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The Holocaust

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: World War II

   The Nazi concentration camp in Nordhausen.
   Enlarge
   The Nazi concentration camp in Nordhausen.

   The Holocaust, also known as Ha-Shoah (Hebrew: השואה), Khurbn (
   Yiddish: חורבן or Halokaust, האלאקאוסט) or Porajmos ( Romani, also
   Samudaripen), is the name applied to the genocide of minority groups of
   Europe and North Africa during World War II by Nazi Germany and its
   collaborators.

   Early elements of the Holocaust include the Kristallnacht pogrom of 8
   and 9 November 1938 and the T-4 Euthanasia Program, leading to the
   later use of killing squads and extermination camps in a massive and
   centrally organized effort to exterminate every possible member of the
   populations targeted by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

   The Jews of Europe were the most numerous of the victims of the
   Holocaust in what the Nazis called the " Final Solution of the Jewish
   Question" (die Endlösung der Judenfrage) or "the cleaning" (die
   Reinigung). It is commonly stated that approximately six million Jews
   were murdered in the Holocaust, though estimates by historians using,
   among other sources, records from the Nazi regime itself, range from
   five million to seven million.

   Millions of other minorities also perished in the Holocaust. About
   220,000 Sinti and Roma were murdered (some estimates are as high as
   800,000) — between a quarter to a half of their European population.
   Other groups deemed by the Nazis to be "racially inferior" or
   "undesirable" included Poles (6 million killed, of whom 3 million were
   Christian, and the rest Jewish), Serbs (estimates vary between 500,000
   and 1.2 million killed, mostly by Croat Ustaše), Soviet military
   prisoners of war and civilians in occupied territories including
   Russians and other East Slavs, the mentally or physically disabled,
   homosexuals, Blacks, Jehovah's Witnesses, Communists and political
   dissidents, trade unionists, Freemasons, Eastern Christians, and
   Catholic and Protestant clergy, were also persecuted and killed.

   Some scholars do not include the Nazi persecution of all of these
   groups in the definition of the Holocaust, rather limiting the
   Holocaust to the genocide of the Jews. However, taking into account all
   minority groups, 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.

   Another group, whose deaths are related to the Holocaust but not always
   counted in the totals, comprise the thousands who committed suicide
   rather than face what they feared would be untold suffering ending in
   death. In 2006, the European Union financed a project to research these
   victims; despite religious prohibitions against suicide, it is
   estimated that in Berlin alone, 1,600 Jews killed themselves between
   1938 and 1945.
   The Holocaust
   Early elements
   Racial policy • Nazi eugenics • Nuremberg Laws • Euthanasia •
   Concentration camps ( list)
   Jews
   Jews in Nazi Germany, 1933 to 1939

   Pogroms: Kristallnacht • Iaşi • Jedwabne • Lwów • Bucharest

   Ghettos: Warsaw • Łódź • Lwów • Kraków • Theresienstadt • Kovno

   Einsatzgruppen: Babi Yar • Rumbula • Paneriai • Odessa

   "Final Solution": Wannsee • Aktion Reinhard

   Death camps: Auschwitz • Belzec • Chełmno • Majdanek • Treblinka •
   Sobibór • Jasenovac  • Warsaw

   Resistance: Jewish partisans
   Ghetto uprisings ( Warsaw)

   End of World War II: Death marches • Berihah • Displaced persons
   Other victims

   East Slavs • Poles • Serbs • Roma • Homosexuals • Jehovah's Witnesses
   Responsible parties

   Nazi Germany: Hitler • Eichmann • Heydrich • Himmler • SS • Gestapo •
   SA

   Collaborators

   Aftermath: Nuremberg Trials • Denazification
   Lists
   Survivors • Victims • Rescuers
   Resources
   The Destruction of the European Jews
   Phases of the Holocaust
   Functionalism vs. intentionalism
     __________________________________________________________________


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Etymology and usage of the term

   The term holocaust originally derived from the Greek word holokauston,
   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 Oxford English
   Dictionary, the word was first used to describe Hitler's treatment of
   the Jews from as early as 1942, though it 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 Jews in particular. Some historians credited
   Elie Wiesel with giving the term 'Holocaust' its present meaning. The
   biblical word Shoa (שואה), also spelled Shoah and Sho'ah, meaning
   "calamity" in Hebrew, became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust
   as early as the early 1940s. Shoa is preferred by many Jews and a
   growing number of others for a number of reasons, including the
   potentially theologically offensive nature of the original meaning of
   the word holocaust.

   The word "genocide" was coined during the Holocaust.

Features of the Nazi Holocaust

   The Nazi Holocaust had several characteristics that, taken together,
   distinguish it from other genocides in history.

Efficiency

   The Holocaust was characterized by the efficient and systematic attempt
   on an industrial scale to assemble and kill as many people as possible,
   using all of the resources and technology available to the Nazi state.
   Germany was, at the time, one of the world's leading nations in terms
   of technology, industry, infrastructure, research, education,
   bureaucratic efficiency, and many other fields.

   For example, detailed lists of potential victims were made and
   maintained using Dehomag statistical machinery, and meticulous records
   of the killings were produced. 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 (the issuing of receipts also helped to lull the victims into a
   false sense of security, as it made them believe that they would later
   be reunited with their property and luggage).

   In addition, considerable effort was expended over the course of the
   Holocaust to find increasingly efficient means of killing more people.
   Early mass murders by German soldiers of thousands of Jews in Poland,
   Ukraine, and Belarus, by shooting, had caused widespread reports of
   discomfort and demoralization among the German troops. Commanders had
   complained to their superiors that the face-to-face killings had a
   severely negative psychological impact on soldiers. Committed to
   destroying the Jewish population, the German Nazi government decided to
   pursue more mechanical methods, beginning with experiments in
   explosives and poisons.

   In his book, Russia's War, British historian Richard Overy describes
   how the Nazis sought more efficient ways to kill people. In 1941, after
   occupying Belarus, they used mental patients from Minsk asylums 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 dynamite, 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 Mogilev, they tried a 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.
   The Nazis methodically tracked the progress of the Holocaust in
   thousands of reports and documents. Pictured is the Höfle Telegram sent
   to Adolf Eichmann in January, 1943, that reported that 1,274,166 Jews
   had been killed in the four Aktion Reinhard camps during 1942.
   Enlarge
   The Nazis methodically tracked the progress of the Holocaust in
   thousands of reports and documents. Pictured is the Höfle Telegram sent
   to Adolf Eichmann in January, 1943, that reported that 1,274,166 Jews
   had been killed in the four Aktion Reinhard camps during 1942.

   In the spring of 1942, the Aktion Reinhard camps began operating.
   Carbon monoxide was used in the gas chambers at Belzec, Sobibór, and
   Treblinka, whereas Zyklon B was employed at Majdanek and Auschwitz.

   The disposal of large numbers of bodies presented a logistical problem
   as well. Incineration was at first considered infeasible until it was
   discovered that furnaces could be kept at a high enough temperature to
   be sustained by the body fat of the bodies alone. With this
   technicality resolved, the Nazis implemented their plan of mass murder
   on its full scale.

   Alleged corporate involvement in the Holocaust has created significant
   controversy in recent years. Rudolf Höß, 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 IBM also played a role in the categorization of prisoners, through
   the use of punched card machines.

Scale

   The Holocaust was geographically widespread and systematically
   conducted in virtually all areas of Nazi-occupied territory, where Jews
   and other victims were targeted in what are now 35 separate European
   countries, and sent to labor camps in some countries or extermination
   camps 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 occupied 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 other regions if they were conquered, such as the
   United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. The extermination continued
   in different parts of Nazi-controlled territory until the end of World
   War II, 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 reprieve even for children or
   babies, and victims were often tortured before being killed. Nazis
   carried out deadly medical experiments on prisoners, including
   children. Dr. Josef Mengele, medical officer at Auschwitz and chief
   medical officer at Birkenau, was known as the "Angel of Death" for his
   medical and eugenical experiments, e.g., trying to change people's eye
   colour by injecting dye into their eyes. Aribert Heim, another doctor
   who worked at Mauthausen, was known as "Doctor Death".

