CaroleHenson (talk | contribs) Undid revision 786310394 by Henia Perlman (talk) return heading - per previous revert and talk page |
Henia Perlman (talk | contribs) →Other occupied countries: Jews in Shanghai |
||
Line 166: | Line 166: | ||
In October 1940, ''Gauleiters'' [[Josef Bürckel]] and [[Robert Heinrich Wagner]] oversaw Operation ''Bürckel'', the expulsion of the Jews into unoccupied France from their ''gaues'' and the parts of [[Alsace-Lorraine]] that had been annexed to Germany. Only those Jews in [[Anti-miscegenation laws#Nazi Germany|mixed marriages]] were not expelled.{{sfn|Krausnick|1968|p=57}} The Jews expelled in Operation ''Bürckel'' were interned in harsh conditions by the Vichy authorities at various camps.{{sfn|Krausnick|1968|p=57}} |
In October 1940, ''Gauleiters'' [[Josef Bürckel]] and [[Robert Heinrich Wagner]] oversaw Operation ''Bürckel'', the expulsion of the Jews into unoccupied France from their ''gaues'' and the parts of [[Alsace-Lorraine]] that had been annexed to Germany. Only those Jews in [[Anti-miscegenation laws#Nazi Germany|mixed marriages]] were not expelled.{{sfn|Krausnick|1968|p=57}} The Jews expelled in Operation ''Bürckel'' were interned in harsh conditions by the Vichy authorities at various camps.{{sfn|Krausnick|1968|p=57}} |
||
In Shanghai, there were about 20,000 Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe, because they could emigrate there without a visa. After the Wannsee conference, Hitler’s Germany sent SS-Colonel Joseph Meisinger, the “Butcher of Warsaw to Shanghai, and forced the Japanese ruler, an ally of the Third Reich, to put all the Jews in a ghetto, to be called the Hongkew ghetto. But, the Japanese government ignored the Nazis, and didn’t murder the Jews, who left Shanghai after 1945. |
|||
===Concentration and labor camps (1933–1945)=== |
===Concentration and labor camps (1933–1945)=== |
Revision as of 14:43, 19 June 2017
The Holocaust | |
---|---|
Part of World War II | |
Location | Nazi Germany and German-occupied territories |
Date | 1941–45 |
Target | European Jews—broader usage of the term "Holocaust" includes victims of other Nazi crimes.[a] |
Attack type | Genocide, ethnic cleansing, deportation, mass murder |
Deaths | 6,000,000–11,000,000 |
Perpetrators | Nazi Germany and its allies |
No. of participants | 200,000 |
Part of a series on |
The Holocaust |
---|
The Holocaust,[b] also referred to as the Shoah,[c] was a genocide in which some six million European Jews were killed by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, and the World War II collaborators with the Nazis. The victims included 1.5 million children, and constituted about two-thirds of the nine million Jews who had resided in Continental Europe. A broader definition of the Holocaust includes non-Jewish victims of the Nazi campaign of mass murder.The Romani and the Aktion T4 patients who were mentally and physically disabled are most commonly included among the broader victims, but can also include Soviet prisoners-of war, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Slavs – including Soviet citizens, Poles, and other Slavic ethnic groups, blacks, political opponents of the Nazis, and other smaller groups.
From 1941 to 1945, Jews were systematically murdered in a genocide, which was part of a larger event including the persecution and murder of other peoples in Europe. Under the coordination of the SS, with directions from the highest leadership of the Nazi Party, every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in both the logistics and the carrying out of the mass murder. Killings took place throughout German-occupied Europe, as well as within Nazi Germany, and across all territories controlled by its allies. Other victims of Nazi crimes included ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, and other Slavs; Soviet citizens and Soviet POWs; communists; homosexuals; Freemasons; Jehovah's Witnesses; and others. Some 42,500 detention facilities were utilized in the concentration of victims for the purpose of committing gross violations of human rights. Over 200,000 people are estimated to have been Holocaust perpetrators.
The persecution was carried out in stages, culminating in the policy of extermination which was termed the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".[3] Following Hitler's rise to power, the German government passed laws to exclude Jews from civil society, most prominently the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. Starting in 1933 the Nazis began to establish a network of concentration camps. After the outbreak of war in 1939 both German and foreign Jews were herded into wartime ghettos. In 1941, as Germany began to conquer new territory in the East, all anti-Jewish measures radicalized. Specialized paramilitary units called Einsatzgruppen murdered around two million Jews in mass shootings in less than a year. By mid-1942, victims were regularly being transported by freight trains to extermination camps. Most who survived the journey were systematically killed in gas chambers. This continued until the end of World War II in Europe in April–May 1945.
Jewish armed resistance was limited. The most notable exception was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, when thousands of poorly-armed Jewish fighters held the Waffen-SS at bay for four weeks. An estimated 20,000–30,000 Jewish partisans actively fought against the Nazis and their collaborators in Eastern Europe. French Jews took part in the French Resistance, which conducted a guerilla campaign against both the Nazis and the Vichy French authorities. Over a hundred armed Jewish uprisings took place.
Etymology and definition
Etymology and alternate names
The term holocaust comes from the Greek word holókaustos which refers to an animal sacrifice that is offered to a god in which the whole animal is completely burnt.[4] Later it came to denote a massacre or slaughter of large numbers of people.[5] The word shoah (שואה; also transliterated sho'ah and shoa), meaning "calamity" became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s, especially in Europe and Israel.[6]
"Holocaust" was used in the 1950s by historians as a translation of the Jewish word shoah to refer specifically to the Nazi genocide of the Jews.[7] The television mini-series Holocaust is credited with making the term the usual one for the Jewish genocide in the United States.[8] As the definition of the victims of the Holocaust has expanded to include more than just Jews, shoah continues to retain its meaning as specifically the genocide of the Jews under the Nazis.[9][d]
The Nazis used the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" or "Final Solution" to refer to their genocide of the Jews.[11] Historian Peter Longerich writes that the term "final solution" and similar euphemisms, were used by the Germans "as camouflage for mass murder".[12]
Definition
The restrictive definition of the Holocaust is that it was a genocide restricts the usage to just the genocide of Jews by the Nazis.[13][14][e] A broader definition of the Holocaust includes non-Jewish victims of the Nazi campaign of mass murder.[3] The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust limits the definition of the Holocaust to Jews, Romani, and the Aktion T4 patients who were mentally and physically disabled. Its authors write "all three groups, but only these groups, were equal victims of Nazi racism and genocide."[21] They also offer three additional definitions which include the viewpoints of historians who identify several additional victim groups. One is that the Holocaust only applied to Jews, a second is that there were several different Holocausts, each affecting a separate group, and a third would include all German racially-motivated crimes.[22] Timothy Snyder wrote: "The term Holocaust is sometimes used in two other ways: to mean all German killing policies during the war, or to mean all oppression of Jews by the Nazi regime."[23]
Broader definitions of so-called "parallel Holocausts" include the Soviet POWs who died as a result of mistreatment due to Nazi racial policies,[24] the non-Jewish ethnic Poles who died due to the conditions that resulted from the Nazi occupation of Poland, the Soviet citizens who died from similar conditions in occupied parts of the Soviet Union,[25] mentally and physically disabled people who were killed in Nazi Germany's eugenics program,[26] the Gypsies, or the Romani and Sinti,[27] homosexuals, and Jehovah's Witnesses and other religious dissenters.[28]
Distinctive features
Genocidal state
The entirety of German society were engaged in activities relating to the genocide, turning the Third Reich into what one Holocaust scholar, Michael Berenbaum, has called "a genocidal state".[29] Bureaucrats were involved with finding records to identify who was a Jew, the confiscation of property, and the scheduling of trains that deported Jews. Companies fired Jewish employees, and later employed Jews as slave labour. Universities dismissed Jewish students and faculty. German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners; other companies built the crematoria.[29] As prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property, which was catalogued and tagged before being sent to Germany to be reused or recycled.[30] Through a concealed account, the German National Bank helped launder valuables stolen from the victims.[31]
Saul Friedländer writes that: "Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews"[32] He writes that some Christian churches "declared that converted Jews should be regarded as part of the flock, but even then only up to a point".[32] Friedländer argues that this makes the Holocaust distinctive because antisemitic policies were able to "unfold to their most extreme levels without the interference of any major countervailing interests".[32]
Ideology and scale
Part of a series on |
Antisemitism |
---|
Category |
Historian Yehuda Bauer argues that the Holocaust was based on ideology and myths rather than practical considerations.[33] Eberhard Jäckel argues that one distinctive feature of the Holocaust was that it was the first time that a state put the full power behind its declaration that a whole people would be completely wiped out without exception and as quickly as possible.[34]
The killings were systematically conducted in virtually all areas of German-occupied territory in more than 20 occupied countries.[35] Close to 3 million Jews in occupied Poland and between 700,000 and 2.5 million Jews in the Soviet Union were killed. Hundreds of thousands more Jews also died in the rest of German-occupied Europe.[36] Discussions at the Wannsee Conference make it clear that the Nazi "final solution of the Jewish question" included Britain and all the neutral states in Europe, such as Ireland, Switzerland, Turkey, Sweden, Portugal, and Spain.[37] Over 200,000 people are estimated to have been Holocaust perpetrators.[38]
Industrialized murder
The use of extermination camps, or death camps, equipped with gas chambers for the systematic mass extermination of people was an unprecedented feature of the Holocaust. They were built for the systematic purpose of killing millions of people, primarily by gassing.[39] Stationary facilities built for the purpose of mass extermination resulted from earlier Nazi experimentation with poison gas during the secret Action T4 euthanasia programme against mental patients.[40]
Origins
Antisemitism and racism
Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, Jews were subjected to antisemitism based on Christian theology, which blamed them for rejecting and killing Jesus. Even after the Reformation, Catholicism and Lutheranism continued to persecute Jews, accusing them of blood libel and subjecting them to pogroms and expulsions.[41][42] The second half of the 19th century saw the emergence in Germany and Austria-Hungary of the Völkisch movement which was developed by such thinkers as Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Paul de Lagarde. The movement presented a pseudo-scientific, biologically based form of racism that viewed Jews as a race whose members were locked in mortal combat with the Aryan race for world domination.[43]
In the German Empire, völkisch notions and pseudo-scientific racism had become commonplace and they were accepted throughout Germany,[45] with the professional classes of the country adopting an ideology that did not see humans as equally racially and hereditarily valuable.[46] Though the völkisch parties were defeated in the 1912 Reichstag elections, being all but wiped out, antisemitism was incorporated into the platforms of the mainstream political parties.[45]
Germany after World War I
The political situation in Germany and elsewhere in Europe after World War I (1914–1918) also contributed to virulent antisemitism. Many Germans did not accept the fact that their country had been defeated in battle, giving rise to the Stab-in-the-back myth. The myth insinuated that it was disloyal politicians, chiefly Jews and Communists, who orchestrated Germany's surrender. Inflaming the anti-Jewish sentiment espoused by the myth was the apparent overrepresentation of ethnic Jews in the leadership of Communist revolutionary governments in Europe, such as Ernst Toller, who was the head of a short-lived revolutionary government in Bavaria. This perceived overrepresentation contributed to the canard of Jewish Bolshevism.[47]
The economic strains of the Great Depression led many in the German medical establishment to advocate the euthanization of the "incurable" mentally and physically disabled as a cost-saving measure in order to free up money to care for the curable.[48] By the time the Nazis came to power in 1933, a tendency already existed in the German social policy to save the racially "valuable" while seeking to rid society of the racially "undesirable".[49]
The National Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nazi Party, was founded in 1920 as an offshoot of the völkisch movement and it adopted that movement's form of antisemitism.[50] Early antisemites in the Nazi Party included Alfred Rosenberg, who in the 1920s wrote antisemitic articles in the Völkischer Beobachter, and Dietrich Eckart, publisher of the Völkischer Beobachter. 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.[51]
Hitler's world view
The origin and first expression of Hitler's antisemitism remain a matter of debate.[52] Central to Hitler's philosophy was the idea of expansion and lebensraum (living space) for Germany.[53] Hitler was open about his hatred of Jews and subscribed to most of the common antisemitic stereotypes.[54] From the early 1920s Hitler linked the Jews with germs and claimed that they should be dealt with in exactly the same way.[55] Hitler viewed Marxism as a Jewish doctrine and proclaimed he was fighting against "Jewish Marxism". He believed that Jews had created communism as part of a conspiracy to destroy Germany.[56] The journalist Joseph Hell in the 1920s claimed that in response to being asked what he would do to the Jews when he gained power, Hitler said that his "first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews".[57]
Nazi Germany
Dictatorship and repression (1933–1939)
With the establishment of the Third Reich, Nazi leaders proclaimed the existence of a Volksgemeinschaft ("people's community"). Nazi policies divided the population into two categories, the Volksgenossen ("national comrades"), who belonged to the Volksgemeinschaft, and the Gemeinschaftsfremde ("community aliens"), who did not. Nazi policies divided people into three types of enemies, the "racial" enemies such as the Jews and the Romani who were viewed as enemies because of their "blood"; political opponents such as Marxists, liberals, Christians and the "reactionaries" who were viewed as wayward "national comrades"; and moral opponents such as homosexuals, the "work-shy" and habitual criminals, also seen as wayward "national comrades".[58] The last two groups were to be sent to concentration camps for "re-education", with the aim of eventual absorption into the Volksgemeinschaft.[58] "Racial" enemies such as the Jews could never belong to the Volksgemeinschaft; they were to be totally removed from society.[58]
Leading up to the March 1933 Reichstag elections and after it, the Nazis intensified their campaign of violence against their opponents.[59] They set up concentration camps for extrajudicial imprisonment of their opponents.[60] One of the first, at Dachau, opened on 9 March 1933.[61] Initially the camp primarily contained Communists and Social Democrats.[62] Other early prisons were consolidated by mid-1934 into purpose-built camps outside the cities, run exclusively by the SS.[63] The initial purpose of the camps was to serve as a deterrent by terrorizing those Germans who did not conform to social norms.[64]
Throughout the 1930s, the legal, economic, and social rights of Jews were steadily restricted.[65] On 1 April 1933, a boycott of Jewish businesses occurred.[66] On 7 April 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was passed which excluded all Jews and other "non-Aryans" from the civil service.[67] Jewish lawyers were disbarred.[68] Jewish students were restricted by quotas from attending schools and universities,[67] from belonging to the Journalists' Association, and from being owners or editors of newspapers.[65] Jewish businesses were also targeted for either closing or "Aryanisation", the forcible sale to Germans. Of the approximately 50,000 Jewish-owned businesses in Germany in 1933, only about 7,000 were still Jewish-owned in April 1939. Accompanying the removal of Jews from the economic life, they were also gradually restricted from most social activities and public areas.[69] Works by Jewish composers,[70] Jewish authors,[71] and Jewish artists were excluded from publication, performances, or exhibitions.[72]
Nuremberg Laws
In September 1935, Hitler introduced the three Nuremberg Laws,[73] which prohibited Germans or those of "kindred blood",[74] from having sexual relations or marrying Jews.[75] The laws also stripped German Jews of their citizenship and deprived them of all civil rights.[76] At the same time the Nazis used propaganda to justify the need for a restrictive law,[77] grouping these "crimes" under the concept of Rassenschande (racial shame).[78]
Emigration
Nazi racial policy was aimed at forcing the German Jews to emigrate.[79] Fifty thousand German Jews left Germany by the end of 1934,[80] and by the end of 1938 approximately half of the German Jews had left the country.[79] Among the prominent Jews who left was 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.[81] Albert Einstein, who was abroad when Hitler came to power, never returned to Germany. He was expelled from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and his citizenship was revoked.[82] Other Jewish scientists, including Gustav Hertz and Erwin Schrödinger, lost their teaching positions and left the country.[83]
In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria, which exposed the Jews of Austria to Nazi antisemitism. Austrian Nazis broke into Jewish shops, stole from Jewish homes and businesses, and forced Jews to perform humiliating acts such as scrubbing the streets or cleaning toilets.[84] Jewish businesses were "Aryanised" and all the legal restrictions on Jews in Germany were imposed on Austrian Jews.[85] In August, Adolf Eichmann was put in charge of the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration, which centralised the process of emigration and led to about 100,000 Austrian Jews leaving the country by May 1939.[86]
Kristallnacht and afterwards
On 7 November 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew, assassinated the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris in retaliation for the expulsion of his parents from Germany.[87][f] When vom Rath died on 9 November, the Nazis used his death as a pretext to instigate a pogrom against the Jews in the Third Reich. Although the Nazis claimed the pogrom was spontaneous, it was actually planned and ordered by Hitler and Goebbels.[89] This event became known as Kristallnacht ("Crystal Night" or "Night of Broken Glass")[90] and it was carried out by the SS and SA.[91] Over 7,500 Jewish shops and more than 1,000 synagogues were either damaged or destroyed. The damage was estimated at 39 million Reichmarks.[92]
The death toll was officially given as 91, but it may have been higher.[93] 30,000 men were sent to the concentration camps of Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen,[94] but many were released within weeks. Only 2,000 remained in the camps by early 1939.[95] German Jewry was made collectively responsible for restitution of the damage resulting from the pogrom, and they furthermore had to pay an "atonement tax" of more than a billion Reichsmarks. Insurance payments for damages to their property were confiscated by the government. A decree on 12 November barred Jews from most of the remaining occupations that they had not yet been banned from.[96] After Kristallnacht, Jews caught in the Third Reich stepped up their efforts to leave the country. It also marked the end of any sort of public Jewish activity and culture.[97]
Territorial solution and resettlement
Before World War II, the Nazis considered mass deportation of German, and later European, Jewry from Europe.[98] Among the areas considered for possible resettlement were British Palestine,[99] and French Madagascar.[100] After the war began, Nazi leaders considered the idea of deporting Europe's Jews to Siberia.[101]
Palestine was the only location to which any Nazi relocation plan produced any results, via the Haavara Agreement between the Zionist Federation of Germany and the Nazi government.[102] This agreement resulted in the transfer of about 60,000 German Jews and $100 million from Germany to Palestine, but it ended with the outbreak of World War II.[103]
In May 1940 Madagascar became the focus of German deportation efforts.[100] In its favour, the island's unfavorable conditions would hasten deaths.[104] Various Nazis began discussing the idea in 1938 and Adolf Eichmann's office was ordered to carry out resettlement planning, but no evidence of actual planning until after the fall of France in June 1940 exists.[105] But the inability to defeat Great Britain prevented the movement of Jews across the seas,[106] and the end of the Madagascar Plan was announced on 10 February 1942.[107]
World War II
German-occupied Poland
Germany's invasion of Poland increased the urgency of the "Jewish Question". Poland was home to about three million Jews, nearly nine percent of the Polish population, two-thirds of whom fell under Nazi control with Poland's capitulation.
Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) which coordinated Jewish policy in Poland, recommended concentrating all the Polish Jews in ghettos in major cities.[citation needed] Cities chosen were located on railway lines to facilitate later deportation.[108] The Jews in the ghettos, mostly in the General Government area of central Poland, were put to work under the Reich Labor Office headed by Fritz Sauckel. Many thousands died from maltreatment, disease, starvation, and exhaustion, but there was still no program of systematic killing. The Germans considered forced labor as a form of extermination, however, calling it Vernichtung durch Arbeit ("destruction through work").
Although it was clear by late 1941 that the SS hierarchy was determined to embark on a policy of killing all the Jews under German control, there was still opposition to this policy within the Nazi regime, although the motive was economic, not humanitarian. Hermann Göring, who had overall control of the German war industry, and the German army's Economics Department, argued that the Jewish labor force assembled in the General Government area was an asset too valuable to waste, particularly with Germany failing to secure rapid victory over the Soviet Union.
General Government and Lublin reservation (Nisko plan)
After the invasion of Poland, the Germans set up a "Jewish reservation" in the Lublin area, the Nisko Plan. Adolf Eichmann was assigned the task of removing all Jews from Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to this reservation.[109] The first Jews were sent in October 1939.[110] By the end of January 1940, a total of 78,000 Jews had been deported there from the Third Reich.[111] In late March 1940 Göring put the Nisko Plan on hold,[112] and abandoned it entirely by the end of April.[citation needed] By the time the Nisko Plan was stopped, the total number of Jews who had been transported to Nisko had reached 95,000, many of whom had died.[113]
Other occupied countries
When Germany occupied Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France in 1940, and Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941, antisemitic measures were also introduced into these countries and France's overseas territories,[114] although the pace and severity varied greatly from country to country according to local political circumstances. Jews were removed from economic and cultural life and were subject to various restrictive laws, but physical deportation did not occur in most places before 1942. The Vichy regime in occupied France actively collaborated with the Nazi regime in persecuting the Jews of France and French North Africa. Germany's allies Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Finland were pressured to introduce antisemitic measures, but for the most part they did not comply until they were compelled to do so. The German puppet regime in Croatia, on the other hand, began actively persecuting Jews on its own initiative.
In Italian-ruled Libya, the Germans occupied Benghazi's Jewish Quarter in 1942 and deported more than 2,000 Jews to Nazi labor camps. By the end of WWII, about one-fifth of those who were sent away had perished.[citation needed] Several forced labor camps for Jews were established in Libya.[115]
Vichy France's government implemented anti-Jewish measures in French Algeria and the two French Protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco.[116] The French Protectorate of Tunisia was the only French territory in North Africa to come under direct Nazi occupation. It had 100,000 Jews when the Germans and Italians arrived in November 1942.[citation needed] An estimated 5,000 Jews were subjected to forced labor,[117] and some of them were deported to the Nazi death camps in Poland.[citation needed] It has been estimated that 250 Jews died under Nazi occupation.[118][full citation needed]
In October 1940, Gauleiters Josef Bürckel and Robert Heinrich Wagner oversaw Operation Bürckel, the expulsion of the Jews into unoccupied France from their gaues and the parts of Alsace-Lorraine that had been annexed to Germany. Only those Jews in mixed marriages were not expelled.[119] The Jews expelled in Operation Bürckel were interned in harsh conditions by the Vichy authorities at various camps.[119]
In Shanghai, there were about 20,000 Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe, because they could emigrate there without a visa. After the Wannsee conference, Hitler’s Germany sent SS-Colonel Joseph Meisinger, the “Butcher of Warsaw to Shanghai, and forced the Japanese ruler, an ally of the Third Reich, to put all the Jews in a ghetto, to be called the Hongkew ghetto. But, the Japanese government ignored the Nazis, and didn’t murder the Jews, who left Shanghai after 1945.
Concentration and labor camps (1933–1945)
The Third Reich first used concentration camps as places of incarceration. And though death rates were high—with a mortality rate of 50%—they were not designed to be killing centers. After 1939, the camps increasingly became places where Jews and POWs were either killed or made to work as slave laborers.[citation needed] It is estimated in the occupied countries that Germans established 30,000 slave labor camps and subcamps, almost 1,000 concentration camps, and another 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps.[120] New camps were founded in areas with large Jewish, Slavic, or other oppressed populations, including inside Germany. Prisoner transportation was often carried out in open rail freight cars; many died before reaching their destination.
Extermination through labour was a policy of systematic extermination—camp inmates would literally be worked to death, or worked to physical exhaustion, when they would be gassed or shot.[121][122] Slave labour was used in war production. Those fit for work were dispatched for 12- to 14-hour shifts. Roll calls before and after could sometimes last for hours; prisoners regularly died of exposure.[citation needed] Some camps tattooed prisoners with an identification number on arrival, but not all did.[123]
Ghettos (1939–1945)
After invading Poland, the Nazis established ghettos in the incorporated territories and General Government to confine Jews.[citation needed] The ghettos were formed and closed off from the outside world at different times and for different reasons.[124][125] For example, the Łódź ghetto was closed in April 1940 to force the Jews inside to give up money and valuables they did not actually have; the Warsaw ghetto was closed for health considerations (for the people outside, not inside, the ghetto); and the Lublin ghetto was not established until April 1941. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest, with 380,000 people; the Łódź Ghetto was second, holding 160,000.[citation needed]
The Germans required each ghetto to be run by a Judenrat, or Jewish council.[126] Councils were responsible for a ghetto's day-to-day operations, including distributing food, water, heat, medical care, and shelter. The Germans also required councils to confiscate property, organize forced labor, and, finally, facilitate deportations to extermination camps.[127] The councils' basic strategy was one of trying to minimise losses, by cooperating with Nazi authorities, bribing officials, and petitioning for better conditions or clemency.[128]
Eventually the Germans ordered the councils to compile lists of names of deportees to be sent for "resettlement".[citation needed] Although most ghetto councils complied with these orders,[129] some council leaders insisted that no individuals should be handed over who had not committed a capital crime.[citation needed] Leaders who refused these orders were shot. Some individuals or even complete councils committed suicide rather than cooperate with the deportations.[130] Others, like Chaim Rumkowski, who became the "dedicated autocrat" of Łódź,[131] argued that their responsibility was to save the Jews who could be saved, and that therefore others had to be sacrificed.[132] The councils' actions in facilitating Germany's persecution and murder of ghetto inhabitants was important to the Nazis.[133] When cooperation crumbled, as happened in the Warsaw ghetto after the Jewish Combat Organisation displaced the council's authority, the Germans lost control.[134]
Ghettos were intended to be temporary until the Jews were deported to other locations, which never happened. Instead, the inhabitants were sent to extermination camps. The ghettos were, in effect, immensely crowded prisons serving as instruments of "slow, passive murder."[135] Though the Warsaw Ghetto contained 30% of Warsaw's population, it occupied only 2.4% of the city's area, averaging 9.2 people per room. Between 1940 and 1942, starvation and disease, especially typhoid, killed hundreds of thousands in the ghettos.[citation needed] Over 43,000 Warsaw ghetto residents, or one in ten of the total population, died in 1941;[136] in Theresienstadt, more than half the residents died in 1942.[135]
Himmler ordered the start of the deportations to the extermination camps on 19 July 1942, and three days later, on 22 July, the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto began; over the next 52 days, until 12 September 300,000 people from Warsaw alone were transported in freight trains to the Treblinka extermination camp. Many other ghettos were completely depopulated.
The first ghetto uprising occurred in September 1942 in the small town of Łachwa in southeast Poland.[citation needed] Although there were armed resistance attempts in both the larger and smaller ghettos in 1943, in every case they failed against the overwhelming Nazi military force, and the remaining Jews were either killed or deported to the death camps.[137]
Pogroms (1939–1942)
A number of deadly pogroms occurred during the Holocaust. The Nazis encouraged some and others were spontaneous. Some, such as the Iaşi pogrom, were in lands controlled by Germany's allies.[citation needed] In the series of Lviv pogroms committed in occupied Poland, perhaps initiated by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, some 6,000 Polish Jews were murdered in the streets in July 1941, on top of 3,000 arrests and mass shootings by Einsatzgruppe C.[138] Other pogroms perpetrated by the Ukrainian militia in Poland included those at Łuck and Tarnopol.[citation needed] During the Jedwabne pogrom of July 1941, in the presence of the Nazi officers, several hundred Jews were murdered by some local Poles, with some being burned alive in a barn.[139][g]
Death squads (1941–1943)
Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 opened a new phase in the Holocaust.[140] Nazi propaganda portrayed the war against the Soviet Union as both an ideological war between German National Socialism and Jewish Bolshevism and a racial war between the Germans and the Jewish, Romani and Slavic Untermenschen ("sub-humans").[141] The pace of extermination intensified after the Nazis occupied Lithuania, where close to 80% of the 220,000 Lithuanian Jews were exterminated before year's end.[142][143] The Soviet territories occupied by early 1942 were inhabited at the start of the war by about three million Jews.
Local populations in some occupied Soviet territories actively participated in the killings of Jews and others. Besides participating in killings and pogroms, they helped identify Jews for persecution and rounded up Jews for German actions.[144] German involvement ranged from active instigation and involvement to more generalized guidance.[145] In Lithuania, Latvia, and western Ukraine locals were deeply involved in the murder of Jews from the beginning of the German occupation. Some of these Latvian and Lithuanian units also participated in the murder of Jews in Belarus. In the south, Ukrainians killed about 24,000 Jews and some went to Poland to serve as concentration and death-camp guards.[144] Military units from some countries allied to Germany also killed Jews. Romanian units were given orders to exterminate and wipe out Jews in areas they controlled.[146] Ustaše militia in Croatia persecuted and murdered Jews, among others.[citation needed] Many of the killings were carried out in public, a change from previous practice.[147]
The mass killings of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories was assigned to four SS formations called Einsatzgruppen ("task groups"), which were under Heydrich's overall command. Similar formations had been used to a limited extent in Poland in 1939, but the ones operating in the Soviet territories were much larger.[148] The Einsatzgruppen's commanders were ordinary citizens: the great majority were professionals and most were intellectuals.[149] According to Otto Ohlendorf the "Einsatzgruppen had the mission to protect the rear of the troops by killing the Jews, Gypsies, Communist functionaries, active Communists, and all persons who would endanger security.[citation needed] In practice, their victims were nearly all defenseless Jewish civilians and not a single Einsatzgruppe member was killed in action during these operations. By December 1941, the four Einsatzgruppen had killed a total of 300,000 people—mainly by shooting or with hand grenades at mass-killing sites outside the major towns.
The most notorious massacre of Jews in the Soviet Union was at a ravine called Babi Yar outside Kiev,[citation needed] where 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation on 29–30 September 1941.[150] A mixture of SS, SD, and Security Police, assisted by Ukrainian police, carried out the killings. Although they did not participate in the killings, men of the 6th Army played a key role in rounding up the Jews of Kiev and transporting them to be shot at Babi Yar.
Gas vans
As the mass shootings continued in Russia, the Germans began to search for new methods of mass murder. This was driven by a need to have a more efficient method than simply shooting millions of victims. Himmler feared that the mass shootings were coarsening the killers and were causing psychological problems in the SS. His concerns were shared by his subordinates in the field. Himmler entrusted a subordinate with the task of finding more efficient means of killing masses of people. At first they attempted to use explosives as a murder method,[151] but this was found to be less efficient than shooting.
Starting in December 1939, another method was tried. Experimental gas vans equipped with gas cylinders and a sealed trunk compartment were used to kill the disabled and mentally-ill in occupied Poland, as part of the Action T4. In the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, larger vans holding up to 100 people were used from November 1941, using the engine's exhaust rather than tanked gases. Similar vans were introduced to the Chełmno extermination camp in December 1941, and another 15 were used by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet Union. The vans were used to kill about 500,000 people, primarily Jews but also Romani and others.[152]
Final Solution
Wannsee Conference
Reinhard Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942 in Berlin's Wannsee suburb. It brought together Nazi leaders, from the party and government departments responsible for policies linked to Jewish issues. The conference's initial purpose was to discuss plans for a comprehensive solution to the "Jewish question in Europe." Heydrich was put in overall charge of "final solution" throughout Europe.[citation needed] Heydrich meant for the conference to share information among the officials so they would all share responsibility.[153]
A copy of the minutes survives, but on Heydrich's instructions, they were written in "euphemistic language" so the exact words used are not known.[154] But Heydrich announced that the final solution of the “European Jewish Question” would involve some 11 million Jews living not only in territories controlled by Germany, inclusive of French North Africa ruled by pro-Nazi Vichy France, but in Ireland, Great Britain, and Turkey[155]
Extermination camps
During 1942 three camps were built as extermination camps for Operation Reinhard.[156][h] About the same time, two other camps, Chełmno[i] and Majdanek, were already functioning as, respectively, a labor camp and a POW camp: these now had extermination facilities added to them. The three new camps were built for the sole purpose of killing large numbers of Jews as quickly as possible – at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka. At around the same time, Auschwitz was experimenting with systematic killing. A seventh camp, at Maly Trostenets in Belarus, also had extermination facilities. Jasenovac was an extermination camp where mostly ethnic Serbs were killed.
