[112], Germany invaded Norway and Denmark on 9 April 1940, during Operation Weserbung. "[281] The gas was then pumped out, and the Sonderkommandowork groups of mostly Jewish prisonerscarried out the bodies, extracted gold fillings, cut off women's hair, and removed jewelry, artificial limbs and glasses. What Do Americans Know About the Holocaust? American Jewish Committee. [42] From the early 1920s onwards, he compared the Jews to germs and said they should be dealt with in the same way. Despite this, calculating the exact numbers of individuals who were killed as the result of Nazi policies is an impossible task. Michael Gray, a specialist in Holocaust education. [284] Between March 1942 and November 1943, around 1,526,500 Jews were murdered in these three camps in gas chambers using carbon monoxide from the exhaust fumes of stationary diesel engines. We have an estimated 2.5 million Jews in the General Government, perhaps with the half-Jews and all that that entails some 3.5 million. [67] The SS and SA smashed shops and stole cars belonging to Jews; Austrian police stood by, some already wearing swastika armbands. Documenting the Holocaust: Examples of Documents. "[224][t] On 18 December 1941, Hitler and Himmler held a meeting to which Himmler referred in his appointment book as "Juden frage | als Partisanen auszurotten" ("Jewish question / to be exterminated as partisans"). The Russian Academy of Science article by M. V. Filimoshin based this figure on sources published in the Soviet era. In December 1941, similar vans, using exhaust fumes rather than bottled gas, were introduced into the camp at Chemno,[247] Victims were asphyxiated while being driven to prepared burial pits in the nearby forests. [313] An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 joined the Soviet partisan movement. Download our mobile app for on-the-go access to the Jewish Virtual Library, Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust & Nazi Persecution, Bormann Relays Hitler Order Banning Reference to Final Solution (1943), Eichmann on Deportations from Western Europe, Exchange of Letters Concerning the "Final Solution", Himmler Orders Completion of the Final Solution, Himmler Reports on Executions in the East, Hitler Bans Public Reference to The Final Solution, Revelations on the Extermination of the Jews, 1998 - 2023 American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise. Some who lit the six candles that represented the six million, had . [85] Among the areas considered for possible resettlement were British Palestine and, after the war began, French Madagascar,[86] Siberia, and two reservations in Poland. According to Yitzhak Arad, this was the highest number of SS officers killed in a single revolt. [63][62] The laws referred to Jews but applied equally to the Roma and black Germans. [201] It annexed Thrace and Macedonia, and in February 1943 agreed to a demand from Germany that it deport 20,000 Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp. [m] Cesarani writes that the killing of Jews was at this point a "subset" of these activities. With regard to the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust, best estimates for the breakdown of Jewish loss according to location of death follow: There is no single wartime document that contains the above cited estimates of Jewish deaths. [211] Around 8,500 Jews were deported in all. The overall death and destruction that took place during World War II may well be beyond human comprehension. [375][376] An estimated 1.81.9million non-Jewish Polish citizens were killed by Germans during the war. There are several important differences between Pew Research Centers 2019 Holocaust knowledge questions and the other two surveys that make it so that they are not directly comparable (and thus unable to gauge whether levels of knowledge about the Holocaust have changed over time). [402] In Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, the Roma were subject to restrictions on movement and confinement to collection camps,[403] while in Eastern Europe they were sent to concentration camps, where large numbers were murdered. We also dont know the precise number of Jews in any of these areas. Germany, Italy and Bulgaria divided Greece into occupation zones but did not eliminate it as a country. Paramilitary death squads called Einsatzgruppen, in cooperation with the German Army and local collaborators, murdered around 1.3million Jews in mass shootings and pogroms from the summer of 1941. sfn error: no target: CITEREFGoldsteinGoldstein2016 (. (These groups also rank among those with the highest levels of overall religious knowledge.) [5] Gold fillings were pulled from the corpses before burial, but unlike in Auschwitz the women's hair was cut before death. The Indiana Historical Society museum in Indianapolis is bringing awareness and remembrance towards the recent revival of Jewish hatred with their new exhibit, " Eva Kor from Auschwitz to Indiana .". Those that remained in the city mostly included women, children, and the elderly. We must destroy the Jews, wherever we encounter them and whenever it is possible, in order to preserve the entire structure of the Reich. [196] The Romanian military murdered up to 25,000 Jews during the