What Was the Holocaust?

What is Genocide?
Why the Holocaust was a defining historical moment
Is Genocide inevitable?
Do States and citizens have responsibilities?
Does silence contribute to oppression?
What are the roots of prejudice and oppression?
Can modern technology be abused?

AND SO HELPS YOU LEARN ABOUT YOURSELF
AND OF THE WORLD AROUND YOU

HOLOCAUST VICTIMS
Wikipedia

JEWS

Jews delivered to Chełmno death camp were forced to abandon their bundles along the way. In this photo, loading of victims sent from the ghetto in Łódź in 1942

The military campaign to displace persons like the Jews from Germany and other German-held territories during World War II, often with extreme brutality, is known as the Holocaust. It was carried out primarily by German forces and collaborators, German and non-German. Early in the war, millions of Jews were concentrated in urban ghettos. In 1941, Jews were massacred, and by December, Hitler had decided to exterminate all Jews living in Europe at that time. The European Jewish population was reduced from 9,740,000 to 3,642,000; the world's Jewish population was reduced by one-third, from roughly 16.6 million in 1939 to about 11 million in 1946. The extermination of Jews had been a priority to the Nazis, regardless of the consequences.

In January 1942, during the Wannsee Conference, several Nazi leaders discussed the details of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (Endlösung der Judenfrage) and German State Secretary Josef Bühler urged conference chairman Reinhard Heydrich to proceed with the Final Solution in the General Government. Jewish populations were systematically deported from the ghettos and the occupied territories to the seven camps designated as Vernichtungslager (extermination camps):

Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Maly Trostenets, Sobibór, Treblinka

In 1978, Sebastian Haffner wrote that in December 1941, Hitler began to accept the failure of his primary goal—to dominate Europe, after his declaration of war against the United States, and his withdrawal—was compensated for by his secondary goal: the extermination of the Jews. As the Nazi war machine faltered during the war's final years, military resources such as fuel, transport, munitions, soldiers and industrial resources were still diverted from the fronts to the death camps.

Poland, home of the world's largest Jewish community before the war, lost 3,300,000 (90 percent) of its Jewish population. Although reports of the Holocaust had reached Western leaders, public awareness in the United States and other democracies of the mass murder of Jews in Poland was low at the time; the first references in The New York Times, in 1942, were unconfirmed reports rather than front-page news.

Greece, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Lithuania, Bohemia, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Latvia lost over 70 percent of their Jewish populations; in Belgium, Romania, Luxembourg, Norway, and Estonia, the figure was about 50 percent. Over one-third of the Soviet Union's Jews were killed; France lost about 25 percent of its Jewish population, Italy between 15% and 20%. Denmark evacuated nearly all of its Jews to nearby neutral Sweden; the Danish resistance movement, with the assistance of many Danish citizens, evacuated 7,220 of the country's 7,800 Jews by sea to Sweden, in vessels ranging from fishing boats to private yachts. The rescue allowed the vast majority of Denmark's Jewish population to avoid capture by the Nazis. Jews outside Europe under Axis occupation were also affected by the Holocaust in Italian Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Iraq, Japan, and China.

Although Jews are an ethnoreligious group, they were defined by the Nazis on purely racial grounds. The Nazi Party viewed the Jewish religion as irrelevant, persecuting Jews in accordance with antisemitic stereotypes of an alleged biologically determined heritage. Defining Jews as the chief enemy, Nazi racial ideology was also used to persecute other minorities

THE HOLOCAUST
Wikipedia

The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah,[b] was the World War II genocide of the European Jews. Between 1941 and 1945, across German-occupied Europe, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.[a][c] The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination through labour in concentration camps; and in gas chambers and gas vans in German extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka in occupied Poland.[5]

Germany implemented the persecution in stages. Following Adolf Hitler's appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933, the regime built a network of concentration camps in Germany for political opponents and those deemed "undesirable", starting with Dachau on 22 March 1933.[6] After the passing of the Enabling Act on 24 March,[7] which gave Hitler plenary powers, the government began isolating Jews from civil society, which included a boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933, and enacting the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935. On 9–10 November 1938, eight months after Germany annexed Austria, Jewish businesses and other buildings were ransacked, smashed or set on fire throughout Germany and Austria during what became known as Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass"). After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, triggering World War II, the regime set up ghettos to segregate Jews from the rest of the population. Eventually thousands of camps and other detention sites were established across German-occupied Europe.

