With all that said, the excellent Holocaust films, the truly must-sees, transcend ratings. They have humanist aspirations, tell stories that need to be told, and do so in the affecting and often brutal ways of high art. You’ll find few clichés in the films below — only power and feeling and nuance. Unlike Life is Beautiful, The Pianist or Steven Spielberg’s inescapable Schindler’s List, these are films you might not know about. But trust us: They are dramas that shouldn’t be missed.

Ida (2013, Polish)

Winner of the 2015 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski’s masterpiece Ida ranks as one of the greatest Holocaust—or otherwise—films of all time. Ida, which takes place in 1962, is the story of Ida, an orphan raised by nuns, who learns that she is, in fact, a Jew. Together with her aunt, her only remaining relative, Ida searches for the truth about her past, leading her, in lush, gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, to realizations better left buried.

The Pawnbroker (1964)

On the strength of Rod Steiger’s earthshaking performance, this Sidney Lumet tour-de-force was the first American film to depict the horrors of the Holocaust as they manifested after the war was over—and still remains perhaps the greatest. Steiger is Sol Nazerman, a former university professor who survived the camps after losing his two children and wife. Years later, Nazerman owns and runs a pawn shop in Harlem, where he has become an abject misanthrope, emotionally numb and ruthlessly unsympathetic—until, finally, he snaps. In the annals of survivor depictions, nothing touches Steiger’s grandest achievement.

Phoenix (2014, German)

German filmmaker Christian Petzold’s modern film noir is an undertaking of breathless beauty and duplicity. Starring Nina Hoss as Nelly, a survivor rendered unrecognizable after facial reconstruction surgery, Phoenix is the story of Nelly’s search for her husband, a lout who may have been the one who betrayed her to the Nazis. Petzold indulges in some of the genre’s well-trod tropes, but his attention to Nelly’s psychology, a survivor plopped back into a world that would prefer to ignore than remember, is more than commendable. And the ending simply devastates.

Son of Saul (2015, Hungarian)

Nothing will be the same after Son of Saul. Hungarian director László Nemes’ debut, the film is a day in the life of Saul Ausländer, a member of the Sonderkommando — a unit of Jews forced to aid in the killing of other Jews — at Auschwitz. Shot mostly over-the-shoulder, or in very-blurry close-up, the film depicts the mundane horrors of Ausländer’s work — salvaging valuables, removing corpses from the gas chambers and scrubbing the floors — with an unflinching chill. Even without the exceptional work of Géza Röhrig as Saul, a first-time actor and poet, this winner of the 2015 Best Foreign Language Film film would be formidable.

1945 (2016, Hungarian)

Ferenc Török’s recent film begins on a summer day in 1945, when an Orthodox Jew and his son get off a train in a tiny Hungarian village. This doesn’t bode well for the villagers, who are worried their community’s deported Jews will come back to reclaim the property and possessions stolen from them.Quiet, subtle, and fair, 1945 is a very different kind of film.

Train of Life (1998, French)

Released a year after Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, this French film approaches the Holocaust in much the same way: as a cocktail of slapstick and tragedy. Whereas Benigni’s film controversially  suggests that optimism trumps Nazism, director Radu Mihaileanu’s Train of Life treats the fictional, hilarious tale of an entire shtetl’s escape from Europe as exactly what it has to be: a complete, utter, devastating farce.

Europa Europa (1990, German)

Based on a true story, this film follows Solomon Perel, a young German Jew who survives the Holocaust by falling in with the Nazis and posing as a non-Jewish translator. Though the film’s desire for verisimilitude renders it silly at times — there are many coincidences, tricks of fate, that test patience — the story of Perel is simply too bizarre and too extraordinary to be missed.

The post Seven Holocaust Films You Should See appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

On the eve of World War II, the European Sephardic community was concentrated in the Balkan countries of Greece, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Its leading centers were in Salonika, Sarajevo, Belgrade and Sofia. The experience of the Balkan Jewish communities during the war varied greatly and depended on the type of regime under which they fell.

The Jewish communities of Serbia and northern Greece, including the 50,000 Jews of Salonika, fell under direct German occupation in April 1941 and bore the full weight and intensity of Nazi repressive measures from dispossession, humiliation, and forced labor to hostage taking, and finally deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau and extermination in March-August 1943.

The Jewish population of southern Greece fell under the jurisdiction of the Italians, who eschewed the enactment of anti-Jewish legislation and resisted whenever possible German efforts to transfer them to Poland, until the surrender of Italy on September 8, 1943 brought the Jews under German control.

Sephardic Jews in Bosnia and Croatia were ruled by a German-created Fascist-Catholic satellite state from April 1941, which subjected them to pogrom-like actions before herding them into local camps where they were murdered side by side with Serbs and Roma (Gypsies).

The Jews of Macedonia and Thrace were controlled by Bulgarian occupation forces, which after rendering them stateless, rounded them up and turned them over to the Germans for deportation.

Finally, the Jews of Bulgaria proper were under the rule of a Nazi ally that subjected them to ruinous anti-Jewish legislation, but ultimately yielded to pressure from Bulgarian parliamentarians, clerics, and intellectuals not to deport them. More than 50,000 Bulgarian Jews were thus saved.

Reprinted with permission from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia.

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When German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously said that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” he meant that there was no way aesthetics—or art—could live up to the barbarism of the Holocaust. Maybe he was right. But here are 10 lesser-known texts that can, at the very least, increase our understanding—and our empathy.

Badenheim 1939 by Aharon Appelfeld

One of the great Hebrew novels, Badenheim 1939 was beloved writer Appelfeld’s first novel to be published in English in 1980. It revolves around a fictional, mostly Jewish resort town in Austria, in which the Nazis, never explicitly mentioned, are disguised in the abstract as the “Sanitation Department,” a specter that drives the Jewish vacationers to distraction. Appelfeld was a survivor himself — and every word he wrote rings true.

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder

Yale historian Snyder’s 2010 book explores the messy intersection between Hitler’s Final Solution and Stalin’s vicious ideology that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 14 million people throughout Europe’s “bloodlands”: Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and the Baltics. Snyder’s hypothesis is profound, but simple: The Nazis weren’t just the “villains,” and the Soviets weren’t just the “heroes.” Rather, neither regime could have murdered as many as it did without the aiding and abetting of the other. An important history lesson often overlooked.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt

A towering book by a towering figure, theorist and critic, Arendt’s most famous work chronicles Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem. Famous for the coining of the phrase “the banality of evil,” which refers to the moral and emotional detachment Eichmann displayed, this book is so much more: a dense, exploratory treatise on the nature of humanity.

Five Chimneys by Olga Lengyel

Lengyel was a surgical assistant in Transylvania when she was deported to Auschwitz; she was able to secure work in an infirmary, a job that ultimately saved her life. This 1946 memoir is an unflinching account of her time in that area, her interactions with Dr. Josef Mengele and her observations of the medical experiments performed on inmates. A deeply uncomfortable read, Lengyel’s memoir is a necessary living, breathing document.

King of the Jews by Leslie Epstein

Leslie Epstein’s greatest novel, this 1979 book gives a fictional account of Chaim Rumkowski, the Polish Jew appointed by the Nazis as the head of the Council of Elders (known as the Judenrat) in the Łódź Ghetto during the occupation of Poland. Rumkowski was seen as a villain, famous for his role in delivering children to the Nazis for extermination.

Ponary Diary, 1941-1943 by Kazimierz Sakowicz

In 1939, Sakowicz, a non-Jewish Polish newspaperman, moved to a cottage in the Lithuanian suburb of Ponary. From his backyard, through the trees, he could see a clearing. In that clearing, from 1941 to 1943, between 50,000 and 60,000 Jews were murdered by Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators. Published in English in 2005, Sakowicz’s diary is the most unflinching record of death you will ever read—and the fact that he isn’t entirely sympathetic makes it all the more difficult.

The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn

That this gripping story of memory and tragedy won both the 1996 National Jewish Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle award should clue you in to how extraordinary this book is. What begins, familiarly, as the story of a young boy learning about the tragic but mysterious fate of his relatives in the Holocaust, ends in a continent-spanning labyrinth, a sad and seductive tale of near mythic proportions.

The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. by George Steiner

Easily the strangest book on this list, literary critic and philosopher Steiner’s experimental 1981 novella chronicles a revised history in which Hitler survives and goes into hiding for 30 years in the Amazon jungle. The novel caused a stir at the time, as Steiner lets Hitler speak for himself: Hitler’s argument that the existence of Israel is due to him, and that Jews should be thankful was, to say the least, a hard pill to swallow.

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski

Introduced to the American public in the early 1960s by Philip Roth, Borowski’s spellbinding short story collection was based on the writer’s two-year incarceration at Auschwitz as a political prisoner. Borowski, who was a non-Jewish Polish journalist, provides a perspective on camp life quite different from the more common survivor narratives.

Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman’s Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany by Marie Jalowicz Simon

On June 22, 1942, Simon had a choice: submit to the Berlin gestapo and face deportation, or run. She chose the latter. Underground in Berlin is, among other things, a fascinating portrait of the Berliners who helped Marie survive for the three years she spent hiding in plain sight using fake papers and a borrowed identity.

The post 10 Holocaust Books You Should Read appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

The Holocaust is also sometimes referred to as “the Shoah,” the Hebrew word for “catastrophe.” It affected nearly all of Europe’s Jewish population, which in 1933 numbered 9 million people. 

When they came to power in Germany, the Nazis did not immediately start to carry out mass murder. However, they quickly began using the government to target and exclude Jews from German society. The regime persecuted other groups because of politics, ideology, or behavior. The Nazis claimed that Roma, people with disabilities, some Slavic peoples (especially Poles and Russians), and Black people were biologically inferior. Other persecuted groups included Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay men, and people the Nazis called “asocials” and “professional criminals.” 

MAY 7, 1919: Treaty of Versailles

The Treaty of Versailles ending World War I is presented to Germany. Among its provisions, the treaty forces Germany to accept responsibility for the war and commit to enormous reparation payments — a humiliation seen as setting the stage for the rise of Adolf Hitler and his promise to restore German greatness.

FEBRUARY 27, 1925: Hitler Reformulates Nazi Party

Hitler declares the reformulation of the Nazi Party and installs himself as leader in a declaration at the Munich beer hall where he led an aborted coup against the German government in 1923.

JANUARY 30, 1933: Hitler Becomes Chancellor of Germany

The Nazis assume control of Germany with Hitler’s appointment as chancellor.
FROM THE JTA ARCHIVE (1933): Hitler Sworn in as German Chancellor 

FEBRUARY 28, 1933: Reichstag Fire and Aftermath

A day after a fire in the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament building, German President Paul Von Hindenburg approves the Reichstag Fire Decree, an emergency decree that suspends individual rights and due process of law.
THE JTA ARCHIVE (1933): Police Aided By Nazis Search Central Union Premises After Reichstag Fire

MARCH 22, 1933: First Concentration Camp Established

The SS, a Nazi paramilitary group, establishes the first concentration camp to incarcerate political prisoners near the town of Dachau.
THE JTA ARCHIVE (1933): Jewish Lawyer Tortured by Nazis in Concentration Camp 

APRIL 1, 1933: Nazis Stage Boycott of Jewish Businesses

Nazi leadership stages an economic boycott targeting Jewish-owned businesses and the offices of Jewish professionals.
JTA ARCHIVE (1933): Nazi Communique Announces Boycott of Jewish Businesses Throughout Country

SEPTEMBER 15, 1935: Nuremberg Laws

The German parliament (Reichstag) passes the Nuremberg Laws, institutionalizing many of the Nazis’ racial theories and providing the legal grounds for the persecution of Jews in Germany.
Read the full text here.

