The full extent of Mengele's work is unknown because records he sent to Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer are assumed to have been destroyed. the evacuation of the Jews to the East, provided that the Fuehrer gives the appropriate approval in advance. [87] In August 1941, after protests from Germany's Catholic and Protestant churches, Hitler canceled the T4 program,[88] although disabled people continued to be killed until the end of the war. WebDuring The Holocaust, millionsof people died or were killed in Nazi Germany. [134] In the ghettos and forced-labor camps, at least half a million died of starvation, disease, and poor living conditions. [484] Yom HaShoah became Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day in 1951. Still, in the meantime, they would be concentrated in major cities ghettos to achieve, according to an order from Reinhard Heydrich dated 21 September 1939, "a better possibility of control and later deportation". Prisoners condemned to death by the Gestapo are murdered by the first two methods. [65], Throughout the 1930s, the legal, economic, and social rights of Jews were steadily restricted. Later, all Poles will disappear from this world. [70] Jewish students were restricted by quotas from attending schools and universities. [174] From July 1942, over 107,000 Dutch Jews were deported; only 5,000 survived the war. [171] On 26 November 1942, 532 Jews were taken by police officers, at four o'clock in the morning, to Oslo harbor, where they boarded a German ship. [233] In mid-1942 work camps began requiring newly arrived prisoners to be placed in quarantine for four weeks. [401], The first major camp encountered by Allied troops, Majdanek, was discovered by the advancing Soviets, along with its gas chambers, on 25 July 1944. [36] According to Jozo Tomasevich, the Jewish community in Zagreb was the only one to survive out of 115 Jewish religious communities in Yugoslavia in 19391940. [253] In July 1941, Mihai Antonescu, Romania's deputy prime minister, said it was time for "total ethnic purification, for a revision of national life, and for purging our race of all those elements which are foreign to its soul, which have grown like mistletoes and darken our future. [320] Victims usually arrived at the extermination camps by freight train. [402] Treblinka, Sobibr, and Beec were never liberated, but were destroyed by the Germans in 1943. [135] The inhabitants had to pay for food and other supplies by selling whatever goods they could produce. On 910 November 1938, eight months after Germany annexed Austria, Jewish businesses and other buildings were ransacked or set on fire throughout Germany and Austria on what became known as Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass"). [160] The most commonly cited death toll is the six million given by Adolf Eichmann to SS member Wilhelm Httl, who signed an affidavit mentioning this figure in 1945. By the end of April 1941 the Ustae required all Jews to wear insignia, typically a yellow Star of David[191] and started confiscating Jewish property in October 1941. Red signified a political prisoner, Jehovah's Witnesses had purple triangles, "asocials" and criminals wore black and green, and gay men wore pink. According to Haaretz, the writer Yehuda Erez may have been the first to describe events in Germany as the shoah. [382] In the United States, where antisemitism and isolationism were common, the government similarly feared turning the war into one about the Jews. [179] The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that between 72,900 and 74,000 Jews were murdered during the Holocaust in France. A stab-in-the-back myth developed, insinuating that disloyal politicians, chiefly Jews and communists, had orchestrated Germany's surrender. [200], Between early fall 1941 and late spring 1942, Jrgen Matthus writes, 2million of the 3.5million Soviet POWs captured by the Wehrmacht had been executed or had died of neglect and abuse. [285], The 15 men present at Wannsee included Heydrich, SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, head of Reich Security Head Office Referat IV B4 ("Jewish affairs"); SS Major General Heinrich Mller, head of RSHA Department IV (the Gestapo); and other SS and party leaders. Insurance payments for damage to their property were confiscated by the government. According to Dan Stone, only nine survived the war. [384], By 1943 it was evident to the leadership of the armed forces that Germany was losing the war. "[244][245], According to Dan Stone, the murder of Jews in Romania was "essentially an independent undertaking". [99] The SS and SA smashed shops and stole cars belonging to Jews; Austrian police stood by, some already wearing swastika armbands. [228] Most wartime prisoners of the camps were not Germans but belonged to countries under German occupation. [333] Most of the victims at