During the Middle Ages, State and Church laws restricted Jews, preventing them from owning land and holding public office. Jews were excluded from most occupations, forcing them into pursuits like money-lending, trade, commerce. They were accused of causing plagues, of murdering children for religious rituals, and of secretly conspiring to dominate the world.
None of these accusations were true. The second half of the 19th century saw the emergence of yet another kind of antisemitism. Antisemites believed racial characteristics could not be overcome by assimilation or even conversion. These ideas gained wide acceptance. When the Nazi Party took power in Germany in , their antisemitic racism became official government policy.
Hitler and other Nazi Party leaders played a central role in the Holocaust. In countries across Europe, tens of thousands of ordinary people actively collaborated with German perpetrators of the Holocaust, each for their own reasons, and many more supported or tolerated the crimes.
Millions of ordinary people witnessed the crimes of the Holocaust—in the countryside and city squares, in stores and schools, in homes and workplaces.
The Holocaust happened because of millions of individual choices. In much of Europe, government policies, customs, and laws segregated Jews from the rest of the population, relegated them to particular jobs,and prohibited them from owning land. Although life for Jews had improved in many parts of Europe—including Germany—in the century prior to the Holocaust, these prejudices remained. When the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in , many Germans tolerated Nazi antisemitic policies because they supported Nazi attempts to improve the country economically.
There is no credible evidence that Hitler had any Jewish ancestors. Read Adolf Hitler: Early Years — to learn more. The Germans and their collaborators used paper records and local knowledge to identify Jews to be rounded up or killed. Records included those created by Jewish communities of their members, parish records of Protestant and Catholic churches for converted Jews , government tax records, and police records, including registries of Jews compiled by local, collaborating police.
In both Germany and occupied countries, Nazi officials required Jews to identify themselves as Jewish, and many complied, fearing the consequences if they did not. In many countries occupied by or allied with Germany during World War II, local citizens often showed authorities where their Jewish neighbors lived, if they did not themselves help in rounding them up.
Jews in hiding everywhere lived in constant fear of being identified and denounced to officials by individuals in exchange for money or other rewards. Of course, Hitler and many Nazis leaders did not have blonde hair or blue eyes, but as with all racists, their prejudices were not consistent or logical.
This was especially true for Jewish men: circumcision is a Jewish ritual, but was uncommon for non-Jews at the time. Jewish men knew they could be physically identified as Jewish. Read Locating the Victims to learn more. Similar to their fellow Germans, German Jews were patriotic citizens. More than 10, died fighting for Germany in World War I, and countless others were wounded and received medals for their valor and service.
The families of many Jews who held German citizenship, regardless of class or profession, had lived in Germany for centuries and were well assimilated by the early 20th century. At first, Nazi Germany targeted the , Jews in Germany at a relatively gradual pace, attempting attempted to make life so difficult that they would be forced to leave their country. Up until the nationwide anti-Jewish violence of , known as Kristallnacht , many Jews in Germany expected to be able to hold out against Nazi-sponsored persecution, as they hoped for positive change in German politics.
Before World War II, few could imagine or predict killing squads and killing centers. Those who tried to leave had difficulty finding countries willing to take them in, especially since the Nazi regime did not allow them to take their assets out of the country. A substantial percentage tried to go to the United States but American immigration law limited the number of immigrants who could enter the country.
The ongoing Great Depression meant that Jews attempting to go to the United States or elsewhere had to prove they could financially support themselves—something that was very difficult since they were being robbed by the Germans before they could leave. Even when a new country could be found, a great deal of time, paperwork, support, and sometimes money was needed to get there. In many cases, these obstacles could not be overcome. 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. This order propelled Operation Reinhard forward. Deutsche Reichsbahn, the German National Railway , kept to a strict schedule in delivering the victims.
The Nazis, however, destroyed detailed records about these killings. But Yitzhak Arad, an Israeli Holocaust historian, managed to compile data about the murders. Arad collected Reichsbahn data on train deportations from Polish towns and ghettos, recording "the location, number of victims of each transportation and final death-camp destination," Stone said.
There's currently academic interest in modeling and quantifying wars , conflicts and genocides, Stone said. So, upon coming across Arad's data set, Stone said, "I rapidly became engrossed with the project. Almost every victim who arrived at these three death camps was murdered, so the data set served as an extraordinary proxy for murder rate, Stone said.
After crunching the numbers, Stone found that a minimum of 1. In all, between 5. Stone decided to go a step further, comparing the rate of the deaths over those three months to that of the Rwandan genocide. After the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Ghetto was completely destroyed. Of the more than 56, Jews captured, about 7, were shot, and the remainder were deported to killing centers or concentration camps. This is a view of the remains of the ghetto, which the German SS dynamited to the ground.