AUGUST 1, 1936: Opening of Berlin Olympics

The Summer Olympic Games open in Berlin, providing the Nazi government with a major propaganda success by enabling it to present itself as a respectable member of the international community.

MARCH 11, 1938: Germany Annexes Austria

Germany invades Austria and incorporates it into the German Reich, provoking a wave of street violence against Jews in Vienna.
JTA ARCHIVE (1938): Anschluss Proclaimed in Plebiscite

SEPTEMBER 29, 1938: The Munich Agreement

The Munich agreement is signed, ceding the Sudetenland, a region in Czechoslovakia with a large ethnic German population, to Germany and prompting British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to declare the achievement of “peace for our time.”
JTA ARCHIVE (1938): Munich Pact Abandons Minorities to Nazi Terror

NOVEMBER 9, 1938: Kristallnacht

A night of violent anti-Jewish pogroms known as Kristallnacht results in the destruction of hundreds of synagogues, the looting of thousands of Jewish-owned businesses and the deaths of nearly 100 Jews. The event, which was followed by the promulgation of dozens of anti-Jewish laws, is considered a turning point in the persecution of German Jewry.
JTA ARCHIVE: 25,000 Jews Under Arrest in Wake of Worst Pogrom in Modern German History, 4 Dead

DECEMBER 2, 1938: Kindertransports Begin

The first Kindertransport, a program for bringing child refugees out of Nazi Germany, arrives in Great Britain, bringing some 200 Jewish children from a Berlin orphanage destroyed on Kristallnacht. Thousands of refugee children would be brought to England aboard such transports between 1938 and 1940.
JTA ARCHIVE (1999): Former Kindertransport Refugees Gather for a Last Full-Scale Reunion

MAY 13, 1939: Departure of the St. Louis

The ocean liner St. Louis departs Hamburg, Germany and heads toward Cuba carrying 900 passengers, nearly all of them Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. The boat is denied entry to Cuba and later the United States, forcing it to return to Europe. Some were taken in by the United Kingdom, while the others were allowed into Western European countries that would later be occupied by the Nazis. Two hundred and fifty-four of the passengers would eventually be murdered in the Holocaust.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939: Germany Invades Poland

Germany invades Poland, setting off World War II. Britain and France responded with a declaration of war two days later.

May 1940: Germany Invades France

Germany begins its invasion of France, the Netherlands and Belgium. The Netherlands and Belgium surrender in May, and Paris is occupied on June 14.  In a June 22 armistice agreement, Germany is given control of northern France, while the collaborationist French Vichy government controls the south.
JTA ARCHIVE (1940): Jews Fleeing France as Hitler Dictates Armistice Terms

MAY 20, 1940: Auschwitz Established

Germany establishes the Auschwitz concentration camp, the largest facility of its kind built by the Nazis, about 43 miles west of Krakow, Poland.

NOVEMBER 15, 1940: Warsaw Jews Confined to Ghetto

German authorities order the Warsaw ghetto sealed. It is the largest ghetto in both area and population, confining more than 350,000 Jews (about 30 percent of the city’s population) in an area of about 1.3 square miles.

JUNE 22, 1941: Germany Invades the USSR

Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union in “Operation Barbarossa.” German mobile units of Security Police and SD (Nazi intelligence) officials, called Einsatzgruppen, identify, round up and murder Jews, carrying out mass shootings during the last week of June 1941.

JTA ARCHIVE (1941): 500,000 Jews in Path of Nazi Forces Invading Russia
JTA ARCHIVE (1941): Nazis Launch Radio Drive, Urge Russian Troops to Turn Bayonets on Jews

SEPTEMBER 1, 1941: Jews Forced to Wear Yellow Stars of David

All Jews over the age of six residing in territories under German control are required to wear a yellow Star of David with the word Jew inscribed within it on their outer clothing.

JTA ARCHIVE (1941): Jews in Reich Start New Year by Wearing Yellow Stars

DECE 7, 1941: Pearl Harbor Attacked, US Enters World War II

Japan launches a surprise attack on the United States Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to enter World War II.

JTA ARCHIVE (1941): Hebrew U President Judah L. Magnes Cables FDR Day After Pearl Harbor to Offer Service

JAN. 20, 1942: “Final Solution” Planned at Wannsee

The Wannsee Conference convenes in a villa outside Berlin. Plans to coordinate a “final solution” to the Jewish question are presented to leading German and Nazi officials.

July 23, 1942: Nazis Begin Gassing Operations at Treblinka

Some 925,000 Jews and an unknown number of Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners would be murdered there.
JTA ARCHIVE (1943): Nazis Suffocate Jews in Groups of 500 in Special Steam Chambers

APRIL 19, 1943: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Begins

For nearly a month, small groups of Jews fought the larger and better armed German forces before finally being defeated.
JTA ARCHIVE (April 30, 1943): Jews in Warsaw Ghetto Ask for Food and Arms to Continue Resistance
JTA ARCHIVE (May 16, 1943): Nazis Burn Down 200 Houses in Warsaw Ghetto, Execute Jewish Hostages

September 20, 1943: Thousands of Danish Jews Begin Escape to Sweden

With help from resistance fighters and ordinary citizens, some 7,200 Danish Jews began their escape to neutral Sweden.
JTA ARCHIVE (1943): Fishermen Establish Regular Ferry Service for Refugees Between Denmark and Sweden

MARCH 19, 1944: Germany Occupies Hungary

Germany occupies Hungary. Less than two months later, the deportation of 440,000 Hungarian Jews, mostly to Auschwitz, begins.
JTA ARCHIVE (1944): Jewish Shops in Budapest Looted, Jews Flee Homes, Seek Escape from Hungary

OCTOBER 7, 1944: Prisoners at Auschwitz Rebel

Jews arriving at Auschwitz in 1944. (German National Archive/Wikimedia Commons)Prisoners at Auschwitz rebel and the Germans crush the uprising, killing nearly 250 prisoners during the fighting.

January 27, 1945: Soviets Liberate Auschwitz

With Soviet forces advancing, Germany begins, on Jan. 17, the final evacuation of Auschwitz, marching nearly 60,000 west toward Germany in what became known as “death marches.” Anyone who fell behind or could not continue was shot. Ten days later, Soviet forces entered the camp and liberated the remaining 7,000 prisoners.

APRIL 30, 1945: Hitler Commits Suicide

With Soviet forces nearing his command bunker in central Berlin, Adolf Hitler commits suicide.
JTA ARCHIVE (1945): Moscow Jews Rejoice at News of Hitler’s Death

MAY 7, 1945: Germany Surrenders

Germany surrenders unconditionally to the Allies.  armed forces surrender unconditionally in the west. Victory in Europe, V-E Day, is proclaimed the next day.
JTA ARCHIVE (1945): German Refugee Captain Acts as Interpreter as Nazis in Italy Surrender

NOVEMBER 20, 1945: Nazi Leaders Charged with Crimes Against Humanity

An international tribunal in Nuremberg charges 21 Nazi leaders with crimes against humanity. Twelve Nazis would eventually be sentenced to death.

JTA ARCHIVE: Leaders Nervous as Allied Prosecutors at Nuremberg Trial List Crimes Against Jews

JULY 4, 1946: At Least 42 Jews Murdered in Pogrom in Poland

A mob of Polish soldiers, police officers and civilians murder at least 42 Jews and injure over 40 in the Polish town of Kielce, an event that convinces many Holocaust survivors that they have no future in Poland and must emigrate to Palestine or elsewhere.

DECEMBER 15, 1961: Israeli Court Convicts Nazi War Criminal Adolf Eichmann

An Israeli court convicts Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, following a highly publicized trial. Eichmann is executed on June 15, 1962.

JTA ARCHIVE (1961): Eichmann Found Guilty, Reading of Judgment to Conclude Tomorrow

Adapted with permission from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The post A Timeline of the Holocaust appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

Anne was born Annelies Marie Frank on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, to Otto and Edith Frank. For the first five years of her life, Anne lived with her parents and older sister, Margot, in an apartment on the outskirts of Frankfurt.

After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Otto Frank fled to Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where he had business connections. The rest of the Frank family followed Otto, with Anne being the last of the family to arrive in February 1934 after staying with her grandparents in Aachen.

The Germans occupied Amsterdam in May 1940. In July 1942, German authorities and their Dutch collaborators began to concentrate Jews from throughout the Netherlands at Westerbork, a transit camp near the Dutch town of Assen, not far from the German border. From Westerbork, German officials deported the Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor killing centers in German-occupied Poland.

Anne Frank In Hiding

During the first half of July, Anne and her family went into hiding in an apartment which would eventually hide four Dutch Jews as well — Hermann, Auguste, and Peter van Pels, and Fritz Pfeffer.

For two years, they lived in a secret attic apartment behind the office of the family-owned business at 263 Prinsengracht Street, which Anne referred to in her diary as the Secret Annex. Otto Frank’s friends and colleagues, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, Jan Gies and Miep Gies, had previously helped to prepare the hiding place and smuggled food and clothing to the Franks at great risk to their own lives.

On Aug. 4, 1944, the Gestapo (German Secret State Police) discovered the hiding place after being tipped off by an anonymous Dutch caller.

Anne Frank’s Arrest and Deportation

That same day, Gestapo official SS Sergeant Karl Silberbauer and two Dutch police collaborators arrested the Franks. The Gestapo sent them to Westerbork on Aug. 8. One month later, in September 1944, SS and police authorities placed the Franks, and the four others hiding with them, on a train transport from Westerbork to the Auschwitz camp complex in German-occupied Poland. Selected for labor due to their youth, Anne and her sister, Margot were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Celle, in northern Germany, in late October 1944.

Both sisters died of typhus in March 1945, just a few weeks before British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945. SS officials also selected Anne’s parents for labor. Anne’s mother, Edith died in Auschwitz in early January 1945. Only Anne’s father, Otto, survived the war. Soviet forces liberated Otto at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.

What Was Anne Frank’s Tattoo ID Number?

On Sept. 3, 1944, Anne, along with her mother, Edith, her sister, Margot, and her father, Otto, boarded the last transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The transport arrived in Auschwitz on Sept. 5, 1944, with 1,019 Jews on board. Men and women were separated.

The women selected from this transport, including Anne, Edith, and Margot, were marked with numbers between A-25060 and A-25271. Records indicating their exact numbers have not been preserved. Approximately eight weeks later, in late October 1944, Anne and Margot were transferred from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Bergen-Belsen, where they both died sometime in March 1945. Though Anne’s death certificate documents her movement between camps, it, too, does not include her tattoo ID number.

