how many people died in the holocaust
"[93], By the end of 1934, 50,000 German Jews had left Germany,[94] and by the end of 1938, approximately half the German Jewish population had left,[95] among them the conductor Bruno Walter, who fled after being told that the hall of the Berlin Philharmonic would be burned down if he conducted a concert there. [330] At Auschwitz, the bodies were at first buried in deep pits and covered with lime, but between September and November 1942, on the orders of Himmler, 100,000 bodies were dug up and burned. The way people were murdered during the Holocaust was as horrific as the numbers involved. [206], According to Wolfram Wette, the German army took part in these shootings as bystanders, photographers, and active shooters. [359] In the occupied Polish and Soviet territories, thousands of Jews fled into the swamps or forests and joined the partisans,[360] although the partisan movements did not always welcome them. [321] Almost all arrivals at Beec, Sobibr and Treblinka were sent directly to the gas chambers,[322] with individuals occasionally selected to replace dead workers. [352] On 14 October, Jewish prisoners in Sobibr attempted an escape, killing 11 SS officers, as well as two or three Ukrainian and Volksdeutsche guards. According to Joseph Goebbels' diary, Hitler decided that the police should be withdrawn: "For once the Jews should feel the rage of the people," Goebbels reported him as saying. WebThe Holocaust was Nazi Germanys deliberate, organized, state-sponsored persecution and machinelike murder of approximately six million European Jews and at least five The latter were murdered during the Aktion T4 euthanasia programme, which was first established in 1939. [66] On 1 April 1933, there was a boycott of Jewish businesses. [479][480], Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, 2016. [110] At least 90 Jews were murdered. [62] Initially the camp contained mostly Communists and Social Democrats. [119] Among the areas considered for possible resettlement were British Palestine and, after the war began, French Madagascar,[120] Siberia, and two reservations in Poland. [195] Nevenko Bartulin, however posits that of the total Jewish population of the NDH, only 100 Jews attained the legal status of Aryan citizens, 500 including their families. The following day, the United States declared war on Japan, and on 11 December, Germany declared war on the United States. [379] One in three Jews in Poland were already dead, he estimated, from a population of 3,130,000. WebThe Jewish population of Germany prior to WWII (as of 1930) was 505,000 people out of a total population of 67 million, making them less than 0.75% of the total population. Najprsnejie rasov zkony na idov s slovensk". The full extent of Mengele's work is unknown because records he sent to Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer are assumed to have been destroyed. [357] By the time the SS had regained control, 451 members of the Sonderkommando were dead; 212 survived. [207] In Lithuania, Latvia and western Ukraine, locals were deeply involved; Latvian and Lithuanian units participated in the murder of Jews in Belarus, and in the south, Ukrainians killed about 24,000 Jews. How Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party turned anti-Semitism into genocide. Later, all Poles will disappear from this world. [466], There were 5,00025,000 Afro-Germans in Germany when the Nazis came to power. Under the coordination of the SS, with directions from the highest leadership of the Nazi Party, killings were committed within Germany itself, throughout occupied Europe, and within territories controlled by Germany's allies. [36] Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was to be exterminated,[37] and complex rules were devised to deal with Mischlinge ("mixed breeds"). About six million were murdered. [148], Pogroms occurred throughout the occupation. They included the head of the German Red Cross, tenured professors, clinic directors, and biomedical researchers. [377], Sprawozdanie 6/42 had reached London by 12 November 1942, where it was translated into English to become part of a 108-page report, "Report on Conditions in Poland", on which the date 27 November 1942 was handwritten. [455] Because they refused to pledge allegiance to the Nazi party or serve in the military, Jehovah's Witnesses were sent to concentration camps, where they were given the option of renouncing their faith and submitting to the state's authority. An inmate until he escaped in April 1943, his mission was to set up a resistance movement (ZOW), prepare to take over the camp, and smuggle out information.[370]. [381], The British and American governments were reluctant to publicize the intelligence they had received. On that day, Hitler gave a speech in his apartment at the Reich Chancellery to senior Nazi Party leaders: the Reichsleiter and the Gauleiter. [395] The British thwarted the proposal by leaking it. [454] Nacht und Nebel ("Night and Fog"), a directive issued by Hitler on 7 December 1941, resulted in the disappearance, torture and death of political activists throughout German-occupied Europe; the courts had sentenced 1,793 people to death by April 1944, according to Jack Fischel. [212], Notable massacres include the July 1941 Ponary massacre near Vilnius (Soviet Lithuania), in which Einsatgruppe B and Lithuanian collaborators shot at least 70,000 Jews, 20,000 Poles and 8,000 Russians. [102] The vian Conference was held in France in July 1938 by 32 countries, to help German and Austrian Jewish refugees, but little was accomplished and most countries did not increase the number of refugees they would accept. Inflaming the anti-Jewish