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On September 15, 1935, German Jews are stripped of their citizenship, reducing them to mere "subjects" of the state.

After Hitler's accession to the offices of president and chancellor of Germany, he set about the task of remaking his adopted country (Hitler had to pull some strings even to be eligible for office, as he was Austrian by birth) into the dream state he imagined. But his dream was soon to become a nightmare for many. Early on in his reign, the lives of non-Jewish German citizens were barely disrupted. But not so for Hitler's "enemies." Hitler's racist ideology, which elevated those of "pure-blooded" German stock to the level of "masters" of the earth, began working itself out in vicious ways.

Within the first year of Hitler's rule, German Jews were excluded from a host of high-profile vocations, from public office to journalism, radio, theater, film, and teaching-even farming. The professions of law and medicine were also withdrawn slowly as opportunities. "Jews Not Welcome" signs could be seen on shop and hotel windows, beer gardens, and other public arenas. With the Nuremberg Laws, these discriminatory acts became embedded in the culture by fiat, making them even more far-reaching. Jews were forbidden to marry "Aryans" or engage in extramarital relations with them. Jews could not employ female Aryan servants if they were less than 35 years of age. Jews found it difficult even to buy food, as groceries, bakeries, and dairies would not admit Jewish customers. Even pharmacies refused to sell them medicines or drugs.

What was the outside world's reaction? Because unemployment had dropped precipitously under Hitler's early commandeering of the economy, and the average German felt renewed hope and pride, the face of Germany seemed brighter, more at peace with itself. While some foreign visitors, even some political opponents within Germany itself, decried these racist laws and practices, most were beguiled into thinking it was merely a phase, and that Hitler, in the words of former British Prime Minister Lloyd George, was "a great man."

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On September 15, 1935, German Jews are stripped of their citizenship, reducing them to mere "subjects" of the state. After Hitler's accession to the offices of president and chancellor of Germany, he set about the task of remaking his adopted country (Hitler had to pull some strings even to be eligible for office, as he was Austrian by birth) into the dream state he imagined.

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On September 15, 1935, the Nazi regime announced two new laws related to race:

The Reich Citizenship Law

The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor

These laws informally became known as the Nuremberg Laws or Nuremberg Race Laws. This is because they were first announced at a Nazi Party rally held in the German city of Nuremberg.

Why did the Nazis enact the Nuremberg Race Laws?

The Nuremberg Race Laws The Nazis enacted the Nuremberg Laws, because they wanted to put their ideas about race into law. They believed in the false theory that the world is divided into distinct races that are not equally strong and valuable. The Nazis considered Germans to be members of the supposedly superior "Aryan" race. They saw the so-called Aryan German race as the strongest, and most valuable race of all.

According to the Nazis, Jews were not Aryans. They thought Jews belonged to a separate race that was inferior to all other races. The Nazis believed that the presence of Jews in Germany threatened the German people. They believed they had to separate Jews from other Germans to protect and strengthen Germany. The Nuremberg Laws were an important step towards achieving this goal.

What was the Reich Citizenship Law?

The Nazi Party had always promised that, if they came to power, only racially pure Germans would be allowed to hold German citizenship. The Reich Citizenship Law made this a reality. This law defined a citizen as a person who is "of German or related blood." This meant that Jews, defined as a separate race, could not be full citizens of Germany. They had no political rights.

What was the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor?

The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor was a law against what the Nazis viewed as race-mixing or "race defilement" (" Rassenschande "). It banned future intermarriages and sexual relations between Jews and people "of German or related blood." The Nazis believed that such relationships were dangerous because they led to "mixed race" children. According to the Nazis, these children and their descendants undermined the purity of the German race.

Who was Jewish according to the Nuremberg Laws?

According to the Nuremberg Laws, a person with three or four Jewish grandparents was a Jew. A grandparent was considered Jewish if they belonged to the Jewish religious community. Thus, the Nazis defined Jews by their religion (Judaism), and not by the supposed racial traits that Nazism attributed to Jews.

The laws also categorized some people in Germany as " Mischlinge " ( "mixed-race persons"). According to law, Mischlinge were neither German nor Jewish. These were people who had one or two Jewish grandparents.

The Nazi regime required individuals to prove their grandparents' racial identities. To do so, people used religious records. These included baptism records, Jewish community records, and gravestones.

Did the Nuremberg Laws apply to other groups?

Yes. While initially focused on Jews, the Nazi government clarified that the Nuremberg Laws also applied to Roma (also called Gypsies), Black people, and their descendants. They could not be full citizens of Germany. Nor could they marry or have sexual relations with "people of German or related blood."

What were the consequences of the Nuremberg Laws?

The Nuremberg Laws changed the everyday lives of Jews in Germany by making Jews legally different from their non-Jewish neighbors. In the years that followed, the Nazi regime enacted more and more anti-Jewish laws and decrees. These later laws relied on the definition of "Jew" as defined in the Nuremberg Laws. Examples of these other laws or decrees include:

The Law on the Alteration of Family and Personal Names (August 1938)

The Decree on Passports of Jews (October 1938)

The Police Regulation on the Marking of Jews (September 1941)

The Nuremberg Laws were an important step in the Nazi regime's process of isolating and excluding Jews from the rest of German society.

Key Dates
August 17, 1938
Law on the Alteration of Family and Personal Names October 5, 1938
Decree on Passports of Jews September 1, 1941
Police Regulation on the Marking of Jews
On August 17, 1938, the Law on the Alteration of Family and Personal Names sets new name requirements for Jews in Germany. This law states that Jews can only be given specific Jewish first names. New Jewish parents must choose a name from a government-approved list. Also, any Jew who does not already have a name from this list, must add an additional first name: "Israel" (for men) and "Sara" (for women). Individuals have to report their new names to government offices. They also have to use both their given and added first names for business transactions.

The Nazi regime invalidates the German passports of all German Jews. For their passports to become valid again, German Jews must submit them to a passport office so that they can be stamped with the letter "J." The decree specifies that this applies to the passports of German Jews as defined by the Nuremberg Laws.

Beginning in September 1941, all Jews in Nazi Germany are required to wear a special yellow badge in public. The badge must be a palm-sized, yellow six-pointed star with black lines outlining the Star of David. The star must have the word " " (German for "Jew") written in the middle. It must be visible anytime a Jew appears in public. Specifically, Jews are required to sew this yellow star onto the left breast of their clothes. This order applies to all German Jews (as defined by the Nuremberg Laws) who are six years old and older. Germans categorized as Mischlinge do not have to wear the star.

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The Nazi regime's Nuremberg Race Laws of September 1935 made Jews legally different from their non-Jewish neighbors. The laws were the foundation for future antisemitic measures .

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On 15 September 1935, the Nazis introduced the Nuremberg Race Laws. These racist laws were directed against the Jews in Germany and essentially stripped them of their civil rights.

Based on family lineage, the laws determined who was Jewish and who was not. People with three or four Jewish grandparents were considered Jewish. Jews were no longer considered citizens and therefore could not claim certain civil rights, could no longer vote and could not work for the government.

Another section of the Nuremberg Laws was called the 'Law for the protection of German blood and German honour'. Under this law, marriages between Jews and Germans were forbidden. Moreover, Jews were not permitted to employ female citizens of German blood under the age of 45 as domestic workers.

The Nazis were horrified by relationships between Jews and non-Jews. In July 1935, for example, Julius Wolff and his non-Jewish fiancé Christine Neumann were paraded through the streets of Norden by the SA. They were forced to carry signs saying "Ich bin ein Rassenschänder" ("I defile the race") and "I am a German girl and I allowed a Jew to defile me".

Christine was taken to a concentration camp and released after a month. Julius was locked up in the Esterwegen concentration camp. After his release, he fled to the United States.

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On 15 September 1935, the Nazis introduced the Nuremberg Race Laws. These racist laws were directed against the Jews in Germany and essentially stripped them of their civil rights. Based on family lineage, the laws determined who was Jewish and who was not. People with three or four Jewish grandparents were considered Jewish.

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Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945 - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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Auschwitz, Dachau, the Warsaw Ghetto... These are names that resonate with anyone who knows the story of the Holocaust. Most people are shocked, however, to learn just how many camps, ghettos, and other sites of detention, persecution, forced labor, and murder the Nazis and their allies ran: over 42,000.

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A concentration camp is a place where people are held as prisoners for political reasons. Unlike in actual prisons, the people are not there because they did anything wrong....

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Introduction

The first concentration camp in the Nazi system, Dachau, opened in March, 1933. By the end of World War II, the Nazis administered a massive system of more than 40,000 camps that stretched across Europe from the French-Spanish border into the conquered Soviet territories, and as far south as Greece and North Africa. The largest number of prisoners were Jews, but individuals were arrested and imprisoned for a variety of reasons, including ethnicity and political affiliation. Prisoners were subjected to unimaginable terrors from the moment they arrived in the camps; it was a dehumanizing existence that involved a struggle for survival against a system designed to annihilate them.

Within the camps, the Nazis established a hierarchical identification system and prisoners were organized based on nationality and grounds for incarceration. Prisoners with a higher social status within the camp were often rewarded with more desirable work assignments such as administrative positions indoors. Some, such as the kapos (work supervisors) or camp elders held the power of life and death over other prisoners. Those lower on the social ladder had more physically demanding tasks such as factory work, mining, and construction, and suffered a much higher mortality rate from the combined effects of physical exhaustion, meager rations, and extremely harsh treatment from guards and some kapos. Prisoners also staffed infirmaries, kitchens, and served various other functions within the camp. Living conditions were harsh and extreme but varied greatly from camp to camp and also changed over time.

The following bibliography was compiled to guide readers to selected materials on daily life in the Nazi concentration camps that are in the Library's collection. It is not meant to be exhaustive. Annotations are provided to help the user determine the item's focus, and call numbers for the Museum's Library are given the call number in parentheses following each citation. Those unable to visit might find these works in a nearby public or academic library, or acquire them through interlibrary loan. Talk to your local librarian for assistance.