   The guards in the concentration camps carried out beatings and acts of
   torture on a daily basis. For example, some inmates were suspended from
   poles by ropes tied to their hands behind their backs so that their
   shoulder joints were pulled out of their sockets. Women were forced
   into brothels for the SS guards. Russian prisoners of war were used for
   experiments, such as being immersed in ice water or being put into
   pressure chambers in which air was evacuated to see how long they would
   survive as a means to better protect German airmen.

   Homosexual men suffered unusually cruel treatment in the concentration
   camps. They faced persecution not only from German soldiers but also
   from other prisoners, and many homosexual men were beaten to death.
   Additionally, homosexuals in forced labor camps routinely received more
   grueling and dangerous work assignments than other non-Jewish inmates,
   under the policy of "Extermination Through Work". German soldiers also
   were known to use homosexuals for target practice, aiming their weapons
   at the pink triangles their human targets were forced to wear.

Children and adult prisoners

   Children under the age of about 12 were generally deemed unfit for work
   and were therefore immediately taken to the gas chambers.

   Upon having their prisoner ID tattooed on them, older children were
   sent to work in either a factory, quarry, or some other strenuous and
   monotonous place of work. Their shifts lasted from 10 to 14 hours.
   After the day's work was finished, the children were subjected to
   incredibly long roll calls, during which some even died. This routine
   continued for what could be months until the prisoners were either sent
   to the gas chambers or died from malnourishment or exhaustion.

   Between the time of registration into the camp and death, prisoners
   were subjected to a number of demeaning and torturous ordeals.
   Prisoners were often beaten, whipped, or hung from beams with their
   hands behind them. This ordeal was done with their feet just inches
   from the ground. Prisoners were also regularly shot so that the SS
   could maintain a feeling of control.

   These dreadful ordeals combined to create a genuinely miserable
   experience within the camps. As a result, many inmates embraced or
   welcomed death.

Experiments

   At the Auschwitz concentration camp, Dr. Josef Mengele was infamous for
   carrying out medical experiments on human subjects. These included
   placing subjects in pressure chambers, testing various drugs on them,
   freezing them to death, and various other usually fatal traumas. Of
   particular interest to Mengele were twins, gypsies, dwarves and
   infants. Beginning in 1943, twins were selected and placed in special
   barracks.

   Almost all of Mengele's experiments were of little scientific value,
   including attempts to change eye colour by injecting chemicals into
   children's eyes, various amputations and other brutal surgeries, and in
   at least one case attempting to create artificial conjoined twins by
   sewing the veins of twins together. This operation was not successful
   and only caused the children's hands to become badly infected.

   The full extent of Mengele's work will never be known because the two
   truckloads of records he sent to Dr. Otmar von Verschuer at the Kaiser
   Wilhelm Institute were destroyed by the latter. Subjects who survived
   Mengele's experiments were almost always killed after the experiments
   for dissection.

   While Mengele's experiments were the most notorious, his behaviour was
   not an isolated aberration. Other Nazi physicians also engaged in human
   experimentation at several concentration camps, including Dachau,
   Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, and Natzweiler concentration
   camps.

Victims

   The victims of the Holocaust were Jews, Poles, Serbs, Russians,
   Belarusians, Communists, homosexuals, Roma & Sinti (also known as
   Gypsies), the mentally ill and physically disabled, intelligentsia and
   political activists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roman Catholics and
   Protestant clergy, trade unionists, psychiatric patients, Africans,
   Asians, enemy nationals, common criminals, people labeled as "enemies
   of the state"; especially a large portion of the country's rich and
   liberal dissidents, and many who did not belong to the Aryan race.
   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.

Death toll

   General (later US President) Dwight Eisenhower inspecting prisoners'
   corpses at a liberated concentration camp, 1945
   Enlarge
   General (later US President) Dwight Eisenhower inspecting prisoners'
   corpses at a liberated concentration camp, 1945

   The exact number of people killed by the Nazi regime may 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 British and Soviet documents have
   indicated the total may be somewhat higher than previously believed.
   However, the following estimates are considered to be highly reliable.
   The estimates:
     * About 6.0 million Jews, including 3.0–3.5 million Polish Jews
     * 1.8 –1.9 million non-Jewish 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 Warsaw Uprising)
     * 200,000–800,000 Roma & Sinti (Gypsies)
     * 200,000–300,000 people with disabilities
     * 80,000–200,000 Freemasons
     * 100,000 communists
     * 10,000–25,000 homosexual men
     * 2,500-5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses

   Raul Hilberg, in the third edition of his ground-breaking three-volume
   work, The Destruction of the European Jews, 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."
   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. British
   historian Martin Gilbert 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.
   Map titled "Jewish Executions Carried Out by Einsatzgruppe A" from the
   December 1941 Jäger Report by the commander of a Nazi death squad.
   Marked "Secret Reich Matter," the map shows the number of Jews shot in
   the Baltic region, and reads at the bottom: "the estimated number of
   Jews still on hand is 128,000". Estonia is marked as judenfrei ("free
   of Jews").
   Enlarge
   Map titled "Jewish Executions Carried Out by Einsatzgruppe A" from the
   December 1941 Jäger Report by the commander of a Nazi death squad.
   Marked "Secret Reich Matter," the map shows the number of Jews shot in
   the Baltic region, and reads at the bottom: "the estimated number of
   Jews still on hand is 128,000". Estonia is marked as judenfrei ("free
   of Jews").

   Lucy S. Dawidowicz 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 of origin is available in the article about her book,
   The War Against the Jews.

   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 the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust (1990).

   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 POWs
     * 1–1.5 million political dissidents

   Additionally, the Ustaša regime, the Nazis' allies in Croatia,
   conducted its own campaign of mass extermination against the Serbs in
   the areas which it controlled, resulting in the deaths of 500,000–1.2
   million Serbs.

   The summary of various sources' estimates on the number of Nazi regime
   victims is given in Matthew White's online atlas of 20th century
   history.

Searching for records of victims

   Initially after World War II, 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. Yad Vashem 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 yadvashem.org or in person at the Yad Vashem complex in
   Israel.

   Other databases and lists of victims' names, some searchable over the
   Web, are listed in Holocaust (resources).

Execution of the Holocaust

Concentration and Labor Camps (1933-1945)

   Major concentration camps in Europe, 1944.  It should be possible to
   replace this fair use image with a freely licensed one. If you can,
   please do so as soon as is practical.
   Enlarge
   Major concentration camps in Europe, 1944.  It should be possible to
   replace this fair use image with a freely licensed one. If you can,
   please do so as soon as is practical.

   The Nazis were the only political party with paramilitary organisations
   at their disposal, the SS and the SA, which had perpetrated surprise
   attacks on the offices and members of other parties throughout the 20s.
   After the 1932 elections it became clear to the Nazi leaders that they
   would never be able to secure a majority of the votes and that they
   would have to rely on other means to gain power. While gradually
   intensifying the acts of violence to wreak havoc among the opposition
   leading up to the 1933 elections, the Nazis set up concentration
   centers within Germany, many of which were established by local
   authorities, to hold, torture, or kill political prisoners and
   "undesirables" like outspoken journalists and communists.

   These early prisons - usually basements and storehouses - were
   eventually consolidated into full-blown, centrally run camps outside of
   the cities and somewhat removed from the public eye. By 1939, six large
   concentration camps, located in Nazi-occupied Poland, had been
   established. After 1939, with the beginning of the Second World War,
   the concentration camps increasingly became places where the
   non-political enemies of the Nazis, including Jews and POWs, were
   either killed or forced to act as slave laborers, and kept
   undernourished and tortured.

   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 & Sinti
   (Gypsy) populations. Most of the camps were located in the area of
   General Government in occupied 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.

Persecution (1938-1941)

   In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler writes that Freemasonry has "succumbed" to
   the Jews and has become an "excellent instrument" to fight for their
   aims and to use their "strings" to pull the upper strata of society
   into their alleged designs. He continues, “The general pacifistic
   paralysis of the national instinct of self-preservation begun by
   Freemasonry is then transmitted to the masses of society by the Jewish
   press”.