Odessa massacre between 18 October 1941 and March 1942, assisted by gendarmes and the police. Civilians killed in reprisals during the Soviet partisan war account for a major portion. Through song, words, and candle-lighting, those in the Erie Jewish Community and supporters, memorialized the six million Jewish people murdered during the Holocaust. Between 58,000 and 66,260 Jews remained in the country. Main telephone: 202.488.0400 One Man's Journey to ID Death March Victims * Jews estimated murdered in the Holocaust: 6 million Copy no. For example, all three surveys included a question asking approximately how many Jews were killed during the Holocaust. "The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them," Goebbels wrote in his diary in 1942. [390] Between 1939 and 1941, 80,000 to 100,000 mentally ill adults in institutions were killed, as were 5,000 children and 1,000 Jews, also in institutions. [147] The point of the attacks was to destroy the local Communist Party leadership and therefore the state, including "Jews in the Party and State employment", and any "radical elements". [308] The Sonderkommando at crematorium II threw their Oberkapo into an oven when they heard the commotion, believing that a camp uprising had begun. [345] Buchenwald was liberated by the Americans on 11 April;[346] Bergen-Belsen by the British on 15 April;[347] Dachau by the Americans on 29 April;[348] Ravensbrck by the Soviets on 30 April;[349] and Mauthausen by the Americans on 5 May. [336] Publication of the VrbaWetzler report halted Hungarian government cooperation with Jewish deportations for several months and sparked international interventions that saved tens of thousands of lives. [321] In the decades after the war, Swiss banks became notorious for harboring gold deposited by Nazis who had stolen it during the Holocaust, as well as profiting from unclaimed deposits made by Holocaust victims. [329] Shipments of Jews had priority on the German railways over anything but the army's needs, and continued even in the face of the increasingly dire military situation at the end of 1942. [364], A 1995 paper published by M. V. Filimoshin, an associate of the Russian Defense Ministry, put the civilian death toll in the regions occupied by Germany at 13.7million. Forty-one percent of millennials believe 2 million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust. [151], The German army took part in these shootings as bystanders, photographers, and active shooters. [426] In response, Germany set up the "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future" Foundation in 2000, which paid 4.45billion to former slave laborers (up to 7,670 each). According to Yad Vashem, some 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland on the eve of the Sept. 1, 1939 German invasion, and only 380,000 survived the war. [37] These ideas became commonplace throughout Germany; the professional classes adopted an ideology that did not see humans as racial equals with equal hereditary value. [428] In 2013 Germany agreed to provide 772million to fund nursing care, social services, and medication for 56,000 Holocaust survivors around the world. , Responses to this question were coded to prioritize knowledge of the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust. [396][397] Research cited by Ian Hancock suggests the pre-war Romani population of Europe may have been much higher, resulting in estimates of up to 1.5 million Roma deaths. [192] Romania implemented anti-Jewish measures in May and June 1940 as part of its efforts towards an alliance with Germany. The rest of the country was divided into the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), an Italian-German puppet state whose territory comprised Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, with the Croatian fascist Ustae party placed in power; and German occupied Serbia, governed by German military and police administrators[131] who appointed the Serbian collaborationist puppet government, Government of National Salvation, headed by Milan Nedi. Grynszpan was handed over to the Germans and his fate is unknown. [b] Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; [c] around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The four multiple-choice questions also were included in a separate survey of approximately 1,800 U.S. teens (ages 13 to 17). [340] Already sick after exposure to violence and starvation, they were marched to train stations and transported for days without food or shelter in open freight cars, then forced to march again at the other end to the new camp. Vesna Drapac, Gareth Pritchard, Palgrave Publishing, Sep 16, 2017, "Where Memory is a Curse and Amnesia a Blessing: A Journey Through Romania's Holocaust Narrative", "Wannsee Conference and the 'Final Solution', "Jews captured by Waffen SS soldiers during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising", "American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Refugee Aid", "Major death marches and evacuations, 19441945", "The 11th Armoured Division (Great Britain)", "Jewish losses during the Holocaust: By country", "Nazi Persecution of Soviet Prisoners of War", "Hitler's War; Hitler's Plans for Eastern Europe", "The trial of German major war criminals: proceedings of the International Military Tribunal sitting at Nuremberg Germany", "What was the Warsaw Uprising? [293] Timothy Snyder noted that it was only during the three months after the deportations of JulySeptember 1942 that agreement on the need for armed resistance was reached.