Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration With Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 19181947. Yad Vashem (undated): "The Holocaust was the murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators. This page was last edited on 1 March 2023, at 00:12. Companies such as BMW, Deutsche Bank, Ford, Opel, Siemens, and Volkswagen faced lawsuits for their use of forced labor during the war. [101] Around 7,000 Jewish businesses were "Aryanized", and all the legal restrictions on Jews in Germany were imposed in Austria. [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. [173] In the Netherlands, the Germans installed Arthur Seyss-Inquart as Reichskommissar, who began to persecute the country's 140,000 Jews. [333] Most of the victims at these three camps were buried in pits at first. We must destroy the Jews, wherever we encounter them and whenever it is possible, in order to preserve the entire structure of the Reich. At the end of 1941 in occupied Poland, the Germans began building additional camps or expanding existing ones. [132] These orders included, from 1942, facilitating deportations to extermination camps. [68] Jewish businesses were targeted for closure or "Aryanization", the forcible sale to Germans; of the approximately 50,000 Jewish-owned businesses in Germany in 1933, about 7,000 were still Jewish-owned in April 1939. [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. The other approximately 200,000 people were predominantly made up of non-Jewish Poles, the The fighting Jews have won for us what is most important: the truth about the weakness of the Germans. [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. [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. Browning interprets this as a meeting to discuss how to justify and speak about the killing. [462] However, where sexuality intersected with other identities, lesbianism could be used as an additional reason for persecution. [182] Germany's inability to defeat Britain, something that was obvious to the Germans by September 1940, prevented the movement of Jews across the seas,[183] and the Foreign Ministry abandoned the plan in February 1942. As the Soviet armed forces advanced, the SS closed down the camps in eastern Poland and tried to conceal what had happened. In the course of the practical execution of the Final Solution, Europe will be combed through from west to east. [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. [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. [405] Buchenwald was liberated by the Americans on 11 April;[406] Bergen-Belsen by the British on 15 April;[407] Dachau by the Americans on 29 April;[408] Ravensbrck by the Soviets on 30 April;[409] and Mauthausen by the Americans on 5 May. [214][215] The Germans used the ravine for mass killings throughout the war; up to 100,000 may have been killed there. 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. Red signified a political prisoner, Jehovah's Witnesses had purple triangles, "asocials" and criminals wore black and green, and gay men wore pink. WebBefore the Nazi takeover of powerin 1933, Europe had a vibrant and mature Jewish culture. 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. [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. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, triggering World War II, the regime set up ghettos to segregate Jews. [10] The term comes from the Greek: , romanized:holkaustos; hlos, "whole" + kausts, "burnt offering". [373] Also in 1942, Jan Karski sent information to the Allies after being smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto twice. Jews in Shanghai were confined, but despite German pressure they were not killed. Auschwitz was at the centre of that genocide. [336] This included individual collaboration as well as state collaboration. [345] Polish and Jewish accounts stated that hundreds or thousands of Germans had been killed,[346] while the Germans reported 16 dead. In Berlin we were told "Why all this trouble? [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. [59], Before and after the March 1933 Reichstag elections, the Nazis intensified their campaign of violence against opponents,[60] setting up concentration camps for extrajudicial imprisonment. [386] Rail shipments of Jews were still arriving regularly from western and southern Europe at the extermination camps. [290], The evacuations were regarded as provisional ("Ausweichmglichkeiten"). [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. [400] Already sick after exposure to violence and starvation, they were marched to train stations and transported for days without food or shelter in open freight cars, then forced to march again at the other end to the new camp. After opposition from both the government and public, eight non-Finnish Jews were deported in late 1942; only one survived the war. [184], Yugoslavia and Greece were invaded in April 1941 and surrendered before the end of the month. 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. The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (known as the Claims Conference) was opened in New York, and after negotiations the claim was reduced to $845 million. The full extent of Mengele's work is unknown because records he sent to Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer are assumed to have been destroyed. [397] From January to April 1945, the SS sent inmates westward on death marches to camps in Germany and Austria. [15] In 1968 the Library of Congress created a new category, "Holocaust, Jewish (19391945)". [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. The rest of Poland was occupied by the Soviet Union, which invaded Poland from the east on 17 September 1939. [238] Romanian antisemitic legislation was not an attempt to placate the Germans, but rather entirely home-grown, preceding German hegemony and Nazi Germany itself. [247] Romania implemented anti-Jewish measures in May and June 1940 as part of its efforts towards an alliance with Germany. [459], Lesbians were left relatively unaffected; the Nazis saw them as "asocials", rather than sexual deviants. [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. 