The majority, around 1 million people, were Jews. [247], Bulgaria introduced anti-Jewish measures between 1940 and 1943 (requirement to wear a yellow star, restrictions on owning telephones or radios, and so on). "[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. Under the coordination of the SS, with directions from the highest leadership of the Nazi Party, killings were committed within Germany itself, throughout occupied Europe, and within territories controlled by Germany's allies. According to Yitzhak Arad, this was the highest number of SS officers killed in a single revolt. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. [114], Between 9 and 16 November, 30,000 Jews were sent to the Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. [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]. A BBC Hungarian Service memo, written by Carlile Macartney, said in 1942: "We shouldn't mention the Jews at all." Nearly three-in-ten Americans say they are not sure how many Jews died [374] By c.July 1942, Polish leaders in Warsaw had learned about the mass killing of Jews in Auschwitz. Drive the female Jews into the swamps. [148], Pogroms occurred throughout the occupation. "[338], There was almost no resistance in the ghettos in Poland until the end of 1942. On 15 March 1940, SS chief Heinrich Himmler stated: "All Polish specialists will be exploited in our military-industrial complex. [223] Longerich wrote in 2010 that the gradual increase in brutality and numbers killed between July and September 1941 suggests there was "no particular order". In just over four-and-a-half years, Nazi Germany systematically murdered at least 1.1 million people at Auschwitz. 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. [438] After Germany lost the war, the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials and Poland's Supreme National Tribunal concluded that the aim of German policies in Poland the extermination of Poles and Jews was a genocide in biological terms. 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. WebOf this total, nearly 1.1 million were Jews, 960,000 of which died in the camp. Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. [319] At least 1.4million of these were in the General Government area of Poland. WebBefore the Nazi takeover of powerin 1933, Europe had a vibrant and mature Jewish culture. [202] The point of the attacks was to destroy the local Communist Party leadership and therefore the state, including "Jews in the Party and State employment", and any "radical elements". [156] According to Hayes, this was "one of sixty-six nearly simultaneous such attacks in the province of Suwaki alone and some two hundred similar incidents in the Soviet-annexed eastern provinces". [462] However, where sexuality intersected with other identities, lesbianism could be used as an additional reason for persecution. [15] In 1968 the Library of Congress created a new category, "Holocaust, Jewish (19391945)". [230] The Germans estimated the average prisoner's lifespan in a concentration camp at three months, as a result of lack of food and clothing, constant epidemics, and frequent punishments for the most minor transgressions. [83] T4 was mainly directed at adults, but the euthanasia of children was also carried out. [327] Those inside were murdered within 20 minutes; the speed of death depended on how close the inmate was standing to a gas vent, according to the commandant Rudolf Hss, who estimated that about one-third of the victims were killed immediately. [12][f], On 3 October 1941 the American Hebrew used the phrase "before the Holocaust", apparently to refer to the situation in France,[14] and in May 1943 the New York Times, discussing the Bermuda Conference, referred to the "hundreds of thousands of European Jews still surviving the Nazi Holocaust". [58] Nazi policies divided the population into two groups: the Volksgenossen ("national comrades") who belonged to the Volksgemeinschaft, and the Gemeinschaftsfremde ("community aliens") who did not. [118], Before World War II, Germany considered mass deportation from Europe of German, and later European, Jewry. [46][j], Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, Jews were subjected to antisemitism based on Christian theology, which blamed them for killing Jesus. [258] Instead, Jews native to Bulgaria were sent to the provinces. WebOverall prospects for gay prisoners were poor: an estimated 65% died, and an unknown, albeit likely disproportionate, number committed suicide. 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. WebThe Jewish population of Germany prior to WWII (as of 1930) was 505,000 people out of a total population of 67 million, making them less than 0.75% of the total population. At the end of the war, approximately 380,000 Polish Jews remained alive, the rest having been murdered, mostly in the ghettos and the six death camps: Chelmo, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. [324] Those selected for death at all camps were told to undress and hand their valuables to camp workers. Before World War II, Europe had 9.5 million Jews. [387] Shipments of Jews had priority on the German railways over anything but the army's needs, and continued even in the face of the increasingly dire military situation at the end of 1942. From August 1941 they began to murder women and children too. [312] In December 1939 and January 1940, gas vans equipped with gas cylinders and a sealed compartment had been used to kill