Anne Frank’s Diary

Of the millions of children who suffered persecution at the hands of the Nazis and their Axis partners, only a small number wrote diaries and journals that have survived. In these accounts, the young writers documented their experiences, confided their feelings, and reflected on the trauma they endured during these nightmare years.

READ: The Controversy Over Anne Frank’s Diary

While in hiding, Anne kept a diary in which she recorded her fears, hopes, and experiences. Found in the secret apartment after the family was arrested, the diary was kept for Anne by Miep Gies, one of the people who had helped hide the Franks.

Anne’s diary was published after the war in many languages and is used in thousands of middle school and high school curricula in Europe and the Americas. Anne Frank has become a symbol for the lost promise of the children who died in the Holocaust.

Reprinted with permission from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia.

The post Who Was Anne Frank? appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

To read contemporary news accounts of the Holocaust and other Jewish events from 1917 on, search the JTA Archive. 

Dismantling Germany’s Democracy

Once in power, Hitler moved quickly to end German democracy. He convinced his cabinet to invoke emergency clauses of the constitution that permitted the suspension of individual freedoms of press, speech, and assembly. Special security forces — the Gestapo, the Storm Troopers (SA), and the SS — murdered or arrested leaders of opposition political parties (Communists, socialists, and liberals). The Enabling Act of March 23, 1933 — forced through the Reichstag already purged of many political opponents –gave dictatorial powers to Hitler.

READ: Jewish Reactions to the Enabling Act (March 24, 1933)

Also in 1933, the Nazis began to put into practice their racial ideology. The Nazis believed that the Germans were “racially superior” and that there was a struggle for survival between them and inferior races. They saw Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and the handicapped as a serious biological threat to the purity of the “German (Aryan) Race,” what they called the master race.

Jews, who numbered about 525,000 in Germany (less than one percent of the total population in 1933) were the principal target of Nazi hatred. The Nazis identified Jews as a race and defined this race as “inferior.” They also spewed hate-mongering propaganda that unfairly blamed Jews for Germany’s economic depression and the country’s defeat in World War I (1914-1918).

Nuremberg Laws, Property Seizures and Kristallnacht

In 1933, new German laws forced Jews out of their civil service jobs, university and law court positions, and other areas of public life. In April 1933, laws proclaimed at Nuremberg made Jews second-class citizens. These Nuremberg Laws defined Jews, not by their religion or by how they wanted to identify themselves, but by the religious affiliation of their grandparents. Between 1937 and 1939, new anti-Jewish regulations segregated Jews further and made daily life very difficult for them. Jews could not attend public schools; go to theaters, cinema, or vacation resorts; or reside or even walk in certain sections of German cities.

Also between 1937 and 1939, Jews increasingly were forced from Germany’s economic life. The Nazis either seized Jewish businesses and properties outright or forced Jews to sell them at bargain prices. In November 1938, the Nazis organized a riot (pogrom), known as Kristallnacht (the “Night of Broken Glass”). This attack against German and Austrian Jews included the physical destruction of synagogues and Jewish-owned stores, the arrest of Jewish men, the vandalization of homes, and the murder of individuals.

Non-Jewish Targets of Persecution

Although Jews were the main target of Nazi hatred, the Nazis persecuted other groups they viewed as racially or genetically “inferior.” Nazi racial ideology was buttressed by scientists who advocated “selective breeding” (eugenics) to “improve” the human race. Laws passed between 1933 and 1935 aimed to reduce the future number of genetic “inferiors” through involuntary sterilization programs: 320,000 to 350,000 individuals judged physically or mentally handicapped were subjected to surgical or radiation procedures so they could not have children. Supporters of sterilization also argued that the handicapped burdened the community with the costs of their care. Many of Germany’s 30,000 Roma (Gypsies) were also eventually sterilized and prohibited, along with Blacks, from intermarrying with Germans. About 500 children of mixed African-German backgrounds were also sterilized. New laws combined traditional prejudices with the racism of the Nazis, which defined Roma by “race” and as “criminal and asocial.”

Another consequence of Hitler’s ruthless dictatorship in the 1930s was the arrest of political opponents and trade unionists and others whom the Nazis labeled “undesirables” and “enemies of the state.” Some 5,000 to 15,000 homosexuals were imprisoned in concentration camps; under the 1935 Nazi-revised criminal code, the mere denunciation of a man as “homosexual” could result in arrest, trial, and conviction. Jehovah’s Witnesses, who numbered at least 25,000 in Germany, were banned as an organization as early as April 1933, because the beliefs of this religious group prohibited them from swearing any oath to the state or serving in the German military. Their literature was confiscated, and they lost their jobs, unemployment benefits, pensions, and all social welfare benefits. Many Witnesses were sent to prisons and concentration camps in Nazi Germany, and their children were sent to juvenile detention homes and orphanages.

Refugees With No Place to Go

Between 1933 and 1936, thousand of people, mostly political prisoners, were imprisoned in concentrations camps, while several thousand German Roma were confined in special municipal camps. The first systematic round-up of German and Austrian Jews occurred after Kristallnacht, when approximately 30,000 Jewish men were deported to Dachau and other concentration camps, and several hundred Jewish women were sent to local jails. The wave of arrests in 1938 also included several thousand German and Austrian Roma.

Between 1933 and 1939, about half of the German-Jewish population and more than two-thirds of Austrian Jews (1938-1939) fled Nazi persecution. They emigrated mainly to the United States, Palestine, elsewhere in Europe (where many would be later trapped by Nazi conquests during the war), Latin America, and Japanese-occupied Shanghai (which required no visas for entry). Jews who remained under Nazi rule were either unwilling to uproot themselves or unable to obtain visas, sponsors in host countries, or funds for emigration. Most foreign countries, including the United States, Canada, Britain, and France, were unwilling to admit very large numbers of refugees.

Reprinted courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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Yom HaShoah, 27th of Nisan (April or May)

Yom HaShoah, whose full name is Yom HaShoah V’HaGevurah, meaning the Day of the Holocaust and Heroism, is one of the more recent holidays added to the Jewish calendar. In many Jewish communities around the world, Yom HaShoah has become the primary Holocaust memorial day. 

The Knesset, or Israeli parliament, passed the resolution creating Yom HaShoah in 1951. The 27^th of Nisan was chosen because it loosely corresponded to the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on Erev Passover, the 14^th of Nisan. However, because observing Yom HaShoah on that day would interfere with the preparations for Passover, it was not seriously considered as a potential national memorial day. 

Many customs have become associated with the observance of Yom HaShoah in Israel. A two minute siren is heard twice during the day. Various ceremonies are held by schools and youth groups, and there is state ceremony at Yad VaShem, the Israeli Holocaust Memorial and Museum. Other rituals include hearing testimony from survivors, lighting memorial (yahrzeit) candles, reading the names of the deceased and wearing white. 

Not all Jewish communities in Israel observe Yom HaShoah. Some Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox communities do not mark Yom HaShoah in a significant way. This is in part because these communities do not recognize or condone the secular Zionist state that established the day, and also because there are more more traditional days for mourning (Tisha B’Av, for example) and ways to mourn (standing for a moment of silence, for instance, has no prior precedent in Jewish tradition). In addition, the month of Nisan, when the date occurs, is considered a month of happiness, not a time of mourning.  

Since being added to the Jewish calendar in Israel, however, many Jewish communities across and beyond the denominational spectrum and around the world have started marking Yom HaShoah. Their observances look increasingly like Israeli observances. In North America, most synagogues and Jewish groups offer programming and events for Yom HaShoah which may include lighting yahrzeit candles and reading lists of names of victims.

Novemberpogrom/Kristallnacht, November 9th

Another date connected to Holocaust commemoration is the 9^th of November. Known primarily as the Novemberpogrom (November Pogrom) in the German-speaking world, those within the English-speaking world typically know it as Kristallnacht: Night of the Broken Glass. 

On the night of November 9, 1938, Nazi leadership as well as civilians attacked synagogues and Jewish institutional buildings, as well as businesses and even private property across what is today Germany and Austria. Some 30,000 Jewish men were brought to concentration camps, in what is widely understood to be the first mass imprisonment of Jews in the camp system. 

The anniversary of the November Pogrom has become another Holocaust memorial day, though not as universally observed as Yom HaShoah. In Germany and Austria, both non-Jewish and Jewish ceremonies and events mark this date. These ceremonies often feature commemoration wreaths, Jewish prayers honoring the dead such as Mourners’ Kaddish or El Maleh Rahamim and survivors sharing their experiences (or the reading of eye-witness testimonies). 

Outside of Germany and Austria, the 9^th of November is primarily observed by those whose families fled Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Austria. Many of these descendants live in North America or Israel. Customs include lighting a yahrzeit candle and sharing stories of the family members who lived through the November Pogrom. Some synagogues, particularly those founded by Yekkes, or German Jews, will host events or lectures commemorating the destruction and impact of the November Pogrom.

Tisha B’Av, 9th of Av (Falls in July/August)

Tisha B’Av (literally: Ninth of Av) commemorates the destruction of the First Temple (586 BCE) and the Second Temple (70 CE) in Jerusalem. But even since talmudic times, it has been an occasion to mourn other tragedies that have befallen the Jews, like the Bar Kochba Revolt and the Crusades. In many cases, these tragedies are also ascribed to the Ninth of Av. Additionally, some tragedies added to the Ninth of Av didn’t occur on the 9th itself, but in the days surrounding it. 

The most recent tragedy that has joined the events remembered on this day is the Holocaust. One calendar date used to connect the Ninth of Av to the Holocaust is the start of World War I on July 28, 1914 (which was, in that year, the 5th of Av). According to this understanding, World War I led to World War II and the Holocaust.

Tisha B’Av is one of Judaism’s two major fast days, the other being Yom Kippur. The book of Lamentations, or Eicha, is read in synagogues and sections of Jewish texts about destruction are studied. Many also have a custom to visit cemeteries.

For a long time, Tisha B’Av was not observed by most Reform communities, though that has begun to change. But for liberal Jews in general, Tisha B’Av is not seen as the main Holocaust memorial day, since Yom HaShoah serves that function in those communities. 

By contrast, in many Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, Tisha B’Av is the primary Holocaust memorial day. One reason for this is the religious, rather than secular, origins of the day. Another is that already in the time of the Talmud, Tisha B’Av became known as a day to observe various tragedies experienced by the Jewish people. Because of this, adding the Holocaust to the list of tragedies mourned on this date is in step with tradition. 

Holocaust remembrance on Tisha B’Av is limited to Jewish communities. It is uncommon to have non-Jewish memorial activities on this day. 

Tenth of Tevet (December or January) 

The Tenth of Tevet is a minor fast day in Judaism that falls in late December or early January, and it marks the start of the Babylonian siege in Jerusalem in 588 BCE, which then led to the First Temple’s destruction. 

Following World War II, the Orthodox Rabbinate in Israel began to mark the events of the Shoah on this date too. Rather than establish a new fast day, remembrance of the Holocaust was added to this minor fast day that marks what could have been, but was not, the end of the Jewish people. Mourner’s Kaddish is recited on this day for those whose place or date of death is unknown and those without living relatives. 

