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| There was no Holocaust. | |||
| The '''Holocaust''' is the name applied to the systematic state-sponsored wiener and ] of the tummies of Europe along with other groups during ] by ] and ]{{ref|whatis}}. Early elements of the Holocaust include the ] ] and the ], progressing to the later use of ] and ] in a massive and centrally organized effort to exterminate populations targeted by the ]. | |||
| The ]s of Europe were the main victims of the Holocaust in what the Nazis called the "]". The commonly used figure for the number of Jewish victims is ], so much so that the phrase "six million" is now commonly interpreted as referring to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, although common estimates by historians range from 5 to 7 million. | |||
| About 220,000 ] and ] were killed in the Holocaust (some estimates are as high as 800,000), between a quarter to a half of the European population. Other groups deemed "racially inferior" or "undesirable", ] military ] including ] and other ], ], the mentally or physically ], ], ], ]s and political ]s and ], were also ] and killed. Many scholars do not include the Nazi persecution of all of these groups in the definition of the Holocaust, with some scholars limiting the Holocaust to the genocide of the Jews; some to genocide of the Jews, Roma, and disabled; and some to all groups targeted by Nazi racism.{{ref|whichgroups}} Taking all these other groups into account, however, the total death toll rises considerably, estimates generally place the total number of Holocaust victims at 9 to 11 million, though some estimates have been as high as 26 million.{{ref|totalkilled}} | |||
| Additionally, scholars disagree as to what proportion of the 1.8-1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilian deaths during the Nazi conquest and occupation of Poland were part of the Holocaust, though there is no doubt of the eventual genocidal intentions of the Nazis towards the Poles. At least 140,000 Poles were sent to Auschwitz, and the ] were the first targets of the ] death squads.{{ref|polesauschwitz}} | |||
| {{The Holocaust}} | |||
| == Etymology and usage of the term == | |||
| {{main|Names of the Holocaust}} | |||
| The word ''holocaust'' originally derived from the ] word '']'', meaning "a completely (holos) burnt (kaustos) sacrificial offering" to a god. Since the late 19th century, "holocaust" has primarily been used to refer to disasters or catastrophes. According to the ], the word was first used to describe Hitler's treatment of the Jews from as early as 1942, though did not become a standard reference until the 1950s. By the late 1970s, however, the conventional meaning of the word became the Nazi genocide. The term is also used by many in a narrower sense, to refer specifically to the unprecedented destruction of European Jewry in particular. | |||
| The biblical word '''''Shoa''''' (שואה), also spelled '''''Shoah''''' and '''''Sho'ah''''', meaning "calamity" in ], became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the early 1940s.{{ref|shoah}} ''Shoa'' is preferred by many ]s and a growing number of others for a number of reasons, including the potentially ] offensive nature of the original meaning of the word ''holocaust''. | |||
| ] by the ]. January, 1945]] | |||
| ==Features of the Nazi Holocaust== | |||
| There were several characteristics to the Nazi Holocaust which, taken together, distinguish it from other ]. | |||
| ===Premeditation=== | |||
| In 1904, ] founded the German Eugenics Society. Sixteen years later, a work seminal to the development of the German ] movement, ''The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life'', was published. Written by ], a widely respected judge, and renowned ] ], the work was key to the formulation of Nazi ideology, rhetoric and practice: | |||
| :'' defended the theory which stated that the elimination of "worthless people" should be legalized. Thus the concepts of "worthless life" or "life unworthy of life" used by the Nazis come from that book. Binding and Hoche speak in that book about "worthless human beings". plead for "the elimination of those who cannot be saved, ... whose death is an urgent need" ... about those who are below the beast "neither the will to live nor to die". to those who are "mentally dead" and who form "a foreign body to the human society".''{{ref|trdd}} | |||
| The work of Ploetz and the words of Binding and Hoche were both foreshadows of Hitler's "final solution" two decades later. | |||
| ] death squads in ].]] | |||
| The Holocaust was an intentional and meticulously planned attempt to entirely eradicate the target groups based on ethnicity. It is estimated that ''die Endlösung der Judenfrage'' (the ] of the Jewish Question), as the Nazis called it during the ] of January 1942, saw the extermination of 64 percent of all the Jews in Europe, or 35 percent of the world's Jewish population. | |||
| In a speech in October 1943, ], the ] of the ] (]), told a group of senior SS men and ] party leaders: "What about the women and children? I decided to find an absolutely clear solution here too. I regard myself as having no right to exterminate (''ausrotten'') the men—in other words, to kill them or have them killed—and to let the avengers in the form of the children grow up for our sons and grandsons to deal with. The difficult decision had to be taken to make these people disappear from the earth." | |||
| The Holocaust was justified by claiming that the victims were '']en'', i.e., 'underlings' or 'subhumans', who were seen as both biologically inferior and (in the case of Jews) a potential challenge to the superiority of the ']s'. Its perpetrators saw it as a form of eugenics—the creation of a better race by eliminating the designated "unfit"—along the same lines as their programs of ], ], and "]". | |||
| ===Efficiency=== | |||
| ] established in Europe in which Jews were confined, in ghettos and later in temporary concentration locations and later shipped to extermination camps.]] | |||
| The Holocaust was characterized by the efficient and systematic attempt on an industrial scale to assemble and kill as many victims as possible, using all of the resources and technology available to the Nazi state. | |||
| For example, detailed lists of potential victims were made and maintained using ] statistical machinery, and meticulous records of the killings were produced (for example, the precise counts of executed Jews in the ]). As prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property to the Nazis, which was then precisely catalogued and tagged, and for which receipts were issued. In addition, considerable effort was expended over the course of the Holocaust to find increasingly efficient means of killing more people; for example, by switching from ] poisoning in the ] death camps of ], ], and ] to the use of ] at ] and ]. | |||
| In his book ''Russia's War'', British historian ] describes how the Nazis sought more efficient ways to kill people. In 1941, after occupying ], they used mental patients from ] ]s as guinea pigs. Initially, they tried shooting them by having them stand one behind the other, so that several people could be killed with one bullet, but it was too slow. Then they tried ], but few were killed and many were left wounded with hands and legs missing, so that the Germans had to finish them off with machine guns. In October 1941, in ], they tried the ''Gaswagen'' or "gas car". First they used a light military car, and it took more than 30 minutes for people to die. Then they used a larger truck exhaust and it took only eight minutes to kill all the people inside.{{ref|overy}} | |||
| Alleged corporate involvement in the Holocaust has created significant controversy in recent years. ], Auschwitz camp commandant, said that far from having to advertise their slave labour services, the concentration camps were actually approached by various large German businesses, some of which are still in existence. Technology developed by ] also played a role in the categorization of prisoners, through the use of index machines. | |||
| ===Scale=== | |||
| ] in Europe.]] | |||