Background Information

Personal Accounts

Renouard, Jean-Pierre. My Stripes Were Earned in Hell: A French Resistance Fighter's Memoir of Survival in a Nazi Prison Camp. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012.

(D 805 .G3 R43213 2012). [ Find in a library near you]

Recounts the author's experience in three concentration camps after being arrested by the Gestapo in May 1944 for his involvement in the French underground resistance in the town of Albi. Details his initial internment in Neuengamme, his transfer after two months to Misburg, and his second transfer to Bergen-Belsen where he survived until liberation in April 1945. Describes the daily life, social hierarchies, and the author's personal suffering and struggles in each of the camps.

Online Resources

Provides an extensive, searchable listing of camps, organized by type, with a special emphasis on lesser-known subcamps. Also includes survivor interviews, a glossary of camp terminology, and a listing of companies that used concentration camp inmates for slave labor. A project of JewishGen, a major Jewish genealogy Web site.

Holocaust Encyclopedia: Classification System in Nazi Concentration Camps
Overview of different prisoner categories in the camps and their color-coded uniform markings. Includes an image of a classification chart based on badges worn my prisoners.

Brief videos of several survivors describing their experiences in the camps.

Additional Resources

Subject Headings

When searching library catalogs or other electronic search tools for materials on life in the concentration camps or related topics, use the following Library of Congress subject headings to retrieve the most relevant citations. Ask a librarian for assistance in using subject headings to help with your research.

Concentration camps

World War, 1939-1945-Concentration camps

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-Personal narratives.

See all Bibliographies

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The first concentration camp in the Nazi system, Dachau, opened in March, 1933. By the end of World War II, the Nazis administered a massive system of more than 40,000 camps that stretched across Europe from the French-Spanish border into the conquered Soviet territories, and as far south as Greece and North Africa.

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On 27 January 1945, Soviet troops cautiously entered Auschwitz.

Primo Levi - one of the most famous survivors - was lying in a camp hospital with scarlet fever when the liberators arrived.

The men cast "strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive", he would later write.

"They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by... the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist."

"We saw emaciated, tortured, impoverished people," soldier Ivan Martynushkin said of liberating the death camp. "We could tell from their eyes that they were happy to be saved from this hell."

In just over four-and-a-half years, Nazi Germany systematically murdered at least 1.1 million people at Auschwitz. Almost one million were Jews.

Those deported to the camp complex were gassed, starved, worked to death and even killed in medical experiments. The vast majority were murdered in the complex of gas chambers at Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp.

Six million Jewish people died in the Holocaust - the Nazi campaign to eradicate Europe's Jewish population. Auschwitz was at the centre of that genocide.

What was the Holocaust?

When the Nazis came to power in 1933 they began to strip Jewish people of all property, freedoms and rights under the law. After the German invasion and occupation of Poland in 1939, the Nazis started deporting Jewish people from the Third Reich to parts of Poland, where they created ghettos to separate them from the rest of the population.

In 1941, during the German invasion of the USSR, the Nazis began their campaign of extermination in earnest. Nazis spoke about their invasion as a race war between Germany and Jewish people, as well as the Slavic population and the Roma.

Groups of German soldiers called Einsatzgruppen set out across newly conquered lands in Eastern Europe to massacre civilians. By the end of 1941, they had killed 500,000 people, and by 1945 they had murdered about two million - 1.3 million of whom were Jewish.

Behind the lines, Nazi commanders were experimenting with ways to kill en masse. They feared that shooting people was too stressful for their soldiers, and so came up with more efficient means of murder.

Experimental gas vans had been used to kill mentally disabled people in Poland as early as 1939. Poisonous fumes were pumped into a sealed compartment to suffocate those inside. By the winter of 1941, the Nazis had constructed gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Nazi leaders met in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference to coordinate the industrial slaughter - what they called a "final solution to the Jewish question" - killing the entire European Jewish population, 11 million people, by extermination and forced labour.

What was Auschwitz?

Auschwitz was originally a Polish army barracks in southern Poland. Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Poland in September 1939, and by May 1940 turned the site into a jail for political prisoners.

This area - with the infamous lie Arbeit Macht Frei written above the entrance in German - meaning work sets you free - became known as Auschwitz I.

But as the war and the Holocaust progressed, the Nazi regime greatly developed the site.

The first people to be gassed were a group of Polish and Soviet prisoners in September 1941. Work began on a new camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the following month. This became the site of the huge gas chambers where hundreds of thousands were murdered prior to November 1944, and the crematoria where their bodies were burned.

German chemicals company IG Farben built and operated a synthetic rubber factory at Auschwitz III-Monowitz. Other private companies like Krupp and Siemens-Schuckert also ran factories nearby, to use the prisoners as slave labour. Both Primo Levi and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel survived Monowitz concentration camp.

When Auschwitz was eventually liberated, it had more than 40 camps and subcamps. How Auschwitz became centre of Nazi Holocaust

How did Auschwitz work?

People from all over Europe were crammed into cattle wagons without windows, toilets, seats or food, and transported to Auschwitz.

There they were sorted into those who could work and those who were to be immediately killed.

The latter group were ordered to strip naked and sent to the showers for "delousing" - a euphemism used for the gas chambers.

Guards from the so-called "Hygienic Institute" would then drop powerful Zyklon-B gas pellets into the sealed chambers, and wait for people to die. It took about 20 minutes. The thick walls could not hide the screams of those suffocating inside.

Then Sonderkommandos - other prisoners, usually Jews forced to work for the guards or be killed - would remove artificial limbs, glasses, hair and teeth before dragging the corpses to the incinerators. Ashes of the bodies were buried or used as fertiliser.

Belongings of those gassed and those sent to work were taken for sorting in a part of the camp known as "Canada" - so named because the country was seen as a land of plenty.

Who were the victims?

SS guards sought to hide their crimes as Soviet troops closed in, and tried to destroy their extensive prisoner records - making it hard to fully quantify the number of victims.

Academic studies since agree that in total close to 1.3 million people arrived at Auschwitz. About 1.1 million of them died there.

Jews from all across Nazi-controlled Europe made up the vast majority of the victims. Almost one million Jewish people were murdered at Auschwitz.

One specific example was Hungary's Jewish population. In the space of just two months, between May and July 1944, Hungary transported 420,000 of the 437,000 Jewish people it sent to Auschwitz.

Tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz every day. Three quarters of them were killed on arrival.

Some 75,000 Polish civilians, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 25,000 Roma and Sinti, as well as Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals and political prisoners were also put to death by the German state at the Auschwitz complex.

German authorities ordered a halt to gassing and the destruction of the gas chambers and crematoria in late 1944, as Soviet troops advanced westward. The stockpile of stolen valuables in the Canada sector was shipped to Germany shortly afterwards.

Determined to erase the evidence of their crimes, the Nazis ordered 56,000 remaining prisoners to march west to other concentration camps, such as Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Sachsenhausen. Those too sick to walk were left behind; any who fell behind on the march itself were killed.

Soviet forces found only a few thousand survivors when they entered the camp on 27 January 1945, along with hundreds of thousands of clothes and several tonnes of human hair. Soldiers later recalled having to convince some survivors that the Nazis had truly gone.

Elie Wiesel later said in a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of the liberation that the Nazi crimes at Auschwitz "produced a mutation on a cosmic scale, affecting man's dreams and endeavours".

"After Auschwitz, the human condition is no longer the same. After Auschwitz, nothing will ever be the same."

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Auschwitz: How death camp became centre of Nazi Holocaust

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On 27 January 1945, Soviet troops cautiously entered Auschwitz. Primo Levi - one of the most famous survivors - was lying in a camp hospital with scarlet fever when the liberators arrived. The men cast "strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive", he would later write.

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Concentration Camps, 1942-45 - Animated Map/Map

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The Nazi camp system expanded rapidly after the beginning of World War II in September 1939, as forced labor became important in war production. Labor shortages in the German war economy became critical after German defeat in the battle of Stalingrad in 1942-1943.

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The Nazis used a variety of camps throughout their time in power to persecute, control and, eventually, murder their opponents.

This section will explain the different types of camps used at different points by the Nazis.

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The Nazis used a variety of camps throughout their time in power to persecute, control and, eventually, murder their opponents. This section will explain the different types of camps used at different points by the Nazis.

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The first large groups of Asian immigrants reaching Hawaii — a U.S. territory — and the United States in the late 19th century faced racial prejudice. Restrictive laws in Hawaii and the U.S. specifically limited the rights of Asian immigrants to own property and to become citizens. Before 1907, most Japanese immigrants to the U.S. settled on the West Coast and excelled in the cultivation of marginal lands. As successful farmers, fruit growers, fishermen, and small businessmen, their ability to do well with little and to overcome great odds made them objects of envy by some members of the white community. Set apart by their physical appearance, they became further isolated from the white mainstream as envy fed racial hostility.

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The first large groups of Asian immigrants reaching Hawaii - a U.S. territory - and the United States in the late 19th century faced racial prejudice. Restrictive laws in Hawaii and the U.S. specifically limited the rights of Asian immigrants to own property and to become citizens.

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Introduction
During World War II, the U.S. government forced some 120,000 Japanese Americans to leave their homes. They were moved to internment centers, or concentration camps, where they were confined for the rest of the war. The camps were officially called relocation centers. Between 1942 and 1945, a total of 10 camps were opened, mainly in remote areas of the western states. The Japanese Americans who were detained in the camps lost their freedom, their civil liberties, their jobs, and in most cases their property as well. Most of them were U.S. citizens.

The United States and Japan fought on opposite sides of World War II. The U.S. War Department viewed all Japanese Americans as potential traitors who might spy on or sabotage U.S. war efforts. However, there was no evidence to support that view, which was fueled by racist fears and suspicions. More than 40 years later, the U.S. Congress officially acknowledged that the rounding up and confinement of Japanese Americans was a "grave injustice."