   Many scholars date the beginning of the Holocaust itself to the
   anti-Jewish riots of the Night of Broken Glass (" Kristallnacht") 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 synagogues (almost every synagogue in Germany) were
   damaged or destroyed. Similar events took place in Vienna at the same
   time.

   A number of deadly pogroms by local populations occurred during the
   Second World War, some with Nazi encouragement, and some spontaneously.
   This included the Iaşi pogrom in Romania on June 30, 1941, in which as
   many 14,000 Jews were allegedly killed by Romanian residents and
   police, and the Jedwabne pogrom in which between 380 and 1,600 Jews
   were allegedly killed by local Poles.

   The preserved records of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security
   Main Office) show the persecution of the Freemasons. RSHA Amt VII,
   Written Records - overseen by Professor Franz Six - was responsible for
   "ideological" tasks, by which was meant the creation of anti-semitic
   and anti-masonic propaganda. While the number is not accurately known,
   it is estimated that between 80,000 and 200,000 Freemasons were
   exterminated under the Nazi regime. Freemasonic Concentration Camp
   inmates were graded as “Political” prisoners, and wore an inverted
   (point down) red triangle.

   In 1938, a forget-me-not badge – made by the same factory as the
   Masonic badge, and first used by the Grand Lodge Zur Sonne, in 1926 –
   was chosen for the annual Nazi Party Winterhilfswerk. Winterhilfswerk
   was a supposed charitable organization, which actually collected money
   used for rearmament. This coincidence enabled Freemasons to wear
   forget-me-not badge as a secret sign of membership.

Euthanasia (1939-1941)

   The T-4 Euthanasia Program was established to "maintain the genetic
   purity" of the German population by systematically killing citizens who
   were physically deformed, disabled, handicapped, or suffering from
   mental illness. Between 1939 and 1941, over 200,000 people were killed.

Ghettos (1940-1945)

   After the invasion of Poland, the Nazis created ghettos to which Jews
   (and some Roma & Sinti) were confined, until they were eventually
   shipped to death camps and killed. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest,
   with 380,000 people and the Łódź Ghetto, the second largest, holding
   about 160,000, but ghettos were instituted in many cities ( list). 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 Warsaw, it occupied only about 2.4%
   of city's area, averaging 9.2 people per room. From 1940 through 1942,
   disease (especially typhoid fever) and starvation killed hundreds of
   thousands of Jews confined in the ghettos.

   On July 19, 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered the start of the
   deportations of Jews from the ghettos to the death camps. On July 22,
   1942, the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants began; in the
   next 52 days (until September 12, 1942) about 300,000 people were
   transported by train to the Treblinka extermination camp from Warsaw
   alone. Many other ghettos were completely depopulated. The first ghetto
   uprising occurred in September 1942 in the small town of Łachwa in
   southeast Poland. Though there were armed resistance attempts in the
   larger ghettos in 1943, such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the
   Białystok Ghetto Uprising, 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)

   As many as 1.6 million Jews were murdered in open-air shootings by
   Nazis and their collaborators, especially in 1941 before the
   establishment of the concentration camps. During the invasion of the
   Soviet Union, over 3,000 special killing units (organized into the four
   Einsatzgruppen) followed the Wehrmacht, conducting mass murders of
   Poles, Communist officials, and the Jewish population that lived in
   Soviet territory.

   Poles were an early target in the AB Action, in which 30,000 Polish
   intellectual and political figures were rounded up, and 7,000
   eventually murdered. By the summer of 1941, the Einsatzgruppen turned
   to targeting Jews, starting with the extermination of 2,200 Jews in
   Bialystok on June 27, 1941, and quickly increased in scale. 1,500 Jews
   were murdered in Kaunas on June 26 by the German SS forces. 4,000 Jews
   murdered in Lviv on June 30-July 3, 1941 by Ukrainian collaborators.
   From September to the end of 1941, a series of mass murders took place
   throughout Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Latvia: over 33,000 Jews
   were killed at Babi Yar, 25,000 at Rumbula by Latvian Nazis (Arajs
   Commando), over 36,000 at Odessa by Romanian forces, 19,000 at the
   Ninth Fort of Kaunas and 40,000 (up to 100,000 by 1944) at Paneriai by
   the German SS forces . These, and similar slaughters throughout Europe,
   murdered around 100,000 Jews per month for five months. By the end of
   1943, another 900,000 Jews would be murdered 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 Final
   Solution, the complete extermination of the Jews of Europe.

   Serbs were victims of an extermination policy of Croat NDH since this
   Nazi puppet state was formed in 1941. The murders took many forms:
   burning of live Serbs forced into churches; slaughter of Serbs by small
   death squads, often numbering only three, called "black threes", who
   rampaged by night through villages in which dogs were first poisoned.
   The squads filled foiba pits with still-living Serbs, often connected
   by barbed wire, and practiced extremely cruel methods of torture and
   execution such as gouging eyes and cutting salted necks. They also
   nailed guts of slaughtered victims to the roofs. Extermination in
   Jasenovac camp existed since its onset in 1941, at the time when
   Germans had not yet started their systematic genocide, and it has
   appalled even the SS, though soon enough they were organizing
   systematic extermination in their camps too.

Extermination camps (1942-1945)

   Empty poison gas canisters and piles of hair in the memorial museum of
   Auschwitz-Birkenau.
   Enlarge
   Empty poison gas canisters and piles of hair in the memorial museum of
   Auschwitz-Birkenau.

   In December 1941, the Nazis opened Chelmno, the first of what would
   soon be seven extermination camps, 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 or carbon monoxide), usually in " gas chambers",
   although many prisoners were killed in mass shootings and by other
   means. The bodies of those killed were destroyed in crematoria (except
   at Sobibór 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 Aktion Reinhard, opening the extermination camps of Belzec,
   Sobibór, and Treblinka. More than 1.7 million Jews were killed at the
   three Aktion Reinhard camps by October 1943. The largest death camp
   built was Auschwitz-Birkenau, which had both a labor camp (Auschwitz)
   and an extermination camp (Birkenau); 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 8,000 a day.

   Upon arrival in these camps, all valuables were taken from the
   prisoners, and the women had to have their hair cut off . According to
   a Nazi document, the hair was to be used for the manufacture of
   stockings . Prisoners were divided into two groups: those too weak for
   work were immediately executed in gas chambers (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. Shoes, stockings, and anything else of value was
   recycled for use in products to support the war effort, regardless of
   whether or not a prisoner was sent to death. Some prisoners were forced
   to work in the collection and disposal of corpses, and to extract gold
   teeth from the dead.

Death marches and liberation (1944-1945)

   Dachau concentration-camp inmates on a death march through a German
   village in April 1945. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial
   Museum.
   Enlarge
   Dachau concentration-camp inmates on a death march through a German
   village in April 1945. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial
   Museum.

   As the armies of the Allies closed in on the Reich at the end of 1944,
   the Nazis 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 most well known of the death marches took place in January
   1945, when the Soviet army advanced on Poland. Nine days before the
   Soviets arrived at the death camp at Auschwitz, the SS guards marched
   60,000 prisoners out of the camp toward Wodzislaw, 56 km (35mi) away,
   where they were put on freight trains to other camps. Around 15,000
   died on the way. In total, around 100,000 Jews died during these death
   marches.

   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 away by death marches, leaving only a few
   thousand prisoners alive. Concentration camps were also liberated by
   American and British forces, including Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
   on April 15, 1945. 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

Jewish Resistance

   Due to the organization and overwhelming military might of the Nazi
   German state and its supporters, few Jews and other Holocaust victims
   were able to resist the killings. There are, however, many cases of
   attempts at resistance in one form or another, and over a hundred armed
   Jewish uprisings.

   The largest instance of organized Jewish resistance was the Warsaw
   Ghetto Uprising, from April to May of 1943, as the final deportation
   from the Ghetto to the death camps was about to commence, the ZOB and
   ZZW fighters rose up against the Nazis. Most of the resistors were
   killed, but the few who did survive the war are currently residing in
   Israel. There were also other Ghetto Uprisings, 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 Treblinka
   extermination camp. 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 Sobibór extermination camp. This uprising was
   more successful; 11 SS men and a number of Ukrainian 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 October 7, 1944, the Jewish Sonderkommandos (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 Eugenio Calò for the story of a Jewish Italian
   partisan). Also, Jewish volunteers from the Palestinian Mandate, most
   famously Hannah Szenes, parachuted into Europe in a failed attempt to
   organize resistance.