Camp name | Killed | Coordinates[162] | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|
Auschwitz II | 1,000,000 | 50°2′9″N 19°10′42″E / 50.03583°N 19.17833°E | [163] |
Bełżec | 600,000 | 50°22′18″N 23°27′27″E / 50.37167°N 23.45750°E | [164] |
Chełmno | 320,000 | 52°9′27″N 18°43′43″E / 52.15750°N 18.72861°E | [157] |
Jasenovac | 83,000 | 45°16′54″N 16°56′6″E / 45.28167°N 16.93500°E | [165] |
Majdanek | 78,000 | 51°13′13″N 22°36′0″E / 51.22028°N 22.60000°E | [166] |
Maly Trostinets | 65,000 | 53°51′4″N 27°42′17″E / 53.85111°N 27.70472°E | [167] |
Sobibór | 250,000 | 51°26′50″N 23°35′37″E / 51.44722°N 23.59361°E | [168] |
Treblinka | 870,000 | 52°37′35″N 22°2′49″E / 52.62639°N 22.04694°E | [169] |
Gas chambers
All prisoners arrived by train at the extermination camps of Operation Reinhard. At Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec, and Majdanek, entire trainloads were sent straight to the gas chambers. At Auschwitz, the camp officials subjected individuals to selections. A small percentage of new arrivals deemed fit to work were sent to slave labor; the majority were marched from the platforms to a reception area where all their clothes and other possessions were seized. They were then herded naked into the gas chambers. Usually they were told these were showers or delousing chambers, and there were signs outside saying "baths" and "sauna." They were sometimes given a small piece of soap and a towel and were told to remember where they had put their belongings in order to prevent panic.[170]
At Auschwitz, after the chambers were filled, the doors were shut and pellets of Zyklon-B were dropped into the chambers through vents,[171] releasing toxic HCN, or hydrogen cyanide.[citation needed] Those inside died within 20 minutes; the speed of death depended on how close the inmate was standing to a gas vent, according to the commandant Rudolf Höss, who estimated that about one-third of the victims died immediately.[172] 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."[173] If the chamber had been very congested, as they often were, the victims were found half-squatting, their skin colored pink with red and green spots, some foaming at the mouth or bleeding from the ears.[172]
The gas was then pumped out, the bodies were removed (which would take up to four hours), gold fillings in their teeth were extracted with pliers by dentist prisoners, and women's hair was cut.[174][j] The work was done by the Sonderkommando, which were work units of Jewish prisoners.[176] When the Sonderkommando had finished with the bodies, the SS conducted spot checks to make sure all the gold had been removed from the victims' mouths. If a check revealed that gold had been missed, the Sonderkommando prisoner responsible was thrown into the furnace alive as punishment.[177]
At first, the bodies were buried in deep pits and covered with lime, but between September and November 1942, on the orders of Himmler, they were dug up and burned. In early 1943, new gas chambers and crematoria were built to accommodate the numbers.[178]
Jewish resistance
For the great majority of Jews, resistance could take only the passive forms of delay, evasion, negotiation, bargaining and where possible, bribery of German officials. The Nazis encouraged this by forcing the Jewish communities to police themselves. Germans held out the promise of concessions in exchange for each surrender, enmeshing the Jewish leadership so deeply in compromise that a decision to stand and fight was never possible. The historical conditioning of the Jewish communities of Europe to accept persecution and avert disaster through compromise and negotiation was the most important factor in the failure to resist until the very end. Uprisings in the ghettoes only took place when the Jewish population had been greatly reduced and it was obvious that no further compromise was possible. The Jewish communities were also systematically deceived about German intentions, and were cut off from most sources of news from the outside world. The Germans told the Jews that they were being deported to work camps – euphemistically calling it "resettlement in the East" – and maintained this illusion through elaborate deceptions all the way to the gas chamber doors. Rumours of the reality of the extermination camps filtered back only slowly to the ghettos, and were usually not believed.
Peter Longerich observes that in the Polish ghettos by the end of 1942 that "there was practically no resistance."[citation needed] He argues that one of the reasons for this were that there were no organized groups until the early part of 1942.[179] Raul Hilberg accounts for this compliant attitude by evoking the history of Jewish persecution: as had been the case before in history, simply appealing to their oppressors, and complying with orders, would hopefully avoid inflaming the situation and so mitigate the damage until the onslaught abated.[180] They were "caught in the straitjacket of their history", and the realisation that this time was different came too late.[180]
Discussing the case of Warsaw, Timothy Snyder notes in a similar vein that it was only during the three months after the massive deportations of July–September 1942 that general agreement on the need for armed resistance was reached.[181] By the time of the biggest act of armed resistance, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of spring 1943, only a small minority of Polish Jews were still alive.[179]
Henri Michel argues that resistance consisted not only of physical opposition, but of any activity that gave the Jews dignity and humanity in humiliating and inhumane conditions. Yehuda Bauer restricts Michel's definition somewhat, making resistance as actions that opposed somehow the German directives, laws, or conduct.[182]
In every ghetto, in every deportation train, in every labour camp, even in the death camps, the will to resist was strong, and took many forms: fighting with sticks and knives, individual acts of defiance and protest, the courage of obtaining food under the threat of death, the nobility of refusing to allow the Germans their final wish to gloat over panic and despair. Even passivity was a form of courage. ... To die with dignity was in itself courageous. To resist the dehumanizing, brutalizing force of evil, to refuse to be abased to the level of animals, to live through the torment, to outlive the tormentors, these too were courageous. Merely to give a witness by one's own testimony was, in the end, to contribute to a moral victory. Simply to survive was a victory of the human spirit.
— Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust[183]
Hilberg cautions against overstating the extent of Jewish resistance, or using all-encompassing definitions of it like that deployed by Gilbert;[184] aruging that by turning isolated incidents into resistance, it obscures the underlying German motivations and elevates the slaughter of innocent people into some kind of battle. He also contends that by ascribing to every European Jew acts of resistance, it diminishes the heroism of those who to active measures to resist the Germans.[184] Finally he asserts that the blending of the passive majority with the active few is a way of deflecting questions about the survival strategies and leadership of the Jewish community.[185]
Armed resistance
Jewish Uprisings took place in dozens of Nazi ghettos as well as some of the camps. Groups such as the Jewish Combat Organization, Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, and the Jewish Military Union in the Warsaw Ghetto, or the United Partisan Organization in Vilna, were formed to resist through armed revolts or resistance.[citation needed] Over a hundred revolts and uprisings are known to have occurred in ghettos and other locations in Eastern Europe.[186]
The best known example of Jewish armed resistance was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943,[186] when thousands of poorly armed Jewish fighters held the SS at bay for four weeks before being crushed by overwhelmingly superior forces. According to Jewish accounts, several hundred Germans were killed, while the Germans reported 17 dead and 93 wounded. 13,000 Jews were killed and 57,885 were deported according the Germans. This uprising was followed by the revolt in the Treblinka extermination camp in May 1943, when the inmates revolted. They killed a number of guards and set fire to some camp buildings, but another 900 inmates were killed, and out of the 600 who successfully escaped, only 40 survived the war. Another uprising occurred in the in the Białystok Ghetto.[citation needed] The uprising was launched on the night of 16 August 1943 and was the second-largest ghetto uprising organized in Nazi-occupied Poland.[187] The revolt began when the Germans announced mass deportations and a group of 300 to 500 Jewish insurgents revolted.
In mid-1943, there were clashes in the Vilna Ghetto between the FPO and the German occupiers. When the Nazis came to liquidate the ghetto in September 1943, members of the FPO fled to the forest and joined the partisans. In October, 600 Jewish prisoners, including Jewish Soviet prisoners of war, attempted an escape at the Sobibór death camp. The prisoners killed 11 German SS officers and a number of camp guards, but the inmates were forced to run. Three hundred of the prisoners were killed during the escape. Most of the survivors either died in the minefields surrounding the camp or were recaptured and executed. About 60 survived and joined the Soviet partisans. On 7 October 1944, 250 Jewish Sonderkommandos at Auschwitz attacked their guards and blew up Crematorium IV with explosives that had been smuggled in. Three German guards were killed during the uprising, one of whom was stuffed into an oven. The Sonderkommandos attempted a mass breakout, but all 250 were killed.
Partisan and resistance groups
While there were no independent Jewish resistance groups during the war, many joined other active partisan groups. Estimates of total Jewish participation in partisan units throughout Europe range from a low of 20,000 to a high of 100,000.[188] An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Jews joined the Soviet partisan movement.[189]
In the occupied Polish and Soviet territories, thousands of Jews fled into the swamps or forests and joined the partisans, although the partisan movements did not always welcome them. In Lithuania and Belarus, an area with terrain suited to partisan operations, such groups saved thousands of Jews from extermination. No such opportunities existed for the Jews in cities such as Budapest. However, in Amsterdam, and other parts of the Netherlands, many Jews were active in the Dutch Resistance.[citation needed] Some of the fighters in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 had participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. Jews also joined the Polish Home Army or other Polish forces. According to Timothy Snyder, "more Jews fought in the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 than in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943".[190] Joining the partisans was an option only for the young and the fit who were willing to leave their families. Many Jewish families preferred to die together rather than be separated.
French Jews were also highly active in the French Resistance, which conducted a guerilla campaign against the Nazis and Vichy French authorities, helped Allied military forces, and assisted the liberation of many occupied French cities. Although Jews made up only one percent of the French population, they made up fifteen to twenty percent of the French Resistance.[citation needed] Zionist Jews formed the Armee Juive (Jewish Army), which participated in armed resistance under a Zionist flag, smuggled Jews out of the country,[191] and participated in the liberation of Paris and other cities.[192]
Jews in the Allied forces
As many as 1.4 million Jewish soldiers fought in the Allied armies.[193] including 500,000 in the Red Army, 550,000 in the U.S. Army, 100,000 in the Polish army and 30,000 in the British army.[194] About 200,000 Jewish soldiers serving in the Red Army died in the war.[195] The Jewish Brigade, a unit of 5,000 Jewish volunteers from the British Mandate of Palestine, fought in the British Army. German-speaking Jewish volunteers from the Special Interrogation Group performed commando and sabotage operations against the Nazis behind front lines in the Western Desert Campaign.
Medical experimentation
The SS used the inmates of both the concentration and extermination camps as subjects of medical experiments. Both Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners were used for a variety of experiments.[196] The most notorious of these physicians was Josef Mengele, who worked in Auschwitz. His experiments included placing subjects testing drugs on them, freezing them, attempting to change their eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, and amputations and other surgeries.[197] The full extent of his work is unknown because Otmar von Verschuer destroyed the correspondence Mengele sent to him while Mengele was at Auschwitz.[198] Subjects who survived Mengele's experiments were almost always killed and dissected shortly afterwards.
Climax
During 1943 and 1944, the extermination camps killed hundreds of thousands of people shipped to them by rail from almost every country within the German sphere of influence.[citation needed] During the Hungarian deportations in May and June 1944,[199] up to 6,000 people were being gassed every day at Auschwitz.[200]
Despite the high productivity of the war industries based in the Jewish ghettos of General Government, they were liquidated in 1942–1943, and their populations shipped to the camps for extermination.[citation needed] About 42,000 Jews were shot during the Operation Harvest Festival on 3–4 November 1943.[201] At the same time, rail shipments arrived regularly from western and southern Europe at the extermination camps. Few Jews were shipped from the occupied Soviet territories to the camps: the killing of Jews in this zone was left in the hands of the SS, aided by locally recruited auxiliaries.
Shipments of Jews to the camps had priority over anything but the army's needs on the German railways, and continued even in the face of the increasingly dire military situation at the end of 1942[202] and the Allied air attacks on German industry and transport.[citation needed] Army leaders and economic managers complained about this diversion of resources and at the killing of skilled Jewish workers; however, Nazi leaders rated ideological imperatives above economic considerations.[203] In fact, many of the war industries using slave labour were more productive when SS supervision was removed;[204] otherwise their brutality proved counterproductive.
By 1943, it was evident to the armed forces leadership that Germany was losing the war.[205] Many senior officials began to fear the retribution that might await Germany and them personally for the crimes being committed in their name.[citation needed] In October 1943, Himmler gave a speech to senior Nazi Party officials gathered in Poznań. Here he came closer than ever before to stating explicitly his intent to exterminate the Jews of Europe:
I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It's one of those things that is easily said: "The Jewish people are being exterminated", says every party member, "this is very obvious, it's in our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, we're doing it, hah, a small matter." ... The hard decision had to be made that this people should be caused to disappear from earth…Perhaps, at a much later time, we can consider whether we should say something more about this to the German people. I myself believe that it is better for us—us together—to have borne this for our people, that we have taken the responsibility for it on ourselves (the responsibility for an act, not just for an idea), and that we should now take this secret with us to the grave.
— Heinrich Himmler, "Secret Address to SS Officers" 10 June 1943, quoted in Berel Lang Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide[206]
The scale of extermination slackened somewhat at the beginning of 1944 once the ghettos in occupied Poland were emptied,[citation needed] but on 19 March 1944, Hitler ordered the military occupation of Hungary, and dispatched Eichmann to Budapest to supervise the deportation of Hungarian Jews.[207] More than half of Hungarian Jews were shipped to Auschwitz after the occupation. The camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, said at his trial that he killed 400,000 Hungarian Jews in three months.
"Blood for goods"
The operation to kill Hungarian Jews met strong opposition within the Nazi hierarchy, and there were some suggestions that Hitler should offer the Allies a deal where they would be spared in exchange for a favorable peace settlement.[citation needed] There were unofficial negotiations in Istanbul between Himmler's agents, British agents, and representatives of Jewish organizations; at one point an attempt by Eichmann to exchange one million Jews for 10,000 trucks[208]—the so-called "blood for goods" proposal[209]—but there was no real possibility of such a deal being struck on this scale.
Escapes and early Allied responses
Escapes from the camps were few, but not unknown.[citation needed] Assisting a Jew in any way within Nazi-occupied Poland was life-threatening as a result decrees ordering the death penalty for hiding a Jew, later expanded to include the death penalty for any aid to Jews.[210]
In February 1942, an escapee from Chełmno, Jacob Grojanowski, reached the Warsaw Ghetto, where he gave detailed information about the camp to the Oneg Shabbat group. His report, which became known as the Grojanowski Report, was smuggled out of the ghetto and reached London by June 1942.[157][211] In the meantime, by 1 February, the United States Office of War Information had decided not to release information about the extermination of the Jews because it was felt that it would mislead the public into thinking the war was simply a Jewish problem.[212]
After being smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto and infiltrating Bełżec, Jan Karski reported to Allies in 1942 on the situation in Poland, especially the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and the mass killings.[213] In December 1942, the Polish Foreign Minister in-exile sent a report to all Allied governments which detailed liquidation of the ghettos and denounced the mass extermination the Jewish population.[214] This report and the Polish Government's lobbying efforts triggered the Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations of 17 December 1942 which made public and condemned the mass extermination of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland.[215]
By at least 9 October 1942, British radio broadcast news of gassing of Jews to the Netherlands.[citation needed] News about gassing Jews was also published in the illegal newspapers of the Dutch resistance. The news was so unbelievable that many assumed it was merely war propaganda. Many Jews were warned that they would be murdered, but as escape was impossible for most of them, they preferred to believe that the warnings were false.