Background
The U.S. government had a long history of racist treatment of Asian immigrants and their descendants. Laws severely restricted Asian immigration starting in the late 1800s. Americans of Asian descent often faced discrimination and prejudice. Hostility toward Japanese Americans increased greatly after Japan bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. The day after the attack, the United States declared war on Japan.

In 1941 there were about 325,000 Japanese Americans. About 125,000 of them lived on the mainland, and the rest lived in Hawaii. The Japanese Americans included residents and U.S. citizens. Immigration law at the time did not allow Japanese immigrants to be naturalized as U.S. citizens, so they remained "resident aliens." However, their children would be U.S. citizens as long as they were born in the United States. About 80,000 Japanese Americans were U.S. citizens. The first-generation of Japanese Americans, who were themselves immigrants, were known as Issei. Their U.S.-born children were called Nisei. Many Issei retained their Japanese character and culture, but Nisei generally acted and thought of themselves as thoroughly American.

After the Pearl Harbor attack, the U.S. government feared that Americans of Japanese descent would not be loyal to the United States. Many of the largest populations of Japanese Americans lived near vital war assets along the Pacific coast. There was a struggle within the government about whether to send these Japanese Americans to internment (detention) camps. The U.S. Department of Justice opposed moving innocent civilians, but the War Department favored a detention policy. John J. McCloy, the assistant secretary of war, remarked that if it came to a choice between national security and the guarantee of civil liberties expressed in the Constitution, he considered the Constitution "just a scrap of paper."

Relocation
In February 1942 the War Department created 12 restricted zones along the Pacific coast. It established nighttime curfews for Japanese Americans within the zones (requiring them to be at home during specified hours at night). Individuals who broke curfew would be arrested. The Department of Justice arrested some 1,500 Japanese American religious and community leaders as potentially dangerous "enemy aliens."

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. It gave the U.S. military the authority to exclude any persons from designated areas. While no specific group or location was mentioned in the order, it was quickly applied to virtually the entire Japanese American population on the West Coast. This included all of California, the western portions of Washington and Oregon, and the southern portion of Arizona. (The order was not applied to the Japanese Americans in Hawaii, who were not removed to camps.) On March 18, 1942, the federal War Relocation Authority (WRA) was established. Its mission was to "take all people of Japanese descent into custody, surround them with troops, prevent them from buying land, and return them to their former homes at the close of the war."

On March 31, 1942, Japanese Americans along the West Coast were ordered to report to control stations for assignment to an internment camp. They were given from four days to about two weeks to settle their affairs. They could take to the camps only the belongings they could carry. In many cases, Japanese Americans were forced to sell some or all of their property within that short period of time. Some Americans of European descent took advantage of that fact to buy homes and businesses from Japanese Americans at unfairly low prices.

The first camp in operation was the Manzanar War Relocation Center near Lone Pine, California. Eventually, nine other camps were established, in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Arkansas.

Life in the Camps
Conditions at the camps were spare. The Japanese Americans lived in uninsulated barracks furnished only with cots and coal-burning stoves. Residents had to share common bathroom and laundry facilities, and hot water was usually limited. The camps were surrounded by barbed-wire fences. Armed guards had instructions to shoot anyone who tried to leave. Although there were a few isolated incidents of Japanese Americans being shot and killed, the camps generally were run humanely.

People at the camps tried to establish some sense of community. Residents were allowed to live in family groups. They set up schools, churches, farms, and newspapers. Nevertheless, the internment took its toll on Japanese Americans. They spent as long as three years living in an atmosphere of tension, suspicion, and despair.

Closing the Camps
The internment of Japanese Americans led to a few peaceful protests as well as several legal fights. In the case of Korematsu v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1944 that the internment of Nisei was constitutional. Meanwhile, however, the government had begun to investigate Japanese Americans more closely. It concluded that some were loyal Americans. Individuals certified as loyal were allowed to leave the camps, usually to take jobs in the Midwest or the East. Others were allowed to work as temporary migrant laborers in the West. Still others enlisted in the U.S. Army.

On December 18, 1944, the government announced that all relocation centers would be closed by the end of 1945. The last of the centers, the high-security camp at Tule Lake, California, was closed in March 1946. With the end of internment, Japanese Americans were free to move back to where they had lived and to begin reclaiming or rebuilding their lives.

In 1976 President Gerald R. Ford officially repealed Executive Order 9066. He used that opportunity to express regret and to state that the "uprooting of loyal Americans" had been wrong. He said, "I call upon the American people to affirm with me this American Promise-that we have learned from the tragedy of that long-ago experience forever to treasure liberty and justice for each individual American, and resolve that this kind of action shall never again be repeated."

In 1982 a presidential commission identified racism, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership as the underlying causes of the government's internment program. In 1988 the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act. It awarded more than 80,000 Japanese Americans $20,000 each to compensate them for the ordeal they had suffered. Congress also issued a formal apology for the government's policy toward Japanese Americans.

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Introduction During World War II, the U.S. government forced some 120,000 Japanese Americans to leave their homes. They were moved to internment centers, or concentration camps, where they were confined for the rest of the war. The camps were officially called relocation centers.

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On June 2, 1942, the WRA took over the administration of Manzanar, a transition that was relatively seamless. By this point, the government had already decided that Japanese Americans living in the WCCA camps would not be allowed to resettle in areas outside of the West Coast. Therefore, the task of the WRA was to oversee the confinement of Japanese Americans in incarceration centers. The second director of the WRA, Dillon S. Myer , euphemistically referred to the centers as "wayside stations," "temporary homes," and even "havens of rest and security." Historians now refer to the camps as prisons, incarceration centers, or concentration camps because Japanese Americans were confined behind barbed wire with armed guards.

Dillon S. Myer rejected popular notions of a person's race determining loyalty, but strongly believed that culture played a determining role. Because of this, Myer believed that the camps could be used in a way to influence notions of loyalty among the inmates. "We believe that loyalty grows only when it is given a chance to grow, and it doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion, discrimination, and denial of opportunity to practice that loyalty." Myer probably chose Roy Nash as the Manzanar project director because of his likeminded liberal attitude toward racial minorities. Prior to his appointment at Manzanar, Nash served on the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and was an advocate for American Indians in the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA). In Myer's eyes, Nash was an ideal candidate to institute the policies that he had in mind.

One of the goals of the WRA was to institute an Americanization program where camp life would appear as normal as possible considering the extreme circumstances. Japanese Americans who cooperated with the program were rewarded while those who resisted were isolated and labeled as "troublemakers." As with other camps, Manzanar established a form of self-government where detainees could make some decisions regarding their everyday lives. Conflicts arose between the American born Nisei and others in the camp in part because only citizens were allowed to be in the camp government with the WRA having veto power over their decisions. In keeping with Myer's belief that culture strongly determined loyalty among Japanese Americans, the Issei and the Japan-educated Kibei were excluded from formal leadership positions in the camp government in an attempt to diminish their influence among the internees. This led to an uncomfortable change in the community's structure as the younger Nisei were thrust into formal leadership positions while holding limited moral authority. At Manzanar, the conflict between the primarily white collar Nisei leaders and the Issei/Kibei block managers elected by the detainees was particularly pronounced. Detainees often accused the leaders of the Nisei-led Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) of being informants for the WRA officials and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and labeled them as inu . Hostility between the JACL and their detractors culminated with the Manzanar riot/uprising , where Military Police shot into an unarmed crowd of protestors, killing two people and injuring nine others. JACL leaders, fearing the mob, were escorted out the camp for their own safety.

Japanese Americans also felt the hostility from the general public while they were in the camps. The WRA rationed the food to ensure that detainees were not fed better than the troops fighting in the war. Japanese American workers in the camp who were hired to perform a variety of jobs were paid wages that oftentimes didn't even cover the costs of basic necessities such shoes and clothing. At Manzanar, the hatred from the outside community was particularly pointed in part because of racism and the area's history with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP). Since water rights were diverted from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles, local residents felt betrayed by politicians who denied them of their livelihood and were incensed that Japanese Americans were being fed and housed at the government's expense, albeit in a concentration camp. Despite evidence to the contrary, residents believed that the Japanese American detainees were "coddled" with luxuries behind barbed wire while the rest of the country struggled with the war effort.

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On June 2, 1942, the WRA took over the administration of Manzanar, a transition that was relatively seamless. By this point, the government had already decided that Japanese Americans living in the WCCA camps would not be allowed to resettle in areas outside of the West Coast.

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In his speech to Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was "a date which will live in infamy." The attack launched the United States fully into the two theaters of World War II - Europe and the Pacific. Prior to Pearl Harbor, the United States had been involved in a non-combat role, through the Lend-Lease Program that supplied England, China, Russia, and other anti-fascist countries of Europe with munitions.

The attack on Pearl Harbor also launched a rash of fear about national security, especially on the West Coast. In February 1942, just two months later, President Roosevelt, as commander-in-chief, issued Executive Order 9066 that resulted in the internment of Japanese Americans. The order authorized the Secretary of War and military commanders to evacuate all persons deemed a threat from the West Coast to internment camps, that the government called "relocation centers," further inland. Read more...

Primary Sources
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Additional Background Information

Prior to the outbreak of World War II, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had identified German, Italian, and Japanese aliens who were suspected of being potential enemy agents; and they were kept under surveillance. Following the attack at Pearl Harbor, government suspicion arose not only around aliens who came from enemy nations, but around all persons of Japanese descent, whether foreign born ( issei) or American citizens ( nisei). During congressional committee hearings, representatives of the Department of Justice raised logistical, constitutional, and ethical objections. Regardless, the task was turned over to the U.S. Army as a security matter.

The entire West Coast was deemed a military area and was divided into military zones. Executive Order 9066 authorized military commanders to exclude civilians from military areas. Although the language of the order did not specify any ethnic group, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt of the Western Defense Command proceeded to announce curfews that included only Japanese Americans. Next, he encouraged voluntary evacuation by Japanese Americans from a limited number of areas; about seven percent of the total Japanese American population in these areas complied.

