828}}.</ref>}} |
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[[File:Stroop Report - Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 13.jpg|thumb|170px|Captured members of the Jewish resistance, Warsaw Ghetto, 1943]] |
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Hilberg argued against overstating the extent of Jewish resistance, or using all-encompassing definitions of it like that deployed by Gilbert. "When relatively isolated or episodic acts of resistance are represented as typical, a basic characteristic of the German measures is obscured", namely that the merciless slaughter of peaceable innocent people is turned into some kind of battle. "The inflation of resistance has another consequence which has been of concern to those Jews who have regarded themselves as the actual resisters. If heroism is an attribute that should be assigned to every member of the European Jewish community, it will diminish the accomplishment of the few who took action." Finally, the blending of the passive majority with the active few was "not merely a form of dilution, which blurred the multitudinous problems of organizing a defense in a cautious, reluctant Jewish community; it was also a way of shutting off a great many questions about that community, its reasoning and survival strategy." Without posing these questions, Jewish history could not be written.<ref>{{Harvnb|Hilberg|1996|pp=126–137}}.</ref> |
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The most well known example of Jewish armed resistance was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of January 1943, when thousands of poorly armed Jewish fighters held the SS at bay for four weeks before being crushed by overwhelmingly superior forces. According to Jewish accounts, several hundred Germans were killed, while the Germans claimed to have lost 17 dead and 93 wounded. 13,000 Jews were killed, 57,885 were deported and gassed according to German figures. This uprising was followed by the revolt in the Treblinka extermination camp in May 1943, when about 200 inmates escaped from the camp. They overpowered and killed a number of German guards and set the camp buildings ablaze, but 900 inmates were also killed, and out of the 600 who successfully escaped, only 40 survived the war. Two weeks later, there was [[Białystok Ghetto Uprising|an uprising in the Białystok Ghetto]]. |
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In September, there was a short-lived uprising in the [[Vilna Ghetto]]. In October, 600 Jewish prisoners, including Jewish Soviet prisoners of war, attempted an escape at the Sobibór death camp. The prisoners killed 11 German [[SS]] officers and a number of camp guards. However, the killings were discovered, and the inmates were forced to run for their lives under heavy fire. Three hundred of the prisoners were killed during the escape. Most of the survivors either died in the minefields surrounding the camp or were recaptured and executed. About 60 survived and joined the Soviet partisans. On 7 October 1944, 250 Jewish ''[[Sonderkommando]]s'' (laborers) at Auschwitz attacked their guards and blew up Crematorium IV with explosives that female prisoners had smuggled-in from a nearby factory. Three German guards were killed during the uprising, one of whom was stuffed into an oven. The Sonderkommandos attempted a mass breakout, but all 250 were killed soon afterwards. |
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[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-267-0111-36, Russland, russische Kriegsgefangene (Juden).jpg|thumb|170px|Jewish Soviet POW captured by the German Army, August 1941. About 500,000 Jews served in the [[Soviet Armed Forces|Soviet Army]] during World War II.]] |
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An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 [[Jewish partisans]] (see the list at the top of this section) actively fought the Nazis and their collaborators in Eastern Europe.<ref name="Kennedy 2007 780"/><ref name="USHMM_RES"/> They engaged in [[guerilla warfare]] and [[sabotage]] against the Nazis, instigated Ghetto uprisings, and freed prisoners. In Lithuania alone, they killed approximately 3,000 German soldiers. As many as 1.4 million Jewish soldiers fought in the [[Allies of World War II|Allied]] armies.<ref name="75 n.15">{{Harvnb|Lador-Lederer|1980|p=[http://www.jewishagency.org/JewishAgency/English/Jewish+Education/Compelling+Content/Eye+on+Israel/Current+Issues/Jewish+Soldiers+and+Prisoners+of+War+during+World+War+II.htm#_ftnref1 75 n.15]}}.</ref> including 500,000 in the [[Red Army]], 550,000 in the [[United States Armed Forces|U.S. Army]], 100,000 in the Polish army and 30,000 in the British army.<ref>"[http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/jewish-veterans-of-soviet-red-army-suffering-in-solitude-1.519350 Jewish veterans of Soviet Red Army suffering in solitude]". ''[[Haaretz]]''. May 5, 2013.</ref> About 200,000 Jewish soldiers serving in the Red Army died in the war.<ref>{{Harvnb|Pinkus|1990|p=261}}.</ref> The [[Jewish Brigade]], a unit of 5,000 Jewish volunteers from the [[British Mandate of Palestine]], fought in the [[British Army]]. German-speaking Jewish volunteers from the [[Special Interrogation Group]] performed commando and sabotage operations against the Nazis behind front lines in the [[Western Desert Campaign]]. |
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In occupied Poland 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. In Lithuania and Belarus, an area with a heavy concentration of Jews, and also an area which suited partisan operations, Jewish partisan groups saved thousands of Jewish civilians from extermination. No such opportunities existed for the Jewish populations of cities such as [[Budapest]]. However in [[Amsterdam]], and other parts of the Netherlands, many Jews were active in the [[Dutch Resistance]].<ref>{{Harvnb|Klempner|2006|pp=145–146}}.</ref> Timothy Snyder wrote that "Other combatants in the Warsaw Uprising were veterans of the ghetto uprising of 1943. Most of these Jews joined the [[Armia Krajowa|Home Army]]; others found the [[Armia Ludowa|People's Army]], or even the antisemitic [[National Armed Forces]]. Some Jews (or Poles of Jewish origin) were already enlisted in the Home Army and the People's Army. Almost certainly, more Jews fought in the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 than in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943."<ref>{{Harvnb|Snyder|2010|p=320}}.</ref> Joining the partisans was an option only for the young and the fit who were willing to leave their families. Many Jewish families preferred to die together rather than be separated. |
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[[French Jews]] were also highly active in the [[French Resistance]], which conducted a guerilla campaign against the Nazis and Vichy French authorities, assisted the Allies in their sweep across France, and supported Allied including [[Free French Forces|Free French]] forces in the liberation of many occupied French cities. Although Jews made up only one percent of the French population, they made up fifteen to twenty percent of the French Resistance.<ref>{{Harvnb|Suhl|1987|pp=181–3}}.</ref> The Jewish youth movement EEIF, which had originally shown support for the Vichy regime, was banned in 1943, and many of its older members formed armed resistance units. [[Zionism|Zionist]] Jews also formed the [[Armee Juive]] (Jewish Army), which participated in armed resistance under a Zionist flag, and smuggled Jews out of the country. Both organizations merged in 1944, and participated in the liberation of Paris, [[Lyon]], [[Toulouse]], [[Grenoble]], and [[Nice]].<ref>{{Harvnb|Zuccotti|1999|p=274}}.</ref> |
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{{Quote|Many people think the Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter, and that's not true—it's absolutely not true. I worked closely with many Jewish people in the Resistance, and I can tell you, they took much greater risks than I did.|Pieter Meerburg<ref>{{Harvnb|Klempner|2006|p=145}}.</ref>}} |
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[[File:Stroop Report - Warsaw Ghetto Uprising - 037.jpg|thumb|SS troops stand near the bodies of Jews who committed suicide rather than be captured, Warsaw Ghetto, 1943]] |
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For the great majority of Jews, resistance could take only the passive forms of delay, evasion, negotiation, bargaining and where possible, bribery of German officials. The Nazis encouraged this by forcing the Jewish communities to police themselves, through bodies such as the [[Reich Association of Jews]] (''Reichsvereinigung der Juden'') in Germany and the Jewish Councils ''([[Judenrat|Judenräte]]'') in the urban ghettos in occupied Poland. They held out the promise of concessions in exchange for each surrender, enmeshing the Jewish leadership so deeply in well-intentioned compromise that a decision to stand and fight was never possible. Holocaust survivor Alexander Kimel wrote: "The youth in the Ghettos dreamed about fighting. I believe that although there were many factors that inhibited our responses, the most important factors were isolation and historical conditioning to accepting martyrdom."<ref>[http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-holocaust&month=9812&week=a&msg=L9lVtqIk3cxYYQe3K8HC1w&user=&pw= "Holocaust Resistance"] ''[[H-Net]] discussion log'' 2 Dec 1998</ref> |
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The historical conditioning of the Jewish communities of Europe to accept persecution and avert disaster through compromise and negotiation was the most important factor in the failure to resist until the very end. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising took place only when the Jewish population had been reduced from 500,000 to 100,000, and it was obvious that no further compromise was possible. [[Paul Johnson (writer)|Paul Johnson]] writes: |
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{{quote|The Jews had been persecuted for a millennium and a half and had learned from long experience that resistance cost lives rather than saved them. Their history, their theology, their folklore, their social structure, even their vocabulary trained them to negotiate, to pay, to plead, to protest, not to fight.<ref>{{Harvnb|Johnson|1988|p=506}}.</ref>}} |
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The Jewish communities were also systematically deceived about German intentions, and were cut off from most sources of news from the outside world. The Germans told the Jews that they were being deported to work camps{{spaced ndash}}euphemistically calling it "resettlement in the East"{{spaced ndash}}and maintained this illusion through elaborate deceptions all the way to the gas chamber doors (which were marked with labels stating that the chambers were for the removal of lice) to avoid uprisings. As photographs testify, Jews disembarked at the railway stations at Auschwitz and other extermination camps carrying sacks and suitcases, clearly having no idea of the fate that awaited them. Rumours of the reality of the extermination camps filtered back only slowly to the ghettos, and were usually not believed, just as they were not believed when couriers such as [[Jan Karski]], the Polish resistance fighter, conveyed them to the western Allies.<ref>{{Harvnb|Wood|Jankowski|1994}}.</ref> |
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===Climax=== |
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{{refimprove section|date=June 2011}} |
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Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in [[Prague]] in June 1942. He was succeeded as head of the [[RSHA]] by [[Ernst Kaltenbrunner]]. Kaltenbrunner and Eichmann, under Himmler's close supervision, oversaw the climax of the 'Final Solution'. During 1943 and 1944, the extermination camps worked at a furious rate to kill the hundreds of thousands of people shipped to them by rail from almost every country within the German sphere of influence. By the spring of 1944, up to 8,000 people were being gassed every day at Auschwitz.<ref>[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007327 "Killing Centers"]. ''Holocaust Encyclopedia''. [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]]. Retrieved 27 September 2012.</ref> |
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Despite the high productivity of the war industries based in the Jewish ghettos in the General Government, they were liquidated during 1943, and their populations shipped to the camps for extermination. The largest of these operations, the deportation of 100,000 people from the Warsaw Ghetto in early 1943, provoked the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which was suppressed with great brutality. Approximately 42,000 Jews were shot during the [[Operation Harvest Festival]] on 3–4 November 1943.<ref>[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005222 "Aktion 'Erntefest' (Operation 'Harvest Festival')"]. ''Holocaust Encyclopedia''. [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]]. Retrieved 27 September 2012.</ref> At the same time, rail shipments arrived regularly from western and southern Europe. Few Jews were shipped from the occupied Soviet territories to the camps: the killing of Jews in this zone was left in the hands of the SS, aided by locally recruited auxiliaries. In any case, by the end of 1943 the Germans had been driven from most Soviet territory. |
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[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-680-8285A-26, Budapest, Festnahme von Juden.jpg|thumb|Budapest, Hungary – Hungarian and German soldiers drive arrested Jews into the municipal theatre. October 1944]] |
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[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-680-8285A-08, Budapest, Festnahme von Juden.jpg|thumb|Budapest, Hungary – Captured Jewish women in Wesselényi Street, 20–22 October 1944]] |
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Shipments of Jews to the camps had priority on the German railways, and continued even in the face of the increasingly dire military situation after the [[Battle of Stalingrad]] at the end of 1942 and the escalating Allied air attacks on German industry and transport. Army leaders and economic managers complained at this diversion of resources and at the killing of irreplaceable skilled Jewish workers. By 1944, moreover, it was evident to most Germans not blinded by Nazi fanaticism that Germany was losing the war. Many senior officials began to fear the retribution that might await Germany and them personally for the crimes being committed in their name. But the power of Himmler and the SS within the German Reich was too great to resist, and Himmler could always evoke Hitler's authority for his demands. |
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In October 1943, Himmler gave a speech to senior Nazi Party officials gathered in Posen (now [[Poznań]] in western Poland). Here he came closer than ever before to stating explicitly that he was intent on exterminating the Jews of Europe: |
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{{Quote|I may here in this closest of circles allude to a question which you, my party comrades, have all taken for granted, but which has become for me the most difficult question of my life, the Jewish question ... I ask of you that what I say in this circle you really only hear and never speak of ... We come to the question: how is it with the women and children? I have resolved even here on a completely clear solution. I do not consider myself justified in eradicating the men—so to speak [of] killing them or ordering them to be killed—and allowing the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up ... The difficult decision had to be taken, to cause this people to disappear from the earth.}} |
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[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-N0827-318, KZ Auschwitz, Ankunft ungarischer Juden.jpg|thumb|Jewish women and children from [[Carpatho-Ruthenia]] after their arrival at the Auschwitz death camp. May/June 1944]] |
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The audience for this speech included Admiral [[Karl Dönitz]] and Armaments Minister [[Albert Speer]]. Dönitz successfully claimed at the [[Nuremberg trials]] that he had had no knowledge of the Final Solution. Speer, however, declared at the trial and in a subsequent interview that "If I didn't see it, then it was because I didn't want to see it."<ref>{{Harvnb|Fest|1999|p=329}}.</ref> The text of this speech was not known at the time of their trials. |
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The scale of extermination slackened somewhat at the beginning of 1944 once the ghettos in occupied Poland were emptied, but on 19 March 1944, Hitler ordered the [[Operation Margarethe|military occupation of Hungary]], and Eichmann was dispatched to Budapest to supervise the deportation of Hungary's 800,000 Jews. Hitler had personally complained to the Hungarian regent Admiral [[Miklós Horthy]] on the previous day, 18 March 1944, that: |
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{{quote|Hungary did nothing in the matter of the Jewish problem, and was not prepared to settle accounts with the large Jewish population in Hungary.<ref>{{Harvnb|Evans|2002|pp=102–3}}.</ref>}} |
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More than half of them were shipped to Auschwitz after the occupation. The commandant, Rudolf Höss, said at his trial that he killed 400,000 Hungarian Jews in three months. |
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===="Blood for Goods"==== |
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The operation to kill Hungarian Jews met strong opposition within the Nazi hierarchy, and there were some suggestions that Hitler should offer the Allies a deal where they would be spared in exchange for a favorable peace settlement. There were unofficial negotiations in [[Istanbul]] between Himmler's agents, British agents, and representatives of Jewish organizations; at one point an attempt by Eichmann to exchange one million Jews for 10,000 trucks—the so-called "[[blood for goods]]" proposal—but there was no real possibility of such a deal being struck on this scale. |
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===Escapes, publication of existence (April–June 1944)=== |
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[[File:RudolfVrbawithArnostRosin.jpg|thumb|[[Bratislava]], June–July 1944. [[Rudolf Vrba]] (right) escaped from Auschwitz on April 7, 1944, bringing the first credible news to the world of the mass murder that was taking place there. Arnost Rosin (left), escaped on 27 May 1944.<ref name=ConwayWiesenthal>[[John S. Conway (historian)|Conway, John S]]. [http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=394983 "The first report about Auschwitz"], Museum of Tolerance, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Annual 1 Chapter 07. Retrieved 11 September 2006.</ref>]] |
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[[File:The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied.pdf|thumb|left|"The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland", note of [[Republic of Poland]] addressed to United Nations, 1942]] |
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Escapes from the camps were few, but not unknown. In 1940, the Auschwitz commandant reported that "the local population is fanatically Polish and ... prepared to take any action against the hated SS camp personnel. Every prisoner who managed to escape can count on help the moment he reaches the wall of a first Polish farmstead."<ref>{{Harvnb|Swiebocki|1998|p=505}}.</ref> According to Ruth Linn, however, escapees, particularly Jewish ones, could ''not'' rely on help from the local population or the Polish underground.<ref>{{Harvnb|Linn|2004|p=20}}.</ref> |
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In February 1942, an escaped inmate from the Chełmno extermination camp, Jacob Grojanowski, reached the Warsaw Ghetto, where he gave detailed information about the Chełmno camp to the [[Oyneg Shabbos (group)|Oneg Shabbat]] group. His report, which became known as the [[Grojanowski Report]], was smuggled out of the ghetto through the channels of the Polish underground to the [[Delegatura Sił Zbrojnych na Kraj|Delegatura]], and reached London by June 1942. It is unclear what was done with the report at that point.<ref name=yvsch/><ref>[http://motlc.learningcenter.wiesenthal.org/text/x06/xm0619.html Grojanowski Report]</ref><ref>{{cite web|title= Grojanowski Report|url=http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%206317.pdf|publisher=[[Yad Vashem]]|accessdate=26 September 2012}}</ref><ref>{{Harvnb|Farbstein|1998}}.</ref> In the meantime, by 1 February, the [[United States Office of War Information]] had decided not to release information about the extermination of the Jews because it was felt that it would mislead the public into thinking the war was simply a Jewish problem.<ref>Memorandum, [[Arthur Sweetser]] to Leo Rosten, 1 February 1942, quoted in Eric Hanin, "War on Our Minds: The American Mass Media in World War II" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1976), ch. 4, n.6. {{OCLC|3640206}}.</ref> |
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By at least 9 October 1942, British radio had broadcast news of gassing of Jews to the Netherlands.<ref>{{Harvnb|Frank|2007|pp=66–67}}.</ref> In December 1942, the [[Allies of World War II|western Allies]] released the [[Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations]], that described how "Hitler's oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe" was being carried out and which declared that they "condemn in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination."<ref>{{Harvnb|Lemkin|2005|p=89 n.45}}.</ref> |
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In 1942, [[Jan Karski]] reported to the Polish, British and US governments on the situation in Poland, especially the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Holocaust of the Jews. He met with Polish politicians in exile including the prime minister, as well as members of political parties such as the [[Polish Socialist Party|Socialist Party]], [[National Party (Poland)|National Party]], [[Labor Party (Stronnictwo Pracy)|Labor Party]], [[People's Party (Poland)|People's Party]], [[General Jewish Labour Bund in Poland|Jewish Bund]] and [[Poalei Zion]]. He also spoke to [[Anthony Eden]], the British foreign secretary, and included a detailed statement on what he had seen in Warsaw and Bełżec.<ref>{{Harvnb|Karski|2001|pp=552–564}}.</ref> In 1943 in London he met the then-well-known journalist [[Arthur Koestler]]. He then traveled to the United States and reported to president [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]]. His report was a major factor in informing the West. |
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In July 1943, Karski again personally reported to Roosevelt, telling him about the situation in Poland and becoming the first eyewitness to tell him about the Jewish Holocaust.<ref>{{cite web| url=http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/07/17/the-man-who-told-fdr-about-the-holocaust/ |title=Algemeiner 07/17/2013 |publisher=Algemeiner.com |date=2013-07-17 |accessdate=2014-03-04}}</ref> During their meeting Roosevelt asked about the condition of horses in Poland,<ref name="Karski1"/> but did not ask one question about the Jews.<ref name="KarskiLanzmann"/> He also met with many other government and civic leaders in the United States, including [[Felix Frankfurter]], [[Cordell Hull]], [[William Joseph Donovan]], and [[Stephen Samuel Wise|Stephen Wise]]. Karski also presented his report to the media, bishops of various denominations (including Cardinal [[Samuel Stritch]]) and members of the Hollywood film industry and artists, but without success. Many of those he spoke to did not believe him, or supposed that his testimony was much exaggerated or was propaganda from the [[Polish government in exile]].<ref>{{Harvnb|Wood|Jankowski|1994|p=316}}.</ref> |
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News about gassing Jews was also published in illegal newspapers of the [[Dutch resistance]], like in the issue of [[Het Parool]] of 27 September 1943. However, the news was so unbelievable that many assumed it was merely war propaganda. The publications were halted because they were counter-productive for the Dutch resistance. Nevertheless, many Jews were warned that they would be murdered, but as escape was impossible for most of them, they preferred to believe that the warnings were false.<ref>Het Parool, 27 September, page 4–5. ''Concentration camps: where the Nazi's bring their ideals in practice'', NIOD (Dutch Institute of War Documentation), Amsterdam</ref><ref>[http://www.hetillegaleparool.nl/archief/1943/430927-4.php Het 'Illegale Parool'-archief 1940–1945 (4)] and [http://www.hetillegaleparool.nl/archief/1943/430927-5.php Het 'Illegale Parool'-archief 1940–1945 (5)] (Het 'Illegale Parool'-archief 1940–1945, 27 September 1943, p 4–5)</ref> |
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[[File:Pilecki ausch f.jpg|thumb|Auschwitz concentration camp photos of Pilecki (1941)]] |
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In September 1940, Captain [[Witold Pilecki]], a member of the Polish underground and a soldier of the [[Polish Home Army]], worked out a plan to enter Auschwitz and volunteered to be sent there, the only person known to volunteer to be imprisoned at Auschwitz. He organized an underground network [[Związek Organizacji Wojskowej]] (''translation: "Union of Military Organizations"'') that was ready to initiate an uprising but it was decided that the probability of success was too low for the uprising to succeed. UMO's numerous and detailed reports became a principal source of intelligence on Auschwitz for the Western Allies. Pilecki escaped from Auschwitz with information that became the basis of a two-part report in August 1943 that was sent to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in London. The report included details about the gas chambers, about "selection", and about the sterilization experiments. It stated that there were three crematoria in Birkenau able to burn 10,000 people daily, and that 30,000 people had been gassed in one day. The author wrote: "History knows no parallel of such destruction of human life."<ref>{{Harvnb|Lewis|2002|pp=31–33}}.</ref> When Pilecki returned to Poland after the war the communist authorities [[Pilecki#Arrest and execution|arrested and accused him of spying]] for the [[Polish government in exile]]. He was sentenced to death in a show trial and was executed on 25 May 1948. |
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Before Pilecki escaped from Auschwitz the most spectacular escape took place on 20 June 1942, when Ukrainian [[Eugeniusz Bendera]] and three Poles, [[Kazimierz Piechowski]], [[Stanisław Gustaw Jaster]] and [[Józef Lempart]] made a daring escape.<ref>"Byłem Numerem: swiadectwa Z Auschwitz" by Kazimierz Piechowski, Eugenia Bozena Kodecka-Kaczynska, Michal Ziokowski, Hardcover, Wydawn. Siostr Loretanek, ISBN 83-7257-122-8</ref> The escapees were dressed as members of the [[3rd SS Division Totenkopf|SS-Totenkopfverbände]], fully armed and in an SS staff car. They drove out the main gate in a stolen [[Steyr automobile|Steyr]] 220 automobile with a smuggled first report from Witold Pilecki to the [[Polish resistance movement in World War II|Polish resistance]] about the Holocaust. The Germans failed to recapture any of them.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://en.auschwitz.org.pl/m/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=578&Itemid=8|title=Auschwitz-Birkenau – The Film about the Amazing Escape from Auschwitz—Now Available on DVD|publisher=En.auschwitz.org.pl|date=13 January 2009|accessdate=31 July 2010}}</ref> |
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[[Rudolf Vrba]] and [[Alfred Wetzler]], Jewish inmates, escaped from Auschwitz in April 1944, eventually reaching [[Slovakia]]. The 32-page document they dictated to Jewish officials about the mass murder at Auschwitz became known as the [[Vrba-Wetzler report]]. Vrba had an [[eidetic memory]] and had worked on the ''Judenrampe'', where Jews disembarked from the trains to be "selected" either for the gas chamber or slave labor. The level of detail with which he described the transports allowed Slovakian officials to compare his account with their own deportation records, and the corroboration convinced the Allies to take the report seriously.<ref>{{Harvnb|Vrba|2006}}.</ref> |
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Two other Auschwitz inmates, Arnost Rosin and Czesław Mordowicz escaped on 27 May 1944, arriving in Slovakia on 6 June, the day of the [[Normandy Landings|Normandy landing]] ([[D-Day]]). Hearing about Normandy, they believed the war was over and got drunk to celebrate, using dollars they'd smuggled out of the camp. They were arrested for violating currency laws, and spent eight days in prison, before the ''[[Judenrat]]'' paid their fines. The additional information they offered the Judenrat was added to Vrba and Wetzler's report and became known as the Auschwitz Protocols. They reported that, between 15 and 27 May 1944, 100,000 Hungarian Jews had arrived at Birkenau, and had been killed at an unprecedented rate, with human fat being used to accelerate the burning.<ref name=LinnGuardian>[[Ruth Linn|Linn, Ruth]] (13 April 2006). [http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/apr/13/guardianobituaries.secondworldwar "Obituary: Rudolf Vrba"]. ''[[The Guardian]]''. Retrieved 25 September 2012.</ref> |
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The BBC and ''The New York Times'' published material from the Vrba-Wetzler report on 15 June,<ref>According to [[#CITEREFLinn2004|Linn 2004]], p. 30, the BBC first broadcast information from the report on 18 June, not 15 June.</ref> 20 June 3 July<ref name=INQUIRYCONFIRMSNAZIDEATHCAMPS>Brigham, Daniel T. (3 July 1944). [http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB061FFD3554107B93C1A9178CD85F408485F9 "Inquiry confirms Nazi death camps"]. ''[[The New York Times]]''. Retrieved 2 October 2012.</ref> and 6 July<ref name=TWODEATHCAMPSPLACESOFHORROR>Brigham, Daniel T. (6 July 1944). [http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20912F83859147B93C4A9178CD85F408485F9 "Two death camps places of horror"]. ''[[The New York Times]]''. Retrieved 2 October 2012.</ref> 1944. The subsequent pressure from world leaders persuaded [[Miklós Horthy]] to bring the mass deportations of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz to a halt on 9 July, saving up to 200,000 Jews from the extermination camps.<ref name=LinnGuardian/> |
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On 14 November 2001, in the 150th anniversary issue, ''The New York Times'' ran an article by former editor [[Max Frankel]] reporting that before and during World War II, the ''Times'' had maintained a strict policy in their news reporting and editorials to minimize reports on the Holocaust.<ref>[[Max Frankel|Frankel, Max]] (14 November 2001). [http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/14/specials/onefifty/20FRAN.html?pagewanted=all "Turning Away from the Holocaust"]. ''[[The New York Times]]''. Retrieved 28 September 2012.</ref> The ''Times'' accepted the detailed analysis and findings of journalism professor [[Laurel Leff]], who had published an article the year before in the ''Harvard International Journal of the Press and Politics'', that ''The New York Times'' had deliberately suppressed news of the Third Reich's persecution and murder of Jews.<ref>{{Harvnb|Leff|2005}}.</ref> Leff concluded that ''New York Times'' reporting and editorial policies made it virtually impossible for American Jews to impress Congress, church or government leaders with the importance of helping Europe's Jews.<ref>[[Laurel Leff|Leff, Laurel]] (4 April 2005). [http://hnn.us/articles/10903.html "How the NYT Missed the Story of the Holocaust While It Was Happening"]. [[History News Network]], [[George Mason University]]. Retrieved 19 October 2012.</ref> |
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{{further|The New York Times and the Holocaust}} |
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===Death marches (1944–1945)=== |
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{{main|Death marches (Holocaust)}} |
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[[File:Pomnik mogila ofiar marszu smierci Wodzislaw Slaski.JPG|right|thumb|Grave and Memorial in [[Wodzisław]] of the most famous Death march from [[Auschwitz concentration camp|Auschwitz Birkenau]] to [[Wodzisław Śląski]]]] |
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By mid-1944, the Final Solution had largely run its course. Those Jewish communities within easy reach of the Nazi regime had been largely exterminated, in proportions ranging from about 25 percent in France to more than 90 percent in Poland. On 5 May, Himmler claimed in a speech that "The Jewish question has in general been solved in Germany and in the countries occupied by Germany."<ref>{{Harvnb|Longerich|2012|p=695}}.</ref> During 1944, in any case, the task became steadily more difficult. German armies were evicted from the Soviet Union, the Balkans and Italy, and German forces—as well as forces aligned with them—were either defeated or were switching sides to the Allies. In June, the western Allies landed in France. Allied air attacks and the operations of partisans made rail transport increasingly difficult, and the objections of the military to the diversion of rail transport for carrying Jews to Poland more urgent and harder to ignore. |
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At this time, as the Soviet armed forces approached, the camps in eastern Poland were closed down, any surviving inmates being shipped west to camps closer to Germany, first to Auschwitz and later to [[Gross Rosen]] in [[Silesia]]. Auschwitz itself was closed as the Soviets advanced through Poland. The last 13 prisoners, all women, were killed in Auschwitz II on 25 November 1944; records show they were "''unmittelbar getötet''" ("killed outright"),<!--see footnote for the full German--> leaving open whether they were gassed or otherwise disposed of.<ref>[[#CITEREFCzech1989|Czech 1989]], p. 920, 933, which uses information from a series called ''Hefte von Auschwitz'', and cited in [[#CITEREFKárný1998|Kárný 1998]], p. 564. The original German is: ''25. November Im KL Auschwitz II kommen 24 weibliche Häftlinge ums Leben, von denen 13 unmittelbar getötet werden.''</ref> |
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Despite the desperate military situation, great efforts were made to conceal evidence of what had happened in the camps. The gas chambers were dismantled, the crematoria dynamited, mass graves dug up and the corpses cremated, and Polish farmers were induced to plant crops on the sites to give the impression that they had never existed. Local commanders continued to kill Jews, and to shuttle them from camp to camp by forced "death marches" until the last weeks of the war.<ref>[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_nm.php?ModuleId=10005162&MediaId=382 "Maps of the Death Marches"]. ''Holocaust Encyclopedia''. [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum|ushmm.org]]. Retrieved 27 September 2012.<br>According to [[#CITEREFKrakowski|Krakowski 1989]], p. 476, death marches were a frequent occurrence throughout the war. The inaugural one commenced on 14 January 1940 in occupied Poland, when the SS escorted 800 Jewish POWs from the Polish army to Biała Podłaska from Lublin—a distance of 100km in a matter of days in the depths of Polish winter. Massacred all along the way, less than 5% of the 800 survived the journey.</ref> |
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Already sick after months or years of violence and starvation, prisoners were forced to march for tens of miles in the snow to train stations; then transported for days at a time without food or shelter in freight trains with open carriages; and forced to march again at the other end to the new camp. Those who lagged behind or fell were shot. Around 250,000 Jews died during these marches.<ref>{{Harvnb|Friedländer|2007|p=649}}.</ref> |
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The largest and best-known of the death marches took place in January 1945, when the Soviet army advanced on Poland. Nine days before the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz, the SS marched 60,000 prisoners out of the camp toward [[Wodzisław]] (German: Loslau), {{convert|56|km|mi|abbr=on}} away, where they were put on freight trains to other camps. Around 15,000 died on the way. [[Elie Wiesel]] and his father, Shlomo, were among the marchers: |
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{{Quotation| |
|||
An icy wind blew in violent gusts. But we marched without faltering. . . . |