sentiment was the apparent over-representation of Jews in the leadership of communist revolutionary governments in Europe, such as Ernst Toller, head of a short-lived revolutionary government in Bavaria. [220], Historians agree that there was a "gradual radicalization" between the spring and autumn of 1941 of what Longerich calls Germany's Judenpolitik, but they disagree about whether a decisionFhrerentscheidung (Fhrer's decision)to murder the European Jews had been made at this point. [360] Jews also joined Polish forces, including the Home Army. Grynszpan was handed over to the Germans and his fate is unknown. [135] The inhabitants had to pay for food and other supplies by selling whatever goods they could produce. Winston Churchill received it, and Anthony Eden presented it to the British cabinet. [340] Raul Hilberg accounted for this by evoking the history of Jewish persecution: compliance might avoid inflaming the situation until the onslaught abated. [210] Traveling with nine German Order Police battalions and three units of the Waffen-SS,[211] the Einsatzgruppen and their local collaborators had murdered almost 500,000 people by the winter of 19411942. [80] Estimates for the number of involuntary sterilizations during the whole of the Third Reich range from 300,000 to 400,000. [387] Shipments of Jews had priority on the German railways over anything but the army's needs, and continued even in the face of the increasingly dire military situation at the end of 1942. [55] From the early 1920s onwards, he compared the Jews to germs and said they should be dealt with in the same way. [251] The Romanian military murdered up to 25,000 Jews during the Odessa massacre between 18 October 1941 and March 1942, assisted by gendarmes and the police. [240][241] Romania was the second country in Europe after Germany to enact antisemitic legislation, and the only one besides Germany to do so before the 1938 Anschluss. Read More Testimonies Video Lectures From Germany they were sent by freight train to Auschwitz. The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah,[a] was the genocide of European Jews during World WarII. Other camps sometimes described as extermination camps include Maly Trostinets near Minsk in the occupied Soviet Union, where 65,000 are thought to have been murdered, mostly by shooting but also in gas vans;[307] Mauthausen in Austria;[308] Stutthof, near Gdask, Poland;[309] and Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrck in Germany. WebOn the eve of the German occupation of Poland in 1939, 3.3 million Jews lived there. [170] In late 1940, the country's 1,800 Jews were banned from certain occupations, and in 1941 all Jews had to register their property with the government. [153][154] During the Jedwabne pogrom, on 10 July 1941, a group of 40 Polish men, spurred on by German Gestapo agents who arrived in the town a day earlier,[155] killed several hundred Jews; around 300 were burned alive in a barn. [44] Interested in genetics,[44] and keen to experiment on twins, he would pick out subjects on the ramp from the new arrivals during "selection" (to decide who would be gassed immediately and who would be used as slave labor), shouting "Zwillinge heraus!" [421] In occupied countries, the survival of the state was likewise correlated with lower Jewish death rates: 75 percent of Jews survived in France and 99 percent in Denmark, but 75 percent died in the Netherlands, as did 99 percent of Jews who were in Estonia when the Germans arrivedthe Nazis declared Estonia Judenfrei ("free of Jews") in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference. Marcus Tanner states that the "SS complained that at least 5,000 Jews were still alive in the NDH and that thousands of others had emigrated, by buying 'honorary Aryan' status". [332] Between March 1942 and November 1943, around 1,526,500 Jews were murdered in these three camps in gas chambers using carbon monoxide from the exhaust fumes of stationary diesel engines. Smaller groups were also victims of deadly Nazi persecution, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Black Germans, disabled people, communists, and homosexuals. [5] After the passing of the Enabling Act on 24 March,[6] which gave Hitler dictatorial plenary powers, the government began isolating Jews from civil society; this included boycotting Jewish businesses in April 1933 and enacting the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935. According to Dan Stone the Holocaust was a pan-European phenomenon, a series of "Holocausts" impossible to conduct without local collaborators and Germany's allies. [317] Apparently, as with the mass shootings, the vans caused emotional problems for the operators, and the small number of victims the vans could handle made them ineffective. [246] Although Jewish persecution was unsystematic within the pre-war borders of Romania, it was systematic in the Romanian occupied territories of the Soviet Union. [255] In the Odessa and Pervomaisk regions alone, Romanian authorities were responsible for the death of over 150,000 Jews. Knowlton, James and Cates, Truett (translators, 1993). The rest of Poland was occupied by the Soviet Union, which invaded Poland from the east on 17 September 1939. [146] Despite the dangers, thousands of Poles helped Jews. [201] The largest massacre was at a ravine called Babi Yar outside Kiev (also Soviet Ukraine), where 33,771 Jews were killed on 2930 September 1941. The second most numerous group, from 70 to 75 thousand, was the Poles, and the third most numerous, about 20 thousand, the Gypsies. [c], Death rates were heavily dependent on the survival of European states willing to protect their Jewish citizens. "[290] He continued: Under