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I wonder why i am so savage lol

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I wonder how Peter died

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Otto Frank, Fritz Pfeffer and Hermann and Peter van Pels manage to stay together. Most prisoners have to perform heavy labor digging trenches. Peter is luckier: he is assigned to the camp post office. Guards and non- Jews may receive mail. Because Peter handles the packages that arrive, he is sometimes able to "arrange" a bit of extra food.

Otto returns

He hopes Anne and Margot might still be alive.

Hermann van Pels

Fritz Pfeffer

Peter van Pels

Otto survives

On January 27, 1945, Russian soldiers liberate Auschwitz. Otto Frank is one of the 7650 prisoners who are still alive. He weighs less than 115 pounds, while he weighed over 150 pounds in the Secret Annex. Otto particularly remembers the snow-white uniforms the Russian soldiers were wearing and he later says: "They were good men. We didn't care that they were Communists. We weren't concerned about their politics, we were interested in being liberated."

Shortly before his release, the Nazis evacuate the camp. Prisoners who can still walk must go with them. Peter van Pels is among these prisoners. He arrives at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria at the end of January. The prisoners have to perform heavy labor. Peter van Pels probably dies between 11 April and 5 May from exhaustion.

Fritz Pfeffer is deported to the Neuengamme concentration camp in October 1944. Thousands of prisoners die there from a combination of heavy labor, lack of food and poor sanitary conditions. Fritz Pfeffer is among them. He dies in the sick-bay barracks on December 20, 1944, at the age of fifty-five.

Regularly there are selections: prisoners who are too sick or weak to work are sent directly to the gas chamber to be killed. It is a few weeks after their arrival and Hermann van Pels, exhausted, is no longer capable of working. He is selected and then gassed.

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The story of anne Frank: The fate of the men from the secret annex

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Otto Frank, Fritz Pfeffer and Hermann and Peter van Pels manage to stay together. Most prisoners have to perform heavy labor digging trenches. Peter is luckier: he is assigned to the camp post office. Guards and non- Jews may receive mail. Because Peter handles the packages that arrive, he is sometimes able to "arrange" a bit of extra food.

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I wonder if Anne and Peter were ever in a real relationship

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Peter van Daan in The Diary of Anne Frank

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Everything you ever wanted to know about Peter van Daan in The Diary of Anne Frank, written by masters of this stuff just for you.

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I wonder if during the Holocaust people suffered? Also if anyone died of hunger

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We've been reworking our Holocaust Encyclopedia, and we would love for you to explore the new experience. Click the button at right to start using the new version. The version you are viewing now will remain online until June 30, 2018.

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I wonder why children in the holocaust were vulnerable to Nazi murder or death during the era of the holocaust

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During the Holocaust, children were especially vulnerable to death under the Nazi regime. An estimated 1.5 million children, nearly all Jewish, were murdered during the Holocaust, either directly by or as a direct consequence of Nazi actions.

The Nazis advocated killing children of unwanted or "dangerous" people in accordance with their ideological views, either as part of the Nazi idea of the racial struggle or as a measure of preventive security. They particularly targeted Jewish children, but also targeted ethnically Polish children and Romani (also called Gypsy) children and children with mental or physical disabilities. The Nazis and their collaborators killed children for these ideological reasons and in retaliation for real or alleged partisan attacks. Early killings were encouraged by the Nazis in Aktion T4, where children with disabilities were gassed using carbon monoxide, starved to death, given phenol injections to the heart, or hanged.

A much smaller number were saved. Some simply survived, often in a ghetto, occasionally in a concentration camp. Some were saved in various programs like the Kindertransport and the One Thousand Children, in both of which children fled their homelands. Other children were saved by becoming Hidden Children. During and even before the war, many vulnerable children were rescued by Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE).

On April 25, 1933 the Nazi regime enacted the "Law Against Overcrowding in German Schools and Universities" which began school segregation for Jewish children and young adults. This law restricted the number of Jewish children who could enroll in public schools to 1.5 percent of the total school population. However, when the Jewish population in the surrounding area was greater than 5 percent, 5 percent of the school population could be Jewish. Additionally, many Jewish children were eligible for exemptions, allowing them to circumvent the law. These exemptions applied to Jewish children of mixed marriage, those with fathers who served in World War I, and those with foreign citizenship.

Despite the increased eligibility of Jewish children and young adults as a result of the exemptions, many Jewish students older than 14 left the school system, as school was not required past this age. For example, in Württemberg, 58 percent of the Jewish student population at higher schools left, despite the 1933 law only applying to 10 percent of the students. This highlights how many Jewish students left the public school system by choice in order to escape the increasingly antisemitic school environment. The growing hostility towards Jewish children is reflected by the fact that Jewish students received worse grades than their peers, regardless of the quality of their work. Additionally, teachers forbade Jewish students from participating in school activities and incorporated elements of the Nazi ideology in their classrooms, such as the use of anti-Semitic terms in class. As a result of the antagonistic atmosphere in the classroom, many Jewish students faced isolation from their former friends.

Eventually many German Jews enrolled their children in Jewish schools in order to prevent persecution in the classroom. Consequently, the number of children enrolled in Jewish schools increased from 14 percent in 1932 to 60 percent in 1937. Additionally, within the span of two years, the number of Jewish schools increased from 130 in 1935 to 167 in 1937. The increase in Jewish schools as well as the student population at such schools highlights the shift away from public schools and towards private schools in the German Jewish community.

Although the Jewish community generally shifted towards private schools, German Jews continued to attend public schools until November 15, 1938 when the Reich Minister of Education banned all Jewish students from German public schools.

Emaciated corpses of children in the Warsaw Ghetto

German forces established ghettos early in the war in many Polish towns and cities such as Warsaw and Łódź. In them, Jewish children died from starvation and exposure as well as lack of adequate clothing and shelter. The German authorities were indifferent to this mass death because they considered most of the younger ghetto children to be unproductive and hence "useless eaters". Strict control was enforced over the inhabitants of the ghettos, and the food provided was deliberately limited. From 1942 onwards, the ghetto program ended. Inhabitants of the ghettos were murdered at various death camps. Because children were generally too young to be deployed as forced labor, they were particularly vulnerable to being killed: they were one of the main groups in the first deportations to killing centers or in mass shootings near mass graves along with the elderly, the ill, and the disabled. Children who were healthy enough for labor were often worked to death doing jobs to benefit the camp; other times, children were forced to do unnecessary jobs like digging ditches.

Non-Jewish children from certain other targeted groups were not spared. In the Auschwitz concentration camp, Romani children were killed. Meanwhile, five to seven thousand children died as victims of a "euthanasia" program. Others were murdered in reprisals, including most of the children of Lidice; many children in villages in the occupied parts of the Soviet Union were killed with their parents.

Ghetto Litzmannstadt. Children rounded up for deportation to the Kulmhof extermination camp.

The German authorities also incarcerated a number of children in concentration camps and transit camps. Physicians and medical researchers of the Schutzstaffel (SS), a Nazi paramilitary organization, used children, especially twins, in concentration camps for medical experiments that often resulted in the deaths of the children.

In their "search to retrieve 'Aryan blood'", or the perfect race, SS race experts ordered hundreds of children in occupied Poland and the occupied parts of the Soviet Union to be kidnapped and transferred to the Reich to be adopted by racially suitable German families. Although the basis for these decisions was "race-scientific," often blond hair, blue eyes, or fair skin was sufficient to merit the "opportunity" to be "Germanized." On the other hand, female Poles and Soviet civilians who had been deported to Germany for forced labor were often forced into sexual relations with a German man; many cases resulted in pregnancy, and the women were forced to have abortions or to bear their children under conditions that would ensure the infant's death, if the race experts determined that the child would have insufficient German blood.

Jewish twins kept alive to be used in Mengele's medical experiments. These children were liberated from Auschwitz by the Red Army in January 1945.

Transit camps were temporary stops on the way to concentration camps during the Holocaust. Many children were brought with their families to transit camps, unsure of what awaited them. Some hoped for starting a new life and making friends in the camps, while many others were scared. Children brought to the transit camps came from many different backgrounds.

In the transit camps, children were surrounded by bare bodies. Their beds were merely metal frames. There was a lack of food along with a fear of trains coming for deportation. No school supplies were provided. Children began to see their relatives in a different light because each family member dealt with various hardships in the transit camps.

Children had few resources at the transit camps to foster growth. A group of Hungarian Zionists made a rescue committee to negotiate and prevent deportations. Older girls took care of young children. Physicians, nurses, and musicians organized lectures, concerts, and activities for children. Voluntary interns and philanthropic organizations supplied food, clothing, and organized secretive teaching rooms to help the children continue their education. Childcare workers taught children about the ideas of Zionism and the spirit of democracy; they additionally encouraged an affectionate atmosphere. These groups also helped ease the hunger issues in the camps.

A notorious case of the Nazis holding a child in a transit camp is the case of Anne Frank and her sister in Bergen-Belsen. Other notable cases include the children held in the Majdanek concentration camp, some of whom were orphaned because their parents were killed in anti-partisan operations.

Czesława Kwoka, child victim in Auschwitz

Josef Mengele was a physician who worked at Auschwitz, a concentration camp. His research subjects were better fed and housed than other prisoners and temporarily safe from the gas chambers. He established a kindergarten for children who were the subjects of experiments, along with all Romani children under the age of six. The facility provided better food and living conditions than other areas of the camp and even included a playground. When visiting his child subjects, he introduced himself as "Uncle Mengele" and offered them sweets. However, he was also personally responsible for the deaths of an unknown number of victims. Author Robert Jay Lifton describes Mengele as sadistic, lacking empathy, and extremely anti-Semitic, claiming that he believed that the Jews should be eliminated entirely as an inferior and dangerous race. Mengele's son Rolf said that his father showed no remorse for his wartime activities. A lack of regulations on his experiments allowed Mengele to perform his experiments freely.

A former Auschwitz prisoner doctor said:

He was capable of being so kind to the children, to have them become fond of him, to bring them sugar, to think of small details in their daily lives, and to do things we would genuinely admire ... And then, next to that, ... the crematoria smoke, and these children, tomorrow or in a half-hour, he is going to send them there. Well, that is where the anomaly lay.

Photo from Mengele's Argentine identification document (1956)

Mengele had a fascination with twins. He was interested in the difference between identical and fraternal twins as well as how genetic diseases affected them and where they originated. The experiments also distinguished between genetic traits and those developed by the environment of the child. Mengele was known to pretend to be off duty while a train of new prisoners arrived so that he could personally select any twins whom he saw. He operated on children, partly to find genetic weaknesses in the makeup of Jewish or Romani people in order to provide scientific evidence for the ideas of the Nazi party. Mengele hypothesized that his subjects were particularly vulnerable to certain diseases because of their race. In addition to that, he believed that they had degenerative blood and tissue based on his samples.

Mengele or one of his assistants subjected twins to weekly examinations and measurements of their physical attributes. He performed experiments such as unnecessary amputation of limbs; in another experiment, he intentionally infected a twin with typhus or another disease and transfused the blood of the infected twin into the other one. Many of his subjects died while undergoing these procedures. After an experiment was over, the twins were sometimes killed and their bodies dissected. Miklós Nyiszli, a prisoner at Auschwitz, recalled one occasion where Mengele personally killed fourteen twins in one night through a chloroform injection to the heart. If one twin died of disease, Mengele killed the other so that comparative reports could be prepared after their deaths.

He was known for experimenting with eyes. One of his particular studies regarded heterochromia iridum, a condition where people's eyes are differently colored. After he killed heterochromatics, he removed their eyes and sent them to Berlin for study. Another of Mengele's experiments with eyes involved attempts to change eye color by injecting chemicals into the eyes of living subjects. His experiments on dwarfs and people with physical abnormalities included taking physical measurements, drawing blood, extracting healthy teeth, and treatment with unnecessary drugs and X-rays. Many of the victims were sent to the gas chambers after about two weeks, and their skeletons were sent to Berlin for further study. Mengele sought pregnant women, on whom he would perform experiments before sending them to gas chambers. Witness Vera Alexander described how he sewed two Romani twins together back-to-back in an attempt to create conjoined twins. The children died of gangrene after several days of suffering.

Auschwitz, First Hand Account of Children Being Burnt Alive

On 25 July 1945 in Kraków, Judge Stanisław Żmuda (PhD) delegated to the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland at the request, with the participation and in the presence of a member of the Main Commission, prosecutor Wincenty Jarosiński (PhD), pursuant to the Art. 254, in connection with Art. 107 and 115 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, interviewed the former Auschwitz concentration camp prisoner no. 26281 [Stanisława Rachwał née Surówka] as a witness. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations, the witness testified as follows:

"Next to the crematoria were deep pits intended for burning those corpses which didn't fit in the crematoria. I know that small children who arrived in transports at night were loaded into dump trucks, driven to the pits and "spilled" alive into the pits from the body of the truck which was automatically raised. The pits were already burning when the children were being thrown in. The horrible screams of the victims could be heard all over the female camp for one to three minutes." - Stanisława Rachwał née Surówka | Auschwitz concentration camp prisoner no. 26281

During the existence of the Independent State of Croatia during World War II, the Croatian Ustaše established numerous concentration camps like those in Jasenovac, Đakovo, and Jastrebarsko in which many Serbian, Jewish, and Romani children died as inmates. Among them, there was Sisak concentration camp, which was specially formed for children as part of Jasenovac concentration camp.

A group of children wait in line at an Ustaša concentration camp

Sisak children's concentration camp was founded on 3 August 1942 following the Kozara Offensive. It was part of an assembly camp, officially named the "Refugee Transit Camp". This concentration camp consisted of a special part officially called the "Shelter for the Refugee Children" under the auspices of the "Ustasha Female Lineage" and "Ustasha Security Service", and under the direct control of Antun Najžer. The camp was located in several buildings in Sisak: the former Yugoslav Falconry Association ("Sokolana"), the Sisters of St. Vincent nunnery, a rice warehouse, Rajs Saltworks warehouse, Novi Sisak elementary school, and the "Karantena" (Quarantine). All these buildings were considered unsuitable for the housing of children.[according to whom? ] For example, in the Falconry Association, there were no doors; it was drafty because it was built for drying salt. Children, even those who were only a few months old, had to lie on the floor with only a thin layer of straw without any clothes or blankets. When a typhus epidemic broke out, Najžer ordered the transfer of the infected children to an improvised hospital, only serving to increase the number of deaths.

The first group of children arrived on 3 August 1942; there were 906 of them. The very next day another group of 650 children was brought; a third group arrived on 6 August with 1,272 children. In Teslic glasshouse and the newly built barracks, which were named "Karantena", a general concentration camp for men, women, and children had been established. During August and September 1942, Ustaše took parents away from 3,971 children by sending the parents to forced labor. From August 1942 to 8 February 1943, there were 6,693 detained children, mostly Serbs from Kozara, Kordun, and Slavonia. Despite the actions of Diana Budisavljević and a group of humanitarians - Jana Koh, Vera Luketić, Dragica Habazin, Ljubica and Vera Becić, Kamil Bresler, Ante Dumbović, and the sisters of the Red Cross - up to 40 children died every day.

Lazar Margulješ testified about conditions at the concentration camp:

I've noticed that the food parcels sent by Red Cross have never been given to the imprisoned children. My duty as a medic was to research these small prisoners, therefore I often visited these places: Sokolana building, where the children laid on bare concrete or, if they had little luck, on a little straw. The so-called hospital, in a small school in Old Sisak, had no beds so the children were lying on the floor with a little distracted and contaminated straw matted with blood and excrement and covered with swarms of flies.

Jana Koh, former secretary of Croatian Red Cross stated following about the conditions in the Camp:

The barracks were connected by the corridors guarded by the Ustashas. Not far from the ambulance, from another barracks, the sad cries of the children were heard. There was set, on the bare floor, four hundred children: newborns, children from a few weeks or months, up to ten years of age. How many children came, and where they were dispatched, could no longer be found out. The children in the children's barracks cried inexorably and were calling their mothers, who were only a few steps away from the children, but the fascist criminals did not let mothers to approach their children. Older children tell us through tears, that they can not calm the little ones, because they are hungry, there are no one to change diapers of the little ones, and they are afraid that everyone will die. These children, who have not yet reached the age of ten, swear to us, "Come on, sister, bring us mothers, bring at least mothers to these little ones. You will see, if you do not bring them their mothers, they will suffocate, by the tears alone."

Coroner David Egić officially recorded that out of 6,693 children, 1,152 died in the Camp, while teacher Ante Dumbović later claimed that the number was 1,630.

In spite of their acute vulnerability, many children discovered ways to survive. Children smuggled food and medicine into the ghettos, in turn smuggling out their own personal possessions to trade for said goods. Children in youth movements later escaped the ghettos to join underground resistance activities such as Soviet partisan units; others formed their own units to harass the German occupiers. Many children escaped with parents or other relatives to family camps run by Jewish partisans; others had to escape on their own.

Many Jewish children were forced to fake their identity for their own safety. They obtained false identity papers that usually came from anti-Nazi resistance in order to pretend to be Aryans. Even though this was one of the only ways to survive for children, it imposed major security risks. The police and other Nazi authorities closely examined documents in their search for Jews to detect disguised Jews.

Circumcision, a Jewish tradition in which the foreskins of infant male Jews are removed, was an easy way to identify Jews because non-Jews usually did not go through the procedure. Boys had to be mindful about using public restrooms and participating in team sports because their Jewish identity could be exposed. As a solution, they had to go through additional procedures that would hide circumcision[example needed ] or at times even dress up as girls.

Between 1938 and 1939, the Kindertransport (Children's Transport) was a rescue effort organized by the British government in cooperation with Jewish organizations. It brought about 10,000 refugee Jewish children to safety in Great Britain from Nazi Germany and German-occupied territories, although their families did not come with them. Likewise, Youth Aliyah (Youth Immigration) was responsible for integrating thousands of children into life in Palestine for their survival as well as the revitalization of the Yishuv, the Jewish settlement in Palestine.

In the United States, some individuals attempted to help, and efforts around the country allowed the rescue of 1,000 Jewish children from Nazis. Unlike the English work, the actual rescue efforts were not backed up by the government in any way; those who wanted to help had to find their own ways to fight immigration quotas. Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus were a couple who brought 50 Jewish children to the United States to save them from Nazis in 1939 before the war started. They selected the 50 children by interviewing their families, who were close to obtaining a US visa. Most of the children, who had moved to Philadelphia, were eventually reunited with their families. Inspired by the Kindertransport, Congress was urged to allow up to 100,000 Jewish children to come to America. In 1939, the Wagner-Rogers Bill was proposed, which was to admit 20,000 unaccompanied Jewish child refugees under the age of 14 into the United States. However, in February 1939, the bill failed to get Congressional approval.

Meanwhile, some non-Jews hid Jewish children; sometimes, as in the case of Anne Frank, they hid other family members as well. In some cases the Jews were actually hidden; in other cases, they were adopted into the family of their "hider". A unique case of hiding occurred in France. Almost the entire Protestant population of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, as well as many Catholic priests, nuns, and laymen, hid Jewish children in the town from 1942 to 1944. In Italy and Belgium, many children survived in hiding.

In Belgium, the Christian organization Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne hid Jewish children and teenagers with the backing of the Queen-Mother Elisabeth of Belgium.

After the surrender of Nazi Germany, which ended World War II, refugees and displaced persons searched throughout Europe for missing children. Thousands of orphaned children were displaced in camps. Many surviving Jewish children fled eastern Europe as part of the mass exodus ( Brihah) to the western zones of occupied Germany en route to the Yishuv. Youth Aliyah continued its activities after the war by helping child survivors to move to Palestine, which soon became the state of Israel in 1948.

Works cited

Astor, Gerald (1985). Last Nazi: Life and Times of Dr Joseph Mengele. New York: Donald I. Fine. ISBN 978-0-917657-46-7.

Brozan, Nadine (15 November 1982). "Out of Death, a Zest for Life". The New York Times.

Kubica, Helena (1998) [1994]. "The Crimes of Josef Mengele". In Gutman, Yisrael; Berenbaum, Michael (eds.). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. pp. 317-337. ISBN 978-0-253-20884-2.

Lagnado, Lucette Matalon; Dekel, Sheila Cohn (1991). Children of the Flames: Dr Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz. New York: William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09695-3.

Lifton, Robert Jay (21 July 1985). "What Made This Man? Mengele". The New York Times.

Lifton, Robert Jay (1986). The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-04905-9.

Mozes-Kor, Eva (1992). "Mengele Twins and Human Experimentation: A Personal Account". In Annas, George J.; Grodin, Michael A. (eds.). The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 53-59. ISBN 978-0-19-510106-5.

Nyiszli, Miklós (2011) [1960]. Auschwitz: a doctor's eyewitness account. New York: Arcade Pub. ISBN 978-1-61145-011-8.

Posner, Gerald L.; Ware, John (1986). Mengele: The Complete Story. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-050598-8.

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During the Holocaust, children were especially vulnerable to death under the Nazi regime. An estimated 1.5 million children, nearly all Jewish, were murdered during the Holocaust, either directly by or as a direct consequence of Nazi actions.

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I wonder why Hitler treat Jewish people so cruel if he is one of them

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One can't consider the Holocaust without wondering about the source of Adolf Hitler's hatred for the Jews. Although much of his political manifesto, " Mein Kampf," was devoted to explaining that hatred, which was clearly shared by an enthusiastic German nation, the actions taken against Europe's Jews were so monstrous in both nature and scale that it was inevitable that researchers would look for a more personal explanation. It's natural that scholars and others would scrutinize every piece of available evidence for proof of some deeply personal psychological injury that will explain Hitler.

Illegitimate father

Even before Hitler came to power, there were rumors that he was of Jewish descent, a detail of personal history that would be highly damaging, even humiliating to him, and which he went to lengths to quash. The idea derived from the fact - not a secret - that his father, Alois Hitler, was illegitimate. Although Hitler's paternal grandmother, Maria Anna Schicklgruber, eventually married Johann Georg Hiedler and took his surname, Alois was already aged five when she did so, and she never did reveal, if indeed she knew, who his father was.

Naturally, there was much speculation about the identity of Hitler's grandfather - most of it centered on Johann Georg Hiedler himself and his brother, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, who was the stepfather of Alois, and who left him part of his estate when he died.

The Jewish angle to the speculation, however, concerned a third candidate, a Jew named Leopold Frankenberg," who according to Hitler's personal lawyer, Hans Frank, was the young-adult son of a couple who employed Maria Schicklgruber as a cook at the time she became pregnant with Alois. According to testimony given by Hans Frank at the Nuremberg Trials, in 1945-46, he had heard from Hitler himself in 1930 about this Jewish ancestry. Nevertheless, no evidence has ever been found to support this claim, nor is there any proof that Leopold Frankenberger even existed.

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In any event, the connection between having an embarrassing ancestor in one's family tree to possessing a pathological hatred of that ancestor's ethnic group is far from obvious.

The physician

Another well-known theory concerns the Jewish physician, Eduard Bloch, who cared for Hitler's beloved mother, Klara Hitler, before her death from breast cancer, in 1907, at age 47. By the time Klara's condition was diagnosed, it was incurable, but Dr. Bloch, at her son's insistence, treated her for more than a month with a quasi-experimental medication called iodoform. The medication caused her excruciating pain, but did not extend her life.

Could the Holocaust have been Hitler's revenge on Dr. Bloch for his inability to save Klara's life?

Certainly at the conscious level, Hitler did not hold Bloch responsible for his mother's suffering. After her death, he actually wrote to Dr. Bloch thanking him for his devoted care. Three decades later, in post-Anschluss Austria in 1938, when Bloch wrote to the chancellor asking for help, Hitler arranged for him to be spared the harsh measures being taken against Jews until he could make arrangements to emigrate to the United States, where he died in 1945.

Mufti's idea?

Last fall, Israel's prime minister suggested that Hitler got the idea for the Holocaust from the Palestinian political and religious leader Amin al-Husseini, who was the grand mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1937. According to Benjamin Netanyahu, Hitler would have sufficed with expelling the Jews from Germany, but Husseini complained that if he did that, they would just come to Palestine. When Hitler asked Husseini what he recommended, said Netanyahu, the Arab counseled him to "burn them."

Netanyahu's theory was not widely embraced, to put it mildly, and he himself soon backtracked on it, conceding that, "responsibility of Hitler and the Nazis for the extermination of 6 million Jews is clear to fair-minded people."

Truth be told

In "Mein Kampf," published in two volumes, in 1925 and 1926, Hitler himself explains that he had no special feelings about Jews before he moved to Vienna, in 1908, and that even then, initially, he thought favorably of them. He saw the light only after Germany's loss in World War I, for which he held the Jews responsible.

During the second half of the 19th century, as the Jews' emancipation throughout most of Europe led to their increasing integration into society and into the modern economy, it elicited a backlash. Anti-Semitism, some of it murderous, rose across the continent, including in Germany. When the Jews were kept apart in the ghetto, and limited to certain professions, it was possible to accuse them of clannishness, and resent the interest they charged on loans. But when they emerged from the ghetto, and became captains of industry and finance, and socially and intellectually prominent, there was a whole new set of reasons to hate them. The success of the emancipated Jews was perhaps even more galling than the poverty and degradation of disenfranchised Jews - and it gave rise to racial theories that posited an essential biological difference in them.

When imperial Germany went down to defeat in 1918, and Kaiser Wilhelm, the German emperor, was forced to abdicate, a popular theory that Germany had been "stabbed in the back" by the Jews took hold. Jews' role, on the one hand, in the socialist and Communist movements that led revolutions in both Germany and Russia, and their prominence in international finance, on the other, led to dark theories about Jews' lack of national loyalty, their treachery, and their degeneracy.

In Hitler's mind, all the groups that he saw as foiling Germany - Bolsheviks, socialists, social democrats - became identified with Jews, because indeed, Jews were so prominently represented among each of them. His political theories blended with increasingly technical racial theories that imagined the Jews, along with other groups like Slavs and Gypsies, as biologically inferior to Aryans, the white northern European race that pure Germans were presumed to belong to.

However perverted his thinking and outrageous his theories, though, and whatever personal experiences he did have that may have turned him against Jews, Hitler was supported at every level of German society by people who were ready to see their country return to the greatness they felt had been denied it, and to believe that it was the Jews who were responsible for that fall from grace.

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One can't consider the Holocaust without wondering about the source of Adolf Hitler's hatred for the Jews. Although much of his political manifesto, " Mein Kampf," was devoted to explaining that hatred, which was clearly shared by an enthusiastic German nation, the actions taken against Europe's Jews were so monstrous in both nature and scale that it was inevitable that researchers would look for a more personal explanation.

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I wonder how people didn't notice there was more than two floors on the building they were hidden in...

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I wonder why Hitler's perfect point of view for a human was being pale white with blue eyes

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Although Adolf Hitler claimed the Germans were of a superior Aryan race of white, tall, blonde hair, blue-eyed individuals, he himself was of modest height, blue-eyed, and brown-haired. Traudl Junge, his last secretary often told in interviews, that people were amazed about Hitler's blue eyes. Those who met Hitler, after the War often refer, in their reminiscences, to his remarkable pale, clear blue eyes, which many state, unequivocally, had a distinctly hypnotic quality.

Hitler's eyes are important historically because of the mystical qualities sometimes attributed to them: followers frequently describe them as blazing, hypnotic, dominating. In objective fact, they were physically prominent - large and slightly bulging - and Hitler made a point of using them for dramatic effect. It was his practice, when meeting someone for the first time, to with what he imagined to be a penetrating gaze. Not surprisingly, this made a profound impression on many visitors, especially those who had come to the interview wanting this be their unforgettable meeting with the Führer. Others found the famous stare "opaque, dull".

Goebbels described one of his first meetings with Adolf Hitler in the diaries he kept:
Shakes my hand. Like an old friend. And those big blue eyes. Like stars. He is glad to see me. I am in heaven. That man has everything to be king.
Leon Degrelle in his article "The Enigma of Hitler" (The Journal of Historical Review):
Hitler had deep blue eyes that many found bewitching, although I did not find them so. Nor did I detect the electric current his hands were said to give off. I gripped them quite a few times and was never struck by his lightning.
Sefton Delmer of the Daily Express wrote on February 23rd, 1933:
By a detour we next reached a part of the building which was actually in flames. Firemen were pouring water into the red mass. Hitler watched them for a few moments, a savage fury blazing from his pale blue eyes.
Karl Ludecke, who published a book called "I knew Hitler", wrote the following about the first time that he heard Hitler speak:
Hitler was a slight, pale man with brown hair parted to one side. He had steel-blue eyes...he had the look of a fanatic...he held the audience, and me with them, under a hypnotic spell by the sheer force of his conviction.
Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl was a Harvard-educated German businessman who was an intimate of Adolf Hitler before falling out of favor and defecting. In his article in Collier's, August 4, 1934, "My Leader" tells how he got to know and serve Hitler for whom he has greatest admiration.
Then Drexler introduced Adolf Hitler. He didn't look very impressive standing there in repose. That is, until you noticed his eyes. He had clear blue eyes and in them there was neither guile nor fear. There was honesty; there was sincerity; there was a hint of scorn.
Martha Dodd writes in her book "Through Embassy Eyes":
The first glance left me with a picture of a weak, soft face, with pouches under the eyes, full lips and very little bony facial structure. The mustache didn't seem as ridiculous as it appeared in pictures - in fact, I scarcely noticed it; but I imagine that is because I was pretty well conditioned to such things by that time. As has often been said, Hitler's eyes were startling and unforgettable - they seemed pale blue in color, were intense, unwavering, hypnotic. Certainly the eyes were his only distinctive feature. They could contain fury and fanaticism and cruelty; they could be mystic and tearful and challenging. This particular afternoon he was excessive, informal, he had a certain quiet charm, almost a tenderness of speech and glance.
Hundreds of other, similar quotes are to be found in mainstream Hitler biographies. From John Toland to Alan Bullock, historians agree: Hitler had blue eyes.

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Adolf Hitler's eye color in a rare color photo

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Although Adolf Hitler claimed the Germans were of a superior Aryan race of white, tall, blonde hair, blue-eyed individuals, he himself was of modest height, blue-eyed, and brown-haired. Traudl Junge, his last secretary often told in interviews, that people were amazed about Hitler's blue eyes.

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I wonder if any kids survived the Holocaust

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Heart-moving stories of 15 of these children are told for the first time

They were the children of the damned - Jews who had no place in the New World Order of Adolf Hitler and his stormtroopers.

Their parents were rounded up and shipped off to die as the Nazi regime which came to power 80 years ago in Germany - set about the systematic 'cleansing' of the country.

But there were good people too; people who looked beyond the religion of an innocent child and risked death by guillotine to hide them from the round-up squads.

Now the heart-moving stories of 15 of these children are told for the first time in a book published this week in Berlin called 'You Don't Get Us.'

The survivors include Rahel Renate Mann, 75, who still lives in Berlin where she was hidden all those years ago.

Thrown out of hospital in June 1937 hours after she was born because of her mother's Jewishness, her mother Edith later had her baptized in the hope that it would save her from the Holocaust to come.

They lived in a tiny apartment with a Jewish star pinned on the door by the local Gestapo thugs.

When her mother was at work little Rahel played with Frau Vater, who acted as the Nazi spy for the building on the other residents, but who nonetheless liked Rahel.

The Nazis came in 1941 and took her mother away but Rahel was saved by the Vater family and fostered to another Jewish family in the building.

Then the Nazis came the following year for them. 'Mr. Vater saved me by saying I was his niece,' she said.

After this she went underground, passing from family to family, from cellar to secret cellar, staying one step ahead of the death squads shipping all Jews off to be exterminated in the death camps in occupied Poland.

She remembers a pastor called Eitel-Friedrich von Rabenau of Apostle Paul Church. He tells her about Jesus, sings Hebrew songs with her in the darkness of her hiding place in the church crypt. 'For the first time,' she says, 'I felt loved.'

When she was seven, the Gestapo arrested the pastor and Rahel was given back to the Vater family. Frau Vater built a secret compartment in the family cellar.

'I spent all day on a cold stone floor sitting on a mattress, just a sliver of light coming in through a nailed down, grimy window,' she said.

'I could not cry, talk, make any noise at all.' She taught herself to read using a children's book and a friend of the Vater family came to stay with her sometimes to pass the boredom.

'This was 1944 and the air raids were pummelling Berlin now,' she recalled. 'I was taken up after a particularly heavy one and breathed fresh air for the first time in a year.

'There was barely a house standing and there were dead bodies everywhere. The image has always haunted me.'

Then in 1945, after several more months in the cellar, the Russian soldiers arrive and haul her out of her hiding place. She is reunited with her mother shortly afterwards, but she is deathly ill with TB from a concentration camp.

'I felt so guilty as I grew up and learned about the Holocaust,' she said. 'I thought; 'Why did I live when so many had to die?' When I was 17 I tried to kill myself by throwing myself underneath a car, but the driver stopped and gave me a clip around the ear. It brought me to my senses.'

She went on to live for a decade in Israel before returning to her native Berlin where she now acts as a helper for the terminally ill in a hospice.

'My childhood taught me the value of living every second of your life,' she said. 'I survived the Nazis and that is the greatest gift of all.'

Eugen Herman-Friede had Jewish parents who separated early. His mother went on to marry a non-Jewish man, Julius Friede, and it is only after Eugen starts school that he learns of his roots.

He went to school but was booted out in 1936, aged 10, because he was branded a 'Jewish pig.' Later he was forced to wear the yellow star on his clothes - the Nazi branding of Jews as 'outsiders.'

In 1942, the Nazis closed all Jewish schools and he was sent to perform forced labour for the Reich. In 1943, weakened from lack of food, he decides to become a 'U-Boat' - the Nazi term for Jews, 6,000 in all, who went into hiding in Berlin.

He said goodbye to his girlfriend Helga Weissblut, 16. He would never see her again: she was shipped off to be murdered at the ultimate Nazi death factory of Auschwitz.

He lived in numerous hideouts, coalsheds, cellars until he reached the non-Jewish family Winkler whose son was in the Hitler Youth but who had come to detest the Nazis. 'They were warm hearted, courageous and unselfish,' says Eugem today.

'Ask yourself: would you be willing to put your neck on the block of the guillotine for people you didn't know?' He was even able to wear the Hitler Youth uniform to walk about in and was photographed in it.

The Winklers founded a resistance group but it was informed upon and in December 1944, Eugen was arrested with his parents but they were not executed as the Gestapo wanted more information about the resistance group.

They were still in prison when the war ended. 'Now I make it my
business to tell people I wasn't the hero, but those people who gave us food and shelter and hope,' he said.

'I was already doomed: they chose to defy doom when they could have looked the other way. That made them heroes.'

Rolf Joseph, now 92, says he had a normal childhood with his brother Alfred in Berlin's working class Wedding district - until the day in 1933 when the Nazis came to power and the teacher wore a 'brownshirt' uniform instead of a suit and tie.

'And he had a cane,' he said. 'And he liked to hit the Jewish children with it a lot.'