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Pitch darkness. Every now and then, an explosion in the night. They had orders to fire on any who could not keep up. Their fingers on the triggers, they did not deprive themselves of this pleasure. If one of us had stopped for a second, a sharp shot finished off another filthy son of a bitch. ... |
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Near me, men were collapsing in the dirty snow. Shots.<ref>{{Harvnb|Wiesel|2012|p=122}}.</ref> |
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}} |
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===Liberation=== |
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[[File:Eines von 3 Massengräbern in Bergen-Belsen, so wie es von den Befreiern vorgefunden wurde, 1945.jpg|left|thumb|A grave inside Bergen-Belsen]] |
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{{main|Battle of Berlin|Death of Adolf Hitler|Prague Offensive|Victory in Europe Day}} |
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The first major camp, [[Majdanek concentration camp|Majdanek]], was discovered by the advancing Soviets on 23 July 1944. Chełmno was liberated by the Soviets on 20 January 1945. Auschwitz was liberated, also by the Soviets, on 27 January 1945;<ref>{{Harvnb|Hitchcock|2009|p=283}}.</ref> Buchenwald by the Americans on 11 April;<ref>{{Harvnb|Hitchcock|2009|p=297}}.</ref> [[Bergen-Belsen concentration camp|Bergen-Belsen]] by the British on 15 April;<ref>{{Harvnb|Hitchcock|2009|p=340}}.</ref> Dachau by the Americans on 29 April;<ref>{{Harvnb|Gilbert|1986|p=798}}.</ref> [[Ravensbrück concentration camp|Ravensbrück]] by the Soviets on the same day; Mauthausen by the Americans on 5 May;<ref>{{Harvnb|Gilbert|1986|pp=808–9}}.</ref> and [[Theresienstadt concentration camp|Theresienstadt]] by the Soviets on 8 May.<ref name=GluckWood144>{{cite book|author=Stone, Dan G.; Wood, Angela|title=Holocaust: The events and their impact on real people, in conjunction with the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education|location=|year=2007|page=144|isbn=0-7566-2535-1}}</ref> Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec were never liberated, but were destroyed by the Nazis in 1943. Colonel [[William Wilson Quinn|William W. Quinn]] of the US 7th Army said of Dachau: "There our troops found sights, sounds, and stenches horrible beyond belief, cruelties so enormous as to be incomprehensible to the normal mind."<ref>{{citation|author=[[Office of Strategic Services|OSS]] Section, [[Seventh United States Army|Seventh Army]]|year=1945|title=Dachau|publisher=[[United States Army]]|page=[https://archive.org/stream/Dachau_675/Dachau#page/n3/mode/2up 2]|accessdate=27 September 2012}}</ref><ref>A film with scenes from the liberation of Dachau, Buchenwald, Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps, supervised by the British Ministry of Information and the American Office of War Information, was begun but never finished or shown. It lay in archives until first aired on PBS's ''Frontline'' on 7 May 1985. The film, partly edited by [[Alfred Hitchcock]], can be seen online at [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/camp/view/#lower Memory of the Camps].</ref> |
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[[File:Ebensee concentration camp prisoners 1945.jpg|thumb|Starving prisoners in Mauthausen camp liberated on 5 May 1945]] |
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In most of the camps discovered by the Soviets, almost all the prisoners had already been removed, leaving only a few thousand alive—7,600 inmates were found in Auschwitz,<ref>{{Harvnb|Hitchcock|2009|p=289}}.</ref> including 180 children who had been experimented on by doctors. Some 60,000 prisoners were discovered at Bergen-Belsen by the British 11th Armoured Division,<ref name=11th>[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10006188 "The 11th Armoured Division (Great Britain)"]. ''Holocaust Encyclopedia''. [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]]. Retrieved 27 September 2012.</ref> 13,000 corpses lay unburied, and another 10,000 died from [[typhus]] or malnutrition over the following weeks.<ref name=BB>[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005224 "Bergen-Belsen"]. ''Holocaust Encyclopedia''. [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]]. Retrieved 27 September 2012.</ref> The British forced the remaining SS guards to gather up the corpses and place them in mass graves.<ref>{{Harvnb|Wiesel|2002|p=41}}.</ref> |
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The BBC's [[Richard Dimbleby]] described the scenes that greeted him and the British Army at Belsen: |
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{{quote|Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which . . . The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them . . . Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live . . . A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms . . . He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days. This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.<ref>[[Richard Dimbleby|Dimbleby, Richard]] (15 April 1945). [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/4445811.stm "Liberation of Belsen"]. [[BBC News]]. Retrieved 25 September 2012.</ref>}} |
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{| class="wikitable" style="float:center; margin-left:1.0em" |
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==Victims and death toll== |
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|+Major extermination camps{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=120}} |
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{{further|The Destruction of the European Jews|The War Against the Jews|Holocaust victims}}<!-- Comment added for future reference Do not remove: [[File:Fichier:WWII-HolocaustDeaths-Pie-All.png|thumb]] --> |
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{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left:1em; font-size:80%" |
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|- |
|- |
||
!scope="col"| Camp |
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!Victims!!Killed!!Source |
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!scope="col"| Location |
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!scope="col"| Number of Jews killed |
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!scope="col"|Killing technology |
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!scope="col"| Planning began |
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!scope="col"| Mass gassing duration |
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|- |
|- |
||
|scope="row"| [[Chełmno extermination camp|Chełmno]] |
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|Jews |
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| [[Wartheland]]{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=120}} || 150,000{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=120}} || [[Gas vans]]{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=120}} || July 1941{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=120}} <!-- construction in November 1941{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=209}} --> || 8 December 1941 – April 1943 and April–July 1944{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=74, 120}} |
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| align="right" |5.93 million|| style="text-align:center;" |<ref name="autogenerated2">[[Lucy Dawidowicz|Dawidowicz, Lucy]]. ''The War Against the Jews'', Bantam, 1986.p. 403</ref> |
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|- |
|- |
||
|scope="row"| [[Belzec extermination camp|Belzec]] |
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|Soviet POWs |
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| [[Lublin District]]{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=120}} || 440,823–596,200{{sfn|Lehnstaedt|2021|p=63}} || Stationary [[gas chamber]], engine exhaust{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=120}} ||October 1941{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=74, 120}} || 17 March 1942 – December 1942{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=74, 120}} |
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| align="right" |2–3 million|| style="text-align:center;" |<ref name="Berenbaum 2005 125">{{Harvnb|Berenbaum|2005|p=125}}.</ref> |
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|- |
|- |
||
|scope="row"| [[Sobibor extermination camp|Sobibor]] |
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|Ethnic Poles |
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| [[Lublin District]]{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=120}} || 170,618–238,900{{sfn|Lehnstaedt|2021|p=63}} || Stationary [[gas chamber]], engine exhaust{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=120}} || Late 1941 or March 1942{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=93–94, 120}} || May 1942 – October 1942{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=93–94, 120}} |
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| align="right" |1.8–2 million|| style="text-align:center;" |<ref name="autogenerated1">1.8–1.9 million non-Jewish Polish citizens are estimated to have died as a result of the Nazi occupation and the war. Estimates are from Polish scholar, Franciszek Piper, the chief historian at Auschwitz. [http://www.ushmm.org/education/resource/poles/poles.php?menu=/export/home/www/doc_root/education/foreducators/include/menu.txt&bgcolor=#CD9544 Poles: Victims of the Nazi Era] at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.</ref><ref name="PolandWorldWarIIcasualties" /> |
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|- |
|- |
||
|scope="row"| [[Treblinka extermination camp|Treblinka]] |
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|Disabled |
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| [[Warsaw District]]{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=120}} || 780,863–951,800{{sfn|Lehnstaedt|2021|p=63}} || Stationary [[gas chamber]], engine exhaust{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=120}} || April 1942{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=120}} <!-- construction in May<ref name=Treblinkadates>{{harvnb|Gerlach|2016|p=94}}; also see {{harvnb|Cesarani|2016|p=504}}.</ref> --> || 23 July 1942 – October 1943{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=120}} |
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| align="right" |270,000|| style="text-align:center;" |<ref name="holocaust-education.dk">http://www.holocaust-education.dk/baggrund/eutanasi.asp</ref> |
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|- |
|- |
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|scope="row"| [[Auschwitz II–Birkenau]] |
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|Romani |
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| [[The Holocaust in East Upper Silesia|East Upper Silesia]]{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=120}} || 900,000–1,000,000{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=120}} || Stationary [[gas chamber]], [[Zyklon B|hydrogen cyanide]]{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=120}} || September 1941<br /><small>(built as POW camp)</small>{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=281–282}}{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=120}} || February 1942 – October 1944{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=120}} |
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| align="right" |90,000–220,000|| style="text-align:center;" |<ref name="USHMM Roma">[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005219 "Genocide of European Roma (Gypsies)"]. ''Holocaust Encyclopedia''. [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]]. Retrieved 27 September 2012. The USHMM places the scholarly estimates at 220,000–500,000. According to [[#CITEREFBerenbaum2005|Berenbaum 2005]], p. 126, "serious scholars estimate that between 90,000 and 220,000 were killed under German rule."</ref><ref name="383–96">{{Harvnb|Hancock|2004|pp=[http://www.radoc.net/radoc.php?doc=art_e_holocaust_porrajmos&lang=en&articles=true 383–96]}}.</ref> |
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|- |
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|Freemasons |
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| align="right" |80,000–200,000|| style="text-align:center;" |<ref name="GrandLodgeofScotland">{{cite web|url=http://www.grandlodgescotland.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=91&Itemid=125|title=GrandLodgeScotland.com|publisher=GrandLodgeScotland.com|accessdate=31 July 2010}}</ref><ref name="holocaust">''Freemasons for Dummies'', by [http://members.aol.com/brlodge/whymasons.html Christopher Hodapp], Wiley Publishing Inc., Indianapolis, 2005, page 85, sec. ''Hitler and the Nazis''</ref> |
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|- |
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|Slovenes |
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| align="right" |20,000–25,000|| style="text-align:center;" |<ref>The number of [[Slovenes]] estimated to have died as a result of the Nazi occupation (not including those killed by Slovene collaboration forces and other Nazi allies) is estimated between 20,000 and 25,000 people. This number only includes civilians: Slovene partisan POWs who died and resistance fighters killed in action are not included (their number is estimated at 27,000). These numbers however include only Slovenes from present-day [[Slovenia]]: it does not include [[Carinthian Slovene]] victims, nor Slovene victims from areas in present-day Italy and Croatia. These numbers are result of a 10-year long research by the Institute for Contemporary History (''Inštitut za novejšo zgodovino'') from Ljubljana, Slovenia. The partial results of the research have been released in 2008 in the volume ''Žrtve vojne in revolucije v Sloveniji'' (Ljubljana: Institute for Conetmporary History, 2008), and officially presented at the Slovenian National Council ([File:http://www.ds-rs.si/sites/default/files/dokumenti/zbornik_zrtve_vojne_in_revolucije.pdf]</ref> |
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|- |
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|Homosexuals |
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| align="right" |5,000–15,000|| style="text-align:center;" |<ref name="Chronicle108">''The Holocaust Chronicle'', Publications International Ltd., p. 108.</ref> |
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|- |
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|Jehovah's<br>Witnesses |
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| align="right" |2,500–5,000|| style="text-align:center;" |<ref name="Shulman">Shulman, William L. ''A State of Terror: Germany 1933–1939''. Bayside, New York: Holocaust Resource Center and Archives.</ref> |
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|- |
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|Spanish Republicans |
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| align="right" |7000|| style="text-align:center;" |<ref name="Pike, David Wingeate 2000">Pike, David Wingeate. Spaniards in the Holocaust: Mauthausen, the horror on the Danube; Editorial: Routledge Chapman & Hall ISBN 9780415227803. London, 2000.</ref> |
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|} |
|} |
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The number of victims depends on which definition of "the Holocaust" is used. Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia write in ''The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust'' that the term is commonly defined as the mass murder of more than five million European Jews.<ref name="Niewyk 2000 45–52">{{Harvnb|Niewyk|Nicosia|2000|pp=45–52}}.</ref> They further state that 'Not everyone finds this a fully satisfactory definition.'<ref>{{cite book|authors=Donald L. Niewyk, Francis R. Nicosia|title=The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust|publisher= Columbia University Press|location= |year=2000 |isbn= 0231112009|oclc=|doi=|page=49 |quote=Those who offer explicit or implicit arguments for including them among the victims of the Holocaust, such as Bohdan Wytwycky in ''The Other Holocaust'' and Christian Streit and Jürgen Forster in ''The Policies of Genocide'', point out that the appallingly high losses among Soviet prisoners of war were racially determined. The Germans did not usually mistreat prisoners from other Allied countries, but in the Nazi view Soviet prisoners were Slavic "subhumans" who had no right to live. ... Those who would include Polish and Soviet civilian losses in the Holocaust include Bohdan Wytwycky in ''The Other Holocaust'', [[Richard C. Lukas]] in ''The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Rule, 1939–1944'', and Ihor Kamenetsky in ''Secret Nazi Plans for Eastern Europe''.}}</ref> According to British historian [[Martin Gilbert]], the total number of victims is just under six million—around 78 percent of the 7.3 million Jews in occupied Europe at the time.<ref>{{Harvnb|Gilbert|1988|pp=242–4}}.</ref> Timothy D. Snyder wrote that "The term Holocaust is sometimes used in two other ways: to mean all German killing policies during the war, or to mean all oppression of Jews by the Nazi regime."<ref>{{Harvnb|Snyder|2010|p=412}}.</ref> |
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===Liquidation of the ghettos in Poland=== |
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Broader definitions include the two to three million Soviet POWs who died as a result of mistreatment due to Nazi racial policies, two million non-Jewish ethnic Poles who died due to the conditions of Nazi occupation, 90,000-220,000 Romani, 270,000 mentally and physically disabled killed in Germany's eugenics program, 80,000–200,000 Freemasons, 20,000–25,000 Slovenes, 5,000–15,000 homosexuals, 2,500–5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses and 7,000 Spanish Republicans, bringing the death toll to around 11 million. The broadest definition would include six million Soviet civilians who died as a result of war-related famine and disease, raising the death toll to 17 million.<ref name="Niewyk 2000 45–52"/> A research project conducted by the [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]] estimated that 15 to 20 million people died or were imprisoned.<ref name=NYT030113 /> [[R.J. Rummel]] estimates the total [[democide]] death toll of Nazi Germany to be 21 million. |
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{{further|Operation Reinhard}} |
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[[File:Cumulative murders at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka from January 1942 to February 1943.jpg|thumb|alt=See caption|Cumulative murders of Jews from the [[General Governorate]] at [[Belzec]], [[Sobibor]], and [[Treblinka]] from January 1942 to February 1943]] |
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<!-- [[File:Sosnowiec Ghetto liquidation.jpg|thumb|Liquidation of [[Sosnowiec Ghetto]] to [[Auschwitz concentration camp]], 1943]] --> |
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Plans to kill most of the Jews in the General Governorate were affected by various goals of the SS, military, and civil administration to reduce the amount of food consumed by Jews, enable a slight increase in rations to non-Jewish Poles, and combat the [[black market]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=91}} In March 1942, killings began in Belzec, targeting Jews from Lublin who were not capable of work. This action reportedly reduced the black market and was deemed a success to be replicated elsewhere.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=243}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=200}} By mid-1942, Nazi leaders decided to allow only 300,000 Jews to survive in the General Governorate by the end of the year for forced labor;{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=91}} for the most part, only those working in [[Military production during World War II|armaments production]] were spared.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=342}} The majority of ghettos were liquidated in mass executions nearby, especially if they were not near a train station. Larger ghettos were more commonly liquidated during multiple deportations to extermination camps.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=220}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=200}} During this campaign, 1.5 million [[Polish Jews]] were murdered in the largest killing operation of the Holocaust.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=340}} |
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In order to reduce resistance, the ghetto would be raided without warning, usually in the early morning, and the extent of the operation would be concealed as long as possible.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=339}} [[Trawniki men]] would cordon off the ghetto while the [[Order Police]] and [[Sicherheitsdienst|Security Police]] carried out the action.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=338}} In addition to local non-Jewish collaborators, the Jewish councils and [[Jewish ghetto police]] were often ordered to assist with liquidation actions, although these Jews were in most cases murdered later.{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=209}} Chaotic, capriciously executed selections determined who would be loaded onto the trains. Many Jews were shot during the action, often leaving ghettos strewn with corpses. Jewish forced laborers had to clean it up and collect any valuables from the victims.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=339}} |
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===Jewish=== |
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[[File:Stroop Report - Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 06c.jpg|link=Warsaw Ghetto boy|alt=A young boy surrounded by other unarmed civilians holds his hands over his head while a man in uniform points a submachine gun in his direction|thumb|left|The [[Warsaw Ghetto uprising]] became significant as a symbol of [[Jewish resistance in German-occupied Europe|Jewish resistance against the Nazis]].{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=209}}]] |
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{|class="sortable wikitable" style="float:right; clear:right; text-align:right; margin-left:1em; font-size:90%" |
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The Warsaw Ghetto [[Grossaktion Warsaw|was cleared]] between 22 July and 12 September. Of the original population of 350,000 Jews, 250,000 were killed at Treblinka, 11,000 were deported to labor camps, 10,000 were shot in the ghetto, 35,000 were allowed to remain in the ghetto after a final selection, and around 20,000 or 25,000 managed to hide in the ghetto. Misdirection efforts convinced many Jews that they could avoid deportation until it was too late.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=335–336}} During a six-week period beginning in August, 300,000 Jews from the [[Radom District]] were sent to Treblinka.{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=203}}{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=337}} |
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|+The following figures from [[Lucy Dawidowicz]] show the annihilation of the Jewish population of Europe by (pre-war) country:<ref name=autogenerated2/> |
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!Country |
|||
!Estimated<br>Pre-War<br>Jewish<br>population |
|||
!Estimated<br>killed |
|||
!Percent<br>killed |
|||
|- |
|||
|Poland |
|||
|3,300,000 |
|||
|3,000,000 |
|||
|90 |
|||
|- |
|||
|[[Baltic countries]] |
|||
|253,000 |
|||
|228,000 |
|||
|90 |
|||
|- |
|||
|Germany and Austria |
|||
|240,000 |
|||
|210,000 |
|||
|90 |
|||
|- |
|||
|[[Bohemia]] and [[Moravia]] |
|||
|90,000 |
|||
|80,000 |
|||
|89 |
|||
|- |
|||
|[[Slovakia]] |
|||
|90,000 |
|||
|75,000 |
|||
|83 |
|||
|- |
|||
|Greece |
|||
|70,000 |
|||
|54,000 |
|||
|77 |
|||
|- |
|||
|Netherlands |
|||
|140,000 |
|||
|105,000 |
|||
|75 |
|||
|- |
|||
|Hungary |
|||
|650,000 |
|||
|450,000 |
|||
|70 |
|||
|- |
|||
|[[Byelorussian SSR]] |
|||
|375,000 |
|||
|245,000 |
|||
|65 |
|||
|- |
|||
|[[Ukrainian SSR]] |
|||
|1,500,000 |
|||
|900,000 |
|||
|60 |
|||
|- |
|||
|Belgium |
|||
|65,000 |
|||
|40,000 |
|||
|60 |
|||
|- |
|||
|[[Yugoslavia]] |
|||
|43,000 |
|||
|26,000 |
|||
|60 |
|||
|- |
|||
|[[Romania]] |
|||
|600,000 |
|||
|300,000 |
|||
|50 |
|||
|- |
|||
|Norway |
|||
|2,173 |
|||
|890 |
|||
|41 |
|||
|- |
|||
|France |
|||
|350,000 |
|||
|90,000 |
|||
|26 |
|||
|- |
|||
|[[Bulgaria]] |
|||
|64,000 |
|||
|14,000 |
|||
|22 |
|||
|- |
|||
|Italy |
|||
|40,000 |
|||
|8,000 |
|||
|20 |
|||
|- |
|||
|[[Luxembourg]] |
|||
|5,000 |
|||
|1,000 |
|||
|20 |
|||
|- |
|||
|[[Russian SFSR]] |
|||
|975,000 |
|||
|107,000 |
|||
|11 |
|||
|- |
|||
|Denmark |
|||
|8,000 |
|||
|52 |
|||
|<1 |
|||
|- class="sortbottom" |
|||
|'''Total''' |
|||
|'''8,861,800''' |
|||
|'''5,933,900''' |
|||
|'''67''' |
|||
|} |
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At the same time as the mass killing of Jews in the General Governorate, Jews who were in ghettos to the west and east were targeted. Tens of thousands of Jews were deported from ghettos in the Warthegau and East Upper Silesia to Chełmno and Auschwitz.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=343}} 300,000 Jews—largely skilled laborers—were shot in [[Volhynia]], [[Podolia]], and southwestern Belarus.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=93, 249}}{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=352}} Deportations and mass executions in the [[Bialystok District]] and Galicia killed many Jews.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=338, 352–353}} Although there was practically no resistance in the General Governorate in 1942, some Soviet Jews improvised weapons, attacked those attempting to liquidate the ghetto, and set it on fire.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=341, 353–354}} These [[ghetto uprisings]] were only undertaken when the inhabitants began to believe that their death was certain.{{sfn|Engel|2020|pp=241–242}} In 1943, larger uprisings in [[Warsaw Ghetto uprising|Warsaw]], [[Białystok Ghetto uprising|Białystok]], and [[Hlybokaye|Glubokoje]] necessitated the use of heavy weapons.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=110}} The uprising in Warsaw prompted the Nazi leadership to liquidate additional ghettos and labor camps in German-occupied Poland with their inhabitants massacred, such as the [[Wola massacre|Wola Massacre]], or deported to extermination camps for fear of additional Jewish resistance developing.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=378–380}} Nevertheless, in early 1944, more than 70,000 Jews were performing forced labor in the General Governorate.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=214}} |
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Since 1945, the most commonly cited figure for the total number of Jews killed has been six million. The [[Yad Vashem]] Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in [[Jerusalem]], writes that there is no precise figure for the number of Jews killed,<ref>{{cite web|title=The Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names|url=http://db.yadvashem.org/names/search.html?language=en|publisher=Yad Vashem|accessdate=8 November 2013}}</ref> but has been able to find documentation of more than three million names of Jewish victims killed,<ref name=names-documentation>{{cite web|title=The Holocaust: Tracing Lost Family Members|url=https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/tracing.html|work=JVL|accessdate=8 November 2013}}</ref> which it displays at its visitors center. The figure most commonly used is the six million attributed to Adolf Eichmann, a senior SS official.<ref>[[Wilhelm Höttl]], an SS officer and a Doctor of History, testified at the [[Nuremberg Trials]] and Eichmann's trial that at a meeting he had with Eichmann in Budapest in late August 1944, "Eichmann ... told me that, according to his information, some 6,000,000 (six million) Jews had perished until then – 4,000,000 (four million) in extermination camps and the remaining 2,000,000 (two million) through shooting by the Operations Units and other causes, such as disease, etc."[http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Testimony-Abroad/Wilhelm_Hoettl-07.html] [http://david-kahn.com/articles-secret-history-author-front.htm] [http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/tgmwc/tgmwc-02/tgmwc-02-20-05.shtml]</ref> |
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===Deportations from elsewhere=== |
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Early calculations range from about 4.2 to 4.5 million in ''The Final Solution'' (1953) by [[Gerald Reitlinger]] (arguing against higher Russian estimates),<ref>{{cite book|last=Reitlinger|first=Gerald|title=The Final Solution. The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945|location=New York|publisher=Beechhurst Press}} Review by {{cite journal|first=Philip|last=Friedman|title=Review of ''The Final Solution''|journal=[[Jewish Social Studies]]|volume=16|issue=2|year=1954|pages=186–189 [p. 189]|jstor=4465231 }} See also a review by {{cite journal|first=Albert M.|last=Hyamson|title=Review of ''The Final Solution''|title=[[International Affairs (journal)|International Affairs]]|volume=29|issue=4|year=1953|pages=494–495|jstor=2606046 }}</ref> and 5.1 million from [[Raul Hilberg]], to 5.95 million from [[Jacob Lestschinsky]]. [[Yisrael Gutman]] and Robert Rozett in the ''[[Encyclopedia of the Holocaust]]'' estimate 5.59–5.86 million.<ref>Israel Gutman. ''Encyclopedia of the Holocaust'', Macmillan Reference Books; Reference edition (1 October 1995).</ref> A study led by [[Wolfgang Benz]] of the [[Technical University of Berlin]] suggests 5.29–6.2 million.<ref name=YadVashemnumbers/><ref name=isbn3-423-04690-2>{{cite book|author=Benz, Wolfgang|title=Dimension des Völkermords. Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus.|publisher=Dtv|year=1996|isbn=3-423-04690-2}}</ref> Yad Vashem writes that the main sources for these statistics are comparisons of prewar and postwar censuses and population estimates, and Nazi documentation on deportations and murders.<ref name=YadVashemnumbers>[http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/resource_center/faq.asp "How many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust?"], FAQs about the Holocaust, Yad Vashem.</ref> Its Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names currently holds close to three million names of Holocaust victims, all accessible online. Yad Vashem continues its project of collecting names of Jewish victims from historical documents and individual memories.<ref>[//www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/remembrance/hall_of_names.asp About: The Central Database of Shoah Victims Names], [[Yad Vashem]] web site.</ref> |
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[[File:Deportation of Jews from Würzburg to the Lublin district, 25 April 1942 (USHMM 46207).jpg|thumb|alt=A column of people marching with luggage|Jews are deported from [[Würzburg]], [[Nazi Germany|Germany]] to the [[Lublin District]] of the [[General Governorate]], 25 April 1942.]] |
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Unlike the killing areas in the east, the deportation from elsewhere in Europe was centrally organized from Berlin, although it depended on the outcome of negotiations with allied governments and popular responses to deportation.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=99}} Beginning in late 1941, local administrators responded to the deportation of Jews to their area by massacring local Jews in order to free up space in ghettos for the deportees.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=299–300, 331}} If the deported Jews did not die of harsh conditions, they were killed later in extermination camps.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=321}} Jews deported to Auschwitz were initially entered into the camp; the practice of conducting selections and murdering many prisoners upon arrival began in July 1942.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=97}} In May and June, German and Slovak Jews deported to Lublin began to be sent directly to extermination camps.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=97}} |
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In Western Europe, almost all Jewish deaths occurred after deportation.{{sfn|Welch|2020|p=460}} The occupiers often relied on local policemen to arrest Jews, limiting the number who were deported.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=375–376}} In 1942, nearly 100,000 Jews were deported [[The Holocaust in Belgium|from Belgium]], [[the Holocaust in France|France]], and [[The Holocaust in the Netherlands|the Netherlands]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=96–97}} Only 25 percent of the Jews in France were killed;{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=366}} most of them were either non-citizens or recent immigrants. [[Si Kaddour Benghabrit]] and [[Abdelkader Mesli]] saved hundreds of Jews by hiding them in the basements of the [[Grand Mosque of Paris]] and other resistance efforts in France.<ref name="lep1">{{cite web |last1=De Bengy |first1=Raphael |title=Mohamed Mesli : « Mon père, l'imam sauveur de juifs » |url=https://www.leparisien.fr/week-end/mohamed-mesli-mon-pere-l-imam-sauveur-de-juifs-18-02-2015-4543709.php |website=leparisien.fr |access-date=26 May 2024 |language=fr-FR |date=18 February 2015}}</ref>{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=95–96, 387}} The death rate in the Netherlands was higher than neighboring countries, which scholars have attributed to difficulty in hiding or increased collaboration of the Dutch police.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=257}} |
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Hilberg's estimate of 5.1 million, in the third edition of ''[[The Destruction of the European Jews]]'', includes over 800,000 who died from "ghettoization and general privation"; 1,400,000 killed in open-air shootings; and up to 2,900,000 who perished in camps. Hilberg estimates the death toll of Jews in Poland as up to 3,000,000.<ref>{{Harvnb|Hilberg|2003|pp=1320–1321}}.</ref> Hilberg's numbers are generally considered to be a conservative estimate, as they typically include only those deaths for which records are available, avoiding statistical adjustment.<ref>{{Harvnb|Piper|1998|p=71}}.</ref> |
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The German government sought the deportation of Jews from allied countries.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=97}}{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=324, 360}} The first to [[The Holocaust in Slovakia|hand over its Jewish population was Slovakia]], which [[List of Holocaust transports from Slovakia|arrested and deported about 58,000 Jews]] to Poland [[first mass transport of Jews to Auschwitz concentration camp|from March]] to October 1942.{{sfn|Stone|2010|pp=33–34}}{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=373, 379}}{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=325–326}} The [[Independent State of Croatia]] had already [[The Holocaust in Croatia|shot or killed in concentration camps]] the majority of its Jewish population (along with a [[Genocide of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia|larger number of Serbs]]),{{sfn|Stone|2010|p=35}}{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=306, 368, 372}} and later deported several thousand Jews in 1942 and 1943.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=366, 389}} Bulgaria deported 11,000 Jews from [[The Holocaust in Bulgarian-occupied Greece|Bulgarian-occupied Greece]] and [[The Holocaust in North Macedonia|Yugoslavia]], who were murdered at Treblinka, but [[The Holocaust in Bulgaria|declined to allow the deportation of Jews from its prewar territory]].{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=392}} Romania and Hungary did not send any Jews, which were the largest surviving populations after 1942.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=97, 102, 371–372}} Prior to the [[Italian Social Republic|German occupation of Italy]] in September 1943, there were no serious attempt to deport Italian Jews, and Italy refused to allow the deportation of Jews in many [[Italian-occupied Europe (disambiguation)|Italian-occupied areas]].{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=396}}{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=387}} Nazi Germany did not attempt the destruction of the [[Finnish Jews]]{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=105}} and the [[Jews outside Europe under Axis occupation|North African Jews living under French or Italian rule]].{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=115–116, 382}} |