On March 29, 1942, under the authority of the executive order, DeWitt issued Public Proclamation No. 4, which began the forced evacuation and detention of Japanese-American West Coast residents on a 48-hour notice. Only a few days prior to the proclamation, on March 21, Congress had passed Public Law 503, which made violation of Executive Order 9066 a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison and a $5,000 fine.

Because of the perception of "public danger," all Japanese Americans within varied distances from the Pacific coast were targeted. Unless they were able to dispose of or make arrangements for care of their property within a few days, their homes, farms, businesses, and most of their private belongings were lost forever.

From the end of March to August, approximately 112,000 persons were sent to "assembly centers" - often racetracks or fairgrounds - where they waited and were tagged to indicate the location of a long-term "relocation center" that would be their home for the rest of the war. Nearly 70,000 of the evacuees were American citizens. There were no charges of disloyalty against any of these citizens, nor was there any vehicle by which they could appeal their loss of property and personal liberty.

"Relocation centers" were situated many miles inland, often in remote and desolate locales. Sites included Tule Lake and Manzanar in California; Gila River and Poston in Arizona; Jerome and Rohwer in Arkansas, Minidoka in Idaho; Topaz in Utah; Heart Mountain in Wyoming; and Granada in Colorado. (Incarceration rates were significantly lower in the territory of Hawaii, where Japanese Americans made up over one-third of the population and their labor was needed to sustain the economy. However, martial law had been declared in Hawaii immediately following the Pearl Harbor attack, and the Army issued hundreds of military orders, some applicable only to persons of Japanese ancestry.)

In the "relocation centers" (also called "internment camps"), four or five families, with their sparse collections of clothing and possessions, shared tar-papered army-style barracks. Most lived in these conditions for nearly three years or more until the end of the war. Gradually some insulation was added to the barracks and lightweight partitions were added to make them a little more comfortable and somewhat private. Life took on some familiar routines of socializing and school. However, eating in common facilities, using shared restrooms, and having limited opportunities for work interrupted other social and cultural patterns. Persons who resisted were sent to a special camp at Tule Lake, CA, where dissidents were housed.

In 1943 and 1944, the government assembled a combat unit of Japanese Americans for the European theater. It became the 442d Regimental Combat Team and gained fame as the most highly decorated of World War II. Their military record bespoke their patriotism.

As the war drew to a close, "internment camps" were slowly evacuated. While some persons of Japanese ancestry returned to their hometowns, others sought new surroundings. For example, the Japanese-American community of Tacoma, WA, had been sent to three different centers; only 30 percent returned to Tacoma after the war. Japanese Americans from Fresno had gone to Manzanar; 80 percent returned to their hometown.

The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II sparked constitutional and political debate. During this period, three Japanese-American citizens challenged the constitutionality of the forced relocation and curfew orders through legal actions: Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu, and Mitsuye Endo. Hirabayashi and Korematsu received negative judgments; but Mitsuye Endo, after a lengthy battle through lesser courts, was determined to be "loyal" and allowed to leave the Topaz, Utah, facility.

Justice Murphy of the Supreme Court expressed the following opinion in Ex parte Mitsuye Endo:

I join in the opinion of the Court, but I am of the view that detention in Relocation Centers of persons of Japanese ancestry regardless of loyalty is not only unauthorized by Congress or the Executive but is another example of the unconstitutional resort to racism inherent in the entire evacuation program. As stated more fully in my dissenting opinion in Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 , 65 S.Ct. 193, racial discrimination of this nature bears no reasonable relation to military necessity and is utterly foreign to the ideals and traditions of the American people.

In 1988, Congress passed, and President Reagan signed, Public Law 100-383 - the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 - that acknowledged the injustice of "internment," apologized for it, and provided a $20,000 cash payment to each person who was incarcerated.

One of the most stunning ironies in this episode of denied civil liberties was articulated by an internee who, when told that Japanese Americans were put in those camps for their own protection, countered "If we were put there for our protection, why were the guns at the guard towers pointed inward, instead of outward?"

A note on terminology: The historical primary source documents included on this page reflect the terminology that the government used at the time, such as alien, evacuation, relocation, relocation centers, internment, and Japanese (as opposed to Japanese American).
Materials created by the National Archives and Records Administration are in the public domain.

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Japanese-American Incarceration During World War II

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In his speech to Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was "a date which will live in infamy." The attack launched the United States fully into the two theaters of World War II - Europe and the Pacific.

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Japanese Internment Camps Facts

During World War II more than 127,000 Japanese-American citizens were imprisoned at internment camps in the United States. Their only crime was that they had Japanese ancestry and they were suspected of being loyal to their homeland of Japan. The fear was that if the Japanese invaded the west coast of America, where there was a large Japanese population, that they would be loyal to Japan instead of the United States. Popular opinion and bad advice led President Roosevelt to sign an executive order (Executive Order 9066) in 1942 that forced all Japanese-Americans to concentration camps in America's interior. The majority of those sent to the internment camps had been born in the United States.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor helped to fuel the anti-Japanese sentiment that led the Roosevelt's executive order.

More than 66% of the Japanese-Americans sent to the internment camps in the spring of 1942 were born in the United States and many had never been to Japan.

Japanese-Americans are also known as 'Nisei' in North and South America and Australia, which is a term that means children born to Japanese people.

Because the camps were not yet completed when Roosevelt signed the executive order, the Japanese prisoners were held in temporary shelters such as stables in racetracks.

The orders to evacuate were posted in Japanese-American communities. Many of those affected by the orders sold their land, homes, and businesses for a fraction of what they were worth because they did not know if they would be able to return or if they would still be there when they returned.

Japanese-American World War I veterans that served for the United States were also sent to the internment camps.

There were 10 Japanese internment camps in the United States located in remote areas in seven western U.S. states including California, Idaho, Utah, Arkansas, Colorado, Wyoming and Arizona.

The internment camps had tarpaper barracks for housing, mess halls and schools. The adults were allowed to work if they chose for $5 per day.

The camps were located in areas that made farming difficult and the prisoners ate a lot of army grub-style food.

It was often too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter making life very difficult and uncomfortable.

The U.S. Army eventually decided to allow the prisoners to leave the camps if they joined the U.S. Army but only 1,200 took the option.

President Roosevelt rescinded the order in 1944, two years after signing it.

The last Japanese internment camp in the United States was closed in 1945.

Canada also sent almost 23,000 Japanese-Canadians to internment camps in British Columbia.

5,766 Nisei prisoners renounced their American citizenship because they were sent to the internment camps. They were legal American citizens and even the courts had denied them their rights as such.

It wasn't until 1968, almost 24 years after the camps had been closed that the U.S. government decided to make reparations to those who had lost property due to their imprisonment.

In 1988 surviving prisoners were awarded $20,000. Only 60,000 prisoners of the internment camps were still alive.

Today, the four largest populations in the world of Japanese emigrants and descendants of Japanese live in the United States, Canada, Brazil and Peru.

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japanese internment camps facts for kids

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fun facts about japanese internment camps

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During World War II more than 127,000 Japanese-American citizens were imprisoned at internment camps in the United States. Their only crime was that they had Japanese ancestry and they were suspected of being loyal to their homeland of Japan.

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Children of the Camps | INTERNMENT HISTORY

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“Most of the 110,000 persons removed for reasons of ‘national security’ were school-age children, infants and young adults not yet of voting age.” - “Years of Infamy”, Michi Weglyn

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Ugly History: Japanese American incarceration camps - Densho

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Nazi Germany persecuted, brutalized, and murdered groups of people whom they saw as enemies or threats. The Nazis saw Jews as their primary enemy. They targeted Jewish men, women, and children with unrelenting focus. The scope of terror and the scale of human loss raise the questions: What groups did the Nazis target? And why did they target these specific groups of people?

Nazi Germany targeted Jews because the Nazis were radically antisemitic . From the very beginning, the Nazi German regime took steps to ruthlessly and tirelessly isolate, impoverish, and discriminate against Jewish people in Germany. During World War II, this policy escalated to mass murder. In total, the Nazis and their allies and collaborators murdered six million Jews in a genocide now known as the Holocaust.

In addition to the genocide of Europe's Jews, the Nazis also persecuted, brutalized, or murdered additional groups of people. In some cases, they did so with the help of their allies and collaborators. 1

The Nazis targeted people as members of the following groups ( listed in alphabetical order for ease of reference ):

Black people in Germany;

civilians (non-Jewish) accused of disobedience, resistance, or partisan activity;

gay men, bisexual men, and other men accused of homosexuality in Germany;

Jehovah's Witnesses;

people with disabilities;

Poles;

political opponents and dissenters in Germany;

Roma and other people derogatorily labeled as "Gypsies";

social outsiders in Germany derogatorily labeled as "asocials" or "professional criminals"; and

Soviet Prisoners of War.

Why did the Nazis target groups of people for persecution and murder?

Nazi Germany dehumanized and devalued entire groups of people on the basis of Nazi ideology. Ideology is a set of beliefs about how the world operates. Nazi ideology was racist, antisemitic, and ultra-nationalist. It drew on a number of existing concepts. These concepts included racism, nationalism, antisemitism, anticommunism, antigypsyism, and eugenics. The Nazis combined these concepts and took them to destructive, murderous extremes.

The Nazis evaluated people according to biological, racial, political, and social criteria . According to Nazi ideology, certain groups of people-such as Jews and Roma-were racial threats that undermined the racial purity of the German people. Others-such as people with disabilities-were considered biological threats. The Nazis believed they compromised the genetic health of the German people. Still others were seen as social, political, and/or ideological threats to Nazi control in Germany and beyond. During World War II (1939-1945) , the Nazis conquered much of Europe. They treated real and supposed enemies as existential threats. Among those targeted as existential threats were members of the Polish elite, Soviet Prisoners of War, and members of resistance groups. During the war, Nazi Germany perpetrated a genocide of Europe's Jews and numerous other mass atrocities.