Two Jews, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, escaped from Auschwitz in April 1944, eventually reaching Slovakia. The 32-page document they dictated to Jewish officials about the mass murder at Auschwitz became known as the Vrba-Wetzler report. The level of detail with which they described the transports allowed Slovakian officials to compare their account with their own deportation records, and the corroboration convinced the Allies to take the report seriously.[217][page needed] The New York Times published material from the Vrba-Wetzler report in June and July 1944.[218][219] The subsequent pressure persuaded Miklós Horthy to bring the deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz to a halt on 9 July, saving up to 200,000 Jews from death.[220]
Death marches (1944–1945)
By mid-1944, the Holocaust had largely run its course. Those Jewish communities within easy reach of the Nazi regime had been largely exterminated, in proportions ranging from about 25 percent in France to more than 90 percent in Poland.[citation needed] On 5 May, Himmler claimed in a speech that "the Jewish question has in general been solved in Germany and in the countries occupied by Germany".[221] During the rest of 1944 finding victims became more difficult due to defections of some of Germany's allies, Allied air attacks, and the loss of German-held territory.
As the Soviet armed forces advanced, the camps in eastern Poland were closed down, with surviving inmates shipped to camps closer to Germany.[citation needed] Despite the military situation, efforts were made to conceal evidence of what had happened in the camps. The gas chambers were dismantled, the crematoria dynamited, and the mass graves dug up and the corpses cremated. Local commanders continued to kill Jews, and to shuttle them from camp to camp by forced "death marches" until the last weeks of the war.[222][k]
Already sick after months or years of violence and starvation, prisoners were forced to march out of the camps. Some were marched to train stations and then transported for days at a time without food or shelter in open freight cars and forced to march again at the other end to the new camp. Others were marched the entire distance to the new camp. Those who lagged behind or fell were shot. Around 250,000 Jews died during these marches.[224]
The largest and best-known of the death marches took place in January 1945, when the Soviet army advanced on Poland. Nine days before the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz, the SS marched 60,000 prisoners out of the camp toward Wodzisław, 56 km (35 mi) away, where they were put on freight trains to other camps. Around 15,000 died on the way.
Liberation
The first major camp to be encountered by Allied troops, Majdanek, was discovered by the advancing Soviets on 23 July 1944. Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec were never liberated, but were destroyed by the Nazis in 1943.[citation needed] Chełmno was liberated by the Soviets on 20 January 1945.[citation needed] Auschwitz was liberated, also by the Soviets, on 27 January 1945;[225] Buchenwald by the Americans on 11 April;[226] Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British on 15 April;[227] Dachau was liberated by the Americans on 29 April;[228] Ravensbrück was liberated by the Soviets on 30 April;[229] Mauthausen was liberated by the Americans on 5 May;[230] and the Red Cross took control of Theresienstadt on 4 May,[231] some days before the Soviets arrived.[232]
In most of the camps discovered by the Soviets, almost all the prisoners had already been removed, leaving only a few thousand alive[citation needed]—7,600 inmates were found in Auschwitz,[233] including 180 children who had been experimented on by doctors.[citation needed] Some 60,000 prisoners were discovered at Bergen-Belsen by the British 11th Armoured Division,[234] 13,000 corpses lay unburied, and another 10,000 died from typhus or malnutrition over the following weeks.[235] On the orders of the British, the SS guards picked up the corpses and took them to mass graves.
The BBC's Richard Dimbleby described the scenes that greeted him and the British Army at Belsen:
Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which… The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them… Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live… A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms… He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days. This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.
— Richard Dimbleby, 1945[236]
Responses to the Holocaust
Perpetrator's motivations
In his 1965 essay "Command and Compliance", historian Hans Buchheim wrote there was no coercion to murder Jews and others, and all who committed such actions did so out of free will.[237] Buchheim wrote that the chances to avoid participating in killing Jews were available for perpetrators, although they did not often admit that after the war,[237] and that he found no evidence that SS men who refused to carry out criminal orders were sent to concentration camps or executed.[238] Moreover, SS rules prohibited acts of gratuitous sadism and acts of sadism were taken on the individual initiative of those who were either especially cruel or who wished to prove themselves ardent Nazis.[237] Finally, he argued that those who committed crimes did so because they wished to conform to the values of the group and were afraid of being branded "weak" by their colleagues.[239]
In his 1992 monograph Ordinary Men, the historian Christopher Browning examined the deeds of German Reserve Police Battalion 101, used for massacres and round-ups of Jews as well as deportations to the death camps. The members of the battalion were middle-aged men of working-class background who were too old for regular military duty.[240] They were given no special training for genocide and at first,[241] the commander gave his men the choice of opting out of direct participation in the killing of Jews if they found it too unpleasant. The majority chose not to opt out; fewer than 12 men, out of a battalion of 500 did so on the first occasion.[242] Browning argued that the men of the battalion killed out of peer pressure, not blood-lust.[243]
Historian Sergei Kudryashov studied the guards trained at the Trawniki SS camp division ("Trawniki men"), who provided the bulk of personnel for the Operation Reinhard death camps. Most of them were former Red Army soldiers who volunteered to join the SS in order to get out of the POW camps.[244] Kudryashov claimed that prior to their capture many had been Communists.[245] The vast majority carried out the SS's expectations of how to treat Jews,[245] and most personally killed Jews.[246] Following Browning, Kudryashov argued that the Trawniki men were examples of ordinary people becoming willing killers.[247]
Germans usually justified the Einsatzgruppen's massacres on the grounds of anti-Bolshevik, anti-partisan or anti-bandit operations, but the historian Andreas Hillgruber aruges that this was merely an excuse for the German Army's considerable involvement in the Holocaust in Russia.[248] Hillgruber maintained that those German generals who claimed that the Einsatzgruppen were a necessary anti-partisan response were lying.[248] Jürgen Förster agrees, and argued that the Wehrmacht played a key role in the Holocaust. He said it is wrong to describe the Holocaust as solely the work of the SS with the Wehrmacht as a passive and disapproving bystander.[249]
Army co-operation with the SS in anti-Bolshevik, anti-partisan and anti-Jewish operations was close and intensive. After a 1941 SS "anti-partisan" operation which killed over 14,000 Jews and only 1000 partisans, General Max von Schenckendorff, who commanded the Army Group Center Rear Area, ordered that all Wehrmacht security divisions should emulate this example when on anti-partisan duty, and organized a joint SS-Wehrmacht seminar on how best to kill Jews. The event, that became known as the Mogilev Conference, ended with a German unit killing Jews as a demonstration.[250]
German public
In his 1983 book, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw examined everyday life in Bavaria during the Nazi period. Kershaw argued that the most common viewpoint of Bavarians was indifference towards the persecution of Jews. Kershaw argued that most Bavarians were vaguely aware of the genocide, but were vastly more concerned about the war than the "Final Solution".[251] Kershaw made the analogy that "the road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference".[252][253]
Kershaw's assessment that most Bavarians, and by implication most Germans, were indifferent to the Holocaust faced criticism from historians Otto Dov Kulka and Michael Kater. Kater maintained that Kershaw downplayed the extent of popular antisemitism, and that though admitting that most of the "spontaneous" antisemitic actions of Nazi Germany were staged, argued that because these actions involved substantial numbers of Germans, it is wrong to see the extreme antisemitism of the Nazis as coming solely from above.[254] Kulka argued that most Germans were more antisemitic than Kershaw portrayed them and that rather than "indifference", "passive complicity" would be a better term to describe the reaction of the German people.[255]
In a study focusing only on the views about Jews among Germans opposed to the Nazi regime, historian Christof Dipper in his 1983 essay "Der Deutsche Widerstand und die Juden" argued that the majority of the anti-Nazi national-conservatives were antisemitic.[254] Though Dipper noted no one in the German resistance supported the Holocaust, he also commented that the national-conservatives did not intend to restore civil rights to the Jews after the planned overthrow of Hitler.[254]
Research by the United States Holocaust Museum has established that because the camps were so widespread[l] it is unlikely that the German population could avoid knowing about the persecutions and killings.[120] Robert Gellately has argued that the German civilian population were, by and large, aware of what was happening. According to Gellately, the government openly announced the conspiracy through the media and civilians were aware of its every aspect except for the use of gas chambers.[256]
Victims enumerated
Victims (enlarged) | Killed | Source |
---|---|---|
Jews | 5.93 million | Dawidowicz[257] |
Soviet POWs | 2–3 million | Berenbaum[258] |
Ethnic Poles | 1.8–2 million | Piotrowski[259][260] |
Other Slavs | | | | | |
Disabled | 270,000 | DCHGS[261] |
Romani | 90,000–220,000 | USHMM / Hancock[262][m][264] |
Homosexuals | 5,000–15,000 | Harran[265] |
Jehovah's Witnesses | 2,500–5,000 | Shulman [266] |
The number of victims depends on which definition of the Holocaust is used.[7] The number of Jewish victims is somewhere over 5 million,[7] with upper estimates ranging from 5.9 million,[267] to 6 million,[79] or even over 6 million.[268] The broadest definition of the Holocaust would raise the death toll to 17 million.[7] A research project conducted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimated that 15 to 20 million people died or were imprisoned during the Holocaust.[120] Rudolph Rummel estimates the total democidal death toll of Nazi Germany to be 21 million.
Jewish death toll
Country (1945) |
Death toll of Jews |
---|---|
Poland | 2,700,000 |
Soviet republics | 2,100,000 |
Germany | 144,000 |
Austria | 48,767 |
Czechoslovakia | 143,000 |
Greece | 58,443 |
Netherlands | 102,000 |
Hungary | 559,250 |
Belgium | 28,000 |
Yugoslavia | 51,400 |
Romania | 120,919 |
Norway | 758 |
France | 76,000 |
Bulgaria | 7,335 |
Luxembourg | 720 |
Denmark | 116 |
Italy | 5,596 |
Albania | 591 |
Since 1945, the most commonly cited figure for the total number of Jews killed has been 6 million, quoted originally by Adolf Eichmann.[citation needed][n] Of those victims, 1.5 million were children.[270] The Yad Vashem Museum writes that "there is no precise figure for the number of Jews killed",[271] but has been able to find documentation of more than three million names of Jewish victims killed.[272]
The early postwar calculations ranged from about 4.2 to 4.5 million in The Final Solution (1953) by Gerald Reitlinger, who was arguing against higher Russian estimates,[273] and 5.1 million from Raul Hilberg, to 5.95 million from Jacob Lestschinsky.[274] Yehuda Bauer and Robert Rozett in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust estimate 5.59–5.86 million.[275] A study led by Wolfgang Benz suggests 5.29 to 6.20 million. These estimates derive from comparing census records from before and after the war as well as the surviving German documentation on deportations and killings.[271] Martin Gilbert arrived at a "minimum estimate" of over 5.75 million Jewish victims.[276] Lucy S. Dawidowicz used the pre-war census figures to estimate that 5.934 million Jews died.[257]
The roughly six million killed in the Holocaust represent 60 to 75 percent of European Jewry, based on an estimated number of about eight to ten million Jews in the territories controlled by the Nazis. The uncertainty revolves around how many Jews there were in the Soviet Union; compounded by the NKVD practice of claiming foreign nationals as Soviet citizens.[277][278] Of Poland's 3.3 million Jews, about 90 percent were killed.[citation needed] At the beginning of World War II, the Jewish population of the Baltic States was around 350,000 in total: 250,000 in Lithuania, 95,000 in Latvia, and 4,500 in Estonia.[279] By the end of 1941, close to 230,000 Jews in Latvia and Lithuania had been murdered during the previous six months.[280] Of 4,000 Jews in Estonia before the German invasion, some 3,000 fled to the Soviet Union. The remaining 1,000 were all murdered by the SS killing squads.[281]
According to Holocaust Encyclopedia, there were 523,000 Jews in Germany in 1933. Following the Nazi takeover, many left the country. About 202,000 Jews remained in Germany and 57,000 in Austria after the invasion of Poland. The majority died in the Holocaust.[282]
In Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Netherlands, and Yugoslavia, over 70 percent of the Jews were killed. Fifty to 70 percent were killed in Romania, Belgium and Hungary. It is likely that a similar proportion were killed in Soviet Belarus and the Soviet Ukraine, but these figures are less certain. Countries with notably lower proportions of deaths include Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Italy, and Norway. Albania was the only country occupied by Germany that had a larger Jewish population in 1945 than in 1939.[citation needed][o]
Death camps
At Auschwitz-Birkenau over 1,000,000 people were killed.[285][286] At Treblinka 870,000[169] to 925,000 Jews were murdered.[287] At Bełżec, between 434,000[288] and 600,000 Jews were slaughtered.[164] At Chełmno, between 152,000[289] and 320,000 Jews were executed.[157] At Sobibór, between 170,000[290] and 250,000 Jews were killed.[168] At Majdanek, depending on the various sources, between 79,000 and 235,000 Jews were murdered.[166][291] For the death camps, 80–90% of the victims are estimated to be Jews. They accounted for half the total number of Jews killed in the entire Holocaust.[257]
Other Jewish deaths
In addition to those who died in the extermination camps, at least half a million Jews died in other camps, including the major concentration camps in Germany. Although these were not extermination camps, they had large numbers of Jewish prisoners at various times, particularly in the last year of the war as the Nazis withdrew from Poland.[citation needed] Around one million Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet territories,[292] an approximate figure, since the Einsatzgruppen reports did not always survive the war.[293] Many more died through execution or of disease and malnutrition in the ghettos of Poland before they could be deported.
By country
In the 1990s, the opening of government archives in Eastern Europe resulted in the adjustment of the death tolls published in the pioneering work by Hilberg, Dawidowicz and Gilbert.
Non-Jewish
Slavs
The Nazis considered the Slavs as subhumans,[294] or Untermenschen.[295] Heinrich Himmler in a secret memorandum dated 25 May 1940 expressed his own thoughts and the future plans for the populations in the East. Himmler stated that it was in the German interests to discover as many ethnic groups in the East and splinter them as much as possible, find and select racially valuable children to be sent to Germany to assimilate them and restrict non-Germans in the conquered territories to schools which would only teach them how to write their own name, count up to 500 and to obey Germans.[296]
Himmler's General Plan East, or Generalplan Ost,[297] which was agreed to by Hitler in the summer of 1942,[298] involved exterminating, expelling, or enslaving most or all Slavs from their lands so as to make living space for German settlers, something that would be carried out over a period of 20–30 years.[299][300] Though Generalplan Ost was never implemented,[citation needed] historian Rudolph Rummel estimates the number of Slav civilians and POWs murdered by the Nazis to be 10,547,000.[301]
Ethnic Poles
German planners in November 1939 called for "the complete destruction" of all Poles.[302] Poland under German occupation was to be cleared of Poles and settled by German colonists.[303] But Nazi planners decided against a genocide of ethnic Poles on the same scale as against Jews, at least in the short term.[304]
German actions against ethnic Poles were not on the scale of the Jewish genocide. Most Polish Jews perished during the Holocaust, while most Christian Poles survived the occupation.[305] Between 1.8 and 2.1 million non-Jewish Polish citizens perished in German hands during the course of the war, about four-fifths of whom were ethnic Poles with the rest ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians.[259][260] According to 2009 estimates by the IPN, over 2.5 million non-Jewish Polish citizens died as a result of the German occupation.[306] At least 200,000 of these victims died in concentration camps with about 146,000 being killed in Auschwitz. Many others died as a result of general massacres or uprisings such as the Warsaw Uprising where between 120,000 and 200,000 civilians were killed.[307]
The policy of the Germans in Poland included reducing food rations, deliberate lowering of public hygiene, and the deprivation of medical services. The general mortality rate rose from 13 to 18 per thousand.[308] Overall, about 5.6 million of the victims of World War II were Polish citizens,[260] both Jewish and non-Jewish, and over the course of the war Poland lost 16 percent of its pre-war population.[309] Over 90 percent of the death toll came through non-military losses, through various deliberate actions by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.[307]
Other West Slavs
Other West Slavic populations were persecuted. By one estimate, 345,000 Czechoslovak citizens were executed or otherwise killed, and hundreds of thousands West Slavs were sent to concentration camps and used as forced labour.[310] The villages of Lidice and Ležáky were completely destroyed by the Nazis; all men over 16 years of age were murdered and the rest of the population were sent to concentration camps where many women and nearly all of the children were killed.