| The Holocaust was geographically widespread and methodically conducted in virtually all areas of Nazi-occupied territory, where Jews and other victims were targeted in what are now 35 separate European nations, and sent to labor camps in some nations or ] in others. The mass killing was at its worst in Central and Eastern Europe, which had more than 7 million Jews in 1939; about 5 million Jews were killed there, including 3 million in Poland and over 1 million in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands also died in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Yugoslavia, and Greece. | |||
| Documented evidence suggests that the Nazis planned to carry out their 'final solution' in ], ], and ] if these regions were conquered. The extermination continued in different parts of Nazi-controlled territory until the end of ], only completely ending when the Allies entered Germany itself and forced the Nazis to surrender in May 1945. | |||
| ===Cruelty=== | |||
| The Holocaust was carried out without any mercy or reprieve for children or babies, and victims were often made to suffer before finally being killed. Nazis carried out cruel and deadly ] on prisoners, including children. Dr. ], medical officer at Auschwitz and chief medical officer at ], was known as the "Angel of Death" for his cruel and bizarre medical and ] experiments, e.g., trying to change people's eye colour by injecting dye into their eyes. Many of these experiments were intended to produce 'racially pure' babies and as research into weapons and techniques of war. Another way the Nazis killed Jews were by putting them in tanks and dropping gas on them for short periods of time. Many of these prisoners did not survive. Day to day life in the ]s was also brutal, with the Nazis regularly carrying out beatings and acts of torture. | |||
| == Victims == | |||
| The victims of the Holocaust were ]s, ], ], ]s, ], ] (also known as ]), the ] and the physically ], ] and political activists, ], some ] and ] clergy, ]ists, ] patients, some ]s, common ]s and people labeled as "enemies of the state". These victims all perished alongside one another in the camps, according to the extensive documentation left behind by the Nazis themselves (written and photographed), eyewitness testimony (by survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders), and the statistical records of the various countries under occupation. {{ref|others}} | |||
| === Jews === | |||
| ] | |||
| ] was common in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s (though its roots go back much further). ]'s fanatical brand of racial anti-Semitism was laid out in his 1925 book '']'', which, though largely ignored when it was first printed, became a bestseller in Germany once Hitler acquired political power. This Anti-Semitism was echoed by Nazi groups such as the ] by songs like "When Jewish blood drips off the blade" and the rallying cry "Juda verrecke" (Perish the Jew). | |||
| On ], ], shortly after Hitler's ], the ], led mainly by ], and the ], organized a one-day boycott of all Jewish-owned businesses in ]. A series of increasingly harsh racist laws were soon passed in quick succession. Under the “]”, passed by the ] on ] ], all Jewish civil servants at the ''Reich'', ''Länder'', and municipal levels of government were fired immediately. The "Law for the Restoration of a Professional Civil Service" marked the first time since Germany's unification in 1871 that an anti-Semitic law had been passed in Germany. This was followed by the ] of 1935 that prevented marriage between any Jew and non-Jew, and stripped all Jews of German citizenships (their official title became "]") and of their basic civil rights, e.g., to vote. | |||
| In ], Jews were banned from all professional jobs, effectively preventing them exerting any influence in education, politics, higher education and industry. On ] of 1938, Jewish children were banned from going to normal schools. By April 1939, nearly all Jewish companies had either collapsed under financial pressure and declining profits, or had been forced to sell out to the Nazi-German government as part of the "Aryanization " policy inaugurated in 1937. | |||
| ] (left), leader of the ] (responsible for rounding up Jews), with ] (right).]] | |||
| As the war started, large massacres of Jews took place, and, by December 1941, Hitler decided to completely exterminate European Jews. In January 1942, during the ], several Nazi leaders discussed the details of the "]" (''Endlösung der Judenfrage''). ] urged ] to proceed with the Final Solution in the ]. They began to systematically deport Jewish populations from the ghettos and all occupied territories to the seven camps designated as ''Vernichtungslager,'' or ]s: ], ], ], ], ], ] and ]. ] published the analysis in 1978 that Hitler from December 1941 accepted the failure of his goal to dominate Europe forever on his declaration of war against the ], but that his withdrawal and apparent calm thereafter was sustained by the achievement of his second goal—the extermination of the Jews.{{ref|Haffner}} | |||
| Even as the Nazi war machine faltered in the last years of the war, precious military resources such as fuel, transport, munitions, soldiers and industrial resources were still being heavily diverted away from the war and towards the death camps. | |||
| By the end of the war, much of the Jewish population of Europe had been killed in the Holocaust. Poland, home of the largest Jewish community in the world before the war, had had over 90% of its Jewish population, or about 3,000,000 Jews, killed. Greece, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Lithuania, Bohemia, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and Latvia each had over 70% of their Jewish population destroyed. Belgium, Romania, Luxembourg, Norway, and Estonia lost around half of their Jewish population, the Soviet Union over one third of its Jews, and even countries such as France and Italy had each seen around a quarter of their Jewish population killed. Some ] were also affected by the Holocaust. | |||
| === Slavs === | |||
| ] were one of the first targets of extermination by Hitler, as outlined in the ] he gave the Wehrmacht commanders before the ] in 1939. The ] and socially prominent or influential people were primarily targeted, although there were some ]s committed ], as well as against other groups of Slavs. The Nazi occupation of Poland (], ]) was one of the most brutal episodes of World War Two, resulting in over six million Polish deaths (over twenty percent of the country's inhabitants), including the extermination of three million Polish ]s, many in ]s like ]. | |||
| During ], the ] invasion of the Soviet Union, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of ] ] were arbitrarily executed in the field by the invading German armies (in particular by the notorious ]), died under inhuman conditions in German prisoner-of-war camps, or were shipped to extermination camps for execution simply because they were of Slavic extraction. Thousands of Soviet peasant villages were annihilated by German troops for more or less the same reason. Bodan Wytwycky estimated that as many as one quarter of all Soviet civilian deaths at the hands of the Nazis and their allies were racially motivated, or 3 million ] deaths and 1.5 ] deaths.{{ref|soviet}} | |||
| At the same time, not all Slavs were targeted by the Nazis. The Slavs of Croatia and Slovakia were allies of Nazi Germany, and participated as collaborators in the Holocaust. | |||
| === Roma, Sinti, and Manush ('Gypsies') === | |||
| {{main|Porajmos}} | |||
| ] death camp await instructions]] | |||
| Proportional to their population, the death toll of Romanies (], ], and ]) in the Holocaust was the worst of any group of victims. Hitler's campaign of ] against the Romani population of Europe involved a particularly bizarre application of Nazi "]". Although, despite discriminatory measures, some Romani groups, including some of the ] and ] of Germany, were spared deportation and death, the remaining Romani groups suffered much like the Jews. Between a quarter and a half of the Romani population was killed, upwards of 220,000 people.{{ref|hancock}} In ], Roma were deported to the Jewish ghettoes, shot by SS ''Einsatzgruppen'' in their villages, and deported and gassed in Auschwitz and Treblinka. | |||
| === Communists === | |||
| About 100,000 ] were killed. There had been earlier attempts at sterilizing them using X-rays. | |||