these three camps were buried in pits at first. [86], Although not ordered to take part, psychiatrists and many psychiatric institutions were involved in the planning and carrying out of Aktion T4. "[290] He continued: Under proper guidance, in the course of the Final Solution, the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. WebOf this total, nearly 1.1 million were Jews, 960,000 of which died in the camp. The British government's view was that the Hungarian people's antisemitism would make them distrust the Allies if Allied broadcasts focused on the Jews. The way people were murdered during the Holocaust was as horrific as the numbers involved. [252] Within the city of Odessa, Jews were segregated to ghettos where they were later deported en masse, with the majority dying from disease, hunger and murder. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. They must go. [237], Romania ranks first among Holocaust perpetrator countries other than Germany. [451] In Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, the Roma were subject to restrictions on movement and confinement to collection camps,[452] while in Eastern Europe they were sent to concentration camps, where large numbers were murdered. [49] The second half of the 19th century saw the emergence, in the German empire and Austria-Hungary, of the vlkisch movement, developed by such thinkers as Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Paul de Lagarde. WebSix million Jewish people died in the Holocaust - the Nazi campaign to eradicate Europe's Jewish population. He viewed Marxism as a Jewish doctrine, said he was fighting against "Jewish Marxism", and believed that Jews had created communism as part of a conspiracy to destroy Germany. [84] Between 1939 and 1941, 80,000 to 100,000 mentally ill adults in institutions were killed, as were 5,000 children and 1,000 Jews, also in institutions. The Holocaust Encyclopedia. [448], Robert Ritter, head of Germany's Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit, called Roma "a peculiar form of the human species who are incapable of development and came about by mutation". It deported 7,500 Jews in 1938 on its own initiative; introduced anti-Jewish measures in 1940; and by the autumn of 1942 had deported around 60,000 Jews to Poland. [196], In the Bulgarian annexed zones of Macedonia and Thrace, upon demand of the German authorities, the Bulgarians handed over the entire Jewish population, about 12,000 Jews to the military authorities, all were deported. The latter two groups were to be sent to concentration camps for "re-education", with the aim of eventual absorption into the Volksgemeinschaft. By the end of the Holocaust, six million European Jews were murdered. WebEven today, the Holocaust is remembered as one of the most tragic events of world history, wherein as many as 11 million people were killed in a systematic state-sponsored "Racial" enemies could never belong to the Volksgemeinschaft; they were to be removed from society. Another 2,396 were deported and 2,257 killed that autumn during an uprising, and 13,500 were deported between October 1944 and March 1945. [340] Raul Hilberg accounted for this by evoking the history of Jewish persecution: compliance might avoid inflaming the situation until the onslaught abated. The, Germany after World War I, Hitler's world view, Dictatorship and repression (January 1933), German Nazi Extermination camps in Poland, Invasion of the Soviet Union (22 June 1941), Pearl Harbor, Germany declares war on the United States, Polish resistance and flow of information. WebThe figure includes 7.4 million victims of Nazi genocide and reprisals, 2.2 million deaths of persons deported to Germany as forced labour, and 4.1 million famine and disease "[458], Around 100,000 gay men were arrested in Germany and 50,000 jailed between 1933 and 1945; 5,00015,000 are thought to have been sent to concentration camps. [79] There were 84,525 applications from doctors in the first year. [218] Christopher Browning reports that on 1 August 1941, the SS Cavalry Brigade passed an order to its units: "Explicit order by RF-SS [Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfhrer-SS]. [123], Between 2.7 and 3million Polish Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, out of a population of 3.33.5 million. The death rates decreased when the POWs were [194], The state broke away from Nazi antisemitic policy by promising honorary Aryan citizenship, and thus freedom from persecution, to Jews who were willing to contribute to the "Croat cause". Janusz Gumkowski and Kazimierz Leszczynski, sfn error: no target: CITEREFGordon1984 (, Piotrowski, Tadeusz. Although other European countriesBulgaria, Independent State of Croatia, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Slovakia, and Vichy Francepassed similar legislation,[91] Gerlach notes that "Nazi Germany adopted