The German ethnic Sorbian population was also persecuted.
Ethnic Serbs and other South Slavs
In the Balkans, up to 581,000 Yugoslav civilians were killed during World War II in Yugoslavia.[311][312] The Germans had specific orders from Hitler to fight ruthlessly against the Serbs, who, besides being potential allies of the Russians, were considered Untermenschen (sub-humans).[313] The Ustaše collaborators conducted a systematic extermination of large numbers of people for political, religious or racial reasons. The most numerous victims were Serbs. Bosniaks, Croats and others were also victims of the Ustaše.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reports that between 77,000 and 99,000 persons were killed at the Jasenovac concentration camp.[314] Yad Vashem reports that over 500,000 Serbs were murdered by the Ustaše.[315]
According to the study, Bošnjaci u Jasenovačkom logoru ("Bosniaks in the Jasenovac concentration camp") by the author Nihad Halilbegović, at least 103,000 Bosniaks perished at the hands of both the Nazi regime and the Ustaše.[316] Excluding Slovenes under Italian rule, between 20,000 and 25,000 civilian Slovenes were killed.[317]
Albanian collaborationists cooperated with the Nazis in an extensive persecution of non-Albanians. Most of the war crimes were perpetrated by the Albanian SS Skenderbeg Division and the Balli Kombëtar.[citation needed] 3,000 to 10,000 Kosovo Serbs were murdered by the Albanians during the war, and another 30,000 to 100,000 were expelled.[318]
East Slavs
Soviet civilian populations in the occupied areas were also heavily persecuted outside of events taking place in the frontline warfare of the Eastern Front. Thousands of peasant villages across Soviet Russia, Belarus and Ukraine were destroyed by German troops.
In 1995 The Russian Academy of Sciences reported that the number of civilian victims in the USSR who were murdered at German hands, including Jews, totaled 13.7 million dead, 20% of the 68 million persons in the occupied USSR. This included 7.4 million victims of Nazi genocide and reprisals.[319]
In Belarus, Nazi Germany imposed a regime in the country that deported some 380,000 people for slave labour and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. More than 600 villages had their entire populations killed and at least 5,295 Belarusian settlements were destroyed by the Nazis. According to Timothy Snyder, of "the nine million people who were on the territory of Soviet Belarus in 1941, some 1.6 million were killed by the Germans in actions away from battlefields, including about 700,000 prisoners of war, 500,000 Jews, and 320,000 people counted as partisans (the vast majority of whom were unarmed civilians)".[320]
Soviet POWs
According to Michael Berenbaum, between two and three million Soviet prisoners-of-war—which was around 57 percent of all Soviet POWs—died of starvation, mistreatment, or executions between June 1941 and May 1945, most during their first year of captivity.[citation needed] According to other estimates by Daniel Goldhagen, an estimated 2.8 million Soviet POWs died in eight months in 1941–42, with a total of 3.5 million by mid-1944.[citation needed] The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has estimated that 3.3 million of the 5.7 million Soviet POWs died in German custody.[321] The death rates decreased as the POWs were needed to work as slaves to help the German war effort; by 1943, half a million of them had been deployed as slave labour.[258]
Romani people
The Nazi crimes against the Roma and Sinti people paralleled those against the Jews, and both groups were subject to discrimination under the Nuremberg racial laws. About 25% of the Romani population of Europe died in the war.[citation needed] Because the Romani are traditionally private with a culture based on oral history, less is known about their experience than is known about any other group.[322] Yehuda Bauer writes that the lack of information can be attributed to the Romani's distrust and suspicion, and to their humiliation, because some of the taboos in Romani culture regarding hygiene and sex were violated at Auschwitz.[323]
The treatment of the Romani was not consistent across German-occupied territories. In some areas, such as Luxembourg and the Baltic countries, the Nazis killed almost the entire Romani population. In other areas, such as Denmark or Greece, no Romanis were subjected to mass killings.[citation needed] Before being sent to the camps, the victims were herded into ghettos, including several hundred into the Warsaw Ghetto.[136] Further east, teams of Einsatzgruppen tracked down Romani encampments and murdered the inhabitants on the spot, leaving no records of the victims. They were also targeted by the allies of the Germans, such as the Ustaše regime in Croatia, where a large number of Romani were killed in the Jasenovac concentration camp.[citation needed]
In May 1942, the Romani were placed under similar labour and social laws to the Jews. On 16 December 1942, Heinrich Himmler issued a decree that "Gypsy Mischlinge [mixed breeds], Roma Gypsies, and members of the clans of Balkan origins who are not of German blood"[324] should be sent to Auschwitz, unless they had served in the Wehrmacht.[324] This was adjusted on 15 November 1943, when Himmler ordered that, in the occupied Soviet areas, "sedentary Gypsies and part-Gypsies are to be treated as citizens of the country. Nomadic Gypsies and part-Gypsies are to be placed on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps."[325] Bauer argues that this adjustment reflected Nazi ideology that the Romani, originally an Aryan population, had been "spoiled" by non-Romani blood.[326]
Donald Niewyk and Frances Nicosia write that the death toll was at least 130,000 of the nearly one million Romani in German-occupied Europe.[322] Michael Berenbaum writes that serious scholarly estimates lie between 90,000 and 220,000.[327] The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum calculates a death toll of at least 220,000.[262] Martin Gilbert estimates a total of more than 220,000 of the 700,000 Romani in Europe.[citation needed] Ian Hancock has argued in favour of a much higher figure of between 500,000 and 1,500,000.[264]
Persons of color
The number of Afro-Germans in Germany when the Nazis came to power is variously estimated at 5,000–25,000.[328] It is not clear whether these figures included Asians. Although blacks in Germany and German-occupied Europe were subjected to incarceration, sterilization, murder, and other abuse, there was no programme to kill all of them as there was for the Jews.[329] Meanwhile, Afrikaners, Berbers, Iranians and Pre-Partition Indians were classified as Aryans, so they were not persecuted. Racial restrictions were relaxed to the extent that Turkic peoples, Arabs and South Asians were recruited by the German military due to the shortage of manpower.
Others
Disabled and mentally ill
Nazis used the phrase Lebensunwertes Leben (Life unworthy of life) in reference to their disabled or mentally-ill victims.[330] In July 1933, the Sterilization Law allowing for compulsory sterilization of the "inferior" was passed.[331] In the first year of operation, this eugenics policy had over 80,000 cases, which were decided in favour of sterilization over 90 percent of the time. Estimates for the total number of involuntary sterilizations during the whole of the Third Reich range from 300,000 to 400,000.[332] In October 1939 Adolf Hitler signed a "euthanasia decree" backdated to 1 September 1939 that authorized Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, the chief of Hitler's Chancellery,[p] and Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician, to carry out the programme of involuntary euthanasia, known as Action T4.
The Action T4 programme aimed to maintain the racial purity of the German people by killing or sterilizing citizens who were judged to be disabled or suffering from mental disorders. The program was named after Tiergartenstraße 4, the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, where the various organizations involved were headquartered.[333]
Between 1939 and 1941, 80,000 to 100,000 mentally-ill adults in institutions were killed; 5,000 children in institutions; and 1,000 Jews in institutions. There were also specialized killing centres, where the deaths are estimated as 20,000, according to Georg Renno, the deputy director of Schloss Hartheim, one of the euthanasia centers, or 400,000, according to Frank Zeireis, the commandant of Mauthausen concentration camp.[334] Overall it has been estimated that over 270,000 individuals[261] with mental disorders of all kinds were put to death.[citation needed] Despite not being formally ordered to take part, psychiatrists and many psychiatric institutions took part in the planning and carrying out of the Action T4 at every stage, and constituted the connection to the later annihilation of Jews and others in the Holocaust.[335] After strong protests by the German Catholic and Protestant churches in August 1941 Hitler ordered the cancellation of the T4 program,[336] although the disabled and mentally-ill continued to be killed until the end of the war, just in smaller numbers.
Homosexuals
Between 5,000 and 15,000 German homosexuals are estimated to have been sent to concentration camps.[265] James Steakley writes that what mattered in Germany was criminal intent or character, rather than acts, and the "gesundes Volksempfinden" ("healthy sensibility of the people") became the guiding legal principle.[337] In 1936, Himmler created the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion.[338] Homosexuality was declared contrary to "wholesome popular sentiment",[265] and homosexuals were consequently regarded as "defilers of German blood".[citation needed] The Gestapo raided gay bars, tracked individuals using the address books of those they arrested, used the subscription lists of gay magazines to find others, and encouraged people to report suspected homosexual behavior and to scrutinize the behavior of their neighbors.[265][337]
Tens of thousands were convicted between 1933 and 1944 and sent to camps for "rehabilitation", where they were identified by pink triangles.[337] Hundreds were castrated, sometimes voluntarily in hopes that they could avoid criminal sentences, although in some cases the consent had been forced.[339] They were abused, tortured, used in medical experiments, and killed.[265] Steakley writes that the full extent of gay suffering was slow to emerge after the war. Many victims kept their stories to themselves because homosexuality remained criminalized in postwar Germany.[337]
Political opponents
German communists, socialists and trade unionists were among the earliest opponents of the Nazis,[340] and they were also among the first to be sent to concentration camps. Within concentration camps such as Buchenwald, German communists were privileged in comparison to Jews because of their "racial purity".
Whenever the Nazis occupied a new territory, members of communist, socialist, or anarchist groups were normally to be the first persons detained or executed.[citation needed] Before the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler issued the Commissar Order, which ordered the execution of all political commissars and Communist Party members captured.[341] Nacht und Nebel ("Night and Fog") was a directive of Hitler in December 1941, resulting in kidnapping and the disappearance of political activists throughout Germany's occupied territories.
Jehovah's Witnesses
Because they refused to pledge allegiance to the Nazi party or to serve in the military, roughly 12,000 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. They were marked out by purple triangles. Between 2,500 and 5,000 were killed.[266] Historian Detlef Garbe writes that "no other religious movement resisted the pressure to conform to National Socialism with comparable unanimity and steadfastness."[342]
Uniqueness question
Part of a series on |
Genocide |
---|
Issues |
Related topics |
Category |
Shimon Samuels says that one debate in Holocaust scholarship is between "specifists" and "universalists". The former regards comparisons of the Holocaust to other genocides to be invidious trivialization, while the latter places the Holocaust alongside other experiences of mass killings as part and parcel of the global context of genocide and human suffering.[343] Proponents of the Holocaust's uniqueness argue that comparing it to other genocides trivializes the Holocaust, with regards to its scope, scale, methods and motivations.[344] Opponents of this view consider it immoral and unjustified to hold any tragedy as unique and beyond comparison. Others believe that debating the Holocaust's uniqueness itself is offensive and misguided.
A 2011 survey by Dan Stone deemed the debate "irrelevant" in genocide scholarship.[38] However specific arguments about the Nazi Holocaust continue to characterize the views of many specialists on the subject. A 2015 view from a historian of the Third Reich, Richard J. Evans:
Thus although the Nazi 'Final Solution' was one genocide among many, it had features that made it stand out from all the rest as well. Unlike all the others it was bounded neither by space nor by time. It was launched not against a local or regional obstacle, but at a world-enemy seen as operating on a global scale. It was bound to an even larger plan of racial reordering and reconstruction involving further genocidal killing on an almost unimaginable scale, aimed, however, at clearing the way in a particular region – Eastern Europe – for a further struggle against the Jews and those the Nazis regarded as their puppets. It was set in motion by ideologues who saw world history in racial terms. It was, in part, carried out by industrial methods. These things all make it unique.
— Richard Evans, The Third Reich in History and Memory[345]
Aftermath
Trials
The Nuremberg trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the Allied forces after World War II in Nuremberg, Germany, to prosecute prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany. The first, and best known of these trials,[citation needed] was the 1945–1946 trial of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT).[346] This tribunal tried 22 political and military leaders of the Third Reich,[347] except for Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels, all of whom had committed suicide several months before.[348]
The prosecution entered indictments against 24 major war criminals[q] and seven organizations—the leadership of the Nazi party, the Reich Cabinet, the Schutzstaffel (SS), Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Gestapo, the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the "General Staff and High Command". The indictments were for: participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of a crime against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace; war crimes; and crimes against humanity. The Tribunal passed out sentences ranging from acquittal to death by hanging.[349] Further trials at Nuremberg took place between 1946 and 1949, which tried a further 185 defendants.[350]
Effect on languages
Because the significant majority of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were speakers of Yiddish, the Holocaust had a profound and permanent effect on the fate of the Yiddish language and culture. On the eve of World War II, there were 11 to 13 million Yiddish speakers in the world.[351] The Holocaust led to a dramatic, sudden decline in the use of Yiddish, because the Jewish communities that used it in their day-to-day life were largely destroyed.[352] Of the remaining non-Yiddish speaking population, the Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish) speaking Jewish communities of Greece and the Balkans were also destroyed, which contributed to the near-extinction of this language.
Reparations
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the Jewish Agency submitted to the Allies a memorandum demanding reparations to Jews by Germany but it received no answer. In March 1951, a new request was made by Israel's foreign minister Moshe Sharett which claimed global recompense to Israel of $1.5 billion based on the financial cost absorbed by Israel for the rehabilitation of 500,000 Jewish survivors. West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer accepted these terms and declared he was ready to negotiate other reparations. A Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany was opened in order to help with individual claims. After negotiations, the claim was reduced to a sum of $845 million in direct and indirect compensation to be paid over a period of 14 years.
In 1988, West Germany allocated another $125 million for reparations. In 1999, many German industries such as Deutsche Bank, Siemens or BMW faced lawsuits for their role in the forced labour during World War II. In order to dismiss these lawsuits, Germany agreed to raise $5 billion for reparations.[353] In 2013, Germany agreed to pay a new reparation of €772 million as a result of negotiations with Israel.[354] In 2014, the SNCF, the French state-owned railway company, was compelled to allocate $60 million to American Jewish Holocaust survivors for its role in the transport of deportees to Germany.[355] These reparations were sometimes criticized in Israel where they were seen as "blood money".[353]
See also
- השואה on the Hebrew Wikipedia Template:He icon
- Bibliography of The Holocaust
- Holocaust denial
- Holocaust research
- Individuals and groups who assisted Jews during the Holocaust
- Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust
- International Holocaust Remembrance Day
- International response to the Holocaust
- Holocaust memorials
- List of Holocaust survivors
- List of major perpetrators of the Holocaust
- Righteous Among the Nations
- Stolperstein
- Timeline of the Holocaust
Notes
- ^ The extended definition of the Holocaust includes other victims of Nazi crimes against humanity and war crimes, such as the Romani genocide, Germany's eugenics program, the German mistreatment of Soviet prisoners of war, the Nazi crimes against the Polish nation and other Slavs as well as political opponents, the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, the persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany, as well as murder of civil hostages and Resistance during World War II members from all over Europe.