disabled people in occupied Poland. [434][435] Hitler's plan combined classic imperialism with Nazi racial ideology. All Jews must be shot. Davar and later Haaretz both used the term in September 1939. [419] According to Yad Vashem, "[a]ll the serious research" confirms that between five and six million Jews were murdered. [281], SS-Obergruppenfhrer Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA), convened what became known as the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942 at Am Groen Wannsee 5658, a villa in Berlin's Wannsee suburb. [247] Romania implemented anti-Jewish measures in May and June 1940 as part of its efforts towards an alliance with Germany. [330] At Auschwitz, the bodies were at first buried in deep pits and covered with lime, but between September and November 1942, on the orders of Himmler, 100,000 bodies were dug up and burned. [56], With the appointment in January 1933 of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany and the Nazi's seizure of power, German leaders proclaimed the rebirth of the Volksgemeinschaft ("people's community"). It is imperative that the great German nation consider the elimination of all Polish people as its chief task. the evacuation of the Jews to the East, provided that the Fuehrer gives the appropriate approval in advance. [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. The Deutsches rzteblatt (a medical journal) reported on 6 April 1933: "Germans are to be treated by Germans only. [70] Jewish students were restricted by quotas from attending schools and universities. [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. [359] In the occupied Polish and Soviet territories, thousands of Jews fled into the swamps or forests and joined the partisans,[360] although the partisan movements did not always welcome them. [228] Most wartime prisoners of the camps were not Germans but belonged to countries under German occupation. [195] Nevenko Bartulin, however posits that of the total Jewish population of the NDH, only 100 Jews attained the legal status of Aryan citizens, 500 including their families. [421] In countries allied to Germany, the state's control over its citizens, including the Jews, was seen as a matter of sovereignty. [132] These orders included, from 1942, facilitating deportations to extermination camps. [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. [428] The death rates decreased when the POWs were needed to help the German war effort; by 1943, half a million had been deployed as slave labor. [72] Jewish doctors were dismissed or urged to resign. [266] Officers from RSHA IV B4, a Gestapo unit, began deporting Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau. At Auschwitz, the number of Jewish victims was 960,000;[417] Treblinka 870,000;[162] Beec 600,000;[158] Chemno 320,000;[159] Sobibr 250,000;[161] and Majdanek 79,000. 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. [205] The latter was known as Sardinenpackung ("packing sardines"), a method reportedly started by SS officer Friedrich Jeckeln. Antisemitic legislation in Romania was usually aimed at exploiting Jews rather than humiliating them as in Germany. [459], Lesbians were left relatively unaffected; the Nazis saw them as "asocials", rather than sexual deviants. In the course of the practical execution of the Final Solution, Europe will be combed through from west to east. As German forces captured territories in the East, all anti-Jewish measures were radicalized. Explosives were used to reduce the time taken by digging. [386] Rail shipments of Jews were still arriving regularly from western and southern Europe at the extermination camps. Some went by truck or wagons; others were marched the entire distance. 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. Germany had over 500,000. Consequently, the Danish government stayed in power and the Germans found it easier to work through it. [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". Web11 million, not 6 million, died in the Holocaust The scrapbook of Margaret Gruenbaum, who with her two children was imprisoned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, is now 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. [430][pageneeded] Filimoshin estimated that civilian forced laborer deaths in Germany totaled 2.1million. But, tragically, gay Holocaust [147] Nearly 1,000 were executed for having done so,[141] and Yad Vashem has named over 7,000 Poles as Righteous Among the Nations. [34] As prisoners entered the death camps, they surrendered all personal property,[39] which was cataloged and tagged before being sent to Germany for reuse or recycling. [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. [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). [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. [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". The evacuated Jews will first be sent, group by group, to so-called transit ghettos, from which they will be transported to the East. [236] Prisoners in Auschwitz were tattooed on arrival with an identification number. [264] Most Italian Jews, over 40,000, survived the Holocaust. 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 second [269], In Finland, the government was pressured in 1942 to hand over its 150200 non-Finnish Jews to Germany. At the end of 1941 in occupied Poland, the Germans began building additional camps or expanding existing ones. 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