During his apprenticeship as a carpenter he recalls cycling home from school on November 9 1938 and seeing flames light up the sky. This was Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass when the Nazis instigated a statewide pogram against the Jews.

'When I saw our synagogues burn,' he said, 'I knew I had to go.' He tried to persuade his father to leave, but the stubborn WW1 veteran, who fought for the Kaiser in the trenches in France, said; 'Nothing will happen to us.'

On June 6 1942, Rolf and Alfred were on the corner of their street when they saw Gestapo men bundling and kicking their parents into a car to take them away. They never saw them again.

'Suddenly we were homeless,' says Rolf . 'Our apartment was sealed, we had only the things we carried on our backs.' They, too, went underground, first spending three weeks sleeping under leaves in the city's Tegel Forest before seeking more permanent help.

Alfred found shelter with the family of a former girlfriend, Rolf with a rag and bone woman. 'She was a strange woman with many quirks, but a good heart,' he recalled.

He was stuffed into a cellar in the Wedding district, not far from where he used to live, and ventured out cautiously once a week to meet his brother - 11.00am every Wednesday. But on one Autumn day in 1942, Alfred doesn't turn up.

'I was wondering what happened when suddenly there was this sharp voice at my shoulder,' said Rolf. 'I turned around and saw a soldier in uniform. 'Why aren't you in the Wehrmacht?' he barked. 'I told him I worked in the munitions industry.'

The soldier demanded his papers; Rolf produced a bad fake of an ID card bearing the name Paul Wagner. 'Well, Mr. Wagner, you had better come along with us,' said the soldier, motioning to a comrade sitting in a nearby car.

'Are you Jewish?' asked the soldier. Rolf nodded and his fate was sealed - he was delivered to the Burgstrasse Gestapo office in the centre of town.

Rolf went on; 'I was interrogated for hours. I was interrogated for hours. They wanted to know about where my brother is and where I hid.'

He said nothing, was moved to a basement cell and told to strip. 'We get everything in the end, you know' said a Gestapo torturer who proceeded to beat him with a bullwhip.

'You remember that address of your brother now?' he asked after administering 25 lashes. There came 25 more lashes. The silent Rolf was thrown into a cell known as Bunker Number One where he could not sit upright and he heard low voices outside saying; 'The transport to Auschwitz leaves tomorrow....'

The next morning, Rolf Joseph was chained together with five other young men and driven in a van like the one which had taken his parents away.

Above the driver's cab, Rolf saw a toolbox and he stole a pair of pliers with the aid of his fellow prisoners. They were in his pocket when he and the rest were deposited at the Pulitzstrasse train station.

A long freight train composed of cattle cars waits for them. 'They were bedecked with straw and bucket for the necessaries were in the corners.' Thousands were crammed into cars then the doors were shut and the whistle blew.

The train rattled towards Auschwitz. Using the pliers he managed to free himself from his handcuffs and those of his fellow prisoners. All six of them then prised a plank loose from the wagon and jumped inot the night air as the train crossed into Poland.

But they were betrayed by a shepherd as they walked back to Berlin, arrested again by the Gestapo. And at Burgstrasse, Rolf is again severely beaten by the man with the bullwhip, beatings which have left him with epileptic seizures to this day.

In the Gestapo HQ he scratched his body all over, claiming he had scarlet fever.. 'That was a really good idea - the Germans were really scared of infections,' he said. Weighing 93lbs, he was shipped to a Jewish hospital; his fellow escapees were shot.

At the hospital, with a guard outside his door, he manages to jump out of the second floor window by squeezing past the bars. But he has broken bones in his back by the time he drags himself to the old hiding place with the rag and bone woman - to find his brother sheltering there.

The two survived in her cellar sanctuary until it was hit by an RAF incendiary and they had to move out to the suburbs near Bernau where the old lady owned some land and they built an underground bunker to live in.

One morning in late April 1945, Russian soldiers come face to face with Rolf and Alfred Joseph in their hideyhole. 'You SS? Nazi? ', they ask in broken German.

'No, no,' says Rolf Joseph. But they brought him to their CO who happened to be Jewish. 'He asked me to say a prayer in Hebrew and I did and he said we were free men.'

Now, as Berlin remembers the Nazis and their takeover of power 80 years ago, Rolf did not live to see the anniversary or the book; he died two months before it was published, but before he passed away he said: 'I remember every day. The dead, the hopeless and the heroic.

'People who gave us life because they found it in their hearts to act with dignity towards other human beings.'

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The little ones that got away: Incredible stories of Jewish children who survived the Nazi holocaust

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Heart-moving stories of 15 of these children are told for the first time They were the children of the damned - Jews who had no place in the New World Order of Adolf Hitler and his stormtroopers.

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I wonder how the Holocaust began and how it affected peoples lives

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Holocaust | The reasons for the Holocaust

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The Jews' presence in the German-occupied parts of Europe was seen as a problem and a great annoyance. At best, they were to disappear from the face of the earth, so that the Nazis could reach their goal: a Greater Germany free from Jews.

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I wonder why people were so cruel ?

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I wonder if there was tension between the family of Anne Frank while they were in the annex?

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Eight people, living in extremely cramped quarters, in a stifling Secret Annex ... the tension is unbearable. The people in hiding live in continual fear of being discovered.

Anne writes:

'My mind boggles at the profanity this honorable house has had to endure in the past month... To tell you the truth, I sometimes forget who we're at odds with and who we're not. The only way to take my mind off it is to study, and I've been doing a lot of that lately.'

Arguments

We thought that by living together with the family of my business partner's family life would be less monotonous, but we had not considered how many difficulties would arise due the combination of characters and opinions.

Anne is struggling

Otto notes about Anne: "It was clear right from the beginning that life in hiding would be far more difficult for the spirited Anne than for us. We were aware of how much she would miss her many friends from school. Margot, who was much more mature, would accept with the situation quicker. As often as she can, Anne pours out her heart to her diary: "The nicest part is being able to write down all my thoughts and feelings, otherwise I'd absolutely suffocate."

Otto Frank

In the beginning, the atmosphere in the Secret Annex is very pleasant, but the first conflicts quickly arise. The people in hiding have to stay indoors around the clock. They must also be extremely quiet during the day when people are at work in the warehouse downstairs. Because the waste pipes for the toilet run right through the warehouse, the toilet is flushed as little as possible.There is a lot of tension, probably due to the oppressive nature of the hiding place and their constant fear of being discovered. They often quarrel among themselves. Anne describes this in much detail in her diary.

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The story of Anne Frank: Tension and bickering in the secret annex

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Eight people, living in extremely cramped quarters, in a stifling Secret Annex ... the tension is unbearable. The people in hiding live in continual fear of being discovered. 'My mind boggles at the profanity this honorable house has had to endure in the past month...

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I wonder If Anne ever caught feelings for Peter

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On Friday 7 January 1944, Anne Frank confessed her love for a boy she had been smitten with for years. She had first set eyes upon him in school in 1940, and they had been 'inseparable' for a whole summer, walking hand in hand through their neighbourhood in Amsterdam, him in a white cotton suit, her in a short summer dress. He was 'tall, slim and good-looking, with a serious, quiet and intelligent face'. He had dark hair, brown eyes, a slightly pointed nose. Anne was 'crazy about his smile', which gave him a mischievous air. At one point he gave her a pendant as a keepsake. This was the boy she hoped to marry.

His name was Peter Schiff, he was almost three years her senior, and it is clear from her diary that he was seldom out of her thoughts throughout her two years in hiding in the secret annexe behind her father's office. On 6 January 1944 she wrote that her image of him was so vivid that she didn't need a photograph, but anyone who has read her diary may be curious to see what he looked like at the time she knew him.

Until now, no portrait of Peter Schiff has come to light. But the picture you see opposite has ended this 60-year mystery and provided another glimpse into a devastated world. The photo does its trick - it shows an extremely handsome boy of 12 full of hope for the future; it is not difficult to see his appeal to any vivacious and eager girl of similar age - but the background to its recent discovery provides something more, another layer in one of the most iconic stories of our time.

The story of Anne Frank is one of bravery and fortitude. Her journal, the Diary of a Young Girl, continues to be read anew by hundreds of thousands each year not just for the insights it brings us into occupied Europe, or the practical details we glean about hiding in cramped conditions with limited resources. It is also a story of a bright Jewish girl's transition to adulthood, a maturing of intellect and sexuality and all the possibilities and challenges this brings. At times her diary is a catalogue of frustration and insecurity, but it is all-involving, a saga of peril and yearning written with exceptional emotional insight and cadences that, judging by the teenage blogs of today, we may have lost for good. But the romantic longing and crushes she experienced are timeless and universal, and anyone who has ever lost in love will sense their eyes swell with tears as she writes of Peter Schiff. Anne Frank's life and writing is not emblematic of the 6 million who died; it is far more powerful as a single voice. Since its first Dutch publication under the title The Secret Annexe in 1947, total sales have been estimated at more than 35m.

Anne Frank was born on 12 June 1929 in Frankfurt am Main. She moved to Amsterdam with her family following the Nazis' rise to power in 1933, but became trapped by the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940. She moved from a Montessori school to a Jewish one, and her life became a series of restrictions and limitations. In June 1942 she received a notebook for her 13th birthday, and her commonplace observations were usually accompanied by darker allusions. The preceding months had seen the Frank family dispose of much of their furniture and other possessions as her father planned the flight from their house to a number of rooms at the back of his office by a canal in the western quarter of the city. A move was set for 16 July, but circumstances forced a move 10 days earlier. Decoys were set: the house was made to look like it was vacated in an emergency; a note suggested their destination was Switzerland.

Anne shared her back rooms with seven others: her mother Edith, father Otto and sister Margot, a family friend named Fritz Pfeffer and the van Daan family (real name: van Pels), and much of her writing describes the jostling for position within their confined environment. She disguised the identity of the family who concealed them and brought them food and news of the outside world, and she addressed most of her diary entries to 'Dearest Kitty', a technique that prompted both a confessional style and the prospect of response. Despite her desire to become a published author, she intended her diary to remain private. But as the war progressed she began to realise the potential educational value of her writing, and she edited entries she judged to be too exposing.

At times her head is full of jealousy and self-doubt, but her mood is levelled by her memory of one boy. 'You mustn't think I am in love with Peter [van Daan], because I'm not... This morning I woke up just before seven and immediately remembered what I'd been dreaming about. I was sitting on a chair and across from me was Peter... Peter Schiff... the dream was so vivid... Peter's eyes suddenly met mine and I...#8239;stared for a long time into those velvety brown eyes. Then he said very softly: "If only I'd known I'd have come to you long ago." I turned away abruptly, overcome by emotion. And then I felt a soft, oh-so-cool and gentle cheek against mine, and it felt so good, so good.'

When she woke up she could still feel his cheek against hers, and his eyes 'staring deep into my heart'. She believed he knew how much she had loved him 'and how much I still do'.

She had a nickname for him, Petel. On 7 January 1944, she writes of being kissed by her father, and wishing it was Peter. 'All day long I've been repeating to myself, "Oh Petel, my darling, darling Petel ..."' Later in the entry she asks: 'Where can I find help? I simply have to go on living and praying to God that, if we ever get out of here, Peter's path will cross mine. Once, when Father and I were talking about sex, he said I was too young to understand that kind of desire. But I thought I did understand it, and now I'm sure I do. Nothing is as dear to me now as my darling Petel!'

As the months progress she wonders if Peter van Daan will serve as a suitable replacement for Peter Schiff, and her suspicious attitude towards him softens towards affection. But at the end of the diary we learn that he has disappointed her. Her last mention of Peter Schiff occurs at the end of April 1944, six weeks before her 15th birthday and three months before her house was raided by the German Security Police. She recalls her dream and the brushing of his cheek, and the intensity it aroused: 'I love Peter as I've never loved anyone.'

Before he moved to Amsterdam in 1939, Peter had another friend. Ernst 'Mic' Michaelis went to school with him in Berlin, and they saw each other whenever they could. Michaelis is now 81, and is a director of Pearson Panke, automotive and aerospace machinery suppliers in Mill Hill in north London. His recollections of Peter Schiff are as vivid as if he had written them in a diary. 'I always had a feeling of elation being with him,' he says. 'As a boy I liked making things, and I had simple woodworking tools and later a metal construction kit. We played with that together. I also had a very grand model railway layout, and we probably played with that as well. We were 11 or 12 years old. I was never bored in his company - I had always liked people who were full of odd ideas, and he was.'

Michaelis was born in Berlin in 1926, and he still speaks with a slight German accent. He remembers that Peter owned an expensive pen, perhaps the one in his pocket in the photograph, possibly bought for him by his mother's new partner (it is believed his father had separated from his mother before the war and moved to the United States). Michaelis also remembers the comfort he felt from being with his friend the day after Kristallnacht, the evening in November 1938 when Jewish homes, shops and synagogues were vandalised throughout Germany and thousands of Jews were escorted to the camps. 'I must have known him for at least a year and a half, possibly longer,' Michaelis remembers. 'He was an intelligent boy, and I think this must have been why he liked Anne - she had a lively mind. You get the impression from her mentions of him that it was all to do with appearance, but I'm sure she would have been bored with him if he'd been stupid.'

Michaelis and Schiff last saw each other in the summer of 1939. Michaelis came to England on the Kindertransport, going to school first in Sussex and then attending Bryanston School in Dorset. Schiff, accompanied by his mother, went to Amsterdam. But before the boys parted they exchanged photographs. Michaelis's picture was taken by a friend of his mother at his home, while Schiff's may have been taken at a professional studio. 'We did not know how else to say goodbye to each other - 12-year-old boys do not promise each other to write letters. We were at my home, but to be together as long as possible I walked with him to his home, about 25 minutes' walk.' Schiff wrote a note using his full name: 'In friendly remembrance of your friend Lutz Peter Schiff' and Michaelis pasted both note and photograph (which was standard passport-size) into an album. A few years later the photograph was transferred to a larger book, where it sat undisturbed alongside other photos and correspondence for several decades. When he first read Anne Frank's diary in the Fifties, Michaelis had suspected that the Peter Schiff in the book was the same boy he had once known. He imagined that Schiff had perished in a concentration camp, but he couldn't confirm this either. In the last few years, however, things have come into focus.

In 2000 he received a copy of Aktuell, a publication sent to refugees from Berlin scattered throughout the world. It carried a class photograph from Holdheim School taken in the spring of 1938, and with it a request for information regarding any of the 25 people pictured in it with their thick winter coats and sunny dispositions. Michaelis recognised it as his class: there he was, number 18, leaning to his left so we could get a good look at him. To his right in the same row, at number 10, was Peter Schiff. But Michaelis had more important things on his mind at the time: his wife Ann had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. He put the magazine to one side, and forgot about it.

In May 2005 his wife was told there was nothing more they could do for her. She said she would like to pay a final visit to Berlin, but this may have been as much for his benefit as for hers: she was born in London in 1939, and was not Jewish. They had visited the city not long after the wall came down, at a time when large parts of it still resembled a building site, and Ann said she wanted to see what had been built. They visited the Jewish Museum, and she bought a copy of Anne Frank's diary. 'At that time, because of her confused mind, she couldn't read novels, but she could still read biographies,' her husband says. She died four months after their visit.

Last summer, shortly before his two children had found him sheltered accommodation, Michaelis picked up Anne Frank's diary again and began to wonder. 'I realised that there were lots of pictures associated with her life, but no picture of Peter Schiff. That seemed very odd, as his [good] looks are at the heart of his story. I thought that people might be interested in my picture.' He contacted the man who had placed the class photo in Aktuell, and began a correspondence with several of his old classmates. Two remembered Peter Schiff well: 'He was a very likeable and friendly boy,' wrote Ursula Meyer (nee Totschek, number six in the photograph), who now lives in Maryland, 'and I think I had a bit of a crush on him.' Helga Burch (nee Walnau, number two), now residing in California, remembered that he was a 'delightful, funny, alert class clown, the spirit of the class. He once made Dr Gottschalk [the rabbi to the right of the picture] so angry that he hit him.'

When Michaelis searched the internet he found conflicting information, but his research did at least confirm Schiff's date of birth, and that he and Anne Frank shared the same friend.

Michaelis called the Anne Frank Trust in London: they said they didn't have a picture of Peter Schiff and knew very little about him. Then he wrote to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam (the preserved building where she and her family hid - an educational centre that attracted more than 1m visitors last year), and staff confirmed that they didn't have a picture. They encouraged Michaelis to visit, and earlier this year he made the trip with his children and his grandchildren, and his photograph. 'They were very excited,' he says, and he agreed the photograph could be used for educational purposes and on the museum's busy website. They told him there are pictures of the school Peter attended in Amsterdam, and they might now be able to pick him out.

The photo will soon be on display on the Anne Frank House website, and perhaps at the House itself, but the story is not quite complete. We know of Anne Frank's fate - arrest and then deportation to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; she died of typhus in late February or early March 1945, only a few weeks before the camp was liberated. Of those in hiding with her only her father survived, and until his death in 1980 he dedicated his life to the protection and promotion of her diaries.

But the fate of Peter Schiff is less certain. He too must have spent many months in hiding, and upon capture it is believed he disobeyed orders to join an enforced labour unit in Amsterdam (the fate of his mother is unclear). Classified as a criminal, he was transported to the Westerbork transit camp near the Netherlands' northeastern border (the Frank family was also held there for a while), and from there to Bergen-Belsen and probably Auschwitz. The date of his death is unknown, although it is entered in the record books on 31 May 1945.

In place of Peter Schiff's final details we have something quite as valuable. Not just a photograph but also a love story, between a famous girl and a handsome boy, and an elderly man and his memories of a fractured childhood. 'We tried to make some very silly jokes,' Mic Michaelis says of the day he obtained his unique memento and said goodbye to a friend he would not see again. 'But instead of laughing, all we could do was to try not to cry.'
Topics

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Simon Garfield uncovers the story of Anne Frank's lost love, Peter Schiff

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On Friday 7 January 1944, Anne Frank confessed her love for a boy she had been smitten with for years. She had first set eyes upon him in school in 1940, and they had been 'inseparable' for a whole summer, walking hand in hand through their neighbourhood in Amsterdam, him in a white cotton suit, her in a short summer dress.

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I wonder how Anne Frank's diary changed the world?

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Anne Frank was a German-Jewish teenager who was forced to go into hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, Holland during the Holocaust. Shortly after receiving a diary for her 13th birthday, the girl started recording entries on June 14, 1942, and she continued writing down her impressions while confined with her family and four other fugitives as they hid behind a bookcase in a concealed attic space in her father's office building.

The young girl's entries were made in the form of letters to several imaginary friends and she also employed pseudonyms to conceal the identities of her fellow fugitives and accomplices. Like many other normal teenagers, Anne agonized over her conflicted feelings about her family and a possible romantic interest, as well as her evolving thoughts about life. But her extraordinary depth and fine literary ability, combined with her optimism in the face of such adversity made her account a literary and historical treasure.

"It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals," she wrote shortly before her arrest,

they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart... I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.

Anne would end up spending two years and one month closeted in the hideaway, before the group was betrayed and sent off to concentration camps. Of the eight persons in hiding in the attic, only her father would survive. Anne succumbed to typhus in Belsen-Belsen in March 1945. She was just fifteen.

A family friend later retrieved the diary from the attic and presented it to Anne's father after the war. Upon reading it, Otto Frank persevered to get it published.

The diary first appeared in Amsterdam in 1947 and was subsequently published in the U.S. and the United Kingdom as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl in 1952. Its immense popularity inspired award-winning stage and movie versions.

To date the book has sold more than 30 million copies in 67 languages. The original manuscript was bequeathed to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation.
This article is excerpted from Scott Christianson's "100 Documents That Changed The World," available November 10.
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How Anne Frank's Diary Changed the World

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Anne Frank was a German-Jewish teenager who was forced to go into hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, Holland during the Holocaust. Shortly after receiving a diary for her 13th birthday, the girl started recording entries on June 14, 1942, and she continued writing down her impressions while confined with her family and four other fugitives as they hid behind a bookcase in a concealed attic space in her father's office building.

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I wonder why did Anna write in her diary

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Anne Frank starts writing in her diary on her 13th birthday. She has no truly close friends to confide in, so in her diary she writes detailed letters to an imaginary girlfriend named Kitty.

Anne Frank and her diary

Discover the story behind Anne Frank's diary.

To the website

Anne Frank's diary is published

Otto reads in Anne's diary that she intended to publish a book after the war about her time in the secret annexe.

Reactions to the diary

Otto received many letters after the publication of Anne's diary.

Anne brings the diary to the hiding place

Suffocate

Written "Tales"

Favorite quotes

Besides her diary and the stories, Anne also writes her "favorite quotes" in a separate notebook. If she reads a sentence in a book and it makes an impression on her, she then copies it into that notebook. She gets the idea for doing this from her father. Sometimes, she reflects further about one of these "favorite quotes" by writing about it in her diary.

During the hiding period, Anne does not only write in her diary. She also writes short stories. "A few weeks ago I started writing a story, something I made up from beginning to end, and I've enjoyed it so much that the products of my pen are piling up." Some of her "Tales" she reads aloud to the people in hiding.

The long letters addressed to Kitty, the name she gave to her diary, are part of Anne's diary from the very beginning. The diary becomes even more imporant to Anne during the hiding period, because she can entrust it with her innermost thoughts. On March 16, 1944, she realizes: The nicest part is being able to write down all my thoughts and feelings, otherwise I'd absolutely suffocate."

The last time she commits her feelings to paper is on August 1, 1944. Two years have passed and much has changed in her life. Those first few weeks after her birthday were "normal": she went to school, worried about her report card, gossiped about her classmates... But by July 6 she has gone into hiding and is living in the Secret Annex with her parents and sister. A week later the Van Pels family arrives, and Fritz Pfeffer joins them all in November 1942.

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The story of Anne Frank: Anne throws herself into writing

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Anne Frank starts writing in her diary on her 13th birthday. She has no truly close friends to confide in, so in her diary she writes detailed letters to an imaginary girlfriend named Kitty. Discover the story behind Anne Frank's diary.

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I wonder how Hitler became so powerful?

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I wonder why Hilter attacked the jews if he was jewish.

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One can't consider the Holocaust without wondering about the source of Adolf Hitler's hatred for the Jews. Although much of his political manifesto, " Mein Kampf," was devoted to explaining that hatred, which was clearly shared by an enthusiastic German nation, the actions taken against Europe's Jews were so monstrous in both nature and scale that it was inevitable that researchers would look for a more personal explanation. It's natural that scholars and others would scrutinize every piece of available evidence for proof of some deeply personal psychological injury that will explain Hitler.

Illegitimate father

Even before Hitler came to power, there were rumors that he was of Jewish descent, a detail of personal history that would be highly damaging, even humiliating to him, and which he went to lengths to quash. The idea derived from the fact - not a secret - that his father, Alois Hitler, was illegitimate. Although Hitler's paternal grandmother, Maria Anna Schicklgruber, eventually married Johann Georg Hiedler and took his surname, Alois was already aged five when she did so, and she never did reveal, if indeed she knew, who his father was.

Naturally, there was much speculation about the identity of Hitler's grandfather - most of it centered on Johann Georg Hiedler himself and his brother, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, who was the stepfather of Alois, and who left him part of his estate when he died.

The Jewish angle to the speculation, however, concerned a third candidate, a Jew named Leopold Frankenberg," who according to Hitler's personal lawyer, Hans Frank, was the young-adult son of a couple who employed Maria Schicklgruber as a cook at the time she became pregnant with Alois. According to testimony given by Hans Frank at the Nuremberg Trials, in 1945-46, he had heard from Hitler himself in 1930 about this Jewish ancestry. Nevertheless, no evidence has ever been found to support this claim, nor is there any proof that Leopold Frankenberger even existed.

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In any event, the connection between having an embarrassing ancestor in one's family tree to possessing a pathological hatred of that ancestor's ethnic group is far from obvious.

The physician

Another well-known theory concerns the Jewish physician, Eduard Bloch, who cared for Hitler's beloved mother, Klara Hitler, before her death from breast cancer, in 1907, at age 47. By the time Klara's condition was diagnosed, it was incurable, but Dr. Bloch, at her son's insistence, treated her for more than a month with a quasi-experimental medication called iodoform. The medication caused her excruciating pain, but did not extend her life.

Could the Holocaust have been Hitler's revenge on Dr. Bloch for his inability to save Klara's life?

Certainly at the conscious level, Hitler did not hold Bloch responsible for his mother's suffering. After her death, he actually wrote to Dr. Bloch thanking him for his devoted care. Three decades later, in post-Anschluss Austria in 1938, when Bloch wrote to the chancellor asking for help, Hitler arranged for him to be spared the harsh measures being taken against Jews until he could make arrangements to emigrate to the United States, where he died in 1945.

Mufti's idea?

Last fall, Israel's prime minister suggested that Hitler got the idea for the Holocaust from the Palestinian political and religious leader Amin al-Husseini, who was the grand mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1937. According to Benjamin Netanyahu, Hitler would have sufficed with expelling the Jews from Germany, but Husseini complained that if he did that, they would just come to Palestine. When Hitler asked Husseini what he recommended, said Netanyahu, the Arab counseled him to "burn them."

Netanyahu's theory was not widely embraced, to put it mildly, and he himself soon backtracked on it, conceding that, "responsibility of Hitler and the Nazis for the extermination of 6 million Jews is clear to fair-minded people."

Truth be told

In "Mein Kampf," published in two volumes, in 1925 and 1926, Hitler himself explains that he had no special feelings about Jews before he moved to Vienna, in 1908, and that even then, initially, he thought favorably of them. He saw the light only after Germany's loss in World War I, for which he held the Jews responsible.

During the second half of the 19th century, as the Jews' emancipation throughout most of Europe led to their increasing integration into society and into the modern economy, it elicited a backlash. Anti-Semitism, some of it murderous, rose across the continent, including in Germany. When the Jews were kept apart in the ghetto, and limited to certain professions, it was possible to accuse them of clannishness, and resent the interest they charged on loans. But when they emerged from the ghetto, and became captains of industry and finance, and socially and intellectually prominent, there was a whole new set of reasons to hate them. The success of the emancipated Jews was perhaps even more galling than the poverty and degradation of disenfranchised Jews - and it gave rise to racial theories that posited an essential biological difference in them.

When imperial Germany went down to defeat in 1918, and Kaiser Wilhelm, the German emperor, was forced to abdicate, a popular theory that Germany had been "stabbed in the back" by the Jews took hold. Jews' role, on the one hand, in the socialist and Communist movements that led revolutions in both Germany and Russia, and their prominence in international finance, on the other, led to dark theories about Jews' lack of national loyalty, their treachery, and their degeneracy.

In Hitler's mind, all the groups that he saw as foiling Germany - Bolsheviks, socialists, social democrats - became identified with Jews, because indeed, Jews were so prominently represented among each of them. His political theories blended with increasingly technical racial theories that imagined the Jews, along with other groups like Slavs and Gypsies, as biologically inferior to Aryans, the white northern European race that pure Germans were presumed to belong to.

However perverted his thinking and outrageous his theories, though, and whatever personal experiences he did have that may have turned him against Jews, Hitler was supported at every level of German society by people who were ready to see their country return to the greatness they felt had been denied it, and to believe that it was the Jews who were responsible for that fall from grace.

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One can't consider the Holocaust without wondering about the source of Adolf Hitler's hatred for the Jews. Although much of his political manifesto, " Mein Kampf," was devoted to explaining that hatred, which was clearly shared by an enthusiastic German nation, the actions taken against Europe's Jews were so monstrous in both nature and scale that it was inevitable that researchers would look for a more personal explanation.

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I wonder how Anne and her family got caught during the Holocaust.

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Acting on tip from a Dutch informer, the Nazi Gestapo captures 15-year-old Jewish diarist Anne Frank and her family in a sealed-off area of an Amsterdam warehouse. The Franks had taken shelter there in 1942 out of fear of deportation to a Nazi concentration camp. They occupied the small space with another Jewish family and a single Jewish man, and were aided by Christian friends, who brought them food and supplies. Anne spent much of her time in the "secret annex" working on her diary. The diary survived the war, overlooked by the Gestapo that discovered the hiding place, but Anne and nearly all of the others perished in the Nazi death camps.

Annelies Marie Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on June 12, 1929. She was the second daughter of Otto Frank and Edith Frank-Hollander, both of Jewish families that had lived in Germany for centuries. With the rise of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in 1933, Otto moved his family to Amsterdam to escape the escalating Nazi persecution of Jews. In Holland, he ran a successful spice and jam business. Anne attended a Montessori school with other middle-class Dutch children, but with the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940 she was forced to transfer to a Jewish school. In 1942, Otto began arranging a hiding place in an annex of his warehouse on the Prinsengracht Canal in Amsterdam.

On her 13th birthday in 1942, Anne began a diary relating her everyday experiences, her relationship with her family and friends, and observations about the increasingly dangerous world around her. Less than a month later, Anne's older sister, Margot, received a call-up notice to report to a Nazi "work camp." Fearing deportation to a Nazi concentration camp, the Frank family took shelter in the secret annex the next day. One week later, they were joined by Otto Frank's business partner and his family. In November, a Jewish dentist-the eighth occupant of the hiding place-joined the group.

For two years, Anne kept a diary about her life in hiding that is marked with poignancy, humor, and insight. The entrance to the secret annex was hidden by a hinged bookcase, and former employees of Otto and other Dutch friends delivered them food and supplies procured at high risk. Anne and the others lived in rooms with blacked-out windows, and never flushed the toilet during the day out of fear that their presence would be detected. In June 1944, Anne's spirits were raised by the Allied landing at Normandy, and she was hopeful that the long-awaited liberation of Holland would soon begin.

On August 1, 1944, Anne made her last entry in her diary. Three days later, 25 months of seclusion ended with the arrival of the Nazi Gestapo. Anne and the others had been given away by an unknown informer, and they were arrested along with two of the Christians who had helped shelter them. They were sent to a concentration camp in Holland, and in September Anne and most of the others were shipped to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. In the fall of 1944, with the Soviet liberation of Poland underway, Anne was moved with her sister Margot to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Suffering under the deplorable conditions of the camp, the two sisters caught typhus and died in early March 1945. The camp was liberated by the British less than two months later.

Otto Frank was the only one of the 10 to survive the Nazi death camps. After the war, he returned to Amsterdam via Russia, and was reunited with Miep Gies, one of his former employees who had helped shelter him. She handed him Anne's diary, which she had found undisturbed after the Nazi raid. In 1947, Anne's diary was published by Otto in its original Dutch as Diary of a Young Girl. An instant best-seller and eventually translated into more than 50 languages, The Diary of Anne Frank has served as a literary testament to the nearly six million Jews, including Anne herself, who were silenced in the Holocaust.

The Frank family's hideaway at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam opened as a museum in 1960. A new English translation of Anne's diary in 1995 restored material that had been edited out of the original version, making the work nearly a third longer.

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Anne Frank captured - Aug 04, 1944 - HISTORY.com

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Acting on tip from a Dutch informer, the Nazi Gestapo captures 15-year-old Jewish diarist Anne Frank and her family in a sealed-off area of an Amsterdam warehouse. The Franks had taken shelter there in 1942 out of fear of deportation to a Nazi concentration camp.

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I wonder what the jews did to Hitler if he was a good person?

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10 Reasons why Hitler was one of the Good Guys

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Initially I had intended creating a piece titled "10 Myths about Hitler" but decided that there were so many, that I switched topic slightly. I understand like most of my work, these areas outlined only give a flavor and are not conclusively resourced. But that's OK.

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I wonder why Hitler's army was so powerful?

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In an anarchical system like international relations, military power is the ultimate form of currency. A state may have all the culture, art, philosophy, and glitter and glory in the world, but it's all for naught if the country doesn't have a powerful military to defend itself. Mao Zedong bluntly when he stated: "power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

Of all the types of military power, armies are arguably the most important for the simple fact that people live on land, and are likely to continue doing so in the future. As the famous political scientist John J. Mearsheimer : "Armies, along with their supporting air and naval forces, are the paramount form of military power in the modern world."

In fact, according to Mearsheimer, the Pacific War against Japan was the "only great-power war in modern history in which land power alone was not principally responsible for determining the outcome, and in which one of the coercive instruments- airpower or sea power-played more than an auxiliary power." Nevertheless, Mearsheimer maintains, "land power [still] played a critical role in defeating Japan."

( Recommended: Top 5 Battleships of All Time)

Thus, armies are the most important factor in assessing the relative power of a nation. But how do we judge which armies were the most powerful in their time? By their ability to win battles decisively and consistently and the extent to which they allowed their countries to dominate other states-a function of land power, as only armies could achieve this type of control and conquest. Here are some of the most powerful armies in history.
The Roman Army
The Roman Army famously conquered the Western world over a period of a few hundred years. The Roman Army's advantage was tenacity, its ability to come back and fight again and again even in the face of utter defeat. The Romans displayed this during the Punic Wars when despite a lack of knowledge and resources, they were able to defeat the Carthaginians first by waiting them out and then by using the tactics of surprise (by landing an army at Carthage itself).

( Recommended: Top 5 Naval Battles of All Time)

The Roman Army gave its soldiers many initiatives to fight for the army with vigor and determination. For poor soldiers, victory in war meant grants of land. For landholders, it meant protecting what they held dear and also gaining additional riches. For the Roman state as a whole, victory meant securing Rome's security.

All of these initiatives spurred Roman soldiers to fight harder, and morale is a very important ingredient in the performance of armies. Just as important in this was its use of multi-line formations which, among its many advantages, helped the Roman Army replenish front-line troops during battle, where fresh Roman soldiers would square off against exhausted enemies. The Roman Army, often led by brilliant generals, also used mobility to generate offensive advantages, especially against their often defensive-minded enemies.

( Recommended: 5 Ways Japan Could Have Won World War II)

As a result, in a span of about three hundred years, Rome expanded from a regional Italian power to the master of the entire Mediterranean Sea and the lands surrounding it. The Roman Legions-divisions of the Roman Army which contained professional soldiers who served for 25 years-were well trained and well-armed with iron and were placed all over the empire in strategic locations, both holding the empire together and its enemies at bay. The Roman Army, despite some setbacks, really had no competitors of equal strength anywhere in its neighborhood.
The Mongol Army
The Mongols, who numbered at most one million men when they started their conquests in 1206, managed to conquer and subjugate most of Eurasia in a hundred years, defeating armies and nations that had tens or even hundreds of times the manpower of the Mongols. The Mongols were basically an unstoppable force that emerged seemingly out of nowhere to dominate the Middle East, China, and Russia.

( Recommended: Preparing for War with China)

Mongol success boiled down to the many strategies and tactics employed by Genghis Khan, who founded the Mongol Empire. Most important was the mobility of the Mongols and their endurance. To begin with, the nomadic Mongol way of life enabled them to move large armies across amazing distances in short times, as the Mongols could live off of their herds or the blood of their horses.

Pages

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In an anarchical system like international relations, military power is the ultimate form of currency. A state may have all the culture, art, philosophy, and glitter and glory in the world, but it's all for naught if the country doesn't have a powerful military to defend itself.