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Martin Gilbert arrived at a "minimum estimate" of over 5.75 million Jewish victims.<ref name=isbn0415281458>{{cite book|author=Martin Gilbert|title=The Routledge atlas of the Holocaust, 3rd Ed.|publisher=[[Routledge]]|location=London|year=2002|isbn=0-415-28145-8|page=245|quote=By the most exact estimates of recent research, the number of Jews killed in Europe between September 1939 and May 1945 was nearly six million. This estimate is a minimum; the deaths shown opposite total just over 5,750,000, and are based on such country-by-country and region-by-region records as survive.}}</ref> [[Lucy Dawidowicz|Lucy S. Dawidowicz]] used pre-war census figures to estimate that 5.934 million Jews died (see table below).<ref name=isbn0553343025>{{cite book|author=Dawidowicz, Lucy S.|title=The war against the Jews, 1933–1945|publisher=Bantam Books|location=New York|year=1986|isbn=0-553-34302-5}}p. 403</ref> |
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==Perpetrators and beneficiaries== |
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[[File:Auschwitz Resistance 280 cropped.jpg|thumb|250px|Members of the ''[[Sonderkommando]]'' burn corpses in the fire pits at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.<ref>[http://www.auschwitz.org.pl/ Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Oświęcim, Poland].</ref>]] |
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{{further|Responsibility for the Holocaust}} |
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[[File:Photographie prise à Solahütte en juillet 1944 - collections USHMM - 34585A.jpg|thumb|alt=Men and women in uniform smiling and posing with musical instruments|Auschwitz [[Schutzstaffel|SS]] guards and female staff auxiliaries enjoying themselves on vacation in [[Solahütte]]]] |
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An estimated 200,000 to 250,000 Germans were directly involved in killing Jews, and if one includes all those involved in the organization of extermination, the number rises to 500,000.{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=2}} Genocide required the active and tacit consent of millions of Germans and non-Germans.{{sfn|Westermann|2020|p=117}}{{sfn|Burzlaff|2020|p=1055}} The motivation of [[Holocaust perpetrators]] varied and has led to historiographical debate.{{sfn|Westermann|2020|p=117}}{{sfn|Bloxham|2009|p=264}} Studies of the SS officials who organized the Holocaust have found that most had strong ideological commitment to Nazism.{{sfn|Westermann|2020|pp=124–125}}{{sfn|Bloxham|2009|p=265}} In addition to ideological factors, many perpetrators were motivated by the prospect of material gain and social advancement.{{sfn|Westermann|2020|p=121}}{{sfn|Bloxham|2009|p=269}}{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=213}} German SS, police, and regular army units rarely had trouble finding enough men to shoot Jewish civilians, even though punishment for refusal was absent or light.{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=211}}{{sfn|Bloxham|2009|p=280}} |
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Non-German perpetrators and collaborators included Dutch, French, and [[Blue Police|Polish policemen]], Romanian soldiers, [[Waffen-SS foreign volunteers and conscripts|foreign SS and police auxiliaries]], [[Ukrainian Insurgent Army]] partisans, and some civilians.{{sfn|Westermann|2020|p=117}}{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=260}}{{sfn|Burzlaff|2020|pp=1064, 1066}} Some were coerced into committing violence against Jews, but others killed for entertainment, material rewards, the possibility of better treatment from the occupiers, or ideological motivations such as nationalism and anti-communism.{{sfn|Bloxham|2009|p=281}}{{sfn|Beorn|2018|pp=259, 264}}{{sfn|Burzlaff|2020|p=1067}} According to historian [[Christian Gerlach]], non-Germans "not under German command" caused 5 to 6 percent of the Jewish deaths, and their involvement was crucial in other ways.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=13}} |
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There were about eight to ten million Jews in the territories controlled directly or indirectly by Germany (the uncertainty arises from the lack of knowledge about how many Jews there were in the Soviet Union). The six million killed in the Holocaust thus represent 60 to 75 percent of these Jews. Of Poland's 3.3 million Jews, about 90 percent were killed.<ref>{{cite web|title=Responses to common Holocaust-denial claims|url=http://archive.adl.org/holocaust/response.asp|publisher=ADL|accessdate=8 November 2013}}</ref> The same proportion were killed in [[Latvia]] and Lithuania, but most of [[Estonia]]'s Jews were evacuated in time. Of the 750,000 Jews in Germany and Austria in 1933, only about a quarter survived. Although many German Jews emigrated before 1939, the majority of these fled to [[Czechoslovakia]], France or the Netherlands, from where they were later deported to their deaths. |
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Millions of Germans and others benefited from the genocide.{{sfn|Westermann|2020|p=117}} Corruption was rampant in the SS despite the proceeds of the Holocaust being designated as state property.{{sfn|Wachsmann|2015|pp=340, 376–377}} Different German state agencies vied to receive property stolen from Jews murdered at the death camps.{{sfn|Wachsmann|2015|p=379}} Many workers were able to obtain better jobs vacated by murdered Jews.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=340}} Businessmen benefitted from eliminating their Jewish competitors or taking over Jewish-owned businesses.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=450}} Others took over housing and possessions that had belonged to Jews.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=349}} Some Poles living near the extermination camps later dug up human remains in search of valuables.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=349}}{{sfn|Beorn|2020|p=166}} The property of deported Jews was also appropriated by Germany's allies and collaborating governments. Even [[puppet state]]s such as [[Vichy France]] and [[Quisling government|Norway]] were able to successfully lay claim to Jewish property.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=334–335}} In the decades after the war, Swiss banks [[World Jewish Congress lawsuit against Swiss banks|became notorious]] for harboring gold deposited by Nazis who had stolen it during the Holocaust, as well as profiting from unclaimed deposits made by Holocaust victims.{{sfn|Messenger|2020|p=383}} |
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In Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Netherlands, and Yugoslavia, over 70 percent were killed. 50 to 70 percent were killed in [[Romania]], Belgium and Hungary. It is likely that a similar proportion were killed in [[Belarus]] and Ukraine, but these figures are less certain. Countries with notably lower proportions of deaths include [[Bulgaria]], Denmark, France, Italy, and [[Shoah in Norway|Norway]]. [[Albania]] was the only country occupied by Germany that had a significantly larger Jewish population in 1945 than in 1939. About two hundred native Jews and over a thousand refugees were provided with false documents, hidden when necessary, and generally treated as honored guests in a country whose population was roughly 60% Muslim.<ref>Shoah Research Center;– Albania [http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%205725.pdf] The Jews of Albania during the Zogist and Second World War Periods [http://www.heimat.de/home/illyria/i.php3?s=e&p=2004_01_09_fisher_jews_in_albania] and see also Norman H. Gershman's book Besa: Muslims Who Saved Jews in World War II – for reviews etc [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0815609345] (all consulted 24 June 2010)</ref> Additionally, Japan, as an Axis member, had its own unique response to German policies regarding Jews; see [[Shanghai Ghetto]]. |
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{|class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left:1em; font-size:80%" |
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|- |
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!Year!!Jews killed<ref>{{Harvnb|Hilberg|2003|p=1322}}.</ref> |
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|- |
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|1933–1940 |
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|align="right"|under 100,000 |
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|- |
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|1941 |
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|align="right"|1,100,000 |
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|- |
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|1942 |
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|align="right"|2,700,000 |
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|- |
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|1943 |
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|align="right"|500,000 |
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|- |
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|1944 |
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|align="right"|600,000 |
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|- |
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|1945 |
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|align="right"|100,000 |
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|} |
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{|class="wikitable" style="float:left; margin-right:1em; font-size:80%" |
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|- |
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!Extermination Camp!!Estimate of<br> number killed!!Ref |
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|- |
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|[[Auschwitz concentration camp|Auschwitz-Birkenau]] |
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|align="right"|1,000,000||<ref name=yvsau>[http://en.auschwitz.org.pl/h/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=14&Itemid=13&limit=1&limitstart=3 Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau]</ref><ref>{{Harvnb|Piper|1998|p=62}}.</ref> |
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|- |
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|[[Treblinka]] |
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|align="right"|870,000||<ref name=yvstr>[http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%205886.pdf Treblinka], Yad Vashem.</ref> |
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|- |
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|[[Belzec extermination camp|Belzec]] |
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|align="right"|600,000||<ref name=yvsbe>[http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%205981.pdf Belzec], Yad Vashem.</ref> |
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|- |
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|[[Majdanek]] |
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|align="right"|79,000–235,000||<ref name=yvsmaj>[http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%206622.pdf Majdanek], Yad Vashem.</ref><ref name='Reszka'>{{cite web|url=http://en.auschwitz.org.pl/m/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=44&Itemid=8|title=Majdanek Victims Enumerated. Changes in the history textbooks?|accessdate=13 April 2010|last=Reszka|first=Paweł|date=23 December 2005|work=[[Gazeta Wyborcza]]|publisher=Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum}}</ref> |
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|- |
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|[[Chełmno]] |
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|align="right"|320,000||<ref name=yvsch>[http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%202494.pdf Chelmno], Yad Vashem.</ref> |
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|- |
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|[[Sobibór extermination camp|Sobibór]] |
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|align="right"|250,000||<ref name=yvsso>[http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%206030.pdf Sobibor], Yad Vashem.</ref> |
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|} |
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This gives a total of over 3.8 million; of these, 80–90% were estimated to be Jews. These seven camps thus accounted for half the total number of Jews killed in the entire Nazi Holocaust. Virtually the entire Jewish population of Poland died in these camps.<ref name=autogenerated2/> |
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==Forced labor== |
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In addition to those who died in the above extermination camps, at least half a million Jews died in other camps, including the major concentration camps in Germany. These were not extermination camps, but had large numbers of Jewish prisoners at various times, particularly in the last year of the war as the Nazis withdrew from Poland. About a million people died in these camps, and although the proportion of Jews is not known with certainty, it was estimated to be at least 50 percent.{{Citation needed|date=September 2009|reason=need sourcing for concentration camps and Einsatzgruppen killing estimates}} Another 800,000 to one million Jews were killed by the ''Einsatzgruppen'' in the occupied Soviet territories (an approximate figure, since the ''Einsatzgruppen'' killings were frequently undocumented).<ref name=isbn0-375-40900-9>{{cite book|author=Rhodes, Richard|title=Masters of death: the SS-Einsatzgruppen and the invention of the Holocaust|publisher=Alfred A. Knopf|location=New York|year=2002|isbn=0-375-40900-9}}</ref> Many more died through execution or of disease and malnutrition in the ghettos of Poland before they could be deported. |
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{{further|Forced labor in Nazi Germany}} |
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[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-138-1084-19, Russland, Mogilew, Zwangsarbeit von Juden.jpg|thumb|alt=People collecting refuse in a wagon|Jews of [[Mogilev]], Belarus, forced to clean a street, July 1941]] |
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[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 146-2007-0074, IG-Farbenwerke Auschwitz.jpg|thumb|alt=See caption|Woman with {{lang|de|[[Ostarbeiter]]}} badge at work at [[IG-Farben]]werke in Auschwitz]] |
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Beginning in 1938—especially in Germany and its annexed territories—many Jews were drafted into [[Zwangsarbeitslager für Juden|forced-labor camps]] and segregated work details. These camps were often of a temporary nature and typically overseen by civilian authorities. Initially, mortality did not increase dramatically.{{sfn|Dean|2020|pp=265, 267}}{{sfn|Spoerer|2020|pp=141–143}} After mid-1941, conditions for Jewish forced laborers drastically worsened and death rates increased; even [[Private sector participation in Nazi crimes|private companies]] deliberately subjected workers to murderous conditions.{{sfn|Spoerer|2020|pp=142–143}} Beginning in 1941 and increasingly as time went on, Jews capable of employment were separated from others—who were usually killed.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=196–197}}{{sfn|Spoerer|2020|p=142}} They were typically employed in non-skilled jobs and could be replaced easily if non-Jewish workers were available, but those in skilled positions had a higher chance of survival.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=207}}{{sfn|Spoerer|2020|p=143}} Although conditions varied widely between camps, Jewish forced laborers were typically treated worse than non-Jewish prisoners and suffered much higher mortality rates.{{sfn|Dean|2020|p=270}} |
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====By country==== |
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[[File:Holocaustdeathtoll%.png|thumb|Jewish Holocaust death toll as a percentage of the total pre-war Jewish population]] |
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In the 1990s, the opening of government archives in Eastern Europe resulted in the adjustment of the death tolls published in the pioneering work by Hilberg, Dawidowicz and Gilbert (e.g. compare Gilbert's estimation of two million deaths in Auschwitz-Birkenau with the updated figure of one million in the Extermination Camp data box). As pointed out above, Wolfgang Benz has been carrying out work on the more recent data. He concluded in 1999: |
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In mid-1943, Himmler sought to bring surviving Jewish forced laborers under the control of the SS in the concentration camp system.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=379, 383}}{{sfn|Dean|2020|pp=271–272}}{{efn|The [[Nazi concentration camp]] system administered by the [[SS Main Economic and Administrative Office]] (SS-WVHA){{sfn|Wachsmann|2015|p=290}} was [[Types of Nazi camps|administratively separate]] from other forced-labor camps{{sfn|Wachsmann|2015|p=456}}{{sfn|Dean|2020|p=274}} and from the single-purpose extermination camps.{{sfn|Wachsmann|2015|p=293}}}} Some of the forced-labor camps for Jews and some ghettos, such as Kovno, were designated concentration camps, while others were dissolved and surviving prisoners sent to a concentration camp.{{sfn|Dean|2020|pp=265, 272}} Despite many deaths, as many as 200,000 Jews survived the war inside the concentration camps.{{sfn|Dean|2020|p=265}} Although most Holocaust victims were never imprisoned in a concentration camp, the image of these camps is a popular symbol of the Holocaust.{{sfn|Dean|2020|pp=264–265}} |
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{{quote|The goal of annihilating all of the Jews of Europe, as it was proclaimed at the conference in the villa Am Grossen Wannsee in January 1942, was not reached. Yet the six million murder victims make the holocaust a unique crime in the history of mankind. The number of victims—and with certainty the following represent the minimum number in each case—cannot express that adequately. Numbers are just too abstract. However they must be stated in order to make clear the dimension of the genocide: 165,000 Jews from Germany, 65,000 from Austria, 32,000 from France and Belgium, more than 100,000 from the Netherlands, 60,000 from Greece, the same number from Yugoslavia, more than 140,000 from Czechoslovakia, half a million from Hungary, 2.2 million from the Soviet Union, and 2.7 million from Poland. To these numbers must be added all those killed in the pogroms and massacres in Romania and Transitrien (over 200,000) and the deported and murdered Jews from Albania and Norway, Denmark and Italy, from Luxembourg and Bulgaria.|Benz, Wolfgang ''The Holocaust: A German Historian Examines the Genocide''<ref>{{cite book|author=Benz, Wolfgang|title=The Holocaust: A German Historian Examines the Genocide|publisher=Columbia University Press|location=New York|year=1999|isbn=0-231-11214-9 |pages=152–153}}</ref>}} |
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Including the Soviet prisoners of war, 13 million people were brought to Germany for forced labor.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=194}} The largest nationalities were Soviet and Polish{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=187}} and they were the worst-treated groups except for Roma and Jews.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=189}} Soviet and Polish forced laborers endured inadequate food and medical treatment, long hours, and abuse by employers. Hundreds of thousands died.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=189–190}} Many others were forced to work for the occupiers without leaving their country of residence.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=195}} Some of Germany's allies, including Slovakia and Hungary, agreed to deport Jews to protect non-Jews from German demands for forced labor.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=392–393}} East European women were also kidnapped, via ''[[Łapanka|lapanka]]'', to serve as sex slaves of German soldiers in [[German military brothels in World War II|military]] and [[German camp brothels in World War II|camp brothels]]<ref name="Herbermann">{{cite book |author1=Nanda Herbermann |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3JM3AdnmE18C&q=%22it+is+impossible+to+speak+of+free+will+when+considering+the+circumstances%22&pg=PA34 |title=The Blessed Abyss |author2=Hester Baer |author3=Elizabeth Roberts Baer |publisher=[[Wayne State University]] Press |year=2000 |isbn=0-8143-2920-9 |location=Detroit |pages=33–34 |format=[[Google Books]] |access-date=January 12, 2011}} </ref><ref name="Lenten">{{cite book |last=Lenten |first=Ronit |title=Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence |publisher=Berghahn Books |year=2000 |isbn=1-57181-775-1 |pages=33–34}}.</ref><ref name="polityka">{{cite news |last1=Ostrowska |first1=Joanna |last2=Zaremba |first2=Marcin |date=May 30, 2009 |title=Do burdelu, marsz! |language=pl |trans-title=To the brothel, march! |volume=22 |page= |pages=70–72 |work=[[Polityka]] |number=2707 |url=https://www.polityka.pl/archiwumpolityki/1912104,1,do-burdelu-marsz.read |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101205003034/http://archiwum.polityka.pl/art/do-burdelu-marsz,424445.html |archive-date=2010-12-05}}</ref> despite the prohibition of relationships, including fraternization, between German and foreign workers,<ref>{{cite web |title='Sonderbehandlung erfolgt durch Strang' |trans-title=Special treatment is done by train |url=https://www.ns-archiv.de/imt/ps3001-ps3200/3040-ps.php |work=ns-archiv.de}}</ref><ref name="hertzstein2">{{cite book |last=Hertzstein |first=Robert Edwin |title=The War That Hitler Won: The Most Infamous Propaganda Campaign in History |year=1978 |publisher=Putnam |isbn=9780399118456}}</ref> which imposed the penalty of imprisonment<ref name="hertzstein2"/> and death.<ref>Robert Gellately, ''Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany'', p. 155</ref><ref name="Majer2">Majer, ''"Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich'', p. 369</ref> |
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====Effect on the Yiddish and Ladino languages==== |
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[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 175-04413, KZ Auschwitz, Einfahrt.jpg|thumb|270px|Entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1945]] |
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Because the significant majority of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were speakers of [[Yiddish language|Yiddish]], the Holocaust had a profound and permanent effect on the fate of the Yiddish language and culture (see [[Yiddish Renaissance]]). On the eve of [[World War II]], there were 11 to 13 million Yiddish speakers in the world.<ref>{{Harvnb|Jacobs|2005|p=3}}.</ref> The Holocaust led to a dramatic, sudden decline in the use of Yiddish, because the extensive Jewish communities, both secular and religious, that used it in their day-to-day life were largely destroyed. Around five million (85%) of the victims of the Holocaust were speakers of Yiddish.<ref>[[Solomon Birnbaum|Salomo Birnbaum]], ''Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache'' (4., erg. Aufl., Hamburg: Buske, 1984), p. 3.</ref> |
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==Escape and hiding== |
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Of the remaining non-Yiddish speaking population, the [[Judaeo-Spanish|Ladino]] (Judaeo-Spanish) speaking Jewish communities of [[Greece]] and the Balkans were also destroyed, which contributed to the near-extinction of this language. |
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[[File:Stroop Report - Warsaw Ghetto Uprising - 26559.jpg|thumb|alt=A bunker with a bed and other supplies|A bunker where Jews attempted to hide during the [[Warsaw Ghetto uprising]]]] |
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{{further|Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust}} |
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Gerlach estimates that 200,000 Jews survived in hiding across Europe.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=117}} [[Knowledge of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe|Knowledge of German intentions]] was essential to take action, but many struggled to believe the news.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=424–425}} Many attempted to jump from trains or flee ghettos and camps, but successfully escaping and living in hiding was extremely difficult and often unsuccessful.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=236}}{{sfn|Burzlaff|2020|p=1064}}{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=413}} |
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===Non-Jewish=== |
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The support, or at least absence of active opposition, of the local population was essential but often lacking in Eastern Europe.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|pp=236–237}} Those in hiding depended on the assistance of non-Jews.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=419}} Having money,{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=420}} social connections with non-Jews, a non-Jewish appearance, perfect command of the local language, determination, and luck played a major role in determining survival.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=423}} Jews in hiding were hunted down with the assistance of local collaborators and rewards offered for their denunciation.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=382}}{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=260}}{{sfn|Burzlaff|2020|p=1066}} The death penalty was sometimes enforced on people hiding them, especially in eastern Europe.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=360}}{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=206}}{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=269}} Rescuers' motivations varied on a spectrum from altruism to expecting sex or material gain; it was not uncommon for helpers to betray or murder Jews if their money ran out.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|pp=269–270}}{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=206}}{{sfn|Burzlaff|2020|pp=1065, 1075}} Gerlach argues that hundreds of thousands of Jews may have died because of rumors or denunciations, and many others never attempted to escape because of a belief it was hopeless.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=417}} |
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====Slavs==== |
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{{main|Generalplan Ost|Hunger Plan}} |
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[[File:Czeslawakwoka.jpg|thumb|A 14-year-old Polish girl in Auschwitz 1942/43. Prisoner identity photographs.]] |
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Himmler's ''[[Generalplan Ost]]'' (General Plan East), which was enthusiastically agreed to by Hitler in the summer of 1942, involved exterminating, expelling, or enslaving most or all [[Slav]]s from their native lands so as to make [[Lebensraum|living space]] for German settlers, something that would be carried out over a period of 20–30 years.<ref>{{Harvnb|Mazower|2008|pp=204–211}}; {{Harvnb|Müller|Ueberschär|2002|p=285}}.</ref> |
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[[Jewish resistance in German-occupied Europe|Jews participated]] in [[Resistance in World War II|resistance movements]] in most European countries, and often were overrepresented.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=290}} Jews were not always welcome, particularly in nationalist resistance groups—some of which killed Jews.{{sfn|Cesarani|2016|p=648}}{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=242}} Particularly in Belarus, with its favorable geography of dense forests, many Jews joined the [[Soviet partisans]]—an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 across the Soviet Union.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|pp=237, 242–243}} An additional 10,000 to 13,000 Jewish non-combatants lived in [[Jewish partisan|family camps]] in Eastern European forests, of which the most well known was the [[Bielski partisans]].{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=243}}{{sfn|Burzlaff|2020|p=1074}} |
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Author and historian Doris L. Bergen has written: "Like so much Nazi writing, General Plan East was full of euphemisms. ... Nevertheless its intentions were obvious. It also made clear that German policies toward different population groups were closely connected. Settlement of Germans and ethnic Germans in the east; expulsion, enslavement, and decimation of Slavs; and murder of Jews were all parts of the same plan."<ref>{{Harvnb|Bergen|2009|p=168}}.</ref> |
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==International reactions== |
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Historian [[Rudolph Rummel]] estimates the number of Slav civilians and POWs murdered by the Nazis at 10,547,000.<ref name="University of Hawaii">{{cite web|last1=Rummel|first1=R.J.|title=DEMOCIDE: NAZI GENOCIDE AND MASS MURDER|url=http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NAZIS.CHAP1.HTM|website=http://www.hawaii.edu/|publisher=University of Hawaii|accessdate=7 June 2014}}</ref> |
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{{main|International response to the Holocaust}} |
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The Nazi leaders knew that their actions would bring international condemnation.{{sfn|Evans|2019|p=140}} On 26 June 1942, [[BBC World Service|BBC services]] in all languages publicized [[1942 Bund report|a report]] by the [[General Jewish Labour Bund in Poland|Jewish Social-Democratic Bund]] and other resistance groups and transmitted by the [[Polish government-in-exile]], documenting the killing of 700,000 Jews in Poland. In December 1942, [[Allies of World War II|the Allies]], then known as the United Nations, adopted a [[Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations|joint declaration]] condemning the systematic murder of Jews.{{sfn|Láníček|2012|pp=74–75, 81}} Most neutral countries in Europe maintained a pro-German foreign policy during the war. Nevertheless, some Jews were able to escape to neutral countries, whose policies ranged from rescue to non-action.{{sfn|Messenger|2020|p=393}} |
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According to historian [[William W. Hagen]]: |
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{{quote| |
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''Generalplan Ost'' . . . forecast the diminution of the targeted east European peoples' populations by the following measures: Poles – 85 percent; [[Belarusians]] – 75 percent; [[Ukrainians]] – 65 percent; [[Czechs]] – 50 percent. These enormous reductions would result from "extermination through labor" or decimation through malnutrition, disease, and controls on reproduction. . . . The [[Russians|Russian]] people, once subjugated in war, would join the four Slavic-speaking nations whose fate ''Generalplan Ost'' foreshadowed.<ref>{{Harvnb|Hagen|2012|p=313}}.</ref> |
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}} |
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During the war the [[American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee]] (JDC) raised $70 million and in the years after the war it raised $300 million. This money was spent aiding emigrants and providing direct relief in the form of parcels and other assistance to Jews living under German occupation, and after the war to [[Holocaust survivors]]. The United States banned sending relief into German-occupied Europe after entering the war, but the JDC continued to do so. From 1939 to 1944, 81,000 European Jews emigrated with the JDC's assistance.<ref>{{cite web |title=American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Refugee Aid |url=https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/american-jewish-joint-distribution-committee-and-refugee-aid |website=[[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]] |access-date=28 April 2023 |language=en}}</ref> |
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{{Quotation| |
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It is a question of existence, thus it will be a racial struggle of pitiless severity, in the course of which 20 to 30 million Slavs and Jews will perish through military actions and crises of food supply.| [[Heinrich Himmler]] spoke about [[Operation Barbarossa|Operation ''Barbarossa'']], June 1941<ref>{{Harvnb|Cesarani|2004|p=366}}.</ref> |
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}} |
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Throughout the war, no detailed photo intelligence study was carried out on any of the major concentration or extermination camps.{{sfn|Neufeld|Berenbaum|2000|p=55}} Appeals from Jewish representatives to the American and British governments to bomb rail lines leading to the camps or crematoriums was rejected, with little to no input from the War Departments of the United States or United Kingdom.{{sfn|Neufeld|Berenbaum|2000|p=61}} However, debate exists on whether a military response would have impacted on the Holocaust.{{sfn|Neufeld|Berenbaum|2000|p=2}} |
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=====Ethnic Poles===== |
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{{further|Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles|Occupation of Poland (1939–1945)|Pacification operations in German-occupied Poland|Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen}} |
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[[File:P Oboz.svg|thumb|left|upright|Auschwitz I [[badge|patch]] with the letter "P", required wear for Polish inmates]] |
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[[File:Polish civilians murdered by German-SS-troops in Warsaw Uprising Warsaw August 1944.jpg|thumb|Polish civilians executed in Warsaw]] |
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[[File:Death penalty for Jews outside ghetto and for Poles helping Jews anyway 1941.jpg|thumb|left|175px|upright|Announcement of death penalty for Poles helping Jews]] |
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[[File:Execution of Poles by German Einsatzkomanndo Oktober1939.jpg|thumb|Execution of Poles by ''Einsatzkommando'', Leszno, October 1939]] |
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==Second half of the war== |
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German planners had in November 1939 called for "the complete destruction" of all [[Poles]].<ref>{{Harvnb|Gellately|2001|p=153}}.</ref> "All Poles", Heinrich Himmler swore, "will disappear from the world".<ref>{{Harvnb|Phayer|2000|p=21}}.</ref> The Polish state under German occupation was to be cleared of ethnic Poles and settled by German colonists.<ref>{{Harvnb|Berghahn|1999|pp=32–3}}.</ref> Of the Poles, by 1952 only about three–four million of them were to be left in the former Poland, and only to serve as slaves for German settlers. They were to be forbidden to marry, the existing ban on any medical help to Poles in Germany would be extended, and eventually Poles would cease to exist. On 22 August 1939, just over a week before the onset of war, Hitler declared that "the object of the war is ... physically to destroy the enemy. That is why I have prepared, for the moment only in the East, my 'Death's Head' formations with orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living space we need."<ref>{{Harvnb|Piotrowski|1998|p=115}}.</ref> Nazi planners decided against a genocide of ethnic Poles on the same scale as against ethnic Jews; it could not proceed in the short term since "such a solution to the Polish question would represent a burden to the German people into the distant future, and everywhere rob us of all understanding, not least in that neighbouring peoples would have to reckon at some appropriate time, with a similar fate".<ref>{{Harvnb|Gellately|2001|p=154}}.</ref> |
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===Continuing killings=== |
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[[File:Selection on the ramp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, 1944 (Auschwitz Album) 3a.jpg|thumb|alt=see caption|Jews from [[Carpathian Ruthenia]], annexed by Hungary in 1938,{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=408}} on the selection ramp at [[Auschwitz II]] in May or June 1944. Men are lined up to the right, women and children to the left. About 25 percent were selected for work and the rest gassed.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=199}}]] |
