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Greenwood Race Massacre in Tulsa, OK (also known as Black Wall Street), 1921

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Greenwood Race Massacre in Tulsa, OK (also known as Black Wall Street), 1921

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Slavery during American Revolution, 1776

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Slavery during American Revolution, 1776

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The debate between which Negro leader, Booker T. Washington or W.E.B. Du Bois, staunch ideas could produce Black freedom to alleviate the pains of slavery was a major part of this novel. This historical fiction is about Isaiah Wilson and Angel Hill who are teenager's, set in May 1921, in the Greenwood section of Tulsa, OK referred to as the "Negro Wall Street of America" twelve days prior to the race riot that destroyed their home, businesses, and interrupted their life's. The race riot is a tru ...more

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Kristi Housman Confessions of a YA Reader

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The debate between which Negro leader, Booker T. Washington or W.E.B. Du Bois, staunch ideas could produce Black freedom to alleviate the pains of slavery was a major part of this novel.

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Read 2,979 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. In R. J. Palacio's collection of stories Auggie & Me, which expands on characters in Won...

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Cult graphic novelist Dylan Meconis offers a rich reimagining of history in this hybrid novel loosely based on the exile of Queen Elizabe...

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This book has sat on my shelf for literally a decade. I've never had the urge to pick it up but always had this nagging feeling that I should read it someday. Now I'm reading it and I'm just... not engaged. Am I a terrible person?

Personally I just don't think I'm a fan of Laurie Halse Anderson's writing. I couldn't get through Speak either and Wintergirls was a two-star read for me.

Oh well. I'm glad it's finally off my to-read shelf....more

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Scarlett Readz and Runz....Through Novel Time & Distance

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This book has sat on my shelf for literally a decade. I've never had the urge to pick it up but always had this nagging feeling that I should read it someday. Now I'm reading it and I'm just... not engaged. Am I a terrible person?

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For this review, I decided to borrow an idea from one of my favorite movie bloggers, Nathaniel Rogers. When new trailers debut, he groups his thoughts into three kinds of responses: yes, no, and maybe so. Now, the book that I am reviewing, Joseph Bruchac's Code Talkers, is not a movie, and I am not just now encountering it for the first time. But I am going to apply the yes/no/maybe so format anyway because it gives me something reasonably interesting to say about a book I respected but didn't r...more

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For this review, I decided to borrow an idea from one of my favorite movie bloggers, Nathaniel Rogers. When new trailers debut, he groups his thoughts into three kinds of responses: yes, no, and maybe so. Now, the book that I am reviewing, Joseph Bruchac's Code Talkers, is not a movie, and I am not just now encountering it for the first time.

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Sandy *The world could end while I was reading and I would never notice*

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Lina is just like any other fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl in 1941. She paints, she draws, she gets crushes on boys. Until one night wh...

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World War II[b] or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies and the Axis. Nearly all of the world’s countries participated, with many nations mobilising all resources in pursuit of total war. Tanks and aircraft played major roles, enabling the strategic bombing of cities and delivery of the first and only nuclear weapons ever used in war. World War II is the deadliest conflict in history, causing the death of 70 to 85 million people, more than half of whom were civilians. Millions died in genocides, including the Holocaust, and by massacres, starvation, and disease. After the Allied victory, Germany, Austria, Japan, and Korea were occupied, and German and Japanese leaders were tried for war crimes.

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England underwent huge changes during the reigns of three generations of Tudor monarchs. Henry VIII ushered in a new state religion, and the increasing confidence of the state coincided with the growth of a distinctively English culture.

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England underwent huge changes during the reigns of three generations of Tudor monarchs. Henry VIII ushered in a new state religion, and the increasing confidence of the state coincided with the growth of a distinctively English culture.

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Causes of the Revolutionary War

For more than a decade before the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775, tensions had been building between colonists and the British authorities.

The French and Indian War, or Seven Years' War (1756-1763), brought new territories under the power of the crown, but the expensive conflict lead to new and unpopular taxes. Attempts by the British government to raise revenue by taxing the colonies (notably the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773) met with heated protest among many colonists, who resented their lack of representation in Parliament and demanded the same rights as other British subjects.

Colonial resistance led to violence in 1770, when British soldiers opened fire on a mob of colonists, killing five men in what was known as the Boston Massacre. After December 1773, when a band of Bostonians altered their appearance to hide their identity boarded British ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party, an outraged Parliament passed a series of measures (known as the Intolerable, or Coercive Acts) designed to reassert imperial authority in Massachusetts.

Did you know? Now most famous as a traitor to the American cause, General Benedict Arnold began the Revolutionary War as one of its earliest heroes, helping lead rebel forces in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775.

In response, a group of colonial delegates (including George Washington of Virginia, John and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, Patrick Henry of Virginia and John Jay of New York) met in Philadelphia in September 1774 to give voice to their grievances against the British crown. This First Continental Congress did not go so far as to demand independence from Britain, but it denounced taxation without representation, as well as the maintenance of the British army in the colonies without their consent. It issued a declaration of the rights due every citizen, including life, liberty, property, assembly and trial by jury. The Continental Congress voted to meet again in May 1775 to consider further action, but by that time violence had already broken out.

On the night of April 18, 1775, hundreds of British troops marched from Boston to nearby Concord, Massachusetts in order to seize an arms cache. Paul Revere and other riders sounded the alarm, and colonial militiamen began mobilizing to intercept the Redcoats. On April 19, local militiamen clashed with British soldiers in the Battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, marking the "shot heard round the world" that signified the start of the Revolutionary War.

HISTORY Vault: The Revolution

Declaring Independence (1775-76)

When the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, delegates-including new additions Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson-voted to form a Continental Army, with Washington as its commander in chief. On June 17, in the Revolution's first major battle, colonial forces inflicted heavy casualties on the British regiment of General William Howe at Breed's Hill in Boston. The engagement, known as the Battle of Bunker Hill, ended in British victory, but lent encouragement to the revolutionary cause.

Throughout that fall and winter, Washington's forces struggled to keep the British contained in Boston, but artillery captured at Fort Ticonderoga in New York helped shift the balance of that struggle in late winter. The British evacuated the city in March 1776, with Howe and his men retreating to Canada to prepare a major invasion of New York.

By June 1776, with the Revolutionary War in full swing, a growing majority of the colonists had come to favor independence from Britain. On July 4, the Continental Congress voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence, drafted by a five-man committee including Franklin and John Adams but written mainly by Jefferson. That same month, determined to crush the rebellion, the British government sent a large fleet, along with more than 34,000 troops to New York. In August, Howe's Redcoats routed the Continental Army on Long Island; Washington was forced to evacuate his troops from New York City by September. Pushed across the Delaware River, Washington fought back with a surprise attack in Trenton, New Jersey, on Christmas night and won another victory at Princeton to revive the rebels' flagging hopes before making winter quarters at Morristown.

Saratoga: Revolutionary War Turning Point (1777-78)

British strategy in 1777 involved two main prongs of attack aimed at separating New England (where the rebellion enjoyed the most popular support) from the other colonies. To that end, General John Burgoyne's army marched south from Canada toward a planned meeting with Howe's forces on the Hudson River. Burgoyne's men dealt a devastating loss to the Americans in July by retaking Fort Ticonderoga, while Howe decided to move his troops southward from New York to confront Washington's army near the Chesapeake Bay. The British defeated the Americans at Brandywine Creek, Pennsylvania, on September 11 and entered Philadelphia on September 25. Washington rebounded to strike Germantown in early October before withdrawing to winter quarters near Valley Forge.

Howe's move had left Burgoyne's army exposed near Saratoga, New York, and the British suffered the consequences of this on September 19, when an American force under General Horatio Gates defeated them at Freeman's Farm in the first Battle of Saratoga. After suffering another defeat on October 7 at Bemis Heights (the Second Battle of Saratoga), Burgoyne surrendered his remaining forces on October 17. The American victory Saratoga would prove to be a turning point of the American Revolution, as it prompted France (which had been secretly aiding the rebels since 1776) to enter the war openly on the American side, though it would not formally declare war on Great Britain until June 1778. The American Revolution, which had begun as a civil conflict between Britain and its colonies, had become a world war.

Stalemate in the North, Battle in the South (1778-81)

During the long, hard winter at Valley Forge, Washington's troops benefited from the training and discipline of the Prussian military officer Baron Friedrich von Steuben (sent by the French) and the leadership of the French aristocrat Marquis de Lafayette. On June 28, 1778, as British forces under Sir Henry Clinton (who had replaced Howe as supreme commander) attempted to withdraw from Philadelphia to New York, Washington's army attacked them near Monmouth, New Jersey. The battle effectively ended in a draw, as the Americans held their ground, but Clinton was able to get his army and supplies safely to New York. On July 8, a French fleet commanded by the Comte d'Estaing arrived off the Atlantic coast, ready to do battle with the British. A joint attack on the British at Newport, Rhode Island, in late July failed, and for the most part the war settled into a stalemate phase in the North.

The Americans suffered a number of setbacks from 1779 to 1781, including the defection of General Benedict Arnold to the British and the first serious mutinies within the Continental Army. In the South, the British occupied Georgia by early 1779 and captured Charleston, South Carolina in May 1780. British forces under Lord Charles Cornwallis then began an offensive in the region, crushing Gates' American troops at Camden in mid-August, though the Americans scored a victory over Loyalist forces at King's Mountain in early October. Nathanael Green replaced Gates as the American commander in the South that December. Under Green's command, General Daniel Morgan scored a victory against a British force led by Colonel Banastre Tarleton at Cowpens, South Carolina, on January 17, 1781.

Revolutionary War Draws to a Close (1781-83)

By the fall of 1781, Greene's American forces had managed to force Cornwallis and his men to withdraw to Virginia's Yorktown peninsula, near where the York River empties into Chesapeake Bay. Supported by a French army commanded by General Jean Baptiste de Rochambeau, Washington moved against Yorktown with a total of around 14,000 soldiers, while a fleet of 36 French warships offshore prevented British reinforcement or evacuation. Trapped and overpowered, Cornwallis was forced to surrender his entire army on October 19. Claiming illness, the British general sent his deputy, Charles O'Hara, to surrender; after O'Hara approached Rochambeau to surrender his sword (the Frenchman deferred to Washington), Washington gave the nod to his own deputy, Benjamin Lincoln, who accepted it.

Though the movement for American independence effectively triumphed at the Battle of Yorktown, contemporary observers did not see that as the decisive victory yet. British forces remained stationed around Charleston, and the powerful main army still resided in New York. Though neither side would take decisive action over the better part of the next two years, the British removal of their troops from Charleston and Savannah in late 1782 finally pointed to the end of the conflict. British and American negotiators in Paris signed preliminary peace terms in Paris late that November, and on September 3, 1783, Great Britain formally recognized the independence of the United States in the Treaty of Paris. At the same time, Britain signed separate peace treaties with France and Spain (which had entered the conflict in 1779), bringing the American Revolution to a close after eight long years.

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Revolutionary War - Timeline, Facts & Battles | HISTORY

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The Revolutionary War (1775-83), also known as the American Revolution, arose from growing tensions between residents of Great Britain's 13 North American colonies and the colonial government, which represented the British crown.

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World War II[b] or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies and the Axis. Nearly all of the world’s countries participated, with many nations mobilising all resources in pursuit of total war. Tanks and aircraft played major roles, enabling the strategic bombing of cities and delivery of the first and only nuclear weapons ever used in war. World War II is the deadliest conflict in history, causing the death of 70 to 85 million people, more than half of whom were civilians. Millions died in genocides, including the Holocaust, and by massacres, starvation, and disease. After the Allied victory, Germany, Austria, Japan, and Korea were occupied, and German and Japanese leaders were tried for war crimes.

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What Is a Gulag?

The word "Gulag" is an acronym for the Russian phrase Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Russian Communist Party, took control of the Soviet Union. When Lenin died of a stroke in 1924, Joseph Stalin propelled his way to power and became dictator.

The Gulag was first established during Lenin's rule in 1919, and by 1921 the Gulag system had 84 camps. But it wasn't until Stalin's rule that the prison population reached significant numbers.

From 1929 until Stalin's death, the Gulag went through a period of rapid expansion. Stalin viewed the camps as an efficient way to boost industrialization in the Soviet Union and access valuable natural resources such as coal, other minerals and timber.

Additionally, Gulag camps became a destination for victims of Stalin's Great Purge, a campaign to eliminate dissenting members of the Communist Party and anyone who challenged the leader.

Gulag Prisoners

The first group of prisoners at Gulag camps included common criminals and prosperous peasants, known as kulaks. Many kulaks were arrested when they revolted against collectivization, a policy enforced by the Soviet government that demanded peasant farmers give up their individual farms and join collective farming.

When Stalin launched his purges, a wide variety of laborers, known as "political prisoners," were transported to Gulag camps. Opposing members of the Communist Party, military officers and government officials were among the first targeted. Later, educated people and ordinary citizens-doctors, writers, intellects, students, artists and scientists-were sent into the Gulag system.

Anyone who had ties to disloyal anti-Stalinists could be imprisoned. Even women and children endured the harsh conditions of the camps. Many women faced the threat of rape or assault by male prisoners or guards.

Without notice, some victims were randomly picked up by Stalin's security police (the NKVD) and hauled to the prisons with no trial or rights to an attorney.
WATCH: Joseph Stalin
Life at a Gulag Camp

Prisoners at the Gulag camps were forced to work on large-scale construction, mining and industrial projects. The type of industry depended on the camp's location and the area's needs.

Gulag labor crews worked on several massive Soviet endeavors, including the Moscow-Volga Canal, the White Sea-Baltic Canal and the Kolyma Highway.

Prisoners were given crude, simple tools and no safety equipment. Some workers spent their days cutting down trees or digging at frozen ground with handsaws and pickaxes. Others mined coal or copper, and many had to dig up dirt with their bare hands.

The work was often so grueling that prisoners would cut their hands with axes or place their arms in a wood stove to avoid work.

Camp prisoners often drudged through brutal weather, sometimes facing sub-zero temperatures. Food rations were tight, and workdays were long. If prisoners didn't complete their work quotas, they received less food.

Gulag living conditions were cold, overcrowded and unsanitary. Violence was common among the camp inmates, who were made up of both hardened criminals and political prisoners. In desperation, some stole food and other supplies from each other.

Many workers died from exhaustion, while others were physically assaulted or shot by camp guards. Historians estimate that at least 10 percent of the total Gulag prison population was killed each year.

Prison Terms and Release

Prisoners in the Gulag were given sentences, and if they survived the term, they were permitted to leave camp. For example, family members of a suspected traitor would receive a minimum sentence of five to eight years of labor.

If they worked extremely hard and surpassed their quotas, some prisoners qualified for early release. Between 1934 and 1953, about 150,000 to 500,000 people were released from the Gulag each year.

End of the Gulag

The Gulag started to weaken immediately after Stalin's death in 1953. Within days, millions of prisoners were released.

Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, was a staunch critic of the camps, the purges and most of Stalin's policies.

But, the camps didn't disappear completely. Some were restructured to serve as prisons for criminals, democratic activists and anti-Soviet nationalists during the 1970s and 1980s.

It wasn't until about 1987 that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the grandson of Gulag victims, officially began the process of completely eliminating the camps.

Legacy of the Gulag

The true horrors of the Gulag system were revealed belatedly: Before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, state archives were sealed. Unlike the Holocaust camps in Europe during World War II, no film or images of the Gulag camps were available to the public.

In 1973, The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West by Russian historian and Gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (though only a few underground copies were available in the Soviet Union at the time). The influential book detailed the atrocities of the Gulag system and its impact on the lives of prisoners and their families.

Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970; he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, but returned to Russia in 1994.

Although the Gulag provided a system of cheap labor, most historians agree that the camps ultimately didn't make a significant contribution to the Soviet economy. Experts believe that without enough food and supplies, workers were unequipped to provide productive results.

The dark history of the Gulag has left generations of Russians scarred and damaged. Even today, some survivors are too fearful to discuss their experiences.