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 Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January 1942. As German forces captured territories in the East, all anti-Jewish measures were radicalized. 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. Paramilitary death squads called Einsatzgruppen, in cooperation with the German Army and local collaborators, murdered around 1.3 million Jews in mass shootings and pogroms between 1941 and 1945. By mid-1942, victims were being deported from ghettos across Europe in sealed freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, they were worked to death or gassed. The killing continued until the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945.

The European Jews were targeted for extermination as part of a larger event during the Holocaust era, usually defined as beginning in January 1933,[8] in which Germany and its collaborators persecuted and murdered other groups, including Slavs (chiefly ethnic Poles, Soviet citizens, and Soviet prisoners of war), the Roma, the "incurably sick", political and religious dissenters, and gay men.[d] The death toll of these groups is thought to rise to 11 million.

HOW THE HOLOCAUST IS SEEN
The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert, 1989
Publishers Weekly

A poignant introduction by the author (official biographer of Winston Churchill) is followed by his instructive analysis of anti-Semitism in Europe, from Martin Luther's venomous fulminations against Jews to the motivating power of anti-Semitism in the National Socialist movement. Hitler's "final solution" began formally within hours of the German invasion of Russia, a campaign that, as Gilbert shows, provided an opportunity for genocide hitherto lacking. With a relentless accumulation of detail and eyewitness accounts, he writes of the systematic efficiency of the Nazi attempt to destroy European Jewry and the widespread disbelief that such could be happening. Though the figure of Adolf Hitler remains in the background, such executives as Himmler, Eichmann and Mengele are very much in evidence throughout the gripping narrative (there is new material on the latter's labors at Auschwitz). An element in the historical tragedy that Gilbert stresses is the deliberate destruction of children one of Mengele's principal interests which the author calls "the new barbarism." The narrative reaches its dreadful climax with the convergence on the death camps of the Allied and Soviet armies, a time when "rescue and slaughter marched hand in hand." A particularly disturbing section deals with outbreaks of anti-Semitism after the German surrender. On July 4, 1946, for instance more than a year after V-E Day 42 Jews were massacred by Poles in the town of Kielce. Gilbert brings within the pages of this volume all the major substantiated evidence of Jewish resistance throughout the war, plus many examples of Gentiles risking their lives to protect Hitler's prey.

Dwight D. Eisenhower,(Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe WW2, President of USA 1953-61)
Rational Wiki

I saw my first horror camp [on 12 April 1945]. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never been able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain however, that I have never at any time experienced an equal sense of shock.

I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that "the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda." Some members of the visiting party were unable to go through with the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton's headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and the British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.

UCL CENTRE FOR HOLOCAUST EDUCATION
UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, Paul Salmons March 2014

Not long ago, and not far from where we live, ordinary people across Europe became complicit in the murder of their neighbours. What will young people’s education amount to if they do not confront this appalling truth ?

For the Holocaust was a catastrophe not only for its millions of victims but also for our view of ourselves, of who we are, our faith in human nature, and a belief in western progress and ‘civilization’. If we are not prepared to consider what went wrong in modern society that allowed state persecution of political opponents; mass murder of the disabled; European genocide of the Roma (Gypsies); and ultimately led to an attempt to murder every last Jewish man, woman and child, then how can we consider ourselves to be educated people at all?

“YOU CAN’T INTERPRET THE WORLD WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING THE HOLOCAUST”

YAD VASHEM and MUSEUM OF THE BIBLE
STRENGTHEN THEIR
HOLOCAUST COMMEMORATION AND EDUCATION EFFORTS

FORMAL COOPERATION AGREEMENT BETWEEN
‘THE MUSEUM OF THE BIBLE’, WASHINGTON DC
AND ‘YAD VASHEM’ JERUSALEM
Jewish Philanthropy

Yad Vashem and Museum of the Bible have signed a formal cooperation agreement to strengthen ties between Jewish and Christian communities and support Yad Vashem’s Holocaust commemoration and education efforts across the world.

The agreement, called the “Declaration of Cooperation,” was signed in Washington, D.C. at Yad Vashem’s 2016 Christian Leadership Conference.

With the agreement, Yad Vashem will be better able to meet the rising demand among Christian individuals, youth members, and pastors in recent years for authoritative sources on the history and facts of the Shoah. In addition to continuing to support seminars at Yad Vashem, the Museum of the Bible will also help Yad Vashem develop ties with Christian ministries across the world, recruit candidates to Christian Leadership Seminars, organize Yad Vashem events, bolster Yad Vashem’s Holocaust commemoration efforts with the general public, and spearhead public relations efforts in areas related to Christian Holocaust commemoration.

