Types and Numbers of Nazi Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945 Estimated Deaths from Nazi Violence during World War II (by Group) Estimated Number of Prisoners and Survivors (by Extermination Camps) Golub, Jennifer, and Renae Cohen. Israel says world's Jewry is still 2 million shy of 1939 numbers [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. "[219] In the view of Christian Gerlach, Hitler "announced his decision in principle" to annihilate the Jews on or around 12 December 1941, one day after his declaration of war. [179], The allies of Nazi Germany comprise the independent states that aligned themselves with the Reich. The pre-war Greek Jewish population had been between 72,000 and 77,000. [163] Christopher Browning reports that on 1 August 1941, the SS Cavalry Brigade passed an order to its units: "Explicit order by RF-SS [Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfhrer-SS]. [99] The Warsaw Ghetto was established in November 1940, and by early 1941 it contained 445,000 people;[100] the second largest, the d Ghetto, held 160,000 as of May 1940. [270] At least 1.4million of these were in the General Government area of Poland. "[199] Romania set up concentration camps in Transnistria, reportedly extremely brutal, where 154,000170,000 Jews were deported from 1941 to 1943. [82] German Jewry was held collectively responsible for restitution of the damage; they also had to pay an "atonement tax" of over a billion Reichsmark. A copy was among the records captured by the US Army in 1945. [185][186] Romania was the second country in Europe after Germany to enact antisemitic legislation, and the only one besides Germany to do so before the 1938 Anschluss. It is imperative that the great German nation consider the elimination of all Polish people as its chief task. The population data ranges from 1937-1941 so, for example, the countries where the figures came from 1937 may not accurately reflect the number of Jews at the time the war began. One-in-ten decline to answer the question. [308] The Sonderkommando at crematorium II threw their Oberkapo into an oven when they heard the commotion, believing that a camp uprising had begun. A controversial ultra-Orthodox rabbi based in New York has said that fewer that one million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, claiming most of those . By the end of April 1941 the Ustae required all Jews to wear insignia, typically a yellow Star of David[136] and started confiscating Jewish property in October 1941. Both the online survey panels used as a basis for this study recruited panelists by phone or mail via random sampling to ensure that nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. [102] Although the Warsaw Ghetto contained 30 percent of the city's population, it occupied only 2.4 percent of its area,[103] averaging over nine people per room. "[189][190], According to Dan Stone, the murder of Jews in Romania was "essentially an independent undertaking". [118] From July 1942, over 107,000 Dutch Jews were deported; only 5,000 survived the war. The Germans called this "the final solution to the Jewish question." A decree on 12 November 1938 barred Jews from most remaining occupations. According to Yitzhak Arad, this was the highest number of SS officers killed in a single revolt. 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. [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. [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). [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. While no precise numbers are likely to ever be determined, after 70 years of research and increasingly open archives, these ranges are likely not to change dramatically in the years ahead. Nearly three-in-ten Americans say they are not sure how many Jews died during the Holocaust, while one-in-ten overestimate the death toll, and 15% say that 3 million or fewer Jews were killed. The gas chambers were dismantled, the crematoria dynamited, and the mass graves dug up and corpses cremated. [76] At least 90 Jews were murdered. [426][427], West Germany allocated another $125million for reparations in 1988. [277], At Auschwitz, after the chambers were filled, the doors were shut and pellets of Zyklon-B were dropped into the chambers through vents,[278] releasing toxic prussic acid. [33] Peter Hayes writes that the persecution of these groups was less uniform than that of the Jews. [310], Estimates of Jewish participation in partisan units throughout Europe range from 20,000 to 100,000. Ninety percent of Austria's 176,000 Jews lived in Vienna. Nazi Cloud Hangs Over Christie's Jewelry Sale - New York Times The 2019 Pew Research Center survey was administered online on the American Trends Panel, a nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults. Compared with those who say they do not know anyone who is Jewish, Americans who know a Jewish person answer about one additional question right, on average (2.6 vs. 1.5). Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. ET. 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. Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. 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. 