Sources

Gulag: Soviet Prison Camps and Their Legacy, A Project of the National Park Service and the National Resource Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies, Harvard University.
Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives. GulagHistory.org.
The Gulag Collection, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
13 Stomach-Churning Facts About Being Held Prisoner in the Soviet Gulags, Ranker.com.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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Gulag: Meaning, Archipelago & Definition - HISTORY

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The Gulag, a brutal system of forced labor camps, was first established in 1919 and grew under Joseph Stalin's reign as communist dictator of the Soviet Union.

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Also called:

Mary Tudor

(Show more)

Byname:

Bloody Mary

(Show more)

Mary I (born February 18, 1516, Greenwich, near London, England-died November 17, 1558, London) the first queen to rule England (1553-58) in her own right. She was known as Bloody Mary for her persecution of Protestants in a vain attempt to restore Roman Catholicism in England.

Early life

The daughter of King Henry VIII and the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon, Mary as a child was a pawn in England's bitter rivalry with more powerful nations, being fruitlessly proposed in marriage to this or that potentate desired as an ally. A studious and bright girl, she was educated by her mother and a governess of ducal rank.

Betrothed at last to the Holy Roman emperor, her cousin Charles V (Charles I of Spain), Mary was commanded by him to come to Spain with a huge cash dowry. This demand ignored, he presently jilted her and concluded a more advantageous match. In 1525 she was named princess of Wales by her father, although the lack of official documents suggests she was never formally invested. She then held court at Ludlow Castle while new betrothal plans were made. Mary's life was radically disrupted, however, by her father's new marriage to Anne Boleyn.

As early as the 1520s Henry had planned to divorce Catherine in order to marry Anne, claiming that, since Catherine had been his deceased brother's wife, her union with Henry was incestuous. The pope, however, refused to recognize Henry's right to divorce Catherine, even after the divorce was legalized in England. In 1534 Henry broke with Rome and established the Church of England. The allegation of incest in effect made Mary illegitimate. Anne, the new queen, bore the king a daughter, Elizabeth (the future queen), forbade Mary access to her parents, stripped her of her title of princess, and forced her to act as lady-in-waiting to the infant Elizabeth. Mary never saw her mother again-though, despite great danger, they corresponded secretly. Anne's hatred pursued Mary so relentlessly that Mary feared execution, but, having her mother's courage and all her father's stubbornness, she would not admit to the illegitimacy of her birth. Nor would she enter a convent when ordered to do so.

After Anne fell under Henry's displeasure, he offered to pardon Mary if she would acknowledge him as head of the Church of England and admit the "incestuous illegality" of his marriage to her mother. She refused to do so until her cousin, the emperor Charles, persuaded her to give in, an action she was to regret deeply. Henry was now reconciled to her and gave her a household befitting her position and again made plans for her betrothal. She became godmother to Prince Edward, Henry's son by Jane Seymour, the third queen.

Mary was now the most important European princess. Although plain, she was a popular figure, with a fine contralto singing voice and great linguistic ability. She was, however, not able to free herself of the epithet of bastard, and her movements were severely restricted. Husband after husband proposed for her failed to reach the altar. When Henry married Catherine Howard, however, Mary was granted permission to return to court, and in 1544, although still considered illegitimate, she was granted succession to the throne after Edward and any other legitimate children who might be born to Henry.

Edward VI succeeded his father in 1547 and, swayed by religious fervour and overzealous advisers, made English rather than Latin compulsory for church services. Mary, however, continued to celebrate mass in the old form in her private chapel and was once again in danger of losing her head.

Mary as queen

Upon the death of Edward in 1553, Mary fled to Norfolk, as Lady Jane Grey had seized the throne and was recognized as queen for a few days. The country, however, considered Mary the rightful ruler, and within some days she made a triumphal entry into London. A woman of 37 now, she was forceful, sincere, bluff, and hearty like her father but, in contrast to him, disliked cruel punishments and the signing of death warrants.

Insensible to the need of caution for a newly crowned queen, unable to adapt herself to novel circumstances, and lacking self-interest, Mary longed to bring her people back to the church of Rome. To achieve this end, she was determined to marry Philip II of Spain, the son of the emperor Charles V and 11 years her junior, though most of her advisers advocated her cousin Courtenay, earl of Devon, a man of royal blood.

Those English noblemen who had acquired wealth and lands when Henry VIII confiscated the Catholic monasteries had a vested interest in retaining them, and Mary's desire to restore Roman Catholicism as the state religion made them her enemies. Parliament, also at odds with her, was offended by her discourtesy to their delegates pleading against the Spanish marriage: "My marriage is my own affair," she retorted.

When in 1554 it became clear that she would marry Philip, a Protestant insurrection broke out under the leadership of Sir Thomas Wyatt. Alarmed by Wyatt's rapid advance toward London, Mary made a magnificent speech rousing citizens by the thousands to fight for her. Wyatt was defeated and executed, and Mary married Philip, restored the Catholic creed, and revived the laws against heresy. For three years rebel bodies dangled from gibbets, and heretics were relentlessly executed, some 300 being burned at the stake. Thenceforward the queen, now known as Bloody Mary, was hated, her Spanish husband distrusted and slandered, and she herself blamed for the vicious slaughter. An unpopular, unsuccessful war with France, in which Spain was England's ally, lost Calais, England's last toehold in Europe. Still childless, sick, and grief stricken, she was further depressed by a series of false pregnancies.
Eric Norman Simons

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Mary I, the first queen to rule England (1553-58) in her own right. She was known as Bloody Mary for her persecution of Protestants in a vain attempt to restore Catholicism to England. Learn more about Mary's life and reign in this article.

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American Revolutionary War - Timelines and Maps - Animated US History

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Office of the Director of National Intelligence

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Every WWII combatant appreciated the need for an unbreakable code that would help them communicate while protecting their operational plans. The U.S. Marines knew where to find one: the Navajo Nation. Marine Corps leadership selected 29 Navajo men, the Navajo Code Talkers, who created a code based o…

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The fate of France's Jews during World War II has become an unlikely topic of debate in the run-up to the French presidential election, exhumed by a revisionist candidate's widely debunked claims that the Nazi-allied Vichy regime offered them protection. FRANCE 24 spoke to historian Jacques Sémelin, whose latest book sheds light on the real reasons some 200,000 French Jews survived the Holocaust.

Sémelin's quest began more than a decade ago, following an interview with the late Simone Veil, the revered politician and Holocaust survivor who was recently inducted into the Panthéon of French heroes. During their conversation, back in 2008, Sémelin found he could offer no easy answer to the following question: "How is it that so many Jews were able to survive in spite of the Vichy government and the Nazis?"

Of the roughly 320,000 Jews established in France at the start of the war, an estimated 74,150 - most of them foreign nationals - were deported by Nazi Germany with the complicity of its allies in the Vichy regime, according to data compiled by the renowned French historian and Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld. The figures translate into a survival rate of 75 percent, one of the highest in Nazi-dominated Europe, well above the 25 percent documented for the Netherlands or neighbouring Belgium's 45 percent.

Understanding this French exception is the focus of Sémelin's recent book, "Une énigme française, pourquoi les trois quarts des juifs en France n'ont pas été déportés" (A French enigma, why three-quarters of Jews in France were not deported), based on 10 years of painstaking research on the fate of Western Europe's largest Jewish community at the time.

Minimising the guilt of Vichy France

Since 1995, when President Jacques Chirac acknowledged the French state's role in rounding up Jews and handing them over to their executioners, few have challenged the notion that the Vichy regime led by Marshal Philippe Pétain colluded in the arrest, deportation and mass murder of Jews. However, some revisionists continue to minimise the regime's guilt, claiming it sought to protect Jews who were French nationals.

Contrary to the claims made by Éric Zemmour, a far-right candidate for the French presidency, French Jews who managed to avoid wartime deportation do not owe their survival to Pétain's regime, says Sémelin.

"Such claims are nonsense. There is absolutely no archival evidence to back them up," says the historian, whose book recalls Vichy France's own antisemitic laws, enacted independently of Nazi Germany, as well as the active role of French police in the arrests and round-ups that preceded deportations. He adds: "Zemmour is simply playing on people's ignorance of the matter."

To understand why a majority of France's Jews were not deported during the Holocaust, Sémelin combined archival research with witness accounts of wartime France. These included extensive interviews with Jews who were able to avoid deportation, many of whom were either ignored after the war or reluctant to share their personal stories.

"There is a sense of guilt among survivors. At first, a lot of them told me they had nothing to say. But when we sat down for a chat, tongues would loosen and their stories eventually unspooled," says Sémelin. "My aim was to restore the voices of Jews who were persecuted in France by the laws of the Vichy regime. They experienced anguish, separation and displacement. They also suffered."

'Web of social relationships'

The first and most obvious escape route for Jews was to cross into the so-called zone libre (free zone), the southeastern part of the country, covering roughly two-fifths of the entire French territory, that was controlled by Vichy but not occupied by the Nazis - at least not until November 1942. There, many Jews were able to hide in remote corners of what was still a predominantly rural country.

"Two-thirds of France's Jews fled to the zone libre and scattered across the territory," says Sémelin. Stressing that "those who spoke French and were better off financially had the best chance of hiding." Still, as late as the spring of 1944, some 40,000 Jews continued to live in Paris, according to the historian, whereas the Jewish communities of Warsaw or Amsterdam had by then been practically wiped out.

Sémelin says French Jews' best ally during the war was the "web of social relationships" which they were very much part of. French Jews were highly integrated and had friends, neighbours and colleagues they could call upon. Without minimising wartime collaboration with the Nazis, Sémelin rejects the notion of a profoundly antisemitic French public. He cites the more than 4,000 French citizens recognised by Israel as "Righteous Among the Nations" for their role in saving Jews from deportation. He also points to the multiple round-ups of Jews, including the infamous Vel d'Hiv round-up of July 1942, which fell short of Nazi targets.
>> Macron restates France's responsibility for wartime round-up of Jews
"When the Vel d'Hiv round-up took place, something unexpected happened," he explains. "The Nazis and their Vichy allies were counting on the arrest of 27,000 Jews, mostly foreigners. In the end, they had to settle for 13,000 - though obviously it was still 13,000 too many." More than half the targeted Jews were able to avoid arrest, largely because their fellow Parisians gave them advance warning and helped them to hide. Sémelin adds: "A large part of the public was outraged that police were going after women and children."

'They are our brothers'

With the unprecedented mass arrest of Jewish women and children, the Vel d'Hiv round-up marked a turning point in France, exposing - in part - the sinister motives of the Nazis. It triggered the secretive establishment of rescue networks across the country, including by Catholic and Protestant clergy. Some prominent figures publicly spoke out against the treatment of Jews, including the archbishop of Toulouse, Monsignor Saliège, who urged worshipers to respect "human dignity" in a sermon delivered on August 23, 1942.

"Children, women, men, fathers and mothers being treated like a lowly herd; members of a single family being separated from each other and carted away to an unknown destination - it is our age which was destined to see this dreadful sight," the archbishop said. " Jews are men and women. Foreigners are men and women. One may not do anything one wishes to these men, to these women, to these fathers and mothers. They are part of the human race; they are our brothers, like so many others."

The sermon, which was carried by the BBC and the New York Times, "had a considerable impact on the public," says Sémelin, who ranks himself "among those who believe Monsignor Saliège has not been given the recognition he deserves. His words still resonate."

Fourteen years on from his conversation with Veil, Sémelin has come up with a detailed, 224-page answer to her question. Establishing historical facts is also "the best answer to those who attempt to fabricate history," he says, referring to Zemmour's claims. His book helps clarify why a much higher proportion of France's Jews survived the Holocaust than in other Nazi-occupied countries. It does so without forgetting the 74,150 Jewish men, women and children who were deported from France - most of whom perished.
This article was adapted from the original in French.

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How three-quarters of French Jews survived the Holocaust, despite the Vichy regime

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The fate of France's Jews during World War II has become an unlikely topic of debate in the run-up to the French presidential election, exhumed by a revisionist candidate's widely debunked claims that...

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Elizabeth I (born September 7, 1533, Greenwich, near London, England-died March 24, 1603, Richmond, Surrey) queen of England (1558-1603) during a period, often called the Elizabethan Age, when England asserted itself vigorously as a major European power in politics, commerce, and the arts.

Although her small kingdom was threatened by grave internal divisions, Elizabeth's blend of shrewdness, courage, and majestic self-display inspired ardent expressions of loyalty and helped unify the nation against foreign enemies. The adulation bestowed upon her both in her lifetime and in the ensuing centuries was not altogether a spontaneous effusion. It was the result of a carefully crafted, brilliantly executed campaign in which the queen fashioned herself as the glittering symbol of the nation's destiny. This political symbolism, common to monarchies, had more substance than usual, for the queen was by no means a mere figurehead. While she did not wield the absolute power of which Renaissance rulers dreamed, she tenaciously upheld her authority to make critical decisions and to set the central policies of both state and church. The latter half of the 16th century in England is justly called the Elizabethan Age: rarely has the collective life of a whole era been given so distinctively personal a stamp.

Childhood

Elizabeth's early years were not auspicious. She was born at Greenwich Palace, the daughter of the Tudor king Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn. Henry had defied the pope and broken England from the authority of the Roman Catholic Church in order to dissolve his marriage with his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, who had borne him a daughter, Mary. Since the king ardently hoped that Anne Boleyn would give birth to a male heir, regarded as key to stable dynastic succession, the birth of a second daughter was a bitter disappointment that dangerously weakened the new queen's position. Before Elizabeth reached her third birthday, her father had her mother beheaded on charges of adultery and treason. Moreover, at Henry's instigation, an act of Parliament declared his marriage with Anne Boleyn invalid from the beginning, thus making their daughter Elizabeth illegitimate, as Roman Catholics had all along claimed her to be. (Apparently, the king was undeterred by the logical inconsistency of simultaneously invalidating the marriage and accusing his wife of adultery.) The emotional impact of these events on the little girl, who had been brought up from infancy in a separate household at Hatfield, is not known; presumably, no one thought it worth recording. What was noted was her precocious seriousness; at six years old, it was admiringly observed, she had as much gravity as if she had been 40.

When in 1537 Henry's third wife, Jane Seymour, gave birth to a son, Edward, Elizabeth receded still further into relative obscurity, but she was not neglected. Despite his capacity for monstrous cruelty, Henry VIII treated all his children with what contemporaries regarded as affection; Elizabeth was present at ceremonial occasions and was declared third in line to the throne. She spent much of the time with her half brother Edward and, from her 10th year onward, profited from the loving attention of her stepmother, Catherine Parr, the king's sixth and last wife. Under a series of distinguished tutors, of whom the best known is the Cambridge humanist Roger Ascham, Elizabeth received the rigorous education normally reserved for male heirs, consisting of a course of studies centring on classical languages, history, rhetoric, and moral philosophy. "Her mind has no womanly weakness," Ascham wrote with the unselfconscious sexism of the age, "her perseverance is equal to that of a man, and her memory long keeps what it quickly picks up." In addition to Greek and Latin, she became fluent in French and Italian, attainments of which she was proud and which were in later years to serve her well in the conduct of diplomacy. Thus steeped in the secular learning of the Renaissance, the quick-witted and intellectually serious princess also studied theology, imbibing the tenets of English Protestantism in its formative period. Her association with the Reformation is critically important, for it shaped the future course of the nation, but it does not appear to have been a personal passion: observers noted the young princess's fascination more with languages than with religious dogma.

Position under Edward VI and Mary

With her father's death in 1547 and the accession to the throne of her frail 10-year-old brother Edward, Elizabeth's life took a perilous turn. Her guardian, the dowager queen Catherine Parr, almost immediately married Thomas Seymour, the lord high admiral. Handsome, ambitious, and discontented, Seymour began to scheme against his powerful older brother, Edward Seymour, protector of the realm during Edward VI's minority. In January 1549, shortly after the death of Catherine Parr, Thomas Seymour was arrested for treason and accused of plotting to marry Elizabeth in order to rule the kingdom. Repeated interrogations of Elizabeth and her servants led to the charge that even when his wife was alive Seymour had on several occasions behaved in a flirtatious and overly familiar manner toward the young princess. Under humiliating close questioning and in some danger, Elizabeth was extraordinarily circumspect and poised. When she was told that Seymour had been beheaded, she betrayed no emotion.

