By early 1939, only about 16 percent of Jewish breadwinners had steady employment of any kind. Because the Nazis advocated killing children of unwanted groups, childrenparticularly Jewish and Romani childrenwere especially vulnerable in the era of the Holocaust. They also destroyed physical evidence of mass murder. [335] Between 15 May and 9 July, 440,000 Jews were deported from Hungary to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, almost all sent directly to the gas chambers. [410] In 1936, Himmler created the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion. [309] By the time the SS had regained control, 451 members of the Sonderkommando were dead; 212 survived. 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. 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. [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. 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. [152] In Lithuania, Latvia and western Ukraine, locals were deeply involved; Latvian and Lithuanian units participated in the murder of Jews in Belarus, and in the south, Ukrainians killed about 24,000 Jews. Still, in the meantime, they would be concentrated in major cities ghettos to achieve, according to an order from Reinhard Heydrich dated 21 September 1939, "a better possibility of control and later deportation". For other uses, see, Dining room in which the conference took place, German extermination and concentration camps built in, Women on their way to the gas chamber, near Crematorium V, Auschwitz II, August 1944. [132][133][134], In the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), the Nazi regime demanded that its rulers, the Ustae, adopt antisemitic racial policies, persecute Jews and set up several concentration camps. [187][188] Romania was the only country other than Germany itself that "implemented all the steps of the destruction process, from definitions to killings. [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. Archived from the original on 22 June 2006. According to Yitzhak Arad, this was the highest number of SS officers killed in a single revolt. The United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union have used most of these documents at one time or another as exhibits in criminal or civil proceedings against Nazi offenders. Groups of Jews were forced by the crowd to watch their synagogues burn; in Bensheim they were made to dance around it and in Laupheim to kneel before it. [173] Although conditions varied widely between camps, Jewish forced laborers were typically treated worse than non-Jewish prisoners and suffered much higher mortality rates. [203] Instead, Jews native to Bulgaria were sent to the provinces. [140] Nevenko Bartulin, however posits that of the total Jewish population of the NDH, only 100 Jews attained the legal status of Aryan citizens, 500 including their families. Germany, Italy and Bulgaria divided Greece into occupation zones but did not eliminate it as a country. After Belgium's surrender, the country was ruled by a German military governor, Alexander von Falkenhausen, who enacted anti-Jewish measures against its 90,000 Jews, many of them refugees from Germany or Eastern Europe. There was discussion about whether to include the German Mischlinge (half-Jews). [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. From among 1.3 million Auschwitz deportees, at least 1.1 million were murdered: 900 thousand Jews murdered in the gas chambers immediately on arrival at the camp; Of the 400 thousand prisoners registered in the camp, 200 thousand people died there. An additional 542 respondents were sampled from the Ipsos KnowledgePanel all of them Jewish, Mormon or Hispanic Protestant, to bolster the samples for these subgroups. [206], Italy introduced antisemitic measures, but there was less antisemitism there than in Germany, and Italian-occupied countries were generally safer for Jews than those occupied by Germany. Sometimes when the same question is asked in different modes, such as over the phone and online, there is a difference in results that is attributable to what survey methodologists call a mode effect. According to Timothy Snyder, "more Jews fought in the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 than in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943. 1.32 Million Jews Were Killed in Just Three Months During the Holocaust. By March 1941 all Jews had lost their jobs and had their property confiscated. [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). [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. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. [357] The Jews killed represented around one third of world Jewry[358] and about two-thirds of European Jewry, based on a pre-war figure of 9.7million Jews in Europe. For example, non-Jews who correctly answer at least three of the four multiple-choice questions about the Holocaust rate Jews at a relatively warm 67 degrees on the feeling thermometer, on average. [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. Nearly three years earlier, on 30 January 1939, Hitler had told the Reichstag: "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 be not the Bolshevising of the earth, and thus a victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe! The following chart shows the estimated number of Jews killed during the Holocaust by country. The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, [a] was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. [207] Most Italian Jews, over 40,000, survived the Holocaust. We cannot use them in the Ostland or the Reichskommissariat either; liquidate them yourselves!" By contrast, the survey discussed in the 1993 AJC report was administered by interviewers in respondents homes. U.S. Jews are more likely than atheists and agnostics to know how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust. While the survey cannot answer this question directly, the data suggests that relatively few people in this group express strongly negative feelings toward Jews. In the course of the practical execution of the Final Solution, Europe will be combed through from west to east. [231], Translation, Avalon Project: "These actions are, however, only to be considered provisional, but practical experience is already being collected which is of the greatest importance in relation to the future final solution of the Jewish question."[235]. "[27], Roland Freisler (Ministry of Justice); Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger (Reich Cabinet); Alfred Meyer (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories-German-occupied USSR); Georg Leibrandt (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories); Martin Luther (Foreign Office); Wilhelm Stuckart (Ministry of the Interior); Erich Neumann (Office of Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan), Josef Bhler (Office of the Government of the Governor General-German-occupied Poland); Gerhard Klopfer (Nazi Party Chancellery). 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. [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. [302], During a revolt in Treblinka on 2 August 1943, inmates killed five or six guards and set fire to camp buildings; several managed to escape. [297] Polish and Jewish accounts stated that hundreds or thousands of Germans had been killed,[298] while the Germans reported 16 dead. 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. [322], During the Holocaust, some Jews in occupied Europe were able to listen to Allied radio broadcasts to learn more about the war situation. 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. [92] German plans for Poland included expelling non-Jewish Poles from large areas, settling Germans on the emptied lands,[93] sending the Polish leadership to camps, denying the lower classes an education, and confining Jews. After Nazis murdered 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, the future of Germany's remaining Jewish community was in doubt. [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. [213], Stone writes that Slovakia, led by Roman Catholic priest Jozef Tiso (president of the Slovak State, 19391945), was "one of the most loyal of the collaborationist regimes". Copy no. [9], The first recorded use of the term holocaust in its modern sense was made in 1895 by The New York Times to describe the massacre of Armenian Christians by Ottoman forces. On 910 November 1938, eight months after Germany annexed Austria, Jewish businesses and other buildings were ransacked or set on fire throughout Germany and Austria on what became known as Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass"). The two most reliable sources for Holocaust data are the U.S. [129], Yugoslavia and Greece were invaded in April 1941 and surrendered before the end of the month. [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. [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. [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.