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After German military defeats in 1943, it became increasingly evident that Germany would lose the war.{{sfn|Bergen|2016|p=266}}{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=196}} In early 1943, 45,000 Jews [[The Holocaust in Greece#Salonica (March–August 1943)|were deported]] from [[Occupation of Greece|German-occupied northern Greece]], primarily [[History of the Jews in Thessaloniki|Salonica]], to Auschwitz, where nearly all were killed.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=391}} After [[Armistice of Cassibile|Italy switched sides]] in late 1943, Germany deported several thousand Jews from Italy and the former Italian occupation zones of France, Yugoslavia, Albania, and [[The Holocaust in Greece#Passover roundup (March 1944)|Greece]], with limited success.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=402–403}}{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=113}} Attempts to continue deportations in Western Europe after 1942 often failed because of Jews going into hiding and the increasing recalcitrance of local authorities.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=102}} [[Rescue of the Danish Jews|Most Danish Jews escaped to Sweden]] with the help of the [[Danish resistance]] in the face of a half-hearted German deportation effort in late 1943.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=302}} Additional killings in 1943 and 1944 eliminated all remaining ghettos and most surviving Jews in Eastern Europe.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=128}} Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were shut down and [[Sonderaktion 1005|destroyed]].{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=410–412}}{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=221}} |
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The actions taken against ethnic Poles were not on the scale of the genocide of the Jews. Most Polish Jews (perhaps 90% of their pre-war population) perished during the Holocaust, while most Christian Poles survived the brutal German occupation.<ref>[[Israel Gutman]], ''Unequal Victims'' Holocaust Library 1985</ref> Between 1.8 and 2.1 million non-Jewish Polish citizens perished in German hands during the course of the war, about four-fifths of whom were ethnic [[Poles]] with the remaining fifth being ethnic minorities of Ukrainians and Belarusians, the vast majority of them civilians.<ref name=autogenerated1/><ref name=PolandWorldWarIIcasualties>Piotrowski, Tadeusz. [http://www.projectinposterum.org/docs/poland_WWII_casualties.htm "Project InPosterum: Poland WWII Casualties"]. Retrieved 15 March 2007; and [[Czesław Łuczak|Łuczak, Czesław]]. "Szanse i trudności bilansu demograficznego Polski w latach 1939–1945", ''Dzieje Najnowsze'', issue 1994/2.</ref> At least 200,000 of these victims died in concentration camps with about 146,000 being killed in Auschwitz. Many others died as a result of general massacres such as in the Warsaw Uprising where between 120,000 and 200,000 civilians were killed.<ref name="Piotrowski 1998 295">{{Harvnb|Piotrowski|1998|p=295}}.</ref><ref>[http://www.history.ucsb.edu/projects/holocaust/Resources/BookReviews/jessica.htm review]</ref> |
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The largest murder action after 1942 was that against the Hungarian Jews.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=103}} After the [[German invasion of Hungary (1944)|German invasion of Hungary]] in 1944, the Hungarian government cooperated closely in the [[The Holocaust in Hungary|deportation of 437,000 Jews in eight weeks]], mostly to Auschwitz.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=114, 368}}{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=408}}{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=193}} The expropriation of Jewish property was useful to achieve Hungarian economic goals and sending the Jews as forced laborers avoided the need to send non-Jewish Hungarians.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=114}} Those who survived the selection were forced to provide construction and manufacturing labor as part of [[Jägerstab|a last-ditch effort]] to increase the production of [[fighter aircraft]].{{sfn|Spoerer|2020|p=142}}{{sfn|Wachsmann|2015|p=457}} Although the Nazis' goal of eliminating any Jewish population from Germany had largely been achieved in 1943, it was reversed in 1944 as a result of the importation of these Jews for labor.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=188}} |
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The policy of the Germans in Poland included diminishing food rations, conscious lowering of the state of hygiene and depriving the population of medical services. The general mortality rate rose from 13 to 18 per thousand.<ref name=Nurowski>Nurowski, Roman. 1939–1945 War Losses in Poland, Warsaw 1960,</ref> Overall, about 5.6 million of the victims of World War II were Polish citizens,<ref name=PolandWorldWarIIcasualties/> both Jewish and non-Jewish, and over the course of the war Poland lost 16 percent of its pre-war population; approximately 3.1 million of the 3.3 million Polish Jews and approximately two million of the 31.7 million non-Jewish Polish citizens died at German hands during the war.<ref>''Poland-World War II-casualties'', Piotrowski, Tadeusz. [http://www.projectinposterum.org/docs/poland_WWII_casualties.htm "Project InPosterum: Poland WWII Casualties"]</ref> According to recent (2009) estimates by the [[Institute of National Remembrance|IPN]], over 2.5 million non-Jewish Polish citizens died as a result of the German occupation.<ref>Polska 1939–1945. Straty osobowe i ofiary represji pod dwiema okupacjami, ed. Tomasz Szarota and Wojciech Materski, Warszawa, IPN 2009, ISBN 978-83-7629-067-6 ([http://niniwa2.cba.pl/polska_1939_1945.htm Introduction reproduced here])</ref> Over 90 percent of the death toll came through non-military losses, as most of the civilians were targeted by various deliberate actions by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.<ref name="Piotrowski 1998 295"/> |
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===Death marches and liberation=== |
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A few days before the invasion of Poland, on 22 August 1939, Adolf Hitler said to his generals: |
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[[File:Mass Grave at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp - Fritz Klein - IWM BU4260.jpg|thumb|alt=see caption|A mass grave at [[Bergen-Belsen]] after the camp's liberation, April 1945]] |
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Following Allied advances, the SS deported concentration camp prisoners to camps in Germany and Austria, starting in mid-1944 from the Baltics.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=414–418}} Weak and sick prisoners were often killed in the camp and others were forced to travel by rail or on foot, usually with no or inadequate food.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=414}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=234}} Those who could not keep up were shot.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=415}} The evacuations were ordered partly to retain the prisoners as forced labor and partly to avoid allowing any prisoners to fall into enemy hands.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=116}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=234}} In October and November 1944, 90,000 Jews were deported from Budapest to the Austrian border.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=409–410}}{{sfn|Dean|2020|p=272}} The transfer of prisoners from Auschwitz began in mid-1944, the gas chambers were shut down and destroyed after October, and in January most of the remaining 67,000 Auschwitz prisoners were sent on a death march westwards.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=415}}{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=233}} |
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{{quote|Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter—with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. ... Our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness—for the present only in the East—with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (''[[Lebensraum]]'') which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians? ... Poland will be depopulated and settled with Germans. ... As for the rest, gentlemen, the fate of Russia will be exactly the same as I am now going through with in the case of Poland.<ref>Gaymon Bennett, Ted Peters, Martinez J. Hewlett, Robert John Russell (2008). "''The evolution of evil''". Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. p.318. ISBN 3-525-56979-3</ref><ref>{{Harvnb|Pinkus|2005|p=57}}.</ref>}} |
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In January 1945, more than 700,000 people were imprisoned in the concentration camp system, of whom as many as a third died before the end of the war.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=117}} At this time, most concentration camp prisoners were Soviet and Polish civilians, either arrested for real or supposed resistance or for attempting to escape forced labor.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=117}} The death marches led to the breakdown of supplies for the camps that continued to exist, causing additional deaths.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=414}} Although there was no systematic killing of Jews during the death marches,{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=235}} around 70,000 to 100,000 Jews died in the last months of the war.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=418}} Many of the death march survivors ended up in other concentration camps that were liberated in 1945 during the [[Western Allied invasion of Germany]]. The liberators found piles of corpses that they had to bulldoze into mass graves.{{sfn|Stone|2020|p=69}}{{sfn|Priemel|2020|p=178}}{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=215}} Some survivors were freed there{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=215}} and others had been liberated by the Red Army during its march westwards.{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=214}} |
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=====West Slavs===== |
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West Slavic populations were persecuted to some extent. By one estimate, 345,000 [[Czechoslovakia|Czechoslovak]] citizens were executed or otherwise killed, and hundreds of thousands more of all of these groups were sent to concentration camps and used as forced labor.<ref>Stephen A. Garrett (1996). "''[http://books.google.com/books?id=lF9NBUZlh0AC&pg=PA60&dq&hl=en#v=onepage&q=&f=false Conscience and power: an examination of dirty hands and political leadership]''". Palgrave Macmillan. p.60. ISBN 0-312-15908-0</ref> The villages of [[Lidice]] and [[Ležáky]] were completely destroyed by the Nazis; all men over 16 years of age from the village were murdered and the rest of the population was sent to Nazi concentration camps where many women and nearly all of the children were killed. |
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==Death toll== |
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The German ethnic [[Sorbs|Sorbian]] population was also persecuted. |
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{{main|Holocaust victims}} |
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[[File:Holocaust death rate.svg|thumb|Holocaust deaths as an approximate percentage of the 1939 Jewish population: |
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Around six million Jews were killed.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Landau |first=Ronnie S. |url=https://archive.org/details/the-nazi-holocaust-its-history-and-meaning-9780755624225-9780857728432_compress |title=The Nazi Holocaust: Its History and Meaning |publisher=I.B. Tauris |year=2016 |isbn=978-0-85772-843-2 |edition=3rd |pages=3, 124, 126, 265–266 |language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Benz |first=Wolfgang |author-link=Wolfgang Benz |url=https://archive.org/details/9783406811081 |title=Der Holocaust |publisher=[[C. H. Beck]] |year=2023 |isbn=978-3-406-80881-4 |edition=10th |location=Munich, Germany |pages=14, 111–112 |language=de}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Herf |first=Jeffrey C. |author-link=Jeffrey Herf |url=https://archive.org/details/the-routledge-history-of-antisemitism-1138369446-9781138369443_compress |title=The Routledge History of Antisemitism |publisher=[[Routledge]] |year=2024 |isbn=978-1-138-36944-3 |editor-last=Weitzman |editor-first=Mark |edition=1st |location=Abingdon and New York |pages=278 |language=en |chapter=The Long Term and the Short Term: Antisemitism and the Holocaust |doi=10.4324/9780429428616 |editor-last2=Williams |editor-first2=Robert J. |editor-last3=Wald |editor-first3=James}}</ref> Of the six million victims, most of those killed were from Eastern Europe, and with half from Poland alone.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|p=1}}{{sfn|Bergen|2016|p=155}} Around 1.3 million Jews who had once lived under Nazi rule or in one of Germany's allies survived the war.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=404}} One-third of the Jewish population worldwide, and two-thirds of European Jews, had been wiped out.<ref>{{cite web |title=Jewish Population of Europe in 1945 |url=https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/remaining-jewish-population-of-europe-in-1945 |website=[[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]] |access-date=10 May 2023 |language=en}}</ref> Death rates varied widely due to a variety of factors and approached 100 percent in some areas.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=407}} Some reasons why survival chances varied was the availability of emigration{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=407–408}} and protection from Germany's allies—which saved around 600,000 Jews.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=118, 409–410}} [[Children in the Holocaust|Jewish children]] and the elderly faced even lower survival rates than adults.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=428–429}} It is considered to be the single largest genocide in human history.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Rosenberg |first=Alan |date=1979 |title=The Genocidal Universe: A Framework for Understanding the Holocaust |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/41442658 |journal=European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe |volume=13 |issue=1 |pages=29–34 |jstor=41442658 |issn=0014-3006}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |last=Richie |first=Alexandra |date=2024-01-27 |title=The Origins of International Holocaust Remembrance Day |url=https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/origins-international-holocaust-remembrance-day |access-date=2024-04-11 |website=The National WWII Museum {{!}} New Orleans |language=en}}</ref> |
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The deadliest phase of the Holocaust was [[Operation Reinhard]], which was marked by the introduction of extermination camps. Roughly two million Jews were killed from March 1942 to November 1943. Around 1.47 million Jews were murdered in just 100 days from late July to early November 1942, a rate approximately 83% higher than the commonly suggested figure for the [[Rwandan genocide]].<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Stone |first=Lewi |date=2019 |title=Quantifying the Holocaust: Hyperintense kill rates during the Nazi genocide |journal=Science Advances |volume=5 |issue=1|pages=eaau7292 |doi=10.1126/sciadv.aau7292 |pmid=30613773 |pmc=6314819 |bibcode=2019SciA....5.7292S }}</ref> Between July to October 1942, two million Jews were murdered, including Operation Reinhard and other killings, with over three million Jews killed in 1942 alone, as stated by historian [[Christian Gerlach]].{{Sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=100}} On the other hand, historian [[Alex J. Kay]] states that over two million Jews were murdered from late July to mid-November, stating that "these three-and-a-half months were the most intense, the deadliest of the entire Holocaust".{{sfn|Kay|2021|p=207}} It was the fastest rate of genocidal killing in history.{{sfn|Stone|2023|p=191}} |
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=====Ethnic Serbs and other South Slavs===== |
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{{main|World War II persecution of Serbs}} |
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[[File:Ustasa-saw.jpg|thumb|Croatian Ustaše sawing off the head of Branko Jungić, an ethnic [[Serb]] from [[Bosnia (region)|Bosnia]]]] |
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In the [[Balkans]], up to 581,000 Yugoslav civilians were killed during [[World War II in Yugoslavia]].<ref>[[Vladimir Žerjavić|Žerjavić, Vladimir]]''Yugoslavia manipulations with the number Second World War victims'', Zagreb: Croatian Information center,1993 ISBN 0-919817-32-7 [http://www.hic.hr/books/manipulations/ HIC.hr] and [http://www.vojska.net/ww2/losses/ Vojska.net]</ref><ref>[[Bogoljub Kočović|Kočović, Bogoljub]]-Žrtve Drugog svetskog rata u Jugoslaviji 1990 ISBN 86-01-01928-5</ref> German forces, under express orders from Hitler, fought with a special vengeance against the Serbs, who were considered ''[[Untermensch]]'' (sub-human).<ref>Tomasevich, Jozo. ''War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration.'' Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8047-3615-4</ref> The [[Ustaše]] collaborators conducted a systematic extermination of large numbers of people for political, religious or racial reasons. The most numerous victims were [[Serbs]]. |
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On 3 November 1943, around 18,400 Jews were murdered at [[Majdanek concentration camp|Majdanek]] over the course of nine hours, in what was the largest number ever killed in a death camp on a single day.{{sfn|Stone|2023|p=210}} It was part of [[Operation Harvest Festival]], the murder of some 43,000 Jews, the single largest massacre of Jews by German forces, occurring from 3 to 4 November 1943.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Aktion "Erntefest" (Operation "Harvest Festival") |url=https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/aktion-erntefest-operation-harvest-festival |access-date=2024-04-12 |website=encyclopedia.ushmm.org |language=en}}</ref> |
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[[Bosniaks]], [[Croats]] and others were also victims of the Jasenovac concentration camp. According to the US Holocaust Museum: {{quote|The Ustaša authorities established numerous concentration camps in Croatia between 1941 and 1945. These camps were used to isolate and murder Serbs, Jews, Roma, Muslims [Bosniaks], and other non-Catholic minorities, as well as Croatian political and religious opponents of the regime.}} |
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Separate Nazi persecutions killed a similar or larger number of non-Jewish civilians and POWs; estimated by Gerlach at 6 to 8 million, at more than 10 million by [[Martin Gilbert|Gilbert]]<ref>{{cite book |author1=Martin Gilbert |author1-link=Martin Gilbert |title=The Holocaust: The Human Tragedy |date=2014 |publisher=Rosetta Books |isbn=978-0-7953-3719-2 |chapter=Epilogue - "I will tell the world" |quote=As well as the six million Jews who were murdered, more than ten million other non-combatants were killed by the Nazis.}}</ref> and at over 11 million by the [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]].<ref>[[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]]: [https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution Documenting numbers of victims of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution]; [https://books.google.com/books?id=nzJAXkfozW8C&pg=PT67 Niewyk & Nicosia 2000] give a total of 17 million (including more than 5 million Jews).</ref> In some countries, such as Hungary, Jews were a majority of civilian deaths; in Poland, they were either a majority{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=3}} or about half.{{sfn|Bergen|2016|p=155}} In other countries such as the Soviet Union, France, Greece, and Yugoslavia, non-Jewish civilian losses outnumbered Jewish deaths.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|p=3}} |
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The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ([[USHMM]]) and [[Jewish Virtual Library]] report between 56,000 and 97,000 persons were killed at the Jasenovac concentration camp.<ref>United States Holocaust Memorial Museum – Holocaust Era in Croatia: 1941–1945, Jasenovac (go to section III Concentration Camps) [http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/jasenovac/frameset.html USHMM.org]</ref><ref>[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005449 "Jasenovac"]. ''Holocaust Encyclopedia''. [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]]. Retrieved 27 September 2012.</ref><ref>[https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Jasenovac.html JewishVirtualLibrary.org], Jasenovac</ref> Yad Vashem reports an overall number of over 500,000 murders of Serbs "in horribly sadistic ways" at the hands of the Ustaše.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%205930.pdf|title=Croatia|work=Shoah Resource Center, The International School for Holocaust Studies|publisher=Yad Vashem}}</ref> |
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==Aftermath and legacy== |
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According to the most recent study, ''Bošnjaci u Jasenovačkom logoru'' ("Bosniaks in the Jasenovac concentration camp") by the author [[Nihad Halilbegović]], at least 103,000 Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) perished during the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazi regime and the Croatian Ustaše. According to the study, "unknown is the full number of Bosniaks who were murdered under Serb or Croat alias or national name" and "a large numbers of Bosniaks were killed and listed under [[romani people|Roma]] populations", therefore in advance sentenced to death and extermination.<ref>*[http://www.interliber.com/catlistdetail.asp?SID=Interliber^57473-57473&ProductID=30790&ml=b Bosniaks in Jasenovac Concentration Camp]—Congress of Bosniak Intellectuals, Sarajevo. ISBN 978-9958-47-102-5. October 2006. (Holocaust Studies) |
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{{Main|Aftermath of the Holocaust}} |
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</ref><ref>[http://www.bosnjaci.net/egt.php?id=1169&polje=Commemoration of Bosniak victims of Jasenovac]{{dead link|date=January 2011}} {{bs icon}}<!-- {{dead link|date=July 2009}} --> Meliha Pihura, Bosnjaci.net Magazine, 13 April 2007.</ref> Excluding Slovenes under Italian rule, between 20,000 and 25,000 [[Slovenes]] were killed by Nazis or fascists (counting only civilian victims).<ref name=ds-rs.si>http://www.ds-rs.si/dokumenti/publikacije/Zbornik_05-1.pdf</ref> |
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===Return home and emigration=== |
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[[Albanians|Albanian]] collaborationists cooperated with the Nazis and what followed was an extensive persecution of non-Albanians (mostly Serbs) by Albanian fascists. Most of the war crimes were perpetrated by the Albanian [[21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Skanderbeg (1st Albanian)|SS Skenderbeg Division]] and the [[Balli Kombëtar]]. 3,000 to 10,000 Kosovo Serbs were murdered by the Albanians during the war, and another 30,000 to 100,000 were expelled.<ref>[[#Mojzes|Mojzes (2011)]], p. 95.</ref> |
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<!-- [[File:Jewish displaced persons receive bread rations at the Bindermichl displaced persons' camp in Linz.jpg|thumb|Jewish displaced persons (DPs) at a camp in [[Linz]], late 1940s|alt=People collecting bread in a cafeteria]] --> |
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After liberation, many Jews attempted to return home. Limited success in finding relatives, the refusal of many non-Jews to return property,{{sfn|Beorn|2018|pp=273–274}} and violent attacks such as the [[Kielce pogrom]] convinced many survivors to leave eastern Europe.{{sfn|Beorn|2018|pp=275–276}}{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=215}} Antisemitism was reported to increase in several countries after the war, in part due to conflicts over property restitution.{{sfn|Gerlach|2016|pp=353–355}} When the war ended, there were less than 28,000 German Jews and 60,000 non-German Jews in Germany. By 1947, the number of Jews in Germany had increased to 250,000 owing to emigration from eastern Europe allowed by the communist authorities; Jews made up around 25 percent of the population of [[Displaced persons camps in post–World War II Europe|displaced persons camps]].{{sfn|Kochavi|2010|p=509}} Although many survivors were in poor health, they attempted to organize self-government in these camps, including education and rehabilitation efforts.{{sfn|Kochavi|2010|pp=512–513}} Due to the reluctance of other countries to allow their immigration, many survivors remained in Germany until the establishment of Israel in 1948.{{sfn|Kochavi|2010|p=509}} Others moved to the United States around 1950 due to loosened immigration restrictions.{{sfn|Kochavi|2010|p=521}} |
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=== |
===Criminal trials=== |
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{{further|Category:Holocaust trials}} |
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{{main|Occupation of Belarus by Nazi Germany|Reichskommissariat Ukraine}} |
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[[File:Defendants in the dock at nuremberg trials.jpg|thumb|right|Defendants in the dock at the [[International Military Tribunal]], November 1945|alt=Rows of men sitting on benches]] |
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[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1970-043-52, Russland, bei Minsk, tote Zivilisten.jpg|thumb|Mass murder of Soviet civilians near [[Minsk]], Belarus, 1943]] |
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Most Holocaust perpetrators were never put on trial for their crimes.{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=214}} During and after World War II, many European countries launched [[Purges of Nazi collaborators|widespread purges of real and perceived collaborators]] that affected possibly as much as 2–3 percent of the population of Europe, although most of the resulting trials did not emphasize crimes against Jews.{{sfn|Priemel|2020|p=174}} Nazi atrocities led to the United Nations' [[Genocide Convention]] in 1948, but it was not used in Holocaust trials due to the [[non-retroactivity]] of criminal laws.{{sfn|Wittmann|2010|p=524}} |
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Soviet civilian populations in the occupied areas were also heavily persecuted (in addition to the barbarity of the Eastern Front frontline warfare manifesting itself in episodes such as the siege of Leningrad in which more than one million civilians died).<ref>{{Harvnb|Evans|2008|p=406}}.</ref> Thousands of peasant villages across [[Union of Soviet Socialist Republics|Soviet Russia]], [[Soviet Belarus|Belarus]] and [[Soviet Ukraine|Ukraine]] were annihilated by German troops. Bohdan Wytwycky has estimated that as many as one-quarter of all Soviet civilian deaths at the hands of the Nazis and their allies were racially motivated.<ref name="Niewyk 2000 45–52"/> |
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In 1945 and 1946, the [[International Military Tribunal]] tried [[List of defendants at the International Military Tribunal|23 Nazi leaders]] primarily for [[crimes against peace|waging wars of aggression]], which the prosecution argued was the root of Nazi criminality;{{sfn|Priemel|2020|p=176}} nevertheless, the systematic murder of Jews came to take center stage.{{sfn|Priemel|2020|p=177}} This trial and others held by the Allies in occupied Germany—the United States Army alone charged 1,676 defendants in 462 war crimes trials{{sfn|Wittmann|2010|p=525}}—were widely perceived as an unjust form of political revenge by the German public.{{sfn|Wittmann|2010|p=534}} [[West Germany]] later investigated 100,000 people and tried more than 6,000 defendants, mainly low-level perpetrators.{{sfn|Priemel|2020|p=184}}{{sfn|Wittmann|2010|pp=534–535}} The high-level organizer [[Adolf Eichmann]] was kidnapped and [[Eichmann trial|tried in Israel]] in 1961. Instead of convicting Eichmann on the basis of documentary evidence, Israeli prosecutors asked many Holocaust survivors to testify, a strategy that increased publicity but has proven controversial.{{sfn|Priemel|2020|pp=182–183}}{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|pp=215–216}} |
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The Russian Academy of Sciences in 1995 reported [[World War II casualties of the Soviet Union|civilian victims in the USSR]] at German hands, including Jews, totaled 13.7 million dead, 20% of the 68 million persons in the occupied USSR. This included 7.4 million victims of Nazi genocide and reprisals.<ref name="ReferenceA">The Russian Academy of Science Rossiiskaia Akademiia nauk. Liudskie poteri SSSR v period vtoroi mirovoi voiny:sbornik statei. Sankt-Peterburg 1995 ISBN 5-86789-023-6</ref> |
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===Reparations=== |
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In Belarus, Nazi Germany imposed a regime in the country that was responsible for burning down some 9,000 villages, deporting some 380,000 people for slave labour, and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. More than 600 villages, like [[Khatyn]], were burned along with their entire population and at least 5,295 Belarusian settlements were destroyed by the Nazis and some or all of their inhabitants killed. Tim Snyder states: "Of the nine million people who were on the territory of Soviet Belarus in 1941, some 1.6 million were killed by the Germans in actions away from battlefields, including about 700,000 prisoners of war, 500,000 Jews, and 320,000 people counted as partisans (the vast majority of whom were unarmed civilians."<ref>{{Harvnb|Snyder|2010|pp=250–251}}.</ref> |
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Historians estimate that property losses to Jews of Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Poland, and Hungary amounted to around 10 billion in 1944 dollars,{{sfn|Goschler|Ther|2007|p=7}} or ${{Inflation|US|start_year=1944|value=10|r=-1}} billion in {{Inflation/year|US}}.<ref name=inflation/> This estimate does not include the value of labor extracted.{{sfn|Hayes|2010|p=548}} Overall, the amount of Jewish property looted by the Nazis was about 10 percent of the total stolen from occupied countries.{{sfn|Hayes|2010|p=548}} Efforts by survivors to receive reparations for their losses began immediately after World War II. There was an additional wave of restitution efforts in the 1990s connected to the [[fall of Communism]] in eastern Europe.{{sfn|Goschler|Ther|2007|pp=13–14}} |
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{{Quotation| |
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The German racists assigned the Slavs to the lowest rank of human life, from which the Jews were altogether excluded. The Germans thus looked upon Slavs as people not fit to be educated, not able to govern themselves, worthy only as slaves whose existence would be justified because they served their German masters. Hitler's racial policy with regard to the Slavs, to the extent that it was formulated, was "depopulation." The Slavs were to be prevented from procreating, except to provide the necessary continuing supply of slave laborers.| [[Lucy Dawidowicz]], ''The Holocaust and the historians''<ref>{{Harvnb|Dawidowicz|1981|p=10}}.</ref> |
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}} |
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Between 1945 and 2018, [[Wiedergutmachung|Germany paid $86.8 billion]] in restitution and compensation to Holocaust survivors and heirs. In 1952, West Germany negotiated [[Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany|an agreement]] to pay [[Deutsche Mark|DM]] 3 billion (around $714 million) to Israel and DM 450 million (around $107 million) to the [[Claims Conference]].<ref>{{cite web |title=The JUST Act Report: Germany |url=https://www.state.gov/reports/just-act-report-to-congress/germany/ |website=[[United States Department of State]] |access-date=2 May 2023}}</ref> Germany paid pensions and other reparations for harm done to some Holocaust survivors.{{sfn|Hayes|2010|pp=549–550}} Other countries have paid restitution for assets stolen from Jews from these countries. Most Western European countries restored some property to Jews after the war, while communist countries [[nationalized]] many formerly Jewish assets, meaning that the overall amount restored to Jews has been lower in those countries.{{sfn|Bazyler ''et al.''|2019|pp=482–483}}{{sfn|Hayes|2010|p=552}} Poland is the only member of the [[European Union]] that never passed any restitution legislation.{{sfn|Bazyler ''et al.''|2019|p=487}} Many restitution programs fell short of restoration of prewar assets, and in particular, large amounts of immovable property was never returned to survivors or their heirs.{{sfn|Bazyler ''et al.''|2019|p=485}}{{sfn|Hayes|2010|p=556}} |
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[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 192-208, KZ Mauthausen, Sowjetische Kriegsgefangene.jpg|thumb|Naked Soviet POWs in Mauthausen concentration camp. Unknown date]] |
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===Remembrance and historiography=== |
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=====Soviet POWs===== |
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[[File:Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europeabove.jpg|thumb|[[Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe]] in Berlin, 2016|alt=A memorial of many square concrete blocks]] |
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{{main|Nazi crimes against Soviet POWs}} |
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According to [[Michael Berenbaum]], between two and three million Soviet prisoners-of-war—or around 57 percent of all Soviet POWs—died of starvation, mistreatment, or executions between June 1941 and May 1945, and most of those during their first year of captivity. According to other estimates by [[Daniel Goldhagen]], an estimated 2.8 million Soviet POWs died in eight months in 1941–42, with a total of 3.5 million by mid-1944.<ref>{{cite web|title=Soviet Prisoners of war|url=http://www.gendercide.org/case_soviet.html}}</ref> The USHMM has estimated that 3.3 million of the 5.7 million Soviet POWs died in German custody—compared to 8,300 of 231,000 British and American prisoners.<ref>[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007178 "Nazi Persecution of Soviet Prisoners of War |work= Holocaust Encyclopedia"]. ''Holocaust Encyclopedia''. [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]]. Retrieved 27 September 2012.</ref> The death rates decreased as the POWs were needed to work as slaves to help the German war effort; by 1943, half a million of them had been deployed as [[slave labor]].<ref name = "Berenbaum 2005 125"/> |
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In the decades after the war, Holocaust memory was largely confined to the survivors and their communities.{{sfn|Assmann|2010|p=97}} The popularity of Holocaust memory peaked in the 1990s after the fall of Communism, and became central to Western historical consciousness{{sfn|Assmann|2010|pp=98, 107}}{{sfn|Rosenfeld|2015|pp=15, 346}} as a symbol of the ultimate human evil.{{sfn|Assmann|2010|p=110}} Genocide scholar [[A. Dirk Moses]] asserted that "the Holocaust has gradually supplanted genocide as modernity's icon of evil",<ref>{{Cite book |last=Moses |first=A. Dirk |author-link=A. Dirk Moses |title=The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2021 |isbn=978-1-107-10358-0 |edition=1st |pages=481–482 |language=en}}</ref> while political scientist [[Scott Straus]] declared that "the Holocaust, perhaps more than any other event in the past century, represents the pinnacle of evil".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Straus |first=Scott |author-link=Scott Straus |url=https://archive.org/details/genocide-the-power-and-problems-of-a-concept-9780228009511_compress_202404 |title=Genocide: The Power and Problems of a Concept |publisher=McGill-Queen's University Press |year=2022 |isbn=978-0-2280-0951-1 |editor-last=Graziosi |editor-first=Andrea |pages=240 |language=en |editor-last2=Sysyn |editor-first2=Frank E.}}</ref> The Holocaust has been described as "perhaps the most savage and significant single crime in recorded history" and that of the most barbaric events in the twentieth century "the Holocaust probably ranks as the very worst".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Landau |first=Ronnie S. |url=https://archive.org/details/the-nazi-holocaust-its-history-and-meaning-9780755624225-9780857728432_compress |title=The Nazi Holocaust: Its History and Meaning |publisher=I.B. Tauris |year=2016 |isbn=978-0-85772-843-2 |edition=3rd |pages=3, 287 |language=en}}</ref> Renowned German historian [[Wolfgang Benz]] described it as the "singularly most monstrous crime committed in the history of mankind".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Benz |first=Wolfgang |author-link=Wolfgang Benz |url=https://archive.org/details/holocaustgermanh0000benz |title=The Holocaust: A German Historian Examines the Genocide |publisher=Columbia University Press |year=1999 |isbn=0-231-11215-7 |edition=1st |location=New York |pages=2 |language=en}}</ref> [[Holocaust education]], in which its advocates argue promotes citizenship while reducing prejudice generally, became widespread at the same time.{{sfn|Stone|2010|p=288}}{{sfn|Sutcliffe|2022|p=8}} [[International Holocaust Remembrance Day]] is commemorated each year on 27 January, while some other countries have set a [[Holocaust memorial days|different memorial day]].{{sfn|Assmann|2010|p=104}} It has been commemorated in [[Holocaust memorials|memorials]], [[Holocaust museums|museums]], and speeches, as well as [[The Holocaust in the arts and popular culture|works of culture such as novels, poems, films, and plays]].{{sfn|Rosenfeld|2015|p=14}} [[Holocaust denial|Denial of the Holocaust]] is a [[Legality of Holocaust denial|criminal offense]] in some countries;{{sfn|Priemel|2020|p=185}} while denials of the Holocaust have been promoted by various Middle Eastern governments, figures and media. |