- ^ From the Greek ὁλόκαυστος holókaustos: hólos, "whole" and kaustós, "burnt".[2]
- ^ Hebrew: השואה, HaShoah, "the catastrophe"
- ^ The Hebrew word churban is used by many Orthodox Jews to refer to the Holocaust.[10]
- ^ Further examples include Ben Kiernan in Blood and Soil,[15] Stephen Atkins in Holocaust Denial as an International Movement,[16] Susan Zuccotti in The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews,[17] Richard Evans in Lying About Hitler,[18] Martin Gilbert in The Holocaust,[19] and Adam Jones in Genocide.[20]
- ^ The French planned to try Grynszpan for murder, but the German invasion in 1940 interrupted the proceedings. Grynszpan was handed over to the Germans and his fate is unknown.[88]
- ^ The exact details of who killed whom and when are murky and have led to much debate in Poland.[139]
- ^ Although not technically part of Operation Reinhard, Chełmno began functioning as an extermination camp in December 1941.[157]
- ^ Chełmno, which used gas vans rather than gas chambers to commit mass murder,[158] had its roots in the extension of the Euthanasia Program Action T4 to the Warthegau.[159] The camp was established in November 1941,[160] but it did not begin the liquidation of large numbers of that Gau Jews until December 1941.[161].
- ^ According to Rudolf Höss after the war: "We cut the hair from women after they had been exterminated in the gas chambers. The hair was then sent to factories, where it was woven into special fittings for gaskets."[175] Höss said that only women's hair was cut, only after their death, and that the order came in only in 1943.
- ^ According to Krakowski, death marches were a frequent occurrence throughout the war. The inaugural one commenced on 14 January 1940 in occupied Poland, when the SS escorted 800 Jewish POWs from the Polish army to Biała Podłaska from Lublin, a distance of 100 km in a matter of days in the depths of Polish winter. Massacred all along the way, less than 5% of the 800 survived the journey.[223]
- ^ There were over 42,000 camps and other facilities identified. Even in Berlin there were 3,000 camps of various functions.[120]
- ^ The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum places the scholarly estimates at 220,000–500,000. According to Berenbaum "serious scholars estimate that between 90,000 and 220,000 were killed under German rule."[263]
- ^ Wilhelm Höttl testified at the Nuremberg trials and Eichmann's trial that at a meeting he had with Eichmann in Budapest in late August 1944, Eichmann said that "Approximately 4 million Jews had been killed in the various concentration camps, while an additional 2 million met death in other ways, the major part of which were shot by operational squads of the Security Police during the campaign against Russia" (Nuremberg Trial proceedings, Vol. 3). See also Kahn, David (2008). "The Secret History of the Author of the Secret Front". Archived from the original on 9 April 2009. Retrieved 30 October 2016.
{{cite web}}
: Unknown parameter|deadurl=
ignored (|url-status=
suggested) (help) - ^ About 200 native Jews and over 1000 refugees were provided with false documents, and hidden whenever possible.[283][284]
- ^ Hitler's Chancellery, also known as the Kanzlei des Führer der NSDAP, is not to be confused with the Reich Chancellery or Reichskanzlei.
- ^ Two of the indictments were dropped before the end of the trial. Robert Ley committed suicide in prison, and Gustav Krupp was judged unfit for trial.[348]
Citations
- ^ "The Auschwitz Album". Exhibitions. Yad Vashem. Retrieved 24 September 2012.
- ^ Dawidowicz 1986, p. xxxvii.
- ^ a b Gerlach 2016, p. 14.
- ^ Whitney, William Dwight, ed. (1904). "Holocaust". The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia. Vol. 4. p. 2859. Retrieved 1 June 2016.
- ^ "Holocaust". Dictionary. Merriam-Webster. Retrieved 16 June 2017.
- ^ "The Holocaust: Definition and Preliminary Discussion". Holocaust Resource Center. Yad Vashem. Retrieved 26 June 2015.
- ^ a b c d Niewyk & Nicosia 2000, p. 45.
- ^ Black 2016, p. 201.
- ^ Fischel 2010, p. 115.
- ^ Fischel, p. 46.
- ^ Berenbaum 2006, p. xix.
- ^ Longerich, Peter (2003). "Hitler's Role in the Persecution of the Jews by the Nazi Regime". Holocaust Denial on Trial. Emory University. Retrieved 30 May 2017.
- ^ Snyder 2010, p. 412-413.
- ^ Bauer 2002, pp. 10–11.
- ^ Kiernan 2009, p. 454.
- ^ Atkins 2009, p. 11.
- ^ Zuccotti 1993, p. 5.
- ^ Evans 2002, p. 104.
- ^ Gilbert 1985, p. 18.
- ^ Jones 2006, p. 147.
- ^ Niewyk & Nicosia 2000, pp. 45, 51–52.
- ^ Niewyk & Nicosia 2000, pp. 51–52.
- ^ Snyder 2010, p. 412.
- ^ Niewyk & Nicosia 2000, pp. 48–49.
- ^ Niewyk & Nicosia 2000, pp. 49–50.
- ^ Niewyk & Nicosia 2000, p. 48.
- ^ Niewyk & Nicosia 2000, pp. 47–48.
- ^ Niewyk & Nicosia 2000, pp. 50–51.
- ^ a b Berenbaum 2006, p. 103.
- ^ Arad 1987, pp. 154–159.
- ^ Fischel, p. 167.
- ^ a b c Friedländer 2007, p. xxi.
- ^ Bauer 2002, p. 48.
- ^ Maier 1988, p. 53.
- ^ United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 1996, p. 7.
- ^ Crowe 2008, p. 447.
- ^ Gilbert 2001, p. 289.
- ^ a b Stone 2011, p. 109.
- ^ Gellately & Stoltzfus 2001, p. 216.
- ^ "Gassing Operations". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 20 June 2014. Retrieved 25 January 2015.
- ^ Jones 2006, p. 148.
- ^ Bergen 2009, pp. 4–6.
- ^ Fischer 2002, pp. 47–49.
- ^ "Boycotts". Educational Resources. Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota. Archived from the original on 11 June 2007. Retrieved 30 October 2016.
{{cite web}}
: Unknown parameter|deadurl=
ignored (|url-status=
suggested) (help) - ^ a b Evans 1989, p. 69.
- ^ Friedlander 1994, pp. 495–496.
- ^ "Antisemitism in History: World War I". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 1 September 2015.
- ^ Burleigh 2000, pp. 47–48.
- ^ Peukert 1994, p. 289.
- ^ Fischer 2002, pp. 47–51.
- ^ Yahil 1990, pp. 41–43.
- ^ Kershaw 1998, p. 60.
- ^ Bergen 2009, p. 36.
- ^ Bergen 2009, pp. 37–38.
- ^ Bergen 2009, p. 38.
- ^ Bergen 2009, p. 39.
- ^ Fleming 1994, p. 17.
- ^ a b c Noakes & Pridham 1983, p. 499.
- ^ Wachsmann 2015, pp. 28–30.
- ^ Wachsmann 2015, pp. 32–38.
- ^ Gilbert 1985, p. 32.
- ^ Longerich 2012, p. 155.
- ^ Wachsmann 2015, pp. 84–86.
- ^ Peukert 1987, p. 214.
- ^ a b Friedländer 1997, p. 33.
- ^ Evans 2004, pp. 434–435.
- ^ a b Burleigh & Wippermann 1991, p. 78.
- ^ Friedländer 1997, p. 29.
- ^ Burleigh & Wippermann 1991, pp. 86–87.
- ^ Friedländer 1997, p. 134.
- ^ Evans 2005, pp. 158–159.
- ^ Evans 2005, p. 169.
- ^ Evans 2005, pp. 543–544.
- ^ Evans 2005, p. 550.
- ^ Gellately 2001, pp. 122–123.
- ^ Evans 2005, p. 544-545.
- ^ Evans 2005, p. 539.
- ^ Evans 2005, p. 551.
- ^ a b c Gilbert 2001, p. 285.
- ^ Fischel 1998, p. 20.
- ^ Friedländer 1997, p. 1.
- ^ Friedländer 1997, p. 12.
- ^ Evans 2005, p. 16.
- ^ Cesarani 2016, pp. 147–150.
- ^ Cesarani 2016, pp. 153–155.
- ^ Evans 2005, pp. 659–661.
- ^ Evans 2005, p. 580.
- ^ Friedländer 1997, pp. 301–302.
- ^ Evans 2005, pp. 581–582.
- ^ Snyder 1976, p. 201.
- ^ Evans 2005, pp. 583–584.
- ^ Cesarani 2016, pp. 184–185.
- ^ Cesarani 2016, p. 187.
- ^ Evans 2005, p. 591.
- ^ Cesarani 2016, p. 200.
- ^ Evans 2005, pp. 595–596.
- ^ Ben-Rafael, Glöckner & Sternberg 2011, pp. 25–26.
- ^ Friedländer 1989, p. 224-225.
- ^ Friedländer 1997, pp. 62–63.
- ^ a b Browning 2001.
- ^ Cesarani, David (17 February 2011). "From Persecution to Genocide". History: World Wars. BBC. Retrieved 25 September 2012.
- ^ Fischel 2010, p. 264.
- ^ Chase 1999, p. xiii.
- ^ Naimark 2001, p. 73.
- ^ Browning 2004, pp. 81–85.
- ^ Browning 2004, p. 88.
- ^ Hildebrand 2005, p. 70.
- ^ Browning 2004, pp. 111–113.
- ^ Cesarani 2004a, pp. 77–79.
- ^ Niewyk & Nicosia 2000, p. 153.
- ^ Kats 1970, p. 35.
- ^ Niewyk & Nicosia 2000, p. 154.
- ^ Dwork & van Pelt 2003, p. 208.
- ^ Bauer 2001, p. 248-265.
- ^ Ochayon, Sheryl. "The Jews of Libya". The International School for Holocaust Studies. Yad Vashem. Retrieved 1 September 2013.
- ^ Bauer 2001, pp. 256–257.
- ^ R. Saltman (24 April 2012). Sacred Humanism without Miracles: Responding to the New Atheists. Springer. p. 155. ISBN 978-1-137-01271-5.
- ^ Table of the 6,000,000 Jewish victims at Yad Vashem
- ^ a b Krausnick 1968, p. 57.
- ^ a b c d Lichtblau 2013.
- ^ Bloxham 2000, pp. 1–37.
- ^ Longerich 2010, pp. 314–320.
- ^ Harran 2000, p. 461.
- ^ Browning 1986, pp. 345–348.
- ^ Hilberg 2003, pp. 216–7.
- ^ Trunk 1996, pp. 1–6.
- ^ Hilberg 1995, p. 106.
- ^ Hilberg 1995, p. 170.
- ^ Hilberg 1980, p. 104.
- ^ Berenbaum 2006, pp. 81–83.
- ^ Hilberg 1995, p. 109.
- ^ Berenbaum 2006, pp. 79–81.
- ^ Hilberg 2003, p. 1111.
- ^ Snyder 2010, p. 285.
- ^ a b Berenbaum 2006, p. 114.
- ^ a b "Deportations to and from the Warsaw Ghetto". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 27 September 2012.
- ^ Berenbaum 2006, pp. 175–177.
- ^ Longerich 2010, p. 194.
- ^ a b Longerich 2010, p. 196.
- ^ Evans 1989, p. 59.
- ^ Burleigh 2001, pp. 512, 526–527.
- ^ Kwiet 1998, p. 4.
- ^ Porat 2002, p. 161.
- ^ a b Matthäus 2004, p. 268.
- ^ Matthäus 2004, p. 275.
- ^ Matthäus 2004, pp. 275–276.
- ^ Matthäus 2004, pp. 270–271.
- ^ Browning 2004, pp. 224–225.
- ^ Hilberg 2003, p. 291.
- ^ Evans 2008, pp. 226–227.
- ^ Fischel 1998, pp. 42–43.
- ^ Benz 2007, p. 98.
- ^ Longerich 2010, p. 305.
- ^ Longerich 2010, p. 306.
- ^ Longerich 2010, p. 307.
- ^ "Aktion Reinhard" (PDF). Holocaust Resource Center. Yad Vashem. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
- ^ a b c d "Chelmno" (PDF). Holocaust Resource Center. Yad Vashem. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
- ^ Montague 2012, pp. 64–65.
- ^ Montague 2012, pp. 14–16.
- ^ Montague 2012, pp. 53–55.
- ^ Montague 2012, pp. 63.
- ^ Coordinates from corresponding Wikipedia camp pages.
- ^ Per Yad Vashem, Auschwitz II total numbers are "more than 1,100,000".
- ^ a b "Belzec" (PDF). Holocaust Resource Center. Yad Vashem. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
- ^ "List of Individual Victims of Jasenovac Concentration Camp". Jasenovac Memorial Site. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
- ^ a b "Majdanek" (PDF). Holocaust Resource Center. Yad Vashem. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
- ^ "Maly Trostinets" (PDF). Holocaust Resource Center. Yad Vashem. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
- ^ a b "Sobibor" (PDF). Holocaust Resource Center. Yad Vashem. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
- ^ a b "Treblinka" (PDF). Holocaust Resource Center. Yad Vashem. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
- ^ Piper 1998b, p. 173.
- ^ Piper 1998b, p. 162.
- ^ a b Piper 1998b, p. 170.
- ^ Piper 1998b, p. 163.
- ^ Piper 1998b, pp. 170–171.
- ^ Goldensohn 2004, p. 298.
- ^ Piper 1998b, p. 172.
- ^ Piper 1998b, p. 171.
- ^ Piper 1998b, pp. 163–164.
- ^ a b Longerich 2010, p. 341.
- ^ a b Hilberg 2003, pp. 1112–1128.
- ^ Snyder 2010, p. 283.
- ^ Bauer 1997, p. 117.
- ^ Gilbert 1985, p. 828.
- ^ a b Hilberg 1996, pp. 126–137.
- ^ Hilberg 1996, p. 137.
- ^ a b Gilbert 2001, p. 291.
- ^ "The anniversary of the uprising in Bialystok ghetto". Virtual Shtetl. Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Retrieved 1 April 2012.
- ^ Kennedy 2007, p. 780.
- ^ Laqueur 2001, p. 546.
- ^ Snyder 2010, p. 302.
- ^ Zuccotti 1993, p. 274.
- ^ Zuccotti 1993, p. 275.
- ^ Lador-Lederer 1980, p. 75 note 15.
- ^ "Jewish Soldiers in the Allied Armies". About the Holocaust. Yad Vashem. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
- ^ Pinkus 1990, p. 261.
- ^ Niewyk & Nicosia 2000, pp. 229–230.
- ^ Harran 2000, p. 384.
- ^ Lifton 2000, p. 358.
- ^ Dwork & van Pelt 2008, pp. 343–348.
- ^ "Killing Centers". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
- ^ "Aktion 'Erntefest' (Operation 'Harvest Festival')". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
- ^ Yahil 1990, pp. 376–378.
- ^ Kwiet 2004, pp. 59–78.
- ^ Allen 2002, p. 17.
- ^ Fischer 1998, pp. 536–538.
- ^ Lang 2003, p. 3.