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 . The Holocaust: Facts and figures - Haaretz.com Most U.S. adults know what the Holocaust was and approximately when it happened, but fewer than half can correctly answer multiple-choice questions about the number of Jews who were murdered or the way Adolf Hitler came to power, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. [57] Jewish students were restricted by quotas from attending schools and universities. In the 1950s, Hermine. [6] After the passing of the Enabling Act on 24 March,[7] which gave Hitler dictatorial plenary powers, the government began isolating Jews from civil society; this included boycotting Jewish businesses in April 1933 and enacting the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935. By Marisa Thomas. [9], Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, Jews were subjected to antisemitism based on Christian theology, which blamed them for killing Jesus. [436] At least 37 countries and the United Nations have similar observances. [56] In Silesia, in March 1933, a group of men entered the courthouse and beat up Jewish lawyers; Friedlnder writes that, in Dresden, Jewish lawyers and judges were dragged out of courtrooms during trials. Gentlemen, I must ask you, arm yourselves against any thoughts of compassion. [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. And U.S. adults who live in the West, Northeast and Midwest perform slightly better than those who live in the South. [367], From the start of the war against Poland, Germany intended to realize Adolf Hitler's plan, set out in his book Mein Kampf, to acquire "living space" (Lebensraum) in the east for massive settlement of German colonists. Antisemitic legislation in Romania was usually aimed at exploiting Jews rather than humiliating them as in Germany. [289] Stone writes that "many European states, under the extreme circumstances of World War II, took upon themselves the task of solving the 'Jewish question' in their own way. Sources: U.S. [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. Approximately 98 percent of Jewish population of Nazi-occupied Poland during the Holocaust were killed. Those were not empty words. the case that 5.5 million to six million Jews died in the Holocaust, said . [40], Early antisemites in the Nazi Party included Dietrich Eckart, publisher of the Vlkischer Beobachter, the party's newspaper, and Alfred Rosenberg, who wrote antisemitic articles for it in the 1920s. [95], The Germans stipulated that each ghetto be led by a Judenrat of 24 male Jews, who would be responsible for carrying out German orders. We cannot use them in the Ostland or the Reichskommissariat either; liquidate them yourselves!" [385] There were 84,525 applications from doctors in the first year. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. 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. [u] According to Browning, eight of the 15 had doctorates: "Thus it was not a dimwitted crowd unable to grasp what was going to be said to them. On the eve of the Holocaust, Polish Jews made up some 10 percent of the young country's population and approximately one-third of the residents of the capital city, Warsaw. 100-year-old Holocaust survivor shares story in Poway on anniversary of What follow are the current best estimates of civilians and captured soldiers killed by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. The occupation of France, May 1940. According to their findings, nearly two-thirds of respondents did not know 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, nearly half cannot name a single concentration camp, and 11. The margin of sampling error for the full sample is plus or minus 1.5 percentage points. Through song, words, and candle-lighting, those in the Erie Jewish Community and supporters, memorialized the six million Jewish people murdered during the Holocaust. [123] The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that between 72,900 and 74,000 Jews were murdered during the Holocaust in France. | DW | 30 July 2017", "Poster promoting the Nazi monthly publication, "Persecution of Homosexuals in the Third Reich", 'Elsa Conrad Margarete Rosenberg Mary Pnjer Henny Schermann', Homophobie und Devianz: weibliche und mnnliche Homosexualitt im Nationalsozialismus, "Elsa Conrad (18871963) Constellations Brises", "Payment Programme of the Foundation EVZ", "Holocaust Reparations: Germany to Pay 772 Million Euros to Survivors", "Pour le rle de la SNCF dans la Shoah, Paris va verser 100 000 euros chaque dport amricain", "France responsible for sending Jews to concentration camps, says court", "How Americans Described Evil Before Hitler", "Appendix 6: Estimated Losses in the Holocaust", Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 19331949, "The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler's Decision in Principle to Exterminate All European Jews", "Not a slippery slope or sudden subversion: German medicine and National Socialism in 1933", "Bibliographic Classification of Documents Dealing with the Subject 'Holocaust', "Operation Barbarossa and the Onset of the Holocaust, JuneDecember 1941", Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, Persecution of Jews during the Black Death, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project (BAHOHP), Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), National Socialist German Doctors' League, National Socialist League for Physical Exercise (NSRL), Bulgarian National Socialist Workers Party, German National Socialist Workers' Party (Czechoslovakia), Finnish National Socialist Labor Organisation, German National Movement