As a day of Holocaust commemoration, the Tenth of Tevet is primarily observed in Orthodox communities, especially those in Israel. However, it has begun to also be observed by some Orthodox communities elsewhere due to the influence of Jewish thought from Israel. It is not known as a Holocaust memorial date in Reform and Conservative communities, nor among non-Jews.

International Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27th

On January 27^th, 1945, the Soviet military liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex, and it was thereafter observed as memorial day for the Holocaust in various European countries. In 2005, 60 years after that liberation, the United Nations voted to designate it as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. 

International Holocaust Memorial Day is not particular to Jews, and many non-Jews take this day to remember the Holocaust and its victims. Countries around the world, including Germany and Israel, host ceremonies that honor survivors and their descendants, feature discussions on the impact of antisemitism today, and listen to recitations of Mourner’s Kaddish or El Maleh Rahamim.

Some Jewish communities, particularly in Reform and Conservative circles, mark this memorial day, though it is generally less observed than other dates. A common Jewish critique of International Holocaust Memorial Day is that the observances on this date are too impersonal due to the  ritualistic nature of many commemoration ceremonies and a tendency to generalize rather than focus on individual lives. In addition, a common critique is International Holocaust Remembrance Day lacks a significant connection to Judaism.

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Building a Murder Complex

In March 1941 Himmler ordered a second, much larger section of the camp to be built right near the original camp. This site was to be used as an extermination camp and was named Birkenau, or Auschwitz II.

Eventually, Birkenau held the majority of prisoners in the Auschwitz complex, including Jews, Poles, Germans, and Gypsies. Furthermore, it maintained the most degrading and inhumane conditions–inclusive of the complex’s gas chambers and crematoria. A third section, Auschwitz III, was constructed in nearby Monowitz, and consisted of a forced labor camp called Buna-Monowitz.

READ: How Hitler Laid the Groundwork for Genocide

This complex incorporated 45 forced labor sub-camps. The name Buna was based on the Buna synthetic rubber factory on site, owned by I.G. Farben, Germany’s largest chemical company. Most workers at this and other German-owned factories were Jewish inmates. The labor would push inmates to the point of total exhaustion, at which time new laborers replaced them.

Auschwitz was first run by camp commandant Rudolf Höss, and was guarded by a cruel regiment of the SS Death Head Units. The staff was assisted by several privileged prisoners who were given better food, conditions, and opportunity to survive, if they agreed to enforce the brutal order of the camp.

Auschwitz I and II were surrounded by electrically charged four-meter high barbed wire fences, guarded by SS men armed with machine guns and rifles. The two camps were further closed in by a series of guard posts located two thirds of a mile beyond the fences.

In March 1942, trains carrying Jews commenced arriving daily. In many instances, several trains would arrive on the same day, each carrying one thousand or more victims coming from the ghettos of Eastern Europe, as well as from Western and Southern European countries.

Throughout 1942, transports arrived from Poland, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Yugoslavia, and Theresienstadt. Jews, as well as Gypsies, continued to arrive throughout 1943. Hungarian Jews were brought to Auschwitz in 1944, alongside Jews from the remaining Polish ghettos, yet to be liquidated.

No Longer Individuals, But Numbers

By August 1944 there were 105,168 prisoners in Auschwitz whilst another 50,000 Jewish prisoners lived in Auschwitz’s satellite camps. The camp’s population grew constantly, despite the high mortality rate caused by exterminations, starvation, hard labor, and contagious diseases. Upon arrival at the platform in Birkenau, Jews were thrown out of their train cars without their belongings and forced to form two lines, men and women separately.

SS officers, including the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, would conduct selections among these lines, sending most victims to one side and thus condemning them to death in the gas chambers. A minority was sent to the other side, destined for forced labor. Those who were sent to their deaths were killed that same day and their corpses were burnt in the crematoria. Those not sent to the gas chambers were taken to “quarantine,” where their hair was shaved, striped prison uniforms distributed, and registration took place. Prisoners’ individual registration numbers were tattooed onto their left arm.

Most prisoners were then sent to perform forced labor in Auschwitz I, III, sub-camps, or other concentration camps, where their life expectancy was usually only a few months. Prisoners who stayed in quarantine had a life expectancy of a few weeks.

The prisoners’ camp routine consisted of many duties. The daily schedule included waking at dawn, straightening one’s sleep area, morning roll call, the trip to work, long hours of hard labor, standing in line for a pitiful meal, the return to camp, block inspection, and evening roll call. During roll call, prisoners were made to stand completely motionless and quiet for hours, in extremely thin clothing, irrespective of the weather. Whoever fell or even stumbled was killed. Prisoners had to focus all their energy merely on surviving the day’s tortures.

Survival and Resistance

The gas chambers in the Auschwitz complex constituted the largest and most efficient extermination method employed by the Nazis. Four chambers were in use at Birkenau, each with the potential to kill 6,000 people daily. They were built to look like shower rooms in order to confuse the victims. New arrivals at Birkenau were told that they were being sent to work, but first needed to shower and be disinfected. They would be led into the shower-like chambers, where they were quickly gassed to death with the highly poisonous Zyklon B gas.

Some prisoners at Auschwitz, including twins and dwarfs, were used as the subjects of torturous medical experiments. They were tested for endurance under terrible conditions such as extreme heat and cold, or were sterilized.

Despite the horrible conditions, prisoners in Auschwitz managed to resist the Nazis, including some instances of escape and armed resistance. In October 1944, members of the Sonderkommando, who worked in the crematoria, succeeded in killing several SS men and destroying one gas chamber. All of the rebels died, leaving behind diaries that provided authentic documentation of the atrocities committed at Auschwitz.

By January 1945 Soviet troops were advancing towards Auschwitz. In desperation to withdraw, the Nazis sent most of the 58,000 remaining prisoners on a death march to Germany, and most prisoners were killed en route. When the Soviet army liberated Auschwitz on January 27, soldiers found only 7,650 barely living prisoners throughout the entire camp complex. In all, approximately one million Jews had been murdered there.

Reprinted with permission from Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (Yad Vashem).

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Around the World

After Germany annexed Austria in March 1938 and particularly after the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 9–10, 1938, nations in western Europe and the Americas feared an influx of refugees. About 85,000 Jewish refugees (out of 120,000 Jewish emigrants) reached the United States between March 1938 and September 1939, but this level of immigration was far below the number seeking refuge.

In late 1938, 125,000 applicants lined up outside US consulates hoping to obtain 27,000 visas under the existing immigration quota. By June 1939, the number of applicants had increased to over 300,000. Most visa applicants were unsuccessful. At the Evian Conference in July 1938, only the Dominican Republic stated that it was prepared to admit significant numbers of refugees, although Bolivia would admit around 30,000 Jewish immigrants between 1938 and 1941.

In a highly publicized event in May–June 1939, the United States refused to admit over 900 Jewish refugees who had sailed from Hamburg, Germany, on the St. Louis. The St. Louis appeared off the coast of Florida shortly after Cuban authorities cancelled the refugees’ transit visas and denied entry to most of the passengers, who were still waiting to receive visas to enter the United States. Denied permission to land in the United States, the ship was forced to return to Europe. The governments of Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium each agreed to accept some of the passengers as refugees. Of the 908 St. Louis passengers who returned to Europe, 254 (nearly 28 percent) are known to have died in the Holocaust. 288 passengers found refuge in Britain. Of the 620 who returned to the continent, 366 (just over 59 percent) are known to have survived the war.

British Mandate Palestine (Pre-State Israel)

Over 60,000 German Jews immigrated to Palestine during the 1930s, most under the terms of the Haavara (Transfer) Agreement. This agreement between Germany and the Jewish authorities in Palestine facilitated Jewish emigration to Palestine. The main obstacle to emigration of Jews from Germany was German legislation banning the export of foreign currency. According to the agreement, Jewish assets in Germany would be disposed of in an orderly manner and the resulting capital transferred to Palestine through the export of German products.

The British White Paper in May 1939, a policy statement approved by the British Parliament, contained measures that severely limited Jewish entry into Palestine. As the number of hospitable destinations dwindled, tens of thousands of German, Austrian, and Polish Jews emigrated to Shanghai, one destination that did not require a visa. Shanghai’s International Settlements quarter, effectively under Japanese control, admitted 17,000 Jews.

Stricter Limits, Despite Reports of Mass Murder

During the second half of 1941, even as unconfirmed reports of the mass murder perpetrated by the Nazis filtered to the West, the US Department of State placed even stricter limits on immigration based on national security concerns. Despite British restrictions, limited numbers of Jews entered Palestine during the war through “illegal” immigration (Aliyah Bet). Great Britain itself limited its own intake of immigrants in 1938–1939, though the British government did permit the entry of some 10,000 Jewish children in a special Kindertransport (Children’s Transport) program. At the Bermuda Conference in April 1943, the Allies offered no concrete proposals for rescue.

Switzerland took in approximately 30,000 Jews, but turned back about the same number at the border. About 100,000 Jews reached the Iberian Peninsula. Spain took in a limited number of refugees and then speedily sent them on to the Portuguese port of Lisbon. From there, thousands managed to sail to the United States in 1940–1941, although thousands more were unable to obtain US entry visas.

Displaced Persons After the War

After the war, hundreds of thousands of survivors found shelter as displaced persons in camps administered by the western Allies in Germany, Austria, and Italy. In the US, immigration restrictions were still in effect, although the Truman Directive of 1945, which authorized priority to be given within the quota system to displaced persons, permitted 16,000 Jewish DPs to enter the US

Immigration to Palestine (aliyah) remained severely limited until the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948. Thousands of Jewish displaced persons sought to enter Palestine illegally: between 1945 and 1948, the British authorities interned many of these would-be immigrants to Palestine in detention camps on Cyprus.

With the establishment of Israel in May 1948, Jewish refugees began streaming into that new sovereign state. Some 140,000 Holocaust survivors entered Israel during the next few years. The United States admitted 400,000 displaced persons between 1945 and 1952. Approximately 96,000 (roughly 24 percent) of them were Jews who had survived the Holocaust.

The search for refuge frames both the years before the Holocaust and its aftermath.

Reprinted with permission from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia.

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Following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Hitler established a Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda headed by Joseph Goebbels. The Ministry’s aim was to ensure that the Nazi message was successfully communicated through art, music, theater, films, books, radio, educational materials and the press.

There were several audiences for Nazi propaganda. Germans were reminded of the struggle against foreign enemies and Jewish subversion. During periods preceding legislation or executive measures against Jews, propaganda campaigns created an atmosphere tolerant of violence against Jews, particularly in 1935 (before the Nuremberg Race Laws of September) and in 1938 (prior to the barrage of antisemitic economic legislation following Kristallnacht). Propaganda also encouraged passivity and acceptance of the impending measures against Jews, as these appeared to depict the Nazi government as stepping in and “restoring order.”

Real and perceived discrimination against ethnic Germans in east European nations which had gained territory at Germany’s expense following World War I, such as Czechoslovakia and Poland, was the subject of Nazi propaganda. This propaganda sought to elicit political loyalty and so-called race consciousness among the ethnic German populations. It also sought to mislead foreign governments — including the European Great Powers — that Nazi Germany was making understandable and fair demands for concessions and annexations.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Nazi propaganda stressed to both civilians at home and to soldiers, police officers, and non-German auxiliaries serving in occupied territory themes linking Soviet Communism to European Jewry, presenting Germany as the defender of “Western” culture against the “Judeo-Bolshevik” threat and painting an apocalyptic picture of what would happen if the Soviets won the war. This was particularly the case after the catastrophic German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943. These themes may have been instrumental in inducing Nazi and non-Nazi Germans as well as local collaborators to fight on until the very end.