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I wonder what Hitler's childhood was like.

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Who is Adolf Hitler? Everything You Need to Know

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Adolf Hitler was the infamous dictator of Germany who carried out the genocide of Jews and was majorly responsible for the World War II. Know more about his life in this biography.

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I wonder how many people survived in the concentration camps

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I wonder why Hitler hated the Jews?

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The Anne Frank House creates exhibitions and lesson material about Anne Frank, the Second World War, the Holocaust, antisemitism, citizenship, and prejudice. Our material is geared to young people and professionals. Browse through our educational material.

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I wonder what made Hitler commit suicide

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I wonder how Hitler finance his war?

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How did Hitler finance his war? Where did he find so much oil to run his vehicles?

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Answer (1 of 31): The German army confiscated the gold reserves of every country they conquered. They used imprisoned Belgian Jewish engravers to help create counterfeit British Pounds and American currency. So much counterfeit currency was created that the Allies decided to keep it a secret for ...

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I wonder if anything bad ever happened to Hitler to make him so corruptive?

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I wonder what happened in Hitler's life to make him have something against Jewish people.

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Anne Frank House Westermarkt 20 1016 DK Amsterdam

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I wonder what it took for a Jew to be thought of as a non-Jew.

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When World War II ended in 1945, six million European Jews were dead, killed in the Holocaust. More than one million of the victims were children.

Driven by a racist ideology that viewed Jews as "parasitic vermin" worthy only of eradication, the Nazis implemented genocide on an unprecedented scale. All of Europe's Jews were slated for destruction: the sick and the healthy, the rich and the poor, the religiously orthodox and converts to Christianity, the aged and the young, even infants.

Thousands of Jewish children survived this brutal carnage, however, many because they were hidden. With identities disguised, and often physically concealed from the outside world, these youngsters faced constant fear, dilemmas, and danger. Theirs was a life in shadows, where a careless remark, a denunciation, or the murmurings of inquisitive neighbors could lead to discovery and death.

Choices

The vast majority of Jews in German-occupied Europe never went into hiding, for many reasons. Hiding meant leaving behind relatives, risking immediate and severe punishment, and finding an individual or family willing to provide refuge. Many Jews, no doubt, held out the hope that the threat of death would pass or that they could survive until the Allied victory.

Sadly, the willingness or ability of the non-Jewish populations to rescue Jewish lives never matched the Nazis' vehement desire to destroy them. Even in countries where hatred for the German occupiers ran deep, anti-Nazism did not necessarily generate aid for Jews. The Nazis portrayed the Jews as carriers of contagion, as criminals, or as "Bolshevik" agents anxious to subvert European society. The Nazis further discouraged rescue by threatening severe penalties for those caught helping Jews.

Discovered

Life in hiding was always hazardous. Throughout German-occupied Europe, the Nazis made a concerted effort to locate Jews in hiding. German officials and their collaborators harshly penalized those who aided Jews and offered rewards to individuals willing to turn in Jews. Beginning in March 1943, the Gestapo (the German secret state police) granted some Jews in Germany reprieve from deportation in exchange for tracking down their co-religionists who had gone underground. By spring 1945, when the Nazi regime lay in ruins, these informers had turned in as many as 2,000 Jews. In other countries, neighbors betrayed others for money or out of support for the regime. In German-occupied Poland, blackmailers squeezed money or property from Jews by threatening to turn them in to the authorities.

Jews in hiding were discovered by chance during raids seeking conscripts for forced labor, resistance cells, black marketers, or by random searches of documents. A slip of the tongue, improperly prepared false documents, or gossip could lead to arrest and deportation.

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Life in Shadows: Hidden Children and the Holocaust

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When World War II ended in 1945, six million European Jews were dead, killed in the Holocaust. More than one million of the victims were children. Driven by a racist ideology that viewed Jews as "parasitic vermin" worthy only of eradication, the Nazis implemented genocide on an unprecedented scale.

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I wonder how many other families did the same thing as Anne Frank and her family did, during the Holocaust.

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I wonder why Hitler had such a small mustache?

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toothbrush mustache. Before the toothbrush mustache became popular in Germany at the turn of the 20th century, the predominant German mustache style was the Kaiser mustache or "kaiserbart," named after German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Although such a mustache would be the envy of current Brooklyn hipsters, the Kaiser mustache would have been extremely difficult to maintain. In order to acquire the standard version of the toothbrush mustache, all a German man would have to do is simply snip off the ends of the Kaiser mustache, thereby saving a lot of time in mustache maintenance. A New York Times article from 1907 suggests that the mustache was an American import to Germany and that German men were largely adopting it for convenience's sake, because German women of the time tended to prefer the old-style Kaiser mustache.

The notorious Hitler mustache is a variation of the original toothbrush mustache, which makes the mustache even narrower so that it never protrudes beyond the bridge of the nose. In addition, the Hitler mustache compensated for the narrower length of the mustache by keeping the facial hair under the nose bushier. Before Hitler became famous, his variant of the toothbrush mustache was not particularly popular, often nicknamed as a "Rotzbremse" (German for "snot brake") by Bavarians. In fact, Hitler may have adopted his style of mustache because it was unpopular, reasoning that it would make him look more distinctive from the masses. When Hitler's friend Ernst Hanfstaengl asked him why he kept such an ugly mustache, Hitler replied, "If it is not the fashion now, it will be later because I wear it."

According to a Vanity Fair article Becoming Hitler, which extensively discusses the Hitler mustache,

Experts disagree on the exact year Hitler began wearing the Toothbrush. Ron Rosenbaum, perhaps the only historian to give the mustache its proper due, fixes its appearance with confidence. "It was Chaplin's first, before Hitler's," he writes in an essay from The Secret Parts of Fortune . "Chaplin adopted a little black crepe blot beneath the nose for his Mack Sennett silent comedies after 1915, Hitler didn't adopt his until late 1919, and there's no evidence (though some speculation) that Hitler modeled his 'stache on that other actor's."

But some suggest Hitler began wearing it earlier. According to a recently re-discovered essay by Alexander Moritz Frey, who served with Hitler in the First World War, Hitler wore the mustache in the trenches. Because he had been ordered to. The old bushy mustache did not fit under his equipment. In other words, the mustache that defines Hitler was cut in a shape to fit a gas mask. Which is perfect. Because Hitler was the bastard son of the Great War, conceived in the trenches, born in defeat. He inhaled mustard gas and exhaled Zyklon B. In another memoir, dismissed by some as a fraud, Hitler's sister-in-law Bridget claims she was the cause of the mustache. Bridget Hitler was Irish and lived in Liverpool, where, according to the memoir, the young Adolf spent a lost winter. Bridget (or whoever) says she often bickered with her brother-in-law. Because he was disagreeable, but mostly because she could not stand his unruly 'stache. In one of the great inadvertent summaries of historical character, she writes that in this, as in everything, he went too far.

Despite the multiple conflicting accounts of when Hitler first wore his distinctive mustache, it is doubtful that he adopted it because of Charlie Chaplin. One simple reason that Charlie Chaplin is probably not the inspiration for Hitler's mustache is that self-consciously adopting the mustache of a silent film comedian would have invited people to ridicule Hitler, which would have stopped his rise to power in its tracks. Instead, most of the evidence suggests that Hitler adopted his mustache for more utilitarian reasons either because it was easier to keep hygienic than other German mustache style, because he was forced to cut his old mustache while he was in the military, or because he simply wanted a trademark that would help him stand out as the leader he envisioned himself to be.

Source: For the reference to the Hitler mustache as a "Rotzbremse," please see the Slate Explainer column, How Popular was the Hitler Mustache in Nazi Germany?

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Why did Hitler make his moustache like that? Did he copy from Charlie Chaplin?

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Answer (1 of 3): Hitler's moustache was a variation of an early 20th century style called the toothbrush mustache. Before the toothbrush mustache became popular in Germany at the turn of the 20th century, the predominant German mustache style was the Kaiser mustache or "kaiserbart," named after ...

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I wonder if Hitler really died in World War 2

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ADOLF Hitler escaped his Berlin bunker and fled to South America where he saw out his days in the sunshine with fellow Nazis, an author has claimed in an astonishing new book.

The evil dictator allegedly died as an old man in Paraguay after spending years in sunny exile according to a new book by historian Abel Basti.

In his book Hitler in Exile Mr Basti says the Nazi could have escaped Germany to Argentina before moving to Paraguay under the protection of dictator Alfredo Stroessner.

Hitler is said to have died on February 3, 1971 in Paraguay.

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Wealthy families who helped him over the years were responsible for the organisation of his funeral. Hitler was buried in an underground bunker, which is now an elegant hotel in the city of Asuncion

Abel Basti

Mr Basti claims another man may have been left in the Berlin bunker as the Allied forces moved across the German capital leaving Hitler free to escape through a tunnel to the Templhof Airport and into a waiting helicopter to Spain or the Canary Islands before making the journey to Argentina by submarine.

Speaking to Sputnik, the historian said: "There was an agreement with the US that Hitler would run away and that he shouldn't fall into the hands of the Soviet Union.

"This also applies to many scientists, the military and spies who later took part in the struggle against the Soviet regime.

"Wealthy families who helped him over the years were responsible for the organisation of his funeral. Hitler was buried in an underground bunker, which is now an elegant hotel in the city of Asuncion.

"In 1973, the entrance to the bunker was sealed, and 40 people came to say goodbye to Hitler. One of those who attended [the funeral], Brazilian servicemen Fernando Nogueira de Araujo, then told a newspaper about the ceremony."

Using declassified FBI documents the historian found a report dated September 4, 1944 which said: "Argentina kept silent in spite of all the accusations that it became a destination for Hitler, which he reached either flying 7,375 miles from Berlin on the plane, which was built specifically for this purpose, or as a passenger on a submarine."

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He also claims Eva Braun, who was said to have committed suicide with Hitler by poisoning herself with cyanide, also fled to South America.

Mr Basti said she lived in the city of Bariloche before moving to Buenos Aires after she turned 90, where the historian ten lost track of her.

Conspiracy theorists have long argued Hitler escaped from Germany and fled to South America, following fellow Nazis Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele.

The FBI documents were also used by team of former CIA investigators, in a documentary for the History Channel, who claimed to have proof Hitler did not kill himself in his underground bunker and lived out his days in the sunshine.

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Investigators probing Hitler's demise were hampered by the lack of any physical evidence for his death.

Fantasists were given added ammunition he didn't die in his Berlin bunker when 2009 DNA tests on skull fragments found near the bunker and believed to be his, turned out to belong to a woman.

Academics have long rubbished the idea that Hitler scarpered to sunnier climes but the theory persists.

Simoni Renee Guerreiro Dias, who wrote Hitler in Brazil - His Life and His Death, published a photo reportedly of Hitler pictured two years before his death in 1984, posing happily with his black girlfriend Cutinga.

Unlike Mr Basti's book, Mr Dias claims Hitler travelled first to Paraguay and then Argentina before settling in a small town in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil.

The crazed dictator is said to have used the assumed name of Adolf Leipzig and was known to the 12,000 locals in Nossa Senhora do Livramento as "the Old German".

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Hitler 'did NOT' die in WW2 - he fled to South America and died an old man, says author

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ADOLF Hitler escaped his Berlin bunker and fled to South America where he saw out his days in the sunshine with fellow Nazis, an author has claimed in an astonishing new book. The evil dictator allegedly died as an old man in Paraguay after spending years in sunny exile according to a new book by historian Abel Basti.

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I wonder why Hitler spent time in jail before the Halocaust

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After building the product for Huffington Post, and owning the product and engineering groups at AOL after we were acquired, it was clear to me there was a huge gap between what the current CMS offering gave the world and what the world needed. Five years later we are at scale, moving the needle and...

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i wonder where they got all those gas chambers?

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Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

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I wonder if Anne Frank ever tried to escape from the camp?

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I wonder which people tried to help some Jewish people out of the concentration camps

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During World War Two, many individuals from many countries risked their lives to save various minorities, especially Jews, from the horrors of the Holocaust. This list commemorates 10 of them. All these individuals were made 'Righteous Among the Nations' by the Israeli government in honor of what they had done.

Feng-Shan Ho was a Chinese diplomat who saved approximately 2,000 Jews during the early years of World War II. Ho was consul-general of the Chinese embassy in Vienna during the Austrian annexation. After the "Kristallnacht" in 1938, the situation for the almost 200,000 Austrian Jews got rapidly more difficult, but in order to leave the country they had to provide proof of emigration, usually a visa from a foreign nation or a valid boat ticket. This, however, was difficult and the Evian Conference, in 1938, where 32 countries had failed to take a stand against Nazi Germany, made this even more complicated. Acting against orders of his superior, Ho, for humanitarian reasons, started to issue visas to Shanghai. He continued to issue these visas until he was ordered to return to China in May 1940. After the war, Ho settled in San Francisco where he died in 1997. He was made 'Righteous Among the Nations' in 2001 for his efforts to save thousands of Austrian Jews.

Irena Sendler was a Polish Catholic social worker. During World War II, she was a member of the Polish Underground and the ?egota Polish anti-Holocaust resistance in Warsaw. She helped save 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto by providing them with false documents and sheltering them in individual and group children's homes outside the ghetto. As an employee of the Social Welfare Department, she had a special permit to enter the Warsaw Ghetto, to check for signs of typhus, something the Nazis feared would spread beyond the ghetto. During these visits, she wore a Star of David as a sign of solidarity with the Jewish people and so as not to call attention to herself. She cooperated with the Children's Section of the Municipal Administration, linked with the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization tolerated under German supervision. She organized the smuggling of Jewish children from the ghetto, carrying them out in boxes, suitcases and trolleys. Under the pretext of conducting inspections of sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, Sendler visited the ghetto and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and trams, sometimes disguising them as packages. Despite being tortured and imprisoned by the Nazis, Sendler continued to do all she could to help Jewish children in Warsaw. In 1965 she was made 'Righteous Among the Nations', and died in 2008.

Hugh O'Flaherty was an Irish Catholic priest who saved about 4,000 Allied soldiers and Jews in Rome during World War II. O'Flaherty used his status as a priest and his protection by the Vatican to conceal 4000 escapees - Allied soldiers and Jews - in flats, farms and convents. Despite the Nazis desperately wanting to stop his actions, his protection by the Vatican prevented them officially arresting him. He survived an assassination attempt and, along with the Catholic Church, saved the majority of Jews in Rome. He died in 1963.

Giorgio Perlasca was an Italian who helped save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust by issuing them fake passports to travel to neutral countries. Despite fighting alongside Franco in the Spanish Civil War, Perlasca became disillusioned with Fascism and escaped from Italy to the Spanish embassy in Budapest in 1944, where he became a Spanish citizen on account of his war experience. While there he worked with Spanish diplomat Angel Sanz Briz in creating fake passports to smuggle Jews out of the country. When Sanz Briz was removed from his post, Perlasca pretended to be his substitute so that he could continue printing false passports. He also personally sheltered thousands of Hungarian Jews while they were waiting for their passports. It is estimated he saved over 5,000 Jews from the Holocaust. After the war, he returned to Italy where he lived in obscurity until he was contacted in 1987 by a group of Hungarian Jews he had rescued, and his remarkable story became public. He died in 1992.

Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat, serving as Vice Consul for the Japanese Empire in Lithuania. Soon after the occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union, he helped an estimated 6,000 Jews leave the country by issuing transit visas to Jewish refugees so that they could travel to Japan. Most of the Jews who escaped were refugees from Poland or residents of Lithuania. From July 31 to August 28 1940, Sugihara began to grant visas on his own initiative. Many times he ignored the requirements and arranged the Jews with a ten-day visa to transit through Japan, in direct violation of his orders. Given his inferior post and the culture of the Japanese Foreign Service bureaucracy, this was an extraordinary act of disobedience. He spoke to Soviet officials who agreed to let the Jews travel through the country via the Trans-Siberian railway at five times the standard ticket price. Sugihara continued to hand-write visas (reportedly spending 18-20 hours a day on them, producing a normal month's worth of visas each day) until September 4, when he had to leave his post before the consulate was closed. By that time he had granted thousands of visas to Jews, many of them heads of household who could take their families with them. According to witnesses, he was still writing visas while in transit in hotel and after boarding the train, throwing visas into the crowd of desperate refugees out the train's window even as the train pulled out. Sugihara returned to Japan where he lived in obscurity until he was made 'Righteous Among the Nations' by Israel in 1985. He died the following year.

Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz was a German member of the Nazi party who worked as a special envoy to Nazi occupied Denmark. Although Danish Jews were initially treated quite favourably by the Nazis, by 1943 it was planned that they would be rounded up and deported to concentration camps. Risking his career, Duckwitz made a secret visit to neutral Sweden where he convinced Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson to allow Danish Jewish refugees to escape to Sweden. He then went to Denmark and notified Danish politician Hans Hedtoft about the deportation. Hedtoft warned senior rabbis in the country, and in the following two months, over 6,000 Jews were ferried secretly to Sweden in boats. After his actions, Duckwitz returned to his duties as a Nazi official, refusing to reveal what he had done in case of losing his job or worse. After the war, he continued working as West Germany's ambassador to Denmark. He died in 1973. Due to his actions, it is estimated that around 99% of Denmark's Jews survived the Holocaust.

Frank Foley was a British secret service agent estimated to have saved 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust. In his role as passport control officer he helped thousands of Jews escape from Nazi Germany. At the 1961 trial of former ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann, he was described as a "Scarlet Pimpernel" for the way he risked his own life to save Jews threatened with death by the Nazis. Despite having no diplomatic immunity and being liable to arrest at any time, Foley would bend the rules when stamping passports and issuing visas, to allow Jews to escape "legally" to Britain or Palestine, which was then controlled by the British. Sometimes he went further, going into internment camps to get Jews out, hiding them in his home, and helping them get forged passports. He died in 1958.

Aristides de Sousa Mendes was a Portuguese Diplomat who ignored and defied the orders of his own government for the safety of war refugees fleeing from invading German military forces in the early years of World War II. Between the June 16 and June 23 1940, he frantically issued Portuguese visas free of charge, to over 30,000 refugees seeking to escape the Nazi terror, 12,000 of whom were Jews. De Sousa Mendes worked in the Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux, France, where despite explicit orders not to give visas to "foreigners of indefinite or contested nationality; the stateless; or Jews expelled from their countries of origin". De Sousa Mendes sporadically began printing Portuguese visas illegally as early as 1939, but it wasn't until mid June 1940, when Portugal's status was expected to change from 'neutral' to 'non-belligerent' which would make Portugal more allied to Nazi Germany. Between June 16 and June 23, de Sousa Mendes began frantically issuing visas, along with his friend, the Rabbi Chaim Kruger, to refugees waiting in line. De Sousa Mendes travelled to the border town of Irun on June 23, where he personally raised the gate to allow disputed passages into Spain to occur. It was at this point that Ambassador Teotónio Pereira arrived at Irun, declared Sousa Mendes mentally incompetent and invalidated all further visas. An Associated Press story the next day reported that some 10,000 persons attempting to cross over into Spain were excluded because authorities no longer granted recognition to their visas. As de Sousa Mendes continued the flow of visas, Dictator Salazar sent a telegram on June 24 recalling him to Portugal, an order he received upon returning to Bordeaux on June 26 but followed only slowly, not arriving in Portugal until July 8. Along the way he issued Portuguese passports to refugees now trapped in occupied France, saving them by preventing their deportation to concentration camps. After the war, de Sousa Mendes lived in destitute poverty, dying in 1954.

Dimitar Peshev was the Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly of Bulgaria and Minister of Justice during World War II. He rebelled against the pro-Nazi cabinet and prevented the deportation of Bulgaria's 48,000 Jews. Bulgaria was a strong supporter of the Holocaust, rounding up thousands of Jews in occupied Thrace and Macedonia to be deported to death camps. However, when it came to its own Jewish citizens, the government faced strong opposition from Peshev and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Although Peshev had been involved in various anti-Semitic legislation that had passed in Bulgaria during the early years of the War, the decision by the government to deport Bulgaria's 48,000 Jews on March 8 1943 was too much for Peshev. After being informed of the deportation, Peshev tried several times to see Prime Minister Bogdan Filov but the prime minister refused. Next, he went to see Interior Minister Petur Gabrovski insisting that he cancel the deportations. After much persuasion, Gabrovski finally called the governor of Kyustendil and instructed him to stop preparations for the Jewish deportations. By 5:30 p.m. on March 9, the order had been cancelled. After the war, Peshev was charged with anti-Semitism and anti-Communism by the Soviet courts, and sentenced to death. However, after outcry from the Jewish community, his sentence was commuted to 15 years imprisonment, though released after just one year. His deeds went unrecognised after the war, as he lived in poverty in Bulgaria. It was not until 1973 when he was awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations. He died the same year.

Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish humanitarian who worked in Budapest, Hungary during World War II to rescue Jews from the Holocaust. Between July and December of 1944 he issued fake passports and housed several thousand Jews, saving an estimated 100,000 people from the Nazis. On July 9 1944, Wallenberg travelled to Budapest as the First Secretary to the Swedish legation in Budapest. Together with fellow Swedish diplomat Per Anger he issued "protective passports" which identified the bearers as Swedish subjects awaiting repatriation and prevented their deportation. Although not legally valid, these documents looked official and were generally accepted by German and Hungarian authorities, who sometimes were also bribed.

Wallenberg rented thirty-two buildings in Budapest, and declared them to be extraterritorial, protected by diplomatic immunity. He put up signs such as "The Swedish Library" and "The Swedish Research Institute" on their doors and hung oversize Swedish flags on the front of the buildings to bolster the deception. The buildings eventually housed almost 10,000 people.

Wallenberg started sleeping in a different house each night, to avoid being captured or killed by Arrow Cross Party members or by Adolf Eichmann. Two days before the Russians occupied Budapest, Wallenberg negotiated with both Eichmann and General Gerhard Schmidthuber, the commander of the German army in Hungary. Wallenberg bribed Arrow Cross Party member Pál Szalai to deliver a note in which Wallenberg persuaded them to cancel a final effort to organize a death march of the remaining Jews in Budapest by threatening to have them prosecuted for war crimes once the war was over.

People saved by Wallenberg include biochemist Lars Ernster, who was housed in the Swedish embassy, and Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor to serve in the United States House of Representatives, who lived in one of the Swedish protective houses.

After the war, Wallenberg was captured and imprisoned by the Soviets, and died in prison in 1947, though the date and circumstances of his death remain disputed.

On April 28, 1935, four years before the War even started, Pacelli (soon to become Pope Pius XII) gave a speech that aroused the attention of the world press. Speaking to an audience of 250,000 pilgrims in Lourdes, France, the future Pius XII stated that the Nazis "are in reality only miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel. It does not make any difference whether they flock to the banners of social revolution, whether they are guided by a false concept of the world and of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult." During the war (when Pacelli had become Pope) he spoke out strongly in defense of the Jews with the first mass arrests in 1943, and L'Osservatore Romano carried an article protesting the internment of Jews and the confiscation of their property. The Fascist press came to call the Vatican paper 'a mouthpiece of the Jews.'

Prior to the Nazi invasion, the Pope had been working hard to get Jews out of Italy by emigration; he now was forced to turn his attention to finding them hiding places: "[t]he Pope sent out the order that religious buildings were to give refuge to Jews, even at the price of great personal sacrifice on the part of their occupants; he released monasteries and convents from the cloister rule forbidding entry into these religious houses to all but a few specified outsiders, so that they could be used as hiding places. Thousands of Jews - the figures run from 4,000 to 7,000 - were hidden, fed, clothed, and bedded in the 180 known places of refuge in Vatican City, churches and basilicas, Church administrative buildings, and parish houses. Unknown numbers of Jews were sheltered in Castel Gandolfo, the site of the Pope's summer residence, private homes, hospitals, and nursing institutions; and the Pope took personal responsibility for the care of the children of Jews deported from Italy." [ Source]

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10 People Who Saved Jews During World War Two - Listverse

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During World War Two, many individuals from many countries risked their lives to save various minorities, especially Jews, from the horrors of the Holocaust. This list commemorates 10 of them. All these individuals were made 'Righteous Among the Nations' by the Israeli government in honor of what they had done.

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I wonder why Hitler made the jews suffer horribly?

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I wonder how the world would be if Nazi Germany had won World War II?

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How close Nazi Germany came to dominating Europe. Map by Morgan Hauser via Wikimedia

What if Hitler and the Nazis had won World War II? This is perhaps the greatest historical 'what if' of all time. The map above shows just how close they came.

This has led both novelists and historians to speculate about might have happened if Germany had won the war and how they might have done so. Below we'll look at a few fictional scenarios (with maps) where they do win and what that means for the rest of the world. This will be followed by some historical speculation about whether or not Germany really could have won.

Ultimately, it was only Hitler's dual blunders of first invading the Soviet Union and then declaring war on the United States that led to his downfall.

The citizens of the Soviet Union in particular were the ones who paid the heaviest price for Hitler's ambitions and for the allies' victory. If not for their dogged determination and sacrifice in the face of odds uncounted, Hitler may well have been victorious.

So what is it about the Germans winning World War Two in particular that holds such an extreme fascination for us today? Many other wars throughout history have had dramatic turning points that rival those of the Second World War. Yet, it's the prospect of a Nazi victory that fascinates (and horrifies) us.

I think there are two reasons why this is the case. The first is rather obvious: World War Two was the largest and mostly costly war in all human history. It was the last war to see large-scale fighting in Europe and while it ended over 70 years ago, it is still within living memory of a not insignificant portion of the population; in a way that the Napoleonic Wars, US Civil War and World War One are not.

Secondly, and in my opinion much more importantly, World War Two is perhaps the only war in history where there are clear good and bad guys. Most wars by their very nature tend to be morally ambiguous. However, The Holocaust means that World War Two can't be seen in the same light.

While the Allies did commit war crimes, these can in no way compare to the attempt of Nazi Germany to exterminate an entire race of people. If Germany had won the war, there can be little doubt what would have happened to the Jews and other "undesirables," who had the misfortune of finding themselves inside the borders of the Greater German Reich.

So what would the world look like after a German victory? While it's of course impossible to say for certain, that hasn't stopped writers from speculating. Below are three maps, from three different books, representing three fictional scenarios where Germany does win the war.

The Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle's World in 1962

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick is one of the first alternate history novels to look at an Axis victory in World War Two. Written in 1962, it's set in a fictional 1962 where Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan have won the war and more or less divided the world between themselves (see map above).

The divergence from our timeline happens in 1934 when FDR is shot. Without him, the US fails to get out of the Great Depression and fails to mobilize for war. Thus, the Nazis are able to defeat the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, while Japan is able to defeat the United States.

The World is divided into 2 blocks, in a cold war type situation. The Greater German Reich (and occupied countries) with its ally the Italian Empire vs. the Empire of Japan (which includes the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere). The former United States is divided between the Japanese puppet Pacific States of America, the Rocky Mountain States and a Nazi puppet state of the United States of America.

Bizarrely, it seems Canada has managed to avoid occupation, despite being part of the British Empire and being actively at war with Nazi Germany right from the start. Also worth noting is that the Mediterranean Sea has been drained in this timeline, which was actually proposed by German architect Herman Sörgel in 1920.

While the outcome imagined in the book is historically implausible, it does explore many interesting themes, especially around the nature of reality. Thus, it is still well worth reading if you're interested in the genre.

Fatherland

Fatherland's 1964 Europe

Fatherland by Robert Harris is a slightly more realistic look at what Europe might look like after Hitler had won the war. Written in 1992, it's set in a fictional 1964 in the week leading up to Hitler's 75th birthday.

Unlike The Man in the High Castle, Japan was defeated by the United States during the war. However, the US and Germany remain locked in a cold war. Nazi Germany has gained control of all of Europe to the Ural mountains (see map above), but still has to deal with partisan fighting on its fringes.

Most of Eastern Europe has been divided into Nazi controlled Reichskommissariat, with Western Europe forming a sort of European Community (although one dominated by Germany).

While I don't want to ruin the book if you haven't read it, one of the major plot points revolves around what happened to Europe's Jews during and after the war.

In the Presence of Mine Enemies

In the Presence of Mine Enemies' World of 2010, map by Tigerstar7 via Wikimedia

In the Presence of Mine Enemies is the most recent book of the bunch, written in 2003 but set in 2010 where the US stayed out of the Second World War, which meant the Axis powers were able to win. The US then subsequently lost the Third World War when the Axis powers used nuclear weapons.

In this alternate 2010, Germany and Japan are the major world powers having both occupied and annexed large parts of the world. Germany controls almost all of Europe, except for Fascist Italy, Spain and Portugal. As a result of their victory in the Third World War they also control most of North America.

Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany and a white-led Union of South Africa have split control of Africa. Imperial Japan, on the other hand, controls virtually all of East Asia, Australia and Alaska through the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. South America (with a few exceptions) remains outside the direct control of both empires.

If you're curious about what the 21st century would look like if the Nazis had won, you might want to give this one a read.
Other fictional books set in a world where Germany wins the Second World War:
Also see The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism for a more in-depth look into why counterfactual literature focuses so much on Hitler and the Nazis.

Could Nazi Germany Really Have Won? The Facts

Germania 2: A slightly more plausible map of what Germany might look like if it won WW2 by 1Blomma via DeviantArt.

While Nazi Germany winning World War Two makes for great literary fiction, how plausible was it really? Here are a few facts to consider before making your own judgement. Nazi Germany had four main weaknesses, namely:

1. Geography: Nazi Germany was 633,786 km2 in 1939. In contrast, the British Empire in 1939 was 33.7 million km2, the United States was roughly 8 million km2 and the Soviet Union would grow to be be 22,402,200 km2 in 1945. Even at its maximum height in 1942, Nazi Germany was still only 3.6 million km2.

The German military relied on Blitzkrieg tactics, which became increasingly difficult to implement as distances increased. Plus, every new area they conquered required occupying forces. Therefore, without knockout victories, Germany in many ways became increasingly weak as it grew.

2. Population: In 1939 Nazi Germany had a population of roughly 70 million people, more than either Britain (46 million) or France (41 million), but far less than the Soviet Union (nearly 170 million), United States (130 million) or the British Empire as a whole (450+ million).

Even with the occupation of France and large sections of the USSR, it was never able to achieve anything close to parity in numbers compared to those allied against it. Moreover, its racial policies meant that it ended up murdering huge numbers of people who might otherwise have been able to help Germany's war effort.

3. Economy: In 1938, it's estimated that Nazi Germany's GDP was $375.6 billion. However, that same year the British Empire's economy was estimated to be $918.7 billion. At the height of the war, all three Axis countries (Germany, Italy and Japan) had a combined a GDP of $911 billion, still smaller that of the United States alone, which had a GDP of $1,094 billion.

To compound matters, Hitler was afraid of unrest at home, so did not put Germany on a total war production economy until 1944, when the war was all but lost. The Allies, in contrast (especially the Soviet Union), had shifted far more resources into military production far earlier, which gave them an even bigger edge than raw GDP numbers indicate.

4. Oil Production: Finally, a modern military requires oil, and lots of it, to function. Nazi Germany was always woefully under-supplied compared to the Allies. By 1941, Germany was able to extract 9.5 million barrels of crude oil per year and produce an additional 31 million barrels per year of synthetic fuel products.

However, this pales in comparison to the oil resources of the Allies. The British controlled the Middle East, which while not the oil powerhouse it is today, was still important in the 1930s and 40s. The Soviet Union had the Caucasus and Sakhalin oil fields which were estimated to have produced 242 million barrels in 1941, nearly 6 times Germany's combined production.

Finally, and most importantly, you have the United States. In 1941, it may have been producing as much as 2/3rds of the world's oil, roughly 4.5 million barrels per day. This meant that 10 days' worth of US production was greater than what Germany could produce in a year. While greater allied oil production capacity alone did not lead to victory, Germany's lack of oil resources meant that it was always in a precarious situation.

On top of these 4 weaknesses, Hitler also had an incredible string of luck that lasted until the end of 1941. Here are just a few occasions where Hitler seemed to defy the odds:

March 7th, 1936: Remilitarization of the Rhineland, in clear violation of the Treaty of Versailles and Locarno Treaties, with no real consequences.

March 12th, 1938: Austrian Anschluss, yet again it was a violation of the Treaty of Versailles, but yet again there were no real consequences.

March 16th, 1939: Annexation of Czechoslovakia, violated the Munich Agreement which had been signed 6 months before, but yet again no one stood up to Hitler.

August 23rd, 1939: Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed, which had a secret clause that split Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union. More importantly, it included a non-aggression pact that allowed Germany to focus all its resources against France and Great Britain during the first phase of the war in Europe.

June 22nd, 1940: Fall of France complete, with 157,621 German casualties and taking just six weeks, it was a much faster victory at a much lower cost than what was expected.

June 22nd, 1941: Operation Barbarossa took Soviet forces completely by surprise, which meant German armies were able to advance far faster and inflict far more damage than initially expected. However, this proved to be a hollow victory as it decidedly shifted the balance of power against the Nazis.

Finally, Stalin's purges of the 1930's left the Red Army with very weak leaders. Moreover, Stalin's mistrust of the British meant he didn't believe reports that Hitler was likely to invade. Thus, the Red Army that Hitler faced in 1941 was in as bad a shape and as ill-prepared as it was ever likely to be.

So, based on the above, could Nazi Germany have realistically won World War II? I think to answer that you have to look at the various powers it was facing after the Fall of France in 1940 and whether or not it could have defeated them.

Britain (including the British Empire): The British Empire always had a sizable population advantage over the Axis powers. Moreover, the fact that Great Britain itself is an island nation meant that invasion would have been difficult, without air and sea superiority. While neither were achieved in our timeline, a Nazi victory in the Battle of Britain and Dunkirk might have shifted the odds of success.

Being an island, Britain could also in theory have been cut off from the rest of its Empire through the use of U-boats. While an outright invasion seems somewhat unlikely to have been realistically feasible, I think cutting Britain off could have potentially forced them to seek a negotiated peace.

Soviet Union: The invasion of the Soviet Union was the number one factor leading to Hitler's downfall. And, it's difficult to see how things could have gone any better for the Germans during the opening phase of Operation Barbarossa. Geography, population and oil production were all firmly against the Germans, yet they still managed to capture an enormous swath of territory.

The only things Germany could have done better would have been to bring winter clothing and supplies, made better use of so-called " racially inferior" people in captured areas who also happened to hate the Soviet Union and finally made the taking of the Caucasus oil fields a top priority target.

However, even if they had done all three, they still would have faced the obstacle of trying to wage a Blitzkrieg-style war in a country several times its own size and faced the Russian Winter of 1941-42. Thus, while it's possible to see ways the Nazis may have been able to win based on all the things working for them, it seems far more likely that the Soviet Union was always going to win the war against Germany.

United States: With the exception of the Nazis developing atomic weapons before them, there is no way Germany could have ever realistically defeated the United Sates. The US had an industrial base that was well beyond the reach of even the longest range bombers in the 1940s. It had an economy that was larger than that of all the Axis powers combined at their height. It had a much larger population base than Germany. And it had more than enough oil to supply its own army, navy and air force.

