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Crematoriums : buildings with immense red brick chimneys two stories high, like factory chimneys, with flames rising from the center. The smoke from the crematoriums' chimneys filled the air with the odor of burning flesh and scorched hair. The ovens were so hot that it took only 20 minutes to cremate three bodies at a time.
At Auschwitz there were fifteen ovens in each crematorium. Gestapo: Special State Police; S. Gypsy camp : a section of Auschwitz that housed dark skinned gypsies, considered racially inferior by the Nazis. For a period of time the Roma people or "Gypsies" were in "family camps" not segregated by gender , a privilege accorded them as Catholics. The Nazis eventually dismantled the family camps. Hair shaving and tooth pulling : Prisoners who entered the camps were told their heads would be shaved to fight lice.
In fact, hair was a precious commodity used in the construction of delayed action bombs because it expands and contracts uniformly. After the camps were liberated the Allies found other Nazi uses for body parts. Pillows were stuffed with human hair so even corpses were shaved ; lampshades were made of human skin. At Auschwitz a "tooth pulling commando" broke gold teeth off the bridgework of corpses after prisoners were murdered in the death chambers.
As much as eighteen pounds of gold was collected daily from prisoners' jewelry and teeth. List of deportees: a typed and orderly list of Jews who were transported from their homes and from the Jewish ghettos to the concentration camps. By , however, about , German Jews had already left. Once Germany invaded and occupied Poland, millions of Jews were suddenly living under Nazi occupation. The war made travel very difficult, and other countries—including the United States—were still unwilling to change their immigration laws, now fearing that the new immigrants could be Nazi spies.
In October , Germany made it illegal for Jews to emigrate from any territory under its control; by then, Nazi policy had changed from forced emigration to mass murder.
Visit the Americans and the Holocaust online exhibition and the Challenges to Escape lesson plan for more information. The idea that Jews did not fight back against the Germans and their allies is false. Against impossible odds, they resisted in ghettos, concentration camps, and killing centers. There were many factors that made resistance difficult, however, including a lack of weapons and resources, deception, fear, and the overwhelming power of the Germans and their collaborators. Read a Holocaust Encyclopedia article about Jewish resistance for more information.
In Europe, the Holocaust was not a secret. Even though the Nazi government controlled the German press and did not publicize mass shooting operations or the existence of killing centers, many Europeans knew that Jews were being rounded up and shot, or deported and murdered. Many individuals—in Germany and collaborators in the countries that Germany occupied or that were aligned with Germany during World War II—actively participated in the stigmatization, isolation, impoverishment, and violence culminating in the mass murder of six million European Jews.
People helped in their roles as clerks and confiscators of property; as railway and other transportation employees; as managers or participants in round-ups and deportations; as informants; sometimes as perpetrators of violence against Jews on their own initiative; and sometimes as hand-on killers in killing operations, notably in the mass shootings of Jews and others in occupied Soviet territories in which thousands of eastern Europeans participated as auxiliaries and many more witnessed.
Many more people—the onlookers who witnessed persecution or violence against Jews in Nazi Germany and elsewhere—failed to speak out as their neighbors, classmates, and co-workers were isolated and impoverished—socially and legally, then physically. Only a small minority publicly expressed their disapproval. Other individuals actively assisted the victims by purchasing food or other supplies for households to whom shops were closed; providing false identity papers or warnings about upcoming roundups; storing belongings for those in hiding that could be sold off little by little for food; and sheltering those who evaded capture, a form of help that, if discovered, especially in Nazi Germany and occupied eastern Europe, was punished by arrest and often execution.
Although Jews were the main target of Nazi hatred, they were not the only group persecuted. American newspapers reported frequently on Hitler and Nazi Germany throughout the s.
Americans read headlines about book burning, about Jews being attacked on the street, and about the Nuremberg Race laws in , when German Jews were stripped of their German citizenship. The Kristallnacht attacks in November were front-page news in the United States for weeks.
Americans staged protests and rallies in support of German Jews, and sent petitions to the US government calling for action. But these protests never became a sustained movement, and most Americans were still not in favor of allowing more immigrants into the United States, particularly if the immigrants were Jewish. It was very difficult to immigrate to the United States. In , the US Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act in order to set limits on the maximum number of immigrant visas that could be issued per year to people born in each country.