Museum of the Bible has deep ties to Israel, the land of the Bible and the People of the Book, including partnerships with other Israel-based organizations, notably the Israel Antiquities Authority. When Museum of the Bible opens next year, the Israel Antiquities Authority will display rare archaeological objects from Israel in a dedicated 4,000 square foot gallery through this partnership. Museum of the Bible is also dedicated to supporting the excavation of archaeological sites in Israel beginning an archeological dig at Tel-Shimron, one of the largest and most historically significant sites in Israel.

GENOCIDE -
THE NAZI JEWISH HOLOCAUST, 1938-1945,
6,000,000 DEATHS
(The following is only a brief summary)
The History Place Genocide in the 20th Century

ADOLF HITLER TO HIS ARMY COMMANDERS, AUGUST 22, 1939:

"Thus for the time being I have sent to the East only my 'Death's Head Units' with the orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children
of Polish race or language.
Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need.
Who still talks nowadays about the Armenians?"

The term ‘Genocide’ was coined by Polish writer and attorney, Raphael Lemkin, in 1941 by combining the Greek word 'genos' (race) with the Latin word 'cide' (killing).

Genocide as defined by the United Nations in 1948 means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, including: (a) killing members of the group (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

For the Nazis it began with a simple boycott of Jewish shops and ended in the gas chambers at Auschwitz as Adolf Hitler and his Nazi followers attempted to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe.

In January 1933, after a bitter ten-year political struggle, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. During his rise to power, Hitler had repeatedly blamed the Jews for Germany's defeat in World War I and subsequent economic hardships. Hitler also put forward racial theories asserting that Germans with fair skin, blond hair and blue eyes were the supreme form of human, or master race. The Jews, according to Hitler, were the racial opposite, and were actively engaged in an international conspiracy to keep this master race from assuming its rightful position as rulers of the world.

Jews at this time composed only about one percent of Germany's population of 55 million persons. German Jews were mostly cosmopolitan in nature and proudly considered themselves to be Germans by nationality and Jews only by religion. They had lived in Germany for centuries, fought bravely for the Fatherland in its wars and prospered in numerous professions.

But they were gradually shut out of German society by the Nazis through a never-ending series of laws and decrees, culminating in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which deprived them of their German citizenship and forbade intermarriage with non-Jews. They were removed from schools, banned from the professions, excluded from military service, and were even forbidden to share a park bench with a non-Jew.

Back in Germany, years of pent-up hatred toward the Jews was finally let loose on the night that marks the actual beginning of the Holocaust. The Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht) occurred on November 9/10 after 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan shot and killed Ernst vom Rath, a German embassy official in Paris, in retaliation for the harsh treatment his Jewish parents had received from Nazis.

Spurred on by Joseph Goebbels, Nazis used the death of vom Rath as an excuse to conduct the first State-run pogrom against Jews. Ninety Jews were killed, 500 synagogues were burned and most Jewish shops had their windows smashed. The first mass arrest of Jews also occurred as over 25,000 men were hauled off to concentration camps. As a kind of cynical joke, the Nazis then fined the Jews 1 Billion Reichsmarks for the destruction which the Nazis themselves had caused during Kristallnacht.

Many German and Austrian Jews now attempted to flee Hitler's Reich. However, most Western countries maintained strict immigration quotas and showed little interest in receiving large numbers of Jewish refugees. This was exemplified by the plight of the St. Louis, a ship crowded with 930 Jews that was turned away by Cuba, the United States and other countries and returned back to Europe, soon to be under Hitler's control.

On the eve of World War II, the Führer (supreme leader) publicly threatened the Jews of Europe during a speech in Berlin:

"In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it. During the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance only the Jewish race that received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the State, and with it that of the whole nation, and that I would then among other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"

Hitler intended to blame the Jews for the new world war he was soon to provoke. That war began in September 1939 as German troops stormed into Poland, a country that was home to over three million Jews. After Poland's quick defeat, Polish Jews were rounded up and forced into newly established ghettos at Lodz, Krakow, and Warsaw, to await future plans. Inside these overcrowded walled-in ghettos, tens of thousands died a slow death from hunger and disease amid squalid living conditions. The ghettos soon came under the jurisdiction of Heinrich Himmler, leader of the Nazi SS, Hitler's most trusted and loyal organization, composed of fanatical young men considered racially pure according to Nazi standards.

