Between the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 and the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, Nazi Germany and its accomplices strove to murder every Jew under their domination. 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. The majority, around 1 million people, were Jews. [36] According to Jozo Tomasevich, the Jewish community in Zagreb was the only one to survive out of 115 Jewish religious communities in Yugoslavia in 19391940. 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. [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. [i] In total, 165,200 German Jews were murdered. [377], Sprawozdanie 6/42 had reached London by 12 November 1942, where it was translated into English to become part of a 108-page report, "Report on Conditions in Poland", on which the date 27 November 1942 was handwritten. [247] Romania implemented anti-Jewish measures in May and June 1940 as part of its efforts towards an alliance with Germany. [123], Between 2.7 and 3million Polish Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, out of a population of 3.33.5 million. Red signified a political prisoner, Jehovah's Witnesses had purple triangles, "asocials" and criminals wore black and green, and gay men wore pink. [ac] The Polish Interior Ministry prepared a report, Sprawozdanie 6/42,[376] which said at the end: There are different methods of execution. The evacuated Jews will first be sent, group by group, to so-called transit ghettos, from which they will be transported to the East. The fighting Jews have won for us what is most important: the truth about the weakness of the Germans. 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. [104] Sigmund Freud and his family arrived in London from Vienna in June 1938, thanks to what David Cesarani called "Herculean efforts" to get them out. They also included five million of people who were not Jewish, mainly Poles, Sinti and Browning interprets this as a meeting to discuss how to justify and speak about the killing. [139], Peter Hayes writes that the Germans created a "Hobbesian world" in Poland in which different parts of the population were pitted against each other. [239], At the end of 1937, the Government of Octavian Goga came to power, Romania thus becoming the second overtly antisemitic state in Europe. [235] Jews wore two yellow triangles, one over another to form a six-pointed star. [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. [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. The former said that only those of "German or kindred blood" could be citizens. The majority, around 1 million people, were Jews. [443] Others died in massacres or in revolts such as the Warsaw Uprising, where 150,000200,000 were killed. [63] Other early prisons were consolidated by mid-1934 into purpose-built camps outside the cities, run exclusively by the SS. "[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. [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. [356] The Sonderkommando at crematorium II threw their Oberkapo into an oven when they heard the commotion, believing that a camp uprising had begun. [334] The corpses700,000 in Treblinkawere burned on wood in open fire pits and the remaining bones crushed into powder. [132] These orders included, from 1942, facilitating deportations to extermination camps. 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. Between 15 May and early July 1944, 437,000 Jews were deported, mostly to Auschwitz, where most of them were murdered by gas; there were four transports a day, each carrying 3,000 people. [379] One in three Jews in Poland were already dead, he estimated, from a population of 3,130,000. The Russian Academy of Science article by M. V. Filimoshin estimated 6% of the population in the occupied regions died due to war related famine and disease. [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. [460] In 1936, Himmler created the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion. The second most numerous group, from 70 to 75 thousand, was the Poles, and the third most numerous, about 20 thousand, the Gypsies. [b] Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia, in The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust (2000), favor a definition that includes the Jews, Roma, and disabled people: "the systematic, state-sponsored murder of entire groups determined by heredity". [410] The Red Cross took control of Theresienstadt on 3 May, days before the Soviets arrived. "Racial" enemies could never belong to the Volksgemeinschaft; they were to be removed from society. 16 was found by American prosecutors in March 1947 in a German Foreign Office folder. [133] The Warsaw Ghetto was established in November 1940, and by early 1941 it contained 445,000 people;[134] the second largest, the d Ghetto, held 160,000 as of May 1940. [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. On 15 March 1940, SS chief Heinrich Himmler stated: "All Polish specialists will be exploited in our military-industrial complex. "[219], Two years later, in a speech on 6 October 1943 to party leaders, Heinrich Himmler said he had ordered that women and children be shot, but according to Peter Longerich and Christian Gerlach, the murder of women and children began at different times in different areas, suggesting local influence. [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. [434][435] Hitler's plan combined classic imperialism with Nazi racial ideology. [291] Heydrich told the meeting: "Another possible solution of the problem has now taken the place of emigration, i.e. Germany, Italy and Bulgaria divided Greece into occupation zones but did not eliminate it as a country. [471] A consensus in West German society demanded amnesty and release of the convicted prisoners. [70] Jewish students were restricted by quotas from attending schools and universities. Many men and women were also involuntarily sterilized. [438] On 12 September, Wilhelm Keitel added Poland's intelligentsia to the list. [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. [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. ", 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? 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