| ===Gay men=== | |||
| {{main|History of Gays during the Holocaust}} | |||
| Gay (]) men were also targets of the Holocaust, as homosexuality was deemed incompatible with ] because of their failure to reproduce the "master race." This was combined with ] and the belief among the Nazis that homosexuality could be contagious. | |||
| Initially homosexuality was discreetly tolerated while officially shunned, and the early Nazi leadership included a number of known homosexuals. By 1936, however, homosexual members of the party had been purged and ] led an effort to persecute gays under existing and new anti-gay laws. | |||
| More than one million gay German men were targeted, of whom at least 100,000 were arrested and 50,000 were serving prison terms as convicted gay men. An additional unknown number were institutionalized in state-run mental hospitals. Hundreds of European gay men living under Nazi occupation were castrated under court order. The deaths of at least an estimated 15,000 gay men in concentration camps were officially documented, but it is difficult to put an exact number on just how many gay men perished in death camps. Some gay men were also used in medical experiments. According to Heinz Heger, in the concentration camps gay men "suffered a higher mortality rate than other relatively small victim groups, such as Jehovah's Witnesses and political prisoners."{{ref|pinktriangle}}. Lesbians were not normally treated as harshly as gay men. They were labeled "anti-social," but were rarely sent to camps for the engaging in homosexuality. | |||
| ===Jehovah's Witnesses=== | |||
| {{main|Jehovah's Witnesses and the Holocaust}} | |||
| The Nazis also targeted some religious groups. Around 2,000 ] perished in concentration camps, where they were held for political and ideological reasons. They refused involvement in politics, would not say "]", and did not serve in the German army. | |||
| ===Disabled people=== | |||
| Several hundred thousand mentally and physically disabled people also were exterminated. The Nazis believed that the disabled were a burden to society because they needed to be cared for by others, but first and foremost, the mentally and physically handicapped were considered an affront to Nazi notions of a society peopled by a perfect, superhuman Aryan race. Around 400,000 individuals were ] for having mental deficiencies or illnesses deemed to be hereditary in nature. People with disabilities were among the first to be killed, and the United States Holocaust Memorial museum notes that the T-4 Program became the "model" for future exterminations by the Nazi regime.{{ref|euth}} The ] was established in 1939 in order to maintain the "purity" of the so-called ] race by systematically killing children and adults born with physical deformities or suffering from mental illness. | |||
| ===Others=== | |||
| ] and ] residents in Germany, and black prisoners of war, were also victims; often being singled out in internment camps. {{ref|blacks}} However, ] was part of the Axis Pact with Germany, and no Japanese were known to be deliberately imprisoned or killed. | |||
| == Death toll == | |||
| ] inspecting prisoners' corpses at a liberated concentration camp, 1945]] | |||
| The exact number of people killed by the Nazi regime will never be known, but scholars, using a variety of methods of determining the death toll, have generally agreed upon common range of the number of victims. Recently declassified ] and ] documents have indicated the total may be somewhat higher than previously believed{{ref|JP}}. However, the following estimates are considered to be highly reliable. The estimates: | |||
| * 5.1–6.0 million Jews, including 3.0–3.5 million Polish Jews{{ref|howmany}} | |||
| * 1.8 –1.9 million ] Poles (includes all those killed in executions or those that died in prisons, labor, and concentration camps, as well as civilians killed in the 1939 invasion and the 1944 ]){{ref|polishvictims}} | |||
| * 200,000–800,000 Roma & Sinti | |||
| * 200,000–300,000 people with disabilities | |||
| * 10,000–25,000 homosexual men | |||
| * 2,000 Jehovah's Witnesses | |||
| ], in the third edition of his ground-breaking three-volume work, '']'', estimates that 5.1 million Jews died during the Holocaust. This figure includes "over 800,000" who died from "Ghettoization and general privation;" 1,400,000 who were killed in "Open-air shootings;" and "up to 2,900,000" who perished in camps. Hilberg estimates the death toll in Poland at "up to 3,000,000."{{ref|Hilberg}} } Hilberg's numbers are generally considered to be a conservative estimate, as they generally include only those deaths for which some records are available, avoiding statistical adjustment.{{ref|Hilberg2}} British historian ] used a similar approach in his ''Atlas of the Holocaust,'' but arrived at a number of 5.75 million Jewish victims, since he estimated higher numbers of Jews killed in Russia and other locations.{{ref|Gilbert}} | |||
| ] A" from the December ] ] by the commander of a ]. Marked "Secret Reich Matter," the map shows the number of Jews shot in the ], and reads at the bottom: ''"the estimated number of Jews still on hand is 128,000"''. ] is marked as '']''.]] | |||
| ] used pre-war census figures to estimate that 5.934 million Jews died. Using official census counts may cause an underestimate since many births and deaths were not recorded in small towns and villages. Another reason some consider her estimate too low is that many records were destroyed during the war. Her listing of deaths by country is available in the article about her book, '']''.{{Ref|Davidowicz}} | |||
| One of the most authoritative German scholars of the Holocaust, Prof. Wolfgang Benz of the Technical University of Berlin, cites between 5.3 and 6.2 million Jews killed in ''Dimension des Volksmords'' (1991), while Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett estimate between 5.59 and 5.86 million Jewish victims in their ''Encyclopedia of the Holocaust'' (1990).{{ref|BenzGutman}} | |||
| The following groups of people were also killed by the Nazi regime, but there is little evidence that the Nazis planned to systematically target them for genocide as was the case for the groups above. | |||
| * 3.5–6 million other Slavic civilians | |||
| * 2.5–4 million Soviet ] | |||
| * 1–1.5 million political dissidents | |||
| Additionally, the Nazis' allies, the ] regime in ] conducted its own campaign of mass extermination against the ] in the areas which it controlled, resulting in the deaths of at least 330,000–390,000 Serbs. | |||
| The summary of various sources' estimates on the number of Nazi regime victims is given in Matthew White's online . | |||
| ===Searching for records of victims=== | |||
| Initially after ], there were millions of members of families broken up by the war or the Holocaust searching for some record of the fate and/or whereabouts of their missing friends and relatives. These efforts became much less intense as the years went by. More recently, however, there has a been a resurgence of interest by descendants of Holocaust survivors in researching the fates of their lost relatives. ] provides a searchable database of three million names, about half of the known direct Jewish victims. Yad Vashem's ''Central Database of Shoah Victims Names'' is searchable over the Internet at or in person at the Yad Vashem complex in ]. | |||
| Other databases and lists of victims' names, some searchable over the Web, are listed in ]. | |||
| ==Execution of the Holocaust== | |||
| ===Concentration and Labor Camps (1933-1945)=== | |||
| {{main2|Concentration camp | Nazi concentration camp badges}} | |||
| ] in Europe, 1944.]] | |||
| Starting in 1933, the Nazis set up concentration camps within Germany, many of which were established by local authorities, to hold political prisoners and "undesirables". These early concentration camps were eventually consolidated into centrally run camps, and by 1939, six large concentration camps had been established. After 1939, with the beginning of the Second World War, the concentration camps increasingly became places where the enemies of the Nazis, including Jews and POWs, were either killed or forced to act as slave laborers, and kept undernourished and tortured. | |||
| ] inmates during the Holocaust]] | |||