Resistance of Jehovah's Witnesses

   Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany were persecuted between 1933 and 1945.
   They were scorned by the name Ernste Bibelforscher (Earnest Bible
   Students) at that time, because Jehovah's Witnesses would not give
   allegiance to the Nazi party, and refused to serve in the military,
   they were detained, put in concentration camps, or imprisoned during
   the Holocaust. Unlike Jews, homosexuals and Gypsies, who were
   persecuted for racial, political and social reasons, Jehovah's
   Witnesses were persecuted on religious ideological grounds. The Nazi
   government gave detained Jehovah's Witnesses the option: if they were
   to renounce their faith, submit to the state authority, and support the
   German military, they would be free to leave prison or the camps.
   Approximately 12,000 Jehovah's Witnesses were sent to concentration
   camps where they were forced to wear a purple triangle that
   specifically identified them as Jehovah's Witnesses. In the end, about
   2,000 of their members who were incarcerated perished under the Nazi
   system. All lost their employment. Dr. Detlef Garbe Historian and
   director at the Neuengamme (Hamburg) Memorial stated: “Taking
   everything into consideration, it has been established that no other
   religious movement resisted the pressure to conform to National
   Socialism with comparable unanimity and steadfastness.”

Rescuers

   Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and his colleagues saved as many as
   100,000 Hungarian Jews by providing them with diplomatic passes.
   Enlarge
   Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and his colleagues saved as many as
   100,000 Hungarian Jews by providing them with diplomatic passes.

   In three cases, entire countries resisted the deportation of their
   Jewish population. King Christian X of Denmark and his subjects saved
   the lives of most of the 7,500 Danish Jews 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 Bulgaria, led by Bogdan
   Filov, did not deport its 50,000 Jewish citizens, after yielding to
   pressure from the parliament deputy speaker Dimitar Peshev and the
   Bulgarian Orthodox Church, saving them as well, though Bulgaria did not
   prevent Germany from deporting Jews to concentration camps from areas
   in occupied Greece and Macedonia. The government of Finland refused
   repeated requests from Germany to deport its Finnish Jews to Germany.
   German requirements for the deportation of Jewish refugees from Norway
   was largely refused. In Rome, some 4,000 Italian Jews and prisoners of
   war avoided deportation. Many of these were hidden in safe houses and
   evacuated from Italy by a resistance group that was organised by an
   Irish priest, Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty of the Holy Office. Once a
   Vatican ambassador to Egypt, O' Flaherty used his political connections
   to great effect in helping to secure sanctuary for dispossessed Jews.

   Another example of someone who assisted Jews during the Holocaust is
   Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes. It was in clear
   disrespect of the Portuguese state hierarchy that Sousa Mendes issued
   about 30,000 visas to Jews and other persecuted minorities from Europe.
   He saved an enormous number of lives, but risked his career for it. In
   1941, Portuguese dictator Salazar lost political trust in Sousa Mendes
   and forced the diplomat to quit his career. He died in poverty in 1954.

   Some towns and churches also helped hide Jews and protect others from
   the Holocaust, such as the French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon which
   sheltered several thousand Jews. Similar individual and family acts of
   rescue were repeated throughout Europe, as illustrated in the famous
   cases of Anne Frank, often at great risk to the rescuers. In a few
   cases, individual diplomats and people of influence, such as Oskar
   Schindler or Nicholas Winton, protected large numbers of Jews. Swedish
   diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, the Italian Giorgio Perlasca, Chinese
   diplomat Ho Feng Shan and others saved tens of thousands of Jews with
   fake diplomatic passes. Chiune Sugihara 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 Żegota organization,
   that took drastic and dangerous steps to rescue Jews and other
   potential victims from the Nazis. Witold Pilecki, member of Armia
   Krajowa (the Polish Home Army), organized a resistance movement in the
   Auschwitz concentration camp from 1940, and Jan Karski 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
   Righteous Among the Nations.

Perpetrators and collaborators

Who was directly involved in the mass murder?

   A wide range of German soldiers, officials, and civilians were in some
   way 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 SS under Himmler
   was the closest. From the SS came the Totenkopfverbände concentration
   camp guards, the Einsatzgruppen killing squads, and many of the
   administrative offices behind the Holocaust. The Wehrmacht, or regular
   German army, participated directly far less than the SS in the
   Holocaust (though it did directly take part in the massacre of some
   Jews in Russia, Serbia, Poland, and Greece), but it supported the
   Einsatzgruppen, helped form the ghettos, ran prison camps, occasionally
   provided concentration camp guards, transported prisoners to camps, had
   experiments performed on prisoners, and used substantial slave labor.

   German police units, all under the control of the Nazis during the war,
   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. Even private firms
   helped in the machinery of the Holocaust. Nazi bankers at the Paris
   branch of Barclays Bank volunteered the names of their Jewish employees
   to Nazi authorities, and many of them ended up in the death camps.

European collaborationist countries

   In addition to the direct involvement of Nazi forces, collaborationist
   European countries helped the Nazis in the Holocaust. Collaboration
   took the form of either rounding up of the local Jews for deportation
   to the German extermination camps or a direct participation in the
   killings.

Fascist Italy

   In Fascist Italy, a law from 1938 restricted civil liberties of Jews.
   This effectively reduced the country's Jews to second-class status,
   though Mussolini never made it official policy to deport Jews to
   concentration camps. After the fall of Mussolini and his creation, the
   Italian Social Republic, 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 Risiera di
   San Sabba hosted a crematorium; from 2,000 to 5,000 people were killed
   in San Sabba, only a few of whom were Jews.

Vichy France

   In France, Philippe Pétain, who became premier after Paris had fallen
   to the German Army, arranged the surrender to Germany. He then became
   the head of the Vichy government, which collaborated with Nazism,
   claiming that it would soften the hardships of occupation. Opposition
   to the German occupation of northern France and the collaborationist
   Vichy government was left to the French Resistance within France and
   the Free French Forces led by Charles de Gaulle outside of France. The
   police, the Milice ("militia", which worked as the Gestapo's aid), as
   well as members of Jacques Doriot's Parti Populaire Français (PPF)
   rounded up 75,000 Jews for deportation to concentration camps. The
   Vichy regime attracted all of the far-right counterrevolutionary
   sectors of French society, monarchists and other pseudo-fascist
   movements. La Cagoule, a terrorist group and Eugène Schueller, the
   founder of L'Oréal, are examples of such groups. Antisemitism, as the
   Dreyfus Affair had shown at the end of the 19th century, was widespread
   in France, especially among anti-republican synpathizers. The Vichy
   government eagerly participated in the Holocaust, for example with the
   July 16, 1942 rafle du Vel'd'Hiv, in which 12,884 Jews were arrested,
   including 4,051 children which the German authorities had not asked
   for. They were all sent to Drancy transit camp anyway.

   Klaus Barbie, "the Butcher of Lyon", captured and deported 44 Jewish
   children hidden in the village of Izieu, killed Resistance leader Jean
   Moulin, and was in total responsible for the deportation of 7,500
   people, 4,342 murders, and the arrest and torture of 14,311 resistance
   fighters were in some way attributed to his actions or commands.

   Maurice Papon was the number two official in the Bordeaux region and
   supervisor of its "Service for Jewish Questions". In 1997, following
   revelations from Le Canard Enchaîné newspaper, he was finally charged
   with complicity of crimes against humanity. Papon was accused of
   ordering the arrest and deportation of 1,560 Jews, including children
   and the elderly, between 1942 and 1944; most of his victims were sent
   to Auschwitz. As during Adolf Eichmann's trial, one of the main issue
   was to determine to what extent an individual should be held
   responsible in a chain of responsibility. In 1998, he was given a
   10-year prison term. However, he was released on grounds of poor health
   in 2002. Many people thought both the relatively light sentence and his
   release were scandalous, especially when it was known to all that
   following the war, Papon went on to enjoy a civil service career, which
   led him to be the chief of the Paris police, held by historian Luc
   Einaudi as being directly responsible for the 1961 Paris massacre
   during the Algerian War (1954-62); Papon even became budget minister of
   president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in the 1970s. He was finally
   arrested because of the Canard Enchaîné 's revelations, which
   themselves followed a fiscal control ordered by Papon with the aim of
   intimidating the satirical newspaper.