Therefore, the best case scenario for Germany would have been a stalemate situation that resembled the Cold War. In reality, declaring war on the United States was the final nail in the Nazi coffin.

In summary, Nazi Germany and Hitler may have been able to defeat and invade Britain (although a negotiated peace looks far more likely), but was extremely unlikely to be able to defeat the Soviet Union and/or the United States once those powers joined the Allies.

If you'd like to read more about how historians think the Nazis could have won, you'll want to read these books:

Do you think Germany could have won World War II? If so, how? Please leave your thoughts below:

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What If Nazi Germany Won World War II? Fictional & Historical Scenarios

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How close Nazi Germany came to dominating Europe. Map by Morgan Hauser via Wikimedia What if Hitler and the Nazis had won World War II? This is perhaps the greatest historical 'what if' of all time. The map above shows just how close they came.

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I wonder what was Hitler's ultimate goal in launching World War II

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36 Questions About the Holocaust - Simon Wiesenthal Center Multimedia Learning Center

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Simon Wiesenthal Center Multimedia Learning Center Online

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I wonder what influenced Hitler to do these horrible things to Jews?

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The Anne Frank House creates exhibitions and lesson material about Anne Frank, the Second World War, the Holocaust, antisemitism, citizenship, and prejudice. Our material is geared to young people and professionals. Browse through our educational material.

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I wonder what caused the Holocaust?

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Holocaust | The reasons for the Holocaust

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The Jews' presence in the German-occupied parts of Europe was seen as a problem and a great annoyance. At best, they were to disappear from the face of the earth, so that the Nazis could reach their goal: a Greater Germany free from Jews.

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I wonder if Hitler was solely responsible for the holocaust?

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The SS played the leading role in all of the major operations of the "Final Solution." Regional SS and police authorities were responsible for the murder of as many as one million Soviet Jews in shooting operations between 1941 and 1943, although Romanian gendarmes and military personnel killed a few hundred thousand Ukrainian and Romanian Jews-either directly by shooting or indirectly through deliberate neglect, cutting off food and medical supplies in Romanian-occupied Transnistria.

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I wonder who hid the longest during the Holocaust

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Watching refugees escape Syria and Iraq has been really difficult for many people. I know it has been for me. Just imagine what it's like for them.

For one thing, the sheer number of people is numbing.

So are the constant stories of children in trouble. Children dying en route to Europe. Children who lose their parents and then end up alone and scared.

Mirjam Geismar knows what it's like to be a powerless child. She was a young Jewish girl in World War II Holland. I met Mirjam - and her daughter Daphne Geismar - in New Haven, Connecticut, where they live. About 70 years ago, Mirjam's own story of suffering ended when the war ended.

For nearly three years though, she didn't see her parents. Didn't know where they were. And didn't know if she would ever see them again, or what the future held.

Curiously, before Mirjam was separated from her parents during the war, she was seeing into the future - in her dreams. She had one recurring nightmare that a German shepherd - a dog once associated with the Nazis - was chasing her.

She also had another recurring nightmare. It went like this.

"We were all standing somewhere, looking at a clock," Mirjam recalls. "And they said, well if the clock stops at 12, that's when the war will start. And we were all looking, and it stopped."

On August 19, 1942, the day of her parents' anniversary, Mirjam came home from school.

"I went to my bedroom, and I saw my parents coming, and they said we have to tell you something. And then they said, it's gotten too dangerous. The Germans are somehow going to find us, we have to find hiding places. And we found one for you," she says.

At the age of 11, Mirjam got on her push scooter, and left her parents and her two sisters. The first family she stayed with she knew.

"I had braids. And before I was sent to this first family - on my scooter - they changed the name from Mirjam to Manya, because Mirjam was so obviously Jewish. And they cut off my braids - I had long braids - because they supposedly made me look more Jewish," Mirjam says.

Later, she was transferred to another home - people she didn't know - and then a third where she stayed for the rest of the war. At the third hiding place, the full extent of the fear she and the people hiding her were feeling was undeniable.

Home number three belonged to Tante Nel, a single mother. She had a daughter of her own. And she was already harboring a Jewish boy. Tante Nel wanted to help. She also needed some income and hiding Jewish kids would bring her some money.

But near the end of the war, food was so scarce that you needed a relative fortune just to feed a small family. Tante Nel resorted to things like mashed tulip bulbs mixed with flour to keep herself and her charges from starving.

As scary and untethered as daily life was for Mirjam, it all became kind of routine.

Mirjam says they slept in a hiding place at night under the kitchen floor only accessable through a trap door.

"We had a potty, so just in case we had to go to the bathroom," she says. "We had been asked to keep it in as much as possible."

There were some books in Dutch that Mirjam read over and over. "Winnie the Pooh," "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Occasionally, a teacher would slip by the house and go over reading, writing and arithmetic with the kids. Strange knocks on the door though were rarely answered.

Mirjam knew her parents were still alive. But she didn't know where they were.

Her parents had sorted out hiding places for their three girls. But they struggled to find shelter for themselves

"They went house to house like begging, where they knew somebody. Ended up at his sister's house who was married to a non-Jew. His sister was a teacher. So was her husband. They didn't have any children. They went there to beg, ask if they could stay there for awhile. And his sister said 'no.'"

Before the war, Mirjam's father had held an important job as the chief pharmacist of the city of Rotterdam. He knew people. But not even his own sister would risk hiding him. There was another option.

Mirjam's parents ended up being sheltered in a church.

"The pharmacist in Rotterdam who helped my father with medication, also found out about the church," Mirjam says.

That pharmacist introduced them to the minister of the Breeplein church in Rotterdam. And he agreed to take them in. The church is still there today, with a plaque out front explaining its role hiding Jews during the war.

I asked Mirjam if her parents were physically in the church? "In the roof," she says.

Mirjam's daughter Daphne has become kind of the keeper of her parents' and grandparents' history. She knows their story well.

"The minister went to the caretaker of the church, and said 'I would like you to create a place for this Jewish couple to hide,'" Daphne says. "And the caretaker said, 'well, I never told you this but there's another Jewish family that's been hiding in the attic for a year already.' So they made a second hiding place, so there were mirror images on either side of the organ pipes."

Two and a half years living behind a church organ. That's bound to have some consequences.

"That's why my parents hated organ music after the war," Mirjam says.

They hated organ music, but they survived. On a personal level, though, the conditions they found in that church crawl space completely re-ordered their lives.

"They had to lay in bed the whole daytime, because people who visit in the church could hear them walking if they would be," Mirjam says. "And they slept sometimes for 24 hours they were in that bed. Well, if you have a good marriage it goes really well maybe. If it's an in-between marriage, it's not the best, but if you have a trerrible marriage it's murder."

I asked her what her parent's marriage was like?

"Good," she says. "My mother was very vivacious. And my father was philosophical. He kept her happy with sleeping pills. And after the war she was addicted to them. But for a year or two after the war, she was like someone who was drunk all the time."

The pills kept Mirjam's fidgeting mother quiet in their hiding place. Silence was crucial. Months before the end of the war, there was one close-call where noise would have given Mirjam's parents away to the Nazis.

"They were looking for weapons," Mirjam says. "Somebody had told them that there were weapons hidden in the church."

Mirjam's daughter, Daphne, pickes up the story, saying that her grandmother was asleep and right below the attic was another little room behind the organ pipes, so nobody came up there and that's often where my grandfather would go to read.

"He was there (in the room) and he suddenly heard this commotion that was actually the other family hiding on the other side of the organ pipes," Daphne says. "And they were saying 'Quick, quick, get into your hiding places.' So, my grandfather looked out into the nave of the church and he saw the Dutch Nazi police searching the church. He knew he had to get into his space very quickly and without anybody hearing him. There was a ladder and he crawled up into the space and then he would throw the ladder up and catch it.

"He couldn't pull it up because it would grate along the side and make too much noise. He got the ladder up, closed the trap door and was very happy to see that my grandmother was sleeping and she would be quite. The SS did come up to the space right below where he was and as they were there he saw this spoon from lunch teetering on the edge of the stones and could have fallen or not. It happened not to have fallen."

Daphne says her grandfrather heard them searching around in the pipes of the organ, and then they left.

It's just one of many incredible stories that emerged from war. The stories of the ones who survived. By sheer luck in many cases. Many Jews thought that all they had to do was hide, be quiet, and things would be fine once the war was over. Mirjam's family did.

"We just said, we'll be quiet, we'll survive, and we'll come nicely together," Mirjam says. "And somehow it worked for me. But it didn't work for many, many people. Many more."

So why do we tell these stories? I asked Mirjam that. And her answer, basically: Because stories are the only thing the survivors have.

"That's the only you've got to fight it back," she says. "What else is to do? You feel you have to do something. So you tell the story, maybe. If it helps one person, it's worth it, I suppose. Especially if it's your child.

And so Mirjam told Daphne, her daughter. And Daphne tells her daughter. And they tell me. And I tell you.

When the war ended, Mirjam and her two sisters were brought out of their hiding places and taken to the church in Rotterdam.

Her family did come back together. Sheer luck. But somewhere in that luck lies some hope.

Mirjam's parents couldn't tolerate organ music again. But her father never lost his taste for Mozart.

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This Jewish couple survived the Holocaust hidden behind a church organ. Their daughter - also in hiding - had no idea.

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Watching refugees escape Syria and Iraq has been really difficult for many people. I know it has been for me. Just imagine what it's like for them. For one thing, the sheer number of people is numbing. So are the constant stories of children in trouble. Children dying en route to Europe.

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I wonder if Adolf Hiltler commit suicide or was he killed ?

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Adolf Hitler was a German politician who was the leader of the Nazi Party, Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and Führer ("Leader") of Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1945. He killed himself by gunshot on 30 April 1945 in his Führerbunker in Berlin.

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I wonder how many Jews went to Europe to escape the holocaust.

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Jewish Population of Europe Six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Jewish communities across Europe were shattered. Many of those who survived were determined to leave Europe and start new lives in Israel or the United States. The population shifts brought on by the Holocaust and by Jewish emigration were astounding.

According to the American Jewish Yearbook, the Jewish population of Europe was about 9.5 million in 1933. In 1950, the Jewish population of Europe was about 3.5 million. In 1933, 60 percent of all Jews lived in Europe. In 1950, most Jews (51 percent) lived in the Americas (North and South combined), while only a third of the world's Jewish population lived in Europe.

The Jewish communities of eastern Europe were devastated. In 1933, Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe, numbering over three million. By 1950, the Jewish population of Poland was reduced to about 45,000. The Soviet Union had the largest remaining Jewish population, with some two million Jews. Romania's Jewish population was nearly 757,000 in 1930 and fell to approximately 280,000 (1950). Most of these demographic losses were due to the Holocaust, the rest to postwar emigration from Europe.

The Jewish population of central Europe was also devastated. Germany had a Jewish population of 565,000 in 1933 and just 37,000 in 1950. Hungary had 445,000 in 1933 and 190,000 in 1950. Czechoslovakia's Jewish population was reduced from about 357,000 in 1933 to 17,000 in 1950 and Austria's from about 250,000 to just 18,000.

In western Europe, the largest Jewish communities remained in Great Britain, with approximately 450,000 Jews (300,000 in 1933) and France, with 235,000 (225,000 in 1933). In southern Europe, the Jewish population fell dramatically: in Greece from about 100,000 in 1933 to just 7,000 in 1950; in Yugoslavia from about 70,000 to 3,500; in Italy from about 48,000 to 35,000; and in Bulgaria from 50,000 in 1933 to just 6,500 in 1950 (the reduction in the Bulgarian Jewish population resulted from postwar emigration). The demographic focus of European Jewry thus shifted from eastern to western Europe.

Before the Nazi takeover of power in 1933, Europe had a vibrant and mature Jewish culture. By 1945, most European Jews-two out of every three-had been killed. Most of the surviving remnant of European Jewry decided to leave Europe. Hundreds of thousands established new lives in Israel, the United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, South America, and South Africa.

And we were traveling criss-cross Poland looking for surviving Jews, and we found them. And sometimes these meetings were so packed with emotion that I, I lack the words to describe it, you know. Because the idea that we are really survivors couldn't sink in yet.
-Leah Hammerstein Silverstein

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Jewish Population of Europe Six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Jewish communities across Europe were shattered. Many of those who survived were determined to leave Europe and start new lives in Israel or the United States. The population shifts brought on by the Holocaust and by Jewish emigration were astounding.

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Why did Hitler only want to be a dutch country

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The History Place - Triumph of Hitler: Hitler Reveals War Plans

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November 5, 1937: Hitler Reveals His War Plans - The Hossbach Conference

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Why Did Adolf Hitler Hate the Jews?

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One can't consider the Holocaust without wondering about the source of Adolf Hitler's hatred for the Jews. Although much of his political manifesto, " Mein Kampf," was devoted to explaining that hatred, which was clearly shared by an enthusiastic German nation, the actions taken against Europe's Jews were so monstrous in both nature and scale that it was inevitable that researchers would look for a more personal explanation. It's natural that scholars and others would scrutinize every piece of available evidence for proof of some deeply personal psychological injury that will explain Hitler.

Illegitimate father

Even before Hitler came to power, there were rumors that he was of Jewish descent, a detail of personal history that would be highly damaging, even humiliating to him, and which he went to lengths to quash. The idea derived from the fact - not a secret - that his father, Alois Hitler, was illegitimate. Although Hitler's paternal grandmother, Maria Anna Schicklgruber, eventually married Johann Georg Hiedler and took his surname, Alois was already aged five when she did so, and she never did reveal, if indeed she knew, who his father was.

Naturally, there was much speculation about the identity of Hitler's grandfather - most of it centered on Johann Georg Hiedler himself and his brother, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, who was the stepfather of Alois, and who left him part of his estate when he died.

The Jewish angle to the speculation, however, concerned a third candidate, a Jew named Leopold Frankenberg," who according to Hitler's personal lawyer, Hans Frank, was the young-adult son of a couple who employed Maria Schicklgruber as a cook at the time she became pregnant with Alois. According to testimony given by Hans Frank at the Nuremberg Trials, in 1945-46, he had heard from Hitler himself in 1930 about this Jewish ancestry. Nevertheless, no evidence has ever been found to support this claim, nor is there any proof that Leopold Frankenberger even existed.

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In any event, the connection between having an embarrassing ancestor in one's family tree to possessing a pathological hatred of that ancestor's ethnic group is far from obvious.

The physician

Another well-known theory concerns the Jewish physician, Eduard Bloch, who cared for Hitler's beloved mother, Klara Hitler, before her death from breast cancer, in 1907, at age 47. By the time Klara's condition was diagnosed, it was incurable, but Dr. Bloch, at her son's insistence, treated her for more than a month with a quasi-experimental medication called iodoform. The medication caused her excruciating pain, but did not extend her life.

Could the Holocaust have been Hitler's revenge on Dr. Bloch for his inability to save Klara's life?

Certainly at the conscious level, Hitler did not hold Bloch responsible for his mother's suffering. After her death, he actually wrote to Dr. Bloch thanking him for his devoted care. Three decades later, in post-Anschluss Austria in 1938, when Bloch wrote to the chancellor asking for help, Hitler arranged for him to be spared the harsh measures being taken against Jews until he could make arrangements to emigrate to the United States, where he died in 1945.

Mufti's idea?

Last fall, Israel's prime minister suggested that Hitler got the idea for the Holocaust from the Palestinian political and religious leader Amin al-Husseini, who was the grand mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1937. According to Benjamin Netanyahu, Hitler would have sufficed with expelling the Jews from Germany, but Husseini complained that if he did that, they would just come to Palestine. When Hitler asked Husseini what he recommended, said Netanyahu, the Arab counseled him to "burn them."

Netanyahu's theory was not widely embraced, to put it mildly, and he himself soon backtracked on it, conceding that, "responsibility of Hitler and the Nazis for the extermination of 6 million Jews is clear to fair-minded people."

Truth be told

In "Mein Kampf," published in two volumes, in 1925 and 1926, Hitler himself explains that he had no special feelings about Jews before he moved to Vienna, in 1908, and that even then, initially, he thought favorably of them. He saw the light only after Germany's loss in World War I, for which he held the Jews responsible.

During the second half of the 19th century, as the Jews' emancipation throughout most of Europe led to their increasing integration into society and into the modern economy, it elicited a backlash. Anti-Semitism, some of it murderous, rose across the continent, including in Germany. When the Jews were kept apart in the ghetto, and limited to certain professions, it was possible to accuse them of clannishness, and resent the interest they charged on loans. But when they emerged from the ghetto, and became captains of industry and finance, and socially and intellectually prominent, there was a whole new set of reasons to hate them. The success of the emancipated Jews was perhaps even more galling than the poverty and degradation of disenfranchised Jews - and it gave rise to racial theories that posited an essential biological difference in them.

When imperial Germany went down to defeat in 1918, and Kaiser Wilhelm, the German emperor, was forced to abdicate, a popular theory that Germany had been "stabbed in the back" by the Jews took hold. Jews' role, on the one hand, in the socialist and Communist movements that led revolutions in both Germany and Russia, and their prominence in international finance, on the other, led to dark theories about Jews' lack of national loyalty, their treachery, and their degeneracy.

In Hitler's mind, all the groups that he saw as foiling Germany - Bolsheviks, socialists, social democrats - became identified with Jews, because indeed, Jews were so prominently represented among each of them. His political theories blended with increasingly technical racial theories that imagined the Jews, along with other groups like Slavs and Gypsies, as biologically inferior to Aryans, the white northern European race that pure Germans were presumed to belong to.

However perverted his thinking and outrageous his theories, though, and whatever personal experiences he did have that may have turned him against Jews, Hitler was supported at every level of German society by people who were ready to see their country return to the greatness they felt had been denied it, and to believe that it was the Jews who were responsible for that fall from grace.

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One can't consider the Holocaust without wondering about the source of Adolf Hitler's hatred for the Jews. Although much of his political manifesto, " Mein Kampf," was devoted to explaining that hatred, which was clearly shared by an enthusiastic German nation, the actions taken against Europe's Jews were so monstrous in both nature and scale that it was inevitable that researchers would look for a more personal explanation.

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I wonder  when the holocaust began and ended?

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When did the Holocaust actually begin? The answer is not so simple.

The term Holocaust (with a capital H) is commonly used to refer to the systematic murder by Nazi Germany of approximately six million Jews and the destruction of their communities, representing one-third of world Jewry at the time. In this use, it is analogous to the Hebrew word Shoah, also used to refer to the genocide committed against the Jews. Sometimes Holocaust is also used in a broader sense, to refer to all of the victims of Nazi state-organized murder, including the Roma, gay people and others.

The Nazi genocide and ethnic cleansing efforts did not begin as a specific plan to gas Jews and others in concentration camps, but rather evolved over time, beginning with systematic persecution aimed in part at encouraging Jewish emigration from Germany to other countries. It grew from spontaneous murders to planned massacres of Jewish communities, to the establishment of an industrial apparatus for the efficient, wholesale slaughter of a people.

In recognition of the evolving nature of the genocide, the date most frequently associated with the start of the Holocaust is January 30, 1933: This is when Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor, setting in motion what would become the Nazi genocide against the Jews. The end of the Holocaust is usually thought to be May 8, 1945, or VE (Victory in Europe) Day, when the Allies formally accepted Germany's unconditional surrender, ending World War II on the Continent, although fighting continued in the Far East.

When does persecution become genocide?

A major turning point in Nazi policy toward Jews was the coordinated attacks by the Sturmabteilung (or SA, the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party) against Jews and Jewish institutions and businesses throughout Germany and Austria on November 9-10, 1938 - an event known as Kristallnacht or the Night of the Broken Glass, due to the large amount of shattered windows at Jewish properties in its aftermath. At least 91 Jews were killed in the violence, and 30,000 were arrested and interned in concentration camps (but not extermination camps). Over 900 synagogues and 7,000 Jewish businesses were severely damaged or destroyed.

Kristallnacht marked the transition of the Nazi policy vis-a-vis Jews from social ostracism, abrogation of legal rights and economic boycotts, to organized physical violence including murder. As such, some consider the November '38 pogrom as marking the actual beginning of the Holocaust - the date when anti-Jewish persecution in Germany began moving toward genocide.

Mass killings of Jews became commonplace following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Death squads called Einsatzgruppen, formed at the order of Reinhard Heydrich, director of the Reich Main Security Office at the time, were tasked with murdering Jewish civilians and Communist Party officials with the help of local citizens. Historians estimate that between June 1941 and May 1943, these roaming death squads killed over 1 million Jews.

Industrial-scale murder of Jews, known as the Final Solution, was approved by the senior Nazi leadership on January 20, 1942 at the Wannsee Conference, held just outside Berlin. At the meeting, called by Heydrich, he presented the plan to transport Jews from Eastern and Western Europe to extermination camps located in Poland.

While the fall of the Nazi regime and its surrender on May 8, 1945 is usually the date given as the end of the Holocaust - it did not mark the end of organized killings of Jews in Europe. Hundreds of Jews were killed across Poland by Polish locals after the war had ended. In the most of infamous of these events, on July 4, 1946, over 40 Jews were killed in the Polish city of Kielce, in a massacre incited by Polish communist authorities with elements among the local population participating.

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When did the Holocaust begin? A Genesis of genocide

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When did the Holocaust actually begin? The answer is not so simple. The term Holocaust (with a capital H) is commonly used to refer to the systematic murder by Nazi Germany of approximately six million Jews and the destruction of their communities, representing one-third of world Jewry at the time.

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I wonder why they chose to hide in the attic and not anywhere else

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Museum closed - The Anne Frank House is closed until 1 June 2020 due to the corona virus.

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I wonder where the name holocaust came from

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Names of the Holocaust vary based on context. " The Holocaust" is the name commonly applied in English since the mid-1940s to the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II.

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I wonder how Adolf Hitler died?

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Adolf Hitler was the leader of Germany for a little over a decade, and he is known as one of the cruelest dictators of the last century. Yet, how much do you know about the beginning and the end of Hitler's life?

How Hitler Died

By 1945, it was clear that Germany would not win the war. On January 16, 1945, Hitler moved to Fuherbunker and attempted to lead the Nazis against the Allies who were advancing from both the east and the west. By April of 1945, the Soviets had entered Berlin and it was clear the war was almost over.

Some historians conjecture that Hitler had a nervous breakdown by April 22, and he admitted that Germany would lose the war in one of his military conferences. He asked his physician for an appropriate way to commit suicide, and his doctor suggested a dose of cyanide and a gunshot to the temple.

On April 29th, he married his mistress. He and his new wife spent less than forty hours together in the bunker. In the afternoon of April 30th, individuals heard a gunshot from the study. Hitler had shot himself, and it was assumed that his new wife poisoned herself.

Hitler's Early Life

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889. He was born at an inn in Austria-Hungary. He was the fourth child of Alois and Klara Hitler. When he was three, his family moved to Germany. Here, Hitler learned the dialect of Lower Bavarian.

During his childhood, Hitler helped the family in farming and beekeeping. He attended school in Fischlham. After finding a book among his father's possessions about the Franco-Prussian War, Hitler became fixated on the topic of war. He read more and more books about the topic, and studied military texts.

In 1897, the family moved to Lambach and Hitler attended a Catholic school. On the walls of this school, there were several engravings of a swastika. When Hitler's brother died in 1900, Hitler's personality became more withdrawn. He became extremely sullen and detached. Additionally, Hitler did not get along well with his father, who was extremely authoritarian. His father died in 1903.

Hitler and Military Action

The military and German nationalism was an obsession for Hitler. His father served for the Austrian government, and Hitler saw his devotion to Germany as a way of rebelling against his father.

Hitler was kicked out of two schools after 1903, and after he was expelled from his second school, he never returned to formal education again. He was running out of money, and with the death of his mother, he no longer had additional support. In 1909, Hitler lived in a homeless shelter.

He moved out of the shelter in 1910 into a house for poor working men. He attempted to sell his paintings, but did not have much success. In 1913, he moved to Munich because he had received the final part of his father's estate. When Germany entered World War I in August of 1914, Hitler requested to serve in a Bavarian regiment. It was allowed, and Hitler enlisted in the Bavarian army.

Hitler and Anti-Semitism

During World War I, Hitler truly became a passionate German patriot. He was obsessed with the experience of war, and thought it was the greatest of all experiences. He was shocked when Germany lost the war, and thought that Germany was stabbed in the back by its own citizens.

This obsession with who betrayed Germany helped fuel some of his anti-Semitic beliefs. By the end of World War I, the facets of Hitler's personality that made him such a horrifying leader were almost fully formed. He was a passionate German patriot and believer in German superiority, a devout anti-Semite, and an individual obsessed with war and militarization.

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Adolf Hitler was the leader of Germany for a little over a decade, and he is known as one of the cruelest dictators of the last century. Yet, how much do you know about the beginning and the end of Hitler's life? By 1945, it was clear that Germany would not win the war.

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I wonder if the Jews had ever protest against the Nazi party.

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The Anti-Nazi Boycott of 1933 was a boycott of German products by foreign critics of the Nazi Party in response to an organized campaign of violence and boycotting undertaken by Hitler's Nazi Party against the Jews of Germany following his appointment as Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933.

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I wonder if Anne ever felt scared that the Nazis would find them while they were sleeping.

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From Monday July 6, 1942 the Frank family goes into hiding . The hiding place is not quite ready yet at that time. Everywhere there are still things in boxes. The people in hiding immediately go to work to make curtains so the neighbors can not see them from outside.

Anne writes:

"Not being able to go outside upsets me more than I can say, and I'm terrified our hiding place will be discovered and that we'll be shot. "

The Secret Annex Online

Discover Anne Frank's hiding place

The Van Pels family

Two years

Fritz Pfeffer

Very careful

Wishes

A Peek at the Neighbours

In her diary, Anne describes a particular evening when she uses a pair of binoculars to take a peek at the neighbors:
"I never knew that neighbors could be so interesting. Ours are, at any rate. I've come across a couple at dinner, one family was making home movies and the dentist across the way was working on a frightened old lady."

On July 23, 1943, Anne writes down everybody's wishes: "Margot and Mr. Van Pels wish, above all else, to have a hot bath filled to the brim, which they can lie in for more than half an hour. Mrs. Van Pels would like a cake, Pfeffer can think of nothing but seeing his Charlotte and Mother is dying for a cup of real coffee. Father would like to visit Mr. Voskuijl, Peter would go downtown, and as for me, I'd be so overjoyed I wouldn't know where to begin. Most of all I long to have a home of our own, to be able to move around freely and have someone help me with my homework again, at last. In other words, to go back to school!"

The people in hiding may not go outside; it is much too dangerous. The curtains of the Secret Annex may also not be opened during the day, otherwise one of the neighbours might see them. The small window in the attic provides the only chance for getting a breath of fresh air. At night, other windows are occasionally opened just a crack.

In November 1942, an eighth person joins the people in hiding: Fritz Pfeffer. He is a dentist and an acquaintance of both the Franks and the Van Pels family. Margot begins sleeping in her parent's room, so then Anne can share the room next door with Fritz Pfeffer. In her diary, Anne Frank jots down her first impression of her new roommate: ''...a very nice man".

In July 1942, the people in hiding are unaware that they will spend more than two years in the Secret Annex. All that time, they will not be able to go outside and they will have to share the darkness and dampness of the hiding place, continually fearful of being discovered...

The Van Pels family arrive at the Secret Annex a week later. Anne is happy because there are now more people to talk to. The Van Pels family live on the third floor. During the day Mr. and Mrs. Van Pels' bedroom functions as the common living and dining room. Next door is Peter van Pels ' tiny room. Anne writes about it: "...very small, very dark and damp." Via Peter's room, the people in hiding can reach the attic, where the food supplies are stored. Anne and Peter often go to the attic so they can talk in private. The Frank family live in two rooms on the second floor.

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From Monday July 6, 1942 the Frank family goes into hiding . The hiding place is not quite ready yet at that time. Everywhere there are still things in boxes. The people in hiding immediately go to work to make curtains so the neighbors can not see them from outside.

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i wonder how Anne Frank and her family got caught living in the attic.

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On this day in 1944, a German-born Jewish girl and her family, who had been hiding in German-occupied Holland, are found by the Gestapo and transported to various concentration camps. The young girl's diary of her time in hiding was found after her death and published. The Diary of Anne Frank remains one of the most moving testimonies to the invincibility of the human spirit in the face of inhuman cruelty.

She was born Annelies Marie Frank, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on June 12, 1929. Her father, Otto Frank, a businessman, moved his wife and two daughters to Holland early in the Hitler regime. After the German invasion and occupation of the Netherlands, the Franks were threatened with deportation to a forced-labor camp and so went into hiding. They spend the next two years, from July 9, 1942, until August 4, 1944, in the back of Otto's food products warehouse, along with four other Jews. Gentile friends and neighbors smuggled in food and other supplies.

Acting on a tip from Dutch informers, the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police), discovered the Franks and arrested them. They then transported them to the Auschwitz concentration camps in Poland in September. Anne and her sister, Margot, were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany a month later. There Anne died of typhus, in March 1945, not long before the camp was liberated by the Allies.

Otto Frank was found, still alive, in Auschwitz by the Russian troops that liberated the camps there (Anne's mother had died in January). Friends back in Holland who had searched the Franks' former hiding place found a stash of personal papers; among the collection was Anne's diary, which described her emotional and intellectual development during the two years spent eluding detection by the Nazis. Otto had it published in 1947 as The Diary of a Young Girl. It has since been translated into more than 50 languages and adapted for stage and screen. The most memorable line remains: "In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart."

The Franks' hiding place, on the Prinsengracht Canal in Amsterdam, has been turned into a museum.

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Anne Frank and her family arrested by Gestapo - Aug 04, 1944 - HISTORY.com

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On this day in 1944, a German-born Jewish girl and her family, who had been hiding in German-occupied Holland, are found by the Gestapo and transported to various concentration camps. The young girl's diary of her time in hiding was found after her death and published.

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I wonder if hitler was an only child.

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Learning about Adolf Hitler's childhood may help to determine why he acted in such devastatingly cruel and horrible ways later in life.

Adolf Hitler's Childhood

His Family

Interestingly, Adolf Hilter was born on Easter Sunday. However, he would not come to represent the beautiful ideals that Easter stands for. The date was April 20, 1889, and he arrived at 6:30 in the evening.

He was born to Alois and Klara Hitler. Adolf had five siblings, but only one lived past childhood:

Gustav died at the age of two in 1887

Ida died at the age of two in 1888

Otto died within a year of birth in 1887

Edmund died at the age of six in 1900

His sister, Paul, was born in 1896 and lived until 1960

Alois was an Austrian customs official and he was able to provide his family with a comfortable lifestyle; however, he and his son did not get along. Alois had a terrible temper and had a general bad attitude. He was obnoxious and conceited, and he often took his problems out on his children.

His wife was the complete opposite from him, but she had virtually no power in the household. Coupled with the fact that women did not have much power to begin with, she was dealing with an aggressive and dominating husband.

Adolph's Formative Years

Between the ages of six and eight, Adolf attended two different schools based upon where his family was living. He was rewarded and praised by his teachers for constantly having high marks and for acting properly in class.

The family moved around frequently, thanks to Alois' job. However, they eventually settled in Linz when Adolf was nine years old. He frequently referred to Linz as his actual home throughout his life.

Once they moved to Linz, Adolf continued with elementary school. He quickly became the center of his group of friends and would often be the one leading them in games.

Changes in Adolph Hitler's Life

Once he was finished with primary school, his father enrolled him in the Realschule which focused more on matters such as science and technology than a traditional curriculum. He did not enjoy his time there and made it known throughout his life. Although he had received stellar marks when he was younger, he wound up having to repeat a semester at this new school. His grades were never stellar again and bounced back and forth between poor and average for the remainder of his days there.

When he was 16 years old in 1905, he was no longer required to attend school. Of course, he had the option to go on to receive a higher education; but, he decided that he was done with schooling forever.

Adolf Hitler's childhood losses could have played a role in his later personality and style. He suffered quite a number of losses before his death. As we mentioned, four of his five siblings did not live past their childhood, although the majority of them died before he was even born. At the age of 14, his father Alois passed away.

On December 21, 1907, one of the greatest losses that Hitler felt in his life was the death of his mother to breast cancer.

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what is known about adolf hitler's childhood

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What Is Known About Adolf Hitler's Childhood?

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Learning about Adolf Hitler's childhood may help to determine why he acted in such devastatingly cruel and horrible ways later in life. Interestingly, Adolf Hilter was born on Easter Sunday. However, he would not come to represent the beautiful ideals that Easter stands for.

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I wonder why people would believe Hitler when he would say Jews were the problem.

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The claim that the change in Germany's fortunes had been achieved single-handedly was, of course, absurd. Fascinating, nevertheless, in this litany of what most ordinary Germans at the time could only have seen as astonishing personal successes of the Führer, is that they represented national "attainments" rather than reflecting central tenets of Hitler's own Weltanschauung. There was not a word in this passage of the pathological obsession with "removing" the Jews, or of the need for war to acquire living space. Restoration of order, rebuilding the economy, removal of the scourge of unemployment, demolition of the restrictions of the hated Versailles Treaty, and the establishment of national unity all had wide popular resonance, ranging far beyond die-hard Nazis, appealing in fact in different ways to practically every sector of society. Opinion surveys long after the end of the Second World War show that many people, even then, continued to associate these "achievements" positively with Hitler.

Compared with the state of Germany six years earlier, it was hard for those listening to Hitler's 1939 speech, even many who had earlier opposed the Nazis, not to admit that Hitler had accomplished something extraordinary. Few were clear-sighted or willing enough to analyze what lay behind the "achievements," to reject the gross inhumanity on which Germany's rebuilding had been founded, to perceive the undermining of governmental structures and ruination of Reich finances that was taking place, above all, to comprehend the colossal risks for the country's very existence involved in the regime's course of action. And few were in any position to contradict the fundamental lie in the claim that Hitler had constantly endeavored to avoid bloodshed and to spare his people (and others) the suffering of war. What for most Germans in spring 1939 were aims in themselves, which Hitler appeared triumphantly to have accomplished, were for Nazi leaders merely the platform for the war of racial-imperialist conquest which they were preparing to fight.

But, however false their underlying basis, the claims in this speech point to areas of great success in winning over the mass of the population to support for Hitler. With all the caveats that are necessary for generalizations about approval, where those disapproving were mainly forced into silence, it is surely not mistaken to speak of a wide-ranging consensus which the integrative force of the Hitler Myth had cemented during the peace-time years of the dictatorship.

Fertile Terrain Prepared the Way

It was a manufactured consensus, a propaganda construct, with repression of political opponents, "racial enemies" and other outsiders to the proclaimed "national community" as the other side of the coin. The "superman" image of Hitler amounted to the central component of the fabrication. Already before the "takeover of power" it had been the creation of the most modern, hugely successful, political "marketing" strategy of its time, masterminded by Goebbels. And once the monopoly of state control of propaganda fell into Nazi hands in 1933, there was no obstacle in the mass media to the rapid spread of Hitler's "charismatic" appeal.

