The word “Holocaust” was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar. Since 1945, the word has taken on a new and horrible meaning: the mass murder of 6 Million European Jews by the German Nazi regime during the Second World War. After years of Nazi rule in Germany, during which Jews were consistently persecuted, Hitler’s “final solution” –now known as the Holocaust- came to a reality under the cover of world war, with mass killing centers constructed in the concentration camps of occupied Poland.
Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettos in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak, and the very young. The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland. From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone. SW |
How many were executed?But Jews were not the only group singled out for persecution by Hitler’s Nazi regime. As many as one-half million Gypsies, at least 250,000 mentally or physically disabled persons, and more than three million Soviet prisoners-of-war were also victims to the Nazi genocide. Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Social Democrats, Communists, partisans, trade unionists, Polish intelligentsia and other undesirables were also victims of the hate and aggression carried out by the Nazis. While it is impossible to ascertain the exact number of Jewish victims, statistics indicate that the total was over 5,830,000. Six million is the round figure accepted by most authorities. More than 1.2 million Jewish children, tens of thousands of Gypsy children and thousands of institutionalized handicapped children who were murdered under Nazi rule in Germany and occupied Europe. Auschwitz-Birkenau became the killing center where the largest numbers of European Jews were killed. After an experimental gassing there in September 1941 of 850 malnourished and ill prisoners, mass murder became a daily routine. By mid-1942, mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon-B began at Auschwitz, where extermination was conducted on an industrial scale with some estimates running as high as three million persons eventually killed through gassing, starvation, disease, shooting, and burning.
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Concentration CampsBergen-Belsen was a concentration camp near Hanover in northwest Germany, located between the villages of Bergen and Belsen. It was a prisoner-of-war camp for French and Belgium prisoners. In 1941, it was renamed Stalag 311 and housed about 20,000 Russian prisoners. The camp changed its name to Bergen-Belsen and was converted into a concentration camp in 1943. Jews with foreign passports were kept there to be exchanged for German nationals imprisoned abroad, although very few exchanges were made. About 200 Jews were allowed to immigrate to Palestine and about 1,500 Hungarian Jews were allowed to immigrate to Switzerland, both took place under the rubric of exchanges for German nationals.
The Gross-Rosen concentration camp was originally established in 1940 as a sub camp of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The camp was named for the nearby village of Gross-Rosen. In 1941, Gross-Rosen was designated an autonomous concentration camp. At first, the prisoners were employed primarily as forced laborers in the construction of the camp and in the nearby SS-owned granite quarry. The increasing emphasis on the use of concentration camp prisoners in armaments production led to the expansion of the Gross-Rosen camp, which became the center of an industrial complex and the administrative hub of a vast network of at least 97 subcamps. As of January 1, 1945, the Gross-Rosen complex held 76,728 prisoners. Nearly 26,000 of these were women, most of them Jews. This was one of the largest groupings of female prisoners in the entire concentration camp system. Established on November 1, 1941, Belzec extermination center consisted of two camps divided into three parts: administration section, barracks and storage for plundered goods, and extermination section. There were three gas chambers using carbon monoxide housed in a wooden building. They were later replaced by six gas chambers in a brick and concrete building. Belzec extermination center began operations March 17, 1942, and ended operations December 1942. The estimated number of deaths is 500-600,000, mainly Jews. |
Destruction of CampsThe 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 through deportation of the Jewish people to forced-labor and extermination camps. The first ghetto was established in Lodz, Poland, on February 8, 1940. About 155,000 Jews 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 factories there.
In many places ghettoization lasted a short time. Some ghettos existed for only a few days. Others lasted for months or years. The Germans saw the ghettos to control and segregate Jews while the Nazi leadership in Berlin deliberated upon options for the removal of the Jewish population. With the implementation of the "Final Solution" (the plan to murder all European Jews) beginning in late 1941, the Germans destroyed the ghettos. The Germans either shot ghetto residents in mass graves located nearby or deported them. Jews were deported to killing centers. German SS and police authorities also deported a small minority of Jews from ghettos to forced-labor camps and concentration camps. |