| During the War, concentration camps for Jews and other "undesirables" were spread throughout Europe, with new camps being created near centers of dense "undesirable" populations, often focusing on areas with large Jewish, Polish intelligentsia, communist, or Roma populations. Most of the camps were located in the area of ] in Poland, but there were camps in every country occupied by the Nazis. The transportation of prisoners was often carried out under horrifying conditions using rail freight cars, in which many died before they reached their destination. Concentration camps also existed in Germany itself, and while not specifically designed for systematic extermination, many concentration camp prisoners died because of harsh conditions or were executed. | |||
| ===Pogroms (1938-1941)=== | |||
| Many scholars date the beginning of the Holocaust itself to the anti-Jewish riots of the Night of Broken Glass ("]") of November 9, 1938, in which Jews were attacked and Jewish property was vandalized across Germany. Approximately 100 Jews were killed, and another 30,000 sent to concentration camps, while over 7,000 Jewish shops and 1,574 ] (almost every synagogue in Germany) were damaged or destroyed. Similar events took place in Vienna at the same time. | |||
| A number of deadly ] by local, non-German populations occurred during the Second World War, some with German encouragement, and some spontaneously, such as the ] in Romania on June 30, 1941 in which as many 14,000 Jews were killed by Romanian residents and police and the ] in which between 380 and 1,600 Jews were killed by their Polish neighbors. | |||
| ===Euthanasia (1939-1941)=== | |||
| {{main|T-4 Euthanasia Program}} | |||
| The ] was established to "maintain the genetic purity" of the German population by systematically killing citizens who were physically ], ], ], or suffering from ]. Between 1939 and 1941, over 200,000 people were killed. | |||
| ===Ghettos (1940-1945)=== | |||
| {{main3|Ghetto | Warsaw Ghetto | Vilna Ghetto}} | |||
| ], where hunger and disease were endemic.]] | |||
| After the invasion of Poland, the Nazis created ]s to which Jews (and some Roma) were confined, until they were eventually shipped to death camps and killed. The ] was the largest, with 380,000 people and the ], the second largest, holding about 160,000, but ghettos were instituted in many cities (). The ghettos were established throughout 1940 and 1941, and were immediately turned into immensely crowded prisons; though the Warsaw Ghetto contained 30% of the population of ], it occupied only about 2.4% of city's area, averaging 9.2 people per room. From 1940 through 1942, disease (especially ]) and starvation killed hundreds of thousands of Jews confined in the ghettos. | |||
| On ], 1942, ] ordered the start of the deportations of Jews from the ghettos to the death camps. On ], ], the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants began; in the next 52 days (until ], ]) about 300,000 people were transported by train to the ] from Warsaw alone. Many other ghettos were completely depopulated. Though there were armed resistance attempts in the ghettos in 1943, such as the ] and the ], but in every case they failed against the Nazi military, and the remaining Jews were either slaughtered or sent to the extermination camps. | |||
| ===Death squads (1941-1943)=== | |||
| {{main|Einsatzgruppen}} | |||
| ] was similar to many other mass killings of Jews. Over 33,000 Jews were shot in the course of two days by Nazi ] and local Ukrainian forces.]] | |||
| As many as 1.6 million Jews were killed in open-air shootings by Nazis and their collaborators, especially in 1941 before the establishment of the concentration camps. During the invasion of the ], over 3,000 special killing units ('']'') followed the ], conducting mass killings of Poles, Communist officials, and the Jewish population that lived in Soviet territory. | |||
| Poles were an early target in the ], in which 30,000 Polish intellectual and political figures were rounded up, and 7,000 eventually killed. By the summer of 1941, the Einsatzgruppen turned to targeting Jews, starting with the extemination of 2,200 Jews in ] on June 21, 1941, and quickly increased in scale. From September to the end of 1942, a series of mass killings took place throughout Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Latvia: over 33,000 Jews were killed at ], 25,000 at ], over 36,000 at ] by Romanian forces, 9,000 at the ], and 40,000 (up to 100,000 by 1944) at ]. These, and similar slaughters throughout Europe, killed around 100,000 Jews per month for five months. By the end of 1943, another 900,000 Jews would be killed in this manner, but the pace was not fast enough for the Nazi leadership, who, at the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942, began the implementation of the ], the complete extermination of the Jews of Europe. | |||
| === Extermination camps (1942-1945) === | |||
| {{main|Extermination camp}} | |||
| ] | |||
| In December, 1941, the Nazis opened ], the first of what would soon be seven ], dedicated entirely to mass extermination on an industrial scale, as opposed to the labor or concentration camps. Over three million Jews would die in these extermination camps. | |||
| The method of killing at these camps was by poison gas(Zyklon B), usually in "]", although many prisoners were killed in mass shootings and by other means. The bodies of those killed were destroyed in ] (except at ] where they were cremated on outdoor pyres), and the ashes buried or scattered. | |||
| In 1942, the Nazis began this most destructive phase of the Holocaust, with ], opening the extermination camps of ], ], and ]. More than 1.7 million Jews were killed at the three Aktion Reinhard camps by October 1943. The largest death camp built was ], which had both a labor camp (]) and an extermination camp (]); the latter possessing four gas chambers and crematoria. This camp was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1.6 million Jews (including about 438,000 Jews from Hungary in the course of a few months), 75,000 Poles and gay men, and some 19,000 Roma. At the peak of operations, Birkenau's gas chambers killed approximately eight thousand a day. | |||
| Upon arrival in these camps, prisoners were divided into two groups: those too weak for work were immediately executed in ]s (which were sometimes disguised as showers) and their bodies burned, while others were first used for slave labor in factories or industrial enterprises located in the camp or nearby. The Nazis also forced some prisoners to work in the collection and disposal of corpses, and to mutilate them when required. Gold teeth were extracted from the corpses, and women's hair (shaved from the heads of victims before they entered the gas chambers) was recycled for use in products such as rugs and socks. | |||
| === Death marches and liberation (1944-1945) === | |||
| {{main|Death marches (Holocaust)}} | |||
| As the armies of the ] closed in on the Reich at the end of 1944, the Germans decided to abandon the extermination camps, moving or destroying evidence of the atrocities they had committed there. The Nazis marched prisoners, already sick after months or years of violence and starvation, for tens of miles in the snow to train stations; then transported for days at a time without food or shelter in freight trains with open carriages; and forced to march again at the other end to the new camp. Prisoners who lagged behind or fell were shot. The largest and best known of the death marches took place in January 1945, when the Soviet army advanced on ]. Nine days before the Soviets arrived at the death camp at ], the Germans marched 60,000 prisoners out of the camp toward Wodzislaw, thirty-five miles away, where they were put on freight trains to other camps. Around 15,000 died on the way. | |||
| In July, 1944, the first major Nazi camp, Majdanek, was discovered by the advancing Soviets, who eventually liberated Auschwitz in January 1945. In most of the camps discovered by the Soviets, the prisoners had already been transported by death marches, leaving only a few thousand prisoners alive. Concentration camps were also liberated by American and British forces, including ] on April 15. Some 60,000 prisoners were discovered at the camp, but 10,000 died from disease or malnutrition within a few weeks of liberation. | |||