But even the slick and sophisticated techniques behind the creation of the Führer Myth would have been ineffective, had not fertile terrain been prepared long before Hitler became Reich Chancellor. Expectations of national salvation were by 1933 widespread, not just among Nazi supporters, and had already become vested in the person of Hitler. By the time that he took power, over 13 million voters had at least partially swallowed the Führer cult, which was more fully embraced by the huge (if fluctuating) mass membership of the Party and its myriad subordinate affiliations. The organizational basis was therefore laid for the wider transmission of the Führer cult.

Given the failure of Weimar democracy and the crisis conditions in which the Hitler government came to power, it was clear that if the new Reich Chancellor could swiftly attain some successes, he would substantially increase his popularity. The scope for the rapid widening of the adulation of Hitler, the winning of "the majority of the majority" who had not voted for him in March 1933 had been laid. The speed with which the Hitler cult now spread has to be seen from this background, as well as from the masterly deployment of propaganda imagery.

There were a number of crucial areas where Hitler could win great support by acting in what seemed to be the national, not partisan party-political, interest, and through converting his image from that of Party to national leader. Even his opponents recognized the growth of his popularity. The exiled Social Democratic organization, the Sopade, based in Prague, acknowledged in April 1938 the widely-held view it had repeatedly echoed, "that Hitler could count on the agreement of the majority of the people on two essential points: 1) he had created jobs and 2) he had made Germany strong."

Readily Accepted the Acclaim

In the early years of the Third Reich, most people sensed that after the dismal years of hopelessness there was new direction, energy, and dynamism. There was a widespread feeling that finally a government was doing something to get Germany back on her feet. Of course, Hitler, whose knowledge of economics was primitive, had not personally guided the economic recovery in the early years of the Third Reich. The reasons for the rapid revival were complex and varied. If any single individual could be said to have masterminded the recovery, then it was Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank and Reich Minister of Economics. Hitler's contribution was above all to alter the climate, to build an air of confidence that Germany was being revitalized. But propaganda portrayed the economic upturn as Hitler's own achievement. He readily accepted the acclaim, and most people thought it was warranted.

It was the first major step towards winning over those who had not supported him in 1933. It seemed undeniable: while other European countries (and America) still suffered drastically from mass unemployment, Hitler had removed the scourge from Germany and ushered in a kind of "economic miracle". A Sopade report from the Ruhrgebiet in late summer 1934 acknowledged that even "the neutral labor force" largely believed in Hitler, adding: "The 'work creation' by which the unemployed had landed in jobs, even if badly paid ones, has greatly impressed them. They believe that Hitler's 'quick decision-making' will lead him one day, if he is 'properly informed,' to change taxes in their favor." On a clandestine visit to Germany from his Norwegian exile in the second half of 1936, Willi Brandt, no less, admitted much the same: that providing work had won the regime support even among those who had once voted for the Left.

Left a Lasting Mark

By 1936, there was full employment. Of course, by now, rearmament, containing grave dangers for the future, was driving the labor market. But few Germans worried much about where the opportunities were work came from. The fact was, where in the past there had been immense misery through mass unemployment, there was now work. That was seen as largely Hitler's personal achievement. And if image differed from reality, it was the image that left the lasting mark.

That Hitler had rid Germany of mass unemployment and rescued the country from the depths of the depression was seen by many Germans long after the war as a major achievement, whatever disasters had later followed. Good living conditions and full employment were among the positive attributes of Hitler recorded in opinion surveys in the American occupied zone in the late 1940s, while a sample of young Germans in north Germany around a decade later thought Hitler had done much good in abolishing unemployment. As late as the 1970s, Ruhr workers still had positive memories of the peacetime years of the Third Reich, which they associated with full employment and the pleasures of excursions with the Nazi leisure organization, "Kraft durch Freude," or Strength Through Joy.

The second point singled out by the Sopade as the basis of Hitler's support was without doubt a key factor. Hitler never ceased to hammer home the humiliation Germany had suffered in defeat in 1918 -- allegedly the work of the "November criminals" -- and in the Treaty of Versailles signed the following year. The detestation of the Treaty and its perceived unfairness crossed the political spectrum in Germany. The reduction of the army to a mere 100,000 men was the lasting manifestation of national weakness. The bold moves in foreign policy that Hitler undertook to overthrow the shackles of Versailles and reassert Germany's national strength and prestige were, therefore, guaranteed massive popular support as long as they could be accomplished without bloodshed.

Vast Approval for Hitler's Iron Fist

The withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, the Saar plebiscite in 1935, the re-introduction of compulsory military service and announcement of a big new Wehrmacht the same year, the re-militarization of the Rhineland in 1936 and the "Anschluss" or annexation of Austria two years later were all seen as huge national triumphs, openly demonstrating the weakness of the western powers which had lorded it over Germany since the war, and a feat -- unimaginable only a few years earlier -- solely possible through Hitler's "genius" as a statesman. Even oppositional circles were forced to concede this, as a Sopade report on the reactions to the introduction of the military conscription in March 1935 illustrates:

"Enormous enthusiasm on March 17. All of Munich was out on the streets. You can force a people to sing, but you can't force them to sing with that kind of enthusiasm. I experienced the days of 1914 and I can only say, that the declaration of war didn't make the same impression on me as the reception for Hitler on March 17. ... The trust in Hitler's political talent and honest will is becoming greater, as Hitler has increasingly gained ground amongst the people. He is loved by many."

The Sudetenland crisis in the summer of 1938, as the threat of war loomed ever larger, posed the first significant challenge to the image, which Hitler had earlier sought to cultivate, of the fanatical defender of Germany's rights who had restored his country's standing in the world but had striven to avoid bloodshed. The western powers then, at Munich at the end of September, allowed Hitler one final great triumph in foreign policy -- even if it was one which, inwardly, he resented, since he had been set on war over Czechoslovakia.

The resignation, rather than enthusiasm, that greeted war when it finally arrived in September 1939 again shows that Hitler had extended his popular support during the Third Reich's peacetime years on a false prospectus. Most people wanted the preservation of peace. Hitler had sought war. He effectively admitted the need to mislead the public in a confidential address to representatives of the German press in November 1938, when he remarked:

Unlimited German Conquest

"Circumstances have forced me to almost only speak of peace for decades. It was only through the continued emphasis on the German desire for peace and peaceful intentions that it was possible to give the German people the arms that were always a requirement for the next step."

For the vast majority of Germans, the restoration of national pride and military strength, the overthrowing of the Versailles Treaty and the expansion of the Reich to incorporate ethnic Germans from Austria and the Sudetenland were goals in themselves. Most could not, or would not, comprehend, that for Hitler and the Nazi leadership they were the prelude to a war of unlimited German conquest.

In addition to his presumed achievements in bolstering Germany's external standing, Hitler unquestionably won much support through what was taken to be the restoration of "order" at home. Nazi propaganda had been influential in the last, crisis-ridden years of the Weimar Republic, in instilling in much of the population an exaggerated image of criminality, decadence, social disorder and violence (much of which the Nazis themselves had instigated). Once in power, Hitler had much to gain through seeming to represent "people's justice," and the "wholesome national sensibility." His public image was that of the upholder of public morality who would clamp down, wherever he encountered it, on those posing a threat to law and order.

At the end of June 1934, Hitler took what many thought was ruthless but necessary action to crush the leadership of the SA, an increasingly unpopular sector of his own Movement. In his Reichstag speech of 13 July 1934, Hitler took personal responsibility for the murders that had taken place. What had in reality been a brutal, Machiavellian power-political coup was portrayed as a necessary move to crush an imminent internal threat to the nation and to root out corruption and immorality. Hitler emphasized the homosexuality, loose living and extravagant life-style of Ernst Röhm and other SA leaders. Playing on existing, commonly-held prejudice, he was able to override any adherence to fundamental legal principles by claiming to have acted in the national interest as the highest judge of the German people.

Upswing in Support

Instead of condemnation for his authorization of mass murder, he reaped extensive approval for appearing to have acted ruthlessly to eradicate the evils and misdeeds that endangered the nation. "Through his energetic actions the Führer has hugely won over the broad masses, particularly those who had still reacted hesitantly to the Movement; he is not only admired, he is idolized," was the verdict in one confidential report from within the lower levels of the regime's bureaucracy. Many other reports echoed the same sentiments. Reports filtering out of Social Democrat oppositional circles -- whose main thrust was, naturally, criticism of the regime -- acknowledged the upswing in support for Hitler.

According to one report from Bavaria: "In general, it has unfortunately become clear that the people don't think politically. They think, 'now Hitler has created order, now things will go forward -- the saboteurs who sought to hinder his work have been destroyed.'" A report from Berlin added: "Hitler's authority is strengthened in the widest circles. Increasingly, one hears people saying: 'Hitler is cracking down.'"

The view that Hitler had brought order to Germany was one that persisted well into the postwar era. That, despite "mistakes" (presumably those which had brought his country's ruination through war, and death and destruction to millions) he had "cleaned up" Germany, putting an end to disorder, stamping out criminality, making the streets safe to walk again at night, and improving moral standards, belonged -- together with the credit for eradicating mass unemployment and building the motorways -- to the lasting elements of the Führer Myth.

Alongside economic recovery, rebuilding military strength and restoring "order," Hitler gained support by personifying the "positive" values invested in national unity and the "Volksgemeinschaft" or national community. Propaganda incessantly depicted him as the stern but understanding paterfamilias, prepared to sacrifice normal human contentments and to work day and night for no other end than the good of his people. Whatever the frequent criticism of his underlings and the negative image of the "little Hitlers" -- the Party functionaries whom people daily encountered and often found wanting -- Hitler himself was widely perceived as standing aloof from sectional interests and material concerns, his selflessness contrasting with the greed and corruption of the Party big-wigs.

Goebbels' published ritual incantations to "our Hitler" each year on his birthday, and the popular photographic books mass produced by Heinrich Hoffmann (each selling in huge numbers) which seemingly revealed the "private" Hitler -- "The Hitler Nobody Knows" (1932), "Youth Around Hitler" (1934), "Hitler in his Mountains" (1935) and "Hitler Off Duty" (1937) -- all aimed to highlight the "human" side of the Führer and show that his "heroic" qualities arose from the very fact that he was a "man of the people."

The 'Dynamic Hatred' against Minorities

How many fully swallowed the nauseating personality cult can, of course, never be established. Not a few obviously did. Unctuous letters, doggerel poems and other eulogies, photographs and gifts -- including in one case the offer of a sack of potatoes which the Führer apparently liked -- poured in, to be dealt with by Hitler's adjutants. There was a rise in the early years of the Third Reich in the numbers of parents naming their new-born babies Adolf, even though a decree of 1933 had instructed local registry offices to discourage the practice to protect the Führer's name. Such effusions of the Führer cult were doubtless confined in the main to a fanatical, Nazified minority. But even those able to keep the full excesses of the personality cult at arm's length nevertheless often accepted at least some parts of Hitler's positive image.

The national community gained its very definition from those who were excluded from it. Racial discrimination was inevitably, therefore, an inbuilt part of the Nazi interpretation of the concept. Since measures directed at creating "racial purity," such as the persecution later of homosexuals, Roma and "a-socials," exploited existing prejudice and were allegedly aimed at strengthening a homogeneous ethnic nation, they buttressed Hitler's image as the embodiment of the national community. Even more so, the relentless denunciation of the nation's alleged powerful enemies -- Bolshevism, western "plutocracy," and most prominently the Jews (linked in propaganda with both) -- reinforced Hitler's appeal as the defender of the nation and bulwark against the threats to its survival, whether external or from within.

Though Hitler's anti-Semitic paranoia was not shared by the vast bulk of the population, it plainly did not weigh heavily enough in the scales on the negative side to outweigh the positive attributes that the majority saw in him. The widely prevalent latent dislike of Jews, even before monopolistic Nazi propaganda got to work to drum in the messages of hatred, could offer no barrier to the "dynamic" hatred present in a sizeable minority -- though after 1933 a minority holding power. Much research has illustrated a diversity of attitudes towards the persecution of the Jews (most plainly visible in varied reactions to the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935 and "Kristallnacht" in November 1938). Nevertheless, the Nazis appear to have been successful in establishing, in most people's eyes, that there was a „Jewish Question", and in deepening the anti-Jewish feeling at the time that the external threat of imminent war was growing.

An Irrelevant Consideration

When the open violence of Kristallnacht proved unpopular, even within Nazi circles, Hitler took care to distance himself publicly from the pogrom which he himself had commissioned. But, despite extensive disapproval of the methods, there was by now a general feeling that Jews no longer had any place in Germany, and Hitler's association of Jews with the growing international danger (which he had done more than anyone to foster) strengthened -- at least did not weaken -- his image as the fanatical defender of his nation's interests.

Materially, too, many had benefited from the exclusion of Jews from German society, their economic dispossession, and their expulsion. The "boycott movement" which had begun as soon as Hitler became Reich Chancellor and, in waves, had effectively driven Jews out of commercial life, eventually ushering in the "aryanization" program of 1938 that robbed Jews of their possession, operated to the profit of large numbers of Germans. Here, too, many felt reason to be grateful to Hitler. The human cost, paid by an unpopular minority, was for them an irrelevant consideration.

The apparently unending run of successes that Hitler could claim during the "peacetime" years of the Third Reich had a further reinforcing by-product. After 1933, affiliations of the NSDAP could spread their tentacles to almost all sectors of society. Millions of Germans were "organized" by the Nazi Movement in some fashion or another, and in each affiliation it was difficult fully to escape the clammy embrace of the Führer cult. Armies of petty apparatchiks and careerists owed position and advancement to the "system" that Hitler led. The emphasis upon "leadership" and "achievement" invited ruthless competition, played upon everyday ambition and opened up unheard of possibilities, unleashing a vast outpouring of energy in the broad endeavor to promote the vision of national renewal embodied in Hitler himself. Literally or metaphorically, many individuals at every level of the regime operated along the guidelines laid down by Werner Willikens, state secretary in the Prussian Agriculture Ministry in February 1934 when he declared:

"Everyone who has the opportunity to observe it knows that the Führer can hardly dictate from above everything which he intends to eventually accomplish. On the contrary, up till now everyone with a post in the new Germany has worked best when he has, so to speak, cooperated with the Führer."

Willikens added that it was "the duty of everybody to try to cooperate with the Führer"-- a key to how the Third Reich functioned, and to an important bond between "Führer" and society.

Deflated and Isolated

These bonds were not, of course, of uniform strength. Alongside the fanatics were the skeptics and, though they could not express themselves in any meaningful fashion, the dissenters. Nor was it possible to sustain the enthusiasm for Hitler at a constant height. The outpourings of elation at moments of triumph, such as the announcement of the re-militarization of the Rhineland in 1936, were peaks. They subsided again as soon as the gray everyday returned for most people.

Nevertheless, the affective integration which Hitler's mounting popularity during the first years of the dictatorship undoubtedly created was of immeasurable importance. Whether the adulation of Hitler was genuine or contrived (as it doubtless was in many cases), it had the same function. Millions of Germans who might otherwise have been opposed to, doubtful about, or only marginally committed to the regime and Nazi doctrine were publicly seen to give Hitler their backing. This was crucial to the dynamic of Nazi rule.

At the grass roots, the growth of the Führer cult meant that Hitler could detach himself from policy areas which were unpopular and exploit immense reserves of personal support practically at will. The negative impact, for example, of the "Church struggle" was directed away from Hitler and towards subordinate leaders, such as Goebbels and Rosenberg. When popular morale sagged in the spring of 1936, the Rhineland spectacular, focused directly on Hitler's "great achievement," served to re-galvanize support for the regime. The very purpose of the Reichstag "election" of March 29, 1936 was to demonstrate the unity of the people behind Hitler for internal as well as foreign consumption. Not for the last time during the Third Reich, opponents of the regime felt deflated and isolated. And Hitler had the backing he needed for further advancement of his expansionist goals. "The Führer allows the people to demand that he implement the policies he wanted," was the perceptive insight of one Sopade report.

Deposing Him Was Impossible

The plebiscitary acclamation which Hitler could summon on such occasions massively strengthened his own position against the different groupings within the regime's power elite. Among the narrower elite of Nazi leaders, Hitler's immense popularity made him in every respect unchallengeable in his dogmatically held views and in his steerage of policy, even when, by 1938-9 some Nazi leaders, including Göring, were having cold feet about the dangers of embroilment in a war with the western powers.

More important still, Hitler's popularity made him untouchable for those groupings within the national-conservative power-elite, above all in the Wehrmacht leadership and parts of the Foreign Ministry, where fears of a future disastrous war were leading by 1938 to the first embryonic signs of opposition to the dangerous course of foreign policy. When the western powers played into Hitler's hands and given him yet another „triumph without bloodshed", it was plain to the nascent oppositional circles at the end of September 1938, that any move to depose him was impossible (a realization which helped to paralyze the conservative resistance throughout the first, victorious phase of the war).

Fatal Narcissisim

Hitler's conquest of the masses had the vital consequence, therefore, of extending his autonomy from any possible constraints within other sections of the regime. This helped to ensure that the ideological fixations which Hitler obsessively maintained since the beginning of his political "career" -- the "removal" of the Jews and the pursuit of "living space" -- were by the later 1930s emerging not simply as distant utopian dreams, but as realizable policy objectives. The process had been promoted at all levels of the regime through a readiness to "work towards the Führer." But this in itself was a reflection of the dominance that Hitler had so rapidly established after taking over power, then consolidated and extended, backed at crucial stages by the plebiscitary acclamation which the expansion of his popularity had produced.

Finally, there was the impact of the expanded Führer cult on Hitler himself. Some of those in his close proximity later claimed to have detected a change in Hitler around 1935-6. He became, so it was said, more dismissive than earlier of the slightest criticism, more convinced of his own infallibility. His speeches started to develop a more pronounced messianic tone. He saw himself ever more -- the tendency had been long implanted in his personality, but was now much exaggerated -- as chosen by Providence. When, following the successful Rhineland coup, he remarked, in one of his "election" speeches: "I follow the path assigned to me by Providence with the instinctive sureness of a sleepwalker," it was more than a piece of campaign rhetoric. Hitler truly believed it. He increasingly felt infallible.

By the mid-1930s, at the latest, the narcissistic trait in his own personality, the extreme flattery and sycophancy that surrounded him, and the immense adulation of the masses that repeatedly stimulated him, combined to magnify the belief that Germany's destiny lay in his own hands, and that he alone could guide his country to final victory in the ever closer great conflict. "It depends essentially on me, on my being, on my political skills," he told his generals on the eve of the war. He stressed, as part of this reasoning, "the fact that no one else will ever have the trust of the whole German people as I do. There will never be a man in the future, who has more authority than me. My being is therefore a huge value factor ... No one knows how much longer I will live. Therefore, it is better to have the conflict now."

By this time, August 1939, all sections of the regime, and the masses who had been so jubilant at Hitler's every "success," had ensured that their fate was tied to the decisions of the Führer. So it would remain down to 1945. In the wartime years, as seemingly glorious victory gave way to mounting, inexorable calamity, as defeat on defeat inevitably eroded the charismatic basis of his leadership, and as it became plain that he was leading Germany into the abyss, the fateful bonds with Hitler that had been sealed in the "good years" of the 1930s ensured that there was now no way back. The German people, having supported Hitler's triumphs, were now condemned to suffer the catastrophe into which he had led them.

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The Führer Myth: How Hitler Won Over the German People - DER SPIEGEL - International

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The claim that the change in Germany's fortunes had been achieved single-handedly was, of course, absurd. Fascinating, nevertheless, in this litany of what most ordinary Germans at the time could only have seen as astonishing personal successes of the Führer, is that they represented national "attainments" rather than reflecting central tenets of Hitler's own Weltanschauung.

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I wonder why Hitler wanted to take over the world then blew it with Russia?

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Hitler Comes to Power In the early 1930s, the mood in Germany was grim. The worldwide economic depression had hit the country especially hard, and millions of people were out of work. Still fresh in the minds of many was Germany's humiliating defeat fifteen years earlier during World War I, and Germans lacked confidence in their weak government, known as the Weimar Republic. These conditions provided the chance for the rise of a new leader, Adolf Hitler, and his party, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nazi party for short.

Hitler was a powerful and spellbinding speaker who attracted a wide following of Germans desperate for change. He promised the disenchanted a better life and a new and glorious Germany. The Nazis appealed especially to the unemployed, young people, and members of the lower middle class (small store owners, office employees, craftsmen, and farmers).

The party's rise to power was rapid. Before the economic depression struck, the Nazis were practically unknown, winning only 3 percent of the vote to the Reichstag (German parliament) in elections in 1924. In the 1932 elections, the Nazis won 33 percent of the votes, more than any other party. In January 1933 Hitler was appointed chancellor, the head of the German government, and many Germans believed that they had found a savior for their nation.

Key Dates

June 28, 1919
Treaty of Versailles ends World War I
In the Treaty of Versailles, which followed German defeat in World War I, the victorious powers (the United States, Great Britain, France, and other allied states) impose severe terms on Germany. Germany, under threat of invasion, is forced to sign the treaty. Among other provisions, Germany accepts responsibility for the war and agrees to make huge payments (known as reparations), limit its military to 100,000 troops, and transfer territory to its neighbors. The terms of the treaty lead to widespread political discontent in Germany. Adolf Hitler gains support by promising to overturn them.

October 24, 1929
Stock market crash in New York
The plummet in the value of stocks that is associated with the New York stock market crash brings a rash of business bankruptcies. Widespread unemployment occurs in the United States. The "Great Depression," as it is called, sparks a worldwide economic crisis. In Germany, six million are unemployed by June 1932. Economic distress contributes to a meteoric rise in the support for the Nazi party. As a result, the Nazi party wins the votes of almost 40 percent of the electorate in the Reichstag (German parliament) elections of July 1932. The Nazi party becomes at this point the largest party in the German parliament.

November 6, 1932
Nazis lose support in parliamentary elections
In the Reichstag (German parliament) elections of November 1932, the Nazis lose almost two million votes from the previous elections of July. They win only 33 percent of the vote. It seems clear that the Nazis will not gain a majority in democratic elections, and Adolf Hitler agrees to a coalition with conservatives. After months of negotiations, the president of Germany, Paul von Hindenburg, will appoint Hitler chancellor of Germany in a government seemingly dominated by conservatives on January 30, 1933.

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Hitler Comes to Power In the early 1930s, the mood in Germany was grim. The worldwide economic depression had hit the country especially hard, and millions of people were out of work. Still fresh in the minds of many was Germany's humiliating defeat fifteen years earlier during World War I, and Germans lacked confidence in their weak government, known as the Weimar Republic.

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I wonder why Hilter chose the swastika symbol?

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Pages 14-15
The Swastika Flag
The swastika is a very old symbol with use widespread throughout the world. Sometimes referred to as a "Gammadion" "Hakenkreuz" or a "Flyfot," it traditionally had been a sign of good fortune and well being The word "swastika" is derived from the Sanskrit "su" meaning "well" and "asti" meaning "being." It also is considered to be a representation of the sun and is associated with the worship of Aryan sun gods. It is a symbol in both Jainism and Buddhism, as well as a Nordic runic emblem and a Navajo sign.

By definition, the swastika is a primitive symbol or ornament in the form of a cross. As the illustration below shows, the arms of the cross are of equal length with a section of each arm projecting at right angles from the end of each arm, all in the same direction and usually clockwise.

When Adolph Hitler, the frustrated artist, was placed in charge of propaganda for the fledgling National Socialist Party in 1920, he realized that the party needed a vivid symbol to distinguish it from rival groups. He sought a design, therefore, that would attract the masses. Hitler selected the swastika as the emblem of racial purity displayed on a red background "to win over the worker,"

Hitler had a convenient but spurious reason for choosing the Hakenkreuz or hooked cross. It had been used by the Aryan nomads of India in the Second Millennium B.C. In Nazi theory, the Aryans were the Germans ancestors, and Hitler concluded that the swastika had been "eternally anti-Semitic."

In spite of its fanciful origin the swastika flag was a dramatic one and it achieved exactly what Hitler intended from the first day it was unfurled in public. Anti-Semites and unemployed workers rallied to the banner, and even Nazi opponents were forced to acknowledge that the swastika had a "hypnotic effect."

"The hooked cross" wrote American correspondent William Shirer "seemed to beckon to action the insecure lower-middle classes which had been floundering in the uncertainty of the first chaotic postwar years." The swastika flag had a suggestive sense of power and direction. It embodied all of the Nazi concepts within simple symbol. As Adolph Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, "In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the Nationalist idea, and in the swastika the vision of' the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man."
The Bremen Incident
One of the first actions Hitler carried or after becoming Chancellor in 1933 was to abolish the Weimar Republic flag. On April 22, 1933 he decreed that the national flags of German would be the old Imperial red, white, and black tricolor and flown in conjunction with the swastika flag. These flags were to be flown together on all merchant ships, which led to a serious incident with diplomatic consequences.

On the night of Friday, July 26, 1935, several hundred Communists took part in an anti Nazi demonstration on a pier in New York harbor as the German liner Bremen was about to depart for Europe. They attempted to board the liner and were fought by 250 policemen, detectives, and crew members. Thirty of the demonstrators gained the forelock of the vessel and tore down the swastika flag flying there and threw it into the Hudson River. In the short fierce struggle with the police, a detective was badly beaten before the Communists were ejected.

Meanwhile, there was savage fighting on the pier and in the adjacent streets. The police used their batons freely on the heads of the Communists and after a time the demonstrators we drawn off. The police arrested four men alleged to be the assailants of the injured detective. Three others were arrested for disorderly conduct.

The injured detective and two of the rioters were taken to the hospital. Ten of the Bremen's crew also were treated for cuts and bruises. The liner departed on time, and 20 policemen sailed with her as far as the quarantine station to guard against the possibility that other Communists might be concealed on board and start a new attack. The Bremen's commander, Captain Ziegenbein, commended the police's work. The police officials, however, blamed the ship's officers for taking too lightly a warning they had sent them hours before the riot occurred.

The indignities inflicted upon the German flag by the American anti-Nazi demonstrators on board the Bremen resulted four days later in an emphatic protest being delivered to the American Acting Secretary of State by the German Charge d'Affaires in Washington. It was pointed out to the German diplomat, however, that the insult had been aimed at the "Party" flag and that the National flag had not been interfered with: a very fine distinction in the circumstances but one which precipitated the Nuremberg Flag Laws of September 15, 1935.

The whole question of the German National flag was resolved seven weeks later during the Seventh Reichsparteitag Congress held at Nuremberg in September 1935. This annual occasion was used by Hitler to publicly announce that the red, white, and black swastika flag of the Nazi Party would henceforth be the National flag of Germany. The incentive to solve the unsatisfactory arrangement of flying two flags together representing the nation had been thrust upon the Fuhrer as a direct result of the Bremen incident. The official use of the swastika flag came simultaneously with the increased use of racial policies.

The Swastika Flag's use as the National Flag was a symbol of the acceleration of the Nazi's anti-Semitic agenda which included the September 15, 1936, "Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor." These laws revoked the Jews' citizenship in the Reich. Jews could not vote, marry Aryans, or employ "in domestic service, female subjects of German or kindred blood who are under the age of 45 years."

Jews found themselves excluded from schools, libraries, theaters, and public transpor-tation facilities- Passports were stamped with the word "Jew." Name changes were disallowed, but Jewish men had to add the middle name "Israel," Jewish women the name "Sarah." Jewish wills that offended the "sound judgement of the people" could be legally voided. Furthermore, Jewish businesses were taken away from their owners and placed in the hands of German "trustees."
The Bremen Incident led the Nazi's to raise their banner of hatred as a national symbol while making the Jews into "second class subjects" of Germany. The Jews were then treated as the untermenschenHitler believed they were.

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The Swastika: A Sign of Good Luck Becomes a Symbol of Evil

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Pages 14-15 The Swastika Flag The swastika is a very old symbol with use widespread throughout the world. Sometimes referred to as a "Gammadion" "Hakenkreuz" or a "Flyfot," it traditionally had been a sign of good fortune and well being The word "swastika" is derived from the Sanskrit "su" meaning "well" and "asti" meaning "being."

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I wonder how the holocaust symbol looks like and why they called it the holocaust

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Pages 14-15
The Swastika Flag
The swastika is a very old symbol with use widespread throughout the world. Sometimes referred to as a "Gammadion" "Hakenkreuz" or a "Flyfot," it traditionally had been a sign of good fortune and well being The word "swastika" is derived from the Sanskrit "su" meaning "well" and "asti" meaning "being." It also is considered to be a representation of the sun and is associated with the worship of Aryan sun gods. It is a symbol in both Jainism and Buddhism, as well as a Nordic runic emblem and a Navajo sign.

By definition, the swastika is a primitive symbol or ornament in the form of a cross. As the illustration below shows, the arms of the cross are of equal length with a section of each arm projecting at right angles from the end of each arm, all in the same direction and usually clockwise.

When Adolph Hitler, the frustrated artist, was placed in charge of propaganda for the fledgling National Socialist Party in 1920, he realized that the party needed a vivid symbol to distinguish it from rival groups. He sought a design, therefore, that would attract the masses. Hitler selected the swastika as the emblem of racial purity displayed on a red background "to win over the worker,"

Hitler had a convenient but spurious reason for choosing the Hakenkreuz or hooked cross. It had been used by the Aryan nomads of India in the Second Millennium B.C. In Nazi theory, the Aryans were the Germans ancestors, and Hitler concluded that the swastika had been "eternally anti-Semitic."

In spite of its fanciful origin the swastika flag was a dramatic one and it achieved exactly what Hitler intended from the first day it was unfurled in public. Anti-Semites and unemployed workers rallied to the banner, and even Nazi opponents were forced to acknowledge that the swastika had a "hypnotic effect."

"The hooked cross" wrote American correspondent William Shirer "seemed to beckon to action the insecure lower-middle classes which had been floundering in the uncertainty of the first chaotic postwar years." The swastika flag had a suggestive sense of power and direction. It embodied all of the Nazi concepts within simple symbol. As Adolph Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, "In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the Nationalist idea, and in the swastika the vision of' the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man."
The Bremen Incident
One of the first actions Hitler carried or after becoming Chancellor in 1933 was to abolish the Weimar Republic flag. On April 22, 1933 he decreed that the national flags of German would be the old Imperial red, white, and black tricolor and flown in conjunction with the swastika flag. These flags were to be flown together on all merchant ships, which led to a serious incident with diplomatic consequences.

On the night of Friday, July 26, 1935, several hundred Communists took part in an anti Nazi demonstration on a pier in New York harbor as the German liner Bremen was about to depart for Europe. They attempted to board the liner and were fought by 250 policemen, detectives, and crew members. Thirty of the demonstrators gained the forelock of the vessel and tore down the swastika flag flying there and threw it into the Hudson River. In the short fierce struggle with the police, a detective was badly beaten before the Communists were ejected.

Meanwhile, there was savage fighting on the pier and in the adjacent streets. The police used their batons freely on the heads of the Communists and after a time the demonstrators we drawn off. The police arrested four men alleged to be the assailants of the injured detective. Three others were arrested for disorderly conduct.

The injured detective and two of the rioters were taken to the hospital. Ten of the Bremen's crew also were treated for cuts and bruises. The liner departed on time, and 20 policemen sailed with her as far as the quarantine station to guard against the possibility that other Communists might be concealed on board and start a new attack. The Bremen's commander, Captain Ziegenbein, commended the police's work. The police officials, however, blamed the ship's officers for taking too lightly a warning they had sent them hours before the riot occurred.

The indignities inflicted upon the German flag by the American anti-Nazi demonstrators on board the Bremen resulted four days later in an emphatic protest being delivered to the American Acting Secretary of State by the German Charge d'Affaires in Washington. It was pointed out to the German diplomat, however, that the insult had been aimed at the "Party" flag and that the National flag had not been interfered with: a very fine distinction in the circumstances but one which precipitated the Nuremberg Flag Laws of September 15, 1935.

The whole question of the German National flag was resolved seven weeks later during the Seventh Reichsparteitag Congress held at Nuremberg in September 1935. This annual occasion was used by Hitler to publicly announce that the red, white, and black swastika flag of the Nazi Party would henceforth be the National flag of Germany. The incentive to solve the unsatisfactory arrangement of flying two flags together representing the nation had been thrust upon the Fuhrer as a direct result of the Bremen incident. The official use of the swastika flag came simultaneously with the increased use of racial policies.

The Swastika Flag's use as the National Flag was a symbol of the acceleration of the Nazi's anti-Semitic agenda which included the September 15, 1936, "Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor." These laws revoked the Jews' citizenship in the Reich. Jews could not vote, marry Aryans, or employ "in domestic service, female subjects of German or kindred blood who are under the age of 45 years."

Jews found themselves excluded from schools, libraries, theaters, and public transpor-tation facilities- Passports were stamped with the word "Jew." Name changes were disallowed, but Jewish men had to add the middle name "Israel," Jewish women the name "Sarah." Jewish wills that offended the "sound judgement of the people" could be legally voided. Furthermore, Jewish businesses were taken away from their owners and placed in the hands of German "trustees."
The Bremen Incident led the Nazi's to raise their banner of hatred as a national symbol while making the Jews into "second class subjects" of Germany. The Jews were then treated as the untermenschenHitler believed they were.

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The Swastika: A Sign of Good Luck Becomes a Symbol of Evil

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Pages 14-15 The Swastika Flag The swastika is a very old symbol with use widespread throughout the world. Sometimes referred to as a "Gammadion" "Hakenkreuz" or a "Flyfot," it traditionally had been a sign of good fortune and well being The word "swastika" is derived from the Sanskrit "su" meaning "well" and "asti" meaning "being."

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I wonder why Hitler wanted Germans with blonde hair and blue eyes to be the "master race" of the whole world.

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Nazi Racism For years before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, he was obsessed with ideas about race. In his speeches and writings, Hitler spread his beliefs in racial "purity" and in the superiority of the "Germanic race"-what he called an Aryan "master race." He pronounced that his race must remain pure in order to one day take over the world. For Hitler, the ideal "Aryan" was blond, blue-eyed, and tall.

When Hitler and the Nazis came to power, these beliefs became the government ideology and were spread in publicly displayed posters, on the radio, in movies, in classrooms, and in newspapers. The Nazis began to put their ideology into practice with the support of German scientists who believed that the human race could be improved by limiting the reproduction of people considered "inferior." Beginning in 1933, German physicians were allowed to perform forced sterilizations, operations making it impossible for the victims to have children. Among the targets of this public program were Roma (Gypsies), an ethnic minority numbering about 30,000 in Germany, and handicapped individuals, including the mentally ill and people born deaf and blind. Also victimized were about 500 African-German children, the offspring of German mothers and African colonial soldiers in the Allied armies that occupied the German Rhineland region after World War I.