How did the Nazis target Jews?

Nazi Germany persecuted and murdered millions of Jewish people because the Nazis were radically antisemitic . This meant that the Nazis were prejudiced against and hated Jews.

Their intense hatred of Jews drove the Nazis to obsessively seek ways to make Germany, and ultimately Europe, "free of Jews" (" judenrein "). Beginning in 1933, the Nazi German regime used discriminatory laws to drive Jews out of all aspects of German life.

During World War II, Nazi leaders radicalized their treatment of Europe's Jews. Their actions escalated from persecution to mass murder. In 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Soon after, Nazi German authorities imprisoned Jews in ghettos . Many Jews died as a result of disease, starvation, and brutal treatment. After Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, the Nazis and their allies and collaborators began to commit mass shootings of entire Jewish communities in occupied eastern Europe. In 1941-1942, Nazi Germany created killing centers to murder Jewish people using poison gas. With the help of their allies and collaborators, they deported Jews of all ages to their deaths.

In total, Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators murdered six million Jews. The systematic persecution and murder of Europe's Jews is now known as the Holocaust. The Nazis' unrelenting fixation on targeting and ultimately destroying the Jewish people made the Holocaust unique among Nazi German atrocities.

How did the Nazis target non-Jewish groups of people?

The Nazis targeted Jews and other groups of people in different, but overlapping ways. In some cases, they did so with the help of their allies and collaborators.

The Nazis targeted the groups of people listed below with some combination of the following forms of persecution:

extralegal imprisonment in a concentration camp;

discrimination on the basis of supposed racial identity;

torture, including inhumane medical experiments;

forced sterilization; and/or

mass murder.

Not all groups were subjected to all of these forms of persecution and brutality. For instance, the Nazis targeted some groups with discrimination and wrongful imprisonment, but not mass murder.

The Nazis did not target these groups with the same degree of intensity. Throughout the twelve years of the Nazi German regime, Jews remained the Nazis' primary enemy and target. At varying points, the Nazis also turned their attention to other groups of people. The timing and intensity of Nazi persecution was based on a number of evolving factors, including Nazi ideology and practical realities (such as war). But, in all cases, the Nazis behaved with extreme cruelty.
For ease of reference, below is an alphabetical list of non-Jewish groups of people persecuted and/or murdered by the Nazis. Each section serves as an introduction to how and why they targeted a specific non-Jewish group of people.
Black People in Germany

Black people in Germany became victims of the Nazi German regime because the Nazis viewed them as racially inferior. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, there were several thousand Black people living in Germany. The Nazis applied the Nuremberg Race Laws to Black people. They referred to Black people using the derogatory label " Neger und ihre Bastarde " ("Negros and their bastards"). The people targeted as part of this group included Africans, African Americans, multiracial people, and other people racialized as Black and living in Germany. This group included several hundred multiracial children who were born in the Rhineland region of Germany in the interwar era. These children had a variety of ethnic backgrounds (including Arab and Vietnamese). However, they were all labeled as Black and derogatorily referred to as the "Rhineland Bastards."

While there was no centralized, systematic program targeting Black people in Germany for murder, many were imprisoned, forcibly sterilized, and murdered by the Nazis. An unknown number of them, perhaps hundreds, were killed.

Civilians (non-Jewish) Accused of Disobedience, Resistance, or Partisan Activity

During World War II, Nazi German authorities brutalized and murdered innocent civilians in the name of eliminating resistance to German occupation. Throughout occupied Europe, Germans and their allies and collaborators targeted real and suspected members of resistance groups. They arrested, tortured, imprisoned, and sometimes executed individuals. The Germans also targeted non-German civilians, including foreign forced laborers, who violated German-issued decrees, policies, or other regulations .

The Germans also carried out collective punishment. Together with their allies and collaborators, they killed innocent civilians in massacres. The Nazis called the killings "reprisal actions" or "anti-partisan pacification measures." During these massacres, the perpetrators sometimes leveled entire villages. They often murdered all of the inhabitants. This type of terror was far more common in occupied eastern and southern Europe than it was in western and central Europe. In occupied Poland and the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, the Nazis were especially indiscriminate and cruel. In total, hundreds of thousands of people became victims of reprisal massacres. Victims included Belarusians, Greeks, Italians, Poles, Russians, Serbs, Ukrainians, and others.

Gay Men, Bisexual Men, and Other Men Accused of Homosexuality in Germany

The Nazi German regime persecuted gay men , bisexual men, and other men as part of its campaign against male homosexuality. The Nazis saw gay men as threats to the birth rate and thus to the fate of the German people. They arrested tens of thousands of men under Paragraph 175 . Paragraph 175 was the statute of the German criminal code that banned sexual relations between men. In Germany, there was no similar law prohibiting sexual relations between women. Nonetheless, the Nazis created a climate of restriction and fear for many lesbians .

Between 5,000 and 15,000 men were imprisoned as "homosexual" (" ") offenders in This group of prisoners was typically required to wear a pink triangle on their camp uniforms as part of the homosexuell concentration camps. Some men accused of homosexuality were forcibly castrated. prisoner classification system. Hundreds, or possibly thousands, died.

Jehovah's Witnesses

Nazi Germany persecuted because of their refusal to give up their religious beliefs and serve the Nazi German regime. Jehovah's Witnesses refused to give the Nazi salute, join Nazi Party organizations, take the oath to Adolf Hitler, or let their children join the Jehovah's Witnesses Hitler Youth. As pacifists, they also refused to serve in the German military.

In Germany, the Nazis banned many Jehovah's Witness activities and publications. Authorities sometimes took Witnesses' children from their families and placed them into foster care. Many male Witnesses who refused military service as conscientious objectors were executed. Thousands of Jehovah's Witnesses from Germany and occupied Europe were imprisoned in concentration camps for refusing to comply with Nazi demands. In the camps, Jehovah's Witnesses had to wear purple badges. About 1,700 Jehovah's Witnesses were killed during the Nazi era.

People with Disabilities

Nazi Germany persecuted and murdered people with disabilities because the Nazis viewed them as biologically inferior. In order to eliminate this supposed hereditary threat, the Nazi German regime implemented a radical form of eugenics . In 1933, Nazi Germany enacted the Hereditary Health Law . This law resulted in the forcible sterilization of about 400,000 people diagnosed with certain supposedly hereditary disabilities.

In 1939, the Nazi German regime began to murder children born with certain disabilities. Soon after, authorities began to kill adults with disabilities living in institutions and care facilities. German doctors and nurses carried out these murders as part of the Euthanasia Program (codenamed Aktion T-4). Authorities killed tens of thousands of people with disabilities in gas chambers at euthanasia program killing centers . They sometimes killed people by giving them lethal doses of medication or starving them. German units also shot people with disabilities in occupied eastern Europe. In total, some 250,000-300,000 people with disabilities were killed.

Poles

Nazi Germany persecuted and murdered Poles during World War II. They did so because they saw Poland and certain Polish people as obstacles to their expansionist goals. They viewed Polish people as "subhumans" ( Untermenschen ), suited only to be Germans' slaves.

Beginning in 1939, the Nazis conquered Polish territory. They planned to turn much of it into "living space" ( Lebensraum ) for the German people. German authorities carried out ethnic cleansing in occupied Poland. They tried to Germanize Polish people, places, and territory. German authorities carried out special murder operations against Polish educated elites. They imprisoned and shot tens of thousands of people in these operations. Among the victims were Polish school teachers, university professors, clergy, politicians, and others.

German authorities also forcibly displaced Poles from their homes. They stole their land and property. They kidnapped tens of thousands of Polish children for Germanization. German authorities exploited Poles for forced labor. And they responded harshly to any signs of Polish opposition. For example, they leveled entire Polish villages as retaliation for alleged partisan activities. They also arrested and imprisoned tens of thousands of Poles in concentration camps as political prisoners. In total, about 1.8 million Poles were murdered by the Germans during World War II.

Political Opponents and Dissenters in Germany

Nazi Germany persecuted German political opponents and dissenters who expressed opposition to the Nazi Party or the Nazi regime. Immediately after coming to power, the Nazis carried out an assault on German democracy. They rapidly arrested and abused tens of thousands of leaders from opposing political parties. In particular, they targeted Communists and Social Democrats. The Nazis transformed Germany from a democracy with free speech and a free press into a dictatorship that banned dissent in all forms. Many Germans supported this transformation and embraced the regime. But a small minority of Germans chose to express opposition for ethical, religious , political, or other reasons.

Germans who openly spoke out against the Nazis were punished. Many were imprisoned in concentration camps as political prisoners , where they had to wear red badges on their camp uniforms. The regime broadly defined what constituted treason or treasonous activities. For example, telling a joke about Adolf Hitler could be grounds for arrest and even execution. During World War II, Germans who were caught engaging in active resistance were often executed. Tens of thousands of German political opponents and dissenters were killed.

Roma and Other People Derogatorily Labeled as "Gypsies"

Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators persecuted and murdered Romani people and other people derogatorily labeled as "Gypsies." They did this because the Nazis espoused antigypsyism. Antigypsyism, also called anti-Roma sentiment, is the hatred of or prejudice against Romani people and other people derogatorily labeled as "Gypsies." The Nazis viewed Roma as racially inferior and socially delinquent.

In the 1930s, Nazi Germany persecuted Romani people using racial laws and other means. In 1935, German authorities began to establish Zigeunerlager ("Gypsy camps") where they interned Romani families. They forcibly sterilized Romani people, legally and extralegally.

