Holocaust

Guide Note:

During the Second World War, the German Nazi regime carried out an organized campaign to exterminate groups of citizens considered to be undesirable, from their own nation and the other nations occupied during the course of the fighting.

While the most infamous and far-reaching campaign worked against European Jewry, other groups selected for extermination by the Nazi and their leader, Adolf Hitler, included the Porajmos, or Romani people, gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled, Russians (particularly prisoners of war) and Poles.

Key Dates

• November 9, 1938: Anti-Jewish riots sweep throughout Nazi Germany on the so-called "Night of Broken Glass"

• September 1, 1939: Germany invades Poland

• September 3, 1941: First experiment with poison gas at Auschwitz kills 600 Soviet POW's

• January 20, 1942: Wannsee Conference held outside Berlin to finalize plans for Jewish extermination

• July 17, 1942: Battle of Stalingrad

• July 19, 1942: Heinrich Himmler orders that Jews be deported from ghettos to camps

• July 23, 1944: Soviets liberate Majdanek camp

• October 7, 1944: Prisoner uprising in Auschwitz

• November 25, 1944: Final 13 killings at Auschwitz

Casualties

1. Total: Between 9 and 11 million
2. Jews: Roughly 6 million
3. Romani and Sinti: 200,000 - 2 million
4. Poles: 1.8 - 3 million
5. Jehovah's Witnesses: 2,500 - 5,000
6. Soviet POWs: 2 - 3 million

In his autobiographical polemic Mein Kampf, written while serving a prison sentence for his involvement in the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler laid out the basics of his argument against Germany's Jews. After the Nazi regime took control of Germany's government on January 30, 1933, the party began taking steps towards the wider, legally-implemented persecution of the Jewish people, causing many Jewish scholars, writers and intellectuals to leave the country.

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped German Jews officially of their citizenship, thus depriving them of all civil rights. On November 9, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, rioting mobs murdered over 100 German Jews and rounded up thousands more to be sent to concentration camps. Jews not sent to camps were forced to move into ghettos, known as "pogroms."

Many neighboring countries invaded by Germany had large Jewish populations, particularly Poland, which was home to over 2 million Jews. It was decided by the Nazis that these Jews, as well as other groups the Nazis wished to separate from the German public at large, should be deported to labor camps. These camps were not explicitly designed to kill prisoners, though the harsh conditions and intense labor caused a significant number of inmates to die all the same.

With the capture of former Soviet territories such as Lithuania, Belarus and Latvia in 1942, the Nazi campaign against Jews intensified, in part because of fears that native Jewish populations in these territories would plot against German troops stationed there. Paramilitary groups known as "Einsatzgruppen" were tasked with murdering Jews, gypsies and Soviet sympathizers. When this system proved inefficient (largely because of resistance to the extermination of native populations in these countries), the Nazis were forced to devise a more effective way of exterminating mass populations, leading to the development of extermination camps.

What was termed "The Final Solution to the Jewish problem," the mass extermination of Jews via gas in extermination camps, was developed, in part, at the Wannsee Conference held near Berlin on January 20, 1942. The policy came to be known as Operation Reinhard, and consisted of the deportation of Jews from ghettos to one of six extermination camps (including the infamous Auschwitz.)

Most of the prisoners were killed in gas chambers set up to resemble showers or delousing rooms. Some would proceed directly from trains bringing them to the camps into the death chambers, while others would be kept alive to serve as slave labor.

By 1944, the Nazis had exterminated or driven out most Jews in areas surrounding Germany and Poland, leading high-ranking Nazis to consider the Jewish problem "solved." The last victims of the Holocaust were killed on November 25, 1944.

As the Soviets and Americans swept across Poland and Germany, they discovered and shut down the camps, including Auschwitz on January 27, 1945 and Buchenwald on April 11 of that year. By that point, only a few thousand survivors were left alive in most of the camps to be liberated.