[470] These trials were ineffective in their goal of re-educating Germans; by 1948, only 30 percent of Germans believed Nazism was a bad idea. [172], In May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France. 2007, page 23, sfn error: no target: CITEREFPiotrowski2007 (, "They conducted deliberate and systematic genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories in order to destroy particular races and classes of people and national, racial, or religious groups, particularly Jews, Poles, and Gypsies and others. Following Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor on 30 January 1933, the regime built a network of concentration camps in Germany for political opponents and those deemed "undesirable", starting with Dachau on 22 March 1933. [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. [79] There were 84,525 applications from doctors in the first year. After the war this program came to be known as Aktion T4,[82] named after Tiergartenstrae4, the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, where the various organizations involved were headquartered. "[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. When [66] On 1 April 1933, there was a boycott of Jewish businesses. [43] The most notorious physician was Josef Mengele, an SS officer who became the Auschwitz camp doctor on 30 May 1943. [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". [429], A 1995 paper published by M. V. Filimoshin, an associate of the Russian Defense Ministry, put the civilian death toll in the regions occupied by Germany at 13.7million. These Holocaust victimsincluded about six million Jewishpeople. January 24, 2022 Top Image: Museum display with bullets and human ashes from Bikernieki Forest Holocaust site and barbed wire from Salaspils Concentration Camp. [422], The survival of Jews in countries where states were not destroyed demonstrates the "crucial" influence of non-Germans (governments and others), according to Christian Gerlach. [1] Later research cited by Ian Hancock estimated the death toll to be at about 1.5 million out of an estimated 2 million Roma. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2 February 2019. [146] Despite the dangers, thousands of Poles helped Jews. [271], On 7 December 1941, Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor, an American naval base in Honolulu, Hawaii, killing 2,403 Americans. the evacuation of the Jews to the East, provided that the Fuehrer gives the appropriate approval in advance. By March 1941 all Jews had lost their jobs and had their property confiscated. So many died that the marches were stopped. The French had planned to try Grynszpan for murder, but the German invasion in 1940 interrupted the proceedings. These included Roma, Poles, Ukrainians, Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, and other targeted populations. [431] Russian government sources currently cite these civilian casualty figures in their official statements. For example, the Nazis' treatment of the Slavs consisted of "enslavement and gradual attrition", while some Slavs were favored; Hayes lists Bulgarians, Croats, Slovaks, and some Ukrainians. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. [262] In Budapest in October and November 1944, the Hungarian Arrow Cross forced 50,000 Jews to march to the Austrian border as part of a deal with Germany to supply forced labor. 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. [238] Romanian antisemitic legislation was not an attempt to placate the Germans, but rather entirely home-grown, preceding German hegemony and Nazi Germany itself. [457] According to German historian Detlef Garbe, "no other religious movement resisted the pressure to conform to National Socialism with comparable unanimity and steadfastness. [3] 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 [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. 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. [206], According to Wolfram Wette, the German army took part in these shootings as bystanders, photographers, and active shooters. Najprsnejie rasov zkony na idov s slovensk". [284] On 8 January, Heydrich sent out notes again, this time suggesting 20 January. [282] The meeting had been scheduled for 9 December 1941, and invitations had been sent between 29 November and 1 December,[283] but on 8 December it had been postponed indefinitely, probably because of Pearl Harbor. [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". On 15 March 1940, SS chief Heinrich Himmler stated: "All Polish specialists will be exploited in our military-industrial complex. [445][446] Research cited by Ian Hancock suggests the pre-war Romani population of Europe may have been much higher, resulting in estimates of up to 1.5 million Roma deaths. [198] German propaganda portrayed the conflict as an ideological war between German National Socialism and Jewish Bolshevism, and as a racial war between the Germans and the Jewish, Romani, and Slavic Untermenschen ("sub-humans"). Forced labor of camp prisoners became commonplace. The [77][78] The New York Times reported on 21 December that year: "400,000 Germans to be sterilized". [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. [118], Before World War II, Germany considered mass deportation from Europe of German, and later European, Jewry. Auschwitz was at the centre of that genocide. Sex with Jewish women was forbidden on grounds of racial disgrace by the Nazis, but rape was not considered a racial disgrace in concentration camps. The third method, the gas chamber, is employed for those who are ill or incapable of work and those who have been brought in transports especially for the purpose /Soviet prisoners of war, and, recently Jews/. [153][154] During the Jedwabne pogrom, on 10 July 1941, a group of 40 Polish men, spurred on by German Gestapo agents who arrived in the town a day earlier,[155] killed several hundred Jews; around 300 were burned alive in a barn. [70] Jewish students were restricted by quotas from attending schools and universities. From August 1941 they began to murder women and children too. [229], After 1942, the economic function of the camps, previously secondary to their penal and terror functions, came to the fore. In Berlin we were told "Why all