more nationwide anti-Jewish laws and regulations (about 1,500) than any other state. Germany, Italy and Bulgaria divided Greece into occupation zones but did not eliminate it as a country. [38] Bureaucrats identified who was a Jew, confiscated property, and scheduled trains to deport them. (See the experience of history.). Eichmann's trial revived interest in war criminals and the Holocaust in general. [466], There were 5,00025,000 Afro-Germans in Germany when the Nazis came to power. When the German Wehrmacht (armed forces) invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, triggering declarations of war from the UK and France, Germany gained control of about two million Jews in the territory it occupied. [434][435] Hitler's plan combined classic imperialism with Nazi racial ideology. [240][241] Romania was the second country in Europe after Germany to enact antisemitic legislation, and the only one besides Germany to do so before the 1938 Anschluss. [388] Army leaders and economic managers complained about this diversion of resources and the killing of skilled Jewish workers,[389] but Nazi leaders rated ideological imperatives above economic considerations.[390]. About six million were murdered. By the end of the war, they had killed around two million, including about 1.3million Jews and up to a quarter of a million Roma. Germany had over 500,000. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival. [141] A perception among ethnic Poles that the Jews had supported the Soviet invasion[142] contributed to existing antisemitism,[143] which Germany exploited, redistributing Jewish homes and goods, and converting synagogues, schools and hospitals in Jewish areas into facilities for non-Jews. The other approximately 200,000 people were predominantly made up of non-Jewish Poles, the In early 1943, new gas chambers and crematoria were built to accommodate the numbers. [105], On 7 November 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew, shot the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in the German Embassy in Paris, in retaliation for the expulsion of his parents and siblings from Germany. [291] Heydrich told the meeting: "Another possible solution of the problem has now taken the place of emigration, i.e. [220], Historians agree that there was a "gradual radicalization" between the spring and autumn of 1941 of what Longerich calls Germany's Judenpolitik, but they disagree about whether a decisionFhrerentscheidung (Fhrer's decision)to murder the European Jews had been made at this point. [80] Estimates for the number of involuntary sterilizations during the whole of the Third Reich range from 300,000 to 400,000. [177] Vichy France's government implemented anti-Jewish measures in Metropolitan France, in French Algeria and in the two French Protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco. [185], Yugoslavia, home to 80,000 Jews, was dismembered; regions in the north were annexed by Germany and Hungary, regions along the coast were made part of Italy, Kosovo and western Macedonia were given to Albania, while Bulgaria received eastern Macedonia. [461] The police closed gay bars and shut down gay publications. The Nearly three-in-ten Americans say they are not sure how many Jews died [475] In response, Germany set up the "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future" Foundation in 2000, which paid 4.45billion to former slave laborers (up to 7,670 each). Discussing plans for a "final solution to the Jewish question" ("Endlsung der Judenfrage"), and a "final solution to the Jewish question in Europe" ("Endlsung der europischen Judenfrage"),[290] the conference was held to coordinate efforts and policies ("Parallelisierung der Linienfhrung"), and to ensure that authority rested with Heydrich. Germany had a policy of forced confiscation of food that resulted in famine deaths of an estimated 6% of the population, or 4.1million. [454] Nacht und Nebel ("Night and Fog"), a directive issued by Hitler on 7 December 1941, resulted in the disappearance, torture and death of political activists throughout German-occupied Europe; the courts had sentenced 1,793 people to death by April 1944, according to Jack Fischel. [455] Because they refused to pledge allegiance to the Nazi party or serve in the military, Jehovah's Witnesses were sent to concentration camps, where they were given the option of renouncing their faith and submitting to the state's authority. [126] German plans for Poland included expelling non-Jewish Poles from large areas, settling Germans on the emptied lands,[127] sending the Polish leadership to camps, denying the lower classes an education, and confining Jews. Germany implemented the persecution in stages. [3] [34] Eberhard Jckel wrote in 1986 that it was the first time a state had thrown its power behind the idea that an entire people should be wiped