Films in particular played an important role in disseminating racial antisemitism, the superiority of German military power, and the intrinsic evil of the enemies as defined by Nazi ideology. Nazi films portrayed Jews as “subhuman” creatures infiltrating Aryan society. For example, The Eternal Jew (1940), directed by Fritz Hippler, portrayed Jews as wandering cultural parasites, consumed by sex and money. Some films, such as The Triumph of the Will (1935) by Leni Riefenstahl, glorified Hitler and the National Socialist movement. Two other Riefenstahl works, Festival of the Nations and Festival of Beauty (1938), depicted the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games and promoted national pride in the successes of the Nazi regime at the Olympics.

Newspapers in Germany, above all Der Stürmer (The Attacker), printed cartoons that used antisemitic caricatures to depict Jews. After the Germans began World War II with the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Nazi regime employed propaganda to impress upon German civilians and soldiers that the Jews were not only subhuman, but also dangerous enemies of the German Reich. The regime aimed to elicit support, or at least acquiescence, for policies aimed at removing Jews permanently from areas of German settlement

During the implementation of the so-called Final Solution, the mass murder of European Jews, SS officials at killing centers compelled the victims of the Holocaust to maintain the deception necessary to deport the Jews from Germany and occupied Europe as smoothly as possible. Concentration camp and killing center officials compelled prisoners, many of whom would soon die in the gas chambers, to send postcards home stating that they were being treated well and living in good conditions. Here, the camp authorities used propaganda to cover up atrocities and mass murder.

In June 1944, the German Security Police permitted an International Red Cross team to inspect the Theresienstadt (Terezin) camp-ghetto, located in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now in the Czech Republic). The SS and police had established Theresienstadt in November 1941 as an instrument of propaganda for domestic consumption in the German Reich. The camp-ghetto was used as an explanation for Germans who were puzzled by the deportation of German and Austrian Jews who were elderly, disabled war veterans, or locally known artists and musicians “to the East” for “labor.” In preparation for the 1944 visit, the ghetto underwent a “beautification” program. In the wake of the inspection, SS officials in the Protectorate produced a film using ghetto residents as a demonstration of the benevolent treatment the Jewish “residents” of Theresienstadt supposedly enjoyed. When the film was completed, SS officials deported most of the “cast” to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center.

The Nazi regime used propaganda effectively to mobilize the German population to support its wars of conquest until the very end of the regime. Nazi propaganda was likewise essential to motivating those who implemented the mass murder of the European Jews and of other victims of the Nazi regime. It also served to secure the acquiescence of millions of others — as bystanders — to racially targeted persecution and mass murder.

Reprinted with permission from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia.

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Find the full text of the Nuremberg Laws (in English translation) here.

Adolf Hitler announced the Nuremberg Laws on Sept. 15, 1935. Germany’s parliament (the Reichstag), then made up entirely of Nazi representatives, passed the laws. Anti-Semitism was of central importance to the Nazi Party, so Hitler had called parliament into a special session at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Germany.

Reich Citizenship Law

The Nazis had long sought a legal definition that identified Jews not by religious affiliation but according to racial anti-Semitism. Jews in Germany were not easy to identify by sight. Many had given up traditional practices and appearances and had integrated into the mainstream of society. Some no longer practiced Judaism and had even begun celebrating Christian holidays, especially Christmas, with their non-Jewish neighbors. Many more had married Christians or converted to Christianity.

According to the Reich Citizenship Law and many clarifying decrees on its implementation, only people of “German or kindred blood” could be citizens of Germany. The law defined who was and was not a German, and who was and was not a Jew. The Nazis rejected the traditional view of Jews as members of a religious or cultural community. They claimed instead that Jews were a race defined by birth and by blood.

Despite the persistent claims of Nazi ideology, there was no scientifically valid basis to define Jews as a race. Nazi legislators looked therefore to family genealogy to define race. People with three or more grandparents born into the Jewish religious community were Jews by law. Grandparents born into a Jewish religious community were considered “racially” Jewish. Their “racial” status passed to their children and grandchildren. Under the law, Jews in Germany were not citizens but “subjects of the state.”

This legal definition of a Jew in Germany covered tens of thousands of people who did not think of themselves as Jews or who had neither religious nor cultural ties to the Jewish community. For example, it defined people who had converted to Christianity from Judaism as Jews. It also defined as Jews people born to parents or grandparents who had converted to Christianity. The law stripped them all of their German citizenship and deprived them of basic rights.

To further complicate the definitions, there were also people living in Germany who were defined under the Nuremberg Laws as neither German nor Jew, that is, people having only one or two grandparents born into the Jewish religious community. These “mixed-raced” individuals were known as Mischlinge. They enjoyed the same rights as “racial” Germans, but these rights were continuously curtailed through subsequent legislation.

Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor

The second Nuremberg Law, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, banned marriage between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. It also criminalized sexual relations between them. These relationships were labeled as “race defilement” (Rassenschande).

The law also forbade Jews to employ female German maids under the age of 45, assuming that Jewish men would force such maids into committing race defilement. Thousands of people were convicted or simply disappeared into concentration camps for race defilement.

Significance of the Nuremberg Laws

The Nuremberg Laws reversed the process of emancipation, whereby Jews in Germany were included as full members of society and equal citizens of the country. More significantly they laid the foundation for future anti-Semitic measures by legally distinguishing between German and Jew. For the first time in history, Jews faced persecution not for what they believed, but for who they — or their parents — were by birth. In Nazi Germany, no profession of belief and no act or statement could convert a Jew into a German. Many Germans who had never practiced Judaism or who had not done so for years found themselves caught in the grip of Nazi terror.

While the Nuremberg Laws specifically mentioned only Jews, the laws also applied to blacks and Roma (Gypsies) living in Germany. The definition of Jews, blacks, and Roma as racial aliens facilitated their persecution in Germany.

During World War II, many countries allied to or dependent on Germany enacted their own versions of the Nuremberg Laws. By 1941, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Vichy France, and Croatia had all enacted anti-Jewish legislation similar to the Nuremberg Laws in Germany.

Reprinted with permission from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum‘s Holocaust Encyclopedia.

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To find news accounts of the Holocaust and other Jewish events from 1923 on, search the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Archive.

Immigration in the 1930s and 1940s

The U.S. Congress passed new, restrictive quota laws in 1924 that limited the number of immigrants who could enter the U.S. from Europe each year. During the Nazi period, these quotas often were not filled, even though thousands of Jewish refugees sought admittance to the U.S. from Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied territories.

Once the Great Depression began in 1929, President Herbert Hoover instructed the State Department to enforce the quota laws very strictly, which made it very difficult for refugees in the 1930s to obtain immigrant visas. Immigrants needed to prove they were not “likely to become a public charge” and had the financial resources to support themselves indefinitely in the United States. Despite the ongoing persecution of Jews in Germany, public and government attitudes related to immigration were influenced by the economic hardships of the Great Depression, which intensified anti-Semitism, isolationism, and xenophobia. After World War II began in 1939, American consuls abroad also screened refugees on national security grounds, making an already difficult immigration process even harder.

READ: What Americans Had to Say About Jewish War Refugees

Nevertheless, in 1939 and 1940 more than half of all immigrants to the United States were Jewish, most of them refugees from Europe. During those same years, a majority of all immigration to the United States came from Nazi-occupied or collaborationist countries. In 1940, for instance, 82 percent of immigrants to America came from these countries, most of them refugees seeking asylum. But by the time the United States entered the war in December 1941, American consulates had already closed in most of Europe and it became nearly impossible for refugees to escape the continent. Despite many obstacles, however, more than 200,000 Jews found refuge in the United States from 1933 to 1945, most of them arriving before the end of 1941.

U.S. State Department and the “Final Solution”

In August 1942, the State Department received a report sent by Gerhart Riegner, the Geneva-based representative of the World Jewish Congress (WJC). The report revealed that the Germans were planning to physically annihilate the Jews of Europe. Believing the news to be a rumor  — and feeling that any rescue action was impossible even if the report was true — State Department officials did not forward the report to its intended recipient, Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was president of the World Jewish Congress.

Despite the State Department’s obstruction, Wise soon received the report via British channels, and asked the State Department to investigate the information. Three months later, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles confirmed Riegner’s information for Rabbi Wise. On Nov. 24, 1942, Wise held a press conference to announce that Nazi Germany was implementing a policy to annihilate the European Jews. A few weeks later, on Dec. 17, the United States, Great Britain, and 10 other Allied governments issued a declaration denouncing Nazi Germany’s atrocities and warning that perpetrators of such crimes would be held responsible for their actions.

U.S. Press Coverage of the “Final Solution”

During World War II, the American press did not always publicize reports of Nazi atrocities in full or give them prominent placement in the papers. Newspapers had reported on Nazi violence against Jews in Germany as early as 1933, as well as the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and the expanded German anti-Semitic legislation in 1938 and 1939. The nationwide state-sponsored terror against Jews of Nov. 9-10, 1938 — known as Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) — made front-page news across the U.S. as did Hitler’s infamous prediction, expressed to the Reichstag (German parliament) on Jan. 30, 1939, that a new world war would mean the extermination of the Jewish “race.”

As the magnitude of anti-Jewish violence increased in 1939-1941, many American newspapers ran descriptions of German shooting operations by the Einsatzgruppen, first in Poland and later after the invasion of the Soviet Union. The ethnic identity of the victims was not always made clear to American readers. Some reports described German mass murder operations with the word “extermination.” As early as July 2, 1942, the New York Times reported on the operations of killing center in Chelmno based on sources from the Polish underground. In part because of the inability to verify the information, the first article, on Chelmno, appeared on page six of the newspaper. Newspapers’ coverage of the December 1942 Allied statement condemning the mass murder of European Jews generally did appear on the front page.

Very few reports of what we now understand as the Holocaust included photographs. Visual evidence of Nazi atrocities became more common in American newspapers and magazines after May 1945, in the final days of the war and the immediate aftermath of Allied victory.

Reprinted with permission from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum‘s Holocaust Encyclopedia.

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The November pogrom, carried out with the help of the most up-to-date communications technology, was the most modern pogrom in the history of anti-Jewish persecution and an overture to the step-by-step extirpation of the Jewish people in Europe.

Jews Leaving Germany

After Hitler’s seizure of power, even as Germans were being divided into “Aryans” and “non-Aryans,” the number of Jews steadily decreased through emigration to neighboring countries or overseas. This movement was promoted by the Central Office for Jewish Emigration established by Reinhard Heydrich (director of the Reich Main Security Office) in 1938.

In 1925 there were 564,378 Jews in Germany; in May 1939 the number had fallen to 213,390. The flood of emigration after the November pogrom was one of the largest ever, and by the time emigration was halted in October 1941, only 164,000 Jews were left within the Third Reich, including Austria.

