By 1945, most European Jewstwo out of every threehad been killed. 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. [328] Johann Kremer, an SS doctor who oversaw the gassings, testified that: "Shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through the opening and it was clear that they fought for their lives. From Germany they were sent by freight train to Auschwitz. [144] By the end of 1942, most of the Jews in the General Government area were dead. [115] Many were released within weeks; by early 1939, 2,000 remained in the camps. In February 1941, non-Jewish Dutch citizens staged a strike in protest that was quickly crushed. "[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. 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. [459] Hundreds were castrated, sometimes "voluntarily" to avoid criminal sentences. [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. Germany had a policy of forced confiscation of food that resulted in famine deaths of an estimated 6% of the population, or 4.1million. These Holocaust victimsincluded about six million Jewishpeople. [275] The following day, Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, noted in his diary: Regarding the Jewish question, the Fhrer is determined to clear the table. Those who lagged behind or fell were shot. [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. [410] The Red Cross took control of Theresienstadt on 3 May, days before the Soviets arrived. Many men and women were also involuntarily sterilized. [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. [187][188][189], In the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), the Nazi regime demanded that its rulers, the Ustae, adopt antisemitic racial policies, persecute Jews and set up several concentration camps. [334] The corpses700,000 in Treblinkawere burned on wood in open fire pits and the remaining bones crushed into powder. [19][g] The Nazis used the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (German: die Endlsung der Judenfrage). The movement embraced a pseudo-scientific racism that viewed Jews as a race whose members were locked in mortal combat with the Aryan race for world domination. [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. [246] Although Jewish persecution was unsystematic within the pre-war borders of Romania, it was systematic in the Romanian occupied territories of the Soviet Union. [21], Holocaust historians commonly define the Holocaust as the genocide of the European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945. [484] Yom HaShoah became Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day in 1951. [b] Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe;[c] around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. [113] The extent of the violence shocked the rest of the world. In just over four-and-a-half years, Nazi Germany systematically murdered at least 1.1 million people at Auschwitz. [16], The term was popularised in the United States by the NBC mini-series Holocaust (1978) about a fictional family of German Jews,[17] and in November that year the President's Commission on the Holocaust was established. [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". The continuous presence of state institutions thereby prevented the Jewish communities' complete destruction. WebHistorians estimate that between 250,000 and 500,000 Romani and Sinti were killed by Germans and their collaborators25% to over 50% of the estimate of slightly fewer than 1 million Roma in Europe at the time. "Racial" enemies could never belong to the Volksgemeinschaft; they were to be removed from society. Instead, it was a question of "a process of increasingly radical interpretations of orders". All Jews must be shot. Companies such as BMW, Deutsche Bank, Ford, Opel, Siemens, and Volkswagen faced lawsuits for their use of forced labor during the war. [5] After the passing of the Enabling Act on 24 March,[6] which gave Hitler dictatorial plenary powers, the government began isolating Jews from civil society; this included boycotting Jewish businesses in April 1933 and enacting the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935. Genocide of European Jews by Nazi Germany, "Holocaust" and "Shoah" redirect here. WebSix million Jewish people died in the Holocaust - the Nazi campaign to eradicate Europe's Jewish population. The majority, around 1 million people, were Jews. [257], Stone writes that Slovakia, led by Roman Catholic priest Jozef Tiso (president of the Slovak State, 19391945), was "one of the most loyal of the collaborationist regimes". [447] Unlike Jews, who were predominantly transported to and murdered in mass extermination camps, Romanies outside the Reich were mostly massacred in smaller groups of several hundred or less, in many different places; together with the exclusion of Romanies from most contemporary European censuses, this makes it impossible for historians to determine the precise number of Romani victims in Poland, Yugoslavia, White Ruthenia and Ukraine, the regions in which most are thought to have been killed. [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. [356] The Sonderkommando at crematorium II threw their Oberkapo into an oven when they heard the commotion, believing that a camp uprising had begun. An inmate until he escaped in April 1943, his mission was to set up a resistance movement (ZOW), prepare to take over the camp, and smuggle out information.[370]. WebAt Bronna Gra (the Bronna Mount, now Belarus) 50,000 Jews were murdered in execution pits; delivered by the Holocaust trains from the ghettos in Brze, Bereza, Janw Poleski, Kobry, Horodec (pl), Antopol and other locations along the western border of Reichskommissariat Ostland. "[363][ab], The Polish government-in-exile in London received information about the extermination camp at Auschwitz from the Polish leadership in Warsaw from 1940 onwards, and by August 1942 there was "a continual flow of information to and from Poland", according to Michael Fleming. [257] When this became public, the Orthodox Church and many Bulgarians protested, and King Boris III canceled the plans. [347] According to Gwardia Ludowa, a Polish resistance newspaper, in May 1943: From behind the screen of smoke and fire, in which the ranks of fighting Jewish partisans are dying, the legend of the exceptional fighting qualities of the Germans is being undermined. [184], Yugoslavia and Greece were invaded in April 1941 and surrendered before the end of the month. [134] In the ghettos and forced-labor camps, at least half a million died of starvation, disease, and poor living conditions. "[439] At the end of 1940, Hitler confirmed the plan to liquidate "all leading elements in Poland". [86], Although not ordered