On April 30, 1945, surrounded by the Soviet Army in Berlin, Adolf Hitler committed suicide and his Reich soon collapsed. By now, most of Europe's Jews had been killed. Four million had been gassed in the death camps while another two million had been shot dead or died in the ghettos. The victorious Allies; Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, then began the daunting task of sorting through the carnage to determine exactly who was responsible.
Seven months later, the Nuremberg War Crime Trials began,
with 22 surviving top Nazis charged with crimes against humanity.

During the trial, a now-repentant Hans Frank,
the former Nazi Governor of Poland declared:

"A thousand years will pass
nd the guilt of Germany will not be erased.*

THE ABOVE EFFECTS CAN ONLY BE ACHIVED
BY CREATING AN AUTHORITARIAN STATE

AUTHORITARIAN STATE CHECKLIST
historychamps

Emergence of authoritarian states

Conditions in which authoritarian states emerged: economic factors; social division; impact of war; weakness of political system
Methods used to establish authoritarian states: persuasion and coercion; the role of leaders; ideology; the use of force; propaganda

Consolidation and maintenance of power

Use of legal methods; use of force; charismatic leadership; dissemination of propaganda
Nature, extent and treatment of opposition
The impact of the success and/or failure of foreign policy on the maintenance of power

Aims and results of policies

Aims and impact of domestic economic, political, cultural and social policies
The impact of policies on women and minorities
Authoritarian control and the extent to which it was achieve

THE WORLD AND THE HOLOCAUST
Yad Vashem

From The Nazi rise to power was perceived by the world, especially the West, with concern. However, gradually the new regime attained a certain degree of legitimacy. This legitimacy was strengthened by a world-wide participation in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, despite attempts to have them cancelled. Numerous reports on violations of the rights of German Jewry and then of Austrian Jewry, had reached the Free World throughout the 1930’s. For example: segregation of the Jews and dispossession of their property. This, however, elicited only weak protests. Most countries even closed their doors to Jews who sought to leave Germany.

Throughout the war, military matters were the top priority for countries at war with the Nazis. As a result, information concerning the persecution and murder of the Jews was pushed aside. Reports on what was happening in the ghettos and death camps, sometimes endangering the life of the person conveying the information, was at times regarded with disbelief. The Holocaust never became a first priority on any agenda. It was generally believed that the best way of stopping the atrocities of the Nazi regime was to win the war. Furthermore, influential international figures and bodies, such as the Catholic Church, generally refrained from engaging in any unequivocal protest measures against Nazi Germany. Even when the magnitude of the atrocities at Auschwitz became clear, the Allies did not bomb the camp. There were, nevertheless, cases in which diplomatic intervention by other countries - especially the United States - prevented the murder of many Jews. This occurred, for example, in Romania and Hungary.

THE HOLOCAUST’S IMPACT IN POSTWAR SOCIETIES
Perhaps the Holocaust’s main theological effect
is the radically changed position
by the Roman Catholic Church toward Jews.
The author is emeritus chairman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He was given the Lifetime Achievement Award
by the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism,
and the International Leadership Award by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Jerusalem Post Opinion, Bymanfred Gerstenfeld, 25 Jan 2015

The Holocaust has had major impacts in many areas in post-war Western societies.

The upcoming International Holocaust Remembrance Day is a worthy occasion to assess this subject.

One important reason why the magnitude of this post-Holocaust impact is largely hidden is that it is overshadowed by the Holocaust itself.

When seen against this extremely violent and tragic background, the multidisciplinary post-Holocaust impact, with its difficult-to-summarize multiple facets, does not draw much attention.

However, the subject does warrant consideration and focus.

Yet there is research being done in many isolated areas related to post-Holocaust studies. A huge number of individual books and studies concerning the influence of the Holocaust on postwar societies have been published. There are also many other aspects of post-Holocaust impact. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a direct result of the Holocaust. So is the United Nations Genocide Convention.

Perhaps the Holocaust’s main theological effect has been that the Roman Catholic Church radically changed its position toward Jews. This found its expression in a declaration by pope Paul VI in 1965 – Nostra Aetate, which translates to “in our time.” Various popes have spoken very differently about Jews in the past 50 years than their pre-war predecessors did. Similarly, a number of Protestant churches have apologized for their attitudes toward the Jews before and during the war.

The Holocaust has raised many ethical issues. A prime one is the ethics of obedience. Many Nazi criminals claimed that all they did was follow orders. This has raised the fundamental questions of what makes people willing to execute criminal orders from their superiors and to what extent can this be prevented in the future.