The need for circumspection, self-control, and political acumen became even greater after the death of the Protestant Edward in 1553 and the accession of Elizabeth's older half sister Mary, a religious zealot set on returning England, by force if necessary, to the Roman Catholic faith. This attempt, along with her unpopular marriage to the ardently Catholic king Philip II of Spain, aroused bitter Protestant opposition. In a charged atmosphere of treasonous rebellion and inquisitorial repression, Elizabeth's life was in grave danger. For though, as her sister demanded, she conformed outwardly to official Catholic observance, she inevitably became the focus and the obvious beneficiary of plots to overthrow the government and restore Protestantism. Arrested and sent to the Tower of London after Sir Thomas Wyatt's rebellion in January 1554, Elizabeth narrowly escaped her mother's fate. Two months later, after extensive interrogation and spying had revealed no conclusive evidence of treason on her part, she was released from the Tower and placed in close custody for a year at Woodstock. The difficulty of her situation eased somewhat, though she was never far from suspicious scrutiny. Throughout the unhappy years of Mary's childless reign, with its burning of Protestants and its military disasters, Elizabeth had continually to protest her innocence, affirm her unwavering loyalty, and proclaim her pious abhorrence of heresy. It was a sustained lesson in survival through self-discipline and the tactful manipulation of appearances.

Many Protestants and Roman Catholics alike assumed that her self-presentation was deceptive, but Elizabeth managed to keep her inward convictions to herself, and in religion as in much else they have remained something of a mystery. There is with Elizabeth a continual gap between a dazzling surface and an interior that she kept carefully concealed. Observers were repeatedly tantalized with what they thought was a glimpse of the interior, only to find that they had been shown another facet of the surface. Everything in Elizabeth's early life taught her to pay careful attention to how she represented herself and how she was represented by others. She learned her lesson well.

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Elizabeth I | Biography, Facts, Mother, & Death

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Elizabeth I, the iconic Queen of England, navigated political challenges and established a golden age marked by cultural flourishing and maritime exploration.

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African Americans in the Revolutionary War - Wikipedia

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Prior to the revolution, many free African Americans supported the anti-British cause, most famously Crispus Attucks, believed to be the first person killed at the Boston Massacre. At the time of the American Revolution, some blacks had already enlisted as Minutemen.

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During the reign of Joseph Stalin, 14 million people ended up in a Soviet gulag, where they were forced to literally work themselves to death.

During the days of Stalin, one wrong word could end with the secret police at your door, ready to drag you off to a Soviet gulag - one of the many forced labor camps where inmates worked until they died. Historians estimate that nearly 14 million people were thrown into a gulag prison during Stalin's reign.

Some were political prisoners, rounded up for speaking out against the Soviet regime. Others were criminals and thieves. And some were just ordinary people, caught cracking an unkind word about a Soviet official.

Still more inmates came from the Eastern Bloc of Europe - conquered countries that were made subservient to the Soviet regime. The families of priests, professors, and important figures would be rounded up and sent off to the work camps, keeping them out of the way while the Soviet Union systematically erased their culture.

Wherever the gulag inmates came from, their fate was the same: backbreaking labor in freezing, remote locations with little protection from the elements and less food. These photographs tell their story.

The History Of The Soviet Gulag

The history of forced labor camps in Russia is a long one. Early examples of a labor-based penal system date back to the Russian empire, when the tsar instituted the first "katorga" camps in the 17th century.

Katorga was the term for a judicial ruling that exiled the convicted to Siberia or the Russian Far East, where there were few people and fewer towns. There, prisoners would be forced to labor on the region's deeply underdeveloped infrastructure - a job no one would voluntarily undertake.

But it was the government of Vladimir Lenin that transformed the Soviet gulag system and implemented it on a massive scale.

In the aftermath of the 1917 October revolution, Communist leaders found that there were a number of dangerous ideologies and people floating around Russia - and nobody knew how fatal an inspiring new ideology could be better than the leaders of the Russian Revolution.

They decided that it would be best if those who disagreed with the new order found somewhere else to be - and if the state could profit from free labor at the same time, all the better.

Publicly, they would refer to the updated katorga system as a "re-education" campaign; through hard labor, society's uncooperative elements would learn to respect the common people and love the new dictatorship of the proletariat.

While Lenin ruled, there were some questions about both the morality and the efficacy of using forced labor to bring exiled workers into the Communist fold. These doubts didn't stop the proliferation of new labor camps - but they did make progress relatively slow.

That all changed when Joseph Stalin took over after Lenin's death in 1924. Under Stalin's rule, the Soviet gulag prisons became a nightmare of historic proportions.

Stalin Transforms The Soviet Gulag

The word "gulag" was born as an acronym. It stood for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or, in English, Main Camp Administration.

Two factors drove Stalin to expand the gulag prisons at a merciless pace. The first was the Soviet Union's desperate need to industrialize.

Though the economic motives behind the new prison labor camps have been debated - some historians feel economic growth was simply a convenient perk of the plan, while others think it helped to drive arrests - few deny that prison labor played a substantial role in the Soviet Union's new ability to harvest natural resources and take on massive construction projects.

The other force at work was Stalin's Great Purge, sometimes called the Great Terror. It was a crackdown on all forms of dissent - real and imagined.

As Stalin sought to consolidate his power, suspicion fell on party members, "rich" peasants called kulaks, academics, and anyone said to have murmured a word against the country's current direction. In the purge's worst days, it was enough to simply be related to a dissenter - no man, woman, or child was above suspicion.

In two years, some 750,000 people were executed on the spot. One million more escaped execution - but were sent to the gulags.

Daily Life In A Soviet Gulag

In the forced labor camps, conditions were brutal. Prisoners were barely fed. Stories even came out saying that the inmates had been caught hunting rats and wild dogs, snagging any living thing they could find for something to eat.

While starving, they worked themselves literally to the bone, using usually outdated supplies to do intense labor. The Soviet gulag system, instead of relying on expensive technology, threw the sheer force of millions of men with crude hammers at a problem. Inmates worked until they collapsed, often literally dropping dead.

These laborers worked on massive projects, including the Moscow-Volga Canal, the White Sea-Baltic Canal, and the Kolyma Highway. Today, that highway is known as the "Road of Bones" because so many workers died building it that they used their bones in the foundation of the road.

No exceptions were made for women, many of whom were only imprisoned because of the imagined crimes of their husbands or fathers. Their accounts are some of the most harrowing to emerge from the gulag prisons.

Women In The Gulags

Though women were housed in barracks apart from the men, camp life did little to really separate the genders. Female prisoners were often the victims of rape and violence at the hands of both inmates and guards. Many report the most effective survival strategy was to take a "prison husband" - a man who would exchange protection or rations for sexual favors.

If a woman had children, she would have to divide her own rations to feed them - sometimes as little as 140 grams of bread per day.

But for some of the female prisoners, simply being allowed to keep your children was a blessing; many of the gulag children were shipped to distant orphanages. Their papers were often lost or destroyed, making a reunion someday almost impossible.

After Stalin's death in 1953, the zeal that had sent thousands to the gulag prisons every year faded. Nikita Khrushchev, the next to take power, denounced many of Stalin's policies, and separate orders freed those imprisoned for petty crimes and political dissidents.

By the time the last Soviet gulag closed its gates, millions had died. Some worked themselves to death, some had starved, and others were simply dragged out into the woods and shot. It is unlikely the world will ever have an accurate count of the lives lost in the camps.

Though Stalin's successors ruled with a gentler hand, the damage had been done. Intellectual and cultural leaders had been wiped out, and the people had learned to live in fear.
After reading about the gulag prisons of the Soviet Union, check out these photos of abandoned Soviet monuments and fascinating Soviet propaganda posters.

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32 Disturbing Photos Of Life Inside Soviet Gulag Prisons

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During the days of Stalin, one wrong word could end with the secret police at your door, ready to drag you off to a Soviet gulag - one of the many forced labor camps where inmates worked until they died. Historians estimate that nearly 14 million people were thrown into a gulag prison during Stalin's reign.

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France between the Wars

During the interwar period, France was one of the more liberal countries in welcoming Jewish immigrants, many of them from eastern Europe. After World War I, thousands of Jews viewed France as a European land of equality and opportunity and helped to make its capital, Paris, a thriving center of Jewish cultural life.

In the 1930s, however, unnerved by a significant influx of refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and the Spanish Civil War, the leaders of the French Third Republic (1870-1940) began to reassess this "open-door" policy. By 1939 French authorities had imposed strict limitations on immigration and set up a number of internment and detention camps for refugees, such as Gurs and Rivesaltes, in southern France.

German Invasion

When the Third Republic collapsed under German attack in the early summer of 1940, there were approximately 350,000 Jews in France. Less than half of them were French citizens. Many of these individuals were refugees who had fled Nazi persecution in the Third Reich; Jews and other endangered persons fleeing oppression in German-occupied Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands soon joined them in the summer of 1940.

German forces invaded France on May 10, 1940. On June 22, 1940, France signed an armistice with Germany which went into effect on June 25, 1940. Under the terms of the armistice, Germany annexed the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine which shared borders with Germany and had long been a bone of contention between the two countries.

The German army occupied the remainder of northern and western France and administered this occupied zone in conjunction with occupied Belgium under the leadership of a "military commander" ( Militärbefehlshaber). From October 1940 until March 1942, General Otto von Stülpnagel held this position. His cousin, General Karl-Heinrich Stülpnagel, became Military Commander of Belgium and Northern France in March 1942 and held this position until his arrest after the July 20, 1944, attempt to assassinate Hitler.

As early as the winter of 1940-1941, however, the SS and police had established an apparatus on von Stülpnagel's staff in occupied France. SS Colonel Helmut Knochen served as Commander of Security Police and SD ( Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, BdS); and SS Captain Theodor Dannecker represented the Jewish affairs office of the Reich Central Office for Security ( Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA), under command of SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann. In March 1942, with the replacement of the Military Commander in occupied France and Belgium and in preparation for the deportation of the French Jews, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler appointed SS Major General Carl Oberg as Higher SS and Police Header ( Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer, HSSPF) for German-occupied France.

Vichy Regime

Until November 1942, southern and eastern France remained unoccupied. A French collaborationist government, headquartered in the city of Vichy, in the Auvergne, governed unoccupied France.

In July 1940, the French National Assembly voted to suspend the constitution of the Third Republic and placed the new "Vichy regime" under the leadership of the aging Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, French hero of the Battle of Verdun in World War I. Pierre Laval, a former Socialist politician who cultivated good relations with Otto Abetz (the German Foreign Office representative in Paris), functioned as the acting chief of government for most of the period of German occupation.

In theory, measures of the Vichy government applied to all of France. However, only in unoccupied France could the new government actually govern autonomously. Officially neutral, Vichy France collaborated closely with Germany. Under Petain and Laval, the Vichy government followed a nationalist and "pre-French Revolutionary" agenda, replacing the ideals of "liberty, equality, and fraternity" [" Liberté, égalité, fraternité! "] with "work, family, and country."

In the autumn of 1940, Vichy administrators promulgated antisemitic legislation, closely patterned on that of German anti-Jewish decrees and ordinances in place in the German-occupied zone. The so-called " Statut des Juifs" ("Jewish Statute"), passed in two sections in October 1940 and June 1941, excluded Jews from public life, regulated their dismissal from positions in the civil service and the military, and barred them from occupations in industry, commerce, and the free professions (including medicine, law, and teaching).

In March 1941, the Vichy government created a central agency, the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs ( Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives), to coordinate anti-Jewish legislation and policy. Anxious to ensure that material goods and assets confiscated from the Jewish population did not fall into German hands, the Laval government, in July 1941, instituted an extensive program of " Aryanization," appropriating Jewish-owned property for the French state. Aryanization left most Jews in France destitute, affecting foreign Jews particularly severely. French authorities interned thousands of Jews under deplorable conditions in French-administered detention camps-Gurs, Saint-Cyprien, Rivesaltes, Le Vernet, and Les Milles-where at least 3,000 individuals died during the war years.

Deportations

Following the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, German authorities prepared for the deportation of Jews from France and other western European countries. The appointment of Oberg in March 1942 accelerated the process: an initial transport of more than 1,000 Jews left from Compiègne for Auschwitz on March 27, 1942. On May 29, 1942, German authorities issued a decree-to take effect on June 7-that Jews in occupied France wear the yellow star.

After securing the agreement of the Vichy government, German officials and French police conducted round-ups of Jews in both occupied and unoccupied zones of France throughout the summer of 1942. Under the direction of Rene Bousquet, Secretary General of the Vichy police, French police arrested 13,000 Jews in Paris on July 16 and 17, 1942, interning them for several days under appalling conditions in the Vélodrome d'Hiver sports arena. As Vichy policy dictated that initial deportation convoys from France carry only adult Jews to the East, police razzias literally tore families apart, as parents, grandparents, and elder siblings were separated from younger children at collection points and at French or German assembly camps.

By late summer, French authorities altered their policy in favor of deporting whole families. After this time transports included children and juveniles in convoys to the east.

By the autumn of 1942, some 42,000 Jews had passed through the Drancy transit camp on the outskirts of Paris. Nearly one third of these individuals came from unoccupied France. A significant percentage of these victims were foreign or stateless Jews, sacrificed by the Vichy government in a vain attempt to spare France's indigenous Jewish population. The final destination of these deportees was Auschwitz, where the SS murdered the vast majority by means of poison gas shortly after their arrival.

Deportations of Jews from France in the summer and fall of 1942 spurred significant protest within the Catholic Church, a mainstay of the Petain regime, and among the general population. The brutal nature of the roundups, such as the razzia and incarceration in the Velodrome d'Hiver, stirred public anger. The initial decision to separate children from their families during the deportation process met with particular criticism.

The calculated strategy of the Vichy administration to collaborate with German deportation efforts in order to gain more independence for unoccupied France had failed. The Petain government's willingness to surrender foreign Jews in hopes of shielding French Jewish nationals had increasingly obligated Vichy officials to fill all deportation quotas demanded by German authorities, who did not concern themselves with the niceties of nationality and citizenship.

Italian Zone

In November 1942, German troops occupied Vichy's formerly "free zone." As German allies, Italian forces had occupied the southeastern corner of France in 1940. As elsewhere in territories they controlled, Italian authorities refused to enforce antisemitic legislation seriously, or to hand over Jews to Germans officials, despite repeated German demands. Thousands of Jews sought and received protection in the Italian zone until its occupation by German forces with Italy's surrender in September 1943.

Resumption of Deportations

German authorities reinstituted transports of Jews from France in January 1943 and continued the deportations until August 1944. In all, some 77,000 Jews living on French territory perished in concentration camps and killing centers-the overwhelming majority of them at Auschwitz-or died in detention on French soil. One third of these victims were French citizens.

While French officials did not hesitate to meet German quotas for deportations with foreign or stateless Jews living on their soil, they were less enthusiastic in sacrificing French Jews to German demands. As deportations resumed in 1943, German administrators noted that French police seemed less committed to rounding up indigenous Jews, while Laval himself refused to strip French Jews of their citizenship to facilitate deportation. Thanks to the obstruction of French officials, the vast majority of Jews with French citizenship survived the Holocaust.

Yet the cost paid in lives was still enormous. Historian Michael Marrus has noted that although the "'Final Solution' in France was a Nazi project from beginning to end," it is unlikely that German authorities would have been successful in deporting such a large number of Jews from France without the aid and cooperation of French police and administrators.

Liberation of France

The Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, initiated the liberation of France. The French Résistance played a significant role in aiding Allied armies in this effort. Members of the French resistance movement came from every economic milieu and from every element of the political spectrum: conservative nationalists; Catholic and Protestant clergymen; members of the beleaguered Jewish community; liberal republicans, and activists from the socialist and communist Left.