in Liechtenstein, National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands, National Socialist Workers' Party of Denmark, Nationalist Liberation Alliance (Argentina), South African Gentile National Socialist Movement, Interminority racism in the United States, Persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire, Decline of Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent, Muslim conquests in the Indian subcontinent, Persecution of Muslims during the Ottoman contraction, Persecution of Christians in the Eastern Bloc, Canadian Indian residential school system, Genocide of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia, Violence against Hindus in independent India, Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries, Attacks by Islamic extremists in Bangladesh, Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Holocaust&oldid=1152441904, Wikipedia articles needing page number citations from July 2020, Short description is different from Wikidata, Wikipedia extended-confirmed-protected pages, Wikipedia indefinitely move-protected pages, All Wikipedia articles written in American English, Articles with unsourced statements from April 2023, Articles lacking reliable references from April 2023, Wikipedia articles needing page number citations from August 2022, Pages using Sister project links with hidden wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Deaths caused by the result of direct, intentional actions of violence, Deaths due to famine and disease in the occupied regions, This page was last edited on 30 April 2023, at 07:36. German Jews during the Holocaust, 1939-1945 "[395], Historians estimate that Germany and its allies killed between 250,000 and 500,000 Roma, around 2550 percent of the community in Europe. This time, we also included a few questions aimed at measuring how much Americans know about the Holocaust, resulting in this report. Another 2,396 were deported and 2,257 killed that autumn during an uprising, and 13,500 were deported between October 1944 and March 1945. In February 1941, non-Jewish Dutch citizens staged a strike in protest that was quickly crushed. . Scholars defend Polish Holocaust researcher targeted by govt [377] At least 200,000 died in concentration camps, around 146,000 in Auschwitz. p. 281. The ascendance of Germany enabled Romania to disregard the minorities treaties that were imposed upon the country after the First World War. [235], The evacuations were regarded as provisional ("Ausweichmglichkeiten"). In just a few horrifying years, the global population of Jews had fallen by more than a third. However, the questions were not meant to include all of the most essential facts about the Holocaust. "[235] He continued: Under proper guidance, in the course of the Final Solution, the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Holocaust Is Fading From Memory, Survey Finds - New York Times "[232] Thirty copies of the minutes, the Wannsee Protocol, were made. sfn error: no target: CITEREFGoldsteinGoldstein2016 (. 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. 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. The two institutions also divided the occupied areas slightly differently. Nearly three-in-ten Americans say they are not sure how many Jews died during the Holocaust, while one-in-ten overestimate the death toll, and 15% say that 3 million or fewer Jews were killed. The commandos described them as "Bolshevist functionaries" and similar. [295] Over 100 revolts and uprisings occurred in at least 19 ghettos and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. [54] On 7 April 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was passed, which excluded Jews and other "non-Aryans" from the civil service. The Holocaust is the best documented case of genocide. [126] Adolf Eichmann's office was ordered to investigate the option, but no evidence of planning exists until after the defeat of France in June 1940. [299] The Germans said that 14,000 Jews had been killed7000 during the fighting and 7000 sent to Treblinka[300]and between 53,000[301] and 56,000 deported. [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. Yad Vashem (undated): "The Holocaust was the murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators. [371] While the long-term goal of Nazi Germany was removal of Jews from occupied Poland, in the initial months of occupation the SS predominantly directed physical violence towards ethnic Poles, arresting and executing educated elites in an attempt to prevent the development of organized resistance. [208] Several forced labor camps for Jews were established in Italian-controlled Libya; almost 2,600 Libyan Jews were sent to camps, where 562 were murdered. By early 1939, only about 16 percent of Jewish breadwinners had steady employment of any kind. [79] The extent of the violence shocked the rest of the world. persons actually or believed to be active in underground resistance, persons killed in reprisal for some actual or perceived resistance activity carried out by someone else, losses due to so-called collateral damage in actual military operations. [343] On 17 January 1945, 58,000 Auschwitz inmates were sent on a death march westwards;[344] when the camp was liberated by the Soviets on 27 January, they found just 7,000 inmates in the three main camps and 500 in subcamps. Using an unusual dataset originating from railway transportation