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====Romani people==== |
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{{main|Porajmos}} |
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{{quote|[T]hey wish to toss into the Ghetto everything that is characteristically dirty, shabby, bizarre, of which one ought to be frightened and which anyway had to be destroyed.|[[Emmanuel Ringelblum]] on the Roma.<ref>{{Harvnb|Kermish|1968|pp=[http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%203727.pdf 177–8]}}.</ref>}} |
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Although many are convinced that [[Lessons of the Holocaust|there are lessons or some kind of redemptive meaning]] to be drawn from the Holocaust, whether this is the case and what these lessons are is disputed.{{sfn|Rosenfeld|2015|p=93}}{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|pp=190–191}}{{sfn|Stone|2010|p=288}} Communist states marginalized the topic of antisemitic persecution while eliding their nationals' collaboration with Nazism, a tendency that continued into the post-communist era.{{sfn|Rosenfeld|2015|p=22}}{{sfn|Bartov|2023b|p=191}} In West Germany, a self-critical memory of the Holocaust developed in the 1970s and 1980s, and spread to some other western European countries.{{sfn|Kansteiner|2017|pp=306–307}} The national memories of the Holocaust were extended to the European Union as a whole, in which Holocaust memory has provided both shared history and an emotional rationale for committing to [[human rights]]. Participation in this memory is required of countries [[Enlargement of the European Union|seeking entry]].{{sfn|Kansteiner|2017|p=308}}{{sfn|Assmann|2010|pp=100, 102–103}} In contrast to Europe, in the United States the memory of the Holocaust tends to be more abstract and universalized.{{sfn|Assmann|2010|p=103}} Whether Holocaust memory actually promotes human rights is disputed.{{sfn|Stone|2010|p=288}}{{sfn|Kansteiner|2017|p=305}} In Israel, the memory of the Holocaust has been used at times to justify the use of force and violation of international human rights norms, in particular as part of the [[Israeli–Palestinian conflict]].{{sfn|Kansteiner|2017|p=308}} |
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Because the [[Romani people|Romani]] are traditionally a private people with a culture based on [[oral history]], less is known about their experience of the genocide than about that of any other group.<ref name="Niewyk 2000 47">{{Harvnb|Niewyk|Nicosia|2000|p=47}}.</ref> [[Yehuda Bauer]] writes that the lack of information can be attributed to the Romani's distrust and suspicion, and to their humiliation, because some of the basic [[taboo]]s of Romani culture regarding hygiene and sexual contact were violated at Auschwitz. Bauer writes that "most [Romani] could not relate their stories involving these [[torture]]s; as a result, most kept silent and thus increased the effects of the massive [[psychological trauma|trauma]] they had undergone."<ref>{{Harvnb|Bauer|1998|p=453}}.</ref> |
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The Holocaust is the most well-known genocide in history, and is considered to be the single most infamous case of genocide in [[History of Europe|European history]] as well.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Lieberman |first=Benjamin |title=The Holocaust and Genocides in Europe |publisher=Bloomsbury Publishing |year=2013 |isbn=978-1-4411-4655-7 |edition=1st |pages=9, 138, 161, 230 |language=en}}</ref> It is the single most documented and studied genocide in history.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Rummel |first=R.J. |author-link=R. J. Rummel |date=1998 |title=The Holocaust in Comparative and Historical Perspective |url=https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/HOLO.PAPER.HTM |journal=The Journal of Social Issues |volume=3 |issue=2}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Aharon |first=Eldad Ben |url=https://www.prif.org/fileadmin/HSFK/hsfk_publikationen/PRIF0620.pdf |title=How Do We Remember the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust? A Global View of an Integrated Memory of Perpetrators, Victims and Third-party Countries |year=2020 |isbn=978-3-946459-59-0 |location=Frankfurt am Main |pages=3 |language=en}}</ref> It is also seen as the archetype of genocide and the benchmark in [[genocide studies]].<ref>{{Cite book |title=The Holocaust and Other Genocides: An Introduction |publisher=Amsterdam University Press |year=2012 |isbn=978-90-8964-381-0 |editor-last=Boender |editor-first=Barbara |edition=1st |location=Amsterdam |pages=7–10 |language=en |editor-last2=ten Have |editor-first2=Wichert}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Moses |first=A. Dirk |author-link=A. Dirk Moses |title=The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2021 |isbn=978-1-107-10358-0 |edition=1st |pages=18–19, 34, 204, 396, 452, 480 |language=en}}</ref> |
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[[File:Persecution of Roma.gif|thumb|upright=1.5|Map of persecution of the Roma]] |
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The [[Holocaust studies|scholarly literature on the Holocaust]] is massive, encompassing thousands of books.{{sfn|Stone|2010|p=6}} The tendency to see the [[Holocaust uniqueness debate|Holocaust as a unique or incomprehensible event]] continues to be popular among the broader public after being largely rejected by historians.{{sfn|Stone|2010|pp=206–207}}{{sfn|Rosenfeld|2015|p=119}}{{sfn|Sutcliffe|2022|p=2}} Scholar [[Omer Bartov]] points out how the Holocaust was unique in that it was "the industrial killing of millions of human beings in factories of death, ordered by a modern state, organized by a conscientious bureaucracy, and supported by a law-abiding, patriotic "civilized" society."<ref>{{Cite book |last=Bartov |first=Omer |author-link=Omer Bartov |title=Germany's War and the Holocaust |publisher=Cornell University Press |year=2003 |isbn=978-0801486814 |pages=135 |language=en}}</ref> Another debate concerns whether the Holocaust emerged from [[Western civilization]] or was an aberration of it.{{sfn|Stone|2010|pp=163, 219, 239}} |
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The treatment of the Romani was not consistent in the different areas that Nazi Germany conquered. In some areas (e.g. Luxembourg and the Baltic countries), the Nazis killed virtually the entire Romani population. In other areas (e.g. Denmark, Greece), there is no record of Romanis being subjected to mass killings.<ref>See ''History of the Holocaust: a Handbook and a Dictionary'', Edelheit, Edelheit & Edelheit, p.458, Free Press, 1995</ref> |
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The Jewish population still remains below pre-Holocaust levels. According to the [[Israel Central Bureau of Statistics|Central Bureau of Statistics of Israel]], the world Jewish population reached 15.2 million by the end of 2020 – approximately 1.4 million less than on the eve of the Holocaust in 1939, when the number was 16.6 million.<ref>{{Cite web |date=2022-04-25 |title=World Jewish population nears pre-Holocaust numbers at 15.2 million |url=https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-705065 |access-date=2024-06-30 |website=The Jerusalem Post {{!}} JPost.com |language=en}}</ref> |
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Donald Niewyk and Frances Nicosia write that the death toll was at least 130,000 of the nearly one million Romani in Nazi-controlled Europe.<ref name="Niewyk 2000 47"/> Michael Berenbaum writes that serious scholarly estimates lie between 90,000 and 220,000.<ref>{{Harvnb|Berenbaum|2005|p=126}}.</ref> A study by Sybil Milton, senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, calculated a death toll of at least 220,000 and possibly closer to 500,000, but this study explicitly excluded the [[Independent State of Croatia]] where the genocide of Romanies was intense.<ref name="USHMM Roma"/><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.nyed.uscourts.gov/pub/rulings/cv/1996/685455.pdf|title=Re. Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation (Swiss Banks) Special Master's Proposals|date=11 September 2000|accessdate=29 January 2013|archiveurl=//web.archive.org/web/20120516101356/http://www.nyed.uscourts.gov/pub/rulings/cv/1996/685455.pdf|archivedate=16 May 2012 }}</ref> Martin Gilbert estimates a total of more than 220,000 of the 700,000 Romani in Europe.<ref>{{cite book|last=[[Martin Gilbert|Gilbert]]|first=Martin|title=The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust|publisher=Routledge, London & New York|year=2002|isbn=0-415-28145-8}} (ref Map 182 p 141 with Romani deaths by country & Map 301 p 232) Note: formerly ''The Dent Atlas of the Holocaust''; 1982, 1993.</ref> [[Ian Hancock]], Director of the Program of Romani Studies and the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin, has argued in favour of a much higher figure of between 500,000 and 1,500,000, claiming the Romani toll proportionally equaled or exceeded that of Jewish victims.<ref name="383–96"/><ref>Hancock, Ian. [http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Histories__Narratives__Documen/Roma___Sinti__Gypsies_/Jewish_Responses_to_the_Porraj/jewish_responses_to_the_porraj.html Jewish Responses to the Porajmos (The Romani Holocaust)], Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota.</ref> |
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==Notes== |
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Before being sent to the camps, the victims were herded into ghettos, including several hundred into the [[Warsaw Ghetto]].<ref name=USHMMDeportationsWarsaw/> Further east, teams of ''Einsatzgruppen'' tracked down Romani encampments and murdered the inhabitants on the spot, leaving no records of the victims. They were also targeted by the puppet regimes that cooperated with the Nazis, e.g. the [[Ustaše]] regime in [[Croatia]], where a large number of Romani were killed in the Jasenovac concentration camp. The genocide analyst [[Helen Fein]] has stated that the Ustashe killed virtually every Romani in Croatia.<ref>Helen Fein, ''Accounting for Genocide'', New York, The Free Press, 1979, pp.79, 105</ref> |
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{{notelist}} |
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==References== |
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In May 1942, the Romani were placed under similar labor and social laws to the Jews. On 16 December 1942, Heinrich Himmler, Commander of the [[Schutzstaffel|SS]] and regarded as the "architect" of the Nazi genocide,<ref>{{Harvnb|Breitman|1991}}.</ref> issued a decree that "Gypsy ''[[Mischling]]e'' (mixed breeds), Romani, and members of the clans of [[Balkan]] origins who are not of German blood" should be sent to Auschwitz, unless they had served in the ''[[Wehrmacht]]''.<ref>{{Harvnb|Bauer|1998|p=444}}.</ref> On 29 January 1943, another decree ordered the deportation of all German Romani to Auschwitz. |
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{{reflist|20em}} |
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===Works cited=== |
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This was adjusted on 15 November 1943, when Himmler ordered that, in the occupied Soviet areas, "sedentary Gypsies and part-Gypsies (''Mischlinge'') are to be treated as citizens of the country. Nomadic Gypsies and part-Gypsies are to be placed on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps."<ref>{{Harvnb|Bauer|1998|p=445}}.</ref> Bauer argues that this adjustment reflected Nazi ideology that the Romani, originally an Aryan population, had been "spoiled" by non-Romani blood.<ref>{{Harvnb|Bauer|1998|p=446}}.</ref> |
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====Books==== |
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{{Refbegin|30em|indent=yes}} |
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* {{Cite book |last=Bartrop |first=Paul R. |authorlink=Paul R. Bartrop |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=kU6fDwAAQBAJ |title=The Holocaust: The Basics |date=2019 |publisher=[[Routledge]] |isbn=978-1-351-32989-7 |language=en}} |
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* {{Cite book |last=Bartov |first=Omer |authorlink=Omer Bartov |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Ci3WEAAAQBAJ |title=Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis |date=2023a |publisher=[[Bloomsbury Publishing]] |isbn=978-1-350-33234-8 |language=en}} |
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* {{cite book |last1=Bazyler |first1=Michael J. |last2=Boyd |first2=Kathryn Lee |last3=Nelson |first3=Kristen L. |author1-link=Michael Bazyler |title=Searching for Justice After the Holocaust: Fulfilling the Terezin Declaration and Immovable Property Restitution |date=2019 |publisher=[[Oxford University Press]] |isbn=978-0-19-092306-8 |language=en|ref={{sfnref|Bazyler et al.|2019}}}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Beorn |first1=Waitman Wade |author1-link=Waitman Wade Beorn |title=The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution |date=2018 |publisher=[[Bloomsbury Academic]] |isbn=978-1-4742-3219-7 |language=en}} |
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* {{cite book |last=Bergen |first=Doris |author-link=Doris Bergen |year=2016 |title=War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust |publisher=[[Rowman & Littlefield]] |isbn=978-1-4422-4228-9}} |
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* {{cite book |last=Bloxham |first=Donald |author-link=Donald Bloxham |year=2009 |title=The Final Solution: A Genocide |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-955034-0}} |
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*{{ cite book | title= I Nomi dello sterminio: Definizioni di una tragedia| last = Calimani| first =Anna Vera Sullam |
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| publisher =Marietti 1820| year = 2018| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QegCEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT6 | isbn =978-8-821-19615-7}} |
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* {{Cite book |last=Browning |first=Christopher R. |author-link=Christopher Browning |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=d9Wg4gjtP3cC |title=The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 |date=2004 |publisher=[[University of Nebraska Press]] and [[Yad Vashem]] |isbn=978-0-8032-0392-1 |language=en}} |
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* {{cite book |last=Cesarani |first=David |author-link=David Cesarani |year=2016 |title=[[Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949]] |publisher=[[St. Martin's Press]] |isbn=978-0-230-76891-8}} |
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* {{Cite book |last=Engel |first=David |authorlink=David Engel (historian) |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=aI8kEAAAQBAJ |title=The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews |date=2021 |publisher=[[Routledge]] |isbn=978-0-429-77837-7 |language=en}} |
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* {{cite book |author1=Foreign Claims Settlement Commission |title=Foreign Claims Settlement Commission of the United States: Decisions and Annotations |date=1968 |publisher=[[U.S. Government Printing Office]] |location=Washington, D.C. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=cX5AAAAAIAAJ |oclc=1041397012|author1-link=Foreign Claims Settlement Commission }} |
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* {{cite book | last=Gilbert | first=Martin | title=Never Again: A History of the Holocaust | publisher=RosettaBooks | year=2015 |orig-year=2000 | isbn=978-0-7953-4674-3 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=wWhsDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT22}} |
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* {{cite book |last=Gerlach |first=Christian|author-link=Christian Gerlach |year=2016 |title=The Extermination of the European Jews |publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]] |isbn=978-0-521-70689-6}} |
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* {{cite book |last=Hayes |first=Peter |author-link=Peter Hayes (historian) |title=Why? Explaining the Holocaust |date=2017 |publisher=W. W. Norton & Company |location=New York}} |
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* {{Cite book |last=Hayes |first=Peter |authorlink=Peter Hayes (historian) |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=6synBgAAQBAJ |title=How Was It Possible?: A Holocaust Reader |date=2015 |publisher=[[University of Nebraska Press]] |isbn=978-0-8032-7491-4 |language=en}} |
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* {{Cite book |last=Jackson |first=Timothy P. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=NF8tEAAAQBAJ |title=Mordecai Would Not Bow Down: Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Christian Supersessionism |date=2021 |publisher=[[Oxford University Press]] |isbn=978-0-19-753807-4 |language=en}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Kay |first1=Alex J.|author-link=Alex J. Kay |title=Empire of Destruction: A History of Nazi Mass Killing |date=2021 |publisher=[[Yale University Press]] |isbn=978-0-300-26253-7 |language=en|title-link=Empire of Destruction}} |
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* {{cite book |last=Longerich |first=Peter |author-link=Peter Longerich |year=2010 |title=Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-280436-5 }} |
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* {{cite book |last1=Neufeld |first1=Michael |last2=Berenbaum |first2=Michael |title=The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies have attempted it? |date=2000 |publisher=University Press of Kansas |location=New York |isbn=0-7006-1280-7}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Niewyk |first1=Donald L. |title=The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust |last2=Nicosia |first2=Francis R. |author2-link=Francis R. Nicosia| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=nzJAXkfozW8C |publisher=Columbia University Press |year=2000 |isbn=978-0-231-52878-8 |language=en}} |
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* {{cite book |editor-last1=Peck |editor-first1=Abraham J. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=zkZC6bp3upsC&pg=PA311 |title=The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined |editor-last2=Berenbaum |editor-first2=Michael |publisher=Indiana University Press |year=2002 |isbn=978-0-253-21529-1 |language=en |editor-link2=Michael Berenbaum}} |
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* {{cite book |last1=Rosenfeld |first1=Gavriel D. |author1-link=Gavriel D. Rosenfeld |title=Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture |date=2015 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-1-107-07399-9 |language=en}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Russell |first1=Nestar |title=Understanding Willing Participants|volume= 2: Milgram's Obedience Experiments and the Holocaust |date=2018 |publisher=Springer |doi=10.1007/978-3-319-97999-1 |isbn=978-3-319-97999-1 |s2cid=151138604 |url=https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-97999-1 |language=en}} |
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* {{Cite book |last=Smith |first=Stephen D. |authorlink=Stephen D. Smith |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=yPqhEAAAQBAJ |title=The Trajectory of Holocaust Memory: The Crisis of Testimony in Theory and Practice |date=2023 |publisher=[[Taylor & Francis]] |isbn=978-1-000-83062-0 |language=en}} |
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* {{cite book |last=Stone |first=Dan |author-link=Dan Stone (historian) |title=Histories of the Holocaust |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=2010 |isbn=978-0-19-956679-2}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Stone |first1=Dan |title=The Holocaust: An Unfinished History |date=2023 |publisher=Penguin Publishing Group |isbn=978-0-241-38870-9 |language=en}} |
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* {{cite book |last=Wachsmann |first=Nikolaus |author-link=Nikolaus Wachsmann |year=2015 |title=KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps |publisher=[[Farrar, Straus and Giroux]] |isbn=978-0-374-11825-9}} |
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{{refend}} |
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==== |
====Book chapters==== |
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{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}} <!-- {{cite book |last1= |first1= |author-link= |title=The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies |date=2010 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-921186-9|pages= |chapter=}} --> |
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{{main|Black people in Nazi Germany|Rhineland Bastard|Racial policy of Nazi Germany#Other "non-Aryans"}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Assmann |first1=Aleida |author1-link=Aleida Assmann |title=Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories |date=2010 |publisher=[[Palgrave Macmillan UK]] |isbn=978-0-230-28336-7 |pages=97–117 |language=en |chapter=The Holocaust – a Global Memory? Extensions and Limits of a New Memory Community}} |
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The number of black people in Germany when the Nazis came to power is variously estimated at 5,000–25,000.<ref>{{Harvnb|Lusane|2003|pp=97–98}}.</ref> It is not clear whether these figures included Asians. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., "The fate of black people from 1933 to 1945 in Nazi Germany and in German-occupied territories ranged from isolation to persecution, sterilization, medical experimentation, incarceration, brutality, and murder. However, there was no systematic program for their elimination as there was for Jews and other groups."<ref>[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005479 "Blacks During the Holocaust"]. ''Holocaust Encyclopedia''. [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]]. Retrieved 27 September 2012.</ref> Meanwhile, [[Afrikaaners]], [[Berber people|Berbers]], [[Iran]]ians and [[Pre-Partition India]]ns were classified as Aryans, so they were not persecuted (see [[Racial policy of Nazi Germany#Other "non-Aryans"|main article]]). Racial restrictions were relaxed to the extent that [[Ostlegionen|Turkic peoples]], [[Free Arabian Legion|Arabs]] and [[Indische Legion|South Asians]] were recruited by the German military due to the shortage of manpower.<ref>Robert L. Canfield, ''Turko–Persia in Historical Perspective'' p. 212 – "As Turkistanis they joined the so-called "[[Ostlegionen|Eastern Legions]]", which were part of the ''Wehrmacht'' and later the ''Waffen-SS'', to fight the Red Army (Hauner 1981:339-57). The estimates of their numbers vary between 250,000 and 400,000, which include the [[Kalmyks]], the [[Tatars]] and members of the [[Peoples of the Caucasus|Caucasian]] ethnic groups (Alexiev 1982:33)"</ref> |
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*{{cite book |last1=Bartov |first1=Omer |author1-link=Omer Bartov |title=The Oxford History of the Third Reich |date=2023b |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-288683-5 |pages=190–216 |language=en |chapter=The Holocaust}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Beorn |first1=Waitman Wade |author1-link=Waitman Wade Beorn |title=A Companion to the Holocaust |date=2020 |publisher=[[Wiley (publisher)|Wiley]] |isbn=978-1-118-97052-2 |pages=153–172 |language=en |chapter=All the Other Neighbors: Communal Genocide in Eastern Europe}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Dean |first1=Martin C.|author-link=Martin C. Dean |title=A Companion to the Holocaust |date=2020 |publisher=John Wiley & Sons |isbn=978-1-118-97049-2 |pages=263–277 |language=en |chapter=Survivors of the Holocaust within the Nazi Universe of Camps}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Engel |first1=David |author1-link=David Engel (historian) |title=A Companion to the Holocaust |date=2020 |publisher=Wiley |isbn=978-1-118-97052-2 |pages=233–245 |language=en |chapter=A Sustained Civilian Struggle: Rethinking Jewish Responses to the Nazi Regime}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Evans |first1=Richard J. |author-link=Richard J. Evans |title=The Jews, the Holocaust, and the Public: The Legacies of David Cesarani |date=2019 |publisher=[[Springer International Publishing]] |isbn=978-3-030-28675-0 |pages=117–143 |language=en |chapter=The Decision to Exterminate the Jews of Europe}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Goschler |first1=Constantin |last2=Ther |first2=Philipp |author2-link=Philipp Ther |title=Robbery and Restitution: The Conflict over Jewish Property in Europe |date=2007 |publisher=[[Berghahn Books]] |isbn=978-0-85745-564-2 |pages=1–18 |language=en |chapter=Introduction: A History Without Boundaries: the Robbery and Restitution of Jewish Property in Europe}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Hayes |first1=Peter|author-link1=Peter Hayes (historian) |last2=Roth |first2=John K. |title=The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies |date=2010 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-921186-9|pages=1–20 |chapter=Introduction}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Hayes |first1=Peter |title=The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies |date=2010 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-921186-9|pages=540–559 |chapter=Plunder and Restitution}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Kansteiner |first1=Wulf |title=The Twentieth Century in European Memory: Transcultural Mediation and Reception |date=2017 |publisher=Brill |isbn=978-90-04-35235-3 |pages=305–343 |language=en |chapter=Transnational Holocaust Memory, Digital Culture and the End of Reception Studies}} |
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* {{cite book |first=Charles |last=King |authorlink=Charles King (professor of international affairs) |chapter=Can – or Should – There Be a Political Science of the Holocaust? |editor-last1=Kopstein |editor-first1=Jeffrey S. |editor-link=Jeffrey Kopstein |title=Politics, Violence, Memory: The New Social Science of the Holocaust |date=2023 |publisher=[[Cornell University Press]] |isbn=978-1-5017-6676-3 |language=en}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Kochavi |first1=Arieh J. |title=The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies |date=2010 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-921186-9 |pages=509–523 |chapter=Liberation and Dispersal}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Kopstein |first1=Jeffrey S. |author-link=Jeffrey Kopstein |title=Politics, Violence, Memory: The New Social Science of the Holocaust |date=2023 |publisher=[[Cornell University Press]] |isbn=978-1-5017-6676-3 |pages=104–123 |language=en |chapter=A Common History of Violence?: The Pogroms of Summer 1941 in Comparative Perspective}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Messenger |first1=David A. |title=A Companion to the Holocaust |date=2020 |publisher=Wiley |isbn=978-1-118-97052-2 |pages=381–396 |language=en |chapter=The Geopolitics of Neutrality: Diplomacy, Refuge, and Rescue during the Holocaust}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Miron |first1=Guy |title=A Companion to the Holocaust |date=2020 |publisher=Wiley |isbn=978-1-118-97052-2 |pages=247–261 |language=en |chapter=Ghettos and Ghettoization – History and Historiography}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Priemel |first1=Kim Christian |author1-link=Kim Christian Priemel |title=A Companion to the Holocaust |date=2020 |publisher=Wiley |isbn=978-1-118-97052-2 |pages=173–189 |language=en |chapter=War Crimes Trials, the Holocaust, and Historiography, 1943–2011}} |
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* {{cite book |last=Sahlstrom |first=Julia |chapter=Recognition, Justice, and Memory: Swedish-Jewish Reactions to the Holocaust and the Major Trials |date=2021 |title=Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden: Archives, Testimonies and Reflections |pages=287–313 |editor-last=Heuman |editor-first=Johannes |chapter-url=https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55532-0_11 |access-date=2024-01-28 |series=The Holocaust and its Contexts |publisher=[[Springer International Publishing]] |language=en |doi=10.1007/978-3-030-55532-0_11 |isbn=978-3-030-55532-0 |s2cid=229432191 |editor2-last=Rudberg |editor2-first=Pontus}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Spoerer |first1=Mark |title=A Companion to the Holocaust |date=2020 |publisher=Wiley |isbn=978-1-118-97052-2 |pages=135–151 |language=en |chapter=The Nazi War Economy, the Forced Labor System, and the Murder of Jewish and Non-Jewish Workers}} |
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*{{cite journal |last1=Stone |first1=Dan |title=Ideologies of Race: The Construction and Suppression of Otherness in Nazi Germany |journal=A Companion to the Holocaust |date=2020 |pages=59–74 |doi=10.1002/9781118970492.ch3 |publisher=Wiley |language=en}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Weitz |first1=Eric D. |author-link=Eric D. Weitz |title=The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies |date=2010 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-921186-9|pages=54–67 |chapter=Nationalism}} |
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*{{cite book |last1=Westermann |first1=Edward B. |author-link=Edward B. Westermann |title=A Companion to the Holocaust |date=2020 |publisher=Wiley |isbn=978-1-118-97052-2|pages= 117–133 |chapter=Old Nazis, Ordinary Men, and New Killers: Synthetic and Divergent Histories of Perpetrators}} |
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* {{cite book |last1=Wittmann |first1=Rebecca |author-link=Rebecca Wittmann |title=The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies |date=2010 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-921186-9|pages=524–539 |chapter=Punishment}} |
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{{refend}} |
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====Journal articles==== |
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{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}} |
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{{main|Nazi eugenics|Action T4|Erbkrank|Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring|Schloss Hartheim}} |
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*{{cite journal |last1=Burzlaff |first1=Jan |title=Confronting the Communal Grave: a Reassessment of Social Relations During the Holocaust in Eastern Europe |journal=The Historical Journal |date=2020 |volume=63 |issue=4 |pages=1054–1077 |doi=10.1017/S0018246X19000566|s2cid=<!-- --> }} |
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*{{cite journal |last1=Láníček |first1=Jan |author-link=Jan Láníček|title=Governments-in-exile and the Jews during and after the Second World War |journal=[[Holocaust Studies (journal)|Holocaust Studies]] |date=2012 |volume=18 |issue=2–3 |pages=73–94 |doi=10.1080/17504902.2012.11087307|s2cid=<!-- --> }} |
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{{quote|Our starting-point is not the individual, and we do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty or clothe the naked—those are not our objectives. Our objectives are entirely different. They can be put most crisply in the sentence: we must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world.|[[Joseph Goebbels]], 1938.<ref>{{Harvnb|Burleigh|Wippermann|1991|p=69}}.</ref>}} |
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*{{cite journal |last1=Lehnstaedt |first1=Stephan |author1-link=Stephan Lehnstaedt |title=Aktion Reinhardt – Sources, Research and Commemoration in the last 30 years |journal=Témoigner. Entre histoire et mémoire. Revue pluridisciplinaire de la Fondation Auschwitz |date=2021 |issue=132 |pages=62–70 |doi=10.4000/temoigner.9886 |s2cid=256347577 |url=https://journals.openedition.org/temoigner/9886 |language=en |issn=2031-4183|doi-access=free }} |
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*{{cite journal |last1=Sutcliffe |first1=Adam |title=Whose Feelings Matter? Holocaust Memory, Empathy, and Redemptive Anti-Antisemitism |journal=[[Journal of Genocide Research]] |date=2022 |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=222–242 |doi=10.1080/14623528.2022.2160533|s2cid=<!-- --> |doi-access=free }} |
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[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 152-04-28, Heilanstalt Schönbrunn, Kinder.jpg|thumb|Children at Schönbrunn psychiatric hospital, 1934]] |
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*{{cite journal |last1=Welch |first1=Susan |title=Gender and Selection During the Holocaust: Transports of Western European Jews to the East |journal=Journal of Genocide Research |date=2020 |volume=22 |issue=4 |pages=459–478 |doi=10.1080/14623528.2020.1764743|s2cid=<!-- -->|url=https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/resources/68efc96d-e75e-48d2-a5c2-1aba2e1cb28e }} |
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''Action T4'' was a program established in 1939 to maintain the genetic "purity" of the German population by killing or [[Compulsory sterilization#Germany|sterilizing]] citizens who were judged to be [[disabled]] or suffering from [[mental disorder]].<ref>{{Harvnb|Kershaw|2000|pp=252–261}}.</ref> |
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{{refend}} |
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{{Holocaust by country|state=collapsed}} |
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Between 1939 and 1941, 80,000 to 100,000 mentally ill adults in institutions were killed; 5,000 children in institutions; and 1,000 Jews in institutions.<ref name = "Lifton 2000 142">{{Harvnb|Lifton|2000|p=142}}.</ref> Outside the mental health institutions, the figures are estimated as 20,000 (according to Dr. Georg Renno, the deputy director of [[Schloss Hartheim]], one of the euthanasia centers) or 400,000 (according to Frank Zeireis, the commandant of Mauthausen concentration camp).<ref name = "Lifton 2000 142"/> Another 300,000 were forcibly sterilized.<ref>{{Harvnb|Neugebauer|1998}}.</ref> Overall it has been estimated that over 270,000 individuals<ref name="holocaust-education.dk"/> with mental disorders of all kinds were put to death, although their mass murder has received relatively little historical attention. Along with the physically disabled, people suffering from [[dwarfism]] were persecuted as well. Many were put on display in cages and experimented on by the Nazis.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://thehumanmarvels.com/894/the-ovitz-family-nazi-experiments/dwarfism|title=THE OVITZ FAMILY – Nazi Experiments|publisher=Thehumanmarvels.com|accessdate=2013-01-18}}</ref> Despite not being formally ordered to take part, [[psychiatrist]]s and psychiatric institutions were at the center of justifying, planning and carrying out the atrocities at every stage, and "constituted the connection" to the later annihilation of Jews and other "undesirables" in the Holocaust.<ref>{{Harvnb|Strous|2007}}.</ref> After strong protests by the German Catholic and Protestant churches on 24 August 1941 Hitler ordered the cancellation of the T4 program.<ref>{{Harvnb|Lifton|2000|p=95}}.</ref> |
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{{Antisemitism topics}} |
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The program was named after [[Tiergartenstraße]] 4, the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of [[Tiergarten]], the headquarters of the General Foundation for Welfare and Institutional Care,<ref>{{Harvnb|Sereny|1995|pp=48–49}}.</ref> led by [[Philipp Bouhler]], head of Hitler's private chancellery (''Kanzlei des Führer der NSDAP'') and [[Karl Brandt]], Hitler's personal physician. |
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Brandt was tried in December 1946 at [[Nuremberg Trials|Nuremberg]], along with 22 others, in a case known as ''United States of America vs. Karl Brandt et al.'', also known as the [[Doctors' Trial]]. He was [[hanging|hanged]] at [[Landsberg Prison]] on 2 June 1948. |
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====Homosexuals==== |
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{{main|Institut für Sexualwissenschaft|Pink triangle|Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust}} |
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[[File:ac.homomonument.jpg|thumb|left|The [[Homomonument]] in Amsterdam, a memorial to the homosexual victims of Nazi Germany]] |
