THE HOLOCAUST 1939-1945

The War Years

Prewar European Jewish Population: 9.5 million

By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two out of every three

European Jews

A pile of corpses at the Russian Camp section of the Mauthausen concentration camp after liberation. Mauthausen, Austria, May 5-

15, 1945

The War Begins

After the German invasion of Poland (the beginning of WWII), anti-Jewish policy escalated to the imprisonment and eventual murder of European Jews

The Nazis searched for the swiftest way to destroy this hated people

Ghettos

The Nazis first established ghettos, areas of a city (often enclosed) designed to isolate and control the Jews

A sign, in both German and Latvian, warning that people attempting to cross the fence or to contact inhabitants of the Riga ghetto will be shot.

The first ghetto was established in Poland in 1939 Forced Jewish resettlement in ghettos began in 1940

Deportation of Jews from Hanau, to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Hanau, Germany, May 30, 1942

Jews move into the Kovno ghetto. Lithuania, 1941-1942

There they lived in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, working for long hours without pay and proper food to build roads, canals, bridges and railroads, and to staff factories

They were expected to die from disease and starvation

Child forced laborer in a ghetto factory. Kovno, Lithuania, between 1941 and 1944.

Children eating in the ghetto streets. Warsaw, Poland, between 1940 and 1943.

The Germans established at least 1,000 ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone

The largest ghetto in Poland was the Warsaw ghetto, where over 400,000 Jews were crowded into on area of 1.3 square miles

Jewish Resistance In some ghettos, Jews resisted and staged armed uprisings The largest of these was the Warsaw ghetto uprising (April 19 –

May 16, 1943) Though German forces broke the organized military resistance

within a few days of the beginning of the uprising, individuals and small groups hid or fought the Germans for almost a month

Jewish resistance fighters captured during the Warsaw ghetto uprising

the slow death by disease and starvation in the ghettos was not efficient enough for Hitler

The Germans either shot ghetto residents in mass graves located nearby or deported them, usually by train, to killing centers where they were murdered

Einsatzgruppen (Death Squads or Mobile Killing Units)

Squads made up of Nazi (SS) units and police, moved with speed on the heels of the advancing German army

Their job was to kill any Jews they could find in the occupied territory

They entered a town, rounded up all the Jews, marched them to the outskirts of the city

There, they shot them or gassed them in gas vans and dumped their bodies into mass graves

Yet even these methods appeared too insufficient to make Europe free of Jews

German soldiers look on as a member of an Einsatzgruppe prepares to shoot a Ukrainian Jew kneeling on the edge of a mass grave filled with corpses.

The Final Solution

The Nazi solution was to order the systematic mass extermination of the Jewish people

In late 1941, Hitler gave his approval to the policy the Nazi leaders called the “Final Solution”

It began in 1942 Their instrument for this insane policy

was at hand – the SS organization, whose members were sworn to absolute obedience

Extermination Camps

To facilitate the “Final Solution”, the Nazis established special camps in Poland

These were extermination camps, designed for efficient mass murder and organized like slaughterhouses for animals

The entire Jewish population was to be shipped by train in cattle cars to special camps in Polish territories

The trains, arriving at the camps usually at night, poured out their loads of men, women, and children

On arrival, they were stripped of their clothes and valuables; their heads were shaved; and families were separated

The weak, the old, and the very young were sent immediately to the “showers” which spurted not water, but poisonous gas

The strong and healthy survived for a time to work as forced labourers, only to be killed in their turn

At the Auschwitz camp complex, the Birkenau extermination camp had 4 gas chambers. During the height of deportations to the camp, up to 6,000 Jews were gasses there each day

Interior view of a gas chamber, Mauthausen concentration camp

The door to the gas chamber in Dachau. It is marked “shower-bath.”

All that was left were mountains of clothing, gold teeth, hair, and other items taken from the victims

Bales of the hair of female prisoners found in the warehouses of Auschwitz at the liberation.

View of a medical table used for removing gold teeth from prisoners at the Mauthausen concentration camp.

Pile of prisoners clothing found near the crematorium in the Dauchau concentration camp.

Approximately 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Postwar Jewish Population: 3.5 million

THE AFTERMATH OF THE HOLOCAUST

Jews Liberated

The survivors in the concentration camps were barely alive. The prisoners suffered from starvation and disease – and many thousands died in the first months after the liberation

Human remains of prisoners found near the crematorium of the Dachau concentration camp

The Allied troops were met with a horrible sight when they arrived in the extermination and concentration camps in 1945: piles of dead bodies, human remains, and ashes.

Letter written by Canadian soldier

Tonight I am a different man. I have spent the last two days in Belsen concentration camp, the most horrible festering scab there has ever been on the face of humanity. . . . It makes me sick to my stomach even to imagine the smell, and I want to weep. . . when I think of what they have done. . . .

You have seen pictures in the papers but they cannot tell the story. You have to smell it and feel it and keep a stern look on your face while you heart tears itself into pieces and tears of compassion drench your soul. . . .

I have seen hundreds of people dying before my eyes. I have seen filthy green corpses used as pillows for the living. I have seen forty thousand people living and dying amongst their own fetid offal. They are dying faster than they can be buried. For most of them food is absolutely of no use. Their stomachs will not take it. . . .

Jews Homeless

Surviving Jews feared returning to their homes because of the antisemitism that persisted in parts of Europe

Some were without a home in a Europe destroyed by war

Tens of thousands of homeless Holocaust survivors migrated westward to other European territories liberated by the western Allies

They were housed in hundreds of refugee centers and displaced persons (DP) camps

The Nuremberg Trials The International Military Tribunal (IMT) was established in

1945 to prosecute war criminals The Tribunal was set up by the Allied great powers: The

United States, the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and France

View of the courtroom during a session of the International Military Tribunal trial of war criminals at Nuremberg

The IMT tried 22 “major” war criminals for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity

The trials took place in Nuremberg, Germany between 1945 and 1946

The tribunal sentenced 12 of the accused to death by hanging, 3 were sentenced to life in prison

The State of Israel

Some Jews wanted to return to their ancestral homeland in Palestine

In the midst of war with Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, the Jewish state of Israel was proclaimed in 1948

The United States and the Soviet Union immediately recognized the new government

The State of Israel was created as a national home for the Jews

The State of Israel

It was not to be the land of peace that they expected

The creation of the State of Israel greatly offended and hurt the Palestinians and neighbouring Arab countries

The resentment and conflict from this dispute has continued to the present