[294]. [287], Although the Holocaust was planned and directed by Germans, the Nazi regime found willing collaborators in other countries (e.g. [175] During the last year of the war, people of partial Jewish descent and non-Jewish partners in mixed marriages were arrested and imprisoned in one hundred camps. There are modest differences in levels of knowledge about the Holocaust based on gender, race and ethnicity, age, and region. Even after the Reformation, Catholicism and Lutheranism continued to persecute Jews, accusing them of blood libels and subjecting them to pogroms and expulsions. [144] The war was driven by the need for resources, including, according to David Cesarani, agricultural land to feed Germany, natural resources for German industry, and control over Europe's largest oil fields. Known as Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass"), the pogrom on 910 November 1938 saw over 7,500 Jewish shops (out of 9,000) looted and attacked, and over 1,000 synagogues damaged or destroyed. To prevent panic, they were told the gas chambers were showers or delousing chambers. [19][g] The Nazis used the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (German: die Endlsung der Judenfrage). As German troops advanced, the mass shooting of "anti-German elements" was assigned, as in Poland, to the Einsatzgruppen, this time under the command of Reinhard Heydrich. "[216], On 7 December 1941, Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor, an American naval base in Honolulu, Hawaii, killing 2,403 Americans. Under the coordination of the SS, with directions from the highest leadership of the Nazi Party, killings were committed within Germany itself, throughout occupied Europe, and within territories controlled by Germany's allies. In Berlin we were told "Why all this trouble? In response, two-thirds say the Holocaust refers to the attempted annihilation of the Jewish people, or words to that effect, mentioning the mass murder of Jews. Beginning in 1943, as it became clear that they would lose the war, the Germans and their Axis partners destroyed much of the existing documentation. [226], SS-Obergruppenfhrer Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA), convened what became known as the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942 at Am Groen Wannsee 5658, a villa in Berlin's Wannsee suburb. Sex with Jewish women was forbidden on grounds of racial disgrace by the Nazis, but rape was not considered a racial disgrace in concentration camps. They also destroyed physical evidence of mass murder. [77] Contrary to Goebbel's statements in his diary, the police were not withdrawn; the regular police, Gestapo, SS and SA all took part, although Heinrich Himmler was angry that the SS had joined in. Most of the people surveyed (10,429) were members of Pew Research Centers American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel. And behind each number are individuals whose hopes and dreams were destroyed. The new data is based on a survey of 10,971 U.S. adults conducted in February 2019. [176] Other Jews entered the concentration camp system after deportation from the Baltic States or Hungary. The fighting Jews have won for us what is most important: the truth about the weakness of the Germans. When America declared war, he blamed the Jews.[218]. [217] According to Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Hitler had trusted American Jews, whom he assumed were all-powerful, to keep the United States out of the war in the interests of German Jews. A 100-year-old Holocaust survivor, who lived through 12 Nazi concentration camps during World War II, will share his story at the Chabad of Poway. [304] On 14 October, Jewish prisoners in Sobibr attempted an escape, killing 11 SS officers, as well as two or three Ukrainian and Volksdeutsche guards. It also includes people caught in hiding and killed in Poland, Serbia, and elsewhere in German-occupied Europe. About 350,000 Polish Jews survived the war; most survivors never lived in Nazi-occupied Poland, but lived in the Soviet-occupied zone of Poland during 1939 and 1940, and fled or were evacuated by the Soviets further east to avoid the German . [280] Johann Kremer, an SS doctor who oversaw the gassings, testified that: "Shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through the opening and it was clear that they fought for their lives. By Raoul Wootliff 31 December 2015, 12:17 pm. (+1) 202-419-4372 | Media Inquiries. The magnitude is clear. [292] Raul Hilberg accounted for this by evoking the history of Jewish persecution: compliance might avoid inflaming the situation until the onslaught abated. According to the American Jewish Committee's 2021 annual survey, nearly 40 percent of American Jews have reported changing their behavior in fear of being victimized, a trend that makes sense. Notice that Poland by far lost the largest number (three million), with the Soviet Union having lost the second most (one