records, this study identifies an extreme phase of hyperintense killing when >1.47 million Jewsmore than 25% of the Jews killed in all 6 years of World War IIwere murdered by the Nazis in an intense,100-day (~3-month) surge. "Racial" enemies could never belong to the Volksgemeinschaft; they were to be removed from society. [404], German communists, socialists and trade unionists were among the first to be sent to concentration camps. He viewed Marxism as a Jewish doctrine, said he was fighting against "Jewish Marxism", and believed that Jews had created communism as part of a conspiracy to destroy Germany. [12][f], On 3 October 1941 the American Hebrew used the phrase "before the Holocaust", apparently to refer to the situation in France,[14] and in May 1943 the New York Times, discussing the Bermuda Conference, referred to the "hundreds of thousands of European Jews still surviving the Nazi Holocaust". 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. [177] Despite many deaths, as many as 200,000 Jews survived the war inside the camp system. 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? Thirty-one percent of Americans, and 41 percent of millennials, believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust; the actual number is around six million. [187][188] Romania was the only country other than Germany itself that "implemented all the steps of the destruction process, from definitions to killings. [269], Christian Gerlach writes that over three million Jews were murdered in 1942, the year that "marked the peak" of the mass murder. As the method of widespread execution was shooting rather than gas chamber, the Holocaust in the Soviet Union is sometimes referred to as the Holocaust by bullets. [198] In July 1941, Mihai Antonescu, Romania's deputy prime minister, said it was time for "total ethnic purification, for a revision of national life, and for purging our race of all those elements which are foreign to its soul, which have grown like mistletoes and darken our future. [313] An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 joined the Soviet partisan movement. Most Austrians don't know 6 million Jews were killed in Holocaust Key Facts 1 [192][194], Thousands of Jews were murdered in January and June 1941 in the Bucharest and Iai pogroms. And a similar share (45%) know that approximately 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. In Berlin we were told "Why all this trouble? Hence, total estimates are calculated only after the end of the war and are based on demographic loss data and the documents of the perpetrators. While scholars are still researching the scale of the Holocaust in Ukraine, they estimate at least one and a half million Jews were killed . [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). Germany, Italy and Bulgaria divided Greece into occupation zones but did not eliminate it as a country. 1615 L St. NW, Suite 800Washington, DC 20036USA By the end of the war, some 10,000 remained, representing the lowest survival rate in the Balkans and among the lowest in Europe. [417] Although blacks in Germany and German-occupied Europe were subjected to incarceration, sterilization and murder, there was no program to kill them as a group. [172] Beginning in 1938especially in Greater Germanymany Jews were drafted into forced-labor camps and segregated work details. [419] In 1945 and 1946, the International Military Tribunal tried 23 Nazi leaders primarily for waging wars of aggression, which the prosecution argued was the root of Nazi criminality;[420] nevertheless, the systematic murder of Jews came to take center stage. [393] In August 1941, after protests from Germany's Catholic and Protestant churches, Hitler canceled the T4 program,[394] although disabled people continued to be killed until the end of the war. Fewer than half of Americans (43%), however, know that Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany through a democratic political process. Just 3% of Americans mention something else, and an equal share say they dont know. Between 15 May and early July 1944, 437,000 Jews were deported, mostly to Auschwitz, where most of them were murdered by gas; there were four transports a day, each carrying 3,000 people. [330] Army leaders and economic managers complained about this diversion of resources and the killing of skilled Jewish workers,[331] but Nazi leaders rated ideological imperatives above economic considerations. Blazing sapphires and lush emeralds drip from the necklaces, brooches and bracelets. Between November 1933 and December 1939, the agreement resulted in the emigration of about 53,000 German Jews, who were allowed to transfer RM100million of their assets to Palestine by buying German goods, in violation of the Jewish-led anti-Nazi boycott of 1933. Compilation of comprehensive statistics of Jews killed by German and other Axis authorities began in 1942 and 1943. Sunday, April 30th 2023, 9:45 PM EDT. (These groups also rank among those with the highest levels of overall religious knowledge.) Hungary, Bohemia, Slovakia, Yugoslavia, Netherlands and Latvia lost over 70 percent of their Jewish populations. [80], Between 9 and 16 November, 30,000 Jews were sent to the Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. [215] According to Stone, "the Holocaust in Slovakia was far more than a German project, even if it was carried out in the context of a 'puppet' state.