this trouble? [132] These orders included, from 1942, facilitating deportations to extermination camps. I will in principle proceed only on the assumption that they will disappear. "[260], Although Hungary expelled Jews who were not citizens from its newly annexed lands in 1941, it did not deport most of its Jews[261] until the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944. Yad Vashem. WebThe Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. The best known is the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943, when the Germans arrived to send the remaining inhabitants to extermination camps. [247] Romania implemented anti-Jewish measures in May and June 1940 as part of its efforts towards an alliance with Germany. The pre-war Greek Jewish population had been between 72,000 and 77,000. Anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents was classified as a Jew. [227] After war broke out in 1939, new camps were established, many outside Germany in occupied Europe. [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. [232], Transportation to and between camps was often carried out in closed freight cars with little air or water, long delays and prisoners packed tightly. [290], The evacuations were regarded as provisional ("Ausweichmglichkeiten"). [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. The death rates decreased when the POWs were 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. Prisoners condemned to death by the Gestapo are murdered by the first two methods. Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration With Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 19181947. [45] The twins would be measured, killed, and dissected. [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. [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. [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. [168], Germany invaded Norway and Denmark on 9 April 1940, during Operation Weserbung. WebAnd a similar share (45%) know that approximately 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Between 200,000 and 500,000 Roma and Sinti (pejoratively called gypsies) were killed during the Holocaust, along with millions of Slavs in the Soviet Union and Poland, and up to 250,000 disabled people. 16 was found by American prosecutors in March 1947 in a German Foreign Office folder. [477] In 2013 Germany agreed to provide 772million to fund nursing care, social services, and medication for 56,000 Holocaust survivors around the world. Germany proper, including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, will have to be handled first due to the housing problem and additional social and political necessities. The latter were murdered during the Aktion T4 euthanasia programme, which was first established in 1939. [4] Gold fillings were pulled from the corpses before burial, but unlike in Auschwitz the women's hair was cut before death. [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. We cannot be sentimental about it. To prevent panic, they were told the gas chambers were showers or delousing chambers. [42], After the war, 23 senior physicians and other medical personnel were charged at Nuremberg with crimes against humanity. [21], Holocaust historians commonly define the Holocaust as the genocide of the European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945. [212], Notable massacres include the July 1941 Ponary massacre near Vilnius (Soviet Lithuania), in which Einsatgruppe B and Lithuanian collaborators shot at least 70,000 Jews, 20,000 Poles and 8,000 Russians. [129], The Germans stipulated that each ghetto be led by a Judenrat of 24 male Jews, who would be responsible for carrying out German orders. Inflaming the anti-Jewish sentiment was the apparent over-representation of Jews in the leadership of communist revolutionary governments in Europe, such as Ernst Toller, head of a short-lived revolutionary government in Bavaria. [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. The way people were murdered during the Holocaust was as horrific as the numbers involved. the Ustashe of Croatia), or forced others into participation. [c], Death rates were heavily dependent on the survival of European states willing to protect their Jewish citizens. [398][399] In January 1945, the Germans held records of 714,000 inmates in concentration camps; by May, 250,000 (35 percent) had died during these marches. [320] Victims usually arrived at the extermination camps by freight train. [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. [e] The biblical term shoah (Hebrew: ), meaning "calamity" (and also used to refer to "destruction" since the Middle Ages), became the standard Hebrew term for the murder of the European Jews. [176] In July 1940, the Jews in the parts of Alsace-Lorraine that had been annexed to Germany were expelled into Vichy France. Eichmann's trial revived interest in war criminals and the Holocaust in general. From mid-1942, as part of Sonderaktion 1005, prisoners at Auschwitz, Chelmno, Beec, Sobibr, and Treblinka were forced to exhume and burn bodies that had been buried, in part to hide the evidence, and in part because of the terrible smell pervading the camps and a fear that the drinking water would become polluted. "[27], Roland Freisler (Ministry of Justice); Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger (Reich Cabinet); Alfred Meyer (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories-German-occupied USSR); Georg Leibrandt (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories); Martin Luther (Foreign Office); Wilhelm Stuckart (Ministry of the Interior); Erich Neumann (Office of Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan), Josef Bhler (Office of the Government of the Governor General-German-occupied Poland); Gerhard Klopfer (Nazi Party Chancellery). [438] On 12 September, Wilhelm Keitel added Poland's intelligentsia to the list. [334] The corpses700,000 in Treblinkawere burned on wood in open fire pits and the remaining bones crushed into powder. Other Victims Those were not empty words. [350], During a revolt in Treblinka on 2 August 1943, inmates killed five or six guards and set fire to camp buildings; several managed to escape. 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