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Between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexuals of German nationality are estimated to have been sent to concentration camps.<ref name=Chronicle108/> James D. Steakley writes that what mattered in Germany was criminal intent or character, rather than criminal acts, and the ''"gesundes Volksempfinden"'' ("healthy sensibility of the people") became the leading normative legal principle.<ref name=Steakley>Steakley, James. [http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/steakley-nazis.html "Homosexuals and the Third Reich"], ''The Body Politic'', Issue 11, January/February 1974.</ref> In 1936, Himmler created the [[Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion]].<ref>{{Harvnb|Longerich|2012|p=237}}.</ref> Homosexuality was declared contrary to "wholesome popular sentiment,"<ref name=Chronicle108/> and homosexuals were consequently regarded as "defilers of German blood." The Gestapo raided [[gay bar]]s, tracked individuals using the address books of those they arrested, used the subscription lists of gay magazines to find others, and encouraged people to report suspected homosexual behavior and to scrutinize the behavior of their neighbors.<ref name=Chronicle108/><ref name=Steakley/> |
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Tens of thousands were convicted between 1933 and 1944 and sent to camps for "rehabilitation", where they were identified by yellow armbands<ref name=EBnon-Jews>"Non-Jewish victims of Nazism", ''Encyclopædia Britannica''.</ref> and later pink triangles worn on the left side of the jacket and the right trouser leg, which singled them out for [[sexual abuse]].<ref name=Steakley/> Hundreds were [[castration|castrated]] by [[court order]].<ref>{{Harvnb|Giles|1992|p=46}}: "[A] large proportion of those formally convicted of homosexuality by nazi courts were not actual homosexuals. Many of the younger plaintiffs were prosecuted for harmless adolescent horseplay, and some of the older ones by political rivals for entirely fictitious offences".</ref> They were humiliated, tortured, used in [[hormone]] experiments conducted by SS doctors, and killed.<ref name=Chronicle108/> Steakley writes that the full extent of gay suffering was slow to emerge after the war. Many victims kept their stories to themselves because homosexuality remained criminalized in postwar Germany. Around two percent of German homosexuals were persecuted by Nazis.<ref name=Steakley/> |
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====The political left==== |
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[[File:Gestapo-Akte Georg Elser (Delikt).jpg|thumb|170px|German opponent of Nazism executed at Dachau]] |
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German communists, socialists and trade unionists were among the earliest domestic opponents of Nazism<ref>[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007332 "Non-Jewish Resistance"]. ''Holocaust Encyclopedia''. [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]]. Retrieved 27 September 2012.</ref> and were also among the first to be sent to concentration camps. Hitler claimed that communism was a Jewish ideology which the Nazis termed "[[Judeo-Bolshevism]]". Fear of communist agitation was used as justification for the [[Enabling Act of 1933]], the law which gave Hitler his original dictatorial powers. Hermann Göring later testified at the [[Nuremberg Trials]] that the Nazis' willingness to repress German communists prompted president [[Paul von Hindenburg]] and the German elite to cooperate with the Nazis.{{Citation needed|date=October 2012}} [[MI6]] assisted the Gestapo via "the exchange of information about Communism", and as late as October 1937, the head of the British agency's Berlin station, [[Frank Foley]], described his relationship with [[Heinrich Müller (Gestapo)|Heinrich Müller]]'s so-called communism expert as "cordial".<ref>{{Harvnb|Jeffery|2010|p=302}}.</ref> |
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Hitler and the Nazis also hated German [[political left|leftists]] because of their resistance to the party's racism. Many leaders of German leftist groups were Jews, and Jews were especially prominent among the leaders of the [[Spartacist uprising]] in 1919. Hitler already referred to [[Marxism]] and "[[Bolshevism]]" as a means of "the international Jew" to undermine "racial purity" and survival of the [[Nordic race|Nordics]] or Aryans, as well as to stir up [[socioeconomic]] class tension and labor unions against the government or state-owned businesses. Within concentration camps such as [[Buchenwald]], German communists were privileged in comparison to Jews because of their "racial purity".<ref>Augustine, Dolores, [http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FCCC%2FCCC41_01%2FS0008938908000241a.pdf&code=4134a8e9c304e36a6dc05fe2f918880a Book Review] of Niven, Bill, ''The Buchenwald Child: Truth, Fiction, and Propaganda'' in ''Central European History'' 41:01, Cambridge University Press</ref> |
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Whenever the Nazis occupied a new territory, members of communist, socialist, or [[anarchism|anarchist]] groups were normally to be the first persons detained or executed. Evidence of this is found in Hitler's infamous [[Commissar Order]], in which he ordered the summary execution of all political [[commissar]]s captured among Soviet soldiers, as well as the execution of all Communist Party members in German-held territory.<ref>Brown, Maggie (5 October 1999). [http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/1999/oct/05/tvandradio.television1 "The war that time forgot"]. ''[[The Guardian]]''. Retrieved 5 September 2012.</ref><ref>[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007454 "Commissar Order"]. ''Holocaust Encyclopedia''. [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]]. Retrieved 27 September 2012.</ref> ''Einsatzgruppen'' carried out these executions in the east. [[Nacht und Nebel]] ("Night and Fog") was a directive ({{lang-de|link=no|Erlass}}) of Hitler on 7 December 1941 signed and implemented by Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces [[Wilhelm Keitel]], resulting in [[kidnapping]] and the [[Forced disappearance|disappearance]] of many political activists throughout Nazi Germany's occupied territories. |
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Among the well-known leftist prisoners of the concentration camps were German socialists [[Hermann Brill]], [[Rudolf Breitscheid]], Heinrich Bußmann, [[Josef Felder]], Heinrich Fulda, [[Ernst Heilmann]], and Alfred Schmieder; German communists [[Emil Carlebach]], Ernst Grube, Walter Krämer, [[Adolf Maislinger]], [[Oskar Müller]], [[Beppo Römer]], [[Werner Scholem]], and [[Ernst Thälmann]]; Jewish socialist and former [[Prime Minister of France|French Prime Minister]] [[Léon Blum]]; Slovenian socialist activist [[Andrej Gosar]]; Jewish Austrian socialist [[Robert Danneberg]]; and Austrian socialist (and later Interior Minister) [[Franz Olah]]. [[Kurt Schumacher]], a leading German socialist politician, was imprisoned in various concentration camps for ten years, and left the camps severely ill, leading to the amputation of his leg in 1948 and ultimately his death in 1952; however, during that time he played an instrumental role in re-establishing the [[Social Democratic Party of Germany]]. |
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====Freemasons==== |
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{{Main|Suppression of Freemasonry#Nazi Germany and Occupied Europe|Nacht und Nebel}} |
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[[File:Liberté chérie2.jpg|thumb|A memorial for ''[[Loge Liberté chérie]]'', founded in November 1943 in Hut 6 of Emslandlager VII (KZ Esterwegen), one of two Masonic Lodges founded in a Nazi concentration camp]] |
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In ''[[Mein Kampf]]'', Hitler wrote that [[Freemasonry]] had "succumbed" to the Jews: "The general pacifistic paralysis of the national instinct of self-preservation begun by Freemasonry is then transmitted to the masses of society by the Jewish press."<ref>''Mein Kampf'', p. [https://archive.org/stream/Mein_Kampf_Facsimilie/MK#page/n5/mode/2up 315, 320].</ref> Within the Reich, however, the "threat" posed by Freemasons was not considered serious from the mid-1930s onwards.<ref name = "Longerich 2012 213_214">{{Harvnb|Longerich|2012|pp=213–214}}.</ref> Heydrich even established a Freemasonry museum—at which Eichmann spent some time early in his SD career<ref>{{Harvnb|Cesarani|2005|pp=42–33}}.</ref>—for what he regarded as a "disappeared cult".<ref>{{Harvnb|Gerwarth|2011|pp=106–107}}.</ref> Similarly, Hitler was happy to issue a proclamation on 27 April 1938 whose third point lifted restrictions on Party membership for former Freemasons, "provided the applicants had not served with the Lodge as high degree members."<ref>{{Harvnb|Domarus|2004|p=1095}}.</ref> The ''Führer'' still maintained Freemasonry within his conspiratorial outlook,<ref>Hitler signed a decree on 1 March 1942 that spoke of the "systematic spiritual struggle against Jews, Freemasons, and their allies" ([[#CITEREFDomarus2004|Domarus 2004]], p. 2592); he believed Italian Masons were behind the deposition of Mussolini on 24 July 1943 ([[#CITEREFKershaw2000|Kershaw 2000]], p. 595); and he claimed a previously undetected lodge was involved in [[Operation Valkyrie]] of July 1944 ([[#CITEREFKershaw2000|Kershaw 2000]], p. 688).</ref> but its adherents were not persecuted in a systematic fashion like groups such as the Jews.<ref name = "Longerich 2012 213_214"/> Those Freemasons who were sent to concentration camps as political prisoners were forced to wear an inverted [[Nazi concentration camp badges|red triangle]].<ref>{{Harvnb|Cooper|2010|p={{page needed|date=November 2012}}}}.</ref> |
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The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum believes that, "because many of the Freemasons who were arrested were also Jews and/or members of the political opposition, it is not known how many individuals were placed in Nazi concentration camps and/or were targeted only because they were Freemasons."<ref>[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007187 "Freemasonry under the Nazi Regime"]. ''Holocaust Encyclopedia''. [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]]. Retrieved 27 September 2012.</ref> However, the Grand Lodge of Scotland estimates the number of Freemasons executed between 80,000 and 200,000.<ref name=GrandLodgeofScotland/> |
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====Jehovah's Witnesses==== |
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{{main|Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany}} |
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Refusing to pledge allegiance to the Nazi party or to serve in the military, roughly 12,000 [[Jehovah's Witnesses]] were forced to wear a purple triangle and were placed in camps where they were given the option of renouncing their faith and submitting to the state's authority. Between 2,500 and 5,000 were killed.<ref name=Shulman/> Historian Detlef Garbe, director at the Neuengamme (Hamburg) Memorial, writes that "no other religious movement resisted the pressure to conform to National Socialism with comparable unanimity and steadfastness."<ref>{{Harvnb|Garbe|2001|p=251}}.</ref> |
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====Spanish Republicans==== |
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After losing the [[Spanish Civil War]] many republicans fled to France. With the subsequent fall of France, many were sent to concentration camps, particularly the [[Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp]], where about 7000 died.<ref name="Pike, David Wingeate 2000"/><ref>[http://pares.mcu.es/Deportados/servlets/ServletController?accion=2&opcion=10 Españoles deportados a los campos nazis (1940-1945)]</ref> |
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==Uniqueness== |
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Dr. Shimon Samuels, director for International Liaison of the [[Simon Wiesenthal Centre]], describes the acrimonious debate that exists between "specifists" and "universalists". The former fear debasement of the ''Holocaust'' by invidious comparisons, while the latter places the ''Holocaust'' alongside non-Jewish experiences of mass extermination as part and parcel of the global context of [[genocide]]. Dr. Samuels considers the debate, ''[[ipso facto]]'', to dishonour the memory of the respective victims of ''each'' genocide. In his words, "Each case is specific as a threshold phenomenon, while each also adds its unique memory as signposts along an incremental continuum of horror."<ref>{{Harvnb|Samuels|2001|p=209}}.</ref> [[Peter Novick]] argued: "A moment's reflection makes clear that the notion of uniqueness is quite vacuous . . . [and], in practice, deeply offensive. What else can all of this possibly mean except 'your catastrophe, unlike ours, is ordinary'."<ref>{{Harvnb|Novick|1999|p=9}}.</ref> |
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[[Adam Jones (Canadian scholar)|Adam Jones]], professor at the University of British Columbia Okanagan (Canada), believes that claims of uniqueness for the Holocaust have become less common since the 1994 [[Rwandan Genocide|Rwandan genocide]].<ref>{{Harvnb|Jones|2010|p=254}}.</ref> In 1997, the publication of ''[[The Black Book of Communism]]'' led to further debate on the comparison between Soviet and Nazi crimes; the book argued that Nazi crimes were not very different from the Soviet ones, and that Nazi methods were to a significant extent adopted from Soviet methods;<ref>{{Harvnb|Courtois|1999|p=9}}.</ref> in the course of the debate, the term "[[Mass killings under Communist regimes|Red Holocaust]]" appeared in discourse.<ref>{{Harvnb|Möller|1999}}; {{Harvnb|Rosefielde|2009}}.</ref> Some scholars strongly dissent from this view.<ref>[[Stephen G. Wheatcroft]]. [http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/WCR-German_Soviet.pdf The scale and nature of German and Soviet repression and mass killings, 1930–45]. ''Europe-Asia Studies'' Vol. 48, No. 8 (Dec., 1996), pp. 1319-1353.</ref> [[Steven T. Katz|Steven Katz]] of [[Boston University]] has argued that the Holocaust is the only genocide that has occurred in history, and he defines "Holocaust" to include only "the travail of European Jewry" and not other victims of the Nazis.<ref name="novick">{{Harvnb|Novick|1999|pp=196–197}}.</ref> In a speech commemorating the 70th anniversary of the [[Vel' d'Hiv Roundup]], French President [[François Hollande]] maintained the uniqueness of the Holocaust and criticized comparisons as trivialization. {{Quotation|The challenge is to fight tirelessly against all forms of falsification of history: not only the insult of Holocaust denial, but also the temptation of relativism. Indeed, to pass on the history of the Shoah is to teach how uniquely appalling it was. By its nature, its scale, its methods, and the terrifying precision of its execution, that crime remains an abyss unique in human history. We must constantly remind ourselves of that singularity.<ref>http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/aug/18/france-hollande-crime-vel-d-hiv/</ref> |
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}} |
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==See also== |
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{{div col ||20em}} |
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*[[Ethnic cleansing]] |
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===By country=== |
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{{see also|Category:The Holocaust by country}} |
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* [[The Holocaust in Albania]] |
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* [[The Holocaust in Belarus]] |
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* [[The Holocaust in Belgium]] |
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* [[The Holocaust in Croatia]] |
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* [[The Holocaust in Estonia]] |
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* [[The Holocaust in France]] |
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* [[The Holocaust in Latvia]] |
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* [[The Holocaust in Lithuania]] |
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* [[The Holocaust in Luxembourg]] |
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* [[The Holocaust in Italian Libya]] |
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* [[The Holocaust in Norway]] |
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* [[The Holocaust in occupied Poland]] |
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* [[The Holocaust in Romania]] |
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* [[The Holocaust in Russia]] |
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* [[The Holocaust in Serbia]] |
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* [[The Holocaust in Ukraine]] |
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* [[The Holocaust in the USSR]] |
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===Perpetrators and collaborators=== |
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{{main|List of major perpetrators of the Holocaust}} |
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* [[The Holocaust (responsibility)#Other states|Responsibility of individual states]] |
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* [[List of books about Nazi Germany]] |
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===Victims and survivors=== |
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* [[Jewish partisans]] |
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* [[List of famous Holocaust survivors]] |
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* [[List of survivors of Sobibór]] |
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* [[List of victims and survivors of Auschwitz]] |
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* [[List of victims of Nazism]] |
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* [[Sh'erit ha-Pletah]] |
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* [[Wiedergutmachung]] |
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===Involvement of other countries and nationals=== |
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* [[Bermuda Conference]] |
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* [[Évian Conference]] |
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* [[International response to the Holocaust]] |
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* [[Patria disaster]] |
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* [[Struma disaster]] |
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* [[MS St. Louis#Voyage of the Damned|Voyage of the Damned]] |
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===Rescuers=== |
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* [[Arab rescue efforts during the Holocaust]] |
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* [[List of people who assisted Jews during the Holocaust]] |
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* [[List of Righteous Among the Nations by country]] |
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* [[History of the Jews in Bulgaria#Bulgarian Jews during World War II|Rescue of the Bulgarian Jews]] |
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* [[Rescue of the Danish Jews]] |
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* [[Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust]] |
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* [[Righteous Among the Nations]] |
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* [[Związek Organizacji Wojskowej]] |
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* [[Żegota]] |
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====Individual rescuers==== |
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* [[Albert Battel]] |
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* [[Folke Bernadotte]] |
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* [[Ángel Sanz Briz]] |
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* [[Aristides de Sousa Mendes]] |
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* [[Luiz Martins de Souza Dantas]] |
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* [[Jan Karski]] |
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* [[Carl Lutz]] |
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* [[Hugh O'Flaherty]] |
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* [[Jorge Pelasca]] |
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* [[Dimitar Peshev]] |
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* [[Witold Pilecki]] |
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* [[Irena Sendler]] |
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* [[Ho Feng Shan]] |
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* [[Oskar Schindler]] |
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* [[Henryk Slawik]] |
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* [[Chiune Sugihara]] |
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* [[Corrie ten Boom]] |
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* [[Raoul Wallenberg]] |
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===Aftermath=== |
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* [[Aftermath of the Holocaust]] |
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* [[Aftermath of World War II]] |
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* [[Denazification]] |
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* [[Functionalism versus intentionalism]] |
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* [[Historikerstreit]] |
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* [[Responsibility for the Holocaust]] |
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====Legal response==== |
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* [[Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide]] |
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* [[Command responsibility]] |
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* [[Dora Trial]] |
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* [[Eichmann Trial]] |
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* [[German war crimes]] |
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* [[War crimes of the Wehrmacht]] |
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* [[Laws Requiring Teaching of the Holocaust]] |
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====Memorials==== |
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* [[Holocaust memorials]] |
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* [[Yom HaShoah]] |
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====Cultural, political, and scholarly responses==== |
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* [[Bibliography of The Holocaust]] |
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* [[Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust]] |
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* [[The Holocaust in art and literature]] |
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* [[Holocaust denial]] |
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** [[Criticism of Holocaust denial]] |
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* [[Holocaust research]] |
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* [[Holocaust theology]] |
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* [[Holocaust trivialization]] |
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===Miscellaneous=== |
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* [[Animal rights and the Holocaust]] |
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* [[Antisemitism]] |
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* [[Antiziganism]] |
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* [[Aryanization]] |
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* [[Bereavement in Judaism]] |
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* [[Jews outside Europe under Axis occupation]] |
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* [[Selvino children]] |
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===Other genocides and mass killings=== |
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* [[Armenian genocide]] |
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* [[Bosnian genocide]] |
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* [[Cambodian genocide]] and [[The Killing Fields]] |
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* [[Darfur genocide]] |
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* [[Genocides in history]] |
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* [[Halabja chemical attack]] |
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* [[Herero and Namaqua Genocide]] |
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* [[Holodomor]] |
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* [[Indonesian killings of 1965–66]] |
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* [[Japanese war crimes]] |
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* [[Katyn massacre]] |
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* ''[[Maafa]]'' or African Holocaust |
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* [[List of massacres of Indigenous Australians]] |
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* [[Mass killings under Communist regimes]] |
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* [[Native American genocide]] |
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* [[Rwandan genocide]] |
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{{div col end}} |
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==Footnotes== |
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{{reflist|colwidth=30em|refs= |
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<ref name="Karski1">{{cite web |url=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/8460682/Story-of-a-Secret-State-by-Jan-Karski-review.html |title=tory of a Secret State by Jan Karski: review |author=Nigel Jones |publisher=The daily telegraph |date=4 May 2011 |quote=''Karski reached London where he had an interview with the foreign secretary Anthony Eden, the first of many top officials to effectively ignore his account of the Nazis’ systematic effort to exterminate European Jewry. The very enormity of Karski’s report paradoxically worked against him being believed, and paralysed any action against the killings. Logistically unable to reach Poland, preoccupied with fighting the war on many fronts, and unwilling to believe even the Nazis capable of such bestiality, the Allies put the Holocaust on the back burner. When Karski took his tale across the Atlantic, the story was the same. President Roosevelt heard him out, then asked about the condition of horses in Poland."}}</ref> |
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<ref name="KarskiLanzmann">{{cite web|url=http://www.ushmm.org/online/film/display/detail.php?file_num=4739 |title=U.S Holocaust memorial Museum, Claude Lanzmann Interview with Jan Karski |author= Claude Lanzmann |publisher= Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive |date=4 May 2011 |quote= Karski first told Roosevelt that the Polish nation was depending on him to deliver them from the Germans. Karski said to Roosevelt, "All hope, Mr. President, has been placed by the Polish nation in the hands of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Karski says that he told President Roosevelt about Belzec and the desperate situation of the Jews. Roosevelt concentrated his questions and remarks entirely on Poland and did not ask one question about the Jews ". Watch the video, or see the full transcript}}</ref> |
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}} |
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==Bibliography== |
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{{Refbegin|2|indent=yes}} |
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: {{Cite book|last=Bauer|first=Yehuda |authorformat=scap|authorlink=Yehuda Bauer|year=1982|title=A History of the Holocaust|location=New York|publisher=[[Franklin Watts]]|ref=harv}} |
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: {{Cite book|author=———|year=1989|chapter=Rescue by negotiations? Jewish attempts to negotiate with the Nazis|editor=Michael R. Marrus|editor-link=Michael Marrus|title=The Nazi Holocaust, Part 9: The End of the Holocaust|publisher=[[Walter de Gruyter]]|pages=3–21|ref=CITEREFBauer1989}} |
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: {{Cite book|author=———|year=1998|origyear=1994|chapter=Gypsies|editor1-last=[[Yisrael Gutman]]|editor2-last=[[Michael Berenbaum]]|title=Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp|location=Bloomington, IN|publisher=[[Indiana University Press]]|pages=441–455|ref=CITEREFBauer1998}} |
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: {{Cite book|author=———|year=2002|title=Rethinking the Holocaust|location=New Haven, CT|publisher=[[Yale University Press]]|ref=CITEREFBauer2002}} |
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: {{Cite book|last=Mazower|first=Mark |authorformat=scap|authorlink=Mark Mazower|year=2008|title=Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe|location=London|publisher=Allen Lane|ref=harv}} |
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: {{Cite book|last=Montague|first=Patrick |authorformat=scap|year=2012|title=Chelmno and the Holocaust: A History of Hitler's First Death Camp|location=London|publisher=[[I.B.Tauris]]|ref=harv}} |
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: {{Cite book|last=Möller|first=Horst |authorformat=scap|authorlink=Horst Möller|year=1999|title=Der rote Holocaust und die Deutschen. Die Debatte um das 'Schwarzbuch des Kommunismus'|location=Munich|publisher=[[Piper Verlag]]|ref=harv}} |
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: {{Cite book|last=Nicosia|first=Francis R. |authorformat=scap|year=2000|title=The Third Reich & the Palestine Question|location=New Brunswick, NJ|publisher=[[Transaction Publishers]]|ref=harv}} |
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: {{Cite book|last=Niewyk|first=Donald L. |authorformat=scap|year=2012|chapter=The Holocaust: Jews, Gypsies, and the Handicapped|editor1-last=Parsons|editor1-first=Samuel|editor2-last=Totten|editor2-first=William S.|title=Centuries of Genocide: Essays and Eyewitness Accounts|location=New York, NY|publisher=[[Routledge]]|pages=191–248|ref=harv}} |
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: {{Cite journal|last=Petrie|first=Jon |authorformat=scap|year=2000|title=The Secular Word 'HOLOCAUST': Scholarly Myths, History, and Twentieth Century Meanings|url=http://www.berkeleyinternet.com/holocaust|journal=Journal of Genocide Research|volume=2|issue=1|pages=31–63|doi=10.1080/146235200112409|ref=harv}} |
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: {{Cite book|last=Peukert|first=Detlev |authorformat=scap|authorlink=Detlev Peukert|year=1987|title=Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism In Everyday Life|location=London|publisher=Batsford|ref=harv}} |
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: {{Cite book|author=———|year=1994|chapter=The Genesis of the 'Final Solution' from the Spirit of Science|editor=David F. Crew|title=Nazism and German Society, 1933–1945|location=London|publisher=[[Routledge]]|pages=274–299|ref=CITEREFPeukert1994}} |
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: {{Cite book|last=Phayer|first=Michael |authorformat=scap|authorlink=Michael Phayer|year=2000|title=The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965|location=Bloomington, IN|publisher=[[Indiana University Press]]|ref=harv}} |
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: {{Cite book|last=Pinkus|first=Benjamin |authorformat=scap|year=1990|title=The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority|location=Cambridge|publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]]|ref=harv}} |
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: {{Cite book|last=Pinkus|first=Oscar |authorformat=scap|year=2005|title=The War Aims and Strategies of Adolf Hitler|location=Jefferson, NC|publisher=[[McFarland & Company]]|ref=harv}} |
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: {{Cite book|last=Piotrowski|first=Tadeusz |authorformat=scap|authorlink=Tadeusz Piotrowski (sociologist)|year=1998|title=Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration With Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918–1947|location=Jefferson, NC|publisher=[[McFarland & Company]]|ref=harv}} |
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: {{Cite book|last=Piper|first=Franciszek |authorformat=scap|authorlink=Franciszek Piper|year=1998|origyear=1994|chapter=Gas chambers and Crematoria|editor1-last=[[Yisrael Gutman]]|editor2-last=[[Michael Berenbaum]]|title=Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp|location=Bloomington, IN|publisher=Indiana University Press|pages=157–182|ref=harv}} |
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: {{Cite book|last=Poprzeczny|first=Joseph |authorformat=scap|year=2004|title=Odilo Globocnik: Hitler's Man in the East|location=Jefferson, NC|publisher=[[McFarland & Company]]|ref=harv}} |
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: {{Cite book|last=Porat|first=Dina |authorformat=scap|year=2002|chapter=The Holocaust in Lithuania: Some Unique Aspects|editor=[[David Cesarani]]|title=The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation|location=London|publisher=[[Routledge]]|pages=159–174|ref=harv}} |
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: {{Cite book|last=Proctor|first=Robert |authorformat=scap|year=1988|title=Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis|location=Cambridge, MA|publisher=[[Harvard University Press]]|ref=harv}} |
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: {{Cite book|last=Samuels|first=Simon |authorformat=scap|year=2001|chapter=Applying the Lessons of the Holocaust|editor=Alan S. Rosenbaum|title=Is the Holocaust Unique?|location=Boulder, CO|publisher=[[Westview Press]]|pages=472–494|ref=harv }} |
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{{Refend}} |
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==External links== |
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{{wikiquote}} |
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{{commons category}} |
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{{Library resources box}} |
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* '''Other external links, references, and other resources are listed at [[Holocaust (resources)]]''' |
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* [https://www.h-net.org/~holoweb/ H-HOLOCAUST], H-Net discussion list for librarians, scholars and advanced students |
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* [http://eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_documents/holocaust.html Online documents available from the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library] |
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* [http://eisenhower.archives.gov/research/subject_guides/pdf/Holocaust.pdf Guide to materials available at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library] |
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* [http://www.wienerlibrary.co.uk/ The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide] – The World's Oldest Holocaust Memorial Institution |
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* [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-alan-lurie/how-could-god-have-allowe_b_1207672.html How Could God Have Allowed the Holocaust?] |
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* [http://www.ushmm.org/educators/teaching-about-the-holocaust/common-questions Common Questions about the Holocaust] by the [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]] |
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* [http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/Wannsee/wanseeminutes.html The Minutes from the Wannsee Conference in English] |
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Revision as of 19:46, 30 June 2024
The Holocaust | |
---|---|
Part of World War II | |
Jews arriving at Auschwitz II in German-occupied Poland, May 1944. Most were selected to go to the gas chambers. | |
Location | Europe, primarily German-occupied Poland and the Soviet Union |
Date | 1941–1945 |
Attack type | Genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass murder, mass shooting, death marches, poison gas, hate crime |
Deaths | Around 6 million Jews |
Perpetrators | Nazi Germany along with its collaborators and allies |
The Holocaust was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out primarily through mass shootings and poison gas in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chełmno in occupied Poland. Separate Nazi persecutions killed a similar or larger number of non-Jewish civilians and POWs; the term Holocaust is sometimes used to refer to the persecution of these other groups.