Nazi policy towards Romani people radicalized after World War II began. During the war, the Nazis and their allies and collaborators committed a genocide of European Roma . They murdered Romani people in killing centers, in mass shooting operations, and through brutal treatment in ghettos and camps. The "Gypsy Camp" ( Zigeunerlager ) at Auschwitz was particularly infamous. At Auschwitz and other concentration camps, Nazi doctors subjected Romani prisoners to cruel medical experiments . In total, at least 250,000-but possibly as many as 500,000-Romani people were killed.

Social Outsiders in Germany

The Nazi regime persecuted certain Germans whom they considered to be social outsiders. They targeted people who were marginalized and impoverished, as well as people with certain types of criminal records. The Nazi German regime referred to these Germans using the derogatory labels "asocials" (" Asozialen ") and "professional criminals" (" Berufsverbrecher "). People labeled as "asocials" often lacked permanent addresses or stable jobs. Many had been arrested multiple times for begging, vagrancy, or prostitution. The Nazis viewed them as biologically inferior and/or socially deviant. People labeled as "professional criminals" usually had criminal records for property crimes and many were recidivists. But some had never been charged with a crime.

The Nazi German regime cruelly mistreated people it considered social outsiders. Those viewed as social outsiders were often forcibly sterilized. They were also wrongfully and indefinitely imprisoned in concentration camps. In the camps, people imprisoned as "asocials" had to wear black badges. Those who were imprisoned as "professional criminals" had to wear green badges. Tens of thousands of people labeled as "asocials" or "professional criminals" died as a result of Nazi policies.

Soviet Prisoners of War

During World War II, Nazi Germany committed the systematic mistreatment and mass murder of Soviet Prisoners of War (POWs). The Nazis treated Soviet POWs with a level of extreme cruelty that differed from their treatment of British, French, or American POWs. They did so because the Nazis viewed the Communist Soviet Union (USSR) as an existential enemy that needed to be annihilated. They viewed many of the peoples who lived in the Soviet Union as racially and culturally subhuman .

Nazi Germany in June 1941. The German military quickly captured millions of Soviet soldiers. Sometimes the army conducted summary executions of POWs. The SS and police routinely selected and killed tens of thousands of Soviet POWs just because they were Jews, invaded the Soviet Union political commissars, or members of the Communist Party. A significant number of Soviet POWs from Central Asia were also executed by the Nazis because of their race or because they were circumcised and mistaken for Jews. Other Soviet POWs were subjected to long marches, systematic starvation, no medical care, little or no shelter, and forced labor. Many were held under exceptionally brutal conditions in POW camps and in concentration camps. The German treatment of Soviet POWs was particularly cruel in 1941 and early 1942. By war's end, about 3.3 million Soviet prisoners (about 58 percent) died in German captivity. Most had been killed in the first eight months of the German-Soviet war.

Last Edited: Apr 4, 2024

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

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What Groups of People did the Nazis Target?

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Jews were the primary targets for mass murder by the Nazis and their collaborators. Nazi policies also led to the brutalization and persecution of millions of others.

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There were 11 million victims of the Holocaust (or 6 million Jewish victims and 5 million non-Jewish victims)

The number 11 million is a fictious number on a number of levels. "11 million Jews" is the population census that is mentioned in the 16th copy of the Wannsee Protocol, notes taken by Eichmann (January 20, 1942), only about the Jews. The issue also seems to be the differentiation between victims based on NSDAP race policy versus civilian deaths during war (i.e.: victims of genocide or casualties of war) if the latter, the correct number is probably between 30-35 million deaths, maybe more. The death toll on the territory of the former Soviet Union is generally regarded to be about 27 million including Soviet military.

It is best when referencing the total number of victims of the Holocaust to say 6 million Jews and millions of others. All Holocaust organizations are making a united move to adhere to this message, and we must maintain a consistent record as a center of Holocaust education.

Hitler was elected to political office(Often used to emphasize the power/importance of your vote; or the need to vote)

Hitler was not elected to office. By the end of 1932 the Nazis were the largest party in the German parliament (Reichstag), and the Nazis formed a coalition government with the conservative German Nationalists in 1933. The Nazis had 3 members of the cabinet, and the conservatives had 9. Hitler was appointed chancellor by President von Hindenburg, and not elected. In the last relatively free election in March of 1933, Hitler received 37% per cent of the vote.

"The Final Solution" was decided at the Wannsee Conference

While thousands of Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators or died as a direct result of discriminatory measures instituted against Jews during the initial years of the Third Reich, the systematic murder of Jews, or "The Final Solution" began with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 - killing entire Jewish communities mainly through shooting or gas vans.

In ninety minutes, on January 20, 1942, fifteen mid-level Nazi officials met to ensure the cooperation of various administrative departments to make the killing that was already happening more efficient. It is important to note that while the "Holocaust by bullets" was inefficient and psychologically draining on its perpetrators, the killing centers did not replace the mobile killing. In fact, the Einsatzgruppen continued its actions well into 1943.

Number & Types of Camps

Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies established more than 40,000 camps (slave labor (30,000); concentration (980); POW camps (1,000); "care" centers; internment and killing centers (6)) and other incarceration sites. The perpetrators used these sites for a range of purposes, including forced labor, detention of people thought to be enemies of the state, and mass murder. The total number of sites is based upon ongoing research in the perpetrators' own records.

The Allies could have saved more Jews

Perhaps, but most of the killing occurred while Germany appeared to be winning the war. By mid-March 1942, the Nazis and their collaborators, had killed 20-25% of the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust. By the time the war turned in favor of the Allies, February 1943, the Germans and their collaborators had killed 75-80% of the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust. In addition, 75% of the Jews killed in the Holocaust perished before the tide of war turned in the Battle of Stalingrad.

Further, half of all Holocaust victims came from interwar Poland. Poland was in the core area of German-occupied territories during the war and remained out of reach from Allied forces till 1944. The decision to systematically kill all Jews - men, women, and children - was implemented extraordinarily quickly, at a time when Germany was at a zenith of military success, and when the Allies could do almost nothing to stop it.

The Role of Hitler - Precision of Language

Such phrases as "Hitler's War," "Hitler's Holocaust," "Hitler's army," "Hitler did this or decided this..." are easy statements to make. While we do not want to ignore or negate the crucial role that Hitler played, overemphasizing his role leads to "The 'One Man' or "Evil Man' Theory," namely that the Holocaust was the result of a single individual (Hitler's) will, plan, ideas and drive. We then unintentionally ignore the many collaborators and bystanders, and as a result might have our visitors conclude that the Holocaust was "an aberration, something that was the result of 'one sick individual," a view counterproductive to developing an accurate understanding of the Holocaust.

Norwegian non-Jews wore paper clips to express solidarity with Norwegian Jewry

Between 1,700 and 1,800 Jewish people were living in Norway when the Nazis occupied the country in June 1940. Most Jews were living in the capital city of Oslo at that time, and all but 200 Jews were Norwegian citizens. The new Norwegian collaborationist government followed German demands and quickly implemented anti-Jewish legislation. More brutal demands soon followed and in November 1942 the Nazi controlled Norwegian government began rounding up more than 700 Jews. They were subsequently deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau where most were killed while the remaining Jews were able to be smuggled by the Norwegian resistance to neutral Sweden.

However, the wearing of paper clips did not have anything to do with the operation to smuggle Jews out of Norway nor was it a symbol of solidarity with the Norwegian Jewry. Instead, the wearing of paper clips represented one of many non-violent examples of Norwegian nationalism and loyalty to King Haakon VII. These acts included listening to foreign news broadcasts, printing and distributing underground newspapers, and wearing symbols that showed their support for Norway. Some such symbols included wearing pins created from coins that showed the face of the king, wearing various "flowers of loyalty," wearing the symbol "H7" (which showed support for King Haakon VII), and wearing paper clips either on one's jacket or as a bracelet.

Many scholars believe Norwegians wore paper clips as a sense of national pride since the creator of the paper clip, Johan Vaaler, was Norwegian. Vaaler invented the paper clip in 1899 and, ironically enough, had to patent the invention in Germany because Norway did not have patent laws at the time. However, after he got the paper clip patented, Vaaler did not capitalize on his invention. In the ensuing years, the paper clip was manufactured and mass-marked by US and UK firms (most notably, the British based Gem Company who originated the "double-U" slide-on clips, which the Norwegians may have worn during Nazi occupation.)

German Jews were a large proportion of Germany's population

When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the global Jewish population was around 15.3 million. Approximately 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe, making Europe the home of more than 60% of the world's Jewish population, even though Jews only comprised of 1.7% of the total European population. The largest Jewish community was in Poland where 3,250,000 Jews, 9.8% of the Polish population, lived. Germany had approximately 565,000 Jews that made up less than one percent of its total population.

Adolf Hitler was Jewish

While this myth has endured over time, Adolf Hitler was not Jewish. The idea stems from rumors that Hitler's grandfather was Jewish. However, few historians and scholars believe this is true. Hitler's father, Alios, was registered as an illegitimate child with no father, meaning that Hitler was unable to produce the certificate of origin he required of every German citizen. Another rumor was that Alios's mother, Hitler's grandmother, worked in the home of a wealthy Jew and there is some chance a son in the household got Hitler's grandmother pregnant. While Hitler's grandmother did work for a wealthy Jewish family, no evidence suggests she was impregnated by someone in the family.

A Jewish doctor killed Adolf Hitler's mother

There have been some scholars that claim that Hitler's hatred toward Jews stems from the death of his mother. It is believed that Dr. Eduard Bloch, the Hitler family's Jewish physician in Linz, Austria, incompetently treated Klara Hitler's breast cancer, causing her to die in December 1907. However, according to Bloch's own testimony to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1943, Hitler thought Bloch had treated his mother's illness to the best of his ability and harbored no ill will toward him. Bloch recalled that after Klara's death, "[Hitler] stepped forward and took my hand. Looking into my eyes, he said: 'I shall be grateful to you forever.' Then he bowed." In the years that followed, Hitler would send Bloch postcards, warm holiday greetings, gifts of his artwork, and expressed concerned about Bloch's wellbeing after he implemented anti-Jewish laws once he became Führer. Bloch noted that in 1937 Hitler asked a delegation of Linz Nazis "for news of me. Was I still alive, still practicing?" and adding "'Dr. Bloch... is an Edeljude - a noble Jew. If all Jews were like him, there would be no Jewish question.'" Bloch further testified that "Favors were granted me which I feel sure were accorded no other Jew in all Germany or Austria." This meant that the higher ups in Berlin directed the Linz Gestapo to remove the yellow star from Dr. Bloch's apartment and office and allowed the Bloch family to remain in their home. Also, they were allowed to leave Austria in 1938 during the Anschluss - although they were not permitted to keep their lifesavings and the Gestapo confiscated all gifts and notes Hitler gave the Bloch's, as well as the record book that detailed Klara Hitler's treatment.