Antonescu's Romania

   The Romanian Antonescu 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
   Iasi, Odessa, Bogdanovka, Domanovka, and Peciora, for example, were
   among the most hideous acts committed against Jews anywhere during the
   Holocaust." In cooperation with German Einsatzgruppen and Ukrainian
   auxiliaries, Romanians killed hundreds of thousands of Jews in
   Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and Transnistria. Some of the larger
   massacres included 54,000 Jews killed in Bogdanovka, a Romanian
   concentration camp along the Bug River in Transnistria, between 21 and
   31 December 1941. Nearly 100,000 Jews were killed in occupied Odessa
   and over 10,000 were killed in the Iasi pogrom. The Romanians also
   massacred Jews in the Domanevka and Akhmetchetka concentration camps.

Hungary

   The Hungarian Horthy regime deported 20,000 Jews from annexed
   Transcarpathian Ukraine in 1941 to Kamianets-Podilskyi in the
   German-occupied Ukraine, where they were shot by the German
   Einsatzgruppen detachments. Hungarian army and police units killed
   several thousand Jews and Serbs in Novi Sad in January 1942. However
   Horthy resisted German demands for mass deportation of Hungarian Jews,
   and most survived until October 1944, when the Horthy regime fell from
   power and was replaced by the Arrow Cross Party led by Ferenc Szálasi.
   At this late date in the war, with German defeat appearing very likely,
   Hungarian police nevertheless participated fully with SS in the roundup
   of 440,000 Jews for deportation to the extermination camps. Moreover,
   20,000 Budapest Jews were shot by the banks of the Danube by Hungarian
   forces under the direct orders of The Arrow Cross, the Hungarian
   version of the German Nazi Party. 70,000 Jews were forced on a death
   march to Austria—thousands were shot and thousands more died of
   starvation and exposure.
   Killing of 5,000 Jews in Kaunas by Lithuanian nationalists in June
   1941. The SS urged anti-communist partisan leader Klimajtis to attack
   the Jews to show that "the liberated population had resorted to the
   most severe measures against the ... Jewish enemy."
   Enlarge
   Killing of 5,000 Jews in Kaunas by Lithuanian nationalists in June
   1941. The SS urged anti-communist partisan leader Klimajtis to attack
   the Jews to show that "the liberated population had resorted to the
   most severe measures against the ... Jewish enemy."

Ustaše's Croatia

   The Croatian Ustaše regime killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs
   (estimates vary widely, but by all sources more than 330,000-390,000,
   and possibly well over a million), over 20,000 Jews and 26,000 Roma,
   primarily in the Ustase's Jasenovac concentration camp near Zagreb. The
   Ustase also deported 7,000 more Jews to Nazi extermination camps.
   Croats were also victims of the Nazi regime and those who opposed it
   ended in concentration camps. A lot of Croats risked their lives during
   the Holocaust in order to save Jews from extermination by the Nazis (
   Croatian Righteous Among the Nations).

Serbia

   Serbia was set up as a Nazi puppet state under Serbian army general
   Milan Nedić, which was known as Nedić's Serbia. The internal affairs of
   the Serbian puppet state were moderated by German racial laws, that
   were introduced in all occupied teritories with immediate effects on
   Jews, Roma people, as well as imprisonment of left oriented persons.
   The two major concentration camps in Serbia were: Sajmište and Banjica.
   Of 40,000 Serbian Jews around one half lost their lives in Nazi
   concentration camps both in Serbia and German Reich, where most of the
   captured Serbian Jews were transferred. Under Nedić, Belgrade was
   declared to be Judenfrei in 1942. Serbs were also victims of the Nazi
   regime, and most of the victims in Banjica were Serbian. Nazis had a
   policy of killing 100 Serbs for each killed German soldier and 50
   killed Serbs for each wounded, resulting in widespread taking of
   hostages and executions such as Kragujevac massacre. Despite these
   represive measures, Serbs rebelled, and most Serbs saw Jews as their
   fellow victims in World War II, dying together in Nazi represion and
   genocide in Sajmište, Banjica and Jasenovac. Legends about Serbs saving
   the Jews in WWII are widespread in Serbia, and 152 Serbs have been
   honored as righteous Gentiles.

Greece

   The Jews of Greece mainly lived in the area around Thessaloniki, where
   there had been ocassional conflicts between Jews and Greeks. In
   Thessaloniki there had been an anti-Semitic nationalist party called
   National Union of Greece (Ethniki Enosis Ellados, EEE), which was
   revived by Nazi authorities in the city. Members of the EEE assisted
   occupying forces to identify Jews and collaborated on the deportation
   of local Jews with remarkable efficiency, either for ethnic hatred or
   for more prosaic reasons such as obtaining profits. By the time of the
   German withdrawal from Greece in 1944, nearly 90% of the Jewish
   community in Thessaloniki had been annihilated.

   Athenian Jews, on the other hand, went through a different experience.
   They were a minor part of the city's population and in the city there
   had not been an anti-Semitic atmosphere, and most Jews eluded
   deportation by either being helped by Greeks into hiding or joining the
   Greek Resistance in the mountains. This, however, did not exempt
   Athenian Jews from organized crime against them. Just like the Nazi
   authorities had restored the EEE in Thessaloniki, in Athens the German
   occupation authorities created the ESPO (Ethniko-Socialistike
   Patriotike Organosis), whose members attacked or assisted Germans to
   locate local Jews. The ESPO's most notorious action was the ransacking
   the synagogue on Melidoni Street, Athens. Other ESPO members were
   recruited as guards in the Haïdari internment camp, just outside
   Athens.

   In any case, the three quisling governments headed by Georgios
   Tsolakoglou, Konstantinos Logothetopoulos and Ioannis Rallis to
   different extents were unable to stop (or participated) in the
   deportation or prosecution of Greek Jews. Rallis, for instance, was
   known to hold the point of view that the houses left by deported Jews
   in Thessaloniki would be very welcome for the Greek Pontian refugees
   which came to Greece after the 1922 Asia Minor catastrophe.

Bulgaria

   Bulgaria, mainly through the influence of the Bulgarian East Orthodox
   Church, saved all of its own Jewish population from deportation and
   certain death. However, although civil and military administration for
   parts of Northern Greece and Macedonia had been turned over to Bulgaria
   by Germany, Bulgaria did not prevent the deportation by German
   authorities of the Jews from those territories to the concentration
   camps.

Slovakia

   Slovakia's Tiso regime deported approximately 70,000 Jews, of whom
   65,000 were killed.

German-occupied Soviet territories

   In the German-occupied Soviet territories, local Nazi collaborationist
   units represented over 80% of the available German forces providing a
   total of nearly 450,000 personnel organised in so-called
   "Schutzmannschaften" formations. Practically all of these units
   participated in the round-ups and mass-shootings. The overwhelming
   majority were recruited in the western Ukraine and the Baltic region,
   areas recently occupied by the Soviets for which the Jews were
   typically scapegoated, which exacerbated pre-Nazi anti-Semitic
   attitudes. Thus, for instance, Ukrainian nationalists killed 4,000 Lviv
   Jews in July 1941, and an additional 2,000 in late July 1941 during the
   so-called Petliura Days pogrom Nazi Einsatzgruppen, together with
   Ukrainian auxiliary units, killed 33,000 Kievan Jews in Babi Yar in
   September 1941. Ukrainian auxiliaries participated in a number of
   killings of Jews, among them in Romanian concentration camps in
   Bogdanovka and in Latvia.

Baltic collaborators

   Some Lithuanian and Latvian auxiliary military units (Schutzmannschaft)
   with Nazi Einsatzgruppen detachments participated in the extermination
   of the Jewish population in their countries, as well as assisting the
   Nazis elsewhere, such as deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto. The Arajs
   Commando, a Latvian volunteer police unit, for example, shot 26,000
   Latvian Jews, at various locations after they had been brutally
   rounded-up for this purpose by the regular police and auxiliaries and
   was responsible for assisting in the killing of 60,000 more Jews.