out. Laqueur, Walter; Baumel, Judith Tydor (2001). [209] Each Einsatzgruppe numbered around 6001,000 men, with a few women in administrative roles. Some went by truck or wagons; others were marched the entire distance. It is imperative that the great German nation consider the elimination of all Polish people as its chief task. [64] The camps served as a deterrent by terrorizing Germans who did not support the regime. Enemies were divided into three groups: the "racial" or "blood" enemies, such as the Jews and Roma; political opponents of Nazism, such as Marxists, liberals, Christians, and the "reactionaries" viewed as wayward "national comrades"; and moral opponents, such as gay men, the work-shy, and habitual criminals. [85] Overall, the number of mentally and physically disabled people murdered was about 150,000. [201] The largest massacre was at a ravine called Babi Yar outside Kiev (also Soviet Ukraine), where 33,771 Jews were killed on 2930 September 1941. These Holocaust victimsincluded about six million Jewishpeople. [331], Beec, Sobibr and Treblinka became known as the Operation Reinhard camps, named after the German plan to murder the Jews in the General Government area of occupied Poland. Knowlton, James and Cates, Truett (translators, 1993). [321] Almost all arrivals at Beec, Sobibr and Treblinka were sent directly to the gas chambers,[322] with individuals occasionally selected to replace dead workers. [116] German Jewry was held collectively responsible for restitution of the damage; they also had to pay an "atonement tax" of over a billion Reichsmark. German: "Wannsee-Protokoll". [28][h], Other groups targeted after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933[31] include those whom the Nazis viewed as inherently inferior (some Slavic people, particularly Poles and Russians,[32] the Roma, and the disabled), and those targeted because of their beliefs or behavior (such as Jehovah's Witnesses, communists, and homosexuals). By 1945, most European Jewstwo out of every threehad been killed. [355] Three SS officers were killed. Almost all Jews in German-occupied Poland, the Baltic states and the USSR were murdered, with a 5 percent chance of survival on average. [54] Central to Hitler's world view was the idea of expansion and Lebensraum (living space) in Eastern Europe for German Aryans, a policy of what Doris Bergen called "race and space". They also included five million of people who were not Jewish, mainly Poles, Sinti and [117] Kristallnacht marked the end of any sort of public Jewish activity and culture, and Jews stepped up their efforts to leave the country. [236] Prisoners in Auschwitz were tattooed on arrival with an identification number. [61] One of the first, at Dachau, opened on 22 March 1933. [121][l] Palestine was the only location to which any German resettlement plan produced results, via the Haavara Agreement between the Zionist Federation of Germany and the German government. [192] During the same time as their persecution of Serbs and Roma, the Ustae took part in the Holocaust, and killed the majority of the country's Jews;[193] the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that 30,148 Jews were murdered. [438] On 12 September, Wilhelm Keitel added Poland's intelligentsia to the list. [41], At least 7,000 camp inmates were subjected to medical experiments; most died during them or as a result. The continuous presence of state institutions thereby prevented the Jewish communities' complete destruction. [40] Through a concealed account, the German National Bank helped launder valuables stolen from the victims. [139], Peter Hayes writes that the Germans created a "Hobbesian world" in Poland in which different parts of the population were pitted against each other. [310], Chemno, with gas vans only, had its roots in the Aktion T4 euthanasia program. [210] Traveling with nine German Order Police battalions and three units of the Waffen-SS,[211] the Einsatzgruppen and their local collaborators had murdered almost 500,000 people by the winter of 19411942. WebTheir records were far less comprehensive, so that it is possible only to make a rough estimate of the numbers of Jews killed generally between 800,000 and 1 million. How Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party turned anti-Semitism into genocide. [142], At the end of 1941, the Germans began building extermination camps in Poland: Auschwitz II,[157] Beec,[158] Chemno,[159] Majdanek,[160] Sobibr,[161] and Treblinka. [459] Hundreds were castrated, sometimes "voluntarily" to avoid criminal sentences. According to Joseph Goebbels' diary, Hitler decided that the police should be withdrawn: "For once the Jews should feel the rage of the people," Goebbels reported him as saying. [181] Adolf Eichmann's office was ordered to investigate the option, but no evidence of planning exists until after the defeat of France in June 