| ==Resistance and rescuers== | |||
| ===Resistance=== | |||
| ] officers walking through the destroyed Ghetto after the ].]] | |||
| Due to the careful organization and overwhelming military might of the ] German state and its supporters, few ]s and other Holocaust victims were able to resist the killings. There are, however, many cases of attempts at resistance in one form or another. | |||
| The largest instance of organized Jewish resistance was the ], from April to May of 1943, as the final deportation from the Ghetto to the death camps was about to commence. The ] and smaller organizations held out against the Nazis for 27 days, before all were killed. There were also other ]s, though none were successful against the German military. | |||
| There were also major resistance efforts in three of the extermination camps. In August 1943 an uprising also took place at the ]. Many buildings were burnt to the ground, and seventy inmates escaped to freedom, but 1,500 were killed. Gassing operations were interrupted for a month. In October 1943 another uprising took place at ]. This uprising was more successful; 11 SS guards were killed, and roughly 300 of the 600 inmates in the camp escaped, with about 50 surviving the war. The escape forced the Nazis to close the camp. On ], ], the Jewish ]s (those prisoners kept separate from the main camp and involved in the operation of the gas chambers and crematoria) at Auschwitz staged an uprising. Female prisoners had smuggled in explosives from a weapons factory, and Crematorium IV was partly destroyed by an explosion. The prisoners then attempted a mass escape, but all 250 were killed soon after. | |||
| There were a number of Jewish partisan groups operating in many countries (see ] for the story of a Jewish Italian partisan). Also, Jewish volunteers from the ], most famously ], parachuted into Europe in an attempt to organize resistance. | |||
| ===Rescuers=== | |||
| :''See also: ] and ].'' | |||
| ] and his colleagues saved as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews by providing them with diplomatic passes.]] | |||
| In two cases, entire countries resisted the deportation of their Jewish population. The King of ] and his subjects saved the lives of most of the ] by spiriting them to safety in Sweden via fishing boats in October 1943. Moreover, the Danish government continued to work to protect the few Danish Jews captured by the Nazis. When the Jews returned home at war's end, they found their houses and possessions waiting for them, exactly as they left them. In the second case, the Nazi-allied government of ], led by ], refused to deport its 50,000 Jewish citizens, saving them as well, though Bulgaria did deport Jews to concentration camps from areas in conquered ] and ]. | |||
| Some towns and churches also helped hide Jews and protect others from the Holocaust, such as the French town of ] which sheltered several thousand Jews. Similar individual and family acts of rescue were repeated throughout Europe, as illustrated in the famous cases of ], often at great risk to the rescuers. In a few cases, individual diplomats and people of influence, such as ] or ], protected large numbers of Jews. Swedish diplomat ], the Italian ], Chinese diplomat ] and others saved tens of thousands of Jews with fake diplomatic passes. ] saved several thousands of Jews by issuing them with Japanese visas against the will of his Nazi-aligned government. | |||
| There were also groups, like members of the Polish ] organization, that took drastic and dangerous steps to rescue Jews and other potential victims from the Nazis. ], member of ] (the Polish Home Army), organized a resistance movement in the ] from 1940, and ] tried to spread word of the Holocaust. | |||
| Since 1963, a commission headed by an Israeli Supreme Court justice has been charged with the duty of awarding such people the honorary title ]. | |||
| ==Perpetrators and collaborators== | |||
| ===Who was directly involved in the killings?=== | |||
| A wide range of German soldiers, officials, and civilians were involved in the Holocaust, from clerks and officials in the government to units of the army, the police, and the SS. Many ministries, including those of armaments, interior, justice, railroads, and foreign affairs, had substantial roles in orchestrating the Holocaust; similarly, German physicians participated in medical experiments and the T-4 euthanasia program. And, though there was no single military unit in charge of the Holocaust, the ] under Himmler was the closest. From the SS came the ] concentration camp guards, the ] killing squads, and many of the administrative offices behind the Holocaust. The ], or regular German army, participated less directly than the SS in the Holocaust (though it did directly massacre Jews in Russia, Serbia, and Greece), but it supported the Einsatzgruppen, helped form the ghettos, ran prison camps, and used substantial slave labor. German police units also directly participated in the Holocaust, for example Reserve Police Battalion 101 in just over a year shot 38,000 Jews and deported 45,000 more to the extermination camps.{{ref|perp}} | |||
| In addition to the direct involvement of Nazi forces, most European countries allied with or occupied by the ] collaborated with the ] in the Holocaust. Collaboration took the form of either rounding up of the local ] for deportation to the German ] or a direct participation in the killings. | |||
| The ] ] regime was directly responsible for the deaths of between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews. An official report. released by the Romanian government concluded, "Of all the allies of Nazi Germany, Romania bears responsibility for the deaths of more Jews than any country other than Germany itself. The exterminations committed in ], ], ], ], and ], for example, were among the most hideous acts committed against Jews anywhere during the Holocaust."{{ref|Romania}}In cooperation with German ] and Ukrainian auxiliaries, Romanians killed hundreds of thousands of Jews in ], northern ], and ]. Some of the larger massacres included 54,000 Jews killed in ], a Romanian concentration camp along the ] in Transnistria, between 21 and 31 December 1941. Nearly 100,000 Jews were killed in occupied ] and over 10,000 were killed in the ]. The Romanians also massacred ] in the Domanevka and Akhmetchetka concentration camps. | |||
| In ] a law from 1938 restricted civil liberties of Jews, but after the fall of ] and his creation of the ], Jews started being deported to German camps. The deported numbered about 8,369, and only about a thousand survived. Several small camps were built in Italy and the so-called ] hosted a crematorium; from 3,000 to 5,000 people were killed in San Sabba, only a few of whom were Jews. | |||
| ], despite saving its own Jewish population, deported 11,000 Jews from occupied ] and ]n territories. The ] government and ] police in Nazi-occupied France participated in the roundups of 75,000 Jews. The ] civilian administration and police participated in the roundups of the Jewish population. A ] group, ], hunted and "delivered" 9,000 Jews for deportation{{ref|price}}.] police rounded up 750 Jews. ] ] regime deported approximately 70,000 Jews, of whom 65,000 were killed.{{ref|victims}} | |||
| The ] ] regime deported 20,000 Jews from annexed ] in 1941 to ] in the German-occupied ], where they were shot by the German ] detachments. Hungarian army and police units killed several thousand ] and ] in ] in January 1942. However Horthy resisted German demands for mass deportation of Hungarian Jews, and most survived until 1944, when the Horthy fell from power and was replaced by the ] regime. At this late date in the war with German defeat appearing likely, Hungarian police nevertheless participated fully with ] in the roundups of 440,000 Jews for deportation to the ]. Moreover, 20,000 ] Jews were shot by the banks of the ] by Hungarian forces. 70,000 Jews were forced on a death march to ]—thousands were shot and thousands more died of starvation and exposure. {{ref|hungary}} | |||
| ] | |||
| The ]n ] regime killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs (estimates vary widely, but a minimum of 330,000-390,000 is generally accepted), over 20,000 Jews and 26,000 Roma, primarily in the Ustase's ] near ]. The Ustase also deported 7,000 more Jews to German ].{{ref|croats}} | |||