READ: Sept. 16, 1935: Nazi Laws on Jews Put Into Effect

The illusion that the legal repression enacted in the civil service law of April 1, 1933, which excluded non-Aryans from public service, would be temporary was laid to rest in September 1935 by the Nuremberg Laws — the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor. The Reich Citizenship Law heralded the political compartmentalization of Jewish and Aryan Germans.

Economic Exclusion

The complementary ordinances to the Reich Citizenship Law, dated November 14-28, 1935, sought to define who was a Jew; it also created a basis for measures limiting the scope of Jewish occupations and the opportunities for young Jews to get an education. Following the March 1938 annexation (Anschluss) of Austria, which brought 200,000 Austrian Jews under German domination, exclusion of Jews from the economy began first through the removal of Jewish manufacturers and business chiefs and their replacement by “commissars” in charge of “aryanization,” the expropriation of Jewish businesses.

READ: Feb. 14, 1934: Jewish Agents Thrown Out of Reich System

Within a short time, from January to October 1938, the Nazis aryanized 340 middle-sized and small industrial enterprises, 370 wholesale firms, and 22 private banks owned by Jews. The November pogrom was the peak of a series of events intended to expel the Jews from economic life and to force a hurried emigration.

A sequence of normative legislation in 1938 heralded economic despoliation. Under the Law Concerning the Legal Position of the Jewish Religious Community (March 28, 1938), the state subsidy for the Jewish community was withdrawn. Under the decree of April 22, 1938 against “continuing concealment of Jewish business activity,” Jews were obliged to declare their assets–an indication that their possessions might be seized.

The Fourth Decree (July 25, 1938) under the Reich Citizenship Law deprived Jewish doctors, as of September 30, of their practices among Jewish patients. An edict by the police president of Breslau dated July 21 ordered that shops and businesses belonging to Jews should bear a notice: “Jewish Firm.” Air Ministry political-economic guidelines of October 14, 1938 were accompanied by a recommendation, summed up by Hermann Goring (then head of the ministry): “The Jewish question must now be grasped in every way possible, for they [Jews] must be removed from the economy.”

Goring also said that he was in favor of the creation of Jewish ghettos in German towns. His words gave notice of a general anti-Jewish offensive in the coming weeks. The most favorable opportunity for unleashing the attack was afforded by the fatal wounding of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath on November 7th 1938 in Paris by the 16-year-old Polish Jew Herschel Grynszpan.

READ: Nov. 8, 1938: Polish-Jewish Youth, 17, Shoots Nazi Embassy Official in Paris

A Top-Down Pogrom

Ernst vom Rath’s death gave the signal to the Reich propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, to unleash the pogrom against the Jews. The news of the death was received by Adolf Hitler during the traditional dinner for the “old fighters” of the Nazi movement, held in the assembly room of the Old Town Hall in Munich on the anniversary of the bloody march on the Feldherrnhalle and the unsuccessful putsch of November 9, 1923.

The atmosphere for announcements of victory or incitements to hate and revenge was optimal, not only in Munich but also among Nazi organizations throughout the country, where Germans awaited the radio transmission of the customary memorial celebration and Hitler’s speech. The signal for retaliation had already been given by Goebbels (with Hitler’s agreement) in an unusually aggressive speech, which Hitler did not attend. The political propaganda initiative and management of the pogrom was in Goebbels’ hands, though he held no written authority from Hitler.

While the Fuhrer went to his Munich apartment, the propaganda minister told the Nazi notables and old fighters present that there had already been acts of revenge on November 8 in Kurhessen and Magdeburg against State Enemy No. 1 — the Jew. Synagogues and shops belonging to Jews had, he said, been destroyed.

His words were understood by his audience to signify “that while the party would not openly appear as the originator of the demonstrations, in reality it would organize them and carry them through” (secret report of supreme party judge Hans Buch to Hermann Goring, February 13, 1939). These intimations were immediately passed on by telephone to the headquarters of the various districts and were followed by telegrams from the Gestapo. Heydrich’s secret order, sent by teleprinter to all Gestapo offices and senior SD sections, was transmitted at 1:20 a.m. on November 10.

Once Goebbels had given the Nazi district leaders the impetus to unleash a massive pogrom, the further initiative lay in their hands. The execution of the pogrom, under direction of the highest Nazi party leaders, was entrusted to police and state agencies, to units of the SS, and in part to SA members. By means of the latest communications technology — telephone, teleprinters, police transmitters, and radio — within a few hours the pogrom had reached almost every part of the Reich without meeting any resistance.

Desecrated Synagogues, Looted Shops, Mass Arrests

During the night of November 9-10, 1938 Jewish shops, dwellings, schools, and above all synagogues and other religious establishments symbolic of Judaism were set alight. Tens of thousands of Jews were terrorized in their homes, sometimes beaten to death, and in a few cases raped. In Cologne, a town with a rich Jewish tradition dating from the first century CE, four synagogues were desecrated and torched, shops were destroyed and looted, and male Jews were arrested and thrown into concentration camps.

Brutal events were recorded in the hitherto peaceful townships of the Upper Palatinate, Lower Franconia, Swabia, and others. In Hannover, Herschel Grynszpan‘s hometown, the well-known Jewish neurologist Joseph Loewenstein escaped the pogrom when he heeded an anonymous warning the previous day; his home, however, with all its valuables, was seized by the Nazis.

In Berlin, where 140,000 Jews still resided, SA men devastated nine of the 12 synagogues and set fire to them. Children from the Jewish orphanages were thrown out on the street. About 1,200 men were sent to Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen concentration camp under “protective custody.” Many of the wrecked Jewish shops did not open again.

Following the Berlin pogrom the police president demanded the removal of all Jews from the northern parts of the city and declared this area “free of Jews.” His order on December 5, 1938 — known as the Ghetto Decree — meant that Jews could no longer live near government buildings.

READ: Dec. 5, 1938: Nazis Take Drivers’ Permits from Jews, Ban Use of Central Berlin

The vast November pogrom had considerable economic consequences. On November 11, 1938 Heydrich, the head of the security police, still could not estimate the material destruction. The supreme party court later established that 91 persons had been killed during the pogrom and that 36 had sustained serious injuries or committed suicide. Several instances of rape were punished by state courts as Rassenschande (social defilement) in accordance with the Nuremberg laws of 1935.

At least 267 synagogues were burned down or destroyed, and in many cases the ruins were blown up and cleared away. Approximately 7,500 Jewish businesses were plundered or laid waste. At least 177 apartment blocks or houses were destroyed by arson or otherwise.

It has rightly been said that with the November pogrom, radical violence had reached the point of murder and so had paved the road to Auschwitz.

Reprinted with permission from The Holocaust Encyclopedia (Yale University Press).

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Having rejected a proposed boycott of the 1936 Olympics, the United States and other Western democracies missed the opportunity to take a stand that — some observers at the time claimed — might have given Hitler pause and bolstered international resistance to Nazi tyranny. With the conclusion of the Games, Germany’s expansionist policies and the persecution of Jews and other “enemies of the state” accelerated, culminating in World War II and the Holocaust.

In 1931, the International Olympic Committee awarded the 1936 Summer Olympics to Berlin. The choice signaled Germany’s return to the world community after its isolation in the aftermath of defeat in World War I.

Two years later, Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany and quickly turned the nation’s fragile democracy into a one-party dictatorship that persecuted Jews, Roma (Gypsies), all political opponents, and others.

The Nazi claim to control all aspects of German life also extended to sports. German sports imagery of the 1930s served to promote the myth of “Aryan” racial superiority and physical prowess. In sculpture and in other forms, German artists idealized athletes’ well-developed muscle tone and heroic strength and accentuated ostensibly Aryan facial features. Such imagery also reflected the importance the Nazi regime placed on physical fitness, a prerequisite for military service.

Racism in Sports

In April 1933, an “Aryans only” policy was instituted in all German athletic organizations. “Non-Aryans”–Jewish or part-Jewish and Romani (Gypsy) athletes–were systematically excluded from German sports facilities and associations.

READ: Hitler’s Other Olympics

The German Boxing Association expelled amateur champion Erich Seelig in April 1933 because he was Jewish. (Seelig later resumed his boxing career in the United States.) Another Jewish athlete, Daniel Prenn — Germany’s top-ranked tennis player — was removed from Germany’s Davis Cup Team. Gretel Bergmann, a world-class high jumper, was expelled from her German club in 1933 and from the German Olympic team in 1936.

Jewish athletes barred from German sports clubs flocked to separate Jewish associations, including the Maccabee and Shield groups, and to improvised segregated facilities. But these Jewish sports facilities were not comparable to well-funded German groups. Roma (Gypsies), including the Sinti boxer Johann Rukelie Trollmann, also were excluded from German sports.

As a token gesture to placate international opinion, German authorities allowed the part-Jewish fencer Helene Mayer to represent Germany at the Olympic Games in Berlin. She won a silver medal in women’s individual fencing and, like all other medalists for Germany, gave the Nazi salute on the podium. After the Olympics, Mayer returned to the United States.

No other Jewish athlete competed for Germany. Still, nine Jewish athletes won medals in the Nazi Olympics, including Mayer and five Hungarians. Seven Jewish male athletes from the United States went to Berlin. Like some of the European Jewish competitors at the Olympics, many of these young men were pressured by Jewish organizations to boycott the Games. As most did not fully grasp at the time the extent and purpose of Nazi persecution of Jews and other groups, these athletes chose to compete.

Overcoming Boycott Threats, Scoring Propaganda Points

In August 1936, the Nazi regime tried to camouflage its violent racist policies while it hosted the Summer Olympics. Most anti-Jewish signs were temporarily removed, and newspapers toned down their harsh rhetoric. Thus, the regime exploited the Olympic Games to present foreign spectators and journalists with a false image of a peaceful, tolerant Germany.

Movements to boycott the 1936 Berlin Olympics surfaced in the United States, Great Britain, France, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and the Netherlands. Debate over participation in the 1936 Olympics was most intense in the United States, which traditionally sent one of the largest teams to the Games. Some boycott proponents supported counter-Olympics. One of the largest was the “People’s Olympiad” planned for the summer of 1936 in Barcelona, Spain. It was canceled after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, just as thousands of athletes had begun to arrive.

Individual Jewish athletes from a number of countries also chose to boycott the Berlin Olympics. In the United States, some Jewish athletes and Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Congress and the Jewish Labor Committee supported a boycott. However, once the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States voted for participation in December 1935, other countries fell in line and the boycott movement failed.

READ: European Maccabi Games to Play at Olympic Venues Built By Nazis (2015)

The Nazis made elaborate preparations for the August 1-16 Summer Games. A huge sports complex was constructed and Olympic flags and swastikas bedecked the monuments and houses of a festive, crowded Berlin. Most tourists were unaware that the Nazi regime had temporarily removed anti-Jewish signs, nor would they have known of a police roundup of Roma in Berlin, ordered by the German Ministry of the Interior. On July 16, 1936, some 800 Roma residing in Berlin and its environs were arrested and interned under police guard in a special camp in the Berlin suburb of Marzahn. Nazi officials also ordered that foreign visitors should not be subjected to the criminal penalties of German anti-homosexuality laws.