million). [69] Around 7,000 Jewish businesses were "Aryanized", and all the legal restrictions on Jews in Germany were imposed in Austria. [338][339] In January 1945, the Germans held records of 714,000 inmates in concentration camps; by May, 250,000 (35 percent) had died during these marches. The Holocaust is the best documented case of genocide. This perception contributed to the canard of Jewish Bolshevism. [105], During the German invasion, a wave of pogroms targeted Jews in the areas that had been annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 and 1940. [168] Longerich wrote in 2010 that the gradual increase in brutality and numbers killed between July and September 1941 suggests there was "no particular order". [382] On 14 July 1933, the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring (Gesetz zur Verhtung erbkranken Nachwuchses), the Sterilization Law, was passed. [379], The economic strain of the Great Depression led Protestant charities and some members of the German medical establishment to advocate compulsory sterilization of the "incurable" mentally and physically disabled,[381] people the Nazis called Lebensunwertes Leben (life unworthy of life). Nearly nine-in-ten U.S. Jews (90%), agnostics (90%) and atheists (87%) know that the Holocaust happened between 1930 and 1950. Ethan J. Hollander, Springer, Oct 25, 2016. Yad Vashem. The two institutions also divided the occupied areas slightly differently. An additional 18% mention concepts that are more loosely associated with the Holocaust, including the general idea of death (6%), the persecution (but not murder) of Jews (4%), or just something about Jewish people (4%). Eventually, thousands of camps and other detention sites were established across German-occupied Europe. [s], Christopher Browning argues that Hitler gave no order during the Reich Chancellery meeting but made clear that he had intended his 1939 warning to the Jews to be taken literally, and he signaled to party leaders that they could give appropriate orders to others. [323] On 26 June 1942, BBC services in all languages publicized a report by the Jewish Social-Democratic Bund and other resistance groups documenting the killing of 700,000 Jews in Poland. In Lithuania, by contrast, the pogroms were carried out by organized Lithuanian paramilitaries. Either the German authorities were a party to this outbreak or their powers over public order and a hooligan minority are not what they are proudly claimed to be. [269], Christian Gerlach writes that over three million Jews were murdered in 1942, the year that "marked the peak" of the mass murder. According to Timothy Snyder, "more Jews fought in the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 than in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943. [192], Bulgaria introduced anti-Jewish measures between 1940 and 1943 (requirement to wear a yellow star, restrictions on owning telephones or radios, and so on). Denmark was overrun so quickly that there was no time for a resistance to form. There is no single wartime document that spells out how many people were killed. The evacuated Jews will first be sent, group by group, to so-called transit ghettos, from which they will be transported to the East. "Racial" enemies could never belong to the Volksgemeinschaft; they were to be removed from society. [406] Because they refused to pledge allegiance to the Nazi party or serve in the military, Jehovah's Witnesses were sent to concentration camps, where they were given the option of renouncing their faith and submitting to the state's authority. The French had planned to try Grynszpan for murder, but the German invasion in 1940 interrupted the proceedings. Seven percent were not sure, and 3 percent denied that it happened. Explore a timeline of events that occurred before, during, and after the Holocaust. [306] On 7 October 1944, 300 Jewish members, mostly Greek or Hungarian, of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz learned they were about to be killed, and staged an uprising, blowing up crematorium IV. [78] Attacks took place in Austria too. [43], With the appointment in January 1933 of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany and the Nazi's seizure of power, German leaders proclaimed the rebirth of the Volksgemeinschaft ("people's community"). "[164], Two years later, in a speech on 6 October 1943 to party leaders, Heinrich Himmler said he had ordered that women and children be shot, but according to Peter Longerich and Christian Gerlach, the murder of women and children began at different times in different areas, suggesting local influence. Janusz Gumkowski and Kazimierz Leszczynski, sfn error: no target: CITEREFGordon1984 (, Piotrowski, Tadeusz. The fate of those Jews depended on many factors, including the local occupying authority and whether they were among the very few evacuated to the interior of the Soviet Union ahead of the invading forces. [e] The biblical term shoah (Hebrew: ), meaning "calamity" (and also used to refer to "destruction" since the Middle Ages), became the standard Hebrew term for the murder of the European Jews. [157], Notable massacres include the July 1941 Ponary massacre near Vilnius (Soviet Lithuania), in which Einsatgruppe B and Lithuanian