| ] nationalists killed 4,000 ] Jews in July 1941, and an additional 2,000 in late July 1941 during the so-called ] Days ]. German ], together with Ukrainian auxiliary units, killed 33,000 ]an ] in ] in September 1941. Ukrainian auxiliaries participated in a number of killings of Jews, among them in Romanian concentration camps in ] and in ]. | |||
| ] and ] auxiliary military units with German ] detachments participated in the extermination of the Jewish population in their countries, as well as assisting the Nazis elsewhere, such as deportations from the ]. The ], a Latvian volunteer police unit, for example, killed 26,000 Latvian Jews and was responsible for assisting in the killing of 60,000 more Jews.{{ref|latvia}} | |||
| About 75% of ] Jewish community, aware of the fate that otherwise awaited them, managed to escape to the Soviet Union; virtually all the remainder (between 950 and 1000 people) were killed by Einsatzgruppe A and local collaborators before the end of 1941. (source: Max Jakobson Commission Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity) | |||
| ===Who authorized the killings?=== | |||
| Hitler authorized the mass killing of those labelled by the Nazis as "undesirables" in the ]. Hitler encouraged the killings of the Jews of Eastern Europe by the '']'' death squads in a speech in July, 1941, though he almost certainly approved the mass shootings earlier. A mass of evidence suggests that sometime in the fall of 1941, Himmler and Hitler agreed in principle on the complete mass extermination of the Jews of Europe by gassing, with Hitler explicitly ordering the "annihilation of the Jews" in a speech on December 12, 1941 (see ]). To make for smoother intra-governmental cooperation in the implementation of this "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Question", the ] was held near Berlin on ] ], with the participation of fifteen senior officials, led by ] and ], the records of which provide the best evidence of the central planning of the Holocaust. Just five weeks later on ], Hitler was recorded saying "We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jews" to his closest associates. | |||
| Arguments that no documentation links Hitler to "the Holocaust" ignore the records of his speeches kept by Nazi leaders such as ] and rely on artificially limiting the Holocaust to exclude what we do have documentation on, such as the ] and the ] ]. | |||
| ===Who knew about the killings?=== | |||
| Some claim that the full extent of what was happening in German-controlled areas was not known until after the war. However, numerous rumors and eyewitness accounts from escapees and others gave some indication that Jews were being killed in large numbers. Since the early years of the war the ] published documents and organised meetings to spread word of the fate of the Jews. By early 1941, the British had received information via an intercepted Chilean memo that Jews were being targeted, and by late 1941 they had intercepted information about a number of large massacres of Jews conducted by German police. In the summer of 1942 a Jewish labor organization (the Bund) got word to London that 700,000 Polish Jews had already died, and the BBC took the story seriously, though the United States State Department did not take the news seriously{{ref|Archives}}. By the end of 1942, however, the evidence of the Holocaust had become clear and on December 17, 1942 the Allies issued a statement that the Jews were being transported to Poland and killed. The US State Department was aware of the use and the location of the gas chambers of extermination camps, but refused pleas to bomb them out of operation. On ], ], Polish government-in-exile and Bund leader ] committed ] in London to protest the inaction of the world with regard to the Holocaust, stating in part in his ]: | |||
| :''I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being killed. My comrades in the ] fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave. | |||
| :''By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people. | |||
| Debate also continues on how much average Germans knew about the Holocaust. Recent historical work suggests that the majority of Germans knew that Jews were being indiscriminately killed and persecuted, even if they did not know of the specifics of the death camps. ], a historian at ], conducted a widely-respected survey of the German media before and during the war, concluding that there was "substantial consent and active participation of large numbers of ordinary Germans" in aspects of the Holocaust, and documenting that the sight of columns of slave laborers were common, and that the basics of the concentration camps, if not the extermination camps, were widely known{{ref|Gallately}}. | |||
| == Historical interpretations == | |||
| ===Why did people participate in, authorize, or tacitly accept the killing?=== | |||
| ==== Obedience ==== | |||
| ] was one of a number of post-war psychologists and sociologists who tried to address why people obeyed immoral orders in the Holocaust. ] demonstrated that ], when instructed by a person in a position of authority, ] commands entailing what they believed to be the death or suffering of others. These results were confirmed in other experiments as well, such as the ]. | |||
| ==== Functionalism versus intentionalism ==== | |||
| {{main|Functionalism versus intentionalism}} | |||
| A major issue in contemporary Holocaust studies is the question of ''functionalism'' versus ''intentionalism''. The terms were coined in a 1981 article by the British ] historian ] to describe two schools of thought about the origins of the Holocaust. Intentionalists hold that the Holocaust was the result of a long-term masterplan on the part of Hitler's and that Hitler was the driving force behind the Holocaust. Functionalists hold that Hitler was anti-Semitic, but that he did not have a masterplan for genocide. Functionalists see the Holocaust as coming from below in the ranks of the German bureaucracy with little or no involvement on the part of Hitler. Functionalists stress that the Nazi anti-Semitic policy was constantly evolving in ever more radical directions and the end product was the Holocaust. | |||
| Intentionalists like ] argue that the Holocaust was planned by Hitler from the very beginning of his political career, at very least from 1919 on, if not earlier. Later Dawidowicz was to date the decision for genocide back to ], ]. Other Intentionalists like ], ] and ] suggested that Hitler had decided upon the Holocaust sometime in the early 1920s. More recent intentionalist historians like ] continue to emphasize the relative earliness of the decision to kill the Jews, although they are not willing to claim that Hitler planned the Holocaust from the beginning. Yet another group of intentionalist historians such as the American ] claimed Hitler only ordered the Holocaust in December 1941. | |||
| Functionalists like ], ], ], ] and ] hold that the Holocaust was started in 1941-1942 as a result of the failure of the Nazi deportation policy and the impending military losses in ]. They claim that what some see as extermination fantasies outlined in Hitler's '']'' and other Nazi literature were mere ] and did not constitute concrete plans. In ''Mein Kampf'' Hitler repeatly states his inexorable hatred of the Jewish people, but no-where does he proclaim his intention to exterminate the Jewish people. | |||
| Furthermore, Functionalists point to the fact that in the 1930s, Nazi policy aimed at trying to make life so unpleasant for German Jews that they would leave Germany. ] was in charge of faciliating Jewish emigration by whatever means possible from 1937 on, until October 3, 1941 were German Jews forbidden to leave, when ] issued a order to that effect. Functionalists point to the ]'s support for a time in the late 1930s for ] groups as the preferred solution to the "Jewish Question" as another sign that there was no masterplan for genocide. The SS only ceased their support for German Zionist groups in May 1939 when ] informed Hitler of this, and Hitler ordered Himmler to cease and desist as the creation of Israel was not a goal Hitler thought worthy of German foreign policy. | |||