The Germans manufactured soap from Jewish bodies

The belief that Germans made soap from dead humans stems from French propaganda during World War I. Specific claims that Nazi forces were using the fat from Jewish bodies to make soap began to surface in concentration camps as early as August 1942. However, scholars believe that these stories were nothing more than rumors as the lack of proof, such as shipping bills, physical evidence from manufacturing plants, or receipts for economic transactions, has never been found, while such evidence is clear for shipments of human hair and gold teeth that were removed.

Moreover, these rumors disturbed leading Nazi member and head of the SS Heinrich Himmler since the Nazis' extermination plans were top-secret. After hearing that New York Rabbi Stephen Wise had mentioned the soap rumors to the American press on November 24, 1942, Himmler wrote to the head of the Gestapo Heinrich Müller on November 30. Himmler wrote:

In view of the large emigration movement of Jews, I do not wonder that such rumors come to circulate in the world. We both know that there is [at] present an increased mortality among the Jews put to work. You have to guarantee to me that the corpses of these deceased Jews are either burned or buried at each location, and that absolutely nothing else can happen with the corpses at any location. Conduct an investigation immediately everywhere whether any kind of misuse [of corpses] has taken place of the sort as listed in point 1, probably strewn about in the world as a lie. Upon the SS-oath I am to be notified of each misuse of this kind.

While scholars and historians disregard the soap rumor, some Holocaust survivors have presented small blue and green cakes of soap, claiming they were created from the human fat of Jews because they were stamped "RIF." However, senior researcher Aaron Breitbart at the Simon Wiesenthal Center explains the letters stand for "Reich Industry Fat." Nevertheless, Jewish prisoners within the camp believed the "I" was a "J" and the acronym stood for "Pure Jewish Fat." When these bars of soap were analyzed, no evidence of human DNA turned up in the findings, meaning that the soap allegations were nothing more than a terrifying rumor.

King Christian X of Denmark wore a Jewish Star badge to protest German orders that Danish Jews wear such badges

There is no proof that Danish king Christian X wore a Jewish Star to protest Nazi persecution, even though many throughout Europe believed he did. In reality, the Nazi occupiers of Denmark never required Danish Jews to wear any kind of identifying badge. Many historians believe the Nazis did this because implementing the Jewish Star badge would not only deepen Danish solidarity but also further Danish discontent toward Nazi ideology. Nevertheless, King Christian X and much of the Danish people supported their Jewish population and were against German occupation. To show solidarity with his people, Christian would ride on horseback in Copenhagen while scores of Danes would escort their king through the streets to protest Nazi rule.

Jews were foreigners and aliens who controlled the economy and culture of Germany and other countries

Judaism has been an integral part of Western Civilization since the beginning of the Fertile Crescent civilizations (circa. 5,000 years ago) and in Europe since Roman rule (1,500 years ago). Negative stereotypes about Jews became prominent in the late Roman Empire period. The stereotypes stem from the 4 th century when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Jewish people were vilified as "Christ-killers," a reference to the Biblical story of Judas's betrayal of Jesus Christ. During the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, Jews in Europe were increasingly persecuted. Jews were regularly beaten or killed, driven from their homes, put into ghettos, or pressured to convert to a different religion. They were forbidden to own land and prohibited from pursuing most occupations except for certain trades such as peddling goods, working in factories, dealing in grain, wood, and cattle, and "money trades," such as lending money for interest or banking. Because of these occupations, Jews were identified with money, creating the stereotype of Jewish people being selfish, unethical, and exploitative money grubbers. Unfortunately, this stereotypical impression of Jews has persisted for hundreds of years.

When Hitler and the Nazi power came to power in the 1930s, they combined these traditional stereotypes of Jews with the growing fear of a Jewish presence in mainstream European culture and society, which was occurring throughout the 19 th and into the 20 th century. They believed that the small number of Jews in Europe held too much power and stressed that there was a "secret" Jewish plot to take over the world. Sadly, this thinking permeated throughout the world, from France and the Alfred Dreyfus affair to Russia and Tsar Nicholas II, who wrote about his fears of a Jewish takeover, and in the United States where automobile mogul Henry Ford publicly preached of his distrust of the Jews. While these myths have been thoroughly debunked, many people still preach antisemitic ideology today.

In the late 19th century, eugenics became popular. Part of the theory of eugenics categorized people into specific "races," each with had its own unchangeable traits. Some "races" were considered biologically, culturally, and morally superior to others. The 1943 movement to categorize Jews as a "race" in the United States was part of this pseudo-science ideology of eugenics which has now been proven false.

The Nazis promoted racial antisemitism. It did not matter whether a person practice the Jewish faith. The Nazis believed Jews belonged to a separate race and had distinct "Jewish blood." This belief was false: there is no biological difference between Jews and non-Jews.

Additionally, race is a social construction, a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into categories generally viewed as distinct by society. These features include skin color, hair color and texture, eye color, and body shape and size. All these features are inherent in genes and cannot be changed. Judaism has created a culture that has evolved based on laws and rituals regarding diet, the Sabbath, and customs that can vary from place to place because the Jews live in many parts of the world. Any person can convert to Judaism if they wish to do so.

How did Adolf Hitler die?

There is much speculation surrounding the death of Adolf Hitler. Since his death on April 30, 1945, theories have ranged that he may have poisoned himself, shot himself, or both. As well, some conspiracy theorists claim that Hitler's "double" was killed, allowing the real Hitler to escape. The fact is there is a lack of physical evidence to determine how exactly Hitler died. While it is certain that Hitler died in his Berlin bunker, it is most likely that on the morning of April 29, 1945, Hitler married his companion of many years, Eva Braun, in a civil ceremony. The next day, the couple bit into thin glass vials of cyanide with the intent to die by suicide. Furthermore, Hitler shot himself in the head. The remaining Nazi loyalists in the bunker wrapped Hitler's body in a gray army blanket, carried him to the shell-blasted Chancellery Garden, saluted in honor, and lit his body on fire.

Dr. Josef Mengele made all selections upon arrival at the camps

Dr. Josef Mengele is known for being the Senior SS physician at Auschwitz-Birkenau from 1943 - 1944 and performing deadly experiments on prisoners. Mengele was one of the multiple physicians who "selected" prisoners upon arrival at the camp. While Mengele did make many selections, so did other doctors, especially when the prisoners were regularly forced to parade before the doctors at frequent selections inside the camps.

Every concentration camp had a gas chamber and crematoria

While some camps had both deadly mechanisms, this was not true for the majority of camps that were made for slave labor, transit, and political prisoners. By 1945, the Nazis had established thousands of camps. However, only six camps were designated killing centers. Nazi camps equipped with gassing facilities for the mass murder of Jews and other victims included Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek-Lublin, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Approximately 2,700,000 Jews were murdered at these camps, along with tens of thousands of Siniti and Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, and other victims.

Auschwitz-Bi rkenau was the only camp that existed in Auschwitz

Auschwitz had many satellite camps that surrounded the main camp, encompassing a total area of 20 square miles. By 1944, more railroad tracks led to Auschwitz than to the world's largest railroad station - Penn Station in New York. In total, there were three major camps in Auschwitz that were surrounded by subcamps:

Auschwitz I: The original and main Auschwitz camp located in southern Poland. It served first as a Polish military barrack before being converted into a concentration camp during Nazi occupation at first for non-Jews.

Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau): The largest Nazi camp created. It was opened in October 1941 and was specifically used for the extermination of Jewish as well as Sinti and Roma peoples. Auschwitz II had four gas chambers on its premises.

Auschwitz III (Buna-Monowitz): The camp was used as a labor camp for chemical giant I.G. Farben.

All Jews in camps received tattoo ed numbers on their arms

All of those imprisoned in the camp system received a serial number upon first entering. This was assigned not only for identification, but also served an integral part of the Nazi system of dehumanization in the camps. These numbers were sewn onto uniforms, usually along with other patches of classification, such as reasons for arrest and national origin. Only individuals imprisoned at Auschwitz received tattoos, and not all who were imprisoned at Auschwitz were given a tattoo.

All Jews were forced to wear the yellow Star of David badge

Nazi-occupied Denmark was the only country in occupied Europe where Jews were not forced to wear the yellow Star of David badge. Jews in Nazi-occupied central Poland did not wear the yellow star badges. Instead, they wore white armbands with a blue Star of David.

What Pastor Niemoeller really said

One of the misquoted citations of the Holocaust is the "confession of guilt" by Pastor Martin Niemoeller. According to his widow, Sybil Niemoeller, these are his exact words:
First they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out -
because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Socialists
and I did not speak out -
because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out -
because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out -
because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me -
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

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Holocaust Misconceptions - Illinois Holocaust Museum

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There were 11 million victims of the Holocaust (or 6 million Jewish victims and 5 million non-Jewish victims) The number 11 million is a fictious number on a number of levels. "11 million Jews" is the population census that is mentioned in the 16th copy of the Wannsee Protocol, notes taken by Eichmann (January 20, 1942), only...