During the time of the occupation, resistance cells had carried out sabotage and guerilla actions against German and collaborationist authorities, circulated identification papers and documents for Jews and other persecutees, and maintained escape networks for Jews, forced laborers, and Allied POWs and troops trapped behind German lines. Now resistance groups helped to speed the Allied advance against German forces. Within three months the country was free.

On August 25, 1944, German forces in Paris surrendered; on the following day, General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French Forces ( Forces Françaises Libres, or FFL) and President of the Provisional Government of the French Republic, marched triumphantly into the French capital.

Trials

Directly after liberation, the provisional government disbanded many of the collaborationist organizations, such as the Milice Francaise (French Militia), the most significant paramilitary group created to combat the French Resistance movement.

Following a wave of popular judgments and summary executions of collaborators, the provisional government began a series of trials against leading Vichy officials. Pierre Laval, French Minister of State under Petain, and Joseph Darnand, leader of the Milice, were convicted of treason and executed in October 1945. On August 15, 1945, Marshall Petain was also condemned to death on treason charges. Due to his services in World War I and to his advanced age (Petain was 89 at the time), de Gaulle commuted Petain's sentence to life imprisonment; he would die in 1951.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, French jurisprudence undertook efforts to prosecute several individuals on charges of crimes against humanity for their respective roles in the Nazi genocide. The first successful outcome of these efforts was the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyons," whom a French court convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment primarily for his role in the deportation and death of Jewish refugee children hidden in the village of Izieu.

More significant, perhaps, were those proceedings against three Frenchmen and former Vichy officials involved in crimes against Jews or in the implementation of the "Final Solution" in France. In 1991, French justice authorities in Paris indicted Rene Bousquet, former Secretary General of the Vichy police, who in July 1942 negotiated the deportation of some 10,000 foreign Jews from the Unoccupied Zone and who in that same month ordered the notorious round-up by French police of some 13,000 Jews at the Vélodrome d'hiver in Paris. Christian Didier, a mentally ill individual who claimed to have made an attempt on the life of Klaus Barbie, assassinated Bousquet in his home in Paris on June 8, 1993, shortly before Bousquet's trial was to take place.

In 1994, a Versailles court convicted Paul Touvier, head of the Milice' s Second Service, or intelligence branch, for the Lyons region, to life imprisonment for the murder of seven Jewish hostages at Rillieux-la-Pape, near Lyon. Touvier died of prostate cancer in 1996 in Fresnes prison near Paris.

In 1998, a court in Bordeaux convicted Maurice Papon for crimes against humanity for his participation in the deportation of over 1,600 Jews between 1942 and 1944 in his capacity as Secretary General for Police of the Prefecture of Bordeaux. Papon initially fled to Switzerland to elude his ten-year prison sentence, but was interned after his extradition to France in 1999. The 92-year-old was released on medical grounds in September 2002, and died in February 2007.

These proceedings suggest that the legacy of collaboration during " les années noires," the "Dark Years" of the German occupation, still casts its shadow upon French politics and culture in the present day.

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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Learn about France during the Holocaust and WWII, the liberation of France, postwar trials, and the legacy of Vichy France's collaboration with Nazi Germany.

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After the disgrace and execution of her mother, Elizabeth's life was never to be quite the same again. She was probably far too young to be greatly effected by her mother's sudden extinction, but her lifestyle changed considerably. The marriage of her father to her mother was annulled, and she was made a royal bastard. Later, she was stripped of her title of Princess, as her sister had previously been, to become simply, the Lady Elizabeth. Elizabeth was a very bright child, and this change in her name did not escape her. She exclaimed "how haps it governor, yesterday my Lady Princess, today but my Lady Elizabeth?" Within days of Anne's death, Henry had married again, this time to Jane Seymour, a young woman who had been a maid of honour to Anne, just as Anne had been a maid of honour to Catherine. Although Elizabeth still had her own household, her governess found that the young child's needs were being neglected, and she felt obliged to write to the king asking him to ensure that Elizabeth was provided with all the clothes she needed, as the ones she had were too small.

Jane Seymour

Jane Seymour died a few days after giving birth to Henry's longed for son, Prince Edward. The King was devastated at her loss and gave her a royal burial at the Chapel of St. George in Windsor Castle. Like Elizabeth, Edward too had to grow up motherless, and from an early age, the two children formed a close bond. Although Elizabeth was getting along well with her half sister, Mary, the sisters were never close. They were of different religions, Elizabeth a Protestant, Mary a Catholic; of very different ages, Mary being seventeen years older; of different family connections, and they had very different personalities. Edward and Elizabeth, however, were closer in age, of the same religion, and both shared a passion for learning. They were both given a very impressive education.

Kat Ashley

From an early age they were taught Latin, Greek, Spanish, French, as well as all the other requirements of a classical humanist education; history philosophy, mathematics. When Elizabeth was four years old, Lady Bryan was replaced as governess by a young woman called Katherine Champernowne. Katherine was a sweet, motherly, well educated lady, who came to love her young charge dearly. She became an important figure in Elizabeth's life, to all extent and purposes her mother figure, and Elizabeth affectionately came to call her "Kat". Kat later married Elizabeth's cousin, John Ashley (or Asteley), which tied her even closer to the young royal.

As well as Kat Ashley, Elizabeth's immediate household also included a Welsh woman named Blanche Parry, and Thomas Parry (possibly Blanche's brother). Blanche remained a close friend and confident of the Queen throughout her long life, and was given an elaborate tomb by Elizabeth when she died in the late 1580's. Blanche also taught Elizabeth some of her native Welsh language. Elizabeth was a gifted student and her talent was appreciated by those who had the privilege to teach her. Roger Asham, a well known scholar of the day responsible for tutoring other talented students, regarded Elizabeth as his brightest star. Besides reading and writing, Elizabeth also spent her time learning to play musical instruments, which she came to do with a degree of proficiency, and also learnt needlework and art.

Henry's marriage to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, was quickly annulled as neither she or Henry found each other agreeable. Although Anne remained in England as the King's "dear sister", she probably had little to do with Elizabeth. However, Henry's fifth wife,Catherine Howard, had a much more lasting impact upon her. Catherine was Elizabeth's cousin on her mother's side, and the young Queen took a great interest in her new little step-daughter, often having her with her, and playing with her. When she first dined in public, she gave Elizabeth the place of honour opposite her. To the young Elizabeth, who so far had spent her life in the shadows of the court, overlooked as insignificant, this must have been a momentous occasion.

Catherine Howard

But this happy state of affairs was not destined to continue. It was discovered that Catherine had committed adultery, and just like Elizabeth's mother before her, she was taken to the Tower of London, condemned to death, and executed on Tower Green. This must have been a very painful and confusing episode for Elizabeth, who was still only eight years old. The extent of it's impact upon her cannot be measured, but it is significant that Robert Dudley, her childhood friend and confident when she later became Queen, said many years later that when she was eight years old, Elizabeth told him that she would never marry. In eight short years she had lost her mother and had had three stepmothers, two of whom were now dead. Also, no doubt, she had heard tales of the fate of her sister's mother, Catherine of Aragon, and it is not surprising that these combined events impressed in her a certain fear of what happened to women who married.

Katherine Parr

But life with Henry's sixth wife, Katherine Parr, proved to be rather tranquil for Elizabeth. Katherine was a motherly lady who did her utmost to give the royal children a family home. She liked to have the children around her, and did much to reconcile Elizabeth and Mary to their father. But life was certainly not idyllic. During a stay at the royal court Elizabeth managed to offend her father profoundly, for which she was banished from the Palace. What exactly this offence was remains unknown, perhaps a remark or question about her mother or Katherine Howard, or perhaps a remark on religion or another of Henry's policies that a child would not think inappropriate. Henry's reaction was alarming, but with Katherine Parr's intervention, the episode blew over, and Elizabeth was allowed back to court. By this stage, Henry was far from well. He had a great ulcer on his leg that troubled him immensely and his enormous weight hindered his mobility considerably. It was becoming clear to all around him that his days were numbered. He died on 28 January 1547.

Elizabeth was with her brother, Edward, at the royal Palace of Enfield (London) when they were told of their father's death. She and her brother cried bitterly, holding each other close. Both children knew their lives were about to change considerably, and their tears may well have been from fear for the future, as well as grief for the death of their magnificent, if at times, tyrannical father. Both were now orphans. Elizabeth was thirteen years of age, and Edward was King of England at the age of only nine.
TROUBLED TEENS EARLY YEARS

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Difficult Childhood : Early Years of Elizabeth I : Page 1

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After the disgrace and execution of her mother, Elizabeth's life was never to be quite the same again. She was probably far too young to be greatly effected by her mother's sudden extinction, but her lifestyle changed considerably. The marriage of her father to her mother was annulled, and she was made a royal bastard.

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It is difficult to shrink something as enormous as slavery into one generalized picture. Some slave-owners ran businesses; some owned plantations. The kind of work a slave did varied from house to house. Field work might consist of plowing, weeding, planting, and tending tobacco, corn, cotton, sugar cane, tomatoes, or other vegetables. Inside work might include cooking, cleaning, babysitting, and similar tasks.

A rendering of a slave owner inspecting his slave before sale. Public domain image.
How well or how badly slaves were treated also varied from place to place; however, as a general rule, small homes with five or less slaves would be closer and more tight-knit; sometimes almost like a family. Large plantations with hundreds of slaves would be much more disciplined and strict.

Slaves were bought and sold at auctions like household objects or livestock, used as footer or payment for debt, or their services were sold to earn money for their masters.

A poster advertising a slave auction. | Public domain image.
Some masters, not necessarily all, were downright cruel. Whites were not responsible to the law or to anyone for what happened with their slaves. They might kill one without repercussion.

Most slaves were not allowed to learn to read or write. Their owners were afraid that they would pass messages to slaves on other plantations and start a revolt. If a slave-owner caught his slave learning to read or write, he could be punished with up to 300 lashes. The severity of punishment depended on each owner. Punishments for disobedient or rebellious slaves could be as harsh as whipping or could even include the dismemberment of hands or feet if a slave fought back or ran away.

Working from sunrise to well after dark was common. Runaways were hunted like animals and imprisoned if they survived.

Female slaves, especially the ones who lived in the house, were in danger from the male overseers and masters of the house. Young mulattoes (half-white, half-black) were usually sold as young as possible to get them out of the house and away from their vengeful mistresses. If they were white enough, they could sometimes run away, pass as whites, and live normal lives.

Revolutionary War

Slavery, though it was established long before the Revolutionary War broke out, was affected like everything else when the war began. Slave-owners were afraid to leave for war in case the slaves rose up and slaughtered their families in their absence. They didn't want to give slaves weapons to fight for the same reason, in case they used them against their owners.

The slaves wanted to fight for their freedom. Some of the officers in the army, namely Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens wanted to give them that chance and create several battalions of Negroes who would fight with the Patriots in exchange for their freedom. They warned the Patriots that if they didn't offer the slaves their freedom, Britain would.

Illustrated cards presenting the journey of a slave from plantation life to the struggle for liberty, for which he gives his life. By James Fuller Queen in 1863. | Public domain image.
The idea was shut down by the South Carolina legislature for several reasons:

Charleston port was the most lucrative for slave import and export after the Boston Harbor was closed down following the Boston Tea Party.

The primary reason was that the slave-owners in the legislature were against it.

Lord Dunmore's Proclamation

Lord Dunmore's Proclamation | Public domain image.
The British Governor, Lord Dunmore, jumped on this idea and printed a proclamation announcing that any slaves who ran away and fought for the British army would be freed when the war was over.

Between 3,000 and 4,000 runaway slaves signed their name in his ledger. Some freed blacks fought with the Tories, colonists loyal to the king, as well. It is estimated that around 10,000 slaves escaped or died during the war.

After the British lost the war, Lord Dunmore followed through on his promise. Those whose names were signed into the ledger, now referred to as "The Book of Negroes," were relocated to Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Britain.

Colonel Tye

This is the ad that Titus' owner, John Corlis, placed in the paper when he ran away. Click here to read the transcription. Public domain image.
Perhaps the most well-known of the slaves who joined the British Ranks is Colonel Tye, originally Titus. He ran away from home at age 22 and joined the British Ethiopian Regiment. He took the title colonel; it wasn't given to him by the British army.

His ruthless guerrilla raids with his small mixed-race band of mostly ex-slaves, called the Black Brigade, terrorized the Patriot colonies. They raided the small towns and villages, demoralizing the residents, and stealing supplies and food. Sometimes they specifically targeted their previous owners for revenge.

he feats of the Black Brigade encouraged other slaves to run away to New York, which had been overrun by the British.

Colonel Tye died of lockjaw brought on by tetanus after he took a musket shot to the wrist.

The Underground Railroad

Slavery wasn't abolished during the American Revolution, but between the American Revolution and the American Civil War, abolitionists worked tirelessly to help slaves escape their bondage in what became known as the Underground Railroad. Read more about it here!

After the War

Some of the first efforts to end slavery began during the Revolutionary War, aided by a few of the Founding Fathers. However, at the end of the war, most of the slaves returned to their former lives.

There were slave-owners who realized the hypocrisy of owning slaves while fighting for their own independence and freed their slaves. William Whipple, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, is well-known for this. But most slave-owners went back to pre-revolution habits after the war.

After the war, slavery was not much changed, except that now that something as big as the war wasn't consuming the public mind and energy, slavery came to the forefront of the public attention. Read about the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery here.

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Slavery and the Revolutionary War | | Facts, Information & History

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It is difficult to shrink something as enormous as slavery into one generalized picture. Some slave-owners ran businesses; some owned plantations. The kind of work a slave did varied from house to house. Field work might consist of plowing, weeding, planting, and tending tobacco, corn, cotton, sugar cane, tomatoes, or other vegetables.

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Peter MacDonald Sr., a Navajo from Teecnospos, Arizona, didn't know he was going to be a radio operator in the Pacific during World War II. He joined the U.S. Marines because he liked their uniforms as some of his relatives were in the USMC.

He was not alone!

There were 50,000 Navajo tribe members in 1942. About 540 Navajos served as Marines as of 1945 and approximately 400 of them were trained as Code Talkers - mission that remained secret until 1968.

Thanks to their skills, hundreds of messages were sent and received with speed and accuracy. Even though Japanese were skilled code breakers, they were never able to break it.

More than a dozen Navajo Code Talkers were killed in action and more than two dozen of them were wounded.

Today, there are only four survivors: Thomas H. Begay, John Kinsel Jr., Samuel Sandoval and Peter MacDonald Sr., all of them older than 90 years old.

Hear from the Navajo Code Talkers Thomas Begay and Peter MacDonald Sr. on this video:

McDonald, who served in South Pacific as a Navajo Code Talker and North China with the Sixth Marine Division, was honorably discharged with a rank of corporal. Among his many honors is Congressional Silver Medal for heroic service to the country as a Navajo Code Talker.

Our interview with MacDonald, President of the Navajo Code Talker Museum and former president of the Navajo Code Talker Association, is below.

Why did you join the military? What plans or dreams did you have for yourself when you joined? Did you know that you would be a radio operator when you joined the Marines (USMC)?
I joined the USMC because I liked the uniform and many of my relatives were in the USMC. No, I didn't know I was going to be a radio operator. As a matter of fact, none of us knew what we would be doing in the USMC other than to shoot the enemy in the Pacific. The existence of the Navajo Code was top secret. We didn't know there was such a program until after going through boot camp, combat training, and communication school. After passing all those trainings, we were separated to attend the top secret Navajo Code School.
The first group of Navajos, 29 of them, were recruited in 1942 developed over 260 code words, subject to memory only. The code words they developed were tested on the invasion of Guadalcanal in August of 1942. The code worked under severe enemy fire. The code then became the official USMC and Navy military code to be used for all top secret and confidential messages in every invasion after Guadalcanal. Navy and Marine Corps used two communication networks: Navajo communication network for all top secret and confidential messages and English communication network for all other messages. These two communication networks worked side by side in every invasion.