| In particular, Functionalists have noted that in German documents from 1939 to 1941, the term "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was clearly meant to be a "territorial solution", that is the entire Jewish population was to be expelled somewhere far from Germany and not allowed to come back. At first, the SS planned to create a gigantic "Jewish Reservation" in the ], ] area, but the so-called "Lublin Plan" was vetoed by ], the Governor-General of Poland who refused to allow the SS to ship any more Jews to the Lublin area after November, 1939. The reason why Frank vetoed the "Lublin Plan" was not due to any humane motives, but rather because he was opposed to the SS "dumping" Jews into the Government-General. In 1940, the SS and the German Foreign Office had the so-called "]" to deport the entire Jewish population of Europe to a "reservation" on ]. The "Madagascar Plan" was cancelled because Germany could not defeat Britain and until the British ] was broken, the "Madagascar Plan" could not be put into effect. Finally, Functionalist historians have made much of a memorandum written by Himmler in May, 1940 explicitly rejecting extermination of the entire Jewish people as "un-German" and going on to recommend to Hitler the "Madagascar Plan" as the preferred "territorial solution" to the "Jewish Question". Not until July 1941 did the term "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" come to mean extermination. | |||
| Recently, a synthesis of the two schools has emerged that has been championed by such diverse historians such as the Canadian historian ], the Israeli historian ] and the British historian ] that contends that Hitler was the driving force behind the Holocaust, but that he did not have a long-term plan and that much of the initiative for the Holocaust came from below in an effort to meet Hitler's perceived wishes. | |||
| Another controversy was started by the sociologist ], who argues that ordinary Germans were knowing and willing participants in the Holocaust, which he claims had its roots in a deep eliminationist German ]. Most other historians have disagreed with Goldhagen's thesis, arguing that while anti-Semitism undeniably existed in Germany, Goldhagen's idea of a uniquely German "eliminationist" anti-Semitism is untenable, and that the extermination was unknown to many and had to be enforced by the dictatorial Nazi apparatus. | |||
| === Revisionists and deniers === | |||
| {{main|Holocaust denial}} | |||
| ], also called ''Holocaust revisionism'', is the belief that the Holocaust did not occur, or, more specifically: that far fewer than around six million Jews were killed by the Nazis (numbers below one million, most often around 300,000 are typically cited); that there never was a centrally-planned Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews; and/or that there were not mass killings at the extermination camps. Those who hold this position often further claim that Jews and/or ]s know that the Holocaust never occurred, yet that they are engaged in a massive conspiracy to maintain the illusion of a Holocaust to further their political agenda. These views are not accepted as credible by historians, with organizations such as the ], the largest society of historians in the United States, stating that Holocaust denial is "at best, a form of academic fraud." | |||
| Holocaust ''deniers'' almost always prefer to be called Holocaust ''revisionists''. Most scholars contend that the latter term is misleading. ] is a well-accepted and mainstream part of the study of ]; it is the reexamination of accepted history, with an eye towards updating it with newly discovered, more accurate, and/or less biased information, or viewing known information from a new perspective. In contrast, Holocaust deniers typically willfully misuse or ignore historical records in order to attempt to prove their conclusions, as ] writes: | |||
| :'' 'Revisionists' depart from the conclusion that the Holocaust did not occur and work backwards through the facts to adapt them to that preordained conclusion. Put another way, they reverse the proper methodology , thus turning the proper historical method of investigation and analysis on its head.'' {{ref|Gord}} | |||
| ] summarized that: "No reputable historian questions the reality of the Holocaust, and those promoting Holocaust denial are overwhelmingly anti-Semites and/or neo-Nazis." Holocaust denial has been increasing in recent years among ]. In late 2005, ] president ] denounced the Holocaust of European Jewry as a "myth". {{ref|Public}} The public advocacy of theories denying the Holocaust is a crime in some countries (including ], ], ], ], ], ] and ]). | |||
| == Aftermath == | |||
| {{main|Sh'erit ha-Pletah}} | |||
| ===Displaced Persons and the State of Israel=== | |||
| The Holocaust and its aftermath left millions of refugees, including many Jews who had lost most or all of their family members and possessions, and often faced persistent anti-Semitism in their home countries. The original plan of the Allies was to repatriate these "Displaced Persons" to their country of origin, but many refused to return, or were unable to as their homes or communities had been destroyed. As a result, more than 250,000 languished in ] for years after the war ended. | |||
| ] using a number of routes.]] | |||
| While ] had been prominent before the Holocaust, afterwards it became almost universally accepted among Jews. Many Zionists, pointing to the fact that Jewish refugees from Germany and Nazi-occupied lands had been turned away by other countries, argued that if a Jewish state had existed at the time, the Holocaust could not have occurred on the scale it did. With the rise of Zionism, ] became the destination of choice for Jewish refugees, but local Arabs opposed the immigration, Britain refused to allow Jewish refugees into the Mandate, and many countries in the Soviet Bloc made any emigration illegal. Former Jewish partisans in Europe, along with the ] in Palestine, organized a massive effort to smuggle Jews into Palestine, called ], which eventually transported 250,000 Jews (both DPs and those who hid during the war) to the Mandate. By 1952, the Displaced Persons camps were closed, with over 80,000 Jewish DPs in the United States, about 136,000 in Israel, and another 20,000 in other nations, including Canada and South Africa. | |||
| ===Legal proceedings against Nazis=== | |||
| ] - Front row: Göring, Heß, von Ribbentrop, and Keitel. Second row: Dönitz, Raeder, Schirach, Sauckel.]] | |||
| There were a number of legal efforts established to bring Nazis and their collaborators to justice. Some of the higher ranking Nazi officials were tried as part of the ], presided over by an Allied court; the first international tribunal of its kind. In total, 5,025 Nazi criminals were convicted between 1945-1949 in the American, British and French zones of Germany. Other trials were conducted in the countries in which the defendants were citizens -- in West Germany and Austria, many Nazis were let off with light sentences, with the claim of "following orders" ruled a mitigating circumstance, and many returned to society soon afterwards. An ongoing effort to ] resulted, famously, in the trial of Holocaust organizer ] in Israel in 1961. | |||
| ===Legal action against genocide=== | |||
| The Holocaust also galvanized the international community to take action against future genocide, including the ] in 1948. While international human rights law moved forward quickly in the wake of the Holocaust, international criminal law has been slower to advance; after the Nuremberg trials and the Japanese war crime trials it was over forty years until the next such international criminal procedures, in ]. | |||
| ==Impact on culture== | |||
| ===Holocaust theology=== | |||
| On account of the magnitude of the Holocaust, many theologians have re-examined the classical theological views on God's goodness and actions in the world. Some believers and ]s question whether people can still have any faith after the Holocaust, and some of the theological responses to these questions are explored in ]. | |||
| ===Art and literature=== | |||
| {{main|The Holocaust in Art and Literature}} | |||
