[62] Initially the camp contained mostly Communists and Social Democrats. On that day, Hitler gave a speech in his apartment at the Reich Chancellery to senior Nazi Party leaders: the Reichsleiter and the Gauleiter. [235] Jews wore two yellow triangles, one over another to form a six-pointed star. ", List of major perpetrators of the Holocaust, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, Adolf Hitler, antisemitism and the Holocaust, Anti-Jewish legislation in prewar Nazi Germany, Persecution of the Jews in Schleswig-Holstein (19331945), Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, Jewish refugees from German-occupied Europe in the United Kingdom, Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, German camps in occupied Poland during World War II, The Fhrer to the German People: 22 June 1941, Collaboration in German-occupied Soviet Union, Reich Chancellery meeting of 12 December 1941, Germany declared war on the United States, Adolf Hitler's Declaration of War against the United States, Responsibility for the Holocaust Other states, Jewish resistance in German-occupied Europe, Polish resistance movement in World War II, The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland, Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations, German mistreatment of Soviet prisoners of war, Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany, Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany, Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion, Persecution of black people in Nazi Germany, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the Jewish people, Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany, rehabilitation of 500,000 Jewish survivors, Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future" Foundation, "Remaining Jewish Population of Europe in 1945", "Shoah: How a Biblical Term Became the Hebrew Word for Holocaust", "The Holocaust: Definition and Preliminary Discussion", "Senior Management Team: Dr. Michael Gray, Academic and Universities Director", "Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution", "Jewish Losses during the Holocaust: By Country", "Antisemitic Austrian election poster by Bernd Steiner", "Poster promoting the Nazi monthly publication, "Deportations to and from the Warsaw Ghetto", "Einsatzgruppe member kills a Jewish woman and her child near Ivangorod, Ukraine, 1942", "Tattoos and Numbers: The System of Identifying Prisoners at Auschwitz", "Where Memory is a Curse and Amnesia a Blessing: A Journey Through Romania's Holocaust Narrative", "Wannsee Conference and the 'Final Solution', "Jews captured by Waffen SS soldiers during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising", "Could the BBC have done more to help Hungarian Jews? Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. [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. [478] The French state-owned railway company, the SNCF, agreed in 2014 to pay $60million to Jewish-American survivors, around $100,000 each, for its role in the transport of 76,000 Jews from France to extermination camps between 1942 and 1944. [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). [292][x] The final solution would encompass the 11million Jews living in territories controlled by Germany and elsewhere in Europe, including Britain, Ireland, Switzerland, Turkey, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, and Hungary, "dependent on military developments". [43] The most notorious physician was Josef Mengele, an SS officer who became the Auschwitz camp doctor on 30 May 1943. [369] This was in large measure thanks to Captain Witold Pilecki of the Polish Home Army, who was sent to the camp in September 1940 after allowing himself to be arrested in Warsaw. [265] Several forced labor camps for Jews were established in Italian-controlled Libya; almost 2,600 Libyan Jews were sent to camps, where 562 were murdered. The former said that only those of "German or kindred blood" could be citizens. [395] The British thwarted the proposal by leaking it. [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. Browning interprets this as a meeting to discuss how to justify and speak about the killing. For other uses, see, Dining room in which the conference took place, German extermination and concentration camps built in, Women on their way to the gas chamber, near Crematorium V, Auschwitz II, August 1944. [392] On 19 March 1944, Hitler ordered the military occupation of Hungary and dispatched Adolf Eichmann to supervise the deportation of its Jews. The ascendance of Germany enabled Romania to disregard the minorities treaties that were imposed upon the country after the First World War. [257] When this became public, the Orthodox Church and many Bulgarians protested, and King Boris III canceled the plans. 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. 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. [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. [79] There were 84,525 applications from doctors in the first year. A stab-in-the-back myth developed, insinuating that disloyal politicians, chiefly Jews and communists, had orchestrated Germany's surrender. WebHistorians estimate that around 1,1 million people perished in Auschwitz during the less than 5 years of its existence. 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 [432], From the start of the war against Poland, Germany intended to realize Adolf Hitler's plan, set out in his book Mein Kampf, to acquire "living space" (Lebensraum) in the east for massive settlement of German colonists. [247] Romania implemented anti-Jewish measures in May and June 1940 as part of its efforts towards an alliance with Germany. [67] On 7 April 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was passed, which excluded Jews and other "non-Aryans" from the civil service. [434][435] Hitler's plan combined classic imperialism with Nazi racial ideology. Janusz Gumkowski and Kazimierz Leszczynski, sfn error: no target: CITEREFGordon1984 (, Piotrowski, Tadeusz. WebBefore the Nazi takeover of powerin 1933, Europe had a vibrant and mature Jewish culture. [46][j], Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, Jews were subjected to antisemitism based on Christian theology, which blamed them for killing Jesus. (See the experience of history.). [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. [125], The Wehrmacht in Poland was accompanied by seven SS Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolitizei ("special task forces of the Security Police") and an Einsatzkommando, numbering 3,000 men in all, whose role was to deal with "all anti-German elements in hostile country behind the troops in combat". [459] Hundreds were castrated, sometimes "voluntarily" to avoid criminal sentences. [440][441] An estimated 1.81.9million non-Jewish Polish citizens were killed by Germans during the war. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. [248] In June 1941 Romania joined Germany in its invasion of the Soviet Union and within the first few weeks of the invasion, almost the entire rural Jewish population of Bessarabia and Bukovina were decimated. [162] Gas chambers had been installed by the spring or summer of 1942. "Racial" enemies could never belong to the Volksgemeinschaft; they were to be removed from society. They also included five million of people who were not Jewish, mainly Poles, Sinti and [373] Also in 1942, Jan Karski sent information to the Allies after being smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto twice. Copy no. The courts reached a decision in 64,499 of those cases; 56,244 were in favor of sterilization. The extermination camps killed more than five million Jews, with the number rising after their liberation, as thousands of prisoners In December 1941, similar vans, using exhaust fumes rather than bottled gas, were introduced into the camp at Chemno,[300] Victims were asphyxiated while being driven to prepared burial pits in the nearby forests. Either the German authorities were a party to this outbreak or their powers over public order and a hooligan minority are not what they are proudly claimed to be. [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. By the end of the Holocaust, six million European 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. [351] In the Biaystok Ghetto on 16 August, Jewish insurgents fought for five days when the Germans announced mass deportations. Sexual relationships between them were also criminalized; Jews were not allowed to employ German women under the age of 45 in their homes. 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). [216], At first the Einsatzgruppen targeted the male Jewish intelligentsia, defined as male Jews aged 1560 who had worked for the state and in certain professions. [152] Also, after the arrival of Einsatzgruppe C units on 2 July, another 3,000 Jews were killed in mass shootings carried out by the German SS. [237], Romania ranks first among Holocaust perpetrator countries other than Germany. The commandos described them as "Bolshevist functionaries" and similar. "[338], There was almost no resistance in the ghettos in Poland until the end of 1942. [80] Estimates for the number of involuntary sterilizations during the whole of the Third Reich range from 300,000 to 400,000. 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. [136] Although the Warsaw Ghetto contained 30 percent of the city's population, it occupied only 2.4 percent of its area,[137] averaging over nine people per room. [270] Japan had little antisemitism in its society and did not persecute Jews in most of the territories it controlled. [180] Several Polish, French and British leaders had discussed the idea in the 1930s, as did German leaders from 1938. The Holocaust Encyclopedia. [36] Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was to be exterminated,[37] and complex rules were devised to deal with Mischlinge ("mixed breeds"). [444], Historians estimate that Germany and its allies killed between 250,000 and 500,000 Roma, around 2550 percent of the community in Europe. Gentlemen, I must ask you, arm yourselves against any thoughts of compassion. (twins step forward!). Estimates range from 1.5 to 3 million people having died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, with the consensus being approximately 2 million. [460] In 1936, Himmler created the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion. [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. He warned the Jews that if they were to cause another world war, it would lead to their destruction. [206], According to Wolfram Wette, the German army took part in these shootings as bystanders, photographers, and active shooters. When America declared war, he blamed the Jews.[273]. Some went by truck or wagons; others were marched the entire distance. [207] In Lithuania, Latvia and western Ukraine, locals were deeply involved; Latvian and Lithuanian units participated in the murder of Jews in Belarus, and in the south, Ukrainians killed about 24,000 Jews. [70] Jewish students were restricted by quotas from attending schools and universities. [438] On 12 September, Wilhelm Keitel added Poland's intelligentsia to the list. [130][m] From 1 December, Jews were required to wear Star of David armbands. [233] In mid-1942 work camps began requiring newly arrived prisoners to be placed in quarantine for four weeks. [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"). Now the world war has come. Auschwitz, for example, was expanded in October 1941 by building Auschwitz II-Birkenau a few kilometers away. 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"). [33] In contrast, according to historian Dan Stone, Hitler regarded the Jews as "a Gegenrasse: a 'counter-race' not really human at all". In the course of the practical execution of the Final Solution, Europe will be combed through from west to east. Paramilitary death squads called Einsatzgruppen, in cooperation with the German Army and local collaborators, murdered around 1.3million Jews in mass shootings and pogroms from the summer of 1941. [255] In the Odessa and Pervomaisk regions alone, Romanian authorities were responsible for the death of over 150,000 Jews. A decree on 12 November 1938 barred Jews from most remaining occupations. [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. [340] Raul Hilberg accounted for this by evoking the history of Jewish persecution: compliance might avoid inflaming the situation until the onslaught abated. [83] T4 was mainly directed at adults, but the euthanasia of children was also carried out. [85] Overall, the number of mentally and physically disabled people murdered was about 150,000. [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. On 6 January 1942, the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, sent out diplomatic notes about German atrocities, based on reports about mass graves and bodies surfacing in areas the Red Army had liberated, as well as witness reports from German-occupied areas. The destruction of the Jews must be its necessary consequence. 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. German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners; other companies built the crematoria. 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. 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. Prisoners condemned to death by the Gestapo are murdered by the first two methods. This is thought to refer to Mengele's academic supervisor, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, director from October 1942 of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Berlin-Dahlem. [272] According to Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Hitler had trusted American Jews, whom he assumed were all-powerful, to keep the United States out of the war in the interests of German Jews. [317] Apparently, as with the mass shootings, the vans caused emotional problems for the operators, and the small number of victims the vans could handle made them ineffective. 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