Eventually, a dictionary of Navajo Code was developed. Would you tell us about it?
A dictionary of Navajo Code words was developed for all of us, the Navajo Code Talkers, to learn and memorize, starting with 260 code words in 1942. As the war expanded, so did the code words. By the time the war ended in 1945, there were over 600 code words to be memorized. Navajo Code Talkers also grew, from 29 in 1942 to over 400 by the end of WWII in 1945. Navajo Code was only used in the Pacific War. Japanese tried to break the code, but were unsuccessful. USMC tell us that Navajo Code was the only military code, in modern history, never broken by an enemy.

Do you remember the first code that you sent in the war?
I don't remember the first code I sent in battle. I was not on any landing, except in North China for getting the Japanese to surrender. We used the Navajo Code in North China. As a matter of fact, Navajo Code was used in every landing from Guadalcanal in 1942, including Bougainville, to Cape Gloucester, New Britain, Tarawa, Makin, Kwajalein, Eniwetoh, Saipan, Tinian, Guam, Pelilui, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and North China. Over a dozen Navajo Code Talkers were killed in action and more than two dozen were wounded. Out of 400 plus Navajo Code Talkers who served in the Pacific war, there are only four of us still alive; the oldest of the four is 97 and the other two 96 and I am the youngest at age 93. The Navy and USMC established two communication networks to be used in every landing; Navajo Communication Network for all top secret and confidential messages and English Communication Network for all other messages, messages you don't care if the enemy understands or deciphers the message.

Have you ever been back to the battlefields?
I never went back to the Pacific battlefields. I was invited by a friend in North China to come back to see the "after" in China, but I didn't go. What I saw during our stay in Red China was an unusual experience which I shall never forget. War is ugly, during the day hundreds of Chinese kids - ages from 3-year-olds to 15-year-olds - now orphans, roamed the streets begging for food, eating garbage. Wherever they were at the end of the day, they just huddled together to keep themselves warm and usually one or two would die during the night. They'd just leave them there and move on. War and poverty are hell. There is much that we Americans can do to help our own people so they will not end up like those poor Chinese kids.

We always highlight our work with the Marines and call ourselves Blue & Green Team. How was your relationship with Sailors back in the time? Did you have any Sailor friends?
My relationship with the Navy was nice and in most cases friendly. There was always teasing going on between Navy and Marines but nothing serious. I had several Navy friends; one of my clan cousins, Paul Redhouse, was with the Seabees, we met on Guam. Seabees always had good stateside chow with ice cream, pies and steaks, while we only had K-rations or C-rations. Paul used to invite some of us Navajo Code Talkers to Seabee meals to once again taste stateside food. My other cousin, Bob and I were raised together and he served in the Navy, too.

Do you have a message for the Navy community?
My message to the U.S. Navy is to keep on sailing and continue to respect the USMC for their willingness to put their lives on the line to preserve our freedom, liberty and peace. Also, thanks to the Navy for not just dumping us on the beaches, but to continue to support us with their fire power and supplying us with all that we need and providing the critical medical services and evacuation. Semper Fi!

Find Part II of our interview here.

Naval History and Heritage Command has more on the Navajo Code Talkers: Navajo Code Talkers, World War II Fact Sheet and Navajo Code Talkers' Dictionary

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One of the Last Navajo Code Talkers Shares Their Stories - Part I

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Peter MacDonald Sr., a Navajo from Teecnospos, Arizona, didn't know he was going to be a radio operator in the Pacific during World War II.

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Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom

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An internationally known german novelist, Lion Feuchtwanger had been a harsh critic of Adolf Hitler since the 1920s. One of his novels, The Oppermanns, was a thinly veiled exposé of Nazi brutality. He called the Führer's Mein Kampf a 140,000-word book with 140,000 mistakes. "The Nazis had denounced me as Enemy Number One," he once said. They also stripped him of his German citizenship and publicly burned his books.

In July 1940, the Nazis had just occupied Paris, and southeastern France-where Feuchtwanger was living-was controlled by a French government with Nazi sympathies. As the French authorities in the south began rounding up the foreigners in their midst, Feuchtwanger found himself in a lightly guarded detention camp near Nîmes, fearing imminent transfer to the Gestapo. On the afternoon of Sunday, July 21, he took a walk by a swimming hole where inmates were allowed to bathe, debating whether to flee the camp or wait for exit papers that the French had promised.

Suddenly, he spotted a woman he knew along the road to the camp and hurried over. "I have been waiting for you here," she said, shepherding him to a car. A few hours later, the novelist was safely in Marseille, enjoying the hospitality of a low-ranking U.S. diplomat named Hiram Bingham IV. Bingham, 37, was descended from prominent politicians, social scientists and missionaries. His grandfather's book A Residence of Twenty-One Years in the Sandwich Islands presaged James Michener's Hawaii. His father, Hiram Bingham III, was a renowned explorer and, later, a U.S. senator. After a prep school and Ivy League education, Hiram, known as Harry, seemed destined for a brilliant career in the Foreign Service.

But as World War II approached, Bingham made a series of life-altering choices. By sheltering Feuchtwanger in his private villa, Bingham violated both French law and U.S. policy. To draw attention to hunger and disease in the French camps, he challenged indifference and anti-Semitism among his State Department superiors. In speeding up visa and travel documents at the Marseille consulate, he disobeyed orders from Washington. In all, an estimated 2,500 refugees were able to flee to safety because of Bingham's help. Some of his beneficiaries were famous-Marc Chagall, Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst-but most were not.

Bingham accomplished all this in a mere ten months-until the State Department summarily transferred him out of France. By the end of World War II, his hopes of becoming an ambassador had been dashed. At the age of 42, after more than ten years in the Foreign Service, he moved with his wife and growing family to the farm they owned in Salem, Connecticut, where he spent the rest of his days painting landscapes and Chagallesque abstracts, playing the cello and dabbling in business ventures that never amounted to much.

When Bingham died there in 1988, at 84, the stories about his service in Marseille remained untold. William Bingham, 54, the youngest of his 11 children, says he and his siblings "never knew why his career had soured." But after their mother, Rose, died in 1996, at 87, they found out.

While cleaning out a dusty closet behind the main fireplace in the 18th-century farmhouse, William discovered a tightly bound bundle of documents that outlined his father's wartime service. Thus began a campaign to vindicate his father. And as his rescue efforts came to light, he was embraced by the same government that had cast him aside.

Hiram Bingham IV was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 17, 1903. His mother, Alfreda Mitchell, was a granddaughter of Charles L. Tiffany, the founder of Tiffany & Co. Harry's father, Hiram Bingham III, had no interest in following his parents as Protestant missionaries in the South Pacific. Starting in 1911, he led a series of expeditions to Machu Picchu in the Peruvian Andes; his travelogue, Lost City of the Incas, made him world-renowned. After his South American adventures, the senior Bingham entered the Army in 1917 as an aviator, achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel and was a flight instructor in France. A Republican, he served Connecticut as lieutenant governor and U.S. senator, and he was chairman of the McCarthy-era Civil Service Commission Loyalty Review Board.

His seven sons vied to impress him. Harry, the second eldest, and his brother Jonathan (who would become a Democratic congressman from New York) attended the Groton School in Massachusetts, whose illustrious alumni included Franklin D. Roosevelt. Harry had a bookish appearance but excelled at tennis, football, gymnastics and other sports.

Those who knew Harry said he spoke with animation and conviction after overcoming an initial reserve. Family members recalled that he always defended younger students from bullying upperclassmen. His brothers sometimes considered him pompous, perhaps too serious. His schoolmates called him "righteous Bingham."

Harry shared his father's wanderlust. After graduating from Yale University in 1925, he went to China as a civilian U.S. Embassy employee, attended Harvard Law School and then joined the State Department, which posted him to Japan, London (where he met Rose Morrison, a Georgia debutante, whom he soon married) and Warsaw before transferring him, at age 34, to Marseille in 1937.

Europe was careering toward war, but the first few years of Bingham's assignment seem to have been routine enough-other than a chilling visit he paid to Berlin after Hitler rose to power in 1933. In a rare reminiscence recorded by a teenage granddaughter for a school project in the 1980s, Bingham said he and Rose had been repulsed when they "had seen the broken windows where the Jewish stores had all been smashed and there were signs in the restaurants, 'No Jews or Dogs Allowed.' "

In June 1940, the Wehrmacht invaded France by land and air. Bingham sent his pregnant wife and their four children back to the United States, but he himself seemed aloof from the danger. "Two more air raids," he wrote on June 2 as he watched Luftwaffe attacks on Marseille. "Thrilling dive bombing over port...several hangars damaged and two other ships hit." Everyone at the embassy was "very excited about the raids," he noted. Then he headed off to his club for three sets of tennis, only to be disappointed when one match was "called off as my opponent did not show up."

But over the course of a week-as more bombs fell, as he read news of the Germans' overrunning of Belgium and Holland, as refugees poured into Marseille-Bingham's jottings took on a more urgent tone: "Long talk with a Belgian refugee from Brussels who told pitiful story of harrowing experiences during the last days in Brussels and flight to France," he wrote on June 7. "Noise of sirens and diving planes terrorized them...men crying Heil Hitler made human bridges for advancing troops, piles of corpses 5 feet high."

Bingham also worried that "the young Nazis [were] warped and infected with a fanaticism which may make them impossible to deal with for years." He added: "Hitler has all the virtues of the devil-courage, persistence, stamina, cunning, perseverance."

After taking Paris on June 14, 1940, Hitler divided France into an occupied zone and a state to the south that became known for its new capital, Vichy. Tens of thousands of European refugees had been corralled in squalid internment camps throughout southern France; Hitler obliged the Vichy government to hold the refugees until German intelligence units could investigate them. As more refugees streamed into southern France, thousands got as far as Marseille and hundreds lined up at the U.S. Consulate at Place Félix-Baret to beg for documents that would allow them to leave. But the de facto U.S. policy was to stall.

In Washington, James G. McDonald, head of the President's Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, supported pleas from Jewish leaders and others that the United States admit refugees in large numbers. But Breckinridge Long, an assistant secretary of state and head of the Special War Problems Division, opposed that view. Xenophobic and quite possibly anti-Semitic, Long shared a widespread if unfounded fear that German agents would be infiltrated among the visa applicants. In a 1940 memorandum, he wrote that the State Department could delay approvals "by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way...which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas."

As a result, most American consulates in Europe interpreted immigration rules strictly. In Lisbon, "they are very reluctant to grant what they call 'political visas,' that is, visas to refugees who are in danger because of their past political activities," wrote Morris C. Troper, chairman of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in 1940. "Pretty much the same situation prevails in the American Consulate in Marseille," he went on, "although one of the vice-consuls there, Mr. Hiram Bingham, is most liberal, sympathetic and understanding."

Bingham had, in fact, silently broken ranks. "[I] was getting as many visas as I could to as many people," he told his granddaughter-in a conversation that most family members would hear only years later. "My boss, who was the consul general at that time, said, 'The Germans are going to win the war. Why should we do anything to offend them?' And he didn't want to give any visas to these Jewish people."

The case of Lion Feuchtwanger, Bingham's first rescue operation, had come about because the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, asked the State Department to issue him an exit visa after Feuchtwanger's editor in the United States informed her of his plight. But while staying at Bingham's villa, the novelist overheard his host arguing over the telephone with his superiors and realized that in hiding him, Bingham had acted on his own. As Bingham searched for a way to get Feuchtwanger safely out of the country, he hid him all through the summer of 1940. By August, an organization called the Emergency Rescue Committee had been established in New York City; once again Feuchtwanger benefited from Eleanor Roosevelt's patronage. In meetings with her, Rescue Committee members developed a list of prominent exiles to be helped. They then sent American journalist Varian Fry to Marseille as their representative. Fry, whose efforts to help some 2,000 refugees escape from France would eventually be well chronicled and widely honored, quickly contacted Bingham.

Bingham issued the novelist a false travel document under the name "Wetcheek," the literal translation of Feuchtwanger from the German. In mid-September 1940 "Wetcheek" and his wife, Marta, left Marseille with several other refugees; he made his way to New York City aboard the SS Excalibur. (His wife followed on a separate ship.) When Feuchtwanger disembarked on October 5, the New York Times reported that he spoke "repeatedly of unidentified American friends who seemed to turn up miraculously in various parts of France to aid him in crucial moments in his flight." (Feuchtwanger settled in the Los Angeles area, where he continued to write. He died in 1958, at the age of 74.)

The State Department, of course, knew precisely who Feuchtwanger's American friends were. Soon after the writer left Marseille, Secretary of State Cordell Hull wired the U.S. Embassy at Vichy: "[T]his Government can not repeat not countenance the activities as reported of...Mr. Fry and other persons, however well-meaning their motives may be, in carrying on activities evading the laws of countries with which the United States maintains friendly relations."

Bingham's boss in Marseille, Consul General Hugh Fullerton, advised Fry to leave the country. Fry declined. For his part, Bingham surreptitiously broadened his work with Fry-setting him up, for example, with a police captain who was sympathetic to escape operations. The vice consul "had no hesitation to work with Fry," says Pierre Sauvage, a filmmaker who is gathering material for a documentary on Fry's work in Marseille. "If Bingham could find a way of bending the rules, of being accommodating to somebody who wanted to get out, he did that."

Through the summer of 1940, Bingham also gave secret shelter to Heinrich Mann, brother of novelist Thomas Mann; the novelist's son, Golo, also left Europe with Bingham's help. Both "have repeatedly spoken to me about your exceptional kindness and incalculable help to them in their recent need and danger," Thomas Mann wrote Bingham on October 27, 1940. "My feeling of indebtedness and gratitude to you is very great."

Bingham also visited Marc Chagall, a Jew, at Chagall's home in the Provençal village of Gordes and persuaded him to accept a visa and flee to the United States; their friendship continued for the rest of their lives. At the consulate, Bingham continued to issue visas and travel papers, which in many cases replaced confiscated passports. Fred Buch, an engineer from Austria, received an exit visa and temporary travel documents; he left Marseille with his wife and two children and settled in California. "God, it was such a relief," Buch told Sauvage in a 1997 interview. "Such a sweet voice. You felt so safe there in the consulate when he was there. You felt a new life will start." Bingham "looked like an angel, only without wings," Buch added. "The angel of liberation."

State Department files show that Bingham issued dozens of visas daily, and many other elements of his work-sheltering refugees, writing travel papers, meeting with escape groups-were not always recorded. "My father had to keep what he was doing secret, but I think people suspected it," says William Bingham. "From his perspective, what he was doing by defying the direct orders [of his own government] was complying with international law."

Bingham's next act, however, was even more provocative: with winter approaching, he began pressing for U.S. support for relief efforts at the detention camps around Marseille.

In 1940, there were about two dozen such camps in Vichy France, many of them having been originally set up in the 1930s for émigrés from Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Even before the Nazis took Paris that June, French authorities ordered European foreigners to report for internment on the ground that the criminals, spies and anti-government operatives among them had to be weeded out. From November 27 to December 1, Bingham visited camps at Gurs, Le Vernet, Argelès-sur-Mer, Agde and Les Milles, accompanied by an official who was coordinating the work of 20 international relief organizations in Marseille.

French authorities actually welcomed such relief missions, because local officials lacked the infrastructure and supplies to care for the inmates adequately. In a report Bingham wrote of his travels, he cited "immigration problems" as the reason for his trip, but his account portrays a gathering tragedy for the 46,000 camp inmates. Gurs, one of the largest camps, he wrote, held about 14,000 people, including 5,000 women and 1,000 children, and many of the detainees were diseased, malnourished or badly housed. Three hundred inmates had died there in November, 150 in the first ten days of December. "When the shortage of food becomes more acute, the camps may be used as centers of unrest," Bingham wrote. "Resulting riots may be used if desired as an excuse for intervention and military occupation of the whole of France."

When Bingham's report was forwarded to Secretary of State Hull on December 20, 1940, it was preceded by a caveat from Bingham's boss, Consul General Fullerton: "Mr. Bingham's trip to the camps was in nowise official and under instructions from the Department of State," Fullerton had written. "It was, in fact, made at his own expense."