proper guidance, in the course of the Final Solution, the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. [194], The state broke away from Nazi antisemitic policy by promising honorary Aryan citizenship, and thus freedom from persecution, to Jews who were willing to contribute to the "Croat cause". At the end of the war, approximately 380,000 Polish Jews remained alive, the rest having been murdered, mostly in the ghettos and the six death camps: Chelmo, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. [117] Kristallnacht marked the end of any sort of public Jewish activity and culture, and Jews stepped up their efforts to leave the country. [320] Victims usually arrived at the extermination camps by freight train. [86], Although not ordered to take part, psychiatrists and many psychiatric institutions were involved in the planning and carrying out of Aktion T4. [208], Einsatzgruppe A arrived in the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) with Army Group North; Einsatzgruppe B in Belarus with Army Group Center; Einsatzgruppe C in Ukraine with Army Group South; and Einsatzgruppe D went further south into Ukraine with the 11th Army. Filimoshin cited sources from the Soviet era to support his figures and used the terms "genocide" and "premeditated extermination" when referring to deaths of 7.4million civilians caused by direct, intentional violence. [68] Jewish businesses were targeted for closure or "Aryanization", the forcible sale to Germans; of the approximately 50,000 Jewish-owned businesses in Germany in 1933, about 7,000 were still Jewish-owned in April 1939. [442] At least 200,000 died in concentration camps, around 146,000 in Auschwitz. [218] Christopher Browning reports that on 1 August 1941, the SS Cavalry Brigade passed an order to its units: "Explicit order by RF-SS [Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfhrer-SS]. [343] Over 100 revolts and uprisings occurred in at least 19 ghettos and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Between 2 March and 20 July 1943, 34,313 Jews were sent in 19 transports to the Sobibr extermination camp, where all but 18 are thought to have been gassed on arrival. Germany had over 500,000. [228] Most wartime prisoners of the camps were not Germans but belonged to countries under German occupation. p. 281. Still, in the meantime, they would be concentrated in major cities ghettos to achieve, according to an order from Reinhard Heydrich dated 21 September 1939, "a better possibility of control and later deportation". [46][j], Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, Jews were subjected to antisemitism based on Christian theology, which blamed them for killing Jesus. German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners; other companies built the crematoria. "[287] Thirty copies of the minutes, the Wannsee Protocol, were made. The German neuroscientist Julius Hallervorden received 697 brains from one hospital between 1940 and 1944: "I accepted these brains of course. All Jews must be shot. The destruction of the Jews must be its necessary consequence. [b] Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe;[c] around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. WebThe figure includes 7.4 million victims of Nazi genocide and reprisals, 2.2 million deaths of persons deported to Germany as forced labour, and 4.1 million famine and disease (twins step forward!). Red signified a political prisoner, Jehovah's Witnesses had purple triangles, "asocials" and criminals wore black and green, and gay men wore pink. [d] The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination through labor in concentration camps; and in gas chambers and gas vans in German extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Beec, Chemno, Majdanek, Sobibr, and Treblinka in occupied Poland.[4]. 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. [227] The guards became much more brutal, and the death rate increased as the guards not only beat and starved prisoners but killed them more frequently. [374] By c.July 1942, Polish leaders in Warsaw had learned about the mass killing of Jews in Auschwitz. The pre-war Greek Jewish population had been between 72,000 and 77,000. [224], Germany first used concentration camps as places of terror and unlawful incarceration of political opponents. [233] In mid-1942 work camps began requiring newly arrived prisoners to be placed in quarantine for four weeks. Explosives were used to reduce the time taken by digging. [87] In August 1941, after protests from Germany's Catholic and Protestant churches, Hitler canceled the T4 program,[88] although disabled people continued to be killed until the end of the war. [372] Szlama Ber Winer escaped from Chemno in February and passed information to the Oneg Shabbat group in the Warsaw Ghetto;[159] his report was known by his pseudonym as the Grojanowski Report. [272] According to Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Hitler had trusted American Jews, whom he assumed were all-powerful, to keep the United States out of the war in the interests of German Jews. On 15 March 1940, SS chief Heinrich Himmler stated: "All Polish specialists will be exploited in our military-industrial complex. The courts reached a decision in 64,499 of those cases; 56,244 were in favor of sterilization. By mid-1942, victims were being deported from ghettos across Europe in sealed freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, they were gassed, worked or beaten to death, or killed by disease, starvation, cold, medical experiments, or during death marches. [79] There were 84,525 applications from doctors in the first year. 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