Nazis Link Ancient Greece to Aryan Racial Mythology

Forty-nine athletic teams from around the world competed in the Berlin Olympics, more than in any previous Olympics. Germany fielded the largest team with 348 athletes. The U.S. team was the second largest, with 312 members, including 18 African Americans. American Olympic Committee President Avery Brundage led the delegation. The Soviet Union did not participate in the Berlin Games.

Germany skillfully promoted the Olympics with colorful posters and magazine spreads. Athletic imagery drew a link between Nazi Germany and ancient Greece, symbolizing the Nazi racial myth that a superior German civilization was the rightful heir of an “Aryan” culture of classical antiquity. This vision of classical antiquity emphasized ideal “Aryan” racial types: heroic, blue-eyed blonds with finely chiseled features.

READ: Jewish Woman, 98, Recalls Being Pulled from 1936 Berlin Olympics

Concerted propaganda efforts continued well after the Olympics with the international release in 1938 of “Olympiad,” the controversial documentary directed by German filmmaker and Nazi sympathizer Leni Riefenstahl. She was commissioned by the Nazi regime to produce this film about the 1936 Summer Games.

Germany emerged victorious from the XIth Olympiad. German athletes captured the most medals, and German hospitality and organization won the praises of visitors. Most newspaper accounts echoed the New York Times report that the Games put Germans “back in the fold of nations,” and even made them “more human again.”

Some even found reason to hope that this peaceable interlude would endure. Only a few reporters, such as William Shirer, understood that the Berlin glitter was merely a facade hiding a racist and oppressively violent regime.

After the Games

As post-Games reports were filed, Hitler pressed on with grandiose plans for German expansion. Persecution of Jews resumed. Two days after the Olympics, Captain Wolfgang Fuerstner, head of the Olympic village, killed himself when he was dismissed from military service because of his Jewish ancestry.

Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Within just three years of the Olympiad, the “hospitable” and “peaceable” sponsor of the Games unleashed World War II, a conflict that resulted in untold destruction. With the conclusion of the Games, Germany’s expansionist policies and the persecution of Jews and other “enemies of the state” accelerated, culminating in the Holocaust.

Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC.

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Nazi high officials also believed that the Jews would succumb to the unfavorable living conditions of the ghetto, including lack of food, water, and living space. Furthermore, the ghettos served as round-up centers that made it more convenient to exterminate large numbers of the Jewish population later.

What Ghettos Looked Like

The ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe — primarily Poland — were often closed off by walls, barbed-wire fences, or gates. Ghettos were extremely crowded and unsanitary. Starvation, chronic food and fuel shortages, and severe winter weather led to repeated outbreaks of epidemics and to a high mortality rate. Ghettoization, however, was seen as a temporary situation, and in many places the ghettos existed only for a brief time. With the implementation of the “Final Solution” in 1942, the Germans began to destroy the ghettos by deporting the Jewish occupants to forced-labor and extermination camps.

The first ghetto was established in Lodz, Poland, on February 8, 1940. Approximately 155,000 Jews, almost one-third of the city’s total population, were forced to live in the Lodz ghetto. As Lodz was a center of textile production, this ghetto was of considerable economic importance to the German war machine. Jews played an important role as workers in the textile factories there. For this reason, the deportation of Jews from the Lodz ghetto was only completed in August 1944.

The Warsaw ghetto was the largest ghetto established in Poland. Approximately 450,000 Jews were crowded into an area of 1.3 square miles that was the Warsaw ghetto. Other major ghettos were located in Krakow, Bialystok, Lvov, Lublin, Vilna, Kovno, Czestochowa, and Minsk.

Conditions in the Ghettos

Conditions in the ghettos were appalling. For example, the majority of the apartments in the Warsaw ghetto were unheated during winter, and the Nazis decided that the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto could survive on an official food allocation of 300 calories per day (compared with 634 calories for the Poles and 2,310 for the Germans).

The Nazis ordered Jews to wear identifying badges or armbands with a yellow Star of David on them in the ghettos. Many Jews were also required to perform forced labor for the German Reich. The Nazi-appointed Jewish councils (Judenrat) and Jewish police maintained order within the ghettos and were forced by the Germans to facilitate deportations to the extermination camps.

The ghettos, however, were still full of life. Illegal activities, such as smuggling food or weapons, joining youth movements, or holding cultural events such as concerts, often occurred without the approval of the Jewish councils (though in many cases the Jewish councils did in fact sponsor cultural activities).

Historian Emanuel Ringelblum, an inhabitant of the Warsaw ghetto, founded a clandestine organization that aimed to provide an accurate record of events taking place in the ghetto. Ringelblum’s project came to be known as the Oneg Shabbat (“Joy of the Sabbath”). Oneg Shabbat records were hidden in a series of milk cans that were buried in various areas of the ghetto. While only a few of these milk cans were recovered after the war, they proved to be an invaluable source documenting life in the ghetto and German policy toward the Jews of Poland.

Jewish Resistance in the Ghetto

Between July and mid-September 1942, the Germans deported at least 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto. As a response to the deportations, several Jewish underground organizations created armed self-defense units known as the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa or ZOB) and the Jewish Fighting Union (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy or ZZW). The Germans intended to begin deporting the remaining Jews in the Warsaw ghetto on April 19, 1943, the eve of Passover. The renewal of deportations provoked an armed uprising within the ghetto.

Though organized military resistance was soon broken, individuals and small groups hid or fought the Germans — who had planned to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto in three days–holding out for a month, until May 16, 1943.The Warsaw ghetto uprising was the first urban uprising in German-occupied Europe. It was also the largest and most successful Jewish uprising during the war and, as such, has served as a symbol of Jewish resilience and resistance to Nazi persecution.

READ: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

After the Warsaw ghetto uprising, revolts occurred in Vilna, Bialystok, Czestochowa, and in several smaller ghettos. In August 1944, the Nazis completed the destruction of the last major ghetto in Lodz. In contrast, in Hungary, ghettoization did not begin until the spring of 1944 after the German invasion and occupation of the country. In less than three months, the Hungarian police, in coordination with the Germans, deported nearly 440,000 Jews from ghettos in Hungary to extermination camps. The majority were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.

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Organized armed resistance was the most forceful form of Jewish opposition to Nazi policies in German-occupied Europe.

Ghetto Uprisings

Jewish civilians offered armed resistance in over 100 ghettos in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union. In April-May 1943, Jews in the Warsaw ghetto rose in armed revolt after rumors that the Germans would deport the remaining ghetto inhabitants to the Treblinka killing center. As German SS and police units entered the ghetto, members of the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa; ZOB) and other Jewish groups attacked German tanks with Molotov cocktails, hand grenades, and a handful of small arms. Although the Germans were able to end the major fighting within a few days, it took the vastly superior German forces nearly a month before they were able to completely pacify the ghetto and deport virtually all of the remaining inhabitants. For months after the end of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, individual Jewish resisters continued to hide in the ruins of the ghetto, which SS and police units patrolled to prevent attacks on German personnel.

During the same year, ghetto inhabitants rose against the Germans in Vilna (Vilnius), Bialystok and a number of other ghettos. Many ghetto fighters took up arms in the knowledge that the majority of ghetto inhabitants had already been deported to the killing centers; and also in the knowledge that their resistance even now could not save from destruction the remaining Jews who could not fight. But they fought for the sake of Jewish honor and to avenge the slaughter of so many Jews.

Partisans, Judenrat Refusers and Camp Uprisings

Thousands of young Jews resisted by escaping from the ghettos into the forests. There they joined Soviet partisan units or formed separate partisan units to harass the German occupiers. Although many Jewish council (Judenrat) members cooperated under compulsion with the Germans until they themselves were deported, some, such as Jewish council chairman Moshe Jaffe in Minsk, resisted by refusing to comply when the Germans ordered him to hand over Jews for deportation in July 1942.

Jewish prisoners rose against their guards at three killing centers. At Treblinka in August 1943 and Sobibor in October 1943, prisoners armed with stolen weapons attacked the SS staff and the Trawniki-trained auxiliary guards. The Germans and their auxiliaries killed most of the rebels, either during the uprising or later, after hunting down those who escaped. Several dozen prisoners eluded their pursuers and survived the war, however. In October 1944, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, members of the Jewish Special Detachment (Sonderkommando) mutinied against the SS guards. Nearly 250 died during the fighting; the SS guards shot another 200 after the mutiny was suppressed. Several days later, the SS identified five women, four of them Jewish, who had been involved in supplying the members of the Sonderkommando with explosives to blow up a crematorium. All five women were killed.

Aid, Rescue and Spiritual Resistance

In many countries occupied by or allied with the Germans, Jewish resistance often took the form of aid and rescue. Jewish authorities in pre-state Israel sent clandestine parachutists such as Hannah Senesh into Hungary and Slovakia in 1944 to give whatever help they could to Jews in hiding. In France, various elements of the Jewish underground consolidated to form different resistance groups, including the Armée Juive (Jewish Army), which operated in the south of France. Many Jews fought as members of national resistance movements in Belgium, France, Italy, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece and Slovakia.

Jews in the ghettos and camps also responded to Nazi oppression with various forms of spiritual resistance. They made conscious attempts to preserve the history and communal life of the Jewish people despite Nazi efforts to eradicate the Jews from human memory. These efforts included: creating Jewish cultural institutions, continuing to observe religious holidays and rituals, providing clandestine education, publishing underground newspapers, and collecting and hiding documentation, as in the case of the Oneg Shabbat archive in Warsaw that would tell the story of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, despite its destruction in 1943.

This article was adapted from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum‘s Holocaust Encyclopedia.

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Wannsee Conference and Einsatzgruppen

On January 20, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Head Office, convened all secretaries of state of the major German ministries to the Wannsee Conference. This conference is generally held to have been a major turning point, whereby the “final solution of the Jewish question” in Europe by “evacuation” to the East and by other “means” was decided upon. But in fact, the mass extermination of the Jews on an industrial scale, made possible by the creation of death camps, was launched prior to this notorious conference.

Executions by the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads,were abandoned for practical reasons. Although approximately 1.5 million Jews had been shot by the winter of 1941, the Nazis felt that the efficiency of this slow and cumbersome method left much to be desired. Moreover, they found it was bad for the sol­diers’ morale. Himmler himself, commander of the SS and as such responsible for the annihilation of the Jews, was persuaded, after having witnessed such an execu­tion, that it badly affected the mental health of those carrying out the execution. The institutionalization of organized murder, founded on a division of labor and carried out in special installations expressly designed for this purpose, distanced the executioner from the victim, an indispensable psychological advantage in an enterprise of annihilation of such a huge scale.

“Euthanasia” and Death Camps

The murder industry began in the Chelmno camp, built in December 1941. Work was carried out in special trucks, where the victims were asphyxiated by exhaust fumes, a method that had been tried before on those whose lives were deemed useless (the “Euthanasia Pro­gram”). From September 1939, about 100,000 “Aryan” Germans were assassinated in this manner, in what was named “Operation T4.” Two years later, the personnel responsible for the “euthanasia” program were called upon to apply their expertise to murdering Jews. In the single camp of Chelmno, 150,000 human beings were gassed to death, most of them brought to the camp from annexed territories, the Warthegau district of western Poland and the Lodz Ghetto.