In Washington, immigration policy remained unchanged. Later that month, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to the State Department to ask what could be done about France's refugee crisis; she may not have seen Bingham's report, but she was still in close communication with the Emergency Rescue Committee. On January 10, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles blamed the French: "The French government has been unwilling or has failed to grant the required exit permits with the consequence that these persons have not been able to proceed to the United States and remain on French territory where they must be cared for and fed," he wrote, then added pointedly: "I believe, despite some critics who are not aware of the facts, the machinery we have set up to deal with the emergency refugee problem is functioning effectively and well."

But Bingham, despite the State Department's reluctance, continued to work with relief organizations outside the government. With his help, Martha Sharp of the Unitarian Service Committee and others assembled 32 refugees, including 25 children, and got them onto a ship that arrived in New York, on December 23.

Robert C. Dexter, a director of the Boston-based committee, wrote to Hull to commend "the sympathetic and understanding way in which Vice-Consul Hiram Bingham, Jr. carried out his responsibilities at the consulate....Mrs. Sharp reports that his whole conduct made other Americans proud of the way he represents their government to foreigners coming before him for assistance."

Breckinridge Long, the assistant secretary of state who had been adamant about closing the gates to immigrants, replied that "the Department is always glad to learn that its officers abroad are proving themselves of service to American citizens and their interests." Long's tepid response reflected growing concern among Bingham's superiors about his activities. "In general, Bingham was stretching the boundaries," says historian Richard Breitman, who has written extensively on the period. "Bingham was on one side, and Long and the majority of consuls were on the other side."

In the winter of 1941, one of Bingham's Marseille superiors, William L. Peck, wrote a memo describing Peck's efforts to give humanitarian consideration "to aged people, especially those in the camps. These are the real sufferers and the ones who are dying off." He then added: "The young ones may be suffering, but the history of their race shows that suffering does not kill many of them. Furthermore, the old people will not reproduce and can do our country no harm, provided there is adequate evidence of support." Such an expression of anti-Semitism within the government, which was forwarded to the secretary of state, as well as to the consulates in Lyon and Nice, was not unusual during the war, Breitman says; overt anti-Semitism did not recede until the Nazi concentration camps were liberated in 1945 and the true dimensions of the Holocaust began to emerge.

Although Bingham left no record that he sensed any trouble, his time in Marseille was running out. In March 1941, Long effectively silenced McDonald's pleas for a more open immigration policy; in official Washington sentiment for aiding refugees evaporated.

In April, Bingham was delegated to accompany the new U.S. ambassador to Vichy, retired Adm. William D. Leahy, during Leahy's official visit to Marseille. Nothing gave any indication of tensions, and afterward Bingham sent a note to the ambassador saying, "It was a great privilege for me to have had the opportunity of being with you and Mrs. Leahy during your short visit here."

A few days later, a wire from Washington arrived in Marseille: "Hiram Bingham, Jr., Class VIII, $3600, Marseille has been assigned Vice Consul at Lisbon and directed proceed as soon as practicable....This transfer not made at his request nor for his convenience."

There is no explanation in official records for the transfer, though notes found among Bingham's papers suggest the reasons: "Why was I transferred to Lisbon," he wrote. "Attitude toward Jews-me in visa section...attitude toward Fry." In any case, on September 4, while Bingham was on home leave, he received another telegram from the State Department: "You are assigned Vice Consul at Buenos Aires and you should proceed upon the termination of your leave of absence."

Bingham was in Buenos Aires when the United States entered World War II. He spent the remainder of the war there in the rank of vice consul and was an ongoing irritant to the State Department with his complaints about Nazis who had slipped out of Europe. They were operating openly in nominally neutral Argentina, whose military government dominated by Col. Juan Domingo Perón hardly disguised its fascist sympathies. "Perón and his whole gang are completely unreliable, and, whatever happens, all countries in South America will be seedbeds of Nazism after the war," Bingham wrote in a confidential memo to his superiors.

When, after the war, Bingham's request to be posted to Nazi-hunting operations in Washington, D.C. was turned down, he resigned from the Foreign Service and returned to the family farm in Connecticut. "For the children it was wonderful. Daddy was always there," says his daughter Abigail Bingham Endicott, 63, a singer and voice teacher in Washington, D.C. "He spent part of the day playing with the kids and much time in his study, dreaming up new business ideas." He designed a device called the Sportatron, an enclosed court 12 feet by 24 feet with various attachments and adjustments that would allow the user to play handball, tennis, basketball, even baseball in confined spaces. "Unfortunately, he didn't master the skill of selling and promoting something on a big scale," says Abigail. After a while, she says, he lost his patent on the device.

Bingham went through his inheritance. Wanting to live off the land as well as to save money, he bought a cow and chickens. Rose became a substitute teacher. "I was pretty much dressed in hand-me-downs," says William Bingham. His father "tried to fix things around the house, but wasn't good at it."

Amid Harry's financial hardship, his father, who lived in Washington, set up a trust fund to educate Harry's children. Abigail recalls a rare visit from the famous old explorer. "He was wearing a white linen suit and made us line up in order of age," she says. "There were maybe eight or nine of us, and he handed each of us a freshly minted silver dollar."

In his later years, says Abigail, Harry Bingham "told my older sister that he was very sorry he couldn't have left money for the family, but that he was very poor." ("Oh, Daddy, you've given us each other," she replied.) After his widow, Rose, died, the house passed into a trust that allows the Bingham children and others to use it, which is how William came to discover the documents his father had left behind.

William's discovery helped satisfy a curiosity that had been intensifying ever since the Bingham family was invited, in 1993, to a tribute to Varian Fry and other rescuers, sponsored by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. In 1996, William brought the documents he had found to the museum, where a curator expressed interest in including information about Harry in future exhibits. In 1998, the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem honored Bingham and ten other diplomats for having saved some 200,000 lives during the war.

Robert Kim Bingham, 66, Harry's sixth child, who went to Jerusalem for the Yad Vashem ceremonies, marshaled a campaign for recognition of his father in his own country; in June 2002, Bingham's "constructive dissent" was recognized when he was designated a Courageous Diplomat by the American Foreign Service Association, the society of Foreign Service professionals, at the State Department. Bingham, said Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, had "risked his life and his career, put it on the line, to help over 2,500 Jews and others who were on Nazi death lists to leave France for America in 1940 and 1941. Harry was prepared to take that risk to his career to do that which he knew was right."

Afterward, the department revised Bingham's biographical entry in its official history, highlighting his humanitarian service. In 2006, the Postal Service released a stamp bearing Bingham's likeness.

As Harry Bingham's story spread, a few dozen of the people he had helped and their survivors came forward, writing to his children, filling in the portrait of their father. "He saved my Mother, my sister and I," Elly Sherman, whose family eventually settled in Los Angeles, wrote to Robert Kim Bingham. She included a copy of a visa bearing Harry's signature and dated May 3, 1941-ten days before he left Marseille. "Without him we would not have been able to avoid the concentration camp to which we were assigned two days later."

Abigail Bingham Endicott says she wishes her father knew how proud his children are of him. "We had no idea about the extent of what he had done," she says. She recalls a hymn the family often sang at gatherings and in it she hears a suggestion of her father's predicament in Marseille:
Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision,
offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever,
'twixt that darkness and that light.
Peter Eisner has written three books, including The Freedom Line, about the rescue of Allied airmen shot down over Europe.

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An internationally known german novelist, Lion Feuchtwanger had been a harsh critic of Adolf Hitler since the 1920s. One of his novels, The Oppermanns, was a thinly veiled exposé of Nazi brutality. He called the Führer's Mein Kampf a 140,000-word book with 140,000 mistakes. "The Nazis had denounced me as Enemy Number One," he once said.

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The American Revolution: Crash Course Black American History #8

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By Sandi Gohn

400-plus men. 411 words. One unbreakable code.

The Navajo Code Talkers - U.S. Marines of Navajo descent who developed and utilized a special code using their indigenous language to transmit sensitive information during World War II - are legendary figures in military and cryptography history.

Their encrypted code, which was never cracked by the enemy, helped the United States win its way across the Pacific front from 1942 to 1945. Historians argue that the Navajo Code Talkers helped expedite the end of the war and, undoubtedly, saved thousands of lives.

"Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima," said Maj. Howard Connor, the signal officer of the Navajos at Iwo Jima in 1945.

In 1942, Philip Johnston - a son of missionaries who grew up on the Navajo Nation - came up with the idea for the Navajo Code Talker program after reading a news article about Native American soldiers delivering messages during Army training exercises in their mother tongues.

Johnston, a World War I veteran, also knew that the U.S. military had been experiencing difficulties developing an unbreakable code for secure communication in the Pacific.

"In the early part of World War II, the enemy was breaking every military code that was being used in the Pacific. This created a huge problem for strategizing against the enemies," said Navajo Code Talker Peter MacDonald during an appearance at the White House in 2017.

So, Johnston approached the military with his idea.

In his proposal, Johnston argued that the Navajo people's extremely unique and largely unwritten language, isolated geographic location and relatively large population made them a perfect fit for his proposed program. Additionally, there was a growing number of young Navajo men who could speak both Navajo and English fluently, thanks to the U.S. government's assimilation program, which forced Native American children to leave their families, live in English-language boarding schools and abandon their indigenous culture.

After catching the attention of the Marine Corps, Johnston launched a pilot Code Talker program with 29 Marine recruits of Navajo descent.

After completing basic training, the 29 young, Navajo Marines worked with Marine communication teams to develop a complex, two-type code of more than211 words. Over the course of the war, the code would expand to include a total of 411 words.

During the initial testing phase of the Navajo Code Talker's system, Marine officials were stunned at how fast the Navajo Marines could transmit, receive and decode messages from other Code Talkers. No other form of military code, at the time, was as fast or accurate.

With a successful pilot program under their belt, the Marines decided to expand the Code Talkers program and began recruiting another 200 Navajo men. By the end of WWII, roughly 400 Navajo men would serve as Code Talkers.

All Navajo Code Talkers were highly trained in military and coded communication techniques and were known for their efficiency and accuracy under pressure, even while serving on the front lines.

For example, during Iwo Jima, six Navajo Code talkers sent over 800 encrypted messages across front lines. All of the messages were transmitted and received without error.

As if that wasn't impressive enough, it's important to note that all Navajo Code Talkers, who sent and received messages via radio, completed their mission without writing down any of their code. The messages were all coded and transmitted orally - Navajo Code Talkers had to decipher each line of code, in real-time, in their head.

"We acted as coding machines, transmitting messages that would have taken a couple of hours in just a couple of minutes," said the late Navajo Code Talker Chester Nez in a 2012 interview with the website ArmchairGeneral.com. "We could never make a mistake, because many communications involved bombing coordinates."

(Fun fact, Nez was one of the original 29 Navajo Code Talkers).

Although other Native American languages were used to create codes in World War I, WWII and other conflicts, the Navajo's code was one of the most successful.

Despite the thousands of messages that Code Talkers sent during WWII, their code was never broken by the Japanese or the Germans, who were very good at decryption. Additionally, their code was so good that Navajos who were not part of the Code Talker Program, but served in the U.S. military, could not understand the code. This was because the code worked by using word association, in which Code Talkers assigned a Navajo word to specific, key phrases and military tactics.

The Navajo Code Talkers and their work were classified by the government for several decades in case the code needed to be used in future national conflicts. As such, the Navajo men who risked their lives to be part of this program lived for decades without recognition for the unique role they played in helping the U.S. win the war.

"When we got out, discharged, they told us this thing that you guys did is going to be a secret. When you get home you don't talk about what you did ... and that was our secret for about 25, 26 years," Nez said in a 2004 interview for the National Museum of the American Indian.

"We were never told that our code was never decoded," said the late Navajo Code Talker Keith Little in a 2009 AP interview.

Even in 1968, when the project was declassified, few outside of the Navajo community heard about the Code Talkers role in the war. As the years went on, the group slowly received more national recognition:

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan gave the Code Talkers a Certificate of Recognition and declared August 14 "Navajo Code Talkers Day"

In 2000, President Bill Clinton signed a law awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the original 29 Navajo Code Talkers

In 2001, President George W. Bush presented the medals to the four surviving original Code Talkers and posthumously to the other 25

In 2017, President Donald Trump honored surviving Code Talkers at an event at the White House.

Although the Navajo Code Talker's WWII contributions aren't as publicly known as they should be, the group holds a special place in modern culture and history.

In 2002, the Navajo Code Talkers were featured in the film "Windtalkers," starring Nicolas Cage and Christian Slater. Several books have been released about the Code Talkers, including the only firsthand account written by Nez.

There is even a Navajo Code Talker G.I. Joe and a Code Talker beer, which was brewed by Code Talker John V. Goodluck's grandson, LT Goodluck of Hellbender Brewery in Washington, D.C.

Today, less than 12 Code Talkers are likely alive. The exact number, according to the Navajo Nation, is unknown, as no formal tally was taken during or after the war.
- This story was originally published on USO.org in 2019. It has been updated in 2021.

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which is one advantage of using navajo as a military code language?

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How Navajo Code Talker Marines Used Their Indigenous Language to Help Win World War II

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The Navajo Code Talkers - U.S. Marines of indigenous Navajo descent who developed and utilized an unbreakable code to transmit sensitive information in the Pacific during World War II - are legendary figures in military and cryptography history.

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The Holocaust (1933-1945) was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German regime and its allies and collaborators. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines the years of the Holocaust as 1933-1945. The Holocaust era began in January 1933 when 1 Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. It ended in May 1945, when the Allied Powers defeated Nazi Germany in World War II. The Holocaust is also sometimes referred to as "the Shoah," the Hebrew word for "catastrophe."

When they came to power in Germany, the Nazis did not immediately start to carry out mass murder. However, they quickly began using the government to target and exclude Jews from German society. Among other antisemitic measures, the Nazi German regime enacted discriminatory laws and organized violence targeting Germany's Jews. The Nazi persecution of Jews became increasingly radical between 1933 and 1945. This radicalization culminated in a plan that Nazi leaders referred to as the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." The "Final Solution" was the organized and systematic mass murder of European Jews. The Nazi German regime implemented this genocide between 1941 and 1945.

Why did the Nazis target Jews?

The Nazis targeted Jews because the Nazis were radically antisemitic. This means that they were prejudiced against and hated Jews. In fact, antisemitism was a basic tenet of their ideology and at the foundation of their worldview.

The Nazis falsely accused Jews of causing Germany's social, economic, political, and cultural problems. In particular, they blamed them for Germany's defeat in World War I (1914-1918). Some Germans were receptive to these Nazi claims. Anger over the loss of the war and the economic and political crises that followed contributed to increasing antisemitism in German society. The instability of Germany under the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), the fear of communism, and the economic shocks of the Great Depression also made many Germans more open to Nazi ideas, including antisemitism.

However, the Nazis did not invent antisemitism. Antisemitism is an old and widespread prejudice that has taken many forms throughout history. In Europe, it dates back to ancient times. In the the myth that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. Suspicion and discrimination rooted in religious prejudices continued in legal restrictions on Jews. This, however, did not mean the end of antisemitism. In addition to religious antisemitism, Middle Ages (500-1400), prejudices against Jews were primarily based in early Christian belief and thought, particularly early modern Europe (1400-1800). At that time, leaders in much of Christian Europe isolated Jews from most aspects of economic, social, and political life. This exclusion contributed to stereotypes of Jews as outsiders. As Europe became more secular, many places lifted most other types of antisemitism

The Nazi Party promoted a particularly virulent form of racial antisemitism. It was central to the party's race-based worldview. The Nazis believed that the world was divided into distinct races and that some of these races were superior to others. They considered Germans to be members of the supposedly superior "Aryan" race. They asserted that "Aryans" were locked in a struggle for existence with other, inferior races. Further, the Nazis believed that the so-called "Jewish race" was the most inferior and dangerous of all. According to the Nazis, Jews were a threat that needed to be removed from German society. Otherwise, the Nazis insisted, the "Jewish race" would permanently corrupt and destroy the German people. The Nazis' race-based definition of Jews included many persons who identified as Christians or did not practice Judaism.