Unlike today, the United States had no refugee policy, and Jews could not come as asylum seekers or migrants. Approximately ,, European Jews immigrated to the United States between , most of them between The US Government learned about the systematic killing of Jews almost as soon as it began in the Soviet Union in Yet saving Jews and others targeted for murder by the Nazi regime and its collaborators never became a priority. As more information about Nazi mass murder reached the United States, public protests and protests within the Roosevelt administration led President Roosevelt to create the War Refugee Board in January The establishment of the War Refugee Board marked the first time the US government adopted a policy of trying to rescue victims of Nazi persecution.
The War Refugee Board coordinated the work of both US and international refugee aid organizations, sending millions of dollars into German-occupied Europe for relief and rescue. The American people—soldiers and civilians alike—made enormous sacrifices to free Europe from Nazi oppression.
The United States could have done more to publicize information about Nazi atrocities, to pressure the other Allies and neutral nations to help endangered Jews, and to support resistance groups against the Nazis.
Prior to the war, the US government could have enlarged or filled its immigration quotas to allow more Jewish refugees to enter the country. These acts together might have reduced the death toll, but they would not have prevented the Holocaust. Visit the Americans and the Holocaust online exhibition for more information. Although the liberation of Nazi camps was not a primary objective of the Allied military campaign, Soviet, US, British, and Canadian troops freed prisoners from their SS guards, provided them with food and badly needed medical support, and collected evidence for war crimes trials.
The Holocaust is the best documented case of genocide. Despite this, calculating the exact numbers of individuals who were killed as the result of Nazi policies is an impossible task. There is no single wartime document that spells out how many people were killed. Historians estimate that approximately six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, including approximately 2. Although the Holocaust specifically refers to the murder of European Jews, Nazi Germany and its collaborators also killed non-Jews, including seven million Soviet citizens, three million Soviet prisoners of war, 1.
Beginning in the winter of , the governments of the Allied powers announced their intent to punish Nazi war criminals. After much debate, 24 defendants were chosen to represent a cross-section of Nazi diplomatic, economic, political, and military leadership. Those who were not fit enough were gassed immediately.
The others had to do forced labour under barbaric conditions. The work was extremely hard, the little food was of poor quality, hygiene was poor, and Jews were often maltreated. Jews were brought in from other occupied parts of Europe. In and , deportations started from the occupied regions in Italy, Hungary, Greece, and the Balkans.
Only when the Allies were drawing near, by end of , did the persecution of the Jews slowly come to a halt. In the last months of the war, thousands of Jews and other prisoners died during the 'death marches' after the Germans had evacuated the concentration camps to prevent the prisoners from falling into the hands of the Allied troops.
Even after liberation, people still died of malnutrition, disease, and exhaustion. The Nazis did not just kill Jews during the war.
Their political opponents, Jehovah's Witnesses, the handicapped, homosexuals, Slavs, and Roma and Sinti were also murdered on a large scale. Nevertheless, the murder of the European Jews takes a special place. Numerically speaking, they were the largest group of victims. Moreover, the Nazis set out to exterminate the entire Jewish people. The only other group they intended to wipe out as a whole were the Roma and Sinti, although the Nazis were slightly less fanatical in their persecution.
They murdered The Roma and Sinti call this massacre porajmos , 'the devouring'. The main perpetrators of the Holocaust were the Nazis who planned and carried out the mass murder. Still, they could never have done this without the support and help of millions of Germans and others. Virtually all government agencies were complicit to some extent. There was little protest from the population, although it should be noted that the Third Reich was a dictatorship without free speech.
The allies of Nazi Germany were often guilty of killing Jews themselves or of deporting them to Germany. In some cases, they succumbed to German pressure, in others, they did not deport their own citizens, but only Jews with foreign passports.
Throughout the occupied territories, there were numerous collaborators, who reported Jews to the Germans or helped the Germans to find Jews in hiding. Government agencies often followed the orders of the Germans and cooperated in the arrest and deportation of Jews. Sometimes they did so in order to prevent worse from happening, but their actions often had fatal consequences for the Jews.
In Eastern Europe, some people sided with the Germans to join them in the fight against the hated Soviet regime. The Germans sometimes recruited personnel for the extermination camps among Soviet prisoners of war, for whom this was their only chance to escape death. People collaborated with the Germans for a variety of reasons.
Antisemitic ideas often played a role, but not always. Some people had personal scores to settle. Others reported Jews out of greed, hoping that they would be able to seize their possessions. Fear of the Germans sometimes kept people from helping the Jews. It is difficult to determine how many people knew that the Jews were being murdered during the war.
Few will have realised the full extent of the Nazi crimes. Yet in many cases, the population was aware of what was going on, at least to some extent.
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