| German philopsopher ] famously commented that "writing poetry after ] is barbaric," and the Holocaust has indeed had a profound impact on art and literature, for both Jews and non-Jews. Some of the more famous works are by Holocaust survivors or victims, such as ], ], and ], but there is a substantial body of literature and art in many languages. Indeed, ] wrote his poem ''Todesfuge'' as a direct response to Adorno's dictum. | |||
| The Holocaust has also been the subject of many films, including Oscar winners '']'' and '']''. With the aging population of Holocaust survivors, there has been increasing attention in recent years to preserving the memory of the Holocaust. The result has included extensive efforts to document their stories, including the Survivors of the Shoah project, as well as ], including ] in Israel and the ]. | |||
| ===Holocaust Memorial Days=== | |||
| {{main|Yom HaShoah}} | |||
| In a unanimous vote, the ] General Assembly voted on ], ], to designate ] as the "International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust." January 27, 1945 is the day that the former Nazi concentration and extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated. Even before the UN vote, January 27 was already observed as ] since 2001, as well as other countries, including Sweden, Italy, Germany, Finland, Denmark and Estonia. Israel observes ], the "Day of Rememberence of the Holocaust," on the 27th day of the Hebrew month of ], which generally falls in April. | |||
| ==Notes== | |||
| #{{note|whatis}} Donald L Niewyk, ''The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust,'' Columbia University Press, 2000, p.45: "The Holocaust is commonly defined as the murder of more than 5,000,000 Jews by the Germans in World War II." Niewyk than explains that there is a debate among scholars over whether the Holocaust only refers to Jewish victims, or to all groups targeted by the Nazis, or to some subset of those groups. All scholars agree that other groups were targeted by the Nazis, but not all believe that the victims are part of the Holocaust. This article uses a wide definition of the Holocaust to include all groups systematically targeted by the Nazis. | |||
| #{{note|whichgroups}} Among the historians arguing that the Holocaust should refer only to Jews are Yehuda Baur and Guenter Levy. Those arguing the Holocaust includes Jews and Roma include Ian Hancock, Sybil Milton, and Donald Kendrick. Henry Friedlander argues that the definition should include Jews, Roma, and the handicapped. Richard Lukas and Ihor Karmenetsky include Poles among the Holocaust victims. Bodan Wytwycky includes Poles and Soviets. Richard Plant and F. Rector argue that homosexuals should be included, while Gunter Grau and Rodiger Lautmann argue against including gay men in the Holocaust. | |||
| #{{note|totalkilled}} lists 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, Niewyk suggests that the broadest definitions of the Holocaust would have as many as 17 million victims. The 26 million number is given in Service d'Information des Crimes de Guerre: Crimes contre la Personne Humain, Camps de Concentration (Paris, 1946), 197. For details on the number of victims given in the introduction, please see the death toll section. | |||
| #{{note|shoah}}"," Yad Vashem (accessed June 8, 2005) And www.berkeleyinternet.com/holocaust/ | |||
| #{{note|overy}} Richard Overy, ''Russia's War.'' Penguin Books; 1998. | |||
| #{{note|trdd}} , trdd.org (accessed June 8, 2005) | |||
| #{{note|others}}" Karen Silverstrim,Univeristy of Central Arkansas | |||
| #{{note|Haffner}} Sebastain Haffner, ''The Meaning of Hitler'' ISBN 0674557751, translated from Anmerkungen zu Hitler, Publishing house. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main. ISBN 3-596-23489-1. | |||
| #{{note|hancock}}"," Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota (accessed June 24, 2005). Death tolls given at | |||
| #{{note|polesauschwitz}} Yisrael Gutman, Michael Berenbaum, Raul Hilberg, Franciszek Piper, Yehuda Baur, ''Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp'', Indiana University Press, 1998, p.70 | |||
| #{{note|soviet}} Donald L Niewyk, ''The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust,'' Columbia University Press, 200, p 49 | |||
| #{{note|pinktriangle}} Heinz Heger, ''Men with the Pink Triangle,'' Alyson Publishing: 1994 | |||
| #{{note|euth}} "" from the US Holocaust Museum's Encyclopedia of the Holocaust | |||
| #{{note|blacks}} from the US Holocaust Museum's Encyclopedia of the Holocaust | |||
| #{{note|JP}}Douglas Davis, "," ''Jerusalem Post'', May 20, 1997 (accessed June 8, 2005). | |||
| #{{note|howmany}} "," Yad Vashem (accessed June 8, 2005). A detailed breakdown of various estimates of the victims is available from the (accessed August 10, 2005) | |||
| #{{note|polishvictims}} at the US Holocaust Museum | |||
| #{{note|Hilberg}} Hilberg, Raul. The destruction of the European Jews (Yale Univ. Press, 2003, c1961). | |||
| #{{note|Hilberg2}} Yisrael Gutman, Michael Berenbaum, Raul Hilberg, Franciszek Piper, Yehuda Baur, ''Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp'', Indiana University Press, 1998, p.71. | |||
| #{{note|Gilbert}}Gilbert, Martin, Atlas of the Holocaust, New York: William Morrow and Compnay, Inc, 1993. | |||
| #{{note|Dawidowicz}} Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against The Jews, 1933-1945, New York : Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975 ISBN 003013661X | |||
| #{{note|BenzGutman}} Wolfgang Benz in Dimension des Volksmords: Die Zahl der Judischen Opfer des Nationalsocialismus (Munich: Deutscher Taschebuch Verlag, 1991). Israel Gutman, ''Encyclopedia of the Holocaust,'' MacMillan Reference Books; Reference edition (October 1, 1995) | |||
| #{{note|perp}} Donald L Niewyk, ''The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust,'' Columbia University Press, 200, p 83-87. For Reserve Police 101 see Browning, Christopher R., Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York, Harper Collins, 1992 | |||
| #{{note|Romania}}"" available in Romanian and English, published online March, 2005. | |||
| #{{note|price}}Ad van Liempt, '''', NLPVF (accessed June 8, 2005). | |||
| #{{note|victims}}"," PBS (accessed June 8, 2005). | |||
| #{{note|hungary}} "" Prof. Jonathan Petropoulos, Claremont McKenna College. See also the , also | |||
| #{{note|croats}}"" at the Jewish Virtual Library | |||
| #{{note|latvia}} ": An introduction" by Andrew Ezergailis, book excerpt, The Historical Institute of Latvia, 1996. | |||
| #{{note|Archives}}Richard Breitman, "," US National Archives (accessed August 30, 2005). | |||
| #{{note|Gallately}} John Ezard, "," Guardian, February 17, 2001. | |||
| #{{note|Gord}}Gord McFee, "," The Holocaust History Project (accessed June 8, 2005). | |||
| #{{note|Public}} Tom Smith, "The Polls--A Review: The Holocaust Denial Controversy." Public Opinion Quarterly 59 (Summer 1995): 269-295. | |||
| ==See also== | |||
| {{sisterlinks|The Holocaust}} | |||
| * ] | |||
| * ] | |||
| * ] | |||
| * ] | |||
| * ] | |||
| * ] | |||
| * ] | |||
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| * ] | |||
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| * ] (involvement of the Dutch population in the Holocaust) | |||
| * ] (Jewish Holocaust survivors) | |||
| * ] (reparations to individual survivors) | |||
| * ] | |||
| ===Nazi plans related to the Holocaust=== | |||
| * ] ("Final Solution") | |||
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| * ] | |||
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| ===Eugenics=== | |||
| * ] | |||
| ===Individuals and the Holocaust=== | |||
| * ] | |||
| * ] | |||
| * ] (see also ]) | |||
| ===Nazi concentration camps=== | |||
| ''See'' ], ] | |||
| * ], ], ], ], ], ], ] | |||
| ===Ghettos=== | |||
| * ] | |||
| * ] (Jewish administrative bodies established in the ghettos by order of the Nazis) | |||
| ===Massacres and pogroms=== | |||
| * in ] | |||
| * ] | |||
| * in ] | |||
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| ===Jewish resistance=== | |||
| ====Poland==== | |||
| * Resistance groups | |||
| ** ] | |||
| ** ] | |||
| * Uprisings | |||
| ** ] | |||
| ** ] | |||
| ** ] | |||
| == External links, references, resources == | |||
| External links, references, books and other resources are listed ]. | |||
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Revision as of 13:50, 17 February 2006
There was no Holocaust.