The many traumatic experiences of Holocaust survivors have led to advances in psycho-social treatment, including for traumas not derived from the Holocaust. Epigeneticists are now studying whether Holocaust traumas sometimes are being be passed on to the next generation genetically.

There are a multitude of other subjects concerning survivors. These include their contribution to the Jewish world as well as to societies at large.

Restitution and how it was handled can be seen as a prism for the diverse attitudes of countries which were under German occupation. A study by Sidney Zabludoff shows that only 20% of assets stolen from the Jews before and during the Second World War were returned. Furthermore, there can hardly be a major restitution debate without reference to guilt. One may wonder why some nations occupied by the Germans were willing to apologize in recent decades for their wartime behavior, while others, such as France, have limited their efforts to describe their wartime past truthfully.

Alone among Western European nations the Netherlands stands out as being the one nation consistently refusing to admit any culpability.

Remembrance also has many aspects. Monuments and memorials for Jewish victims were initially mainly located in Jewish synagogues, centers or cemeteries. Only decades later did they increasingly find their place in the public domain.

Many Holocaust museums have been established.

There are also books on the design and architecture of Holocaust monuments and museums. In the Communist world, no differentiation was allowed between Jewish and non-Jewish victims.

Also related to memory are the remaining structures of the camps themselves. Archeologists have been digging at the Sobibor extermination camp and unearthed the gas chambers.

Philosophy is another discipline touched by post-Holocaust influence. Has Never Again become an empty slogan? The leading Holocaust philosopher Emil Fackenheim has said that in addition to the classic 613 commandments of Jewish law, there is a 614th – the duty to remember.

Yet, philosopher Shmuel Trigano claims that this duty to remember has become a largely distorted issue in French society. And why is it that rather than fading away, the mention of the Holocaust seems to have increased in recent years in the public debate? The distortion of the Holocaust has become a major issue in postwar society. Often the focus of debates is on Holocaust denial. Far more important is the inversion of the Holocaust – comparing Israel to the Nazi state. At least 150 million citizens of the European Union agree with the absurd claim that Israel conducts a war of extermination against the Palestinians.

Many novels have Holocaust-related plots. The best-known poem on the Holocaust is probably Paul Celan’s “The Death Fugue” with its penetrating sentence, “Death is a master from Germany.”

There is also literary analysis of Holocaust novels.

All of this is but a small selection of a field of which no overview exists. Only once a number of universities start looking systematically at post-Holocaust studies in their entirety will we acquire important additional tools to understand better some contemporary developments in an increasingly chaotic world.

UCL Centre for Holocaust Education

“YOU CAN’T INTERPRET THE WORLD
WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING THE HOLOCAUST”

The Nazi regime attempted to establish a system of rule based upon race. The National Socialists (Nazis) saw themselves as a revolutionary movement and their goal as a radical reshaping of existing society The Jews were the chief enemy to be eliminated. THE HOLOCAUST was the outcome through the systematic murder of six million Jews.

The question of who was a jew was put into law by The First Supplementary Decree of 14 November 1935 which defined three categories:

Persons of German or kindred blood

Jews

Persons of mixed Jewish blood (Mischlinge)

This was expanded at the Wannsee Conferences and meetings on the "Final Solution".
(See Who Is a Jew)

The Nazis had no plan to gas Jews and others in concentration camps. This evolved over time, beginning with systematic persecution aimed in part at encouraging Jewish emigration from Germany to other countries. It grew from spontaneous murders to planned massacres of Jewish communities, to the establishment of an industrial apparatus for the efficient, wholesale slaughter of a people.

In recognition of the evolving nature of the genocide, the date most frequently associated with it is January 30, 1933 when Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor.

When does Persecution Become Genocide? A major turning point in Nazi policy toward Jews was the coordinated attacks by the Sturmabteilung (or SA, the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party) against Jews and Jewish institutions and businesses throughout Germany and Austria on November 9-10, 1938 – an event known as Kristallnacht or the Night of the Broken Glass, due to the high number of shattered windows at Jewish properties in its aftermath. At least 91 Jews were killed, and 30,000 arrested and interned in concentration camps (but not extermination camps). Over 900 synagogues and 7,000 Jewish businesses were severely damaged or destroyed.

Or at the Wansee Conference of January 20, 1942 when fifteen high-ranking Nazi party and German government leaders agreed the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" and the part all offices and administrative departments were to play.