Where did the Holocaust take place?

The Holocaust was a Nazi German initiative that took place throughout German- and Axis-controlled Europe. It affected nearly all of Europe's Jewish population, which in 1933 numbered 9 million people.

The Holocaust began in Germany after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933. Almost immediately, the Nazi German regime (which called itself the Third Reich) excluded Jews from German economic, political, social, and cultural life. Throughout the 1930s, the regime increasingly pressured Jews to emigrate.

But the Nazi persecution of Jews spread beyond Germany. Throughout the 1930s, Nazi Germany pursued an aggressive foreign policy. This culminated in World War II, which began in Europe in 1939. Prewar and wartime territorial expansion eventually brought millions more Jewish people under German control.

Nazi Germany's territorial expansion began in 1938-1939. During this time, Germany annexed neighboring Austria and the Sudetenland and occupied the Czech lands. On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany began World War II (1939-1945) by attacking Poland. Over the next two years, Germany invaded and occupied much of Europe, including western parts of the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany further extended its control by forming alliances with the governments of Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. It also created puppet states in Slovakia and Croatia. Together these countries made up the European members of the Axis alliance, which also included Japan.

By 1942-as a result of annexations, invasions, occupations, and alliances-Nazi Germany controlled most of Europe and parts of North Africa. Nazi control brought harsh policies and ultimately mass murder to Jewish civilians across Europe.

The Nazis and their allies and collaborators murdered six million Jews.

Geography of the Holocaust

How did Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators persecute Jewish people?

Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators implemented a wide range of anti-Jewish policies and measures. These policies varied from place to place. Thus, not all Jews experienced the Holocaust in the same way. But in all instances, millions of people were persecuted simply because they were identified as Jewish.

Throughout German-controlled and aligned territories, the persecution of Jews took a variety of forms:

Legal discrimination in the form of antisemitic laws. These included the Nuremberg Race Laws and numerous other discriminatory laws.

These included Various forms of public identification and exclusion. antisemitic propaganda, boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses, public humiliation, and obligatory markings (such as the Jewish star badge worn as an armband or on clothing).

The most notable example is There were also isolated incidents and other Organized violence. Kristallnacht.pogroms (violent riots).

Physical Displacement. Perpetrators used forced emigration, resettlement, expulsion, deportation, and ghettoization to physically displace Jewish individuals and communities.

in overcrowded Internment. Perpetrators interned Jews ghettos, concentration camps, and forced-labor camps, where many died from starvation, disease, and other inhumane conditions.

Widespread theft and plunder. The confiscation of Jews' property, personal belongings, and valuables was a key part of the Holocaust.

Jews had to perform Forced labor. forced labor in service of the Axis war effort or for the enrichment of Nazi organizations, the military, and/or private businesses.

Many Jews died as a result of these policies. But before 1941, the systematic mass murder of all Jews was not Nazi policy. Beginning in 1941, however, Nazi leaders decided to implement the mass murder of Europe's Jews. They referred to this plan as the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question."

What was the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question"?

The Nazi "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (" Endlösung der Judenfrage ") was the deliberate and systematic mass murder of European Jews. It was the last stage of the Holocaust and took place from 1941 to 1945. Though many Jews were killed before the "Final Solution" began, the vast majority of Jewish victims were murdered during this period.

Nazi Germany committed mass murder on an unprecedented scale. There were two main methods of killing. One method was As part of the "Final Solution," mass shooting. German units carried out mass shootings on the outskirts of villages, towns, and cities throughout eastern Europe. The other method was asphyxiation with poison gas. Gassing operations were conducted at killing centers and with mobile gas vans.

Mass Shootings

The Nazi German regime perpetrated mass shootings of civilians on a scale never seen before. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, German units began to carry out mass shootings of local Jews. At first, these units targeted Jewish men of military age. But by August 1941, they had started massacring entire Jewish communities. These massacres were often conducted in broad daylight and in full view and earshot of local residents.

Mass shooting operations took place in more than 1,500 cities, towns, and villages across eastern Europe. German units tasked with murdering the local Jewish population moved throughout the region committing horrific massacres. Typically, these units would enter a town and round up the Jewish civilians. They would then take the Jewish residents to the outskirts of the town. Next, they would force them to dig a mass grave or take them to mass graves prepared in advance. Finally, German forces and/or local auxiliary units would shoot all of the men, women, and children into these pits. Sometimes, these massacres involved the use of specially designed mobile gas vans. Perpetrators would use these vans to suffocate victims with carbon monoxide exhaust.

at these killing sites. At Maly Trostenets, thousands of victims were also murdered in gas vans.

The German units that perpetrated the mass shootings in eastern Europe included (special task forces of the SS and police), units. The provided logistical support and manpower. Some Wehrmacht units also carried out massacres. In many places, local auxiliary units working with the Einsatzgruppen Order Police battalions, and Waffen-SS German military ( Wehrmacht ) SS and police participated in the mass shootings. These auxiliary units were made up of local civilian, military, and police officials.

As many as 2 million Jews were murdered in mass shootings or gas vans in territories seized from Soviet forces.

Killing Centers

In late 1941, the Nazi regime began building specially designed, stationary killing centers in German-occupied Poland. In English, killing centers are sometimes called "extermination camps" or "death camps." Nazi Germany operated five killing centers: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. They built these killing centers for the sole purpose of efficiently murdering Jews on a mass scale. The primary means of murder at the killing centers was poisonous gas released into sealed gas chambers or vans.

German authorities, with the help of their allies and collaborators, transported Jews from across Europe to these killing centers. They disguised their intentions by calling the transports to the killing centers "resettlement actions" or "evacuation transports." In English, they are often referred to as "deportations." Most of these deportations took place by train. In order to efficiently transport Jews to the killing centers, German authorities used the extensive European railroad system, as well as other means of transportation. In many cases the railcars on the trains were freight cars; in other instances they were passenger cars.

The conditions on deportation transports were horrific. German and collaborating local authorities forced Jews of all ages into overcrowded railcars. They often had to stand, sometimes for days, until the train reached its destination. The perpetrators deprived them of food, water, bathrooms, heat, and medical care. Jews frequently died en route from the inhumane conditions.

The vast majority of Jews deported to killing centers were gassed almost immediately after their arrival. Some Jews whom German officials believed to be healthy and strong enough were selected for forced labor.

My mother ran over to me and grabbed me by the shoulders, and she told me "Leibele, I'm not going to see you no more. Take care of your brother."
- Leo Schneiderman describing arrival at Auschwitz, selection, and separation from his family

At all five killing centers, German officials forced some Jewish prisoners to assist in the killing process. Among other tasks, these prisoners had to sort through victims' belongings and remove victims' bodies from the gas chambers. Special units disposed of the millions of corpses through mass burial, in burning pits, or by burning them in large, specially designed crematoria.

Nearly 2.7 million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered at the five killing centers.

What were ghettos and why did German authorities create them during the Holocaust?

Ghettos were areas of cities or towns where German occupiers forced Jews to live in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. German authorities often enclosed these areas by building walls or other barriers. Guards prevented Jews from leaving without permission. Some ghettos existed for years, but others existed only for months, weeks, or even days as holding sites prior to deportation or murder.

German officials first created ghettos in 1939-1940 in German-occupied Poland. The two largest were located in the occupied Polish cities of Warsaw and Lodz (Łódź). Beginning in June 1941, German officials also established them in newly conquered territories in eastern Europe following the German attack on the Soviet Union. German authorities and their allies and collaborators also established ghettos in other parts of Europe. Notably, in 1944, German and Hungarian authorities created temporary ghettos to centralize and control Jews prior to their deportation from Hungary.

The Purpose of the Ghettos

German authorities originally established the ghettos to isolate and control the large local Jewish populations in occupied eastern Europe. Initially, they concentrated Jewish residents from within a city and the surrounding area or region. However, beginning in 1941, German officials also deported Jews from other parts of Europe (including Germany) to some of these ghettos.

Jewish forced labor became a central feature of life in many ghettos. In theory, it was supposed to help pay for the administration of the ghetto as well as support the German war effort. Sometimes, factories and workshops were established nearby in order to exploit the imprisoned Jews for forced labor. The labor was often manual and grueling.

Life in the Ghettos

Life in the ghettos was miserable and dangerous. There was little food and limited sanitation or medical care. Hundreds of thousands of people died by starvation; rampant disease; exposure to extreme temperatures; as well as exhaustion from forced labor. Germans also murdered the imprisoned Jews through brutal beatings, torture, arbitrary shootings, and other forms of arbitrary violence.

Jews in the ghettos sought to maintain a sense of dignity and community. Schools, libraries, communal welfare services, and religious institutions provided some measure of connection among residents. Attempts to document life in the ghettos, such as the Many ghettos also had underground movements that carried out armed resistance. The most famous of these is the Oneg Shabbat archive and clandestine photography, are powerful examples of Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. spiritual resistance.

Liquidating the Ghettos

Beginning in 1941-1942, Germans and their allies and collaborators murdered ghetto residents en masse and dissolved ghetto administrative structures. They called this process "liquidation." It was part of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." The majority of Jews in the ghettos were murdered either in mass shootings at nearby killing sites or after deportation to killing centers. Most of the killing centers were deliberately located near the large ghettos of German-occupied Poland or on easily-accessible railway routes.

Who was responsible for carrying out the Holocaust and the Final Solution?

Many people were responsible for carrying out the Holocaust and the Final Solution.

At the highest level, inspired, ordered, approved, and supported the genocide of Europe's Jews. However, Hitler did not act alone. Nor did he lay out an exact plan for the implementation of the Final Solution. Other Nazi leaders were the ones who directly coordinated, planned, and implemented the mass murder. Among them were Adolf Hitler Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Adolf Eichmann.

However, millions of Germans and other Europeans participated in the Holocaust. Without their involvement, the genocide of the Jewish people in Europe would not have been possible. Nazi leaders relied upon German institutions and organizations; other Axis powers; local bureaucracies and institutions; and individuals.

German Institutions, Organizations, and Individuals

(the SD), the the Nazi leaders relied on many German institutions and organizations to help them carry out the Holocaust. Members of Nazi organizations initiated and carried out many anti-Jewish actions before and during World War II. These organizations Schutzstaffel , Protection Squadron). Once the war began, the SS and its police affiliates became especially deadly. Members of the Sicherheitsdienst Gestapo ,Criminal Police (Kripo), and the Order Police played particularly active and deadly roles in the mass murder of Europe's Jews. Other German institutions involved in carrying out the Final Solution included the German military; the German national railway and healthcare systems; the German civil service and criminal justice systems; and German businesses, insurance companies, and banks.

chose to implement the regime's policies. Ordinary Germans also participated in the Holocaust in a variety of ways. Some Germans cheered as Jews were beaten or humiliated. Others denounced Jews for disobeying racist laws and regulations. Many Germans bought, took, or looted their Jewish neighbors' belongings and property. These Germans' participation in the Holocaust was motivated by enthusiasm, careerism, fear, greed, self-interest, antisemitism, and political ideals, among other factors.

Non-German Governments and Institutions

Nazi Germany did not perpetrate the Holocaust alone. It relied on the help of its allies and collaborators. In this context, "allies" refers to Axis countries officially allied with Nazi Germany. "Collaborators" refers to regimes and organizations that cooperated with German authorities in an official or semi-official capacity. Nazi Germany's allies and collaborators included:

The European Axis Powers and other collaborationist regimes (such as Vichy France). These governments passed their own antisemitic legislation and cooperated with German goals.

These organizations helped round up, intern, and deport Jews even in countries not allied with Germany, such as German-backed local bureaucracies, especially local police forces. the Netherlands.

Local auxiliary units made up of military and police officials and civilians. These German-backed units participated in massacres of Jews in eastern Europe (often voluntarily).

The terms "allies" and "collaborators" can also refer to individuals affiliated with these governments and organizations.

Individuals across Europe

Throughout Europe, individuals who had no governmental or institutional affiliation and did not directly participate in murdering Jews also contributed to the Holocaust.

One of the deadliest things that neighbors, acquaintances, colleagues, and even friends could do was denounce Jews to Nazi German authorities. An unknown number chose to do so. They revealed Jews' hiding places, unmasked false Christian identities, and otherwise identified Jews to Nazi officials. In doing so, they brought about their deaths. These individuals' motivations were wide-ranging: fear, self-interest, greed, revenge, antisemitism, and political and ideological beliefs.

Individuals also profited from the Holocaust. Non-Jews sometimes moved into Jews' homes, took over Jewish-owned businesses, and stole Jews' possessions and valuables. This was part of the widespread theft and plunder that accompanied the genocide.

Most often individuals contributed to the Holocaust through inaction and indifference to the plight of their Jewish neighbors. Sometimes these individuals are called bystanders.

Who were the other victims of Nazi persecution and mass murder?

The Holocaust specifically refers to the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews. However, there were also millions of other victims of Nazi persecution and murder. In the 1930s, the regime targeted a variety of alleged domestic enemies within German society. As the Nazis extended their reach during World War II, millions of other Europeans were also subjected to Nazi brutality.

The Nazi regime also targeted Germans whose activities were deemed harmful to German society. These included men accused of homosexuality, persons accused of being professional or habitual criminals, and so-called asocials (such as people identified as vagabonds, beggars, prostitutes, pimps, and alcoholics). Tens of thousands of these victims were incarcerated in prisons and concentration camps. The regime also forcibly sterilized and persecuted Afro-Germans.

People with disabilities were also victimized by the Nazi regime. Before World War II, Germans considered to have supposedly unhealthy hereditary conditions were forcibly sterilized. Once the war began, Nazi policy radicalized. People with disabilities, especially those living in institutions, were considered both a genetic and a financial burden on Germany. These people were targeted for murder in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

The Nazi regime employed extreme measures against groups considered to be racial, civilizational, or ideological enemies. This included Roma (Gypsies),

How did the Holocaust end?

so-called The Holocaust ended in May 1945 when the major Allied Powers (Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union) defeated Nazi Germany in World War II. As Allied forces moved across Europe in a series of offensives, they overran concentration camps. There they liberated the surviving prisoners, many of whom were Jews. The Allies also encountered and liberated the survivors of death marches. These forced marches consisted of groups of Jewish and non-Jewish concentration camp inmates who had been evacuated on foot from camps under SS guard.

But liberation did not bring closure. Many Holocaust survivors faced ongoing threats of violent antisemitism and displacement as they sought to build new lives. Many had lost family members, while others searched for years to locate missing parents, children, and siblings.

How did some Jews survive the Holocaust?

Despite Nazi Germany's efforts to murder all the Jews of Europe, some Jews survived the Holocaust. Survival took a variety of forms. But, in every case, survival was only possible because of an extraordinary confluence of circumstances, choices, help from others (both Jewish and non-Jewish), and sheer luck.

Survival outside of German-Controlled Europe

Some Jews survived the Holocaust by escaping German-controlled Europe. Before World War II began, hundreds of thousands of Jews emigrated from Nazi Germany despite significant immigration barriers. Those who immigrated to the United States, Great Britain, and other areas that remained beyond German control were safe from Nazi violence. Even after World War II began, some Jews managed to escape German-controlled Europe. For example, approximately 200,000 Polish Jews fled the German occupation of Poland. These Jews survived the war under harsh conditions after Soviet authorities deported them further east into the interior of the Soviet Union.

Survival in German-Controlled Europe

A smaller number of Jews survived inside German-controlled Europe. They often did so with the help of rescuers. Rescue efforts ranged from the isolated actions of individuals to organized networks, both small and large. Throughout Europe, there were non-Jews who took grave risks to help their Jewish neighbors, friends, and strangers survive. For example, they found hiding places for Jews, procured false papers that offered protective Christian identities, or provided them with food and supplies. Other Jews survived as members of partisan resistance movements. Finally, some Jews managed, against enormous odds, to survive imprisonment in concentration camps, ghettos, and even killing centers.