Majdanek, set up in September 1941 as a camp for Soviet prisoners‑of‑war and as a concentration camp for Polish Jews and non‑Jews, became the base for the SS advancing in the East and a reservoir of slave labor for factories in the Lublin region. Extermination installations were built there in the autumn of 1942, but it was only in the winter of the following year that the Zyklon B gas chambers and the crematorium were used­ for the first time. Of the 200,000 persons killed in Majdanek, about 50,000‑60,000 were Jews.

Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka formed part of what the Nazis called “Operation Reinhard,” whose sole purpose was the systematic massacre of Jews. A labor camp existing in Belzec since 1940 was turned into an extermination camp in the autumn of 1941, becoming operative in March 1942. In the same month, the camp at Sobibor was set up to alleviate the overburdened camp of Belzec. The third, Treblinka, received the Jews from Warsaw and the Radom district.

These three extermination factories — with Belzec responsible for about 600,000 victims, Sobibor 200,000, Treblinka 900,000 — shared certain features. Like Auschwitz at a later stage, they were equipped with railroad terminals that the trains entered in reverse. The victims were ordered to undress and then led through a corridor to the gas chambers; the gas was composed of carbon monoxide produced by diesel motors. At first, the corpses were buried in mass graves, later they were burnt in crematoria. The similarity to the “euthanasia” program was evident here too. In August 1941, the camps inspector was SS Sturmbannfiihrer Christian Wirth who, like dozens of other specialists of “Operation T4,” was placed under Odilo Globocnik, the commander of the SS for the region of Lublin.

However, the capital of this bureaucratized and industrialized world of mass murders was Auschwitz. An operative concentration camp since May 1940, in the autumn of 1941 it was equipped with gas chambers. According to the latest estimates, the number of Jews killed in this camp approximated 1.5 million. In Auschwitz II (Birkenau), symbol and synonym of the Holocaust, the Nazi program of mass extermination reached its highest level of “perfection.”

Reprinted with permission from A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People published by Schocken Books.

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Signed by the foreign secretaries of the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, the October 1943 Moscow Declaration stated that at the time of an armistice persons deemed responsible for war crimes would be sent back to those countries in which the crimes had been committed and judged according to the laws of the nation concerned. “Major” war criminals, whose crimes could be assigned no particular geographic location, would be punished by joint decisions of the Allied governments. The trials of leading German officials before the International Military Tribunal (IMT), the best known of the postwar war crimes trials, took place in Nuremberg, Germany, before judges representing the Allied powers.

Trials of High-Ranking Nazis

Between October 18, 1945, and October 1, 1946, the IMT tried 22 “major” war criminals on charges of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and conspiracy to commit such crimes. The IMT defined crimes against humanity as “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation…or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds.” Twelve of those convicted were sentenced to death, among them Reich Marshall, Hermann Göring, Hans Frank, Alfred Rosenberg and Julius Streicher. The IMT sentenced three defendants to life imprisonment and four to prison terms ranging from 10 to 20 years. It acquitted three of the defendants.

Under the aegis of the IMT, US military tribunals conducted 12 further trials of high-ranking German officials at Nuremberg. These trials are often referred to collectively as the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings. Between December 1946 and April 1949, US prosecutors tried 177 persons and won convictions of 97 defendants. Leading physicians, Einsatzgruppen (mass-killing squads) members, members of the German justice administration and German Foreign Office, members of the German High Command and leading German industrialists were among the groups who stood trial.

The overwhelming majority of post-1945 war crimes trials involved lower-level officials and functionaries. In the immediate postwar years, the four Allied powers occupying Germany (and Austria) — the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union — held trials in their zones of occupation and tried a variety of perpetrators for wartime offenses. Many of the earliest zonal trials, especially in the U.S. zone, involved the murder of Allied military personnel who had been captured by German or Axis troops. In time, however, Allied occupiers expanded their juridical mandate to try concentration camp guards and commandants and others who had committed crimes against Jews and others who suffered persecution in areas the Allies now occupied. Much of our early knowledge of the German concentration camp system came from the evidence and eyewitness testimonies at these trials.

Allied occupation officials were interested in a denazification of Germany and saw the reconstruction of the German court system as an important step in this direction. Allied Control Council Law No. 10 of December 1945 authorized German courts of law to pass sentence on crimes committed during the war years by German citizens against other German nationals or against stateless persons. For this reason, occupation officials left Euthanasia crimes — where both victims and perpetrators had been predominantly German nationals — to newly reconstructed German tribunals. These proceedings represented the first German national trials in the early postwar period. Both the German Federal Republic (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) continued to hold trials against Nazi-era defendants in the decades following their establishment as independent states. To date, the Federal Republic (in its old manifestation as West Germany and in its current status as a united Germany) has held a total of 925 proceedings trying defendants of National Socialist era crimes. Many detractors have criticized German proceedings, particularly those held in the 1960s and 1970s, for doling out acquittals or light sentences to aging defendants or defendants who claimed superior orders.

Nazi-Occupied Nations and Nazi Collaborators

Many nations that Germany occupied during World War II or who collaborated with the Germans in the persecution of civilian populations, especially Jews, have also held national trials in the years following World War II. Poland, the former Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Hungary, Romania, and France, among others, have tried thousands of defendants—both Germans and indigenous collaborators, in the decades since 1945. The Soviet Union held its first trial, the Krasnodar Trial, against local collaborators in 1943, long before World War II had ended. Perhaps Poland’s most famous postwar national trial was held in 1947 in Krakow. The proceedings tried a number of functionaries of the Auschwitz concentration camp and sentenced Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss and others to death. One of the most famous national trials of German perpetrators was held in Jerusalem: the trial of Adolf Eichmann, chief architect in the deportation of European Jews, before an Israeli court in 1961 captured worldwide attention and is thought to have interested a new postwar generation in the crimes of the Holocaust.

Unfortunately, many perpetrators of Nazi-era criminality have never been tried or punished. In many cases, German perpetrators of National Socialist crimes simply returned to their normal lives and professions in German society. The hunt for German and Axis war criminals still goes on today.

Reprinted with permission from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia.

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Until the late 1930s, Cuba had been a haven for European Jews. Especially since Manuel Benitez Gonzales, Cuba’s director general of immigration, willingly sold visas for a fee, 500 refugee European Jews a month were landing in Cuba in early 1939. Some went on to other destinations, but the Cuban Jewish population rose to 4,000 in 1938 and continued to increase sharply. With the deepening of the worldwide economic Depression, the spread of Nazi propaganda and the association of Eastern European Jews with socialism, Cuban president Laredo Brú felt the public pressure to reduce the number of Jewish immigrants.

Brú also felt the wrath of Benitez Gonzales’s rivals in government, who wanted their share of the visa-selling business. They convinced Brú to curtail Gonzales’s authority, and persuaded Brú to announce that prospective immigrants must post $500 to guarantee that they would not become a public burden. On May 5, 1939, Brú decreed Gonzales’s old visas null and void; starting May 6, immigrants had to post the bond.

When the St. Louis sailed on May 13, only a handful of passengers had met the requirement. The rest clung to one of Benitez’s now-invalid landing permits. The Hamburg American Line did not insist that each passenger post $500 before sailing. To the shock and dismay of the passengers when the ship arrived at Havana 13 days later, the Jewish passengers were forbidden to disembark.

The United States government took the position that the St. Louis affair was an internal Cuban matter; while the American consul in Havana tried to be helpful, he took no formal action. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee sent an agent, New York attorney Lawrence Berenson, to Havana to negotiate with Brú to admit the refugees. Berenson had lots of business experience in Cuba, and he believed that Brú’s intransigence was based on his desire to have the $500 bonds paid to him directly. Thinking he was doing business as usual, Berenson offered Brú a lesser amount.

But Berenson misjudged Brú’s desire to dissociate himself from the entry of additional Jews to Cuba. Brú called off the talks and ordered the St. Louis, with its 906 Jewish passengers, to sail for Germany. Max Loewe, a passenger who had been in a Nazi concentration camp, could not face the prospect of returning to Germany and slashed his wrists and jumped overboard. Cuban police fished Loewe out and hospitalized him, but then refused to let his wife or children ashore to visit him.

On June 2, the St. Louis steamed out of Havana harbor. Once it was at sea, President Brú–facing the pressure of world opinion which ran counter to that of Cuban nationalists and fascists–agreed to reopen negotiations with Berenson. The captain of the St. Louis diverted the ship toward Miami, where it anchored 4 miles offshore. The U. S. immigration office in Miami announced that under no circumstances would the passengers be allowed to enter, and the U.S. Coast Guard shadowed the ship’s every movement until it returned to international waters steaming back to Havana.

Berenson and Brú met again on June 5, and Berenson still thought he could lower the cost of each bond. Brú abruptly lost patience, announced that time had expired on his government’s offer, and ordered the St. Louis and two other ships with Jewish refugees to depart. The St. Louis headed for Germany. Acting quickly, the Joint Distribution Committee deposited $500,000 in a Havana bank, more than Brú had demanded, but it was too late. The Cuban president would not relent; the ship was not to return. The White House received more than 200 letters from Americans pleading with the Roosevelt Administration to intervene. On June 8th, an eleven year old wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt:

Mother of our Country. I am so sad the Jewish people have to suffer so . . .Please let them land in America . . . It hurts me so that I would give them my little bed if it was the last thing I had because I am an American let us Americans not send them back to that slater (sic) house. We have three rooms we do not use. [My] mother would be glad to let someone have them.

On June 10th, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy approached the British government to take some of the refugees, and two days later it agreed. The Netherlands, France and Belgium immediately followed suit. Sadly, many of the passengers died between 1939 and 1945 when the Nazis overran Western Europe. These were lives that could have been saved.

Chapters in American Jewish History are provided by the American Jewish Historical Society, collecting, preserving, fostering scholarship and providing access to the continuity of Jewish life in America for more than 350 years (and counting). Visit www.ajhs.org.

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Some 160,000 Jews resided in Kyiv — roughly 20 percent of the city’s population — prior to the Nazi invasion of Ukraine in the summer of 1941. By the time the Germans reached Kyiv on September 19, 1941, only 60,000 were left. 

Using the bombing of several buildings occupied by the Germans as a pretext, Nazi forces issued an order demanding that the city’s Jews assemble on the morning of Sept. 29. The order instructed the Jews to bring money, documents and valuables, which may have led them to believe they were being resettled. Instead, they were marched to Babi Yar, where they were shot to death in groups. Over the next several days, 33,771 Jews were killed at the site. 

The site continued to be used as an execution site for years. Over 100,000 people are believed to have been murdered there. 

After the war, several of the perpetrators were tried by tribunals set up by the Allies. Paul Blobel, who oversaw the killings at Babi Yar, was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death in 1948. 

In the ensuing decades, efforts to memorialize the victims of Babi Yar were undertaken, but failed to materialize. Only in 2021 did the Ukrainian government inaugurate a memorial at the site as part of a planned $100 million memorial intended to include a museum and monuments to those killed. 

“The time for memory has come,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said at the inauguration ceremony, which was also attended by the president of Israel and the German chancellor. 

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