The end of the Holocaust is usually thought to be May 8, 1945, or VE (Victory in Europe) Day, when the Allies formally accepted Germany’s unconditional surrender, ending World War II on the Continent, although fighting continued in the Far East.

Europe's Jewish population in the 1930's numbered nine million. Six million had been murdered by the end of World War II in 1945, many of whom had been reduced to ashes in facilities built by Hitler's regime as part of the The Nazi ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’.

Six million non-Jews were also murdered, though not on racial grounds. See Nazi Treatment of Non-Jewish Minorities

Every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics in carrying out of the genocide, so turning the Third Reich into "a genocidal state". Between 100,000 and 500,000 people were direct participants in its planning and execution. Of the nine million Jews in Europe before the Holocaust, approximately two-thirds were killed. A network of about 42,500 facilities in Germany and German-occupied territories were used to concentrate, confine, and kill Jews and other victims.

The Nazis killed about 2,000,000 per year between 1939-1945

The Holocaust raises many perplexing questions.

Why did so many ordinary Europeans cooperate with Hitler's programme of Jewish persecution (actively or passively), and why did relatively few resist?

Was the systematic murder of Jews on an industrial scale an anomaly of history, or merely the worst manifestation of a hatred that for thousands of years has simmered and frequently boiled over?

How could a "Christian" society, including doctors, as highly educated and cultured as that of 1930's Germany spawn such evil?

We alone, cannot provide satisfactory answers. It can and does, however, convey some idea of what happened and, importantly, it provides a human face for what has become, for many, merely a faceless statistic. From Shadows of Shoah

From this we can also learn why over another 55 million civilians have been been murdered and why their death have become further examples of Genocide. Understanding the Holocaust explains Why We Need to Teach and Learn About the Holocaust which Happened 80 Years Ago.

__________________________________________

Throughout the Arab world, during the late 1940s and 1950s, the historic Sephardi communities were reduced to a fraction of their prewar size or eliminated.

__________________________________________

Tideway School (now Seahaven Academy),
Newhaven, East Sussex BN9 9JL, England

(Jim Fanning, Assistant Headteacher)

INCREDIBLE

I AM A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR
WHILE NOT A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR

I AM A SURVIVOR
BECAUSE I LIVED THROUGH THE 1940’s
WHEN THE NAZIS CARRIED OUT THE HOLOCAUST

I AM NOT A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR
BECAUSE I LIVED SOMEWHERE THAT WAS OUTSIDE THE AREA
OF THE NAZIS HOLOCAUST - ENGLAND

THE SAD CASE OF THOSE WHO CREATE,
AND TRY TO SPREAD, A FALSE HISTORY
(Denial of the Holocaust)

Only those who went through it, and felt it,
truly knows what it means.

WE CAN ONLY LEARN FROM IT BY

Telling you about it - History
- by taking you through what happened

Providing videos, for you to visualise what happened

Hearing the stories of some who survived

Understanding the importance of Music and listening
to music created in concentration camps

Holocaust
Victims

The
Holocaust

How
the Holocaust
is Seen

Go to The Jews and Germany

Go to Holocaust Research Project

Go to HOLOCAUST TIMELINE

Go to GENOCIDE -
DEFINITION, ANALYSIS AND VIDEOS

Go to HOLOCAUST
VIDEOS and MOVIES

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the country's official memorial to the Holocaust,

"The Holocaust was the murder of six million Jews and millions of others by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II." The museum puts the total number of murdered during the Holocaust at 17 million: 6 million Jews
and 11 million others.

SEE THE WONDERFUL DISPLAY
THAT THE

THE MUSEUM OF THE BIBLE,
WASHINGTON D.C.

BRINGS TO LIFE

YAD VASHEM

REMEMBERING THE PAST,
SHAPING THE FUTURE

JERUSALEM
HOLOCAUST HISTORY MUSEUM

Cooperation Agreement
Between
the
‘Museum of the Bible,
Washington DC

and
Yad Vashem, Jerusalem

Genocide -
The Nazi
Jewish Holocaut
1938-1945
6,000,000
Deaths

The World
and the
Holocaust

The

Holocaust’s
Impact
in
Postwar
Societies

THE

INCREDIBLE

STORY OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE

The death of 6,000,000 Jews during THE HOLOCAUST
under the German Nazis, during the 1930-40’s,
saw the most horrific event
in the 2,000 year history of Antisemitism.

WHAT WAS THE

JEWISH HOLOCAUST ?