1940. [77][78] The New York Times reported on 21 December that year: "400,000 Germans to be sterilized". [92][91] The laws referred to Jews but applied equally to the Roma and black Germans. After Belgium's surrender, the country was ruled by a German military governor, Alexander von Falkenhausen, who enacted anti-Jewish measures against its 90,000 Jews, many of them refugees from Germany or Eastern Europe. [118], Before World War II, Germany considered mass deportation from Europe of German, and later European, Jewry. [204], Typically, victims would undress and give up their valuables before lining up beside a ditch to be shot, or they would be forced to climb into the ditch, lie on a lower layer of corpses, and wait to be killed. Forced labor of camp prisoners became commonplace. [197], Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, a day Timothy Snyder called "one of the most significant days in the history of Europe the beginning of a calamity that defies description". German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners; other companies built the crematoria. [96] Albert Einstein, who was in the United States when Hitler came to power, never returned to Germany; his citizenship was revoked and he was expelled from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and Prussian Academy of Sciences. [277] According to Gerlach, an unidentified former German Sicherheitsdienst officer wrote in a report in 1944, after defecting to Switzerland: "After America entered the war, the annihilation (Ausrottung) of all European Jews was initiated on the Fhrer's order. By mid-1942, victims were being deported from ghettos across Europe in sealed freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, they were gassed, worked or beaten to death, or killed by disease, starvation, cold, medical experiments, or during death marches. [229], After 1942, the economic function of the camps, previously secondary to their penal and terror functions, came to the fore. [221][q] According to Browning, writing in 2004, most historians say there was no order, before the invasion of the Soviet Union, to kill all the Soviet Jews. [51] The Nazi Party (the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or National Socialist German Workers' Party) originated as an offshoot of the vlkisch movement, and it adopted that movement's antisemitism. [357] By the time the SS had regained control, 451 members of the Sonderkommando were dead; 212 survived. [98], On 12 March 1938, Germany annexed Austria. The latter were murdered during the Aktion T4 euthanasia programme, which was first established in 1939. 16 was found by American prosecutors in March 1947 in a German Foreign Office folder. [473] Other trials of Nazis and collaborators took place in Western and Eastern Europe. The German neuroscientist Julius Hallervorden received 697 brains from one hospital between 1940 and 1944: "I accepted these brains of course. [208], Einsatzgruppe A arrived in the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) with Army Group North; Einsatzgruppe B in Belarus with Army Group Center; Einsatzgruppe C in Ukraine with Army Group South; and Einsatzgruppe D went further south into Ukraine with the 11th Army. According to Timothy Snyder, "more Jews fought in the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 than in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943. [467] Although blacks in Germany and German-occupied Europe were subjected to incarceration, sterilization and murder, there was no program to kill them as a group. [235] Jews wore two yellow triangles, one over another to form a six-pointed star. WebThe Holocaust in Ukraine represents the first phase of the Holocaust in which an estimated 1.5 million Jews were shot to death at close range in ravines, open fields, and forests. [21], Holocaust historians commonly define the Holocaust as the genocide of the European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945. [271], On 7 December 1941, Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor, an American naval base in Honolulu, Hawaii, killing 2,403 Americans. [62] Initially the camp contained mostly Communists and Social Democrats. Some Ukrainians went to Poland to serve as guards in the camps. "[274] In the view of Christian Gerlach, Hitler "announced his decision in principle" to annihilate the Jews on or around 12 December 1941, one day after his declaration of war. Between 15 May and early July 1944, 437,000 Jews were deported, mostly to Auschwitz, where most of them were murdered by gas; there were four transports a day, each carrying 3,000 people. Ninety percent of Austria's 176,000 Jews lived in Vienna. Groups of Jews were forced by the crowd to watch their synagogues burn; in Bensheim they were made to dance around it and in Laupheim to kneel before it.
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