The Warsaw Ghetto only existed for a few years, and in that time, some , Polish Jews lost their lives there. A German in a military uniform shoots at a Jewish woman after a mass execution in Mizocz, Ukraine. In October of , the 1, people in the Mizocz ghetto fought with Ukrainian auxiliaries and German policemen who had intended to liquidate the population. About half the residents were able to flee or hide during the confusion before the uprising was finally put down.
The captured survivors were taken to a ravine and shot. Photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial. Jewish deportees in the Drancy transit camp near Paris, France, in , on their last stop before the German concentration camps. Some 13, Jews including 4, children were rounded up by French police forces, taken from their homes to the "Vel d'Hiv", or winter cycling stadium in southwestern Paris, in July of They were later taken to a rail terminal at Drancy, northeast of the French capital, and then deported to the east.
Only a handful ever returned. In August of , Anne, her family and others who were hiding from the occupying German Security forces, were all captured and shipped off to a series of prisons and concentration camps.
Anne died from typhus at age 15 in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, but her posthumously published diary has made her a symbol of all Jews killed in World War II.
The arrival and processing of an entire transport of Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, a region annexed in to Hungary from Czechoslovakia, at Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland, in May of The picture was donated to Yad Vashem in by Lili Jacob.
Czeslawa Kwoka, age 14, appears in a prisoner identity photo provided by the Auschwitz Museum, taken by Wilhelm Brasse while working in the photography department at Auschwitz, the Nazi-run death camp where some 1. Within three months, both were dead. Photographer and fellow prisoner Brasse recalled photographing Czeslawa in a documentary: "She was so young and so terrified.
The girl didn't understand why she was there and she couldn't understand what was being said to her. So this woman Kapo a prisoner overseer took a stick and beat her about the face. This German woman was just taking out her anger on the girl. Such a beautiful young girl, so innocent. She cried but she could do nothing. Before the photograph was taken, the girl dried her tears and the blood from the cut on her lip. To tell you the truth, I felt as if I was being hit myself but I couldn't interfere.
It would have been fatal for me. A victim of Nazi medical experimentation. A victim's arm shows a deep burn from phosphorus at Ravensbrueck, Germany, in November of The photograph shows the results of a medical experiment dealing with phosphorous that was carried out by doctors at Ravensbrueck.
In the experiment, a mixture of phosphorus and rubber was applied to the skin and ignited. After twenty seconds, the fire was extinguished with water. After three days, the burn was treated with Echinacin in liquid form. After two weeks the wound had healed. This photograph, taken by a camp physician, was entered as evidence during the Doctors Trial at Nuremberg.
Jewish prisoners in Buchenwald concentration camp, after the liberation of the camp in American soldiers silently inspect some of the rail trucks loaded with dead which were found on the rail siding at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, on May 3, A starved Frenchman sits among the dead in a sub-camp of the Mittelbau-Dora labor camp, in Nordhausen, Germany, in April of Bodies lie piled against the walls of a crematory room in a German concentration camp in Dachau, Germany.
Even Jews who had converted to Christianity were still 'different' because of their bloodline. The origin of Hitler's hatred of Jews is not clear. In Mein Kampf, he described his development into an antisemite as the result of a long, personal struggle.
Supposedly, his aversion to everything Jewish came to fruition when he was living and working as a painter in Vienna Most historians believe that Hitler came up with this explanation in hindsight. He would have used it to assure people who were not yet convinced of his ideas that they would eventually see the light. One way or another, it is clear that Hitler came into contact with antisemitic ideas at an early age. To what extent he shared them at that point, is not certain.
If he was prejudiced against Jews while living in Vienna, his prejudice had not yet crystallised into a clear worldview. After all, one of the most loyal buyers of his paintings in Vienna was a Jew, Samuel Morgenstern. There are countless imaginative explanations for the reasons for Hitler's antisemitism. Hitler is said to be have been ashamed of his partly Jewish roots.
Another explanation links his hatred of Jews to trauma caused by a poison gas attack in the First World War. Yet other theories suggest that Hitler had contracted a venereal disease from a Jewish prostitute. There are, however, no facts to support these explanations. What we do know is that two Austrian politicians greatly influenced Hitler's thinking. He believed that the German-speaking regions of Austria-Hungary should be added to the German empire.
He also felt that Jews could never be fully-fledged German citizens. From the second, the Viennese mayor Karl Lueger , Hitler learned how antisemitism and social reforms could be successful. It gave his life, which had been rather unsuccessful up until then, a new purpose.
Although he saw little action, he did receive an award for courage shown.
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