   About 75% of Estonia's Jewish community, aware of the fate that
   otherwise awaited them, managed to escape to the Soviet Union;
   virtually all the remainder (between 950 and 1,000 people) were killed
   by Einsatzgruppe A and local collaborators before the end of 1941.

European occupied countries

The Netherlands

   Of the 140,000 Dutch Jews, the German occupiers deported about 107,000
   of which 101,800 were murdered. This death toll of 73% is the highest
   in Western Europe. Reasons that have been suggested to explain this
   phenomenon are: the occupation regime in the Netherlands was formed by
   fanatic Austrian Nazis; the degree of efficiency and the high level of
   administrative organization of the pre-war Dutch civilian
   administration; the typical Dutch landscape without mountains or woods
   made it practically impossible to find shelter; the majority of the
   Dutch Jews lived in the larger cities and thus they formed relatively
   easy targets for persecution and segregation; the Jewish leaders chose,
   "in order to prevent worse", a policy of collaboration with the Nazis;
   the Dutch pre-war society can be characterized as a conglomerate of
   different groups, which lived separately from another and this fact
   made it easy for the Germans to segregate and persecute the Jewish
   section of society; because the Jews were cut off from public life,
   they lost almost all of the support that could have been provided by
   other groups in society; active assistance by Dutch collaborators, such
   as the Henneicke Column group that hunted and "delivered" 8,000 to
   9,000 Jews for deportation. All of these circumstances made it
   relatively easy for the SS, regularly aided by Dutch police officers,
   to round up the Jewish population.

Norway

   After Norway was invaded, the Nazis took control of the government and
   the true government went into exile. Power was given to the German
   Reichskommisioner Josef Terboven and the Norwegian Fascist leader
   Vidkun Quisling. Quisling had attempted to establish himself as the
   leader of occupied Norway, but the Nazis only used him as leader of a
   puppet government. The Nazis, as well as some Norwegian police units,
   rounded up 750 Jews. However, the Nazis and their collaborators were
   very unpopular in Norway, causing a strong resistance movement, so the
   German government's aims for Norway were never fulfilled. Many Jews and
   other people were saved by the actions of Norwegians, including
   Norwegian police. Still, detailed lists of Jews (and assumingly most
   other persons as well) existed at the time of the occupation. This
   caused the rounding-up of Jews in Norway, to be much more efficent than
   in similar countries (like Denmark). Quisling and other Norwegians, who
   collaborated with the Nazis, were executed as traitors after the war.

   Also, 245 Sinti and Roma were deported to the Nazi extermination camps,
   of which 190 were murdered.

Who authorized the killings?

   Hitler authorized the mass killing of those labelled by the Nazis as
   "undesirables" in the T-4 Euthanasia Program. Hitler encouraged the
   killings of the Jews of Eastern Europe by the Einsatzgruppen 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 Final Solution). To make for smoother
   intra-governmental cooperation in the implementation of this "Final
   Solution" to the "Jewish Question", the Wannsee conference was held
   near Berlin on January 20, 1942, with the participation of fifteen
   senior officials, led by Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann, the
   records of which provide the best evidence of the central planning of
   the Holocaust. Just five weeks later on February 22, Hitler was
   recorded saying "We shall regain our health only by eliminating the
   Jew" 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 Joseph
   Goebbels and rely on artificially limiting the Holocaust to exclude
   what we do have documentation on, such as the T-4 Euthanasia Program
   and the Kristallnacht pogrom.

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,
   even though Hitler did not talk about the camps in public, 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 Polish government-in-exile 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 an entry in the Friedrich
   Kellner Diary dated October 28, 1941, the German justice inspector
   Friedrich Kellner recorded a conversation he had in Laubach with a
   German soldier who had witnessed a massacre in Poland. Churchill, who
   was privy to intelligence reports derived from decoded German
   transmissions, first began mentioning "mass killings" in public at the
   same time. 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. In the United States, in November of 1942, a
   telegram from Europe which contained word about Hitler's plans was
   released by Stephen Wise of the World Jewish Congress, after a long
   wait for permission from the government. This led to attempts by Jewish
   organizations to put Roosevelt under pressure to act on behalf of the
   European Jews, many of whom had tried in vain to enter either Britain
   or the U.S.

   On December 17, 1942, however, after receiving a detailed eyewhitness
   account from Jan Karski, the Allies issued a formal declaration
   confirming and condemning Nazi extermination policy toward the Jews.
   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 May 12, 1943, Polish government-in-exile and Bund
   leader Szmul Zygielbojm committed suicide in London to protest the
   inaction of the world with regard to the Holocaust, stating in part in
   his suicide letter:

          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 Warsaw ghetto 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.

   The death camps were discussed between American and British leaders at
   the Bermuda Conference in April of 1943. The large camps near Auschwitz
   were finally surveyed by plane in April of 1944, many months after the
   German air force ceased to be a serious danger. While all important
   German cities and production centers were bombed by Allied forces until
   the end of the war, no attempt was made to collapse the system of mass
   annihilation by destroying pertinent structures or train tracks, even
   though Churchill was a proponent of bombing parts of the Auschwitz
   complex. Throughout the war, Britain also pressed European leaders to
   prevent "illegal" Jewish immigration and sent ships to block the
   sea-route to Palestine (from which Britain withdrew in 1948), turning
   back many refugees.

   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. Robert
   Gellately, a historian at Oxford University, 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.

Historical and philosophical interpretations

   The Holocaust and the historical phenomenon of Nazism, which has since
   become the dark symbol of the 20th century's crimes, is the subject of
   numerous historical, psychological, sociological, literary, and
   philosophical studies. All types of scholars have tried to give an
   answer to what appears as the most irrational act of the Western World,
   which, until at least World War I, had been so sure of its eminent
   superiority to other civilizations. Frankfurt school philosopher
   Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer thus began the Dialectic of
   Enlightenment:

     "Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of
     thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and
     installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is
     radiant with triumphant calamity.

   Theodor Adorno went as far as ceasing to work as a composer, declaring:
   "writing any more poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" (Nach Ausschwitz
   noch ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch). Thus, Auschwitz became
   the metonymic name for the Holocaust and the Nazi barbarity. Although
   Adorno later retracted this statement, declaring that "Perennial
   suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to
   scream...", the concepts of civilization and of progress themselves
   were severely called into question, and in a much greater manner than
   had happened due to World War I's massive killings. Germany, which was
   considered one of the most enlightened European countries, radiant with
   literature and philosophy ( Goethe, Hegel, etc.), art (Bach, Bauhaus,
   etc.), and which had quickly followed in Great Britain's and France's
   steps during the competition induced during the New Imperialism period
   (starting in 1860s), had made itself guilty of one of the biggest
   crimes against humanity ever committed. Thus, the juridical concept of
   crimes against humanity was created to qualify what could not be
   qualified. It was left to literature, such as Primo Levi's If This Is a
   Man (1947) or Robert Antelme's The Human Race (1947) to describe what
   poetry, according to Adorno, couldn't describe.

   Thus, until this day, many different people have tried to explain what
   many deemed unexplainable due to its horror. One important
   philosophical question, addressed as early as 1933 by Wilhelm Reich in
   Mass Psychology of Fascism, was the mystery of the obedience of the
   German people to such an "insane" operation. Hannah Arendt, in her 1963
   report on Adolf Eichmann, presented him as a symbol of dull obedience
   to authority in what was at first seen as a scandalous book, Eichmann
   in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), which has since
   become a classic of political philosophy. Thus, Arendt opposed herself
   to the first, immediate, explanation, which accused the Nazis of "
   cruelty" and of " sadism". Later, the historians' debate concerning
   functionalism and intentionalism also demonstrated that the question
   couldn't be simplified to a question of cruelty. Many people who
   participated in the Holocaust were normal people, according to Arendt,
   and that is the real scandal. This led Stanley Milgram's to conduct
   psychological experiences on obedience, opening up the way to
   understanding the psychological experiences of " authority" and
   charisma. The question of charisma was renewed by Gustave Le Bon's 19th
   century studies about crowd psychology. Thus, his work acquired new
   force, although Hitler himself had been inspired by Le Bon's
   description of propaganda techniques to write Mein Kampf. Furthermore,
   Hannah Arendt and some authors such as Sven Lindqvist and Olivier
   LeCour Grandmaison tried to point toward a relative continuity between
   the crimes committed against " primitive" people during colonialism and
   the Holocaust. They most notably argued that many techniques that the
   Nazis industrialized had been experimented on in other continents,
   starting with the concentration camps invented during the Second Boer
   War if not before. This thesis was met with fierce opposition by some
   groups who argued that nothing could be compared to the Holocaust, not
   even other genocides: although the Herero genocide (1904-07) and the
   Armenian genocide (1915-17) are commonly considered as the first
   genocides in history, many argued that the Holocaust had taken
   proportions that even these crimes against humanity hadn't achieved.