- ^ Evans 2002, p. 95.
- ^ Fischel 1998, p. 76-77.
- ^ Fischel 2010, p. 31.
- ^ Paldiel 1993, p. 184.
- ^ "Grojanowski Report" (PDF). Holocaust Resource Center. Yad Vashem. Retrieved 1 September 2012.
- ^ Memorandum, Arthur Sweetser to Leo Rosten, 1 February 1942, quoted in Eric Hanin, "War on Our Minds: The American Mass Media in World War II" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1976), ch. 4, n.6. OCLC 3640206
- ^ Jakob Weiss (2011). The Lemberg Mosaic. New York: Alderbrook Press. p. 409 footnote 199.
- ^ Krzysztof Kania, Edward Raczynski, 1891–1993, Dyplomata i Polityk (Edward Raczynski, 1891–1993, Diplomat and Politician), Wydawnictwo Neriton, Warszawa, 2014, p. 232
- ^ "11 Allies Condemn Nazi War on Jews". The New York Times. 18 December 1942. Retrieved 3 February 2012.
{{cite news}}
: Unknown parameter|subscription=
ignored (|url-access=
suggested) (help) - ^ Conway, John S. "The First Report About Auschwitz". Museum of Tolerance Online. The Simon Wiesenthal Center. Retrieved 1 September 2006.
- ^ Vrba 2006.
- ^ Brigham, Daniel T. (3 July 1944). "Inquiry confirms Nazi death camps". The New York Times. Retrieved 1 October 2012.
{{cite news}}
: Unknown parameter|subscription=
ignored (|url-access=
suggested) (help) - ^ Brigham, Daniel T. (6 July 1944). "Two death camps places of horror". The New York Times. Retrieved 1 October 2012.
{{cite news}}
: Unknown parameter|subscription=
ignored (|url-access=
suggested) (help) - ^ Linn, Ruth (13 April 2006). "Rudolf Vrba (obituary)". The Guardian. Retrieved 1 September 2012.
- ^ Longerich 2012, p. 695.
- ^ "Map of the Death Marches". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 1 September 2012.
- ^ Krakowski 1989, p. 476.
- ^ Friedländer 2007, pp. 648–650.
- ^ Hitchcock 2008, p. 283.
- ^ Hitchcock 2008, p. 297.
- ^ Hitchcock 2008, p. 340.
- ^ Gilbert 1985, p. 798.
- ^ Wachsmann 2015, p. 577.
- ^ Gilbert 1985, pp. 808–809.
- ^ Gilbert 1985, p. 810.
- ^ Cesarani 2016, p. 762.
- ^ Hitchcock 2008, p. 289.
- ^ "The 11th Armoured Division (Great Britain)". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 1 September 2012.
- ^ "Bergen-Belsen". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 1 September 2012.
- ^ Dimbleby, Richard (15 April 1945). "Liberation of Belsen". BBC News. Retrieved September 2012.
- ^ a b c Buchheim 1968, pp. 372–373.
- ^ Buchheim 1968, p. 381.
- ^ Buchheim 1968, pp. 386–387.
- ^ Browning 1998, pp. 44–48.
- ^ Browning 1998, pp. 183–184.
- ^ Browning 1998, p. 57.
- ^ Browning 1998, pp. 171–189.
- ^ Kudryashov 2004, pp. 232–242.
- ^ a b Kudryashov 2004, p. 234.
- ^ Kudryashov 2004, pp. 234–5.
- ^ Kudryashov 2004, pp. 226–7, 234–5.
- ^ a b Hillgruber 1989, pp. 102–3 (Yad Yashem p. 121-3)..
- ^ Förster 1998, p. 280.
- ^ Förster 1998, p. 276-277.
- ^ Marrus 1987, pp. 89–90.
- ^ Evans 1989, p. 71.
- ^ Marrus 1987, p. 91.
- ^ a b c Marrus 1987, p. 92.
- ^ Marrus 1987, p. 93.
- ^ Ezard, John (17 February 2001). "Germans knew of Holocaust horror about death camps". The Guardian. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
- ^ a b c Dawidowicz 1986, p. 403.
- ^ a b Berenbaum 2006, p. 125.
- ^ a b An estimated 1.8–1.9 million non-Jewish Polish citizens have died as a result of the Nazi occupation and the war (Franciszek Piper, Polish scholar and chief historian at Auschwitz). See also "Polish Victims". Holocaust Encyclopedia – USHMM. Retrieved 1 June 2016.
- ^ a b c Piotrowski, Tadeusz. "Project InPosterum: Poland WWII Casualties". Retrieved 15 March 2007; and Łuczak, Czesław. "Szanse i trudności bilansu demograficznego Polski w latach 1939–1945", Dzieje Najnowsze, issue 1994/2.
- ^ a b "Euthanasia – the 'mercy killing' of disabled people in Germany". The Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 1 March 2016.
{{cite web}}
: Unknown parameter|deadurl=
ignored (|url-status=
suggested) (help) - ^ a b "Genocide of European Roma (Gypsies)". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 1 September 2012.
- ^ Berenbaum 2005, p. 126.
- ^ a b Hancock 2004, pp. 383–96.
- ^ a b c d e Harran 2000, p. 108.
- ^ a b Shulman, William L. (2000). A State of Terror: Germany 1933–1939. Holocaust Resource Center and Archives. ASIN B0006RN8B0.
- ^ Fischel 1998, p. 87.
- ^ McKale 2002, p. 454.
- ^ Laqueur 2001, p. 145.
- ^ Keren 2001, p. 115.
- ^ a b Benz, Wolfgang (1996). Dimension des Völkermords. Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (in German). Dtv. ISBN 3-423-04690-2.
- ^ "The Holocaust: Tracing Lost Family Members". Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved 1 November 2013.
- ^ Reitlinger, Gerald. The Final Solution. The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945. New York: Beechhurst Press. Review by Friedman, Philip (1954). "Review of The Final Solution". Jewish Social Studies. 16 (2): 186–9. JSTOR 4465231. See also a review by Hyamson, Albert M. (1953). "Review of The Final Solution". International Affairs. 29 (4): 494–5. JSTOR 2606046.
- ^ Bauer & Rozett 1990, p. 1797.
- ^ Bauer & Rozett 1990, p. 1799.
- ^ Gilbert 2001, p. 245.
- ^ Davies, Norman (2012). God's Playground [Boże igrzysko]. Otwarte (publishing). p. 956. ISBN 8324015566. Polish edition, second volume.
- ^ Bernd Wegner (1997). From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia, and the World, 1939–1941. Berghahn Books. p. 74. ISBN 1-57181-882-0.
- ^ Laqueu 2001, pp. 51–52.
- ^ Gilbert 1993, p. 56.
- ^ Gilbert 1993, p. 49.
- ^ "German Jewish Refugees, 1933–1939". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
- ^ "Albania" (PDF). Holocaust Resource Center. Yad Vashem. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
- ^ Gershman, Norman H. (2008). Besa: Muslims Who Saved Jews in World War II. Syracuse Univ Press. ISBN 978-0815609346.
- ^ "The Number of Victims". Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau. Retrieved 1 June 2016.
- ^ Piper 1998a, p. 62.
- ^ "Treblinka". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 11 June 2017.
- ^ "Belzec". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 11 June 2017.
- ^ "Chelmno". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 11 June 2017.
- ^ "Sobibor". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 11 June 2017.
- ^ Reszka, Paweł (23 December 2005). "Majdanek Victims Enumerated. Changes in the history textbooks?". Gazeta Wyborcza. Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Archived from the original on 22 May 2011. Retrieved 30 October 2016.
{{cite web}}
: Unknown parameter|deadurl=
ignored (|url-status=
suggested) (help) - ^ Niewyk & Nicosia 2000, pp. 221–222.
- ^ Rhodes 2002, p. 274.
- ^ Evans 2008, pp. 174–175.
- ^ Snyder 1976, p. 359.
- ^ Himmler, Heinrich. "Treatment of Alien Races in the East (1940)" in Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law N. 10. 13. United States of America v. Ernst von Weizsaecker, et al. (Case 11: 'Ministries Case'). US Government Printing Office, District of Columbia: 1952. pp. 147–150.
- ^ Fritz 2011, p. 93.
- ^ Mazower 2008, p. 204-205.
- ^ Mazower 2008, pp. 208–211.
- ^ Müller & Ueberschär 2002, p. 285.
- ^ Rummel, R.J. (1992). Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publications. Retrieved 1 June 2014.
- ^ Gellately 2001, p. 153.
- ^ Berghahn 1999, pp. 32–33.
- ^ Gellately 2001, p. 154.
- ^ Israel Gutman, Unequal Victims Holocaust Library 1985
- ^ Szarota, Tomasz; Materski, Wojciech, eds. (2009). Polska 1939–1945. Straty osobowe i ofiary represji pod dwiema okupacjami (in Polish). Warszawa: IPN. ISBN 978-8376290676. Archived from the original on 1 February 2013. Retrieved 30 October 2016.
{{cite book}}
: Unknown parameter|deadurl=
ignored (|url-status=
suggested) (help) - ^ a b Piotrowski 1998, p. 295.
- ^ Nurowski, Roman (1960). 1939–1945 War Losses in Poland. Poznan: Wydawnictwo Zachodnie.
- ^ Piotrowski 1998, p. 305, Table 20.
- ^ Stephen A. Garrett (1996). Conscience and power: an examination of dirty hands and political leadership. Palgrave Macmillan. p.60. ISBN 0-312-15908-0
- ^ Žerjavić, Vladimir (1993). Yugoslavia manipulations with the number of Second World War victims. Zagreb: Croatian Information center. ISBN 0-919817-32-7. See also Vojska.net.
- ^ Kočović, Bogoljub-Žrtve Drugog svetskog rata u Jugoslaviji 1990 ISBN 86-01-01928-5
- ^ Tomasevich 2001, p. 744.
- ^ "Jasenovac". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
- ^ "Croatia" (PDF). Holocaust Resource Center. Yad Vashem. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
- ^ Meliha Pihura (13 April 2007). "Commemoration of Bosniak victims of Jasenovac". Bosnjaci.net Magazine (in Bosnian). Archived from the original on 13 October 2007. Retrieved 30 October 2016.
{{cite web}}
: Unknown parameter|deadurl=
ignored (|url-status=
suggested) (help) - ^ Božo Repe. Povojna represija v nacionalni identiteti in kolektivnem spominu Slovencev (PDF) (in Slovenian). Archived from the original (PDF) on 7 September 2012.
{{cite book}}
: Unknown parameter|deadurl=
ignored (|url-status=
suggested) (help) - ^ Mojzes 2011, p. 95.
- ^ The Russian Academy of Science Rossiiskaia Akademiia nauk. Liudskie poteri SSSR v period vtoroi mirovoi voiny:sbornik statei. Sankt-Peterburg 1995 ISBN 5-86789-023-6
- ^ Snyder 2010, pp. 250–251.
- ^ "Nazi Persecution of Soviet Prisoners of War". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 1 September 2012.
- ^ a b Niewyk & Nicosia 2000, p. 47.
- ^ Bauer 1998, p. 453.
- ^ a b Bauer 1998, p. 444.
- ^ Bauer 1998, p. 445.
- ^ Bauer 1998, p. 446.
- ^ Berenbaum 2006, p. 126.
- ^ Lusane 2003, pp. 97–8.
- ^ "Blacks During the Holocaust". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
- ^ Lifton 2000, p. 21.
- ^ Proctor 1988, pp. 101–103.
- ^ Proctor 1988, pp. 106–108.
- ^ Kershaw 2000, pp. 252–261.
- ^ Lifton 2000, p. 142.
- ^ Strous 2007.
- ^ Lifton 2000, pp. 90–95.
- ^ a b c d Steakley, James. "Homosexuals and the Third Reich", The Body Politic, Issue 11, January/February 1974.
- ^ Longerich 2012, p. 237.
- ^ Giles 1992, pp. 45–7.
- ^ "Non-Jewish Resistance". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
- ^ "Commissar Order". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
- ^ Garbe 2001, p. 251.
- ^ Samuels 2009, p. 259.
- ^ Grobman, Alex. "The Uniqueness of the Holocaust". Holocaust Teacher Resource Center. Holocaust Education Foundation. Retrieved 1 March 2016.
- ^ Evans 2015, p. 385.
- ^ Harris 2006, p. 106.
- ^ Snyder 1976, p. 255.
- ^ a b Biddiss 2001, p. 643.
- ^ Biddiss 2001, pp. 643–644.
- ^ Biddiss 2001, p. 646.
- ^ Jacobs 2005, p. 3.
- ^ Salomo Birnbaum, Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache (4th ed.) Hamburg: Buske, 1984, p. 3.
- ^ a b "Holocaust Restitution: German Reparations". Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
- ^ "Holocaust Reparations: Germany to Pay 772 Million Euros to Survivors". Spiegel Online International. 29 March 2013.
- ^ "Pour le rôle de la SNCF dans la Shoah, Paris va verser 100 000 euros à chaque déporté américain". Le Monde (in French).
Bibliography
- Allen, Michael Thad (2002). The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-2677-4.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Arad, Yitzhak (1987). Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-21305-1.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Atkins, Stephen E. (2009). Holocaust Denial as an International Movement. Westport, CT: Praeger. ISBN 978-0-313-34538-8.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Bauer, Yehuda (1997) [1979]. "Forms of Jewish Resistance". In Niewyk, Donald L. (ed.). The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. pp. 116–132. ISBN 0-669-41700-9.
{{cite encyclopedia}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (1998) [1994]. "Gypsies". In Gutman, Yisrael; Berenbaum, Michael (eds.). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. pp. 441–455. ISBN 0-253-20884-X.
{{cite encyclopedia}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (2001) [1982]. A History of the Holocaust (Revised ed.). New York: Franklin Watts. ISBN 0-531-15576-5.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (1989). "Rescue by negotiations? Jewish attempts to negotiate with the Nazis". In Michael R. Marrus (ed.). The Nazi Holocaust, Part 9: The End of the Holocaust. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 3–21.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (2002). Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-09300-4.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Bauer, Yehuda; Rozett, Robert (1990). "Appendix". In Gutman, Israel (ed.). Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. New York: Macmillan Library Reference. ISBN 0-02-896090-4.
{{cite encyclopedia}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help); Unknown parameter|editorlink=
ignored (|editor-link=
suggested) (help) - Ben-Rafael, Eliezer; Glöckner, Olaf; Sternberg, Yitzhak (2011). Jews and Jewish Education in Germany Today. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-25329-2.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Benz, Wolfgang (2007). Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen- das dritte Reich (Second ed.). C.H. Beck.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Berenbaum, Michael (2006). The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. ISBN 978-0-8018-8358-3.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Bergen, Doris (2009). The Holocaust: A Concise History (Second, revised ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-7425-5715-4.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Berghahn, Volker R. (1999). "Germans and Poles, 1871–1945". Yearbook of European Studies. 13: 15–36.
{{cite journal}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Biddiss, Michael (2001). "Nuremberg trials". In Dear, Ian; Foot, Richard D. (eds.). The Oxford Companion to World War II. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 643–646. ISBN 0-19-280670-X.
{{cite encyclopedia}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Black, Edwin (1999) [1984]. The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine. Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books. ISBN 978-0914153139.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (2016). The Holocaust: History and Memory. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-02214-1.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Bloxham, Donald (2000). Extermination through work: Jewish Slave Labour under the Third Reich. Vol. 1. Holocaust Educational Trust Research Papers.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Breitman, Richard (1991). The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-394-56841-9.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Browning, Christopher (2001). "Madagascar Plan". In Laqueur, Walter (ed.). The Holocaust Encyclopedia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-08432-3.