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". [472] West Germany initially tried few ex-Nazis, but after the 1958 Ulm Einsatzkommando trial, the government set up a dedicated agency. [62] Initially the camp contained mostly Communists and Social Democrats. [347] The Germans said that 14,000 Jews had been killed7000 during the fighting and 7000 sent to Treblinka[348]and between 53,000[349] and 56,000 deported. [144] The Germans ordered the death penalty for anyone helping Jews. The [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. * Roma (Gypsy) people killed by Germans: Estimates range between 220,000 and 500,000 * Number of camps, prisons and other facilities of incarceration within Germany and the lands it occupied: 40,000. [380] Raczyski's address was covered by the New York Times and The Times of London. Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. [484] Yom HaShoah became Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day in 1951. The pre-war Greek Jewish population had been between 72,000 and 77,000. They included the head of the German Red Cross, tenured professors, clinic directors, and biomedical researchers. [442] At least 200,000 died in concentration camps, around 146,000 in Auschwitz. Rosenberg's vision of a secretive Jewish conspiracy ruling the world would influence Hitler's views of Jews by making them the driving force behind communism. We cannot use them in the Ostland or the Reichskommissariat either; liquidate them yourselves!" Smaller groups were also victims of deadly Nazi persecution, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Black Germans, disabled people, communists, and homosexuals. [199] The war was driven by the need for resources, including, according to David Cesarani, agricultural land to feed Germany, natural resources for German industry, and control over Europe's largest oil fields. There was discussion about whether to include the German Mischlinge (half-Jews). [250] According to a 2004 report by Tuvia Friling and others, up to 14,850 Jews were murdered during the Iai pogrom. 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. "[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. 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. All 11,000 Jews from the annexed territories were sent to be murdered, and plans were made to deport 6,0008,000 Bulgarian Jews from Sofia to meet the quota. Civilians killed in reprisals during the Soviet partisan war account for a major portion. [148], Pogroms occurred throughout the occupation. [i] In total, 165,200 German Jews were murdered. [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. "[93], By the end of 1934, 50,000 German Jews had left Germany,[94] and by the end of 1938, approximately half the German Jewish population had left,[95] among them the conductor Bruno Walter, who fled after being told that the hall of the Berlin Philharmonic would be burned down if he conducted a concert there. WebAnd a similar share (45%) know that approximately 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Forced labor of camp prisoners became commonplace. [110] At least 90 Jews were murdered. [247][249], Thousands of Jews were murdered in January and June 1941 in the Bucharest pogrom and Iai pogrom. [72] Jewish doctors were dismissed or urged to resign. According to Dan Stone the Holocaust was a pan-European phenomenon, a series of "Holocausts" impossible to conduct without local collaborators and Germany's allies. 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. [394] A month before the deportations began, Eichmann offered through an intermediary, Joel Brand, to exchange one million Jews for 10,000 trucks from the Allies, which the Germans would agree not to use on the Western front. WebSix million Jewish people died in the Holocaust - the Nazi campaign to eradicate Europe's Jewish population. The continuous presence of state institutions thereby prevented the Jewish communities' complete destruction. [36] Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was to be exterminated,[37] and complex rules were devised to deal with Mischlinge ("mixed breeds"). [236] Prisoners in Auschwitz were tattooed on arrival with an identification number. 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. Marcus Tanner states that the "SS complained that at least 5,000 Jews were still alive in the NDH and that thousands of others had emigrated, by buying 'honorary Aryan' status". [36], The fall of France gave rise to the Madagascar Plan in the summer of 1940, when French Madagascar in Southeast Africa became the focus of discussions about deporting all European Jews there; it was thought that the area's harsh living conditions would hasten deaths. [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. [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. In Western Europe, he writes, Jewish communities failed to piece the information together, while in Eastern Europe they could not accept that the stories they had heard from elsewhere would end up applying to them too. WebThe Holocaust was Nazi Germanys deliberate, organized, state-sponsored persecution and machinelike murder of approximately six million European Jews and at least five [69] In Silesia, in March 1933, a group of men entered the courthouse and beat up Jewish lawyers; Friedlnder writes that, in Dresden, Jewish lawyers and judges were dragged out of courtrooms during trials. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. For France, Gerlach 2016, p.14; for Denmark and Estonia, Snyder 2015, p.212; for Estonia (Estland) and the Wannsee Conference, "Besprechungsprotokoll" (PDF). This report was sent to the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C.[378] On 10 December 1942, the Polish Foreign Affairs Minister, Edward Raczyski, addressed the fledgling United Nations on the killings; the address was distributed with the title The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland. 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. The head of the practical execution of the practical execution of the victims at these three camps were in. Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Netherlands, the SS inmates! 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