Aftermath

While the Holocaust ended with the war, the legacy of terror and genocide did not. By the end of World War II, six million Jews and millions of others were dead. Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators had devastated or completely destroyed thousands of Jewish communities across Europe.

In the those Jews who survived were often confronted with the traumatic reality of having lost their entire families and communities. Some were able to go home and chose to rebuild their lives in Europe. Many others were afraid to do so because of aftermath of the Holocaust, postwar violence and antisemitism. In the immediate postwar period, those who could not or would not return home often found themselves living in displaced persons camps. There, many had to wait years before they were able to immigrate to new homes.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the world has struggled to come to terms with the horrors of the genocide, to remember the victims, and to hold perpetrators responsible. These important efforts remain ongoing.

Last Edited: Nov 5, 2021

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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Introduction to the Holocaust: What was the Holocaust?

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Learn about the Holocaust, the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

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The English Renaissance and NOT Shakespeare: Crash Course Theater #13

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When Did Slavery Start in America?

In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia.

After the American Revolution, many colonists-particularly in the North, where slavery was relatively unimportant to the agricultural economy-began to link the oppression of enslaved Africans to their own oppression by the British, and to call for slavery's abolition.

Did you know? One of the first martyrs to the cause of American patriotism was Crispus Attucks, a former enslaved man who was killed by British soldiers during the Boston Massacre of 1770. Some 5,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought on the American side during the Revolutionary War.

But after the Revolutionary War, the new U.S. Constitution tacitly acknowledged the institution of slavery, when it valued each enslaved individual as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress. The Constitution's drafters also guaranteed the right to repossess any "person held to service or labor" (an obvious euphemism for slavery).

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa, forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton.

By the mid-19th century, America's westward expansion and the abolition movement provoked a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody Civil War. Though the Union victory freed the nation's four million enslaved people, the legacy of slavery continued to influence American history, from the Reconstruction to the civil rights movement that emerged a century after emancipation and beyond.

Cotton Gin

In the late 18th century, with the land used to grow tobacco nearly exhausted, the South faced an economic crisis, and the continued growth of slavery in America seemed in doubt.

Around the same time, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop whose production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand.

But in 1793, a young Yankee schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds. His device was widely copied, and within a few years, the South transitioned from the large-scale production of tobacco to that of cotton, a switch that reinforced the region's dependence on enslaved labor.

Slavery itself was never widespread in the North, though many of the region's businessmen grew rich on the slave trade and investments in southern plantations. Between 1774 and 1804, most of the northern states abolished slavery or started the process to abolish slavery, but the institution of slavery remained vital to the South.

Though the U.S. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, the domestic trade flourished, and the enslaved population in the United States nearly tripled over the next 50 years. By 1860 it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton-producing states of the South.

Living Conditions of Enslaved People

Enslaved people in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population. Most lived on large plantations or small farms; many masters owned fewer than 50 enslaved people.

Landowners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes. They were usually prohibited from learning to read and write, and their behavior and movement were restricted.

Many masters raped enslaved women, and rewarded obedient behavior with favors, while rebellious enslaved people were brutally punished. A strict hierarchy among the enslaved (from privileged house workers and skilled artisans down to lowly field hands) helped keep them divided and less likely to organize against their masters.

Marriages between enslaved men and women had no legal basis, but many did marry and raise large families. Most owners of enslaved workers encouraged this practice, but nonetheless did not usually hesitate to divide families by sale or removal.

Slave Rebellions

Rebellions among enslaved people did occur-notably, ones led by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in 1800 and by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822-but few were successful.

The revolt that most terrified enslavers was that led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Turner's group, which eventually numbered around 75 Black men, murdered some 55 white people in two days before armed resistance from local white people and the arrival of state militia forces overwhelmed them.

Supporters of slavery pointed to Turner's rebellion as evidence that Black people were inherently inferior barbarians requiring an institution such as slavery to discipline them. And fears of similar insurrections led many southern states to further strengthen their slave codes in order to limit the education, movement and assembly of enslaved people.

Abolitionist Movement

In the North, the increased repression of southern Black people only fanned the flames of the growing abolitionist movement.

From the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by free Black people such as Frederick Douglass and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the radical newspaper The Liberator, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who published the bestselling antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.

While many abolitionists based their activism on the belief that slaveholding was a sin, others were more inclined to the non-religious "free-labor" argument, which held that slaveholding was regressive, inefficient and made little economic sense.

Free Black people and other antislavery northerners had begun helping enslaved people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the 1780s. This practice, known as the Underground Railroad, gained real momentum in the 1830s.

Conductors like Harriet Tubmanguided escapees on their journey North, and " stationmasters" included such prominent figures as Frederick Douglass, Secretary of State William H. Seward and Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Althoughestimates vary widely, it may have helped anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 enslaved people reach freedom.

The success of the Underground Railroad helped spread abolitionist feelings in the North. It also undoubtedly increased sectional tensions, convincing pro-slavery southerners of their northern countrymen's determination to defeat the institution that sustained them.

Missouri Compromise

America's explosive growth-and its expansion westward in the first half of the 19th century-would provide a larger stage for the growing conflict over slavery in America and its future limitation or expansion.

In 1820, a bitter debate over the federal government's right to restrict slavery over Missouri's application for statehood ended in a compromise: Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state and all western territories north of Missouri's southern border were to be free soil.

Although the Missouri Compromise was designed to maintain an even balance between slave and free states, it was only temporarily able to help quell the forces of sectionalism.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

In 1850, another tenuous compromise was negotiated to resolve the question of slavery in territories won during the Mexican-American War.

Four years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict, leading pro- and anti-slavery forces to battle it out-with considerable bloodshed-in the new state of Kansas.

Outrage in the North over the Kansas-Nebraska Act spelled the downfall of the old Whig Party and the birth of a new, all-northern Republican Party. In 1857, the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court (involving an enslaved man who sued for his freedom on the grounds that his master had taken him into free territory) effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise by ruling that all territories were open to slavery.

John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry

In 1859, two years after the Dred Scott decision, an event occurred that would ignite passions nationwide over the issue of slavery.

John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia-in which the abolitionist and 22 men, including five Black men and three of Brown's sons raided and occupied a federal arsenal-resulted in the deaths of 10 people and Brown's hanging.

The insurrection exposed the growing national rift over slavery: Brown was hailed as a martyred hero by northern abolitionists but was vilified as a mass murderer in the South.

Civil War

The South would reach the breaking point the following year, when Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected as president. Within three months, seven southern states had seceded to form the Confederate States of America; four more would follow after the Civil War began.

Though Lincoln's anti-slavery views were well established, the central Union war aim at first was not to abolish slavery, but to preserve the United States as a nation.

Abolition became a goal only later, due to military necessity, growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North and the self-emancipation of many people who fled enslavement as Union troops swept through the South.

When Did Slavery End?

On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and on January 1, 1863, he made it official that "slaves within any State, or designated part of a State...in rebellion,...shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free."

By freeing some 3 million enslaved people in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side.

Though the Emancipation Proclamation didn't officially end all slavery in America-that would happen with the passage of the 13th Amendment after the Civil War's end in 1865-some 186,000 Black soldiers would join the Union Army, and about 38,000 lost their lives.

The Legacy of Slavery

The 13th Amendment, adopted on December 18, 1865, officially abolished slavery, but freed Black peoples' status in the post-war South remained precarious, and significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period.

Previously enslaved men and women received the rights of citizenship and the "equal protection" of the Constitution in the 14th Amendment and the right to vote in the 15th Amendment, but these provisions of the Constitution were often ignored or violated, and it was difficult for Black citizens to gain a foothold in the post-war economy thanks to restrictive Black codes and regressive contractual arrangements such as sharecropping.

Despite seeing an unprecedented degree of Black participation in American political life, Reconstruction was ultimately frustrating for African Americans, and the rebirth of white supremacy-including the rise of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)-had triumphed in the South by 1877.

Almost a century later, resistance to the lingering racism and discrimination in America that began during the slavery era led to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which achieved the greatest political and social gains for Black Americans since Reconstruction.

America's First Memorial to its 4,400 Lynching Victims

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U.S. Slavery: Timeline, Figures & Abolition | HISTORY

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Slavery in America was the legal institution of enslaving human beings, mainly Africans and African Americans. Slavery existed in the United States from its founding in 1776 and became the main cause behind the country's bloody Civil War. Slavery officially ended in America with the passage of the 13th Amendment following the Civil War's end in 1865.

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The incredible story of the Navajo Code Talkers that got lost in all the politics | CNN

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When Peter MacDonald, Fleming Begaye and Thomas Begay joined the elite fraternity of Navajo Code Talkers during World War II, they had no idea what they were getting into.

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Several major voluntary and involuntary population movements taking place between CIS countries today, as well as a number of serious unresolved dilemmas, stem directly from an unparalleled string of forcible population transfers that occurred half a century ago, under the stewardship of Stalin's chief of secret police (NKVD), Lavrenti Beria.

Between 1936 and 1952, more than 3 million people were rounded up, for the most part along the Soviet Union's western borders, strictly on the basis of their 'foreign' origins or culture, and dumped thousands of kilometres away in eastern and central Siberia or in the Central Asian republics. In all, more than 20 major groups suffered in this way, including eight entire 'nations' who were removed from their ancestral homelands. Of these, one was non-Orthodox Christian (the Volga Germans), one Buddhist (the Kalmyks), and the other six Muslim (Chechens, Ingush, Karachai, Balkars, Crimean Tatars and Meskhetians). The Soviet Union's 2.5 million Jews were only saved from a similar fate by Stalin's death in March 1953.

Seven of the eight nationalities had been given their own (or shared) autonomous republics or regions by Lenin in the early 1920s (the exception being the Meskhetians). What Lenin gave, Stalin took away. By the end of World War II, all seven names had been wiped from the map. Some of the autonomous territories were renamed, others were carved up and given whole or in slices to neighbouring republics. Names of towns and villages which contained traces of their founders and former occupants were changed. Buildings, books, places of worship, even cemeteries, were destroyed in an attempt to erase all cultural, linguistic and historical traces of the forcibly transferred - or 'deported' - peoples.

In all, some 1.2 million Soviet Germans were forced onto train convoys of cattle wagons and shunted off to Siberia and Central Asia. Their ties with Germany, from where they had been encouraged to migrate 200 years earlier, were virtually non-existent. Nevertheless, with the German army advancing rapidly through Ukraine towards the Caucasus, the Soviet authorities decided the Germans were collectively guilty of spying for the enemy. The inhabitants of the autonomous Volga German Republic were among the first to go: between 3 and 21 September 1941, 366,000 Volga Germans were removed to Siberia on board 151 train convoys departing from 19 different stations.

The other seven entire 'nations,' totalling over 1 million people, were forced onto the cattle wagons between October 1943 and November 1944, under the watchful eye of Beria, who prowled up and down the Caucasus and Ukraine in his own special train. All but one of their homelands had been conquered by the German army in the latter part of 1942. By February 1943, they had all been recaptured by the Soviet army. The seven nations, along with many of the other smaller groups subsequently rooted out of western areas of the Soviet Union, were collectively branded - despite an almost total lack of evidence - as traitors and collaborators.

By now the practice of forcible transfer had acquired its own distorted and self-sustaining logic. Some 20,000 NKVD troops and huge quantities of rolling stock and other resources were diverted from the war effort in order to shift vast numbers of old people, women and children to distant lands quite unprepared to receive them. The entire population of Chechens and Ingush - around 500,000 people in all - were rounded up and packed on to 180 train convoys in the space of just over a week in February 1944. Three months later, new records were achieved when 183,000 Crimean Tatars, along with 8,000 other Crimeans, were crammed into long lines of waiting trains in the space of two days.

The consequences for the 'special settlers,' as they were euphemistically known, were devastating. Some families were given as little as five or ten minutes to pack up their belongings and food for the trip. No food was supplied. Tens of thousands are believed to have died during journeys which lasted up to two months. In some cases, bodies were left in the overcrowded cattle wagons for weeks on end. In others, they were thrown out beside the tracks.

Many of the transfers took place in winter. Those who survived the journey often found themselves with inadequate clothing, no shelter, and no means to support themselves in temperatures as low as -40C in Siberia or -20C on the Kazak steppes. In addition, their movement was restricted to a specified, very limited zone (which nearly always fell a few kilometres short of the nearest town). The penalty for straying was 15-20 years of hard labour in the Gulag camps. People found themselves doing totally unfamiliar work in utterly alien surroundings. Urban people were set to work in the mines and forests of Siberia. Nomadic herdsmen found themselves working in factories.

In 1948, the Supreme Soviet decreed that the 'special settlers' were definitively transferred, for ever. Stalin's death in 1953, and the subsequent execution of Beria, put an end to the collective condemnation and forced transfer of people simply because they belonged to a particular ethnic group. Under Khrushchev, the punitive restrictions imposed on the 3 million who had been transferred began to loosen. In September 1955, various restrictions on the rights of the Germans were annulled. Two months later, 5,000 Greeks expelled from Georgia in 1949 became the first group to be removed from the list of 'special settlers.'

In February 1956, five of the eight entire 'nations' (the Karachai, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush and Balkars) were named in Khrushchev's famous secret speech at the Communist Party Congress, in which he listed the forced transfers as one of the crimes committed by Stalin. Nevertheless, the 'special settlers' were not given the right to return to their ancestral homelands until 1957 (again, only the same five groups). The Chechens started returning almost immediately, and other groups soon followed. In most cases, their autonomous regions and republics were reinstated. However, none of the deported peoples were granted compensation for their losses, and land disputes became a common feature of some of the return movements (for example, in Chechnya).

The Crimean Tatars, Meskhetians and Volga Germans continued to be denied the right to return. However, under a special arrangement with the German government, Soviet Germans were allowed to emigrate to Germany, and given assistance to do so (travel costs, and various social benefits upon arrival). By the end of 1995, 1,376,000 had moved to Germany, where their continued arrival at the rate of some 200,000 per year has recently become a controversial political issue. A further 1.2 million are believed to be still living in CIS countries (mostly in Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan and the Russian Federation).

Note: All statistics on the original deportations, with the exception of the Meskhetians, are provided by Alain Blum of the Institut National d'Etudes Demographiques in Paris. Historical details were supplied by Blum or taken from Les Peuples deportes d'Union Sovietique by Jean-Jaques Marie. Population transfers (amounting to several million people) linked to collectivization and the Gulag labour camps, rather than the 'special settlers regime,' are not included. Further large-scale deportations took place from the Baltics, Moldova and the Ukraine from 1944-1953.

All the transferred peoples remain scarred to a greater or lesser degree by their terrible experiences in the 1940s. The legacy of such collective tragedy inevitably affects current relations within and between several of the states that emerged from the ashes of the Soviet Union. It has also been a direct factor in the conflict in North Ossetia (which was fought between Ingush who had returned from Central Asia and North Ossetians who had settled on their lands); it is also part of the psychological framework underlying the conflict in Chechnya. The situation of two of the entire 'nations' forcibly removed from their homelands during World War II (the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetians) is still far from resolved, and has been a subject of special focus during the CIS Conference process (see box in Orphans of the USSR).

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United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

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UNHCR publication for CIS Conference (Displacement in the CIS) - Punished peoples: the mass deportations of the 1940s

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Several major voluntary and involuntary population movements taking place between CIS countries today, as well as a number of serious unresolved dilemmas, stem directly from an unparalleled string of forcible population transfers that occurred half a century ago, under the stewardship of Stalin's chief of secret police (NKVD), Lavrenti Beria.

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A Holocaust survivor tells her story | DW Documentary

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Remarks by David Judkins What we normally refer to as the Renaissance in Western European history marks a break or transition from the Medieval period and leads toward our modern era. The Renaissance embraces a series of religious, economic, and political changes which ripple into areas of science, literature, and philosophy.

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Learn about African Americans during the Civil War including soldiers and regiments. Famous patriots such as Crispus Attucks, James Armistead, William Lee, and Peter Salem.

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The History of the Gulag (1929 – 1953) – The Soviet Labor Camps Under Joseph Stalin