Introduction to the Holocaust

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six
million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning
"sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that
Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the
so-called German racial community.

During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their
perceived "racial inferiority": Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles,
Russians, and others). Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral
grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals.

WHAT WAS THE HOLOCAUST?

In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at over nine million. Most European Jews lived in
countries that Nazi Germany would occupy or influence during World War II. By 1945, the
Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the
"Final Solution," the Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe.

Although Jews, whom the Nazis deemed a priority danger to Germany, were the primary victims of
Nazi racism, other victims included some 200,000 Roma (Gypsies). At least 200,000 mentally or
physically disabled patients, mainly Germans, living in institutional settings, were murdered in the
so-called Euthanasia Program.

As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe, the Germans and their collaborators persecuted and
murdered millions of other people. Between two and three million Soviet prisoners of war were
murdered or died of starvation, disease, neglect, or maltreatment. The Germans targeted the non-
Jewish Polish intelligentsia for killing, and deported millions of Polish and Soviet civilians for forced
labor in Germany or in occupied Poland, where these individuals worked and often died under
deplorable conditions.

From the earliest years of the Nazi regime, German authorities persecuted homosexuals and
others whose behavior did not match prescribed social norms. German police officials targeted
thousands of political opponents (including Communists, Socialists, and trade unionists) and
religious dissidents (such as Jehovah's Witnesses). Many of these individuals died as a result of
incarceration and maltreatment.

ADMINISTRATION OF THE "FINAL SOLUTION"

In the early years of the Nazi regime, the National Socialist government established concentration
camps to detain real and imagined political and ideological opponents. Increasingly in the years
before the outbreak of war, SS and police officials incarcerated Jews, Roma, and other victims of
ethnic and racial hatred in these camps.

To concentrate and monitor the Jewish population as well as to facilitate later deportation of the
Jews, the Germans and their collaborators created ghettos, transit camps, and forced-labor camps
for Jews during the war years. The German authorities also established numerous forced-labor
camps, both in the so-called Greater German Reich and in German-occupied territory, for non-
Jews whose labor the Germans sought to exploit.

Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) and,
later, militarized battalions of Order Police officials, moved behind German lines to carry out mass-
murder operations against Jews, Roma, and Soviet state and Communist Party officials. German SS
and police units, supported by units of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS, murdered more than a
million Jewish men, women, and children, and hundreds of thousands of others.

Between 1941 and 1944, Nazi German authorities deported millions of Jews from Germany, from
occupied territories, and from the countries of many of its Axis allies to ghettos and to killing
centers, often called extermination camps, where they were murdered in specially developed
gassing facilities.

THE END OF THE HOLOCAUST

In the final months of the war, SS guards moved camp inmates by train or on forced marches,
often called “death marches,” in an attempt to prevent the Allied liberation of large numbers of
prisoners. As Allied forces moved across Europe in a series of offensives against Germany, they
began to encounter and liberate concentration camp prisoners, as well as prisoners en route by
forced march from one camp to another. The marches continued until May 7, 1945, the day the
German armed forces surrendered unconditionally to the Allies.

For the western Allies, World War II officially ended in Europe on the next day, May 8 (V-E Day),
while Soviet forces announced their “Victory Day” on May 9, 1945.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many of the survivors found shelter in displaced persons (DP)
camps administered by the Allied powers. Between 1948 and 1951, almost 700,000 Jews
emigrated to Israel, including 136,000 Jewish displaced persons from Europe. Other Jewish DPs
emigrated to the United States and other nations. The last DP camp closed in 1957.

The crimes committed during the Holocaust devastated most European Jewish communities and
eliminated hundreds of Jewish communities in occupied eastern Europe entirely

Children were especially vulnerable in the era of the Holocaust.

The Nazis advocated killing children of “unwanted” or “dangerous” groups either as part of the
“racial struggle” or as a measure of preventative security. The Germans and their collaborators
killed children for these ideological reasons and in retaliation for real or alleged partisan attacks.
The Germans and their collaborators killed as many as 1.5 million children. This number included
over a million Jewish children and tens of thousands of Romani (Gypsy) children, German children
with physical and mental disabilities living in institutions, Polish children, and children residing in
the occupied Soviet Union. Some Jewish and some non-Jewish adolescents (13-18 years old) had a
greater chance of survival, as they could be used for forced labor.

The fates of Jewish and non-Jewish children can be categorized in the following ways:

1) children killed when they arrived in killing centers

2) children killed immediately after birth or in institutions

3) children born in ghettos and camps who survived because prisoners hid them

4) children, usually over age 12, who were used as laborers and as subjects of medical experiments

5) children killed during reprisal operations or so-called anti-partisan operations.

In the Ghettos

In the ghettos, Jewish children died from starvation, exposure, and a lack of adequate clothing and
shelter. The German authorities were indifferent to this mass death. They considered most of the
younger ghetto children to be unproductive and hence “useless eaters.” Because children were
generally too young to be used for forced labor, German authorities generally selected them, the
elderly, ill, and disabled, for the first deportations to killing centers, or as the first victims led to
mass graves to be shot.

In the Killing Centers

Camp authorities sent the majority of children directly to the gas chambers upon arrival at
Auschwitz-Birkenau and other killing centers. SS and police forces in German-occupied Poland and
the occupied Soviet Union shot thousands of children at the edge of mass graves.

Sometimes the selection of children to fill the first transports to the killing centers or to provide
the first victims of shooting operations resulted from the agonizing and controversial decisions of
Jewish council (Judenrat) chairmen. The decision by the Judenrat in Lodz in September 1942 to
deport children to the Chelmno killing center was an example of the tragic choices made by adults
when faced with German demands. Janusz Korczak, director of an orphanage in the Warsaw
ghetto, however, refused to abandon the children under his care when they were selected for
deportation. He accompanied them on the transport to the Treblinka killing center and into the
gas chambers, sharing their fate.

Non-Jewish Children

Non-Jewish children from certain targeted groups were not spared. Examples include Romani
(Gypsy) children killed in Auschwitz; 5,000 to 7,000 children killed as victims of the “euthanasia”
program; children murdered in reprisals, including most of the children of Lidice; and children in
villages in the occupied Soviet Union who were killed with their parents.

In Concentration and Transit Camps

The German authorities also incarcerated a number of children in concentration camps and transit
camps. SS physicians and medical researchers used a number of children, including twins, in
concentration camps for medical experiments that often resulted in the deaths of the children.
Concentration camp authorities deployed adolescents, particularly Jewish adolescents, at forced
labor in the concentration camps, where many died because of conditions.

The German authorities held other children under appalling conditions in transit camps, including
Anne Frank and her sister in Bergen-Belsen, and non-Jewish orphaned children whose parents the
German military and police units had killed in so-called anti-partisan operations. Some of these
orphans were held temporarily in the Lublin/Majdanek concentration camp and other detention
camps.