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. [334] The corpses700,000 in Treblinkawere burned on wood in open fire pits and the remaining bones crushed into powder. [340] Raul Hilberg accounted for this by evoking the history of Jewish persecution: compliance might avoid inflaming the situation until the onslaught abated. [184], Yugoslavia and Greece were invaded in April 1941 and surrendered before the end of the month. [168], Germany invaded Norway and Denmark on 9 April 1940, during Operation Weserbung. A stab-in-the-back myth developed, insinuating that disloyal politicians, chiefly Jews and communists, had orchestrated Germany's surrender. Civilians killed in reprisals during the Soviet partisan war account for a major portion. [97] Other Jewish scientists, including Gustav Hertz, lost their teaching positions and left the country. [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. A decree on 12 November 1938 barred Jews from most remaining occupations. Of these deportees, approximately 1.1 million 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. [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. [331], Beec, Sobibr and Treblinka became known as the Operation Reinhard camps, named after the German plan to murder the Jews in the General Government area of occupied Poland. [288] Written by Eichmann and stamped "Top Secret", the minutes were written in "euphemistic language" on Heydrich's instructions, according to Eichmann's later testimony.[289]. [397] From January to April 1945, the SS sent inmates westward on death marches to camps in Germany and Austria. [121][l] Palestine was the only location to which any German resettlement plan produced results, via the Haavara Agreement between the Zionist Federation of Germany and the German government. Antisemitic legislation in Romania was usually aimed at exploiting Jews rather than humiliating them as in Germany. [313] As the mass shootings continued in Russia, Himmler and his subordinates in the field feared that the murders were causing psychological problems for the SS,[314] and began searching for more efficient methods. [462] However, where sexuality intersected with other identities, lesbianism could be used as an additional reason for persecution. 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. The gas chambers were dismantled, the crematoria dynamited, and the mass graves dug up and corpses cremated. "[290] He continued: Under proper guidance, in the course of the Final Solution, the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Most were sent to Auschwitz; the first transport of 1,135 Jews left Holland for Auschwitz on 15 July 1942. It is imperative that the great German nation consider the elimination of all Polish people as its chief task. Eichmann's trial revived interest in war criminals and the Holocaust in general. At the end of 1941 in occupied Poland, the Germans began building additional camps or expanding existing ones. They included the head of the German Red Cross, tenured professors, clinic directors, and biomedical researchers. [119] Among the areas considered for possible resettlement were British Palestine and, after the war began, French Madagascar,[120] Siberia, and two reservations in Poland. In Berlin we were told "Why all this trouble? [324] Those selected for death at all camps were told to undress and hand their valuables to camp workers. [135] The inhabitants had to pay for food and other supplies by selling whatever goods they could produce. [64] The camps served as a deterrent by terrorizing Germans who did not support the regime. WebIt is estimated that 11million people died in the Holocaust and that about 1.1million of those were children. Because of this, few measures were taken against the Danish Jews before 1942. Eventually, thousands of camps and other detention sites were established across German-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. [255] In the Odessa and Pervomaisk regions alone, Romanian authorities were responsible for the death of over 150,000 Jews. WebIt is believed that around 5.9 million Jews were killed or died during the Holocaust, making up around a two-thirds of all of those in Europe. [36] Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was to be exterminated,[37] and complex rules were devised to deal with Mischlinge ("mixed breeds"). "Racial" enemies could never belong to the Volksgemeinschaft; they were to be removed from society. 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. [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. [66] On 1 April 1933, there was a boycott of Jewish businesses. [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. [410] The Red Cross took control of Theresienstadt on 3 May, days before the Soviets arrived. 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]. [459] Hundreds were castrated, sometimes "voluntarily" to avoid criminal sentences. [112] Attacks took place in Austria too. [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. [426] In Belarus, Germany imposed a regime that deported 380,000 people for slave labor, murdered 1.6million, and destroyed at least 5,295 settlements. [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. [442] At least 200,000 died in concentration camps, around 146,000 in Auschwitz. The [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. [479][480], Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, 2016. "[439] At the end of 1940, Hitler confirmed the plan to liquidate "all leading elements in Poland". [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. [134] In the ghettos and forced-labor camps, at least half a million died of starvation, disease, and poor living conditions. [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. [176] In July 1940, the Jews in the parts of Alsace-Lorraine that had been annexed to Germany were expelled into Vichy France. Janusz Gumkowski and Kazimierz Leszczynski, sfn error: no target: CITEREFGordon1984 (, Piotrowski, Tadeusz. [100] Jews were forced to perform humiliating acts such as scrubbing the streets or cleaning toilets while wearing tefillin. [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. [472] West Germany initially tried few ex-Nazis, but after the 1958 Ulm Einsatzkommando trial, the government set up a dedicated agency. [290], The evacuations were regarded as provisional ("Ausweichmglichkeiten"). [355] Three SS officers were killed. [226] Large numbers of Jews were not sent there until after Kristallnacht in November 1938. [220], Historians agree that there was a "gradual radicalization" between the spring and autumn of 1941 of what Longerich calls Germany's Judenpolitik, but they disagree about whether a decisionFhrerentscheidung (Fhrer's decision)to murder the European Jews had been made at this point. Even after the Reformation, Catholicism and Lutheranism continued to persecute Jews, accusing them of blood libels and subjecting them to pogroms and expulsions. [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. [91] The second law said: "Marriages between Jews and subjects of the state of German or related blood are forbidden." The Holocaust Encyclopedia. [124] More Jews lived in Poland in 1939 than anywhere else in Europe;[3] another 3million lived in the Soviet Union. Some went by truck or wagons; others were marched the entire distance. [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. On that day, Hitler gave a speech in his apartment at the Reich Chancellery to senior Nazi Party leaders: the Reichsleiter and the Gauleiter. [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. 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. Germany had a policy of forced confiscation of food that resulted in famine deaths of an estimated 6% of the population, or 4.1million. [384], By 1943 it was evident to the leadership of the armed forces that Germany was losing the war. Many men and women were also involuntarily sterilized. 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. [482] In popular culture, Hitler is a hegemonic historical analogy for evil[483] and Nazi comparisons are common. [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. 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. WebAbout six million Jews and some five million others, targeted for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons, died in the Holocaustmore than one million of those who [360] Jews also joined Polish forces, including the Home Army. [358], Estimates of Jewish participation in partisan units throughout Europe range from 20,000 to 100,000. [320] Victims usually arrived at the extermination camps by freight train. Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz. [72] Jewish doctors were dismissed or urged to resign. [443] Others died in massacres or in revolts such as the Warsaw Uprising, where 150,000200,000 were killed. [434][435] Hitler's plan combined classic imperialism with Nazi racial ideology. Germany, Italy and Bulgaria divided Greece into occupation zones but did not eliminate it as a country. Gentlemen, I must ask you, arm yourselves against any thoughts of compassion. [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. The majority, around 1 million people, were Jews. 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. [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. [468], During the International Military Tribunal, 21 Nazi leaders were tried, primarily for waging wars of aggression, but the trial also exposed the systematic murder of European Jews. 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. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. 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. [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. 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