Hitler and other Nazi leaders viewed the Jews not as a religious group, but as a poisonous "race," which "lived off" the other races and weakened them. After Hitler took power, Nazi teachers in school classrooms began to apply the "principles" of racial science. They measured skull size and nose length, and recorded the color of their pupils' hair and eyes to determine whether students belonged to the true "Aryan race." Jewish and Romani (Gypsy) students were often humiliated in the process.

Key Dates

February 24, 1920
Nazis outline political agenda
The first public meeting of the Nazi party, then called the German Workers' Party, takes place in Munich, Germany. Adolf Hitler issues a "25 Point Program" outlining the party's political agenda. The party platform embodies racism. It demands racial purity in Germany; proclaims Germany's destiny to rule over inferior races; and identifies Jews as racial enemies. Point 4 concludes that "No Jew, therefore, may be a member of the Nation."

July 18, 1925
The first volume of Mein Kampf appears
Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf while in prison for treason following his failed attempt to seize power in 1923. In Mein Kampf, he outlined his racial ideas. Hitler saw history as the struggle between races for living space. He envisioned a war of conquest in the east, with the Slavic peoples enslaved to German interests. He believed the Jews to be an exceptional evil, working within the nation to subvert "racial purity." He urged the "removal" of Jews from Germany.

July 14, 1933
Nazi state enacts racial purity law
Believing that "racial purity" requires state regulation of human reproduction, Adolf Hitler issues the Law to Prevent Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. Among other provisions, the measure prohibits "undesirables" from having children and mandates forced sterilization of certain physically or mentally impaired individuals. The law will affect some 400,000 people over the next 18 months.

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Nazi Racism For years before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, he was obsessed with ideas about race. In his speeches and writings, Hitler spread his beliefs in racial "purity" and in the superiority of the "Germanic race"-what he called an Aryan "master race."

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I wonder if Jews were experimented on when inside the concentration camp and why.

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Other gruesome experiments meant to further Nazi racial goals were a series of sterilization experiments, undertaken primarily at Auschwitz and Ravensbrueck. There, scientists tested a number of methods in their effort to develop an efficient and inexpensive procedure for the mass sterilization of Jews, Roma, and other groups Nazi leaders considered to be racially or genetically undesirable.

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I wonder how many people died in the holocaust.

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View of the Pegnitz River (c. 1900) with the Grand Synagogue of Nuremberg, destroyed in 1938 during the November pogroms

Jews have lived in Europe for more than two thousand years. Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, Jews were subjected to antisemitism based on Christian theology, which blamed them for killing Jesus. In the nineteenth century many European countries granted full citizenship rights to Jews in hopes that they would assimilate. By the early twentieth century, most Jews in central and western Europe were well integrated into society, while in eastern Europe, where emancipation had arrived later, many Jews still lived in small towns, spoke Yiddish, and practiced Orthodox Judaism. Political antisemitism positing the existence of a Jewish question and usually an international Jewish conspiracy emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth century due to the rise of nationalism in Europe and industrialization that increased economic conflicts between Jews and non-Jews. Some scientists began to categorize humans into different races and argued that there was a life or death struggle between them. Many racists argued that Jews were a separate racial group alien to Europe.

The turn of the twentieth century saw a major effort to establish a German colonial empire overseas, leading to the Herero and Nama genocide and subsequent racial apartheid regime in South West Africa. World War I (1914-1918) intensified nationalist and racist sentiments in Germany and other European countries. Jews in eastern Europe were targeted by widespread pogroms. Germany had two million war dead and lost a substantial territory; opposition to the postwar settlement united Germans across the political spectrum. The military promoted the untrue but compelling idea that, rather than being defeated on the battlefield, Germany had been stabbed in the back by socialists and Jews.

The Nazi Party was founded in the wake of the war, and its ideology is often cited as the main factor explaining the Holocaust. From the beginning, the Nazis-not unlike other nation-states in Europe-dreamed of a world without Jews, whom they identified as "the embodiment of everything that was wrong with modernity". The Nazis defined the German nation as a racial community unbounded by Germany's physical borders and sought to purge it of racially foreign and socially deficient elements. The Nazi Party and its leader, Adolf Hitler, were also obsessed with reversing Germany's territorial losses and acquiring additional Lebensraum (living space) in Eastern Europe for colonization. These ideas appealed to many Germans. The Nazis promised to protect European civilization from the Soviet threat. Hitler believed that Jews controlled the Soviet Union, as well as the Western powers, and were plotting to destroy Germany.

Amidst a worldwide economic depression and political fragmentation, the Nazi Party rapidly increased its support, reaching a high of 37 percent in mid-1932 elections, by campaigning on issues such as anticommunism and economic recovery. Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933 in a backroom deal supported by right-wing politicians. Within months, all other political parties were banned, the regime seized control of the media, tens of thousands of political opponents-especially communists-were arrested, and a system of camps for extrajudicial imprisonment was set up. The Nazi regime cracked down on crime and social outsiders-such as Roma and Sinti, homosexual men, and those perceived as workshy-through a variety of measures, including imprisonment in concentration camps. The Nazis forcibly sterilized 400,000 people and subjected others to forced abortions for real or supposed hereditary illnesses.

Although the Nazis sought to control every aspect of public and private life, Nazi repression was directed almost entirely against groups perceived as outside the national community. Most Germans had little to fear provided they did not oppose the new regime. The new regime built popular support through economic growth, which partly occurred through state-led measures such as rearmament. The annexations of Austria (1938), Sudetenland (1938), and Bohemia and Moravia (1939) also increased the Nazis' popular support. Germans were inundated with propaganda both against Jews and other groups targeted by the Nazis.

Persecution of Jews

The roughly 500,000 German Jews made up less than 1 percent of the country's population in 1933. They were wealthier on average than other Germans and largely assimilated, although a minority were recent immigrants from eastern Europe. Various German government agencies, Nazi Party organizations, and local authorities instituted about 1,500 anti-Jewish laws. In 1933, Jews were banned or restricted from several professions and the civil service. After hounding the German Jews out of public life by the end of 1934, the regime passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. The laws reserved full citizenship rights for those of "German or related blood", restricted Jews' economic activity, and criminalized new marriages and sexual relationships between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. Jews were defined as those with three or four Jewish grandparents; many of those with partial Jewish descent were classified as Mischlinge, with varying rights. The regime also sought to segregate Jews with a view to their ultimate disappearance from the country. Jewish students were gradually forced out of the school system. Some municipalities enacted restrictions governing where Jews were allowed to live or conduct business. In 1938 and 1939, Jews were barred from additional occupations, and their businesses were expropriated to force them out of the economy.

View of the old synagogue in Aachen after its destruction during Kristallnacht

Anti-Jewish violence, largely locally organized by members of Nazi Party institutions, took primarily non-lethal forms from 1933 to 1939. Jewish stores, especially in rural areas, were often boycotted or vandalized. As a result of local and popular pressure, many small towns became entirely free of Jews and as many as a third of Jewish businesses may have been forced to close. Anti-Jewish violence was even worse in areas annexed by Nazi Germany. On 9-10 November 1938, the Nazis organized Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), a nationwide pogrom. Over 7,500 Jewish shops (out of 9,000) were looted, more than 1,000 synagogues were damaged or destroyed, at least 90 Jews were murdered, and as many as 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, although many were released within weeks. German Jews were levied a special tax that raised more than 1 billion Reichsmarks (RM).[c]

The Nazi government wanted to force all Jews to leave Germany. By the end of 1939, most Jews who could emigrate had already done so; those who remained behind were disproportionately elderly, poor, or female and could not obtain a visa. The plurality, around 110,000, left for the United States, while smaller numbers emigrated to South America, Shanghai, Mandatory Palestine, and South Africa. Germany collected emigration taxes of nearly 1 billion RM,[c] mostly from Jews. The policy of forced emigration continued into 1940.

Besides Germany, a significant number of other European countries abandoned democracy for some kind of authoritarian or fascist rule. Many countries, including Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia, passed antisemitic legislation in the 1930s and 1940s. In October 1938, Germany deported many Polish Jews in response to a Polish law that enabled the revocation of citizenship for Polish Jews living abroad.

Germany and its allies Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Italy invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Although the war was launched more for strategic than ideological reasons, what Hitler saw as an apocalyptic battle against the forces of Jewish Bolshevism was to be carried out as a war of extermination with complete disregard for the laws and customs of war. A quick victory was expected and was planned to be followed a massive demographic engineering project to remove 31 million people and replace them with German settlers. To increase the speed of conquest the Germans planned to feed their army by looting, exporting additional food to Germany, and to terrorize the local inhabitants with preventative killings. The Germans foresaw that the invasion would cause a food shortfall and planned the mass starvation of Soviet cities and some rural areas. Although the starvation policy was less successful than planners hoped, the residents of some cities, particularly in Ukraine, and besieged Leningrad, as well as the Jewish ghettos, endured human-made famine, during which millions of people died of starvation.

Soviet prisoners of war in the custody of the German Army were intended to die in large numbers. Sixty percent-3.3 million people-died, primarily of starvation, making them the second largest group of victims of Nazi mass killing after European Jews. Jewish prisoners of war and commissars were systematically executed. About a million civilians were killed by the Nazis during anti-partisan warfare, including more than 300,000 in Belarus. From 1942 onwards, the Germans and their allies targeted villages suspected of supporting the partisans, burning them and killing or expelling their inhabitants. During these operations, nearby small ghettos were liquidated and their inhabitants shot. By 1943, anti-partisan operations aimed for the depopulation of large areas of Belarus. Jews and those unfit for work were typically shot on the spot with others deported. Although most of those killed were not Jews, anti-partisan warfare often led to the deaths of Jews.

Mass shootings of Jews

At least 3,000 Jews were killed during the 1941 Lviv pogroms, mainly by local Ukrainians.

The systematic murder of Jews began in the Soviet Union in 1941. During the invasion, many Jews were conscripted into the Red Army. Out of 10 or 15 million Soviet civilians who fled eastwards to the Soviet interior, 1.6 million were Jews. Local inhabitants killed as many as 50,000 Jews in pogroms in Latvia, Lithuania, eastern Poland, Ukraine, and the Romanian borderlands. Although German forces tried to incite pogroms, their role in causing violence is controversial. Romanian soldiers killed tens of thousands of Jews from Odessa by April 1942.

Prior to the invasion, the Einsatzgruppen were reorganized in preparation for mass killings and instructed to shoot Soviet officials and Jewish state and party employees. The shootings were justified on the basis of Jews' supposed central role in supporting the communist system, but it was not initially envisioned to kill all Soviet Jews. The occupiers relied on locals to identify Jews to be targeted. The first German mass killings targeted adult male Jews who had worked as civil servants or in jobs requiring education. Tens of thousands were shot by the end of July. The vast majority of civilian victims were Jews. In July and August Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS ( Schutzstaffel), made several visits to the death squads' zones of operation, relaying orders to kill more Jews. At this time, the killers began to murder Jewish women and children too. Executions peaked at 40,000 a month in Lithuania in August and September and in October and November reached their height in Belarus.

Shooting from behind became popular because killers did not have to look at their victims' faces and the dead were likely to fall into the grave.

The executions often took place a few kilometers from a town. Victims were rounded up and marched to the execution site, forced to undress, and shot into previously dug pits. The favored technique was a shot in the back of the neck with a single bullet. In the chaos, many victims were not killed by the gunfire but instead buried alive. Typically, the pits would be guarded after the execution but sometimes a few victims managed to escape afterwards. Executions were public spectacles and the victims' property was looted both by the occupiers and local inhabitants. Around 200 ghettos were established in the occupied Soviet Union, with many existing only briefly before their inhabitants were executed. A few large ghettos such as Vilna, Kovno, Riga, Białystok, and Lwów lasted into 1943 because they became centers of production.

Victims of mass shootings included Jews deported from elsewhere. Besides Germany, Romania killed the largest number of Jews. Romania deported about 154,000-170,000 Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina to ghettos in Transnistria from 1941 to 1943. Jews from Transnistria were also imprisoned in these ghettos, where the total death toll may have reached 160,000. Hungary expelled thousands of Carpathian Ruthenian and foreign Jews in 1941, who were shortly thereafter shot in Ukraine. At the beginning of September, all German Jews were required to wear a yellow star, and in October, Hitler decided to deport them to the east and ban emigration. Between mid-October and the end of 1941, 42,000 Jews from Germany and its annexed territories and 5,000 Romani people from Austria were deported to Łódź, Kovno, Riga, and Minsk. In late November, 5,000 German Jews were shot outside of Kovno and another 1,000 near Riga, but Himmler ordered an end to such massacres and some in the senior Nazi leadership voiced doubts about killing German Jews. Executions of German Jews in the Baltics resumed in early 1942.

After the expansion of killings to target the entire Soviet Jewish population, the 3,000 men of the Einsatzgruppen proved insufficient and Himmler mobilized 21 battalions of Order Police to assist them. In addition, Wehrmacht soldiers, Waffen-SS brigades, and local auxiliaries shot many Jews. By the end of 1941, more than 80 percent of the Jews in central Ukraine, eastern Belarus, Russia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been shot, but less than 25 percent of those living farther west where 900,000 remained alive. By the end of the war, around 1.5 to 2 million Jews were shot and as many as 225,000 Roma. The murderers found the executions distressing and logistically inconvenient, which influenced the decision to switch to other methods of killing.

Most historians agree that Hitler issued an explicit order to kill all Jews across Europe, but there is disagreement when. Some historians cite inflammatory statements by Hitler and other Nazi leaders as well as the concurrent mass shootings of Serbian Jews, plans for extermination camps in Poland, and the beginning of the deportation of German Jews as indicative of the final decision having been made before December 1941. Others argue that these policies were initiatives by local leaders and that the final decision was made later. On 5 December 1941, the Soviet Union launched its first major counteroffensive. On 11 December, Hitler declared war on the United States after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The next day, he told leading Nazi party officials, referring to his 1939 prophecy, "The world war is here; the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence."

It took the Nazis several months after this to organize a continent-wide genocide. Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), convened the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942. This high-level meeting was intended to coordinate anti-Jewish policy. The majority of Holocaust killings were carried out in 1942, with 20 or 25 percent of Holocaust victims dying before early 1942 and the same number surviving by the end of the year.

Extermination camps

Deportation to Chełmno

Gas vans developed from those used to kill mental patients since 1939 were assigned to the Einsatzgruppen and first used in November 1941; victims were forced into the van and killed with engine exhaust. The first extermination camp was Chełmno in the Wartheland, established on the initiative of the local civil administrator Arthur Greiser with Himmler's approval; it began operations in December 1941 using gas vans. In October 1941, Higher SS and Police Leader of Lublin Odilo Globocnik began work planning Belzec-the first purpose-built extermination camp to feature stationary gas chambers using carbon monoxide based on the previous Aktion T4 programme[205][206]-amid increasing talk among German administrators in Poland of large-scale murder of Jews in the General Governorate. In late 1941 in East Upper Silesia, Jews in forced-labor camps operated by the Schmelt Organization deemed "unfit for work" began to be sent in groups to Auschwitz where they were murdered. In early 1942, Zyklon B became the preferred killing method in extermination camps after gassing experiments were conducted on Russian POWs in late August 1941.[206]

The camps were located on rail lines to make it easier to transport Jews to their deaths, but in remote places to avoid notice. The stench caused by mass killing operations was noticeable to anyone nearby. Except in the deportations from western and central Europe, people were typically deported to the camps in overcrowded cattle cars. As many as 150 people were forced into a single boxcar. Many died en route, partly because of the low priority accorded to these transports. Shortage of rail transport sometimes led to postponement or cancellation of deportations. Upon arrival, the victims were robbed of their remaining possessions, forced to undress, had their hair cut, and were chased into the gas chamber. Death from the gas was agonizing and could take as long as 30 minutes. The gas chambers were primitive and sometimes malfunctioned. Some prisoners were shot because the gas chambers were not functioning. At other extermination camps, nearly everyone on a transport was killed on arrival, but at Auschwitz around 20-25 percent were separated out for labor, although many of these prisoners died later on through starvation, mass shooting, torture,[221] and medical experiments.[222]

Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka reported a combined revenue of RM 178.7 million from belongings stolen from their victims, far exceeding costs. Combined, the camps required the labor of less than 3,000 Jewish prisoners, 1,000 Trawniki men (largely Ukrainian auxiliaries), and very few German guards. About half of the Jews killed in the Holocaust died by poison gas. Thousands of Romani people were also murdered in the extermination camps. Prisoner uprisings at Treblinka and Sobibor meant that these camps were shut down earlier than envisioned.

Camp

Location

Number of Jews killed

Killing technology

Planning began

Mass gassing duration

Auschwitz II-Birkenau

900,000-1,000,000

Stationary gas chamber, hydrogen cyanide

September 1941
(built as POW camp)

February 1942-October 1944

Liquidation of the ghettos in Poland

Cumulative murders of Jews from the General Governorate at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka from January 1942 to February 1943

Plans to kill most of the Jews in the General Governorate were affected by various goals of the SS, military, and civil administration to reduce the amount of food consumed by Jews, enable a slight increase in rations to non-Jewish Poles, and combat the black market. In March 1942, killings began in Belzec, targeting Jews from Lublin who were not capable of work. This action reportedly reduced the black market and was deemed a success to be replicated elsewhere. By mid-1942, Nazi leaders decided to allow only 300,000 Jews to survive in the General Governorate by the end of the year for forced labor; for the most part, only those working in armaments production were spared. The majority of ghettos were liquidated in mass executions nearby, especially if they were not near a train station. Larger ghettos were more commonly liquidated during multiple deportations to extermination camps. During this campaign, 1.5 million Polish Jews were murdered in the largest killing operation of the Holocaust.

In order to reduce resistance, the ghetto would be raided without warning, usually in the early morning, and the extent of the operation would be concealed as long as possible. Trawniki men would cordon off the ghetto while the Order Police and Security Police carried out the action. In addition to local non-Jewish collaborators, the Jewish councils and Jewish ghetto police were often ordered to assist with liquidation actions, although these Jews were in most cases murdered later. Chaotic, capriciously executed selections determined who would be loaded onto the trains. Many Jews were shot during the action, often leaving ghettos strewn with corpses. Jewish forced laborers had to clean it up and collect any valuables from the victims.

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising became significant as a symbol of Jewish resistance against the Nazis.

The Warsaw Ghetto was cleared between 22 July and 12 September. Of the original population of 350,000 Jews, 250,000 were killed at Treblinka, 11,000 were deported to labor camps, 10,000 were shot in the ghetto, 35,000 were allowed to remain in the ghetto after a final selection, and around 20,000 or 25,000 managed to hide in the ghetto. Misdirection efforts convinced many Jews that they could avoid deportation until it was too late. During a six-week period beginning in August, 300,000 Jews from the Radom District were sent to Treblinka.

At the same time as the mass killing of Jews in the General Governorate, Jews who were in ghettos to the west and east were targeted. Tens of thousands of Jews were deported from ghettos in the Warthegau and East Upper Silesia to Chełmno and Auschwitz. 300,000 Jews-largely skilled laborers-were shot in Volhynia, Podolia, and southwestern Belarus. Deportations and mass executions in the Bialystok District and Galicia killed many Jews. Although there was practically no resistance in the General Governorate in 1942, some Soviet Jews improvised weapons, attacked those attempting to liquidate the ghetto, and set it on fire. These ghetto uprisings were only undertaken when the inhabitants began to believe that their death was certain. In 1943, larger uprisings in Warsaw, Białystok, and Glubokoje necessitated the use of heavy weapons. The uprising in Warsaw prompted the Nazi leadership to liquidate additional ghettos and labor camps in German-occupied Poland with their inhabitants massacred, such as the Wola Massacre, or deported to extermination camps for fear of additional Jewish resistance developing. Nevertheless, in early 1944, more than 70,000 Jews were performing forced labor in the General Governorate.

Deportations from elsewhere

Jews are deported from Würzburg, Germany to the Lublin District of the General Governorate, 25 April 1942.

Unlike the killing areas in the east, the deportation from elsewhere in Europe was centrally organized from Berlin, although it depended on the outcome of negotiations with allied governments and popular responses to deportation. Beginning in late 1941, local administrators responded to the deportation of Jews to their area by massacring local Jews in order to free up space in ghettos for the deportees. If the deported Jews did not die of harsh conditions, they were killed later in extermination camps. Jews deported to Auschwitz were initially entered into the camp; the practice of conducting selections and murdering many prisoners upon arrival began in July 1942. In May and June, German and Slovak Jews deported to Lublin began to be sent directly to extermination camps.

In Western Europe, almost all Jewish deaths occurred after deportation. The occupiers often relied on local policemen to arrest Jews, limiting the number who were deported. In 1942, nearly 100,000 Jews were deported from Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. Only 25 percent of the Jews in France were killed; most of them were either non-citizens or recent immigrants. The death rate in the Netherlands was higher than neighboring countries, which scholars have attributed to difficulty in hiding or increased collaboration of the Dutch police.

The German government sought the deportation of Jews from allied countries. The first to hand over its Jewish population was Slovakia, which arrested and deported about 58,000 Jews to Poland from March to October 1942. The Independent State of Croatia had already shot or killed in concentration camps the majority of its Jewish population (along with a larger number of Serbs), and later deported several thousand Jews in 1942 and 1943. Bulgaria deported 11,000 Jews from Bulgarian-occupied Greece and Yugoslavia, who were murdered at Treblinka, but declined to allow the deportation of Jews from its prewar territory. Romania and Hungary did not send any Jews, which were the largest surviving populations after 1942. Prior to the German occupation of Italy in September 1943, there were no serious attempt to deport Italian Jews, and Italy refused to allow the deportation of Jews in many Italian-occupied areas. Nazi Germany did not attempt the destruction of the Finnish Jews and the North African Jews living under French or Italian rule.

Woman with Ostarbeiter badge at work at IG-Farbenwerke in Auschwitz

Beginning in 1938-especially in Germany and its annexed territories-many Jews were drafted into forced-labor camps and segregated work details. These camps were often of a temporary nature and typically overseen by civilian authorities. Initially, mortality did not increase dramatically. After mid-1941, conditions for Jewish forced laborers drastically worsened and death rates increased; even private companies deliberately subjected workers to murderous conditions. Beginning in 1941 and increasingly as time went on, Jews capable of employment were separated from others-who were usually killed. They were typically employed in non-skilled jobs and could be replaced easily if non-Jewish workers were available, but those in skilled positions had a higher chance of survival. Although conditions varied widely between camps, Jewish forced laborers were typically treated worse than non-Jewish prisoners and suffered much higher mortality rates.

In mid-1943, Himmler sought to bring surviving Jewish forced laborers under the control of the SS in the concentration camp system.[d] Some of the forced-labor camps for Jews and some ghettos, such as Kovno, were designated concentration camps, while others were dissolved and surviving prisoners sent to a concentration camp. Despite many deaths, as many as 200,000 Jews survived the war inside the concentration camps. Although most Holocaust victims were never imprisoned in a concentration camp, the image of these camps is a popular symbol of the Holocaust.

Including the Soviet prisoners of war, 13 million people were brought to Germany for forced labor. The largest nationalities were Soviet and Polish and they were the worst-treated groups except for Roma and Jews. Soviet and Polish forced laborers endured inadequate food and medical treatment, long hours, and abuse by employers. Hundreds of thousands died. Many others were forced to work for the occupiers without leaving their country of residence. Some of Germany's allies, including Slovakia and Hungary, agreed to deport Jews to protect non-Jews from German demands for forced labor. East European women were also kidnapped, via lapanka, to serve as sex slaves of German soldiers in military and camp brothels[325][326][327] despite the prohibition of relationships, including fraternization, between German and foreign workers,[328][329] which imposed the penalty of imprisonment[329] and death.[330][331]

Continuing killings

Jews from Carpathian Ruthenia, annexed by Hungary in 1938, on the selection ramp at Auschwitz II in May or June 1944. Men are lined up to the right, women and children to the left. About 25 percent were selected for work and the rest gassed.

After German military defeats in 1943, it became increasingly evident that Germany would lose the war. In early 1943, 45,000 Jews were deported from German-occupied northern Greece, primarily Salonica, to Auschwitz, where nearly all were killed. After Italy switched sides in late 1943, Germany deported several thousand Jews from Italy and the former Italian occupation zones of France, Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece, with limited success. Attempts to continue deportations in Western Europe after 1942 often failed because of Jews going into hiding and the increasing recalcitrance of local authorities. Most Danish Jews escaped to Sweden with the help of the Danish resistance in the face of a half-hearted German deportation effort in late 1943. Additional killings in 1943 and 1944 eliminated all remaining ghettos and most surviving Jews in Eastern Europe. Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were shut down and destroyed.

The largest murder action after 1942 was that against the Hungarian Jews. After the German invasion of Hungary in 1944, the Hungarian government cooperated closely in the deportation of 437,000 Jews in eight weeks, mostly to Auschwitz. The expropriation of Jewish property was useful to achieve Hungarian economic goals and sending the Jews as forced laborers avoided the need to send non-Jewish Hungarians. Those who survived the selection were forced to provide construction and manufacturing labor as part of a last-ditch effort to increase the production of fighter aircraft. Although the Nazis' goal of eliminating any Jewish population from Germany had largely been achieved in 1943, it was reversed in 1944 as a result of the importation of these Jews for labor.

Death marches and liberation

In January 1945, more than 700,000 people were imprisoned in the concentration camp system, of whom as many as a third died before the end of the war. At this time, most concentration camp prisoners were Soviet and Polish civilians, either arrested for real or supposed resistance or for attempting to escape forced labor. The death marches led to the breakdown of supplies for the camps that continued to exist, causing additional deaths. Although there was no systematic killing of Jews during the death marches, around 70,000 to 100,000 Jews died in the last months of the war. Many of the death march survivors ended up in other concentration camps that were liberated in 1945 during the Western Allied invasion of Germany. The liberators found piles of corpses that they had to bulldoze into mass graves. Some survivors were freed there and others had been liberated by the Red Army during its march westwards.

Holocaust deaths as an approximate percentage of the 1939 Jewish population:

The deadliest phase of the Holocaust was Operation Reinhard, which was marked by the introduction of extermination camps. Roughly two million Jews were killed from March 1942 to November 1943. Around 1.47 million Jews were murdered in just 100 days from July to October 1942, a rate approximately 83% higher than the commonly suggested figure for the Rwandan genocide.[397]

Separate Nazi persecutions killed a similar or larger number of non-Jewish civilians and POWs; estimated by Gerlach at 6 to 8 million, at more than 10 million by Gilbert[398] and at over 11 million by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.[399] In some countries, such as Hungary, Jews were a majority of civilian deaths; in Poland, they were either a majority or about half. In other countries such as the Soviet Union, France, Greece, and Yugoslavia, non-Jewish civilian losses outnumbered Jewish deaths.

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Jews have lived in Europe for more than two thousand years. Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, Jews were subjected to antisemitism based on Christian theology, which blamed them for killing Jesus. In the nineteenth century many European countries granted full citizenship rights to Jews in hopes that they would assimilate.

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I wonder if any Jews vote for hitler.

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I wonder if there was anyway that America could have helped out more during The Holocaust? ; ]

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I wonder how many concentration camps the Nazis had

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Early Camps (1933-38)

, and persons accused of "asocial" or socially deviant behavior. Many of these sites were called From its rise to power in 1933, the Nazi regime built a series of incarceration sites to imprison and eliminate real and perceived "enemies of the state." Most prisoners in the early concentration camps were political prisoners-German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats-as well as Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses , homosexuals concentration camps. The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.

After Germany's annexation [Anschluss] of in March 1938, Austrian political prisoners came into the Nazi concentration camp system. Following the violent Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") pogroms in November 1938, Nazi officials conducted mass arrests of adult male Jews throughout the country, the first time Jews were arrested en masse precisely because they were Jews. Over 30,000 German Jews were incarcerated in the , Buchenwald , and concentration camps in Germany, initially until each could provide proof of their ability to emigrate. Sachsenhausen

Types of Camps

Many people refer to all of the Nazi incarceration sites during the Holocaust as concentration camps. The term concentration camp is used very loosely to describe places of incarceration and murder under the Nazi regime, however, not all sites established by the Nazis were concentration camps. Nazi-established sites include:

Concentration camps: For the detention of civilians seen as real or perceived "enemies of the Reich."

Forced-labor camps: In forced-labor camps, the Nazi regime brutally exploited the labor of prisoners for economic gain and to meet labor shortages. Prisoners lacked proper equipment, clothing, nourishment, or rest.

Transit camps: Transit camps functioned as temporary holding facilities for Jews awaiting deportation. These camps were usually the last stop before deportations to a killing center.

Prisoner-of-war camps: For Allied prisoners of war, including Poles and Soviet soldiers.

Killing centers: Established primarily or exclusively for the assembly-line style murder of large numbers of people immediately upon arrival to the site. There were 5 killing centers for the murder primarily of Jews. The term is also used to describe "euthanasia" sites for the murder of disabled patients.

Other types of incarceration sites numbered in the tens of thousands. These included but were not limited to early camps; "euthanasia" facilities for the murder of disabled patients; Gestapo, SS and German justice detention centers; so-called "Gypsy" camps, and Germanization facilities.

Concentration Camps

Concentration camps are often inaccurately compared to a prison in modern society. But concentration camps, unlike prisons, were independent of any judicial review. Nazi concentration camps served three main purposes:

1. To incarcerate real and perceived "enemies of the state." These persons were incarcerated for indefinite amounts of time.

2. To eliminate individuals and small, targeted groups of individuals by murder, away from the public and judicial review.

3. To exploit forced labor of the prisoner population. This purpose grew out of a labor shortage.

The First Concentration Camp

The major purpose of the earliest concentration camps during the 1930s was to incarcerate and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the regime. The first Nazi concentration camp was Dachau, established in March 1933, near Munich.

In many of the concentration camps, the Nazi SS either installed or had plans to install gas chambers to assist in their daily business of killing prisoners who were too weak or sick to work. Before the widespread use of gassing in the concentration camps, weak, ill and exhausted prisoners selected by camp physicians were murdered at "euthanasia" (T4) facilities from 1941-1943 in a secret program called 14f13. Gas chambers were also to kill small targeted groups of individuals whom the Nazis wanted to eliminate (Polish resistance fighters, Soviet POWs, etc.). This was the purpose of the installation of gas chambers, for example, at Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Stutthof, Auschwitz I, Ravensbrück, Lublin/Majdanek, etc.

Camp Structure
All concentration camps were structured in the same way. Each had an internal camp staff that consisted of five sections:

1. Commandant's Headquarters (consisting of the commandant and his staff)

2. A protective detention office run by a Security Police officer who maintained prisoner records in terms of arrival, discharge, discipline and death and who received his instructions from the Reich Central Office for Security

3. Commander of the Protective Detention Camp

4. Administration and Supply

5. SS Physician

Forced-Labor and Prisoner-of-War Camps

Following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Nazis opened forced-labor camps where thousands of prisoners died from exhaustion, starvation, and exposure. SS units guarded the camps. During World War II , the Nazi camp system expanded rapidly. In some camps, Nazi doctors performed medical experiments on prisoners.

Following the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union , the Nazis increased the number of prisoner-of-war (POW) camps and subcamps. Some new camps were built at existing concentration camp complexes (such as Auschwitz ) in occupied Poland. The camp at Lublin, later known as Majdanek , was established in the autumn of 1941 as a POW camp and became a concentration camp in 1943. Thousands of Soviet POWs were shot or gassed there.

Transit Camps

Jews in Nazi-occupied lands often were first deported to transit camps such as in France, en route to the Westerbork in the Netherlands, or killing centers in German-occupied Poland. The transit camps were usually the last stop before deportation to a killing center.

Killing Centers

Killing centers first made their appearance in Nazi Germany in the execution of Operation T4, the so-called "euthanasia" program. It was the Nazi state's first program of mass murder, where disabled patients in German facilities were murdered in gas chambers using carbon monoxide gas.

To help carry out the " Final Solution" (the genocide or mass destruction of Jews), the Nazis established killing centers in German-occupied Poland, the country with the largest Jewish population. Killing centers were designed for efficient mass murder. The first one, which opened in December 1941, was , where Jews and Roma were gassed in mobile gas vans. In 1942, the Nazis opened the , , and killing centers to systematically murder the Jews of the General Government (the territory in the interior of German-occupied Poland). Here Nazi planners borrowed the gassing technique from the "euthanasia" program to murder Jews in gas chambers using carbon monoxide gas generated by engine exhaust.

At the Auschwitz camp complex, the Birkenau killing center had four gas chambers, known here as crematoria. Here gassing took place using the pesticide Zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide, or prussic acid). During the height of deportations to the camp in 1943-44, an average of 6,000 Jews were gassed there each day. Over 2,772,000 Jews (or 46% of Jewish victims) were murdered at killing centers.

Millions of people were imprisoned, mistreated, and murdered in the various types of Nazi camps. Under SS management, the Germans and their collaborators murdered more than three million Jews in the killing centers alone. Only a small fraction of those imprisoned in Nazi camps survived.

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and persons accused of "asocial" or socially deviant behavior. Many of these sites were called From its rise to power in 1933, the Nazi regime built a series of incarceration sites to imprison and eliminate real and perceived "enemies of the state."

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I wonder how many Jews survived the Holocaust

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I wonder if the Jews actually tried to fight against the nazi's.

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36 Questions About the Holocaust - Simon Wiesenthal Center Multimedia Learning Center

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Simon Wiesenthal Center Multimedia Learning Center Online

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I wonder if anyone would defend the Jews when shot on sight?

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After the war, many people, especially American Jews, including some members of my own family, asked me why we never fought back. Why, for instance, when the learned, kind Dr. Bloch was being shot, didn't we start a rebellion and try to save him? Why did millions of Jews in Europe go passively to the camps and then to their deaths?

This logical question deserves an answer. When I was first brought to Kamionka, there were Russian prisoners of war whom the German army had captured a few months earlier. To make room for the transport of Jews, some of the Russians were sent to other camps and others were killed. Killing POWs was against the Geneva Convention, but the Germans were beyond abiding by any rules of civilized conduct. They had become utterly savage.

With my own eyes I saw the execution of POWs. Having been raised so close to the Russian border, I understood Russian and listened carefully to what the Russian POWs were saying as they were being selected for death. One man, about forty-five years old, was considered too old for a labor camp and so the Germans decided to shoot him. He stood tall and looked straight into the eyes of the German soldiers: "I have three sons in the Red Army. They are on their way. Remember, you will pay for this." And then the Germans shot him.

There was nothing the Russian could do in the face of many armed German soldiers. Polish soldiers, whose army had been swiftly defeated at the start of the war, faced the same situation. I saw four or five German soldiers control a thousand Polish POWs. Later on in Kamionka, a small number of Germans did whatever they wanted with Russian soldiers, men who had been trained to fight battles. High-ranking officers were reduced to powerless, ordinary men when confronted with the lowliest German soldier and a gun.

When the tide turned and the Germans began losing the war, I beheld the same sight in reverse: hundreds of mighty German soldiers, who only weeks before took life or saved it as their mood dictated, were now herded about passively by a few Russian soldiers with weapons.