The Nazis developed their ideology based on racism and pursuit of "living space", and seized power in early 1933. Meant to force all German Jews regardless of means to attempt to emigrate, the regime passed anti-Jewish laws, encouraged harassment, and orchestrated a nationwide pogrom in November 1938. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, occupation authorities began to establish ghettos to segregate Jews. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, 1.5 to 2 million Jews were shot by German forces and local collaborators.
Later in 1941 or early 1942, the highest levels of the German government decided to murder all Jews in Europe. Victims were deported by rail to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, most were killed with poison gas. Other Jews continued to be employed in forced labor camps where many died from starvation, abuse, exhaustion, or being used as test subjects in deadly medical experiments. Although many Jews tried to escape, surviving in hiding was difficult due to factors such as the lack of money to pay helpers and the risk of denunciation. The property, homes, and jobs belonging to murdered Jews were redistributed to the German occupiers and other non-Jews. Although the majority of Holocaust victims died in 1942, the killing continued at a lower rate until the end of the war in May 1945.
Many Jewish survivors emigrated outside of Europe after the war. A few Holocaust perpetrators faced criminal trials. Billions of dollars in reparations have been paid, although falling short of the Jews' losses. The Holocaust has also been commemorated in museums, memorials, and culture. It has become central to Western historical consciousness as a symbol of the ultimate human evil.
Terminology and scope
The term Holocaust, derived from a Greek word meaning "burnt offering",[1] has become the most common word used to describe the Nazi extermination of Jews in English and many other languages.[a] The term Holocaust is sometimes used to refer to the persecution of other groups that the Nazis targeted,[b] especially those targeted on a biological basis, in particular the Roma and Sinti, as well as Soviet prisoners of war and Polish and Soviet civilians.[2][3][4] All of these groups, however, were targeted for different reasons.[5] By the 1970s, the adjective Jewish was dropped as redundant and Holocaust, now capitalized, became the default term for the destruction of European Jews.[6] The Hebrew word Shoah ("catastrophic destruction") exclusively refers to Jewish victims.[7][8][2] The perpetrators used the phrase "Final Solution" as a euphemism for their genocide of Jews.[9]
Background
Jews have lived in Europe for more than two thousand years.[10] Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, Jews were subjected to antisemitism based on Christian theology, which blamed them for killing Jesus.[11][12] In the nineteenth century many European countries granted full citizenship rights to Jews in hopes that they would assimilate.[13] By the early twentieth century, most Jews in central and western Europe were well integrated into society, while in eastern Europe, where emancipation had arrived later, many Jews still lived in small towns, spoke Yiddish, and practiced Orthodox Judaism.[14] Political antisemitism positing the existence of a Jewish question and usually an international Jewish conspiracy emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth century due to the rise of nationalism in Europe and industrialization that increased economic conflicts between Jews and non-Jews.[15][16] Some scientists began to categorize humans into different races and argued that there was a life or death struggle between them.[17] Many racists argued that Jews were a separate racial group alien to Europe.[18][19]
The turn of the twentieth century saw a major effort to establish a German colonial empire overseas, leading to the Herero and Nama genocide and subsequent racial apartheid regime in South West Africa.[20][21] World War I (1914–1918) intensified nationalist and racist sentiments in Germany and other European countries.[22] Jews in eastern Europe were targeted by widespread pogroms.[23] Germany had two million war dead and lost a substantial territory;[22] opposition to the postwar settlement united Germans across the political spectrum.[24][25] The military promoted the untrue but compelling idea that, rather than being defeated on the battlefield, Germany had been stabbed in the back by socialists and Jews.[24][26]
The Nazi Party was founded in the wake of the war,[27] and its ideology is often cited as the main factor explaining the Holocaust.[28] From the beginning, the Nazis—not unlike other nation-states in Europe—dreamed of a world without Jews, whom they identified as "the embodiment of everything that was wrong with modernity".[5] The Nazis defined the German nation as a racial community unbounded by Germany's physical borders[29] and sought to purge it of racially foreign and socially deficient elements.[24][30] The Nazi Party and its leader, Adolf Hitler, were also obsessed with reversing Germany's territorial losses and acquiring additional Lebensraum (living space) in Eastern Europe for colonization.[31][32] These ideas appealed to many Germans.[33] The Nazis promised to protect European civilization from the Soviet threat.[34] Hitler believed that Jews controlled the Soviet Union, as well as the Western powers, and were plotting to destroy Germany.[35][36][37]
Rise of Nazi Germany
Amidst a worldwide economic depression and political fragmentation, the Nazi Party rapidly increased its support, reaching a high of 37 percent in mid-1932 elections,[38][39] by campaigning on issues such as anticommunism and economic recovery.[40][41] Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933 in a backroom deal supported by right-wing politicians.[38] Within months, all other political parties were banned, the regime seized control of the media,[42] tens of thousands of political opponents—especially communists—were arrested, and a system of camps for extrajudicial imprisonment was set up.[43] The Nazi regime cracked down on crime and social outsiders—such as Roma and Sinti, homosexual men, and those perceived as workshy—through a variety of measures, including imprisonment in concentration camps.[44] The Nazis forcibly sterilized 400,000 people and subjected others to forced abortions for real or supposed hereditary illnesses.[45][46][47]
Although the Nazis sought to control every aspect of public and private life,[48] Nazi repression was directed almost entirely against groups perceived as outside the national community. Most Germans had little to fear provided they did not oppose the new regime.[49][50] The new regime built popular support through economic growth, which partly occurred through state-led measures such as rearmament.[42] The annexations of Austria (1938), Sudetenland (1938), and Bohemia and Moravia (1939) also increased the Nazis' popular support.[51] Germans were inundated with propaganda both against Jews[42] and other groups targeted by the Nazis.[46]
Persecution of Jews
The roughly 500,000 German Jews made up less than 1 percent of the country's population in 1933. They were wealthier on average than other Germans and largely assimilated, although a minority were recent immigrants from eastern Europe.[52][53][54] Various German government agencies, Nazi Party organizations, and local authorities instituted about 1,500 anti-Jewish laws.[55] In 1933, Jews were banned or restricted from several professions and the civil service.[51] After hounding the German Jews out of public life by the end of 1934, the regime passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935.[56] The laws reserved full citizenship rights for those of "German or related blood", restricted Jews' economic activity, and criminalized new marriages and sexual relationships between Jews and non-Jewish Germans.[57][58] Jews were defined as those with three or four Jewish grandparents; many of those with partial Jewish descent were classified as Mischlinge, with varying rights.[59] The regime also sought to segregate Jews with a view to their ultimate disappearance from the country.[56] Jewish students were gradually forced out of the school system. Some municipalities enacted restrictions governing where Jews were allowed to live or conduct business.[60] In 1938 and 1939, Jews were barred from additional occupations, and their businesses were expropriated to force them out of the economy.[58]
Anti-Jewish violence, largely locally organized by members of Nazi Party institutions, took primarily non-lethal forms from 1933 to 1939.[61] Jewish stores, especially in rural areas, were often boycotted or vandalized.[62] As a result of local and popular pressure, many small towns became entirely free of Jews and as many as a third of Jewish businesses may have been forced to close.[63] Anti-Jewish violence was even worse in areas annexed by Nazi Germany.[64] On 9–10 November 1938, the Nazis organized Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), a nationwide pogrom. Over 7,500 Jewish shops (out of 9,000) were looted, more than 1,000 synagogues were damaged or destroyed,[65] at least 90 Jews were murdered,[66] and as many as 30,000 Jewish men were arrested,[67][68] although many were released within weeks.[69] German Jews were levied a special tax that raised more than 1 billion Reichsmarks (RM).[70][c]
The Nazi government wanted to force all Jews to leave Germany.[73] By the end of 1939, most Jews who could emigrate had already done so; those who remained behind were disproportionately elderly, poor, or female and could not obtain a visa.[74] The plurality, around 110,000, left for the United States, while smaller numbers emigrated to South America, Shanghai, Mandatory Palestine, and South Africa.[75] Germany collected emigration taxes of nearly 1 billion RM,[c] mostly from Jews.[76] The policy of forced emigration continued into 1940.[77]
Besides Germany, a significant number of other European countries abandoned democracy for some kind of authoritarian or fascist rule.[34] Many countries, including Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia, passed antisemitic legislation in the 1930s and 1940s.[78] In October 1938, Germany deported many Polish Jews in response to a Polish law that enabled the revocation of citizenship for Polish Jews living abroad.[79][80]
Start of World War II
The German Wehrmacht (armed forces) invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, triggering declarations of war from the United Kingdom and France.[81] During the five weeks of fighting, as many as 16,000 civilians, hostages, and prisoners of war may have been shot by the German invaders;[82] there was also a great deal of looting.[83] Special units known as Einsatzgruppen followed the army to eliminate any possible resistance.[84] Around 50,000 Polish and Polish Jewish leaders and intellectuals were arrested or executed.[85][86] The Auschwitz concentration camp was established to hold those members of the Polish intelligentsia not killed in the purges.[87] Around 400,000 Poles were expelled from the Wartheland in western Poland to the General Governorate occupation zone from 1939 to 1941, and the area was resettled by ethnic Germans from eastern Europe.[88]
The rest of Poland was occupied by the Soviet Union, which invaded Poland from the east on 17 September pursuant to the German–Soviet pact.[89] The Soviet Union deported hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens to the Soviet interior, including as many as 260,000 Jews who largely survived the war.[90][91] Although most Jews were not communists, some accepted positions in the Soviet administration, contributing to a pre-existing perception among many non-Jews that Soviet rule was a Jewish conspiracy.[92] In 1940, Germany invaded much of western Europe including the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and Denmark and Norway.[81] In 1941, Germany invaded Yugoslavia and Greece.[81] Some of these new holdings were fully or partially annexed into Germany while others were placed under civilian or military rule.[82]
The war provided cover for "Aktion T4", the murder of around 70,000 institutionalized Germans with mental or physical disabilities at specialized killing centers using poison gas.[88][93][94] The victims included all 4,000 to 5,000 institutionalized Jews.[95] Despite efforts to maintain secrecy, knowledge of the killings leaked out and Hitler ordered a halt to the centralized killing program in August 1941.[96][97][98] Decentralized killings via denial of medical care, starvation, and poisoning caused an additional 120,000 deaths by the end of the war.[97][99] Many of the same personnel and technologies were later used for the mass murder of Jews.[100][101]
Ghettoization and resettlement
Germany gained control of 1.7 million Jews in Poland.[54][102] The Nazis tried to concentrate Jews in the Lublin District of the General Governorate. 45,000 Jews were deported by November and left to fend for themselves, causing many deaths.[103] Deportations stopped in early 1940 due to the opposition of Hans Frank, the leader of the General Governorate, who did not want his fiefdom to become a dumping ground for unwanted Jews.[104][105] After the conquest of France, the Nazis considered deporting Jews to French Madagascar, but this proved impossible.[106][107] The Nazis planned that harsh conditions in these areas would kill many Jews.[106][105] In September 1939, around 7,000 Jews were killed, alongside thousands of Poles, however, they were not systematically targeted as they would be later, and open mass killings would subside until June of 1941.[108]
During the invasion, synagogues were burned and thousands of Jews fled or were expelled into the Soviet occupation zone.[109] Various anti-Jewish regulations were soon issued. In October 1939, adult Jews in the General Governorate were required to perform forced labor.[110] In November 1939 they were ordered to wear white armbands.[111] Laws decreed the seizure of most Jewish property and the takeover of Jewish-owned businesses. When Jews were forced into ghettos, they lost their homes and belongings.[110]
The first Nazi ghettos were established in the Wartheland and General Governorate in 1939 and 1940 on the initiative of local German administrators.[112][113] The largest ghettos, such as Warsaw and Łódź, were established in existing residential neighborhoods and closed by fences or walls. In many smaller ghettos, Jews were forced into poor neighborhoods but with no fence.[114] Forced labor programs provided subsistence to many ghetto inhabitants, and in some cases protected them from deportation. Workshops and factories were operated inside some ghettos, while in other cases Jews left the ghetto to work outside it.[115] Because the ghettos were not segregated by sex some family life continued.[116] A Jewish community leadership (Judenrat) exercised some authority and tried to sustain the Jewish community while following German demands. As a survival strategy, many tried to make the ghettos useful to the occupiers as a labor reserve.[117][118] Jews in western Europe were not forced into ghettos but faced discriminatory laws and confiscation of property.[119][120][121]
Rape and sexual exploitation of Jewish and non-Jewish women in eastern Europe was common.[122]
Invasion of the Soviet Union
Germany and its allies Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Italy invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941.[123][105] Although the war was launched more for strategic than ideological reasons,[124] what Hitler saw as an apocalyptic battle against the forces of Jewish Bolshevism[125] was to be carried out as a war of extermination with complete disregard for the laws and customs of war.[126][127] A quick victory was expected[128] and was planned to be followed by a massive demographic engineering project to remove 31 million people and replace them with German settlers.[129] To increase the speed of conquest the Germans planned to feed their army by looting, exporting additional food to Germany, and to terrorize the local inhabitants with preventative killings.[130][131] The Germans foresaw that the invasion would cause a food shortfall and planned the mass starvation of Soviet cities and some rural areas.[132][133][134] Although the starvation policy was less successful than planners hoped,[135] the residents of some cities, particularly in Ukraine, and besieged Leningrad, as well as the Jewish ghettos, endured human-made famine, during which millions of people died of starvation.[136][137]
By mid-June 1941, about 30,000 Jews had died, 20,000 of whom had starved to death in the ghettos.[138]
Soviet prisoners of war in the custody of the German Army were intended to die in large numbers. Sixty percent—3.3 million people—died, primarily of starvation,[139][140] making them the second largest group of victims of Nazi mass killing after European Jews.[141][142] Jewish prisoners of war and commissars were systematically executed.[143][144] About a million civilians were killed by the Nazis during anti-partisan warfare, including more than 300,000 in Belarus.[145][146] From 1942 onwards, the Germans and their allies targeted villages suspected of supporting the partisans, burning them and killing or expelling their inhabitants.[147] During these operations, nearby small ghettos were liquidated and their inhabitants shot.[148] By 1943, anti-partisan operations aimed for the depopulation of large areas of Belarus.[149][150] Jews and those unfit for work were typically shot on the spot with others deported.[148][151] Although most of those killed were not Jews,[146][149] anti-partisan warfare often led to the deaths of Jews.[152]
Mass shootings of Jews
The systematic murder of Jews began in the Soviet Union in 1941.[154] During the invasion, many Jews were conscripted into the Red Army. Out of 10 or 15 million Soviet civilians who fled eastwards to the Soviet interior, 1.6 million were Jews.[155][117] Local inhabitants killed as many as 50,000 Jews in pogroms in Latvia, Lithuania, eastern Poland, Ukraine, and the Romanian borderlands.[156][157] Although German forces tried to incite pogroms, their role in causing violence is controversial.[158][159] Romanian soldiers killed tens of thousands of Jews from Odessa by April 1942.[160][161]
Prior to the invasion, the Einsatzgruppen were reorganized in preparation for mass killings and instructed to shoot Soviet officials and Jewish state and party employees.[162] The shootings were justified on the basis of Jews' supposed central role in supporting the communist system, but it was not initially envisioned to kill all Soviet Jews.[163][164] The occupiers relied on locals to identify Jews to be targeted.[165] The first German mass killings targeted adult male Jews who had worked as civil servants or in jobs requiring education. Tens of thousands were shot by the end of July. The vast majority of civilian victims were Jews.[160] In July and August Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS (Schutzstaffel), made several visits to the death squads' zones of operation, relaying orders to kill more Jews.[166] At this time, the killers began to murder Jewish women and children too.[166][167] Executions peaked at 40,000 a month in Lithuania in August and September and in October and November reached their height in Belarus.[168]
The executions often took place a few kilometers from a town. Victims were rounded up and marched to the execution site, forced to undress, and shot into previously dug pits.[170] The favored technique was a shot in the back of the neck with a single bullet.[171] In the chaos, many victims were not killed by the gunfire but instead buried alive. Typically, the pits would be guarded after the execution but sometimes a few victims managed to escape afterwards.[170] Executions were public spectacles and the victims' property was looted both by the occupiers and local inhabitants.[172] Around 200 ghettos were established in the occupied Soviet Union, with many existing only briefly before their inhabitants were executed. A few large ghettos such as Vilna, Kovno, Riga, Białystok, and Lwów lasted into 1943 because they became centers of production.[117]
Victims of mass shootings included Jews deported from elsewhere.[173] Besides Germany, Romania killed the largest number of Jews.[174][175] Romania deported about 154,000–170,000 Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina to ghettos in Transnistria from 1941 to 1943.[176] Jews from Transnistria were also imprisoned in these ghettos, where the total death toll may have reached 160,000.[177] Hungary expelled thousands of Carpathian Ruthenian and foreign Jews in 1941, who were shortly thereafter shot in Ukraine.[178][179] At the beginning of September, all German Jews were required to wear a yellow star, and in October, Hitler decided to deport them to the east and ban emigration.[180][181] Between mid-October and the end of 1941, 42,000 Jews from Germany and its annexed territories and 5,000 Romani people from Austria were deported to Łódź, Kovno, Riga, and Minsk.[182][183] In late November, 5,000 German Jews were shot outside of Kovno and another 1,000 near Riga, but Himmler ordered an end to such massacres and some in the senior Nazi leadership voiced doubts about killing German Jews.[173][184] Executions of German Jews in the Baltics resumed in early 1942.[185]
After the expansion of killings to target the entire Soviet Jewish population, the 3,000 men of the Einsatzgruppen proved insufficient and Himmler mobilized 21 battalions of Order Police to assist them.[166] In addition, Wehrmacht soldiers, Waffen-SS brigades, and local auxiliaries shot many Jews.[170][186][187] By the end of 1941, more than 80 percent of the Jews in central Ukraine, eastern Belarus, Russia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been shot, but less than 25 percent of those living farther west where 900,000 remained alive.[188] By the end of the war, around 1.5 to 2 million Jews were shot[189] and as many as 225,000 Roma.[190] The murderers found the executions distressing and logistically inconvenient, which influenced the decision to switch to other methods of killing.[191]
Systematic deportations across Europe
Most historians agree that Hitler issued an explicit order to kill all Jews across Europe,[192] but there is disagreement when.[193][194] Some historians cite inflammatory statements by Hitler and other Nazi leaders as well as the concurrent mass shootings of Serbian Jews, plans for extermination camps in Poland, and the beginning of the deportation of German Jews as indicative of the final decision having been made before December 1941.[193][195] Others argue that these policies were initiatives by local leaders and that the final decision was made later.[193] On 5 December 1941, the Soviet Union launched its first major counteroffensive. On 11 December, Hitler declared war on the United States after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.[196][197] The next day, he told leading Nazi party officials, referring to his 1939 prophecy, "The world war is here; the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence."[197][198]
It took the Nazis several months after this to organize a continent-wide genocide.[197] Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), convened the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942. This high-level meeting was intended to coordinate anti-Jewish policy.[199] The majority of Holocaust killings were carried out in 1942, with it being the peak of the genocide, as over 3 million Jews were murdered, with 20 or 25 percent of Holocaust victims dying before early 1942 and the same number surviving by the end of the year.[200][201]
Extermination camps
Gas vans developed from those used to kill mental patients since 1939 were assigned to the Einsatzgruppen and first used in November 1941; victims were forced into the van and killed with engine exhaust.[202] The first extermination camp was Chełmno in the Wartheland, established on the initiative of the local civil administrator Arthur Greiser with Himmler's approval; it began operations in December 1941 using gas vans.[203][204][205] In October 1941, Higher SS and Police Leader of Lublin Odilo Globocnik[206] began work planning Belzec—the first purpose-built extermination camp to feature stationary gas chambers using carbon monoxide based on the previous Aktion T4 programme[207][208]—amid increasing talk among German administrators in Poland of large-scale murder of Jews in the General Governorate.[209][203] In late 1941 in East Upper Silesia, Jews in forced-labor camps operated by the Schmelt Organization deemed "unfit for work" began to be sent in groups to Auschwitz where they were murdered.[210][211] In early 1942, Zyklon B became the preferred killing method in extermination camps[212] after gassing experiments were conducted on Russian POWs in late August 1941.[213][208]
The camps were located on rail lines to make it easier to transport Jews to their deaths, but in remote places to avoid notice.[206] The stench caused by mass killing operations was noticeable to anyone nearby.[214] Except in the deportations from western and central Europe, people were typically deported to the camps in overcrowded cattle cars. As many as 150 people were forced into a single boxcar. Many died en route, partly because of the low priority accorded to these transports.[215][216] Shortage of rail transport sometimes led to postponement or cancellation of deportations.[217] Upon arrival, the victims were robbed of their remaining possessions, forced to undress, had their hair cut, and were chased into the gas chamber.[218] Death from the gas was agonizing and could take as long as 30 minutes.[219][197] The gas chambers were primitive and sometimes malfunctioned. Some prisoners were shot because the gas chambers were not functioning.[220] At other extermination camps, nearly everyone on a transport was killed on arrival, but at Auschwitz around 20–25 percent were separated out for labor,[221] although many of these prisoners died later on[222] through starvation, mass shooting, torture,[223] and medical experiments.[224]
Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka reported a combined revenue of RM 178.7 million from belongings stolen from their victims, far exceeding costs.[225][226] Combined, the camps required the labor of less than 3,000 Jewish prisoners, 1,000 Trawniki men (largely Ukrainian auxiliaries), and very few German guards.[227][216] About half of the Jews killed in the Holocaust died by poison gas.[228] Thousands of Romani people were also murdered in the extermination camps.[229] Prisoner uprisings at Treblinka and Sobibor meant that these camps were shut down earlier than envisioned.[230][231]
Camp | Location | Number of Jews killed | Killing technology | Planning began | Mass gassing duration |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Chełmno | Wartheland[232] | 150,000[232] | Gas vans[232] | July 1941[232] | 8 December 1941 – April 1943 and April–July 1944[233] |
Belzec | Lublin District[232] | 440,823–596,200[234] | Stationary gas chamber, engine exhaust[232] | October 1941[233] | 17 March 1942 – December 1942[233] |
Sobibor | Lublin District[232] | 170,618–238,900[234] | Stationary gas chamber, engine exhaust[232] | Late 1941 or March 1942[235] | May 1942 – October 1942[235] |
Treblinka | Warsaw District[232] | 780,863–951,800[234] | Stationary gas chamber, engine exhaust[232] | April 1942[232] | 23 July 1942 – October 1943[232] |
Auschwitz II–Birkenau | East Upper Silesia[232] | 900,000–1,000,000[232] | Stationary gas chamber, hydrogen cyanide[232] | September 1941 (built as POW camp)[212][232] |
February 1942 – October 1944[232] |
Liquidation of the ghettos in Poland
Plans to kill most of the Jews in the General Governorate were affected by various goals of the SS, military, and civil administration to reduce the amount of food consumed by Jews, enable a slight increase in rations to non-Jewish Poles, and combat the black market.[236] In March 1942, killings began in Belzec, targeting Jews from Lublin who were not capable of work. This action reportedly reduced the black market and was deemed a success to be replicated elsewhere.[237][238] By mid-1942, Nazi leaders decided to allow only 300,000 Jews to survive in the General Governorate by the end of the year for forced labor;[236] for the most part, only those working in armaments production were spared.[239] The majority of ghettos were liquidated in mass executions nearby, especially if they were not near a train station. Larger ghettos were more commonly liquidated during multiple deportations to extermination camps.[240][238] During this campaign, 1.5 million Polish Jews were murdered in the largest killing operation of the Holocaust.[241]
In order to reduce resistance, the ghetto would be raided without warning, usually in the early morning, and the extent of the operation would be concealed as long as possible.[242] Trawniki men would cordon off the ghetto while the Order Police and Security Police carried out the action.[243] In addition to local non-Jewish collaborators, the Jewish councils and Jewish ghetto police were often ordered to assist with liquidation actions, although these Jews were in most cases murdered later.[244] Chaotic, capriciously executed selections determined who would be loaded onto the trains. Many Jews were shot during the action, often leaving ghettos strewn with corpses. Jewish forced laborers had to clean it up and collect any valuables from the victims.[242]
The Warsaw Ghetto was cleared between 22 July and 12 September. Of the original population of 350,000 Jews, 250,000 were killed at Treblinka, 11,000 were deported to labor camps, 10,000 were shot in the ghetto, 35,000 were allowed to remain in the ghetto after a final selection, and around 20,000 or 25,000 managed to hide in the ghetto. Misdirection efforts convinced many Jews that they could avoid deportation until it was too late.[245] During a six-week period beginning in August, 300,000 Jews from the Radom District were sent to Treblinka.[246][247]
At the same time as the mass killing of Jews in the General Governorate, Jews who were in ghettos to the west and east were targeted. Tens of thousands of Jews were deported from ghettos in the Warthegau and East Upper Silesia to Chełmno and Auschwitz.[248] 300,000 Jews—largely skilled laborers—were shot in Volhynia, Podolia, and southwestern Belarus.[249][250] Deportations and mass executions in the Bialystok District and Galicia killed many Jews.[251] Although there was practically no resistance in the General Governorate in 1942, some Soviet Jews improvised weapons, attacked those attempting to liquidate the ghetto, and set it on fire.[252] These ghetto uprisings were only undertaken when the inhabitants began to believe that their death was certain.[253] In 1943, larger uprisings in Warsaw, Białystok, and Glubokoje necessitated the use of heavy weapons.[254] The uprising in Warsaw prompted the Nazi leadership to liquidate additional ghettos and labor camps in German-occupied Poland with their inhabitants massacred, such as the Wola Massacre, or deported to extermination camps for fear of additional Jewish resistance developing.[255] Nevertheless, in early 1944, more than 70,000 Jews were performing forced labor in the General Governorate.[256]
Deportations from elsewhere
Unlike the killing areas in the east, the deportation from elsewhere in Europe was centrally organized from Berlin, although it depended on the outcome of negotiations with allied governments and popular responses to deportation.[201] Beginning in late 1941, local administrators responded to the deportation of Jews to their area by massacring local Jews in order to free up space in ghettos for the deportees.[257] If the deported Jews did not die of harsh conditions, they were killed later in extermination camps.[258] Jews deported to Auschwitz were initially entered into the camp; the practice of conducting selections and murdering many prisoners upon arrival began in July 1942.[259] In May and June, German and Slovak Jews deported to Lublin began to be sent directly to extermination camps.[259]
In Western Europe, almost all Jewish deaths occurred after deportation.[260] The occupiers often relied on local policemen to arrest Jews, limiting the number who were deported.[261] In 1942, nearly 100,000 Jews were deported from Belgium, France, and the Netherlands.[262] Only 25 percent of the Jews in France were killed;[263] most of them were either non-citizens or recent immigrants. Si Kaddour Benghabrit and Abdelkader Mesli saved hundreds of Jews by hiding them in the basements of the Grand Mosque of Paris and other resistance efforts in France.[264][265] The death rate in the Netherlands was higher than neighboring countries, which scholars have attributed to difficulty in hiding or increased collaboration of the Dutch police.[266]
The German government sought the deportation of Jews from allied countries.[259][267] The first to hand over its Jewish population was Slovakia, which arrested and deported about 58,000 Jews to Poland from March to October 1942.[268][269][270] The Independent State of Croatia had already shot or killed in concentration camps the majority of its Jewish population (along with a larger number of Serbs),[271][272] and later deported several thousand Jews in 1942 and 1943.[273] Bulgaria deported 11,000 Jews from Bulgarian-occupied Greece and Yugoslavia, who were murdered at Treblinka, but declined to allow the deportation of Jews from its prewar territory.[274] Romania and Hungary did not send any Jews, which were the largest surviving populations after 1942.[275] Prior to the German occupation of Italy in September 1943, there were no serious attempt to deport Italian Jews, and Italy refused to allow the deportation of Jews in many Italian-occupied areas.[276][277] Nazi Germany did not attempt the destruction of the Finnish Jews[278] and the North African Jews living under French or Italian rule.[279]
Perpetrators and beneficiaries