   The Holocaust was indeed characterized by an industrial project of
   extermination; compared to it, other genocides seemed to lack
   "professionalism". This led authors such as Enzo Traverso to argue in
   The Origins of Nazi Violence that Auschwitz was "an authentic product
   of Western civilization". Beginning his book with a description of the
   guillotine, which according to him marks the entry of the Industrial
   Revolution into capital punishment, and writes: "Through an irony of
   history, the theories of Frederick Taylor" ( taylorism) were applied by
   a totalitarian system to serve "not production, but extermination."
   (see also Heidegger's comments). In the wake of Hannah Arendt, Traverso
   describes the colonial domination during the New Imperialism period
   through "rational organization", which lead in a number of cases to
   extermination. However, this argument, which insists on the
   industrialization and technical rationality through which the Holocaust
   itself was carried out (the organization of trains, technical details,
   etc. — see Adolf Eichmann's bureaucratic work), was in turn opposed by
   other people. These point out that the 1994 Rwandan genocide only used
   machetes.

   Others have presented the Holocaust as a product of German history,
   analyzing its deep roots in German society: "German authoritarianism,
   feeble liberalism, brash nationalism or virulent anti-Semitism. From A.
   J. P. Taylor's The Course of German History fifty-five years ago to
   Daniel Goldhagen's recent Hitler's Willing Executioners, Nazism is
   understood as the outcome of a long history of uniquely German traits",
   writes Russell Jacoby. Furthermore, while many pointed out that the
   specificity of the Holocaust was also rooted in the constant
   antisemitism from which Jews had been the target since the foundation
   of Christianism (and the myth of the " deicide people"), others
   underlined that in the 19th century, pseudo-scientific racist theories
   had been elaborated in order to justify, in a general way, white
   supremacy. In his works on " biopolitics", philosopher Michel Foucault
   also traced the origins of " state racism" to the eugenicist policies
   invented during the 19th century (it is one of the few praise that
   Foucault accorded to Freud's psychoanalysis, that he adamantly opposed
   himself to such a project of "racial hygiene").

Why did people participate in, authorize, or tacitly accept the killing?

Obedience

   Stanley Milgram was one of a number of post-war psychologists and
   sociologists who tried to address why people obeyed immoral orders in
   the Holocaust. Milgram's findings demonstrated that reasonable people,
   when instructed by a person in a position of authority, obeyed 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
   Stanford prison experiment. In his book Mass Psychology of Fascism
   (1933), Wilhelm Reich also tried to explain this obedience. The work
   became known as the foundation of Freudo-Marxism. Nobel prize winner
   Elias Canetti also addressed the problem of mass obedience in Masse und
   Macht (1960 - "Crowds and Power"), developing an original theory of the
   consequences of commandments orders both in the obedient person and in
   the commander, who may well become a " despotic paranoiac". Two recent
   "experiments", one called The Third Wave and one conducted by Jane
   Elliott, tried answer the question of: "How can a people be a part of
   something terrible and then claim at the demise that they were not
   really involved?"

Psychological mechanisms

   The Holocaust is a clear example of two factors at work. One is
   described by the " boiling frog" theory, which says that an enormous
   change will not be noticed if it occurs in gradual steps. The other
   factor is the primal and powerful mechanism of herding, which has its
   home in the limbic system and ensures that individuals conform to the
   group. This mechanism has evolved through natural selection to ensure
   that human groups survive. Together, these factors make conforming to
   the group a stronger impulse than breaking out, even if the individual
   does not agree with what the group is doing. So long as the gradual
   changes in group behaviour are small, herding can eventually take the
   group towards a state that is far removed from past behaviour and is
   more and more extreme. Thus, participants in the Holocaust may have
   privately felt horror or disgust at what they were ordered to do but
   stayed in line with the group. These effects have been exploited many
   times in history by demagogues and revolutionaries; they are also seen
   in bullying.

   Studies of mass psychology, kick-started by Carl Jung but currently
   being developed under various labels, including socionomics (see
   references on that page), suggest that the causal mechanism for crowd
   behaviour is the reverse of what is commonly believed. The socionomic
   perspective says that, rather than persecution making people fearful
   and downtrodden, fearful and downtrodden people look for someone to
   persecute.

   The Jungian-socionomic analysis says that after the humiliation of
   World War I, the economic ruin of the Weimar Republic, being forced to
   pay war reparations and the Great Depression, it was natural for the
   German people to become angry and look for someone on whom to vent
   their anger; herding behaviour amplifed this anger and the Holocaust
   was the result.

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 Marxist historian Timothy Mason 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 Lucy Dawidowicz 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 November 11, 1918. Other
   Intentionalists like Andreas Hillgruber, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Gerhard
   Weinberg and Klaus Hildebrand suggested that Hitler had decided upon
   the Holocaust sometime in the early 1920s. More recent intentionalist
   historians like Eberhard Jäckel 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.
   Saul Friedländer has argued that Hitler was an extreme anti-Semite from
   1919 on, but he did not decide upon genocide until the middle of 1941.
   Yet another group of intentionalist historians such as the American
   Arno J. Mayer claimed Hitler only ordered the Holocaust in December
   1941.

   Functionalists like Hans Mommsen, Martin Broszat, Götz Aly, Raul
   Hilberg and Christopher Browning 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 Russia. They claim that what some see
   as extermination fantasies outlined in Hitler's Mein Kampf and other
   Nazi literature were mere propaganda and did not constitute concrete
   plans. In Mein Kampf Hitler repeatedly states his inexorable hatred of
   the Jewish people, but nowhere 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. Adolf Eichmann was in charge of facilitating
   Jewish emigration by whatever means possible from 1937 until October 3,
   1941, when German Jews were forbidden to leave, Reinhard Heydrich
   issuing an order to that effect. Functionalists point to the SS's
   support for a time in the late 1930s for Zionist 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 Joachim von Ribbentrop 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 Lublin, Poland area, but the so-called
   "Lublin Plan" was vetoed by Hans Frank, the Governor-General of
   occupied 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 "
   Madagascar Plan" to deport the entire Jewish population of Europe to a
   "reservation" on Madagascar. The "Madagascar Plan" was cancelled
   because Germany could not defeat the United Kingdom and until the
   British blockade 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
   Michael Marrus, the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer and the British
   historian Ian Kershaw 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 Daniel Goldhagen,
   who argues that ordinary Germans were knowing and willing participants
   in the Holocaust, which he claims had its roots in a deep
   eliminationist German anti-Semitism. Most 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.

Religious hatred and racism

   The German Nazis considered their duty to overcome natural compassion
   and execute orders for what they believed to be higher ideals. Much
   research has been done to explain how ordinary people could have
   participated in such heinous crimes, but there is no doubt that, like
   in some religious conflicts in the past, some people poisoned with
   racial and religious ideology of hatred committed the crimes with
   sadistic pleasure. Crowd psychology has attempted to explain such
   heinous acts, although Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd: A Study of the
   Popular Mind (1895) was also a major influence of Mein Kampf, in
   particular relating to the propaganda techniques described in it.
   Sadistic acts were perhaps most notable in the case of the genocide
   committed by members of the Ustaše, whose enthusiasm and sadism in
   their killings of Serbs appalled Germans, Italians, and even German SS
   officers, who even acted to restrain the Ustashe. However,
   concentration camp literature, such as the one written by Primo Levi or
   Robert Antelme, described numerous individual sadistic acts, including
   ones committed by Kapos.