{{cite encyclopedia}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (1986). "Nazi Ghettoization Policy in Poland: 1939–41". Central European History. 19 (4): 343–368. doi:10.1017/s0008938900011158. JSTOR 4546081.
{{cite journal}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (1998) [1992]. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperPerennial. ISBN 0-06-099506-8.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (2004). The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Buchheim, Hans (1968). "Command and Compliance". In Helmut Krausnick; Hans Buchheim; Martin Broszat; Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (eds.). The Anatomy of the SS State. New York: Walker and Company. pp. 303–396.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help)CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link) - Burleigh, Michael (2000). "Psychiatry, Society and Nazi 'Euthanasia'". In Omer Bartov (ed.). The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath. London: Routledge. pp. 43–62.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (2001). The Third Reich: A New History. New York: Hill and Wang. ISBN 0-8090-9326-X.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Burleigh, Michael; Wippermann, Wolfgang (1991). The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-39802-9.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Cesarani, David (2004a). Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a 'Desk Murderer'. [New York]: Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-81476-1.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (2016). Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-1-250-00083-5.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (2004b). Holocaust: From the Persecution of the Jews to Mass Murder. London: Routledge.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Chase, Edward T. (1999) [1984]. "Preface". The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine. Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books. ISBN 978-0914153139.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Crowe, David M. (2008). The Holocaust: Roots, History, and Aftermath. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ISBN 978-0-8133-4325-9.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Dawidowicz, Lucy (1986) [1975]. The War Against the Jews: 1933–1945 (Tenth Anniversary ed.). New York: Bantam. ISBN 0-553-34532-X.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Dwork, Deborah; van Pelt, Robert Jan (2008). Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (Revised and expanded ed.). New York: Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-32291-0.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Dwork, Deborah; van Pelt, Robert Jan (2003). Holocaust: A History. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-05188-9.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Evans, Richard J. (2004). The Coming of the Third Reich. New York: Penguin. ISBN 1-59420-004-1.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (1989). In Hitler's Shadow. New York, NY: Pantheon.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (2002). Lying About Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-02153-0.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (2008). The Third Reich at War. New York: Penguin. ISBN 978-1-59420-206-3.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (2015). The Third Reich in History and Memory. London: Abacus. ISBN 978-0-349-14075-9.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (2005). The Third Reich in Power. New York: Penguin. ISBN 1-59420-074-2.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Fein, Helen (1979). Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization During the Holocaust. New York: Free Press. ISBN 0-02-910220-0.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Fischel, Jack R. (1998). The Holocaust. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-29879-3.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (2010). Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust (Second ed.). Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-6774-1.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Fischer, Conan (2002). The Rise of the Nazis. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Fischer, Klaus (1998) [1995]. Nazi Germany: A New History. New York: Barnes & Noble. ISBN 0-7607-0736-7.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Fleming, Gerald (1994) [1984]. Hitler and the Final Solution. Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-06022-9.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Förster, Jürgen (1998). "Complicity or Entanglement? Wehrmacht, War, and Holocaust". In Berenbaum, Michael; Peck, Abraham (eds.). The Holocaust and History. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. pp. 266–283. ISBN 0-253-33374-1.
{{cite encyclopedia}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help); Unknown parameter|editorlink1=
ignored (|editor-link1=
suggested) (help) - Friedlander, Henry (1994). "Step by Step: The Expansion of Murder, 1939–1941". German Studies Review. 17 (3): 495–507. doi:10.2307/1431896. JSTOR 1431896.
{{cite journal}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Friedländer, Saul (1997). Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution 1933–1939. New York: Harper Collins. ISBN 0-06-019042-6.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (2007). The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939–1945. New York: Harper Perennial. ISBN 978-0-06-093048-6.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Fritz, Stephen (2011). Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-3416-1.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Gaon, Solomon (1995). Del fuego : Sephardim and the Holocaust. New York: Sepher-Hermon Press. ISBN 0-87203-143-8.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Garbe, Detlef (2001). "Social Disinterest, Governmental Disinformation, Renewed Persecution, and Now Manipulation of History?". In Hans Hesse (ed.). Persecution and Resistance of Jehovah's Witnesses During the Nazi-Regime 1933–1945. Bremen: Edition Temmen. pp. 251–265.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Gellately, Robert (2001). Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-820560-0.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Gellately, Robert; Stoltzfus, Nathan (2001). Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691086842.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Gerlach, Christian (2016). The extermination of the European Jews. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-70689-0.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Gerwarth, Robert (2012). Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-18772-4.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Gilbert, Martin (1988). Atlas of the Holocaust.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (1993). The Dent atlas of the Holocaust. London: Dent. ISBN 0-460-86171-9.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (2001). "Final Solution". In Dear, Ian; Foot, Richard D. (eds.). The Oxford Companion to World War II. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 285–292. ISBN 0-19-280670-X.
{{cite encyclopedia}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (1985). The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War. New York: Henry Holt. ISBN 0-8050-0348-7.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Giles, Geoffrey J. (1992). "The Most Unkindest Cut of All: Castration, Homosexuality and Nazi Justice". Journal of Contemporary History. 27 (1): 41–61. doi:10.1177/002200949202700103. JSTOR 260778.
{{cite journal}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Goldensohn, Leon (2004). Gellately, Robert (ed.). The Nuremberg Interviews: Conducted by Leon Godensohn. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-375-41469-X.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Hancock, Ian (2004). "Romanies and the Holocaust: A Reevaluation and Overview". In Dan Stone (ed.). The Historiography of the Holocaust. New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 383–396.
{{cite book}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|chapterurl=
(help); Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Harran, Marilyn J. (2000). The Holocaust Chronicle. Lincolnwood, IL: Publications International. ISBN 0-7853-2963-3.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Hedgepeth, Sonja M.; Saidel, Rochelle G. (2010). Sexual Violence against Jewish Women During the Holocaust. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Hilberg, Raul (2003). The Destruction of the European Jews (3rd ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (1980). "The Ghetto as a Form of Government". Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 450: 98–112. doi:10.1177/000271628045000109. JSTOR 1042561.
{{cite journal}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (1995) [1992]. Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933–1945. London: Secker & Warburg.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (1996). The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Hildebrand, Klaus (1984). The Third Reich. Translated by Falla, P. S. London: George Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-04-943033-5.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Hillgruber, Andreas (1989). "War in the East and the Extermination of the Jews". In Marrus, Michael R. (ed.). The Nazi Holocaust. Part 3: The "Final Solution": The Implementation of Mass Murder. Vol. 1. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3598215544.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) In Yad Yashem. - Hitchcock, William I. (2008). The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe. New York: Free Press. ISBN 978-0-7432-7381-7.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Jacobs, Neil G. (2005). Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Jones, Adam (2006). Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-35384-X.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Kats, Alfred (1970). Poland's Ghettos at War. New York, NY: Twayne Publishers.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Kennedy, David M., ed. (2007). The Library of Congress World War II Companion. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-7432-5219-5.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Keren, Nili (2001). "Children". In Laqueur, Walter (ed.). The Holocaust Encyclopedia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-08432-3.
{{cite encyclopedia}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Kershaw, Ian (1998). Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-32035-0.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (2000). Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-32252-1.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Kiernan, Ben (2009). Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-14425-3.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Krakowski, Shmuel (1989). "The Death Marches in the Period of the Evacuation of the Camps". In Michael R. Marrus (ed.). The Nazi Holocaust, Part 9: The End of the Holocaust. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 476–90.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Krausnick, Helmut (1968). "The Persecution of the Jews". In Helmut Krausnick; Hans Buchheim; Martin Broszat; Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (eds.). The Anatomy of the SS State. New York, NY: Walker and Company. pp. 1–125.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help)CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link) - Kudryashov, Sergei (2004). "Ordinary Collaborators: The Case of the Travniki Guards". In Mark Erickson; Ljubica Erickson (eds.). Russia: War, Peace and Diplomacy Essays in Honour of John Erickson. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. pp. 226–239. ISBN 0297849131.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Kwiet, Konrad (1998). "Rehearsing for Murder: The Beginning of the Final Solution in Lithuania in June 1941" (PDF). Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 12 (1): 3–26. doi:10.1093/hgs/12.1.3.
{{cite journal}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (2004). "Forced Labour of German Jews in Nazi Germany". In Cesarani, David (ed.). Holocaust: Concepts in Historical Studies. London: Routledge.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link) - Lador-Lederer, Joseph (1980). "World War II: Jews as Prisoners of War". Israel Yearbook on Human Rights. 10. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University: 70–89.
{{cite journal}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Lang, Berel (2003). Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide. Syracuse University Press.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Laqueur, Walter, ed. (2001). The Holocaust Encyclopedia. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-08432-3.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Lichtblau, Eric (1 March 2013). "The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking". The New York Times. Retrieved 2 March 2013.
{{cite news}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Lifton, Robert J. (2000) [1986]. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (2000 ed.). New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-04905-9.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Longerich, Peter (2010). Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-280436-5.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (2012). Heinrich Himmler. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-959232-6.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Lusane, Clarence (2003). Hitler's Black Victims: The Historical Experience of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans and African Americans in the Nazi Era. London; New York: Routledge.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - MacDonald, David B. (2007). Identity Politics in the Age of Genocide: The Holocaust and Historical Representation. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-43061-6.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Maier, Charles S. (1988). The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-92975-6.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Marrus, Michael R. (1987). The Holocaust in History. New York: Meridian. ISBN 0-452-00953-7.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Matthäus, Jürgen (2004). "Operation Barbarossa and the Onset of the Holocaust, June–December 1941". The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 244–308. ISBN 0-8032-1327-1.
{{cite encyclopedia}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Mazower, Mark (2008). Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe. New York: Penguin. ISBN 978-1-59420-188-2.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - McKale, Donald M. (2002). Hitler's Shadow War: The Holocaust and World War II. New York: Cooper Square Press. ISBN 0-8154-1211-8.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Michael, Robert; Doerr, Karin (2002). Nazi-Deutsch/Nazi-German: An English Lexicon of the Language of the Third Reich. Greenwood Press.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Mojzes, Paul (2011). Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the 20th Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1-4422-0663-2.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Montague, Patrick (2012). Chelmno and the Holocaust: A History of Hitler's First Death Camp. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-8078-3527-2.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Müller, Rolf-Dieter; Ueberschär, Gerd R. (2002). Hitler's War in the East 1941−1945: A Critical Assessment. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Naimark, Norman M. (2001). Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-00313-6.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Niewyk, Donald L.; Nicosia, Francis R. (2000). The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-11200-9.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Noakes, Jeremy; Pridham, Geoffrey (1983). Nazism: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1919–1945. Schocken Books.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Paldiel, Mordecai (1993). The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers of Jews. Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing House. ISBN 0-88125-376-6.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Petrie, Jon (2000). "The Secular Word 'Holocaust': Scholarly Myths, History, and Twentieth Century Meanings". Journal of Genocide Research. 2 (1): 31–63. doi:10.1080/146235200112409.
{{cite journal}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Peukert, Detlev (1987) [1982]. Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism In Everyday Life. Translated by Deveson, Richard. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-04480-1.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (1994). "The Genesis of the 'Final Solution' from the Spirit of Science". In Crew, David F. (ed.). Nazism and German Society, 1933–1945. London: Routledge. pp. 274–299. ISBN 0-415-08240-4.
{{cite encyclopedia}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Pinkus, Benjamin (1990). The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Piotrowski, Tadeusz (1998). Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration With Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918–1947. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Piper, Franciszek (1998b) [1994]. "Gas chambers and Crematoria". In Gutman, Yisrael; Berenbaum, Michael (eds.). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. pp. 157–182. ISBN 0-253-20884-X.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ——— (1998a) [1994]. "The Number of Victims". In Gutman, Yisrael; Berenbaum, Michael (eds.). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. pp. 61–80. ISBN 0-253-20884-X.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Poprzeczny, Joseph (2004). Odilo Globocnik: Hitler's Man in the East. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Porat, Dina (2002). "The Holocaust in Lithuania: Some Unique Aspects". In David Cesarani (ed.). The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation. London: Routledge. pp. 159–174.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Proctor, Robert (1988). Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-74578-7.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Rhodes, Richard (2002). Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0375409004.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Samuels, Simon (2009). "Applying the Lessons of the Holocaust". In Alan S. Rosenbaum (ed.). Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide. Boulder, CO Philadelphia, PA: Westview Press Perseus Books Group distributor. pp. 259–270. ISBN 978-0-8133-4406-5.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Snyder, Louis (1976). Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. New York: McGraw Hill. ISBN 0-07-059525-9.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Snyder, Timothy (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00239-9.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Stone, Dan (2011). Histories of the Holocaust. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-956679-2.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Streicher, Julius (1933). Die Geheimpläne gegen Deutschland enthüllt (in German). Der Stürmer.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Streicher, Julius (1943). Der Weg zur Tat (in German). Der Stürmer.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Strous, Rael D. (2007). "Psychiatry during the Nazi Era: Ethical Lessons for the Modern Professional". Annals of General Psychiatry. 6 (8): 8. doi:10.1186/1744-859X-6-8. PMC 1828151. PMID 17326822.
{{cite journal}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help)CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link) - Tomasevich, Jozo (2001). War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-3615-4.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Tooze, Adam (2006). The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. New York: Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-03826-8.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Trunk, Isaiah (1996) [1972]. Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-8032-9428-X.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1996). Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. New York: Macmillan. ISBN 0-02-897451-4.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Vrba, Rudolf (2006) [2002]. I Escaped from Auschwitz. London: Robson Books.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Wachsmann, Nikolaus; Caplan, Jane, eds. (2010). Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories. New York: Routledge.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Yahil, Leni (1990). The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-504523-9.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Zuccotti, Susan (1993). The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-03034-3.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help)
Further reading
- Berg, Roger (1947). Crimes ennemis en France (in French). Vol. vol. V – La Persécution raciale. Paris: Service d'information des crimes de guerre – Office français d'édition.
{{cite book}}
:|volume=
has extra text (help) - Finkelstein, Norman G. (2003). The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (2nd ed.). London: Verso. ISBN 1-85984-488-X.
- Friedlander, Henry (1997). "Registering the Handicapped in Nazi Germany: A Case Study". Jewish History. 11 (2): 89–98. doi:10.1007/BF02335679. JSTOR 20101303.
- Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah (1996). Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and The Holocaust. New York: Alfred A Knopf. ISBN 0-679-44695-8.
- Kershaw, Ian (2008). Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-15127-5.
- Longerich, Peter (2003) [2001]. The Unwritten Order: Hitler's Role in the Final Solution. Stroud, UK: Tempus.
- Poznanski, Renée (2005) [1994 – English first ed. 2001]. Les Juifs en France, pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale (in French). Paris: Pluriel /Hachette-Littératures.
- van Pelt, Robert Jan (2002). The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Ward, Seth (September 2004). "The Holocaust in North Africa" (PDF). International Sephardic Journal.
External links
- Library resources in your library and in other libraries by The Holocaust
- Global Directory of Holocaust Museums
- H-Holocaust, H-Net discussion list for librarians, scholars and advanced students
- Online documents available from the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library
- Guide to materials available at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library
- The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide—The World's Oldest Holocaust Memorial Institution
- Common Questions about the Holocaust by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- The Minutes from the Wannsee Conference in English
- Stills from Soviet documentary "The Atrocities committed by German Fascists in the USSR" ((1); (2); (3))
- Slide show "Nazi Crimes in the USSR (Graphic images!)"
- Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps (1945) Nuremberg Trials Documentary
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Absence of Humanity Exhibit – The Breman Museum
- Collection of testimonies concerning genocide of Jews in occupied Poland in 'Chronicles of Terror' database