These soldiers had all been trained to fight, to use firearms, to survive under the harshest conditions. If they could not resist imprisonment, how were we Jews - a civilian population, with little or no firearm experience and no weapons, a tribe of merchants, artisans, scholars, women and children, all weak from starvation and exhaustion - able to rebel against a well-equipped army? If you are under the gun, there is little you can do.

Certainly, there were a few, wonderful exceptions. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the first of its kind among a civilian population in Poland, is the most famous. Even in Warsaw, however, organizing to fight did not take place when there had been half a million Jews in the ghetto. Only when almost the entire ghetto had been liquidated and death was at hand did a few thousand remaining residents - right-wingers, leftists, Bundists, religionists, atheists, Jews of every political and religious stripe - band together, under the leadership of Mordechai Anielewicz, to fight since they knew their days were numbered. They realized they would not be able to beat the German army. But if they were going to die, they would at least take some Germans with them.

Those of us in Kamionka who were young and still strong would have been more than willing to fight in an organized fashion if we thought we had the slightest chance of making a difference. For months after learning of the German defeat at Stalingrad, we waited for partisans who were rumored to be in the vicinity. It would have been a great honor, a tremendous opportunity, to join them, to fight to save the lives of innocent Jews and non-Jews under German occupation. We had heard that the partisans liberated a camp not far from ours. Many Jews had joined their ranks immediately. In the end, though, the partisans did not come near Kamionka until the camp had already been liquidated.

One night in April 1943, Ladovsky, Rebel's Jewish chauffer, came into my barracks and woke me up. He had just returned from Warsaw with Rebel where they had gone to purchase supplies. In Warsaw Lasovsky had heard about, and actually seen, the uprising during its second day.

"Jews," he told me, "are killing Germans! I saw it with my own eyes, German blood being spilled!"

"Thank G-d I lived to see the day," I said to him and jumped off my bunk.

The two of us began to sing and dance, crying and laughing, beside ourselves with joy. After two days of successful fighting, Mordechai Anielewicz said that killing German soldiers proved that they, too, were vulnerable, that the Germans were not invincible. Like Jews, they could bleed, and this resistance saved Jewish honor. Of course, within a few weeks the Germans had overrun the ghetto, killing almost everyone inside, and shipped the survivors to the death camps. But the thought of Jews defending themselves thrilled us beyond description. Even though we knew there were Jewish soldiers fighting in the Allied armed forces, we had become accustomed to feeling helpless under German occupation.
from "Darkness and Hope", (Amazon.com)
December 31, 1969

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After the war, many people, especially American Jews, including some members of my own family, asked me why we never fought back. Why, for instance, when the learned, kind Dr. Bloch was being shot, didn't we start a rebellion and try to save him?

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I wonder why people hate Jews so much.

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Anti-Semitism is the intense dislike or prejudice against Jewish people who have faced persecutions , discrimination and expulsions throughout the world in different times and generations. Who is a Jew is a question in itself and is hating them is an influence of the effect derived from history that we've become conditioned to accept and follow. Given below is a compilation of one of the root causes why people have come to hate them as a race much like the Kurds and Armenians that were too resented and exterminated.

10. RACIAL CLEANSING

The Holocaust refers to the systematic murder of more than six million Jews orchestrated by Adolph Hitler and the National Socialist (Nazi) Party in Europe during World War II(1933-1945) during which the Jewish Genocide shocked the world and questioned the human fibre of German authority becoming a license for other colonial countries. The reasons simply known as the preservation of the pure German Nordic race by elimination of the midgets and cycle owners (Jews) with twisted noses and ape-like features(dark haired) were feared and suspiciously looked down upon as lesser humans due to the "strange" cuisine and religious rituals they practised. Hitler's propaganda leading everyone to believe (including Jews) who represented the economy, media, arts and business services, that Jews were responsible for the misfortunes suffered during the fall of the Weimar government through Nuremberg Laws leading to synagogue(the place of worship for a Jewish congregation) burnings , pogroms(Organized persecution of an ethnic group) and lynched by the espionage brutally in camps, ghettos and pits. The reasons were fear of domination by the scholarly and alien mongrel class of people who followed a distant religion and spoke an unknown language(Hebrew) . This contradicts the theory of considering them evil and powerful where in the past they were wiped out for conflicting reasons.

9. TRANSCEDENTALIST 'S THEORY

Jews today have taken over marketing, militia, medicinal, technological, media, industrial, cinema challenges etc. and continue to face the worlds envy through unexplained success stories given their inglorious past and vermin like repression all over Europe , Soviet Union , Asia before the 20th century. They have transcended all barriers of indifference and hatred and continue to represent in majority number sectors of finance, law, medicine etc. People do not like the stats for obvious reasons as a race that's been subjugated to massacres every 21 years in different places and eras continues not only to exist but with money bags and high portfolios. The reasons are complex yet identifiable. Jews were outlawed from owning land and property in historic times and hence resorted to money lending, business trades, middle class bearing and liberating philosophies which is why we see no farmers today and no poverty either. They are few yet powerful because the misery meted out to them in the past, in time ,turned out to be their most precious possession. Also, history is testament to the cause of the literate masses of "the chosen few" in times of universal illiteracy where Jews sincerely attended synagogues regularly when their second pillar (temple of Jerusalem) was destroyed and their only resistance was through unfailing faith. This gave them an upper hand, secured jobs killed the need to convert for economic reasons , and they continued to flourish disproportionately (given their small numbers) invoking the worlds contempt and jealousy furthermore.

8. ISLAMIC FEARS AND INFLUENCE

The holy book of Islam has been quite a force in deciding the attitude of Muslims towards the Jews and absence of questioning its confusing stand on "the chosen few", its led to universal animosity between the children of Allah and Abraham. Quran in some sections maintains Muhammad and his peaceful social contract with the Jews of medina and later a war is waged and the three Jewish tribes of Arabia are expelled for denying prophet hood to Muhammad and called traitors, perfidious and worldliness. What is strange is the fanatic extremities to which the Quran was interpreted and the ruthless treatment of non-Muslims (including Jews) were subjected to for denying Islamic conversion and the right to maintain one's own faith. Dispute was never about the Jewish temple in Jerusalem since the prophet bowed down before it only once which did not make it a religious property of Muslims as that was to represent amicability between medina dwellers (Jews) and the hospitality they offered to Muhammad but misinterpretation led to a prejudiced world belief. Classical commentators viewed Muhammad's struggle with Jews as a minor episode in his career, but this has changed in modern times due to external influences. This became the cause of hatred all around the world within Muslim communities as failure to realize the mortality of a prophet and his whimsical declaration posed a threat to Jews from times immemorial and intensified public opinion(uncontrolled Muslim population) around the globe. Jewish people were viewed as a cult posing threat to world religions which explains the anger. A deeper understanding was never strived for as religion became law and law became faith.

7. HIGHER MORAL (TORAH) AND ZIONISM

Torah consists of the foundational narrative of the Jewish people, their call into being by God, their trials and tribulations, and their covenant with their God, which involves following a way of life embodied in a set of religious obligations and civil laws (halakha). The 613 commandments of the torah(laws of Moses)mostly include morals and self-righteous laws that other people find in contradiction due to the status quo. Jews recognize two kinds of sin, offenses against other people, and offenses against God. Offenses against God may be understood as violation of a contract (the covenant between God and the Children of Israel). Since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, Jews have believed that right action (as opposed to right belief) is the way for a person to atone for one's sins and that explains the situation in Israel. They seem to be claiming back what they feel is rightfully theirs through this understanding of higher moral from the commandments in the Torah as a way to rightly possess what was denied to them and to ease their conscious into committing a sin just because over the years they have been paying for sins they never committed. A movement of world Jewry that arose late in the 19th century with the aim of creating a Jewish state in Palestine(Zionism) also sprouted from the Jewish cult's retaliation to years of suppression, subjugation and discrimination. The holy place of Jewish source being Palestine, the concentrated power in the hands of the Jews and the power monopoly was mere self glorification keeping in with the laws of the Torah. The world therefore hates them for setting two precedents, one, they justify the wrong they do religiously, and two, the general moral standing of Jews that sends the others on a guilt trip since no one wants to be reminded of one's "sins".

6. PUBLIC OPINION

A belief or sentiment shared by most people or the voice of the people or a belief of the majority is popular public opinion. Does condemning a particular race of people for mutually inclusive reasons become a fact just because it is done by more people (majority) or should causes be contemplated even then? The media's role in portraying a negative picture of the Jews is a very strong factor determining mass hatred and global views. The traditional role of the media has always been to presents facts, issues and statistics sans judgements. To present the problem and not the opinion is what is required and expected as with power comes responsibility. The politicising of news in general has added fuel to fire and even if someone is ignorant enough not to know what is happening, he/she will hate Jews not because of the trouble brewing but by virtue of the fact that they are Jews. The most hilarious confessions include viewing Jewish minority as both inferior yet dominating, primitive yet successful, nasty but righteous, alien in existence yet "the chosen few", Internationally supported yet negatively viewed etc. which are nothing but beautiful contradictions , made by people who neither know who a Jew is nor the cause of the problem which is merely a resurfacing phenomenon but with turned tables.

5. DISPROPORTIONATE SUCCESS

Human psychology testifies how we perceive success in terms of collective aspects. For example the world thinks Indians make the best engineers and doctors, Germans make the best automobile and heavy machinery and Spaniards the best wine! Jews on the other hand have surpassed all cliché barriers and are ruling everywhere. 52% of non-fiction Pulitzer prize winners are Jews, Nobel awardees are Jews, two Jewish doctors vanquished polio disease and removed our fears forever, garment industry with names like Levis, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan ,our computers with names like Dell, software from giants like Oracle, search engines like Google, and social media like Facebook, share the legacy just as Intel and Qualcomm chips and technologies are inside so many of our computers and cell phones. The three largest broadcasting networks - ABC, NBC and CBS were built from the efforts of two visionary Jewish entrepreneurs, David Sarnoff and William Paley. Sarnoff in particular saw the potential to convert "wireless," then used for ship-to-shore communications, into a "broadcast" medium distributed via a "network.". In medicine, law, science, politics and education, the leadership, innovation and hard work of Jews have benefited us all. And if they have been successful as entrepreneurs, disproportionately represented among the members of the Forbes 400 and as CEOs of the Fortune 500, that achievement is outstripped by the fact that in philanthropy - particularly for secular causes such as education, medicine and the arts - Jews are even more philanthropic than they are wealthy. Not too hard to imagine why the world hates Judaic people when 9 out of 10 in every scenario are rolling in money and good hearted too ! Global perceptions are defied through these statistics and people do not like what they do not understand because Jews are supposed to be dying, eradicated and suffering like holocaust instead they are flourishing, prospering and invoking sympathies at the same time which becomes quite a lot to digest for Anti-Semites and Anti-Zionists.

4. USURY AND PAST SERVICES

Loan Sharks or Usurers are people practicing Usury , a practice of making unethical or immoral monetary loans intended to unfairly enrich the lender. A loan may be considered usurious because of excessive or abusive interest rates or other factors, but according to some dictionaries, simply charging any interest at all can be considered usury. The Torah (the first of three divisions of the Hebrew Scriptures comprising the first five books of the Hebrew Bible considered as a unit) and Talmud (the collection of ancient rabbinic writings on Jewish law and tradition (the Mishna and the Gemara) that constitute the basis of religious authority in Orthodox Judaism) are a cause of dispute even today. They suggest that charging interest to Hebrew people is an offense but not if the same is done to non-Jews given that Jews comprised of the merchant class. In the Victorian era and times before, Jews were looked down upon as money mongrels and stiff necked usurers who bribed "innocent Christians" before their ships would arrive at the docks. In medieval times it was universally condemned as a heinous and immoral act by the Christian church. The act of usury was deemed a mortal sin, and its practitioner's path of greed was understood to end in eternal damnation in Hell. The idea of profiteering from someone else's' need , possibly desperate , for money was believed by medieval Christianity to be the antithesis of compassion, generosity, and charity. Christ was upheld as an example of poverty, non-materialism, and abstinence. Common wisdom asserted that those who had surplus money to lend in the first place were obsessed with greed and avarice and needed no more - certainly by usury - for their coffers. And making money for doing absolutely nothing (except having the money available) went against Christian medieval understandings of decency, justice, honest work, and morality. In essence, usury was perceived as a crass system of exponential exploitation by which the already wealthy could get increasingly wealthier for little more than the fact of their wealth in the first place and isolated the Christians from the Jews that manifests itself in Shakespeare's plays where a Jew is always the devil and continues even today.

3. ISRAEL PALESTINE CONFLICT

The obvious need not be stated-the Jews in Israel are inhuman, the Arabs are the victims, power monopoly and genocide of the Arab race from Palestine and their extreme control of West Bank which is an open Prison are evidence of a situation that needs to be resolved. But the causes are deep rooted and less known. Jews have lived in this land continuously from the time of its original conquest by Joshua more than 3200 years ago until the present day, though Jews were not always in political control of the land, and Jews were not always the majority of the land's population. Living outside of Israel is viewed as an unnatural state for a Jew. The world outside of Israel is often referred to as "galut," which is usually translated as "diaspora" (dispersion), but a more literal translation would be "exile" or "captivity." In the late 1800s, Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann founded Zionism, a political movement dedicated to the creation of a Jewish state. They saw a state of Israel as a necessary refuge for Jewish victims of oppression, especially in Russia, where pogroms were decimating the Jewish population. The Holocaust brought the need for a Jewish homeland into sharp focus for both Jews and for the rest of the world. The Jews who tried to flee Nazi Germany were often turned back due to immigration limitations at the borders of every country, including the United States, Britain and Palestine. Many of those who were sent back to Germany ended up in death camps where they were systematically murdered. The newly-founded United Nations, which developed a partition plan dividing Palestine into Jewish and Arab portions tried to resolve the problem of control. The plan was ratified in November 1947. The mandate expired on May 14, 1948 and British troops pulled out of Palestine. The Jews of Palestine promptly declared the creation of the State of Israel, which was recognized by several Western countries immediately. However, the surrounding Arab nations did not recognize the validity of Israel and invaded, claiming that they were filling a vacuum created by the termination of the mandate and the absence of any legal authority to replace it. The Arabs fought a year-long war to drive the Jews out. Miraculously, the new state of Israel won this war, as well as every subsequent Arab-Israeli war, gaining territory every time the Arabs attacked them. Now the world stands shocked as one race tries to drive another out and they become the persecutors and villains of the 21st century contributing to their hatred furthermore.

2. AMERICA LOVES JEWS AND MUCH MORE

If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more ‎violence but if the Jews put ‎down their weapons ‎today, there would be no ‎more Israel. There has been a growing call around the world for the United States to 'stop its blind support' of Israel. Arab academics have even begun to conjure up an image of a cowering United States being the 'lackey' of Israel. The possible explanation could be that Jews control the vast majority of wealth in the Western World. All the banks and media companies in America, from health care to the garment industries and law firms are predominantly Jewish with their representation or their stamp. Americans are careful in procuring the best technological and ammunition deals with Israel as the last thing they would want is the Arabs running to the Soviets for support and therefore it is a hush hush affair. Also a great deal of Jews(one of the largest minorities) resides in the US and the new heights of success US has witnessed is their gift to them which they maybe feel obligated to respond to through their unfailing support to Israel and their cause. Israel is a useful country to them with resources, important people, great beneficial consequences and the latest technology in all fields which is why the superpower feels the need to look after its own interests before others leading to provocation in the eastern world who now say America had no right to intervene even in Afghanistan and Iraq with its screwed up notion of "corrective intervention". Any country, race or ethnic group that is rightly condemned by most of the world for terrorizing its populace with a powerful giants support is bound to make them hate it even more which is what makes this issue so delectable

1. DEICIDE

Jewish deicide is a belief that places the responsibility for the death of Jesus on the Jewish people as a whole. The implications of this have been huge- the accusation was frequently stated, and used to exhort violence against the Jews. Many of the most violent pogroms (attacks against Jews), were as a result of a local priest preaching on this theme at Easter. Thus this claim can be linked to numerous persecutions of the Jews. The Dominicans were very active in preaching on this accusation - and the murder of 4000 people in Lisbon in 1506AD is directly attributed to preaching by Dominican priests. The Christian Bible says the Romans killed Jesus, though Jews are mentioned as accomplices (claims that Jews killed Jesus came several hundred years later). How come the accomplices are persecuted and there isn't an anti-Roman movement through history? Jesus himself said, "Forgive them [i.e., the Jews], for they know not what they do." The Second Vatican Council in 1963 officially exonerated the Jews as the killers of Jesus. Neither statement of Christian belief lessened anti-Semitism, because Christianity records the historical fact that the Jews crucified Jesus Christ, the Lord of Glory. Each individual Jew, as the Bible teaches, shares in the Corporate Guilt of the murder of Jesus Christ. Thus the Jews, both individually and corporately, must repent of their sins. The largest world faith is Christianity followed by Islam and unaffiliated faiths and all three hate Jews for reasons already stated and that's why most of the world hates them. This is the biggest and most revealing cause of Anti-Semitism which to some extent exposes the irrational and theocratic undercurrents in both Christian and Islamic faiths.

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Rhea Samyal

Rhea Samyal hails from paradise on earth Jammu and Kashmir and derives her flair for sensitized poetry and diverse writing from the war and conflict that exists amidst ethereal beauty and love. She is a first year law student at the ILS law college , Pune. With the infusion of travel mania in her, Rhea loves to read people, cultures and lifestyles. A lover of animals, music, classics and sitcoms, Rhea always strives to make a difference wherever she can with whatever little means. Her greatest passion is to weave tragedy into words and redefine philanthropy through actions.

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Top 10 Major Reasons why People hate Jews - Listovative

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Anti-Semitism is the intense dislike or prejudice against Jewish people who have faced persecutions , discrimination and expulsions throughout the world in different times and generations. Who is a Jew is a question in itself and is hating them is an influence of the effect derived from history that we've become conditioned to accept and ...

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I wonder how Anne Frank died.

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Credit: BESTWEB | Shutterstock.com

Anne Frank, the young Jewish teenager whose diary became one of the most iconic portrayals of the Holocaust, likely died about a month earlier than her official death date, a new historical analysis finds.

Anne and her sister, Margot, were both given official death dates of March 31, 1945, by Dutch authorities after the end of World War II. The Frank sisters died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, but the exact dates of their deaths are unknown.

Now, the Anne Frank House, an organization devoted to preserving Anne's memory and her family's hiding place in Amsterdam, has released a new study that puts Anne's death in February 1945, earlier than previously believed. The study is based on a re-analysis of old documents and eyewitness accounts from camp survivors. [ 8 Grisly Archaeological Discoveries]

A Holocaust history

During the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, Annelies Marie Frank and her family spent two years living in a secret apartment in the building where her father, Otto, worked. It was during this time that Anne kept her famous diary, which was published posthumously. On Aug. 4, 1944, an unknown tipster led the police to the Frank's secret hiding place, and the family was arrested, along with another family of refugees living alongside them.

The Anne Frank House report traces the misery the Franks endured from that day forward. First, the family was sent to the Westerbork transit camp, and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they arrived in early September 1944. Anne, Margot and their mother, Edith, survived the initial intake into the camp and were kept at Birkenau as slave laborers for two months.

On Nov. 1, 1944, Anne and Margot were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after a humiliating and dehumanizing selection process in which they were forced to stand naked on a parade ground while camp guards and doctors judged their ability to work. Separated from their mother, the two Frank sisters were locked into cattle wagons with about 70 other individuals, with hardly any food or water, for a two-day journey. According to the report, the prisoners had no idea of their destination.

Anne Frank's final days

A few witnesses recall seeing Anne and Margot at Bergen-Belsen, but the new analysis of these survivor stories found no accounts dating later than around Feb. 7, 1945. By the time Anne was found by an old classmate and fellow prisoner Nanette Blitz in December, the young diarist was already in bad shape.

"She was no more than a skeleton by then. She was wrapped in a blanket; she couldn't bear to wear her clothes any more because they were crawling with lice," Blitz later recalled, according to the report.

Multiple witnesses noted that Anne and Margot had typhus symptomsbefore February 7. The disease, carried by lice, normally kills within 12 days. Given Anne's weakened state, it's unlikely that she (or her sister) could have survived into March, the Anne Frank House researchers concluded.

Anne's death, made famous by her writings, was just one of a staggering number of tragedies at Bergen-Belsen in the final months of World War II. According to the Anne Frank House, typhus and starvation killed as many as 1,000 people per day in the camp before its liberation in April 1945.

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Anne Frank Likely Died Earlier Than Believed

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Anne Frank, the young Jewish teenager whose diary became one of the most iconic portrayals of the Holocaust, likely died about a month earlier than her official death date, a new historical analysis finds. Anne and her sister, Margot, were both given official death dates of March 31, 1945, by Dutch authorities after the end of World War II.

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I wonder why some people believe the holocaust never happened, even though there is evidence to prove it occurred?

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Holocaust denial is any attempt to negate the established facts of the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Holocaust denial and distortion are forms of antisemitism, prejudice against or hatred of Jews. Holocaust denial and distortion generally claim that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish interests.

These views perpetuate long-standing antisemitic stereotypes, hateful beliefs that helped lay the groundwork for the Holocaust. Holocaust denial, distortion, and misuse all undermine the truth and our understanding of history.

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Holocaust denial is any attempt to negate the established facts of the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Holocaust denial and distortion are forms of antisemitism, prejudice against or hatred of Jews. Holocaust denial and distortion generally claim that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish interests.

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I wonder if kids in concentration camps still got an education.

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When World War II ended in 1945, six million European Jews were dead, killed in the Holocaust. More than one million of the victims were children.

Driven by a racist ideology that viewed Jews as "parasitic vermin" worthy only of eradication, the Nazis implemented genocide on an unprecedented scale. All of Europe's Jews were slated for destruction: the sick and the healthy, the rich and the poor, the religiously orthodox and converts to Christianity, the aged and the young, even infants.

Thousands of Jewish children survived this brutal carnage, however, many because they were hidden. With identities disguised, and often physically concealed from the outside world, these youngsters faced constant fear, dilemmas, and danger. Theirs was a life in shadows, where a careless remark, a denunciation, or the murmurings of inquisitive neighbors could lead to discovery and death.

Choices

The vast majority of Jews in German-occupied Europe never went into hiding, for many reasons. Hiding meant leaving behind relatives, risking immediate and severe punishment, and finding an individual or family willing to provide refuge. Many Jews, no doubt, held out the hope that the threat of death would pass or that they could survive until the Allied victory.

Sadly, the willingness or ability of the non-Jewish populations to rescue Jewish lives never matched the Nazis' vehement desire to destroy them. Even in countries where hatred for the German occupiers ran deep, anti-Nazism did not necessarily generate aid for Jews. The Nazis portrayed the Jews as carriers of contagion, as criminals, or as "Bolshevik" agents anxious to subvert European society. The Nazis further discouraged rescue by threatening severe penalties for those caught helping Jews.

Discovered

Life in hiding was always hazardous. Throughout German-occupied Europe, the Nazis made a concerted effort to locate Jews in hiding. German officials and their collaborators harshly penalized those who aided Jews and offered rewards to individuals willing to turn in Jews. Beginning in March 1943, the Gestapo (the German secret state police) granted some Jews in Germany reprieve from deportation in exchange for tracking down their co-religionists who had gone underground. By spring 1945, when the Nazi regime lay in ruins, these informers had turned in as many as 2,000 Jews. In other countries, neighbors betrayed others for money or out of support for the regime. In German-occupied Poland, blackmailers squeezed money or property from Jews by threatening to turn them in to the authorities.

Jews in hiding were discovered by chance during raids seeking conscripts for forced labor, resistance cells, black marketers, or by random searches of documents. A slip of the tongue, improperly prepared false documents, or gossip could lead to arrest and deportation.

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Life in Shadows: Hidden Children and the Holocaust

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When World War II ended in 1945, six million European Jews were dead, killed in the Holocaust. More than one million of the victims were children. Driven by a racist ideology that viewed Jews as "parasitic vermin" worthy only of eradication, the Nazis implemented genocide on an unprecedented scale.

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I wonder how Ann Frank's diary changed the world?

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I wonder if children could pass as non-Jews?

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I wonder if homosexuals faced discrimination during the Holocaust?

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Background & Overview of Homosexuals in the Holocaust

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Encyclopedia of Jewish and Israeli history, politics and culture, with biographies, statistics, articles and documents on topics from anti-Semitism to Zionism.

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I wonder what they ate or drank at the concentration camps?

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Meals - The Holocaust Explained: Designed for schools

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While the prisoners were being processed after their arrival, their belongings were taken away. A group of prisoners was assigned to collecting the valuables, while others sifted through the possessions. These were then transported back to Germany. The prisoners working on this task were in a privileged position.

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I wonder why the Nazis named their soldiers Storm-troopers?

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I wonder how life in the Holocaust was?

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When World War II ended in 1945, six million European Jews were dead, killed in the Holocaust. More than one million of the victims were children.

Driven by a racist ideology that viewed Jews as "parasitic vermin" worthy only of eradication, the Nazis implemented genocide on an unprecedented scale. All of Europe's Jews were slated for destruction: the sick and the healthy, the rich and the poor, the religiously orthodox and converts to Christianity, the aged and the young, even infants.

Thousands of Jewish children survived this brutal carnage, however, many because they were hidden. With identities disguised, and often physically concealed from the outside world, these youngsters faced constant fear, dilemmas, and danger. Theirs was a life in shadows, where a careless remark, a denunciation, or the murmurings of inquisitive neighbors could lead to discovery and death.

Choices

The vast majority of Jews in German-occupied Europe never went into hiding, for many reasons. Hiding meant leaving behind relatives, risking immediate and severe punishment, and finding an individual or family willing to provide refuge. Many Jews, no doubt, held out the hope that the threat of death would pass or that they could survive until the Allied victory.

Sadly, the willingness or ability of the non-Jewish populations to rescue Jewish lives never matched the Nazis' vehement desire to destroy them. Even in countries where hatred for the German occupiers ran deep, anti-Nazism did not necessarily generate aid for Jews. The Nazis portrayed the Jews as carriers of contagion, as criminals, or as "Bolshevik" agents anxious to subvert European society. The Nazis further discouraged rescue by threatening severe penalties for those caught helping Jews.

Discovered

Life in hiding was always hazardous. Throughout German-occupied Europe, the Nazis made a concerted effort to locate Jews in hiding. German officials and their collaborators harshly penalized those who aided Jews and offered rewards to individuals willing to turn in Jews. Beginning in March 1943, the Gestapo (the German secret state police) granted some Jews in Germany reprieve from deportation in exchange for tracking down their co-religionists who had gone underground. By spring 1945, when the Nazi regime lay in ruins, these informers had turned in as many as 2,000 Jews. In other countries, neighbors betrayed others for money or out of support for the regime. In German-occupied Poland, blackmailers squeezed money or property from Jews by threatening to turn them in to the authorities.

Jews in hiding were discovered by chance during raids seeking conscripts for forced labor, resistance cells, black marketers, or by random searches of documents. A slip of the tongue, improperly prepared false documents, or gossip could lead to arrest and deportation.

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Life in Shadows: Hidden Children and the Holocaust

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When World War II ended in 1945, six million European Jews were dead, killed in the Holocaust. More than one million of the victims were children. Driven by a racist ideology that viewed Jews as "parasitic vermin" worthy only of eradication, the Nazis implemented genocide on an unprecedented scale.

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I wonder if anyone else had the same idea, and wrote a diary during the Holocaust

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I wonder how Otto Frank survived and his family didn't?

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After Auschwitz is liberated, Otto returns to Amsterdam. On his way back, he hears of Edith's death. Back in Amsterdam, he goes to see Miep and Jan Gies. He hopes Anne and Margot might still be alive, but then discovers that they too did not survive the war. Miep gives him Anne's diaries. Anne had wanted her diary to be published after the war, and her wish would eventually come true.

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The story of Anne Frank: Otto Frank returns back alone

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After Auschwitz is liberated, Otto returns to Amsterdam. On his way back, he hears of Edith's death. Back in Amsterdam, he goes to see Miep and Jan Gies. He hopes Anne and Margot might still be alive, but then discovers that they too did not survive the war.

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I wonder who betrayed Anne Frank and her family and the rest of the people that were living in the annex

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On a warm summer's day on August 4 1944, four Gestapo policemen raided a canal warehouse at 263 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam. The eight Jewish people hiding in the annex there were arrested: Otto Frank, his wife and two children; the van Pels family of three; and Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist. They were taken to Westerbork Kamp and from there herded into cattle wagons bound for Auschwitz. Of the eight, only Otto returned.

During the raid, a policeman emptied Otto's briefcase to fill it with the fugitives' valuables. In his haste, he dropped a batch of papers and a small diary belonging to Otto's daughter. This diary, the diary of Anne Frank, was to become the most widely read document to emerge from the Holocaust.

In March this year, Carol Ann Lee's biography of Otto Frank was published in the Netherlands, generating renewed interest in the diary and reviving the question of who betrayed the Franks. In a television interview, the day before her book was published, Lee identified Tonny Ahlers as that person.

Ahlers was a violent anti-semite. By the early 1940s he had a lengthy criminal record and had been involved in numerous brawls in Jewish-owned cafes. During the war he denounced Jews and members of the Dutch underground to the Germans. In 1945, Ahlers was tried for his wartime activities and sent to prison.

Less than 48 hours after the publication of her book, Lee received an astonishing telephone call from her editor. "Someone rang just now," she told Lee. "He has information about the betrayal of the Frank family. He left his number." Lee called. The man who answered introduced himself as Anton, Tonny Ahlers's son.

"I could never have told people voluntarily that my father betrayed Otto Frank, but now that it has been made public, I feel it's my duty to tell what I know and to prevent any lies and half-truths going into the papers," he explained.

Anton is a reserved man in his mid-50s, who weighs his words carefully. He says he seeks neither fame nor revenge. His Dutch wife had five uncles executed by the Nazis for their resistance activities. He has never been to the Anne Frank house. "I feel shame," he says, "I am ashamed that my father created this situation."

He agrees to meet me, accompanied by Lee, in the lobby of a hotel on the outskirts of Amsterdam. This is the first time he has agreed to be interviewed.

Anton does not remember when he became aware of his father's chequered past. "It was a process, not an incident," he says. "One day, one of the kids at school taunted me, calling me a Nazi boy. Then, when I was 16, I had a girlfriend. I was very keen on her, but when her father found out my identity, he said, 'Not with a Nazi' and forbade her to see me again."

Anton's mother lives in Amsterdam. When Lee approached her in connection with her research on Otto Frank, she got a hostile reception. "I asked her about her ex-husband's relationship with Otto. At first she told me that they were friends and had business relations. But when I confronted her with letters that Ahlers had written about Otto Frank, where it was clear that he hated him, she became aggressive and threatened to call the police. She screamed: 'If you come any closer to this door, I will attack you. The war was bad for everyone, not just the Jews. Otto Frank was my best friend. My husband did nothing wrong during the war. You have no idea what it was like for ordinary Dutch people - everyone talks about the Jews, but it was bad for us too. Anyway, I had Jewish girls working for me during the war, all the time. My husband did not betray anyone. Don't you dare write anything bad about him. If you do, I have family who will come and get you.' And she slammed the door."

Anton is unmoved. "My mother lives in lies. She claims she had Jewish maids working for her during the war but I can categorically say that it's untrue. Lies, lies, lies," he sighs. "My father was a violent man. I remember plates smashing against the walls and punches flying into our faces - my mother saw what was going on but never defended us. She never interfered."

Anton has no doubt that it was his father who denounced the Franks to the Nazis. His evidence is difficult to corroborate, but through painstaking research - poring over letters, listening to testimonies and uncovering wartime documents - Lee has given substance to many of Anton's claims. In her biography, recently published in English, Lee describes Ahlers as an unpleasant and dishonest man. His son concurs: "He was always causing trouble, picking arguments with neighbours and snitching on people. He was always in trouble with the police, always owing money. We often had the bailiffs coming to our flat."

In 1985, the relationship between Ahlers and his wife reached rock bottom. In one incident, she later claimed, Ahlers had tried to run her over with his car. After a particularly violent incident she left him and the following year began divorce proceedings.

At about the same time, Anton's business took a serious blow and he was forced to declare bankruptcy. His lawyer asked him whether he had dealings in the West Indies. "I was rather surprised since I had never been to the West Indies and had no business connections there."

The lawyer showed him a letter sent anonymously to the receivers. The writer claimed that Anton and his wife were involved in drug trafficking in the West Indies. "This letter caused us a lot of problems," he says. "Shortly after this incident, we accompanied my mother to my parents' house, to collect some personal belongings. Lying on my father's desk we found a carbon copy of the 'anonymous letter' sent to the receivers. You see, nothing was beyond him.

"When my daughter was in primary school the class learned about Anne Frank and read from her diary. One day," recalls Anton, "she mentioned that her grandfather had told her that he was involved in the Frank family going into hiding. Then she added that he told her he was also there when they got out."

Assuming that this exchange took place, it is not clear what Ahlers meant, since he was not present when the Franks' hiding place was raided. None the less, there is written evidence indicating that Ahlers knew Otto had gone into hiding and was aware of his hiding place.

In a testimony given to Lee, Ahlers' 82-year-old brother, Cas, said that Ahlers told him that he betrayed the Franks during the war. This can only be submitted as supporting evidence as it is based on hearsay. The incriminating evidence against Ahlers is found by piecing together his wartime activities and contact with Otto Frank. "If you put all the pieces together, it all adds up," says Anton. Then he offers another twist to the tale. "It did not end with the betrayal: I believe that my father blackmailed Otto Frank after the war. My father received money every month - he bragged about it. He would buy lots of presents and go on expensive holidays. He told us it was a disability allowance, because he had polio as a child. But this could not be - the monthly payments were comparable with the salary of a board manager. Then, suddenly, in 1980 his financial situation changed and the spendthrift lifestyle ended." Otto Frank died in 1980.

It is unclear what Otto had to hide and why he would let himself be blackmailed. Lee concedes that the evidence for this theory is circumstantial, but offers a possible motive: "Otto sold products to the Wehrmacht, the German army, in 1940, after the invasion of the Netherlands. Miep Gies, one of Otto's employees - who also helped him go into hiding - confirmed this after the war. Ahlers knew about these dealings. When Otto returned from Auschwitz in 1945, having lost his wife and two daughters, he may have feared his company would be confiscated if his war-time business with Germany became known, although 80% of Dutch firms did business with the Germans during the war, mostly out of fear. You must also take into account," she says, "that when he returned to the Netherlands after the war, Otto was considered an 'enemy national' and his situation was very precarious."

Eva Schloss, whose mother married Otto Frank in 1953, dismisses the blackmail suggestion. "Otto was extremely careful with money. I don't believe for a second that he would allow anyone to blackmail him. My mother and Otto did everything together and there is no way my mother would not know about such a thing."