   Some authors, such as liberal philosopher Hannah Arendt in The Origins
   of Totalitarianism (1951), Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist or French
   historian Olivier LeCour Grandmaison have also linked the Holocaust to
   colonialism. They argue that techniques put in place during the New
   Imperialism period (first of all, concentration camps during the Boer
   War), as well as the pseudo-scientific theories elaborated during this
   period (e.g. Arthur de Gobineau's 1853 Essay on the Inequality of the
   Human Races) had been fundamental in preparing the conditions of
   possibility of the Holocaust. Others authors have adamantly opposed
   these views, on behalf of the "unicity" of the Holocaust, compared to
   any other type of genocide. Philosopher Michel Foucault also traced the
   origins of the Holocaust and of "racial policies" to what he called "
   state racism", which is a part of " biopolitics".

   Finally, many have pointed the ancient roots of antisemitism, which has
   been present in the Western world since the foundation of Christianity.
   These sentiments were not different in pre-war Germany than elsewhere,
   but the Nazis were the first political party to organize, promote, and
   officialize antisemitism, while withdrawing legal protection from Jews.
   Modern ecumenism efforts, in particular by the Roman Catholic Church
   who asked pardon to the Jews, are being done in order to avoid any
   repetition of such acts.

Aftermath

   Until recently, Germany refused to allow access to massive
   Holocaust-related archives located in Bad Arolsen due to, among other
   factors, privacy concerns. However, in May 2006, a 20-year effort by
   the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum led to the announcement
   that 30-50 million pages would be made accessible to historians and
   survivors.

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 DP camps for
   years after the war ended.

   While Zionism 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, Palestine became the
   destination of choice for Jewish refugees, but local Arabs opposed the
   immigration, the United Kingdom 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 Haganah in
   Palestine, organized a massive effort to smuggle Jews into Palestine,
   called Berihah, 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

   Defendants at the Nuremberg Trials - Front row: Göring, Heß, von
   Ribbentrop, and Keitel. Second row: Dönitz, Raeder, Schirach, Sauckel.
   Enlarge
   Defendants at the Nuremberg Trials - Front row: Göring, Heß, von
   Ribbentrop, and Keitel. Second row: Dönitz, Raeder, Schirach, Sauckel.

   The juridical notion of crimes against humanity was invented following
   the Holocaust. The sheer number of people murdered and the
   transnational nature of the slaughter shattered any notion of national
   sovereignty taking precedence over international law when prosecuting
   these crimes. 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 Nuremberg Trials, 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 pursue Nazis and collaborators resulted, famously,
   in the capture of Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann in Argentina (an
   operation led by Rafi Eitan) and to his subsequent trial in Israel in
   1961. Simon Wiesenthal became one of the most famous Nazi hunters. Some
   former Nazis, however, escaped any charges. Thus, Reinhard Gehlen a
   former intelligence officer of the Wehrmacht, set up the ODESSA
   network, which helped many ex-Nazis to escape in Franquist Spain, Latin
   America or in the Middle East. Gehlen managed to turn around and work
   for the CIA, and created in 1956 the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the
   German intelligence agency, which he directed until 1968. Klaus Barbie,
   known as "the Butcher of Lyon" for his role at the head of the Gestapo,
   was protected from 1945 to 1955 by the MI-5 and the CIA, before fleeing
   to South America where he had a hand in Luis García Meza Tejada's 1980
   Cocaine Coup in Bolivia. Barbie was finally arrested in 1983 and
   sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity in 1987. In
   October 2005, Aribert Heim (aka "Doctor Death") was found to be living
   for twenty years in Spain, protected by ODESSA. Paul Schäfer, who had
   founded Colonia Dignidad in Chile, was arrested in 2005 on child sex
   abuses charges. Furthermore, some "enlightened" Nazis were pardoned and
   permitted to become members of the Christian Democracy, among whom Kurt
   Georg Kiesinger, who became Germany's Chancellor for a period in the
   1960s, Hans Filbinger, who became Minister President of
   Baden-Württemberg, and Kurt Waldheim, who became Secretary-General of
   the United Nations and President of Austria.

Legal action against genocide

   The Holocaust also galvanized the international community to take
   action against future genocide, including the Convention on the
   Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide 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
   1993 in Yugoslavia. In 2002, the International Criminal Court was set
   up.

   Although the Holocaust is often cited as the canonical example of
   genocide, none of its perpetrators were tried for that crime, as the
   crime of genocide had not been established at that stage. The
   first-ever convictions for genocide under the 1948 Convention were
   handed down on September 2, 1998, when the International Criminal
   Tribunal for Rwanda found Jean-Paul Akayesu, the former mayor of a
   small town in Rwanda, guilty of nine counts of genocide committed
   during the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. No state has as yet been convicted
   of genocide. Only one inter-state case has so far been brought before
   the International Court of Justice, that of Bosnia and Herzegovina v.
   Serbia and Montenegro, which has yet to be resolved.

Holocaust denial

   Holocaust denial, (referred to by its supporters as 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 30,000 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 Zionists 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. As the
   Holocaust is generally considered by historians to be one of the most
   documented events in recent history, these views are not accepted as
   credible by scholars, with organizations such as the American
   Historical Association, 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.
   Historical revisionism, in the original sense of the word, is a
   well-accepted and mainstream part of the study of history; 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,
   negationists typically willfully misuse or ignore historical records in
   order to attempt to prove their conclusions, as Gordon McFee 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.

   Public Opinion Quarterly 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 also become popular among Muslim opponents of Israel. The
   doctoral dissertation of Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian
   National Authority since 2005, raised doubts that gas chambers were
   used for the extermination of Jews and suggested that the number of
   Jews killed in the Holocaust was "less than a million." Abbas has,
   however, not espoused this position since his appointment as
   Palestinian Prime Minister in 2003, and has denied being a Holocaust
   denier. In late 2005 Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad described
   the Holocaust of European Jewry as "the myth of the Jews' massacre."
   Public espousal of Holocaust denial is a crime in ten European
   countries (including France, Poland, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium,
   Romania, and Germany), while the Nizkor Project attempts to counter it
   on the Internet.

Survivors welfare

   As of 2005, of the nearly 400,000 Holocaust survivors residing in
   Israel, 40% live below the poverty line, increasing significantly since
   1999 and resulting in heated and dramatic protests on the part of
   survivors against the Israeli government and related agencies. The
   average rate of cancer among survivors is nearly two and a half times
   that of the national average. The average cases of colon cancer among
   survivors are nine times higher than the national average, which is
   attributed to the conditions of starvation experienced by survivors as
   well as extreme stress.

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 former believers question
   whether people can still have any faith in God after the Holocaust, and
   some of the theological responses to these questions are explored in
   Holocaust theology.

Art and literature

   German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously commented that "writing
   poetry after Auschwitz 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
   Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, and Anne Frank, but there is a substantial
   body of literature and art in many languages. Indeed, Paul Celan 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 Schindler's List and Life Is Beautiful. 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 and Four Seasons Documentary, as well as
   institutions devoted to memorializing and studying the Holocaust,
   including Yad Vashem in Israel and the US Holocaust Museum.

Freemasonry

   After the World War II, the forget-me-not flower was used again as a
   Masonic emblem at the 1948, first, Annual Convention in of the United
   Grand Lodges of Germany, Ancient Free & Accepted Masons. The badge is
   now worn in the coat lapel by Freemasons around the world to remember
   all those that have suffered in the name of Freemasonry, and
   specifically those during the Nazi era.

Holocaust Memorial Days

   In a unanimous vote, the United Nations General Assembly voted on
   November 1, 2005, to designate January 27 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 Holocaust Memorial Day in the United
   Kingdom since 2001, as well as other countries, including Sweden,
   Italy, Germany, Finland, Denmark and Estonia. Israel observes Yom
   HaShoah vea hagvora, the "Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and the
   courage of the Jewish people ," on the 27th day of the Hebrew month of
   Nisan, which generally falls in April. This memorial day is also
   commonly observed by Jews outside of Israel.
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust"
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