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The Holocaust
The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic annihilation of
six million Jews by the Nazi regime of World War II. The German Third
Reich, a vast empire of murder, pillage, and exploitation attacked
virtually every country in Europe. the toll in lives was enormous. In
1933, approximately nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries of
Europe that would be occupied by Germany during the war. By 1945, two
out of every three European Jews had been killed, including 1.5 million
Jewish children. In Eastern Europe, the Jewish death toll was ninety
percent.
As the Nazi tyranny
under Adolph Hitler spread across Europe from 1933 to 1945, millions of
innocent non-Jewish people were persecuted and murdered as well. Caught
up in the Nazi slaughter were more than 200,000 gypsies (Roma and Sinti)
and about 200,000 mentally or physically disabled persons. More than
three million Soviet prisoners of war were killed because of their
nationality. Poles as well as other Slavs were targeted for slave labor,
and as a result tens of thousands perished. Homosexuals and others
deemed 'anti-social" were persecuted and often murdered. In addition,
thousands of political and religious dissidents, such as communists,
socialists, trade unionists, and Jehovah's Witnesses, were persecuted
for their beliefs and behavior; many of these individuals died as a
result of maltreatment.
The concentration camp
is the most enduring symbol of the Holocaust. The first camps opened
soon after the Nazis took power in January 1933, and continued to
operate until May 8, 1945, when World War II and the Nazi regime ended.
During the war,
ghettos, transit camps, and forced-labor camps, in addition to
concentration camps, were created by the Germans and their collaborators
to imprison Jews, Gypsies, and other victims of racial and ethnic
hatred, as well as political opponents and resistance fighters.
Following the invasion of Poland, three million Polish Jews were forced
into ghettos.
After Hitler launched
an attack on the Soviet Union in June, 1941, the methodical murder
process began with the machine-gunning of Jews by four einsatzgruppen
squads. Between 1942 and 1944, the Germans
moved to eliminate the
ghettos in occupied Poland and elsewhere, deporting ghetto residents to
"extermination camps", death centers equipped with gassing facilities,
in Poland. After the meeting of senior German government officials in
late January 11942 at Wannsee, a Berlin suburb, the decision to
implement "the Final Solution of the Jewish question" became formal
state policy: All European Jews were marked for death.
Six killing
sites were chosen in Poland because of their proximity to railway lines
and their location in semi-rural areas: Chelmno, Belzec,
Sobibor,
Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Chelmno was the first camp
in which mass executions were carried out by gas. Between December 1941
and July 1944, more than 320,000 people were killed at Chelmno. The
death tolls for the other killing centers: Belzec - 600,000; Sobibor -
200,000; Treblinka - 850,000; Majdanek - 275,000; and Auschwitz-Birkenau
- 1,250,000.
The largest single mass deportation
during the Holocaust occurred between May 14 and July 8, 1944, when
437,402 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 147
Transports, consisting of hundreds of sealed freight cars. In that death
center, after an experimental gassing in September 1941, mass murder had
become a daily routine. Nine out of ten people killed at Auschwitz were
Jews.
- from THE HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL at
Emmons Avenue and Shore Boulevard,
Brooklyn, New York
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