collaborators shot at least 70,000 Jews, 20,000 Poles and 8,000 Russians. By fall 1941, most Jews were confined to a ghetto, the largest one in Minsk, where about 70,000 Jews were interned. For example, the Nazis' treatment of the Slavs consisted of "enslavement and gradual attrition", while some Slavs were favored; Hayes lists Bulgarians, Croats, Slovaks, and some Ukrainians. [303] In the Biaystok Ghetto on 16 August, Jewish insurgents fought for five days when the Germans announced mass deportations. [222] According to Gerlach, an unidentified former German Sicherheitsdienst officer wrote in a report in 1944, after defecting to Switzerland: "After America entered the war, the annihilation (Ausrottung) of all European Jews was initiated on the Fhrer's order. Prewar estimates for the latest year available (1937-1941). [d] The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination through labor in concentration camps; and in gas chambers and gas vans in German extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Beec, Chemno, Majdanek, Sobibr, and Treblinka in occupied Poland.[5]. [200] In the Odessa and Pervomaisk regions alone, Romanian authorities were responsible for the death of over 150,000 Jews. By contrast, more atheists and agnostics than Jews correctly answer the question about how Hitler became chancellor of Germany: Three-quarters of atheists (76%) and seven-in-ten agnostics know Hitler became chancellor through a democratic political process, compared with 57% of Jews. To further ensure that each survey reflects a balanced cross-section of the nation, the data are weighted to match the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. And close to two-thirds know that Nazi-created ghettos were parts of a city or town where Jews were forced to live. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. April 27, 2023, 12:59 p.m. The 2019 Pew Research Center survey is not the first research conducted to assess how much American adults know about the Holocaust. [373] After Germany lost the war, the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials and Poland's Supreme National Tribunal concluded that the aim of German policies in Poland the extermination of Poles and Jews was a genocide in biological terms. The segregation of Jews in ghettos culminated in the policy of extermination the Nazis called the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, discussed by senior government officials at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January 1942. [202], Although Hungary expelled Jews who were not citizens from its newly annexed lands in 1941, it did not deport most of its Jews[204] until the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944. Emigration from the Reich was ultimately banned in October 1941. Insurance payments for damage to their property were confiscated by the government. Discussing plans for a "final solution to the Jewish question" ("Endlsung der Judenfrage"), and a "final solution to the Jewish question in Europe" ("Endlsung der europischen Judenfrage"),[235] the conference was held to coordinate efforts and policies ("Parallelisierung der Linienfhrung"), and to ensure that authority rested with Heydrich. Several resistance groups were formed, such as the Jewish Combat Organization (OB) and Jewish Military Union (ZW) in the Warsaw Ghetto and the United Partisan Organization in Vilna. [50] Other early prisons were consolidated by mid-1934 into purpose-built camps outside the cities, run exclusively by the SS. There was discussion about whether to include the German Mischlinge (half-Jews). [413][414][415] In some concentration camps brothels were established to punish lesbian women by raping them. [203] Instead, Jews native to Bulgaria were sent to the provinces. [68] Jews were forced to perform humiliating acts such as scrubbing the streets or cleaning toilets while wearing tefillin. All of these countries were under no formal German occupation and maintained complete domestic administrations. [399], Robert Ritter, head of Germany's Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit, called Roma "a peculiar form of the human species who are incapable of development and came about by mutation". Find topics of interest and explore encyclopedia content related to those topics, Find articles, photos, maps, films, and more listed alphabetically, Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust, Explore the ID Cards to learn more about personal experiences during the Holocaust. Instead, it was a question of "a process of increasingly radical interpretations of orders". [361] In Belarus, Germany imposed a regime that deported 380,000 people for slave labor, murdered 1.6million, and destroyed at least 5,295 settlements. Read our research on: Congress | Economy | Trust in Media. For example, if a respondent said that the Holocaust refers to the attempted elimination of Jews by Hitler and his followers during World War II, that answer was coded into the annihilation of Jews category but not the Hitler or World War II categories. The Holocaust knowledge questions were designed to measure some basic facts about the Holocaust, including when it happened and who it involved.

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