An estimated 200,000 to 250,000 Germans were directly involved in killing Jews, and if one includes all those involved in the organization of extermination, the number rises to 500,000.[280] Genocide required the active and tacit consent of millions of Germans and non-Germans.[281][282] The motivation of Holocaust perpetrators varied and has led to historiographical debate.[281][283] Studies of the SS officials who organized the Holocaust have found that most had strong ideological commitment to Nazism.[284][285] In addition to ideological factors, many perpetrators were motivated by the prospect of material gain and social advancement.[286][287][288] German SS, police, and regular army units rarely had trouble finding enough men to shoot Jewish civilians, even though punishment for refusal was absent or light.[289][290]
Non-German perpetrators and collaborators included Dutch, French, and Polish policemen, Romanian soldiers, foreign SS and police auxiliaries, Ukrainian Insurgent Army partisans, and some civilians.[281][291][292] Some were coerced into committing violence against Jews, but others killed for entertainment, material rewards, the possibility of better treatment from the occupiers, or ideological motivations such as nationalism and anti-communism.[293][294][295] According to historian Christian Gerlach, non-Germans "not under German command" caused 5 to 6 percent of the Jewish deaths, and their involvement was crucial in other ways.[296]
Millions of Germans and others benefited from the genocide.[281] Corruption was rampant in the SS despite the proceeds of the Holocaust being designated as state property.[297] Different German state agencies vied to receive property stolen from Jews murdered at the death camps.[298] Many workers were able to obtain better jobs vacated by murdered Jews.[299] Businessmen benefitted from eliminating their Jewish competitors or taking over Jewish-owned businesses.[300] Others took over housing and possessions that had belonged to Jews.[301] Some Poles living near the extermination camps later dug up human remains in search of valuables.[301][302] The property of deported Jews was also appropriated by Germany's allies and collaborating governments. Even puppet states such as Vichy France and Norway were able to successfully lay claim to Jewish property.[303] In the decades after the war, Swiss banks became notorious for harboring gold deposited by Nazis who had stolen it during the Holocaust, as well as profiting from unclaimed deposits made by Holocaust victims.[304]
Forced labor
Beginning in 1938—especially in Germany and its annexed territories—many Jews were drafted into forced-labor camps and segregated work details. These camps were often of a temporary nature and typically overseen by civilian authorities. Initially, mortality did not increase dramatically.[305][306] After mid-1941, conditions for Jewish forced laborers drastically worsened and death rates increased; even private companies deliberately subjected workers to murderous conditions.[307] Beginning in 1941 and increasingly as time went on, Jews capable of employment were separated from others—who were usually killed.[308][309] They were typically employed in non-skilled jobs and could be replaced easily if non-Jewish workers were available, but those in skilled positions had a higher chance of survival.[310][311] Although conditions varied widely between camps, Jewish forced laborers were typically treated worse than non-Jewish prisoners and suffered much higher mortality rates.[312]
In mid-1943, Himmler sought to bring surviving Jewish forced laborers under the control of the SS in the concentration camp system.[313][314][d] Some of the forced-labor camps for Jews and some ghettos, such as Kovno, were designated concentration camps, while others were dissolved and surviving prisoners sent to a concentration camp.[319] Despite many deaths, as many as 200,000 Jews survived the war inside the concentration camps.[320] Although most Holocaust victims were never imprisoned in a concentration camp, the image of these camps is a popular symbol of the Holocaust.[321]
Including the Soviet prisoners of war, 13 million people were brought to Germany for forced labor.[322] The largest nationalities were Soviet and Polish[323] and they were the worst-treated groups except for Roma and Jews.[324] Soviet and Polish forced laborers endured inadequate food and medical treatment, long hours, and abuse by employers. Hundreds of thousands died.[325] Many others were forced to work for the occupiers without leaving their country of residence.[326] Some of Germany's allies, including Slovakia and Hungary, agreed to deport Jews to protect non-Jews from German demands for forced labor.[327] East European women were also kidnapped, via lapanka, to serve as sex slaves of German soldiers in military and camp brothels[328][329][330] despite the prohibition of relationships, including fraternization, between German and foreign workers,[331][332] which imposed the penalty of imprisonment[332] and death.[333][334]
Escape and hiding
Gerlach estimates that 200,000 Jews survived in hiding across Europe.[335] Knowledge of German intentions was essential to take action, but many struggled to believe the news.[336] Many attempted to jump from trains or flee ghettos and camps, but successfully escaping and living in hiding was extremely difficult and often unsuccessful.[337][338][339]
The support, or at least absence of active opposition, of the local population was essential but often lacking in Eastern Europe.[340] Those in hiding depended on the assistance of non-Jews.[341] Having money,[342] social connections with non-Jews, a non-Jewish appearance, perfect command of the local language, determination, and luck played a major role in determining survival.[343] Jews in hiding were hunted down with the assistance of local collaborators and rewards offered for their denunciation.[344][291][345] The death penalty was sometimes enforced on people hiding them, especially in eastern Europe.[346][347][348] Rescuers' motivations varied on a spectrum from altruism to expecting sex or material gain; it was not uncommon for helpers to betray or murder Jews if their money ran out.[349][347][350] Gerlach argues that hundreds of thousands of Jews may have died because of rumors or denunciations, and many others never attempted to escape because of a belief it was hopeless.[351]
Jews participated in resistance movements in most European countries, and often were overrepresented.[352] Jews were not always welcome, particularly in nationalist resistance groups—some of which killed Jews.[353][354] Particularly in Belarus, with its favorable geography of dense forests, many Jews joined the Soviet partisans—an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 across the Soviet Union.[355] An additional 10,000 to 13,000 Jewish non-combatants lived in family camps in Eastern European forests, of which the most well known was the Bielski partisans.[356][357]
International reactions
The Nazi leaders knew that their actions would bring international condemnation.[358] On 26 June 1942, BBC services in all languages publicized a report by the Jewish Social-Democratic Bund and other resistance groups and transmitted by the Polish government-in-exile, documenting the killing of 700,000 Jews in Poland. In December 1942, the Allies, then known as the United Nations, adopted a joint declaration condemning the systematic murder of Jews.[359] Most neutral countries in Europe maintained a pro-German foreign policy during the war. Nevertheless, some Jews were able to escape to neutral countries, whose policies ranged from rescue to non-action.[360]
During the war the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) raised $70 million and in the years after the war it raised $300 million. This money was spent aiding emigrants and providing direct relief in the form of parcels and other assistance to Jews living under German occupation, and after the war to Holocaust survivors. The United States banned sending relief into German-occupied Europe after entering the war, but the JDC continued to do so. From 1939 to 1944, 81,000 European Jews emigrated with the JDC's assistance.[361]
Throughout the war, no detailed photo intelligence study was carried out on any of the major concentration or extermination camps.[362] Appeals from Jewish representatives to the American and British governments to bomb rail lines leading to the camps or crematoriums was rejected, with little to no input from the War Departments of the United States or United Kingdom.[363] However, debate exists on whether a military response would have impacted on the Holocaust.[364]
Second half of the war
Continuing killings
After German military defeats in 1943, it became increasingly evident that Germany would lose the war.[366][367] In early 1943, 45,000 Jews were deported from German-occupied northern Greece, primarily Salonica, to Auschwitz, where nearly all were killed.[368] After Italy switched sides in late 1943, Germany deported several thousand Jews from Italy and the former Italian occupation zones of France, Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece, with limited success.[369][370] Attempts to continue deportations in Western Europe after 1942 often failed because of Jews going into hiding and the increasing recalcitrance of local authorities.[371] Most Danish Jews escaped to Sweden with the help of the Danish resistance in the face of a half-hearted German deportation effort in late 1943.[372] Additional killings in 1943 and 1944 eliminated all remaining ghettos and most surviving Jews in Eastern Europe.[189] Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were shut down and destroyed.[373][374]
The largest murder action after 1942 was that against the Hungarian Jews.[375] After the German invasion of Hungary in 1944, the Hungarian government cooperated closely in the deportation of 437,000 Jews in eight weeks, mostly to Auschwitz.[376][365][377] The expropriation of Jewish property was useful to achieve Hungarian economic goals and sending the Jews as forced laborers avoided the need to send non-Jewish Hungarians.[378] Those who survived the selection were forced to provide construction and manufacturing labor as part of a last-ditch effort to increase the production of fighter aircraft.[309][379] Although the Nazis' goal of eliminating any Jewish population from Germany had largely been achieved in 1943, it was reversed in 1944 as a result of the importation of these Jews for labor.[380]
Death marches and liberation
Following Allied advances, the SS deported concentration camp prisoners to camps in Germany and Austria, starting in mid-1944 from the Baltics.[381] Weak and sick prisoners were often killed in the camp and others were forced to travel by rail or on foot, usually with no or inadequate food.[382][383] Those who could not keep up were shot.[384] The evacuations were ordered partly to retain the prisoners as forced labor and partly to avoid allowing any prisoners to fall into enemy hands.[385][383] In October and November 1944, 90,000 Jews were deported from Budapest to the Austrian border.[386][387] The transfer of prisoners from Auschwitz began in mid-1944, the gas chambers were shut down and destroyed after October, and in January most of the remaining 67,000 Auschwitz prisoners were sent on a death march westwards.[384][388]
In January 1945, more than 700,000 people were imprisoned in the concentration camp system, of whom as many as a third died before the end of the war.[335] At this time, most concentration camp prisoners were Soviet and Polish civilians, either arrested for real or supposed resistance or for attempting to escape forced labor.[335] The death marches led to the breakdown of supplies for the camps that continued to exist, causing additional deaths.[382] Although there was no systematic killing of Jews during the death marches,[389] around 70,000 to 100,000 Jews died in the last months of the war.[390] Many of the death march survivors ended up in other concentration camps that were liberated in 1945 during the Western Allied invasion of Germany. The liberators found piles of corpses that they had to bulldoze into mass graves.[391][392][393] Some survivors were freed there[393] and others had been liberated by the Red Army during its march westwards.[394]
Death toll
Around six million Jews were killed.[395][396][397] Of the six million victims, most of those killed were from Eastern Europe, and with half from Poland alone.[398][399] Around 1.3 million Jews who had once lived under Nazi rule or in one of Germany's allies survived the war.[400] One-third of the Jewish population worldwide, and two-thirds of European Jews, had been wiped out.[401] Death rates varied widely due to a variety of factors and approached 100 percent in some areas.[402] Some reasons why survival chances varied was the availability of emigration[403] and protection from Germany's allies—which saved around 600,000 Jews.[404] Jewish children and the elderly faced even lower survival rates than adults.[405] It is considered to be the single largest genocide in human history.[406][407]
The deadliest phase of the Holocaust was Operation Reinhard, which was marked by the introduction of extermination camps. Roughly two million Jews were killed from March 1942 to November 1943. Around 1.47 million Jews were murdered in just 100 days from late July to early November 1942, a rate approximately 83% higher than the commonly suggested figure for the Rwandan genocide.[408] Between July to October 1942, two million Jews were murdered, including Operation Reinhard and other killings, with over three million Jews killed in 1942 alone, as stated by historian Christian Gerlach.[409] On the other hand, historian Alex J. Kay states that over two million Jews were murdered from late July to mid-November, stating that "these three-and-a-half months were the most intense, the deadliest of the entire Holocaust".[410] It was the fastest rate of genocidal killing in history.[411]
On 3 November 1943, around 18,400 Jews were murdered at Majdanek over the course of nine hours, in what was the largest number ever killed in a death camp on a single day.[412] It was part of Operation Harvest Festival, the murder of some 43,000 Jews, the single largest massacre of Jews by German forces, occurring from 3 to 4 November 1943.[413]
Separate Nazi persecutions killed a similar or larger number of non-Jewish civilians and POWs; estimated by Gerlach at 6 to 8 million, at more than 10 million by Gilbert[414] and at over 11 million by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.[415] In some countries, such as Hungary, Jews were a majority of civilian deaths; in Poland, they were either a majority[416] or about half.[399] In other countries such as the Soviet Union, France, Greece, and Yugoslavia, non-Jewish civilian losses outnumbered Jewish deaths.[416]
Aftermath and legacy
Return home and emigration
After liberation, many Jews attempted to return home. Limited success in finding relatives, the refusal of many non-Jews to return property,[417] and violent attacks such as the Kielce pogrom convinced many survivors to leave eastern Europe.[418][393] Antisemitism was reported to increase in several countries after the war, in part due to conflicts over property restitution.[419] When the war ended, there were less than 28,000 German Jews and 60,000 non-German Jews in Germany. By 1947, the number of Jews in Germany had increased to 250,000 owing to emigration from eastern Europe allowed by the communist authorities; Jews made up around 25 percent of the population of displaced persons camps.[420] Although many survivors were in poor health, they attempted to organize self-government in these camps, including education and rehabilitation efforts.[421] Due to the reluctance of other countries to allow their immigration, many survivors remained in Germany until the establishment of Israel in 1948.[420] Others moved to the United States around 1950 due to loosened immigration restrictions.[422]
Criminal trials
Most Holocaust perpetrators were never put on trial for their crimes.[394] During and after World War II, many European countries launched widespread purges of real and perceived collaborators that affected possibly as much as 2–3 percent of the population of Europe, although most of the resulting trials did not emphasize crimes against Jews.[423] Nazi atrocities led to the United Nations' Genocide Convention in 1948, but it was not used in Holocaust trials due to the non-retroactivity of criminal laws.[424]
In 1945 and 1946, the International Military Tribunal tried 23 Nazi leaders primarily for waging wars of aggression, which the prosecution argued was the root of Nazi criminality;[425] nevertheless, the systematic murder of Jews came to take center stage.[426] This trial and others held by the Allies in occupied Germany—the United States Army alone charged 1,676 defendants in 462 war crimes trials[427]—were widely perceived as an unjust form of political revenge by the German public.[428] West Germany later investigated 100,000 people and tried more than 6,000 defendants, mainly low-level perpetrators.[429][430] The high-level organizer Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped and tried in Israel in 1961. Instead of convicting Eichmann on the basis of documentary evidence, Israeli prosecutors asked many Holocaust survivors to testify, a strategy that increased publicity but has proven controversial.[431][432]
Reparations
Historians estimate that property losses to Jews of Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Poland, and Hungary amounted to around 10 billion in 1944 dollars,[433] or $170 billion in 2023.[72] This estimate does not include the value of labor extracted.[434] Overall, the amount of Jewish property looted by the Nazis was about 10 percent of the total stolen from occupied countries.[434] Efforts by survivors to receive reparations for their losses began immediately after World War II. There was an additional wave of restitution efforts in the 1990s connected to the fall of Communism in eastern Europe.[435]
Between 1945 and 2018, Germany paid $86.8 billion in restitution and compensation to Holocaust survivors and heirs. In 1952, West Germany negotiated an agreement to pay DM 3 billion (around $714 million) to Israel and DM 450 million (around $107 million) to the Claims Conference.[436] Germany paid pensions and other reparations for harm done to some Holocaust survivors.[437] Other countries have paid restitution for assets stolen from Jews from these countries. Most Western European countries restored some property to Jews after the war, while communist countries nationalized many formerly Jewish assets, meaning that the overall amount restored to Jews has been lower in those countries.[438][439] Poland is the only member of the European Union that never passed any restitution legislation.[440] Many restitution programs fell short of restoration of prewar assets, and in particular, large amounts of immovable property was never returned to survivors or their heirs.[441][442]
Remembrance and historiography
In the decades after the war, Holocaust memory was largely confined to the survivors and their communities.[443] The popularity of Holocaust memory peaked in the 1990s after the fall of Communism, and became central to Western historical consciousness[444][445] as a symbol of the ultimate human evil.[446] Genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses asserted that "the Holocaust has gradually supplanted genocide as modernity's icon of evil",[447] while political scientist Scott Straus declared that "the Holocaust, perhaps more than any other event in the past century, represents the pinnacle of evil".[448] The Holocaust has been described as "perhaps the most savage and significant single crime in recorded history" and that of the most barbaric events in the twentieth century "the Holocaust probably ranks as the very worst".[449] Renowned German historian Wolfgang Benz described it as the "singularly most monstrous crime committed in the history of mankind".[450] Holocaust education, in which its advocates argue promotes citizenship while reducing prejudice generally, became widespread at the same time.[451][452] International Holocaust Remembrance Day is commemorated each year on 27 January, while some other countries have set a different memorial day.[453] It has been commemorated in memorials, museums, and speeches, as well as works of culture such as novels, poems, films, and plays.[454] Denial of the Holocaust is a criminal offense in some countries;[455] while denials of the Holocaust have been promoted by various Middle Eastern governments, figures and media.
Although many are convinced that there are lessons or some kind of redemptive meaning to be drawn from the Holocaust, whether this is the case and what these lessons are is disputed.[456][457][451] Communist states marginalized the topic of antisemitic persecution while eliding their nationals' collaboration with Nazism, a tendency that continued into the post-communist era.[458][459] In West Germany, a self-critical memory of the Holocaust developed in the 1970s and 1980s, and spread to some other western European countries.[460] The national memories of the Holocaust were extended to the European Union as a whole, in which Holocaust memory has provided both shared history and an emotional rationale for committing to human rights. Participation in this memory is required of countries seeking entry.[461][462] In contrast to Europe, in the United States the memory of the Holocaust tends to be more abstract and universalized.[463] Whether Holocaust memory actually promotes human rights is disputed.[451][464] In Israel, the memory of the Holocaust has been used at times to justify the use of force and violation of international human rights norms, in particular as part of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.[461]
The Holocaust is the most well-known genocide in history, and is considered to be the single most infamous case of genocide in European history as well.[465] It is the single most documented and studied genocide in history.[466][467] It is also seen as the archetype of genocide and the benchmark in genocide studies.[468][469]
The scholarly literature on the Holocaust is massive, encompassing thousands of books.[470] The tendency to see the Holocaust as a unique or incomprehensible event continues to be popular among the broader public after being largely rejected by historians.[471][472][473] Scholar Omer Bartov points out how the Holocaust was unique in that it was "the industrial killing of millions of human beings in factories of death, ordered by a modern state, organized by a conscientious bureaucracy, and supported by a law-abiding, patriotic "civilized" society."[474] Another debate concerns whether the Holocaust emerged from Western civilization or was an aberration of it.[475]
The Jewish population still remains below pre-Holocaust levels. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics of Israel, the world Jewish population reached 15.2 million by the end of 2020 – approximately 1.4 million less than on the eve of the Holocaust in 1939, when the number was 16.6 million.[476]
Notes
- ^ Bartov 2023a, pp. 18–19, "Much of this debate curiously boils down to a very specific historical question, namely, did the Nazis target the Jews for genocide in a manner that was essentially different from their treatment of any other group under their rule? [...] There can be little doubt that the Jews played a singular role in the Nazi imaginaire and that German Jewish policies distinguished them within the Nazi universe of murder and fantasy; but other groups clearly have been similarly targeted in other genocides [...] 'the extent of the 'final solution' was ... shaped by an antisemitism that was colored by a different element over and above the racism and ethno-nationalism that explains the murder of other groups by Nazi Germany—that element being the view of 'the Jews' as an implacable, collective world enemy.' To be sure, this makes the Holocaust unique only within the context of the Nazi empire ..."; Smith 2023, p. 36, "The Holocaust is particular to Jews and yet has had increasing relevance for those who do not identify as Jewish. ... All Jews everywhere were to be murdered because of their racial heritage was 'put into state policy' on January 20, 1942 at the Wannsee conference (Bazyler 2017, 29). Witness to the genocide of the Jews is a uniquely Jewish experience, because only Jews were targeted by that policy, even if other groups were targeted for genocide under other policies. The Nazi regime committed genocide against the Roma and Sinti, governed by separate policies. They also committed war crimes against Soviet Prisoners of War under other policies. So too the mass murder of disabled and the mentally ill had their own policies. The Nazis committed multiple genocides and crimes against humanity, at the same time, sometimes in the same place, governed by different laws, policies, and practices. It is not correct to say that there were many victim types during 'the Holocaust,' if by 'the Holocaust' we mean the genocide of the Jews."; Stone 2023, Introduction: What is the Holocaust?, "This is why the focus here is on the Jews. Roma, the disabled, Soviet POWs, homosexuals and other groups were victims of the Nazis, and it is entirely legitimate to study their fate alongside one another. But using the term 'Holocaust' to encompass all of these groups with the aim of being inclusive and not prioritizing one group's suffering, actually does a disservice to groups other than Jews. For the Nazis persecuted these groups for different reasons, reasons we fail to appreciate if we collapse them all together."; Engel 2021, pp. 3 ("This book is about an encounter between two sets of human beings: on one hand, the people who acted on behalf of the German state, its agencies, or its almost 66 million citizens between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945; on the other, the more than 9 million Jews ...") and 5 ("Those discoveries about the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews made that encounter stand out in the minds of many from other instances of Nazi persecution and encouraged observers to assign it its own special name."); Jackson 2021, pp. 199–200, "The Nazis killed some people almost exclusively due to their supposed genetic inferiority (the mentally and physically handicapped, Slavs, Roma); they killed others almost exclusively due to their perceived cultural decadence (communists, democrats, modernist authors and artists); but only the Jews were indicted on both grounds simultaneously and with equal vigor. ... This is not to say that Roma, communists, and others were not hated and murdered by the Nazis, but it is to note that the Jews were unique in being despised and assaulted in every dimension of their identity, corporeal and psychic."; Sahlstrom 2021, p. 291, "the established understanding of the Holocaust today as the genocide of six million Jews"; Bartrop 2019, p. 50, "Given this, it must always be remembered that the Holocaust was a premeditated action by the Nazis to permanently eradicate a Jewish presence in Europe. Others—the disabled, Roma, Poles and other Slavs, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, dissenting clergy, communists, socialists, "asocials," and political opponents of all sorts—were also persecuted and in many cases murdered in huge numbers; however, it was the campaign against the Jews that was the ideological "ground zero" for Nazi racial ideology. Others besides Jews were murdered, often on a genocidal scale, and should be remembered and acknowledged: but it was only the Jews who were all to be killed as part of a calculated policy of genocide."; Beorn 2018, p. 4, "I will use the term 'Holocaust' to refer mainly to the Nazi attempt to murder the Jews of Europe; however, I will also use the more inclusive term 'Nazi genocidal project' to capture the larger murderous vision of which the Jews were such a large part. This includes Sinti/Roma (gypsies), the handicapped, political 'enemies,' Soviet prisoners of war, and—particularly in the East—entire ethnic groups such as the Slavs. One cannot understand the Holocaust in Eastern Europe without placing it in the context of this larger Nazi genocidal project that foresaw murder and demographic engineering on a colossal scale."; Cesarani 2016, p. xxxix, "This book deals with the fate of the Jews, not of 'other victims' of Nazi political repression and racial-biological policies. Several other groups endured social exclusion, incarceration in concentration camps, and mass murder. However, the rationale for the persecution of these groups differed radically from the intentions that underlay anti-Jewish policy. Even though homosexual men and women, Germans of African descent, and the severely mentally and physically disabled were all disparaged in Nazi racial thinking, and depicted as a threat to the strength and purity of the Volk, only the Jews were characterized as an implacable, powerful, global enemy that had to be fought at every turn and finally eliminated."; Hayes 2015, p. xiii, "This book also reflects another of its editor's convictions: the Holocaust was National Socialist Germany's assault on the Jews of Europe. Nazism attacked many groups, but none for the same reason that it attacked the Jews, none with the same urgency, and none to the same extent."; Hayes & Roth 2010, p. 2, "Other groups—for example, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, and Slavs—were swept up in the maelstrom of the Holocaust, but not for the same reasons as Jews and not with the same consequences ... In none of these cases, however, was the target group considered dangerous or coherent enough to warrant complete or immediate extirpation. This circumstance constitutes a significant difference from policies pursued toward the Jews, a difference that helps to clarify and define the Holocaust itself."; Stone 2010, pp. 1–2, "For the purpose of this book, the Holocaust is understood as the genocide of the Jews ... 'Holocaust', then, refers to the genocide of the Jews, which by no means excludes an understanding that other groups—notably Romanies and Slavs—were victims of genocide."; Bloxham 2009, p. 1, "Between 5,100,000 and 6,200,000 Jews were murdered during the Second World War, an episode the Nazis called the 'final solution of the Jewish question'. The world today knows it as the Holocaust."; Niewyk & Nicosia 2000, pp. 45 ("The Holocaust is commonly defined as the mass murder of more than 5,000,000 Jews by the Germans during World War II. Not everyone finds this a fully satisfactory definition.") and 51 ("the traditional view that it was the genocide of the Jews alone")
- ^ King 2023, pp. 26–27, "Rather than one big thing, the Holocaust might now be described as an array of event categories. In Christopher Browning's terms, the Holocaust involved three separate "clusters of genocidal projects": euthanasia and "racial purification" directed against the disabled and Sinti and Roma (at the time referred to collectively as "Gypsies") within the Third Reich; the eradication of Slavic populations living in countries east of Germany; and the Final Solution proper—that is, the attempted mass murder of every Jew residing anywhere within Germany's sphere of influence (Browning 2010, 407). (The list of persecuted categories—people targeted by the Nazis in ways short of genocide—would of course be longer.)"; Engel 2021, p. 6, "Echoing this view, some have contended that the expression 'the Holocaust' ought to refer not only to the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews but also to 'the horrors that Poles, other Slavs, and Gypsies endured at the hands of the Nazis' (Lukas, 1986: 220). Others have extended the term to encompass the Third Reich's treatment of homosexuals, the mentally ill or infrm, and Jehovah's Witnesses, speaking of 11 or 12 million victims of the Holocaust, half of whom were Jews. Still others have employed the word 'holocaust' also when referring to cases of mass murder not perpetrated by the Third Reich."; Kay 2021, pp. 1–2, "For perhaps the first time, all major victim groups where the death tolls reached at least into the tens of thousands will be considered together: Jewish and non-Jewish ... it makes a great deal of sense to consider the different strands of Nazi mass killing together rather than in isolation from one another. This of course means going against the grain of most scholarship on the subject by examining the genocide of the European Jews alongside other Nazi mass-murder campaigns."; Gerlach 2016, pp. 14–15, "There are a number of words I will try to avoid because of the serious misconceptions they might lead to. The terms 'Holocaust' and 'Shoah' are not useful since neither has any analytical value. 'Holocaust' (derived from the Greek holókauton, or burned sacrifice) has a religious connotation unbefitting of the event it is supposed to refer to, and users of this term may mean by it either the persecution and murder of Jews alone, or Nazi German violence against any group more generally ... Importantly, 'Holocaust' and 'Shoah' have also been criticized as 'teleological and anachronistic' terms that convey a retrospective view that makes complex processes appear 'as a single event.'"; Niewyk & Nicosia 2000, p. 51, "The authors of this volume have adopted the third approach to a working definition: The Holocaust—that is, Nazi genocide—was the systematic, state-sponsored murder of entire groups determined by heredity. This applied to Jews, Gypsies, and the handicapped. This section also makes it clear that other definitions are defended by scholars who deserve a respectful hearing."
- ^ a b Equivalent to $400 million at the time,[71] or $7 billion in 2023.[72]
- ^ The Nazi concentration camp system administered by the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office (SS-WVHA)[315] was administratively separate from other forced-labor camps[316][317] and from the single-purpose extermination camps.[318]
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As well as the six million Jews who were murdered, more than ten million other non-combatants were killed by the Nazis.
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{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ^ Boender, Barbara; ten Have, Wichert, eds. (2012). The Holocaust and Other Genocides: An Introduction (1st ed.). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. pp. 7–10. ISBN 978-90-8964-381-0.
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- ^ Stone 2010, p. 6.
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Journal articles
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