Ahlers died in 2000, aged 82, and there are now no living witnesses who might be able to unlock the mystery. The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation recently stated that, as a result of the findings published in Lee's book, The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, it is officially reopening the investigation into the betrayal, and investigating the possibility that Otto was blackmailed after the war. It will review old files and testimony in search of new revelations and hope to reach some sort of conclusion by the end of the year.

After more than 50 years of silence, Anton Ahlers is keen to shed light on his father's past and expose the truth. "I have kept silent all these years", he says. "It's now time to tell the truth. Enough of lies. No more lies."
Topics

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On a warm summer's day on August 4 1944, four Gestapo policemen raided a canal warehouse at 263 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam. The eight Jewish people hiding in the annex there were arrested: Otto Frank, his wife and two children; the van Pels family of three; and Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist.

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I wonder how many people died during the holocaust?

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Calculating the numbers of individuals who were killed as the result of Nazi policies is a difficult task. There is no single wartime document created by Nazi officials that spells out how many people were killed in the Holocaust or World War II.

To accurately estimate the extent of human losses, scholars, Jewish organizations, and governmental agencies since the 1940s have relied on a variety of different records, such as census reports, captured German and Axis archives, and postwar investigations, to compile these statistics. As more documents come to light or as scholars arrive at a more precise understanding of the Holocaust, estimates of human losses may change.

The single most important thing to keep in mind when attempting to document numbers of victims of the Holocaust is that no one master list of those who perished exists anywhere in the world.
Documenting the Holocaust: Examples of Documents
What follow are the current best estimates of civilians and disarmed soldiers killed by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

These estimates are calculated from wartime reports generated by those who implemented Nazi population policy, and postwar demographic studies on population loss during World War II.

Number of Deaths

Soviet civilians

around 7 million (including 1.3 Soviet Jewish civilians, who are included in the 6 million figure for Jews)

Soviet prisoners of war

around 3 million (including about 50,000 Jewish soldiers)

Non-Jewish Polish civilians

around 1.8 million (including between 50,000 and 100,000 members of the Polish elites)

Serb civilians (on the territory of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina)

312,000

People with disabilities living in institutions

up to 250,000

Roma (Gypsies)

196,000-220,000

Jehovah's Witnesses

around 1,900

Repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocials

at least 70,000

German political opponents and resistance activists in Axis-occupied territory

undetermined

Homosexuals

hundreds, possibly thousands (possibly also counted in part under the 70,000 repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocials noted above)

Jewish Loss by Location of Death

With regard to the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust, best estimates for the breakdown of Jewish loss according to location of death follow:

Location of Death

Jewish Losses

Auschwitz complex (including Birkenau, Monowitz, and subcamps)

approximately 1 million

Treblinka 2

approximately 925,000

Sobibor

at least 167,000

Chelmno

156,000-172,000

Shooting operations at various locations in central and southern German-occupied Poland (the Government General)

at least 200,000

Shooting operations in German-annexed western Poland (District Wartheland

at least 20,000

Deaths in other facilities that the Germans designated as concentration camps

at least 150,000

Shooting operations and gas wagons at hundreds of locations in the German-occupied Soviet Union

at least 1.3 million

Shooting operations in the Soviet Union (German, Austrian, Czech Jews deported to the Soviet Union)

approximately 55,000

Shooting operations and gas wagons in Serbia

at least 15,088

Shot or tortured to death in Croatia under the Ustaša regime

23,000-25,000

Deaths in ghettos

at least 800,000

Notes on Documentation
No single wartime document
There is no single wartime document that contains the above cited estimates of Jewish deaths.

There are three obvious and interrelated reasons for the lack of a single document:

1. Compilation of comprehensive statistics of Jews killed by German and other Axis authorities began in 1942 and 1943. It broke down during the last year and a half of the war.

2. Beginning in 1943, as it became clear that they would lose the war, the Germans and their Axis partners destroyed much of the existing documentation. They also destroyed physical evidence of mass murder.

3. No personnel were available or inclined to count Jewish deaths until the very end of World War II and the Nazi regime. Hence, total estimates are calculated only after the end of the war and are based on demographic loss data and the documents of the perpetrators. Though fragmentary, these sources provide essential figures from which to make calculations.

One centrally directed statistical study of Jews killed by German authorities survived the war. A copy was among the records captured by the US Army in 1945. Likewise, several regional compilations of such gruesome data were among the records captured by US, British, and Soviet forces after World War II. The US, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union have used most of these documents at one time or another as exhibits in criminal or civil proceedings against Nazi offenders
Polish and Soviet civilian figures
With regard to the Polish and Soviet civilian figures, at this time there are not sufficient demographic tools to enable historians to distinguish between:

1. racially targeted individuals

2. persons actually or believed to be active in underground resistance

3. persons killed in reprisal for some actual or perceived resistance activity carried out by someone else

4. losses due to so-called collateral damage in actual military operations

Virtually all deaths of Soviet, Polish, and Serb civilians during the course of military and anti-partisan operations had, however, a racist component. German units conducted those operations with an ideologically driven and willful disregard for civilian life.

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Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution

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Calculating the numbers of individuals who were killed as the result of Nazi policies is a difficult task. There is no single wartime document created by Nazi officials that spells out how many people were killed in the Holocaust or World War II.

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How did the Germans define who wasJewish?

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Adolf Hitler became head of the party in 1921, and under his leadership the party eventually became a powerful political force in German elections by the early 1930's. The Nazi party ideology was largely based on nationalism and racism.

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I wonder why Hitler wanted to exterminate all jew

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LAURENCE REES: Why did the Nazis hate the Jews so much?

DAVID CESARANI: The Nazis weren't the only people who hated Jews during the 20th Century, but they hated Jews in a different way to most other people. There's a long history of conflict between Judaism and Christianity, a millennia of conflict. There's also a long history of conflict between Jews and non-Jews because of the social and economic relations between Jews wherever there have been substantial communities of the Jewish population and non-Jews around them. But those historic conflicts were contained within religious understandings - a conflict between Christianity and Judaism, and they were social, economic and sometimes political conflicts. What made the Nazis' hatred of the Jews so unusual is that it was racial and it was biological. They believed that the Jews were not just the followers of an abhorrent religious doctrine, or that the Jews had grabbed too much economic influence, or even that they were too intrusive in politics or culture: what made the Nazis hatred of the Jews so different is that they believed that the Jews were biologically and racially distinct and that there was a kind of biological struggle for dominance over the entire human race between the Jews and everybody else.

This wasn't something that could be solved through religious debate and argument, the conversion of the Jews, for example, wouldn't do. The Nazis hated assimilated and converted Jews as much as they hated orthodox Jews. This was a struggle that was almost zoological, from the animal world. This was a struggle for survival between the human race and this Jewish species that the core group of the Nazis invested with almost a kind of supernatural demonic power, which was absolutely unprecedented.

LAURENCE REES: How and why did people take that seriously?

DAVID CESARANI: One of the peculiar developments in the middle of the 20th Century which makes Nazi anti-Semitism so powerful and ultimately so lethal is not that the Nazis were able to spread their poisonous fantasies through everybody else's minds, it's that there was a sufficient overlap between a traditional dislike of Jews and the Nazis own very radical, cosmological, biological hatred of the Jews. It wasn't until too late in the day that people who disliked Jews for religious, social or political reasons, that were very traditional and actually rather conservative, realised that what the Nazis had in mind in their dealing with the Jews was something very different indeed. Let's take the Catholic Church, for example. The Catholic Church was very happy to convert Jews. Catholics believed that Christ would return when all the Jews were converted and this was a fundamental element of Christian doctrine, more exaggerated in certain Protestant sects but nevertheless present amongst the Catholics.

Catholics, therefore, saw the Jews as a bit of a problem. Certainly if they were radical Jews, Bolsheviks Jews, but if these Jews would see the truth, see the light, would convert to Christianity and become good Catholics, then the problem of the Jews would disappear. They didn't want to kill Jews.

And when they realised that the Nazis' solution to the so-called Jewish question was murder, the vast majority of Catholics were appalled by this and many of them, as we know, risked their lives to save Jews; they believed that Catholicism required them to save the lives of Jews because all human life was sacred. Now, what separated Nazi anti-Semitism from other anti-Semitism is the Nazis did not believe that all human life was sacred. They certainly didn't believe that the lives of Jews were sacred, on the contrary they believed that every Jewish life, even a child, was a threat to the fatherland, the German Volk, and the human race, and had to be exterminated. That kind of biological, racial hatred was something quite unprecedented in human history. The Nazis were able to wrap it up in traditional hatred of Judaism, they used traditional stereotypes, and it wasn't until too late in the day that people realised that what the Nazis had in mind was very different to what most anti-Semites had believed and had practised for centuries beforehand.

LAURENCE REES: How important was the feeling a number of non-Jewish Germans had about the Jewish role in the First World War?

DAVID CESARANI: Another thing that separates the Nazis apart from other people who dislike Jews is that the Nazis believed that the Jews had acquired vast power, and that they had used this power in a malign way. It was the power of the Jews that had led to the Bolshevik revolution, it was the power of the Jews that had led to revolution in Germany, had stabbed the German Army in the back and had brought down Imperial Germany. In the Nazis' world vision not only were the Jews a force for evil, a Manichean, demonic force for evil, but they had vast power, they had their hands on the levers of power. They had to be eliminated, they had to be deprived of that power, they had to be broken and then destroyed. To the Nazis the entire course of world history vindicated that interpretation of Jewish power.

What happened in 1918 was simply one more example of the power of the Jews, and the level and power of the Jews. One reason that Hitler was keen to see the Jews segregated in Nazi Germany and subjected to increasingly harsh measures once the Second World War began, and why he wanted Jews segregated and eventually destroyed throughout the Nazi sphere of influence while the Nazis were fighting the war, was that he believed that if Jews were allowed to exist freely, to hold what he believed was economic and political power while Germany was at war, if they were within the German sphere of influence, they would do what they did in November 1918; they would stab Germany in the back.

So in Hitler's eyes you had to destroy Jewish community after Jewish community wherever the Germans conquered, the countries they occupied, even the Jewish communities that were their allies - those Jewish communities had to be destroyed otherwise they would subvert the war effort and stab Germany in the back. That was a lesson that he had learned from 1918 but it was something that he believed could be seen throughout the workings of history: the malign power of the Jew.

LAURENCE REES: But there is no real evidence that anyone can point to of any reality behind any of this?

DAVID CESARANI: Hitler's not unique in believing that there are mysterious and malign forces at work behind the scenes of history. Wherever life is complicated, and life is usually complicated, wherever political developments or the relations between states begin to unfold in a way that is difficult to comprehend, certainly difficult for ordinary people to comprehend, there is a temptation to see the hidden hand at work; hidden forces that cannot be identified. The only way that many people can explain what is happening to them is as the result of a conspiracy of hidden forces, and that fantasy has enormous appeal, and there are ruthless, cynical people who are willing to exploit that. Now, Hitler actually believed in this paranoid view of world history. There were others who went along with that because they knew it was a way of mobilising public opinion, getting voters into the polls to vote for them.

LAURENCE REES: And there's this profound sense of illogicality, because they're believing that the Jews are behind Capitalism in America and they're also behind Bolshevism, the opposite ideology, in the Soviet Union. So how are they holding those two things together?

DAVID CESARANI: It's nonsensical in one way but it's also very sensible in another way. In this country, in Britain in the 20th Century, you find many donors to political parties who will donate money to the Conservatives and to the Labour Party just in case one wins and the other loses. People always try and back both sides against the middle. It is not inconceivable to believe that there are certain political forces in the modern world in the 21st Century. It's very common for corporations to embody this, who are behind all political parties of the left or the right, and you make sure that whoever is on top's interests come through. So what appears to be a nonsensical belief that the Jews could be behind Capitalism and Communism at the same time is not that unusual, and in fact the great corporations during the 20th Century did have economic relations with the Capitalist countries and with the Communist countries. Fiat in Italy had jolly good relations with the Communist parties as well as being a backer of fascism.

LAURENCE REES: But surely there's more to it than that. What this view of the Jews relies upon, is the belief that the Jews are operating without any core beliefs at all - other than crude self-interest. And the people who believe the Jews are like this, are thus, themselves, operating with a massive level of cynicism about how the world is structured?

DAVID CESARANI: We think of Hitler alone and we think of the great leaders as alone, but usually they are surrounded by a core or a clique, and there can be different world views or different ways of seeing politics amongst these groups. With Hitler you have absolute certainty and a measure of cynicism, but in a character like Goering you have absolute cynicism and not much absolutism. Hitler was quite unusual in that he did have a very rigid world view and a set of policies that he pursued. He was willing to trim at certain times, but he was fairly relentless. Other Nazis were much more flexible in their beliefs and extremely cynical in appearing to be absolutist. Himmler is one of the most notorious examples of this. You would have thought that Himmler was actually rigid in his beliefs, but at crucial moments Himmler was willing and able to be very, very flexible. And I think what makes the Nazi political machine and certainly its political leadership so dangerous is that it combined elements of absolute certainty with other elements of incredible cynicism and flexibility. That's a very unusual combination. It enabled them to take power, to hold power and it almost led to them winning the Second World War.

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LAURENCE REES: Why did the Nazis hate the Jews so much? DAVID CESARANI: The Nazis weren't the only people who hated Jews during the 20th Century, but they hated Jews in a different way to most other people. There's a long history of conflict between Judaism and Christianity, a millennia of conflict.

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I wonder who was left after the holocaust?

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We've been reworking our Holocaust Encyclopedia, and we would love for you to explore the new experience. Click the button at right to start using the new version. The version you are viewing now will remain online until June 30, 2018.

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I wonder why the holocaust started.

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Why did the Holocaust happen? - CBBC Newsround

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Find out more about why the Holocaust happened.

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I wonder why other people had to be so cruel.

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I wonder how many non-jews were killed in the holocaust...

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Encyclopedia of Jewish and Israeli history, politics and culture, with biographies, statistics, articles and documents on topics from anti-Semitism to Zionism.

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I wonder how Otto Frank felt after finding out what happened to his family...

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After Auschwitz is liberated, Otto returns to Amsterdam. On his way back, he hears of Edith's death. Back in Amsterdam, he goes to see Miep and Jan Gies. He hopes Anne and Margot might still be alive, but then discovers that they too did not survive the war. Miep gives him Anne's diaries. Anne had wanted her diary to be published after the war, and her wish would eventually come true.

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The story of Anne Frank: Otto Frank returns back alone

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After Auschwitz is liberated, Otto returns to Amsterdam. On his way back, he hears of Edith's death. Back in Amsterdam, he goes to see Miep and Jan Gies. He hopes Anne and Margot might still be alive, but then discovers that they too did not survive the war.

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I wonder if a tragedy like the Holocaust could happen again in the future.

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After a generation of multiculturalism, we have made some progress. We try to ensure that the workplace is fairer, the school curriculum is more inclusive, and we have more prominent individuals - from newsreaders to footballers, politicians to police - who reflect our diverse society.

But you only have to scratch beneath the surface to find ignorance and distrust. Often the more diverse we are, the less we know about each other, and consequently the more fragmented we can become - as demonstrated only too well in the Celebrity Big Brother House recently.

A recent YouGov poll conducted by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust suggested that 41% of us think that the Holocaust could happen again. Worryingly, 36% of us also think that if genocide were to happen most people would stand by and do nothing.

The vast majority of us - 79% - do not realise that black people were also targets of the Nazis and nearly 50% had no idea that the Roma community, lesbians and gay men, and people with disabilities, were also persecuted.

If, as many of us think, there could be a next time, and a significant minority would do nothing to stop it, have we really learnt from the genocides of our recent past?

Sixty years ago, the Jews of Germany were a model of integration. They had been part of German society for more than a millennium. They favoured High German over Yiddish, the German-Jewish dialect used by many East European Jews, and their synagogues looked like churches. Their religious services sounded for all the world like protestant worship. This was no superficial allegiance either. Jews fought for the Fatherland in the trenches of the Somme and Flanders, shooting at English Jews across bloodied fields. They were German through and through, and fiercely proud of it.

Integration was not enough to save them though. Suspicion, prejudice and discrimination lay dormant, awaiting crisis. It was this deeply embedded anti-Semitism that the Nazis were able to unleash.

Britain today has more complex fault lines than the straightforward Judeo-Christian duel played upon by the fascism of the 1930s. We are surrounded by a cacophony of cultures, of which we often know little. If hit hard with the ideology of hatred, our society would not split into two, it would shatter into a thousand pieces.

The question is what do we really know about our neighbours? Did you wish your Muslim friend well over the fast of Ramadan, or chat to your Hindu friend about Diwali, or find out what Yom Kippur means to a Jew? Have you learned why your Polish colleague has left her child with a grandparent to come to work here, or found out the variety of degrees your East European office cleaners have between them? Have you ever spoken to an asylum seeker about why they are here and what they have left behind? Do you think of your colleague as disabled, or just the same but different? Are we actually speaking to each other or just passing by? This year's Holocaust Memorial Day (tomorrow) is trying to address some of these issues.

Holocaust Memorial Day reflects on the past, but is foremost a call to action to avoid similar tragedy in future. The strap line for Holocaust Memorial Day 2007 is "Same. But Different". It alerts us to the danger of division and suspicion. If the Holocaust happened to the Jews in Germany in the 20th Century, it really can happen anywhere to anyone.

This year national commemorative event in Newcastle will remind the country that genocidal violence has been continuing in Darfur for three years, with little or no serious intervention. It will remind us that we live in a fragmented society where we all need to respect that we are the same but different. It will remind us that Auschwitz is possible anywhere, if we do not make it impossible.
Topics

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After a generation of multiculturalism, we have made some progress. We try to ensure that the workplace is fairer, the school curriculum is more inclusive, and we have more prominent individuals - from newsreaders to footballers, politicians to police - who reflect our diverse society.

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I wonder how many jews hid in their homes?

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I wonder why hitler wanted to blame everything on the Jews

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One can't consider the Holocaust without wondering about the source of Adolf Hitler's hatred for the Jews. Although much of his political manifesto, " Mein Kampf," was devoted to explaining that hatred, which was clearly shared by an enthusiastic German nation, the actions taken against Europe's Jews were so monstrous in both nature and scale that it was inevitable that researchers would look for a more personal explanation. It's natural that scholars and others would scrutinize every piece of available evidence for proof of some deeply personal psychological injury that will explain Hitler.

Illegitimate father

Even before Hitler came to power, there were rumors that he was of Jewish descent, a detail of personal history that would be highly damaging, even humiliating to him, and which he went to lengths to quash. The idea derived from the fact - not a secret - that his father, Alois Hitler, was illegitimate. Although Hitler's paternal grandmother, Maria Anna Schicklgruber, eventually married Johann Georg Hiedler and took his surname, Alois was already aged five when she did so, and she never did reveal, if indeed she knew, who his father was.

Naturally, there was much speculation about the identity of Hitler's grandfather - most of it centered on Johann Georg Hiedler himself and his brother, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, who was the stepfather of Alois, and who left him part of his estate when he died.

The Jewish angle to the speculation, however, concerned a third candidate, a Jew named Leopold Frankenberg," who according to Hitler's personal lawyer, Hans Frank, was the young-adult son of a couple who employed Maria Schicklgruber as a cook at the time she became pregnant with Alois. According to testimony given by Hans Frank at the Nuremberg Trials, in 1945-46, he had heard from Hitler himself in 1930 about this Jewish ancestry. Nevertheless, no evidence has ever been found to support this claim, nor is there any proof that Leopold Frankenberger even existed.

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In any event, the connection between having an embarrassing ancestor in one's family tree to possessing a pathological hatred of that ancestor's ethnic group is far from obvious.

The physician

Another well-known theory concerns the Jewish physician, Eduard Bloch, who cared for Hitler's beloved mother, Klara Hitler, before her death from breast cancer, in 1907, at age 47. By the time Klara's condition was diagnosed, it was incurable, but Dr. Bloch, at her son's insistence, treated her for more than a month with a quasi-experimental medication called iodoform. The medication caused her excruciating pain, but did not extend her life.

Could the Holocaust have been Hitler's revenge on Dr. Bloch for his inability to save Klara's life?

Certainly at the conscious level, Hitler did not hold Bloch responsible for his mother's suffering. After her death, he actually wrote to Dr. Bloch thanking him for his devoted care. Three decades later, in post-Anschluss Austria in 1938, when Bloch wrote to the chancellor asking for help, Hitler arranged for him to be spared the harsh measures being taken against Jews until he could make arrangements to emigrate to the United States, where he died in 1945.

Mufti's idea?

Last fall, Israel's prime minister suggested that Hitler got the idea for the Holocaust from the Palestinian political and religious leader Amin al-Husseini, who was the grand mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1937. According to Benjamin Netanyahu, Hitler would have sufficed with expelling the Jews from Germany, but Husseini complained that if he did that, they would just come to Palestine. When Hitler asked Husseini what he recommended, said Netanyahu, the Arab counseled him to "burn them."

Netanyahu's theory was not widely embraced, to put it mildly, and he himself soon backtracked on it, conceding that, "responsibility of Hitler and the Nazis for the extermination of 6 million Jews is clear to fair-minded people."

Truth be told

In "Mein Kampf," published in two volumes, in 1925 and 1926, Hitler himself explains that he had no special feelings about Jews before he moved to Vienna, in 1908, and that even then, initially, he thought favorably of them. He saw the light only after Germany's loss in World War I, for which he held the Jews responsible.

During the second half of the 19th century, as the Jews' emancipation throughout most of Europe led to their increasing integration into society and into the modern economy, it elicited a backlash. Anti-Semitism, some of it murderous, rose across the continent, including in Germany. When the Jews were kept apart in the ghetto, and limited to certain professions, it was possible to accuse them of clannishness, and resent the interest they charged on loans. But when they emerged from the ghetto, and became captains of industry and finance, and socially and intellectually prominent, there was a whole new set of reasons to hate them. The success of the emancipated Jews was perhaps even more galling than the poverty and degradation of disenfranchised Jews - and it gave rise to racial theories that posited an essential biological difference in them.

When imperial Germany went down to defeat in 1918, and Kaiser Wilhelm, the German emperor, was forced to abdicate, a popular theory that Germany had been "stabbed in the back" by the Jews took hold. Jews' role, on the one hand, in the socialist and Communist movements that led revolutions in both Germany and Russia, and their prominence in international finance, on the other, led to dark theories about Jews' lack of national loyalty, their treachery, and their degeneracy.

In Hitler's mind, all the groups that he saw as foiling Germany - Bolsheviks, socialists, social democrats - became identified with Jews, because indeed, Jews were so prominently represented among each of them. His political theories blended with increasingly technical racial theories that imagined the Jews, along with other groups like Slavs and Gypsies, as biologically inferior to Aryans, the white northern European race that pure Germans were presumed to belong to.

However perverted his thinking and outrageous his theories, though, and whatever personal experiences he did have that may have turned him against Jews, Hitler was supported at every level of German society by people who were ready to see their country return to the greatness they felt had been denied it, and to believe that it was the Jews who were responsible for that fall from grace.

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One can't consider the Holocaust without wondering about the source of Adolf Hitler's hatred for the Jews. Although much of his political manifesto, " Mein Kampf," was devoted to explaining that hatred, which was clearly shared by an enthusiastic German nation, the actions taken against Europe's Jews were so monstrous in both nature and scale that it was inevitable that researchers would look for a more personal explanation.

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I wonder why Hitler despised the Jews so much?

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Anne Frank House Westermarkt 20 1016 DK Amsterdam

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I wonder why Hitler wanted to make the Aryan race the only race of the world?

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I wonder how the Germans defined who was Jewish?

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I wonder how the Germans defined who was Jewish?

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I wonder why people idolized Hitler so much.

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I wonder how scared were the Jews to be caught and taken into the concentration camps during the holocaust?

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Pages 19-21

When the Allied Forces invaded Germany at the end of World War II, few of the combat veterans were prepared to cope with the horrors they encountered during the liberation of the concentration camps. The inhumane conditions and the torturous treatment of the prisoners only further revealed the true cruelty and brutality behind Hitler's leadership and the reign of the Nazi Party.

The Allied troops encountered countless survivors who were so weak, diseased, and malnourished that they could barely walk or carry out their basic life functions. On April 14, 1945, the British freed Beelines and found some 55,000 still alive, but they also discovered the dead by the thousands everywhere: in mass graves, stacked as firewood, scattered about the grounds, and even sharing bunks with the living. While touring the camps, the Allies exposed the gas chambers, the rooms for medical experiments, and the crematories used by the Nazis to enforce the "Final Solution," Hitler's decision to exterminate the Jewish "race."

Each discovery deeply penetrated the hearts and the minds of the soldiers. Grown men and veterans of battle broke down and wept at the horrors seen in the camps. The pain and suffering felt by the inmates was universal: it superseded any language or ethnic barrier.

The prisoners also reacted in many different ways to their liberation. In some camps they ran out to joyously meet their emancipators and to see if their release was true. Others stayed within their living quarters, afraid to come out, like timid animals insecure with their new freedom. Many prisoners took revenge on the captured SS soldiers and still others retreated to their religion. Above all, the inmates had been stripped of their humanity as well as their personal identities, and what remained was merely a shell of a human being.

The Allies offered to the survivors what guidance and support they could. The liberators were also deeply moved by the experience. The Allied reactions included tears, horror, denial, patriotism, and hatred for the Nazis, Overall, a cold anger welled up in the Allied troops for the German citizens. As camp after camp was liberated, the civilians insisted that they had not known of the atrocities that lay within. It was obvious, however, that the camp's stench and the odor of' the crematories had carried for miles over the countryside. Below are some American reactions to the Nazi concentration camps.

"My first impression of it was the odor The stench of it was all over the place and there were a bunch of very bewildered, lost individuals who came to me pathetically at the door in their unkempt uniforms to see what we were doing and what was going to be done about them. They were staying at the camp even though their guards and staff had fled because they didn't know where to go or what to do. They had heard news that the Americans had taken over that area and they were waiting for somebody to turn theirs back straight again and they were just lost souls at that time. Well, my feeling was that this was the most shattering experience of my life,"

"We walked inside and saw these skinny people who were still living, and one of my enlisted men who walked in with me realized they were starving. We had nothing but some candy bars, which we got in a ration, and one of my men gave the candy bar to one of these people who grabbed it and ran away and gulped it down so fast that he became unconscious and probably choked on it when he tried to swallow it before someone took it away from him. These Jewish people and these Polish people were like animals. They were so degraded, there was no goodness, no kindness, nothing of that nature, there was no sharing. If they got a piece of something to eat, they grabbed it and ran away in a corner and fought off anyone who came near them."

"Well, after seeing the train and then standing there looking through that fence at these people, you couldn't believe what you saw. It gave you a lost, sick feeling... Well, it's haunted me as I say for 36 years. I mean, who are they? What's their name? What nationality are they? What is their religious faith? Why were they there? You just can't comprehend it."

Of all the horrors of the place, the smell, perhaps, was the most startling of all. It was a smell make up of all kinds of odors -human excreta, foul bodily odors, smoldering trash fires, German tobacco - which is a stink in itself - all mixed together in a heavy dank atmosphere, in a thick muddy woods, where little breeze could go.

The ground was pulpy throughout the camp, churned to a consistency of warm putty by the milling of thousands of feet, mud mixed with feces and urine. The smell of Gunskirchen nauseated many of the Americans who went there. It was a smell I'll never forget, completely different from anything I've ever encountered. It could almost be seen and hung over the camp like a fog of death.

As we entered the camp, the living skeletons still able to walk crowded around us and, though we wanted to drive farther into the place, the milling, pressing crowd wouldn't let us. It is not an exaggeration to say that almost every inmate was insane with hunger. Just the sight of an American brought cheers, groans, and shrieks. People crowded around to touch an American, to touch the jeep, to kiss our arms - perhaps just to make sure that it was true. The people who couldn't walk crawled out toward our jeep. Those who couldn't even crawl propped themselves up on an elbow, and somehow, through all their pain and suffering, revealed through their eyes the gratitude, the joy they felt at the arrival of Americans.

"We all stopped the trucks to find out what in the world was going on. They all the inmates being taken to displaced persons camps] got out of the trucks and sat down in a field alongside the road and said it was Shabbos. This was Friday night and the sun had just gone down. Of course, this was the Austrian mountains there and the sun went down a little early if anything. They said that they were not going anywhere until the sun went down Saturday night. So I went to some of them and I said. 'Look, I'm Jewish; I know what you're talking about, but it's only it's only another 20 to 25 minutes and we'll be at the hotel - and with everything you've been through, what's the big deal... so it's another 20 or 24 minutes, you know. You can't stay out here all night in the fields, because the nights get pretty cold in the mountains.' But they said they weren't going anywhere and the result is they just laid down in the fields. Of course, we went into town and came back and brought back blankets for them and set up food kitchens and fed them that night and all the next day and - when the sun went down Saturday night, they loaded back in the trucks and went the rest the of the way....that had a tremendous impact on me."

"[The prisoners] were so thin they didn't have anything didn't have any buttocks to lie on; there wasn't any flesh on their arms to rest their skulls on...one man that I saw there who had died on his knees with his arms and head in a praying position and he was still there, apparently had been for days.

"William B. Lovelady,
Commander of the Task Force of the Third
Armored Division and liberator of Nordhausen

"When we walked through those gates...1 saw in front of me the walking dead. There they stood. They were skin and bone. They had skeletal faces with deepset eyes. Their heads had been clean shaved. They were holding each other for stability. I couldn't understand this. I just couldn't. So I walked around the camp; I wanted to...understand more. I went to a building where they stored body parts from 'medical experiments' in jars of formaldehyde. I saw fingers and eyes and the hearts and genitals. I saw mounds of little children's clothing. Little children who didn't survive. I saw.. all of those things that belong to little children. But I never saw a child....If this could happen here, it could happen anywhere. It could happen to me. .1 often wonder what I would have done if. in 1939, my family and I had been caught up in this and for all those years nobody, hut nobody, would help us. I would have been a bitter man...

"We pulled into Dachau, after the medium tanks had taken it. .. I was commanding a platoon of five light tanks. One of my drivers says, 'Sarge go in there and see what's happening.' So I got down and went into a building, and the smell of burnt bodies stifled you. I said, 'Oh, my God, I can't stand this.' I put my handkerchief to ax nose and walked to a furnace. I opened it and I saw a burnt body....I said, 0h, no, it can't be.' I went to the next one and opened it and... 'it can't be.' Against the wall were people, I guess the ones who would have gone into the furnaces if we hadn't got there, and they were moaning and groaning. I just looked at them; they were dying from malnutrition, Then I went in the back to the shower room. I didn't go in, I just peeked through the window... I came out and went to my tank, and I sat and cried. My gunner says, 'What's happening?' I said, 'Oh, nothing.' The tears came out of my eyes. I cried and I said to God, 'How could man give such an order, so cruel to human beings?' "Regardless of the war.

"My driver didn't want to go into the camp. He said, 'Colonel, I can't take it here anymore. I said, 'Well, you, stay here with your jeep.' I found a young captain who took me over to the camp...the enormity of the number of bodies around, thousands of bodies. Then we came to piles that had been heaped up, orderly in some cases, like a stack of logs; other places, helterskelter. Many people died before my eyes. I stood beside one medic who was working on a victim, and the man finally died. The medic said to me, 'Why is it that there's no respect for life?' We both said a prayer together. Mine was partly in Hebrew and partly in English. I said the prayers for the dying and the dead, the Sh'ma Israel and the Kaddish. When we finished, we threw our arms around each other and he said, 'Why do humans have to do this to other humans? Why can't they just be human?'"

"All I have is a picture - a picture of three people that is now 15 years old. I'm here, so that accounts for one of the three people in the picture, but what of the other two? The other two are children, but let me here correct myself for now 15 years ago they were men too - men at the ripe old age of 10 or 12 years - for when you have spent four or five years of your life in a Nazi Prison Camp, manhood comes early!! It's self survival, but it's still manhood for under Nazi terror children learned quickly the arts of survival or they didn't survive.

I started this story because for 15 long years, years that have brought me two wonderful children and left me a Korean War Widow, I have been plagued by a thought - what has happened to the two boys in the picture? They were both Jewish, one Italian - one Polish.

Fifteen years ago I was a Second Lieutenant in the United States Army Nurses Corps - one of not too many who cared for the liberated victims of Nazism' Concentration Camps. Horror makes a deep impression on ones mind and heart - be it young or old - but is said that nurses, though born with a heart, lose it in training or they don't stay nurses.

I have a special love for a boy, a boy in a picture, now a man, whose name I've never known and I doubt he ever knew mine for he called me "Sistra," meaning nurse and I called him "Junior," a good G.I. name you use for the lack for something better. Language is a barrier, but the looks and deeds of a child speak volumes - for the bouquet of wild flowers he gathered each day from the wheat fields and for my boots that he kept immaculately shined, he knew I said, "THANK YOU," but he little knew the years of memory of those small deeds I would have. On a damp Austrian night while we watched a movie beneath the stars, I shook with chill from the dampness and the words, "Sistra cold," still ring in my ears - in a flash he was gone - to return with his one blanket off the air mattress on which he slept on the ground beneath a tent (the best conditions we could offer when a 400 evacuation hospital takes in 1,945 sick patients) - to put on "Sistra" because she was cold - while he sat down again clad only in faded, oversize, summer khakis that covered his small, thin body. His main concern was for me and not for himself. His goodness, his kindness, his gentleness, reflect not the 4 or 5 years in a Concentration Camp but his Mother's love and teaching before she was put to death.

I know even less of the other boy in the picture, and I still don't know what has happened to either of them in the past 15 years. War is a terrible thing, people are torn quickly apart, and when at last you have time to think - the chance to leave a means to "keep in touch" is lost.

May I say "THANKS" for some wonderful but sad memories of two small boys that help to blot out my horrible memories of nursing the victims of Mauthausen Concentration Camp and of whom....ALL I HAVE IS A PICTURE."
Marie Knowles Ellifritz
"If you didn't know what it was, you might take it for the entrance to a third rate amusement park. In a sense it was like that to the S.S..... It probably won't be believed even with the dozens of photographs, but there it is. Take it or leave it. Leave it and there will be another war in ten years."

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Pages 19-21 When the Allied Forces invaded Germany at the end of World War II, few of the combat veterans were prepared to cope with the horrors they encountered during the liberation of the concentration camps. The inhumane conditions and the torturous treatment of the prisoners only further revealed the true cruelty and brutality behind Hitler's leadership and the reign of the Nazi Party.

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How did the Germans treat those who had some Jewish blood but were not classified as Jews?

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How did the Germans treat those who had some Jewish blood but were not classified as Jews?

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The three credible websities I used during my research are-

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I wonder how the holocaust ended

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This article is about the state-sponsored genocide of European Jews during World War II. For all peoples persecuted during this era, see Holocaust victims.

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I wonder how the holocast all began?

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An Introductory History of the Holocaust

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Encyclopedia of Jewish and Israeli history, politics and culture, with biographies, statistics, articles and documents on topics from anti-Semitism to Zionism.