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Concentration Camp Survivors Share Their Stories

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The Holocaust was the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War. The Nazis also enslaved and killed other groups who they perceived as racially, biologically or ideologically inferior or dangerous. Hear seven survivors talk about and reflect…

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The Nuremberg Trials | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans

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After the war, Allied powers-United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union-came together to form the International Military Tribunal (IMT). From 1945 to 1946, Nazi Germany leaders stood trial for crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes.

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In 1945 and 1946 former leaders of Nazi Germany were put on trial for crimes committed during World War II. The trials were run by the countries that had defeated Germany in the war. They took place in Nuremberg, Germany.

The court that held the trials was called the International Military Tribunal. Judges from the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union took part. The defendants (the people put on trial) had been leaders of the German government and the Nazi Party during the war. Adolf Hitler, the top leader of Nazi Germany, could not be tried because he was already dead.

The defendants were accused of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The crimes against peace included planning and starting the war. The war crimes were violations of the laws of war. They included enslaving and killing prisoners captured during the war. The worst of the crimes against humanity was killing millions of Jews and other people in the Holocaust.

Some of the defendants claimed that only the German government, not individual people, could be found guilty. Other defendants claimed that they were not responsible because they were only following orders. The judges rejected both excuses.

All but three of the 22 defendants were found guilty. Ten were put to death. The others received long prison terms.

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In 1945 and 1946 former leaders of Nazi Germany were put on trial for crimes committed during World War II. The trials were run by the countries that had defeated Germany in the war. They took place in Nuremberg, Germany. The court that held the trials was called the International Military Tribunal.

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Nuremberg Prosecutor Still Yearns for Justice

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Nuremberg Prosecutor Still Yearns for Justice

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NUREMBERG, Germany (Reuters) - Seventy-five years on from the Nuremberg Trials, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nazi war criminals behind some of history's worst crimes is 100-years-old and still spreading a message to younger generations about the scourge of conflict and repression.

Benjamin Ferencz was 25 and a U.S. soldier when, in the last days of World War Two, he was assigned to collect evidence about the war crimes committed by Germany under Adolf Hitler.

Later, Ferencz became a prosecutor at the U.S. military tribunal in Nuremberg, southern Germany, securing the convictions of 22 members of the Einsatzgruppen - paramilitary death squads who slaughtered upwards of a million people, most of them Jews, across occupied Europe.

"There are very few people who have seen what I have seen," he said from his home in Delray Beach, Florida.

"My job was to get into the concentration camps as they were being liberated, with the dead bodies all over the floor and with people waiting to be burned because the crematorium was so overcrowded."

The trials are today seen as the forerunners of tribunals like the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, which has prosecuted politicians and soldiers for their crimes against humanity, albeit with mixed results.

Ferencz campaigned for decades for the ICC to be established, delivering a closing prosecution statement at the conclusion of its historic first case, against the Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga, in 2012.

"Take your case to a fair court and have them decide what's right and what's wrong," he said on Wednesday. "Now you save yourself killing a lot of innocent people."

The courtroom in Nuremberg has been preserved and still draws many visitors to see the seat where defendants like Air Marshal Hermann Goering heard their death sentences.

"There is huge interest," Axel Fischer, curator of the museum, said.

(Corrects spelling of author's name)

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international criminal tribunal for the former yugoslavia

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judicial process / court cases / court decisions

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At 100, last Nuremberg prosecutor still yearns for justice

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NUREMBERG, Germany (Reuters) - Seventy-five years on from the Nuremberg Trials, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nazi war criminals behind some of history's worst crimes is 100-years-old and still spreading a message to younger generations about the scourge of conflict and repression. Benjamin Ferencz was 25 and a U.S.

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Less than three decades after the First World War, in which more than 18 million soldiers and civilians were killed, Europe was once again embroiled in a major conflict. The Second World War, which pitted Germany, Japan, and Italy against Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, engulfed the world in a firestorm of death and destruction far exceeding that of the Great War of 1914-1918. This was not only a global war, it was a total war in which each nation's entire human and material resources were called into service. About 70 million civilians and fighters were killed, making World War II the deadliest conflict in human history. Millions were left homeless, and millions more began an uncertain life as refugees.

Only when Germany was defeated in May 1945 did the world fully comprehend the cost of six years of modern warfare: mountains of corpses, entire cities demolished, nations traumatized by the use of violence against civilian populations. Only then did world leaders realize the human cost of 12 years of National Socialist (Nazi) rule in Germany: the Holocaust-the genocidal murder of millions of Jews and gypsies and the persecution of homosexuals and other minorities, many of whom perished in the last year of the war. Eleanor Roosevelt, who served as First Lady of the United States for the duration of World War II, observed, "You can measure the extent of physical damage done to cities but how to gauge what has happened to human beings-that is incalculable."

In addition, the US firebombing of major Japanese cities and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs demonstrated that the world now possessed the tools of its own annihilation. Eleanor Roosevelt later reflected, "I think that if the atomic bomb did nothing more, it scared people to the point where they realized that either they must do something about preventing war or there is a chance that there might be a morning when we would not wake up."

The horrors of World War II reinforced the demands of early twentieth century internationalists to establish a global bill of human rights that would obligate "every state to recognize the equal right of every individual on its territory to life, liberty and property, religious freedom and the use of his own language." This idea was echoed in the stated aims of the newly formed United Nations in 1945.

On joining the US delegation to the United Nations at the end of 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt described the enormous responsibility she and her fellow delegates faced: "The time has come... when we must recognize that our mutual devotion to our own land must never blind us to the good of all lands and of all peoples. In the end... we are "One World" and that which injures any one of us, injures all of us. Only by remembering this will we finally have a chance to build a lasting peace."

Her commitment to seeing beyond national interests drew her to an ambitious project-the drafting of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). To protect its people and interests, every society develops written and unwritten codes spelling out the liberties, taboos, and obligations of its members. And as different societies and cultures encounter each other, they often seek to find common ground. In the modern era, for example, treaties, agreements, and conventions have been used to protect civilians during wartime-with limited success. Enumerating the rights of every human on Earth, as the drafters of the Universal Declaration had planned to do, proved a nearly impossible task. Representatives from Asia, Europe, North and South America, and the Middle East (most of Africa was still ruled by colonial powers) argued not only about cultural issues but politics as well. The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States in particular sharpened disagreements about individual freedoms and government responsibility. After almost three years of negotiations that sometimes escalated into serious conflict, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Eleanor Roosevelt described it as a "composite" of international beliefs on the rights, freedoms, and dignity of human beings, became a reality. Thanks in part to Roosevelt's inspiring leadership, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the declaration on December 10, 1948.

But this was only a beginning. Roosevelt insisted that the document was designed to serve as the foundation for future human rights protections. And to serve this purpose, it needed to be brought to life, through educational programs, in the consciousness of citizens the world over.

Five years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Roosevelt again reminded her audiences that human rights are more than legal or political commitments. Such rights begin, she said, "in small places, close to home-so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person: The neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world."

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has inspired many individuals and policymakers around the world to work toward a better world. Today there are "around two hundred assorted declarations, conventions, protocols, treaties, charters, and agreements dealing with the realization of human rights in the world. Of these postwar [documents] no fewer than sixty-five mention... the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as their source of authority and inspiration." Today we ponder the legacy of the document Roosevelt helped create. Despite substantial movement toward equality and understanding, racism and its consequences continue to haunt communities and governments around the globe; wars targeting civilians continue to be waged; and the perpetrators of genocide, torture, and human rights violations often go unpunished.

For Mary Ann Glendon, the US ambassador to the Vatican and the author of A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UDHR has one undeniable legacy: "I think the message... is that, there was a time when men and women... at a time when much of the world was in ruins... were able to come together to articulate a path forward toward peace and justice, and that over the [past] sixty years, enormous progress has been made on those fronts.... Negotiation, faltering, nevertheless, has so far kept people talking... and it's a great affirmation of the possibility of overcoming conflict through reason and good will. It's what we've got."

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Introduction to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

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Less than three decades after the First World War, in which more than 18 million soldiers and civilians were killed, Europe was once again embroiled in a major conflict. The Second World War, which pitted Germany, Japan, and Italy against Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, engulfed the world in a firestorm of death and destruction far exceeding that of the Great War of 1914-1918.

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Early Times

People in many early societies had no rights. They had only duties that they owed to their ruler.

The ancient Greeks and Romans were probably the first people to think much about rights. A Roman group called the Stoics believed in something that they called natural law. They said that natural law gave some rights to everyone, even people who were not citizens of Rome.

The Enlightenment and Afterward

The 1600s and 1700s were a time in European history that is called the Enlightenment. John Locke of England was an Enlightenment thinker who wrote that individual rights are older than governments. In France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that the purpose of governments is to protect those rights. Other thinkers called such rights "the rights of man."

The American Revolution (1775-83) and the French Revolution of 1789 grew out of these ideas. The U.S. Declaration of Independence lists "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" as rights that "all men" get from God. French people wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

But even in the United States, many people did not enjoy full human rights. Slaves had almost no rights, and women had limited rights. Most slaves did not gain the basic human right of freedom until the 1800s. Women in most countries did not gain the same rights as men until the 1900s.

Human Rights Since World War II

After World War II (1939-45), the world learned that Nazi Germany had killed millions of Jews and other civilians (people not fighting the war). This crime is called the Holocaust. An international court at Nuremberg, Germany, put Nazi leaders on trial for "crimes against humanity." The Holocaust convinced many countries that it was necessary to protect the basic rights of people everywhere.

A number of these countries formed an organization called the United Nations (UN) in 1945. In 1948 the UN issued a document called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The declaration calls for "human rights" instead of "the rights of man" because it includes women's rights. The declaration has 30 articles, or sections. They mention many different rights. The United Nations also established Human Rights Day, to be celebrated on December 10 each year.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights investigates abuses of human rights throughout the world. The office works with several other UN groups to protect the rights of men, women, and children everywhere.

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A right that all people are born with is called a human right. Many people now agree that there are many human rights. Some of the most basic rights are the right to live and...