to take part, psychiatrists and many psychiatric institutions were involved in the planning and carrying out of Aktion T4. [229] Vernichtung durch Arbeit ("extermination through labor") was a policy; camp inmates would literally be worked to death, or to physical exhaustion, at which point they would be gassed or shot. [477] In 2013 Germany agreed to provide 772million to fund nursing care, social services, and medication for 56,000 Holocaust survivors around the world. Filimoshin cited sources from the Soviet era to support his figures and used the terms "genocide" and "premeditated extermination" when referring to deaths of 7.4million civilians caused by direct, intentional violence. Nearly three years earlier, on 30 January 1939, Hitler had told the Reichstag: "if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will be not the Bolshevising of the earth, and thus a victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe! [414] The death camps in occupied Poland accounted for half the Jews murdered. He warned the Jews that if they were to cause another world war, it would lead to their destruction. [167] The Jewish death toll in the extermination camps was over three million overall; most Jews were gassed on arrival. [146] Despite the dangers, thousands of Poles helped Jews. According to Joseph Goebbels' diary, Hitler decided that the police should be withdrawn: "For once the Jews should feel the rage of the people," Goebbels reported him as saying. "The Holocaust: Definition and Preliminary Discussion". [267] The first group of 1,034 Jews arrived from Rome on 23 October 1943; 839 were murdered by gas. The French had planned to try Grynszpan for murder, but the German invasion in 1940 interrupted the proceedings. [4] Gold fillings were pulled from the corpses before burial, but unlike in Auschwitz the women's hair was cut before death. [323] At Auschwitz, about 20 percent of Jews were selected to work. [86] The medical community regularly received bodies for research; for example, the University of Tbingen received 1,077 bodies from executions between 1933 and 1945. We cannot be sentimental about it. There were also dedicated killing centers, where the deaths were estimated at 20,000, according to Georg Renno, deputy director of Schloss Hartheim, one of the euthanasia centers, or 400,000, according to Frank Zeireis, commandant of the Mauthausen concentration camp. [421] Of Poland's 3.3million Jews, about 90 percent were murdered. [362] One of the famous Jewish groups was the Bielski partisans in Belarus, led by the Bielski brothers. German: "Wannsee-Protokoll". [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. Other camps sometimes described as extermination camps include Maly Trostinets near Minsk in the occupied Soviet Union, where 65,000 are thought to have been murdered, mostly by shooting but also in gas vans;[307] Mauthausen in Austria;[308] Stutthof, near Gdask, Poland;[309] and Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrck in Germany. [427] The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that 3.3million of 5.7million Soviet POWs died in German custody. [99] The SS and SA smashed shops and stole cars belonging to Jews; Austrian police stood by, some already wearing swastika armbands. [18] As non-Jewish groups began to include themselves as Holocaust victims, many Jews chose to use the Hebrew terms Shoah or Churban. Works by Jewish composers,[71] authors, and artists were excluded from publications, performances, and exhibitions. WebHow the Holocaust happened in plain sight Six million Jews were murdered between 1933 and 1945. [315] The vans were also used in the occupied Soviet Union, for example in smaller clearing actions in the Minsk ghetto,[316] and in Yugoslavia. [416] Most heavily concentrated in the east, the pre-war Jewish population in Europe was 3.5million in Poland; 3million in the Soviet Union; nearly 800,000 in Romania, and 700,000 in Hungary. 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. Forced to retreat on 19 April from the OB and ZW fighters, they returned later that day under the command of SS General Jrgen Stroop (author of the Stroop Report about the uprising). [d] The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination through labor in concentration camps; and in gas chambers and gas vans in German extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Beec, Chemno, Majdanek, Sobibr, and Treblinka in occupied Poland.[4]. Of these deportees, approximately 1.1 million Between November 1933 and December 1939, the agreement resulted in the emigration of about 53,000 German Jews, who were allowed to transfer RM100million of their assets to Palestine by buying German goods, in violation of the Jewish-led anti-Nazi boycott of 1933. [256] It annexed Thrace and Macedonia, and in February 1943 agreed to a demand from Germany that it deport 20,000 Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp. [174] From July 1942, over 107,000 Dutch Jews were deported; only 5,000 survived the war. The Deutsches rzteblatt (a medical journal) reported on 6 April 1933: "Germans are to be treated by Germans only. [148], Pogroms occurred throughout the occupation. [85] Overall, the number of mentally and physically disabled people murdered was about 150,000. [290], The evacuations were regarded as provisional ("Ausweichmglichkeiten"). Holocaust row seethes as leaders gather in Israel. [175], France had approximately 330,000 Jews, divided between the German-occupied north and the unoccupied collaborationist southern areas in Vichy France (named after the town Vichy), more than half this Jewish population were not French citizens, but refugees who had fled Nazi persecution in other countries. During the Lviv pogroms in Lww, occupied eastern Poland (later Lviv, Ukraine)[n] in June and July 1941the population was 157,490 Polish; 99,595 Jewish; and 49,747 Ukrainian[149]some 6,000 Jews were murdered in the streets by the Ukrainian nationalists (specifically, the OUN)[150] and Ukrainian People's Militia, aided by local people. [208], Einsatzgruppe A arrived in the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) with Army Group North; Einsatzgruppe B in Belarus with Army Group Center; Einsatzgruppe C in Ukraine with Army Group South; and Einsatzgruppe D went further south into Ukraine with the 11th Army. The majority, around 1 million people, were Jews. [255] In the Odessa and Pervomaisk regions alone, Romanian authorities were responsible for the death of over 150,000 Jews. World war, it would lead to their destruction Ausweichmglichkeiten '' ) and Pervomaisk regions alone, authorities! Government area were dead ] Hundreds were castrated, sometimes `` voluntarily '' avoid. 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